#even though I have contacted them to say I have detransitioned | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

fuckingstrange · 4 months

Text

——————————————————————————————————————

| Day25: Christmas Spirit Drought |

——————————————————————————————————————

WARNINGS: Hatred of Christmas, mention of depression, mention of death of mother and father, Reid tries to make reader feel better

——————————————————————————————————————

WORDS: 587

——————————————————————————————————————

PAIRING: Spencer Reid x m!reader

——————————————————————————————————————

All of my previous fanfics could fuck me up the ass, kill off my family, force me to detransition, and then make me live for all of eternity and I'd still hate this more.

You and the team managed to get called out for a case on Christmas. Thankfully, for JJ and Matt, it wasn't until around 6pm that the call came in so they got to spend most of Christmas Day with their families. You, however, had just drowned in depression all day.

You hate Christmas. Some of team, the ones without kids, as in Prentiss, Rossi, and Reid aren't so.. out there, about it either, but they don't share a hatred of the holiday like you do. It's awful and only reminds you just how much you miss your family, back when they called, back when most of them were at least alive. You lost your dad when you were a young boy, right around the holidays. You lost your mom just a few years back, specifically on Christmas Eve. You hate this cursed holiday. With every fucking bone in your body.

You lay curled up on the couch in the back, trying to get some sleep before having to go into the world of terror to find a killer. Reid, who could tell something was off the second you boarded the jet and ignored him, walks up to the couch, turns you around, and lays down next to you. Usually, you wouldn't mind him being close, but you don't really even want to be here right now. “..Sorry about your experience with Christmas being shitty, but, it won't always end up bad.” He says, a frown forming on your face. You just wanted to finish this holiday off like you have since your mom passed. Sleeping through the most part, crying through the rest. “It's always gonna be shit. It's cursed, I swear!” You argue, a light laugh sounding from the man snuggled against you.

You pout, glaring at him as he just starts running his finger along your jawline. “It won't be bad. We'll spend it together. I could take you out to dinner, and it'll be in a town where nobody knows us, so you don't have to deal with the unnecessary fear of running into somebody that hates you.” He says, the mention of the fact that nobody knows you in the town of the case being a bit soothing, helping ease your slight fear of being in the prying eyes of the public. You let your head lean forward to rest against his chest, taking a second to inhale his scent, using the familiar smell of him to soothe you.

Reid smiles down at you, his hand sliding back to gently rest against the back of your head, fingers lightly twirling the hair. He knows that seasonal depression kicks ass, and with the history of Christmas in your family, you're Santa's biggest threat with your lack of holly and jollyness, Christmas spirit more rare than a day off. He places a gentle kiss to the top of your head before snuggling in even more, grabbing a blanket off the back of the couch and pulling it over both of you. “You tryna take a nap?” He asks, though knowing the answer before you even nod your head with a sleepy hum.

Your arm moves to rest over his side, hand tugging his suit shirt out of his pants so it can rest on the warm skin of his lower back. Reid doesn't mind it, enjoying the small bit of skin-to-skin contact. He gives you one last kiss on the head before resting his own back, eyes fluttering shut at the same time yours do.

#spencer reid #hotboxed x-mas ficlist #spencer reid x m!reader #sorry this is lacking holly and jollyness #but I spent an actual fucking #HOURRRRR #on this thing #4am-5am I was fucking WRITINGGGG #AND IT WAS SO HARD TO FIND A GOOD IDEA #AND I COULDN'T EVEN BE HAPPY WITH ANYTHING ELSE ADDED TO THIS #AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

11 notes · View notes

pashterlengkap · 3 months

Text

Dozens of families flee Ohio after anti-trans health care ban passes

A trans advocacy group in Ohio says 68 families and seven trans adults have already contacted them seeking emergency relocation funds to flee the state now that a gender-affirming care ban is set to become law. “Their government is forcing them to uproot their lives,” Dara Adkison, secretary of the board for TransOhio, told NBC News. “They’re selling their homes, they’re changing jobs and careers and closing out all of their savings. They’re closing their businesses, they’re leaving their medical practices. The intense amount of personal and community trauma that is being inflicted by the government right now and putting these families through who just love their f**king kids is so cruel.” Related: New regulations could force trans Ohioans like me to detransition. I’m terrified. It’s not too late to fight back. If you care about trans lives, please say something. The Ohio Senate voted 24-8 on Wednesday to override Gov. Mike DeWine’s (R) veto of H.B. 68, a bill banning gender-affirming care for trans minors and trans women and girls from participating in scholastic sports. The override makes Ohio the 23rd state to ban gender-affirming care for trans minors and the 24th to ban trans sports participation. Never Miss a Beat Subscribe to our daily newsletter to stay ahead of the latest LGBTQ+ political news and insights. State Sen. Kristina Roegner (R), a co-sponsor of the bill, stated before the vote that “there is no such thing as a gender spectrum” and “no such thing as gender-affirming care” because “you can’t affirm something that doesn’t exist.” She accused hospitals of forcing gender-affirming care on kids to make money, though major medical associations, including the American Medical Association, American Psychological Association, and American Academy of Pediatrics, support gender-affirming care for trans youth. Meanwhile, Ohio Congresswoman Shontel Brown (D) called the legislation “a cold, callous, and calculated attack on children, parents, and families.” State Rep. Jessica E. Miranda (D) said the GOP is “literally killing our children” with the bill. “All to win your Republican primary races,” she said. “Disgusting.” “Folks, please watch closely at what is happening here today,” she told fellow lawmakers. “Find out who truly cares about your privacy. The so-called party of personal and parental rights and privacy is voting to take away your parental rights. The party of so-called freedom is voting to take away your freedom today, against their own Republican governor.” I stand by every word. pic.twitter.com/pGNvIrlAfa— Rep. Jessica E. Miranda (@JessicaEMiranda) January 11, 2024 DeWine vetoed H.B. 68 on December 26, 2023, saying, “The government [doesn’t know] better what is medically best for a child [more] than the two people who love that child the most, their parents.” DeWine said he decided to veto the bill after visiting with parents of trans youth who are currently receiving gender-affirming healthcare. DeWine also opposed the sports ban, stating, “This issue is best addressed outside of government, through individual sports leagues and athletic associations.” While Ohio’s law is expected to take effect on April 23, it will likely face a legal challenge, possibly delaying the law from going into effect. The Ohio chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has already pledged to “do everything we can to fight this.” Despite DeWine’s stance against the bill, he recently signed an executive order banning hospitals in the state from performing gender-affirming surgeries on minors. The ban went into effect immediately, even though such surgeries aren’t typically conducted on minors. During a Friday morning press conference, DeWine also announced that the Ohio Department of Health and the Ohio Department of Health and Addiction Services would on Friday file draft rules that would prevent “fly-by-night” providers… http://dlvr.it/T1sZgs

0 notes

yesjejunus · 3 years

Text

So my more eagle eyed followers have probably noticed by now that I deleted all of my fics some months ago. I’ve received numerous asks about them, which I had never planned to answer, but… I am having a change of heart.

So yes, I did in fact delete them all. They weren’t removed, it happened months after last year’s harassment campaign. Honestly I just got… tired. Around the time I figured out I was trans, I went through a period of wanting to abandon my “old” life. I even came pretty close to purging tumblr and leaving the platform again. But ultimately I decided that I was given a good opportunity to pick and choose what I would keep from my old life, and despite everything, I still enjoy this fandom. The fics still went though, because like I said, I was just fatigued.

This is something that I feel a lot of you have picked up on, given that almost a full year later, I’m still receiving asks, DMs, and messages saying that they’re glad I’m still here, and that I’m still creating. And it’s true—over the past year, I have very much not been okay. Some of it was being nearly doxxed and run off the platform last August, but honestly a lot of it was my mental health taking a severe hit from covid; getting harassed to the point of having to leave was akin to kicking a man in the kidneys while he’s down on the ground. Between those two things, 2020 and most of 2021 have been hellish for me. Agoraphobia made a nearly full return, I redeveloped the eating disorder that I conquered a few years ago, and I’ve suffered health problems on top of it that have left me incredibly physically weakened

But I’m not here just to complain and lament the past. A couple of weeks ago I had something truly devastating happen to me, easily one of the worst things to happen in my adult life (if not THE worst), and it was so severe I even strongly considered detransitioning, because it was all just too much to bear. But since then I’ve been trying to scrape myself back together, as I always do. I immediately got back into therapy, and I’ve been trying to make the willful decision to be okay. I’ve been sleeping well, I’ve been recovering from my dental surgery, I’ve been getting outside, and I’ve been pushing myself to eat my trigger foods, so that I can go back to eating a well rounded diet, and just… function like a whole human being again. And for me, some of that is sharing my writing with people, which I have dearly missed, in spite of it all.

With that said though, I won’t be bringing everything back. To be blunt, fear of renewed harassment means that I will most likely not be bringing back my most popular works. I am deeply sorry to those that wanted to read them, or in the case of at least one unfortunate soul who was only partway finished with them, but I just can’t do it again. But some of the smaller things, as well as some new writing, I think I’m finally ready for.

I’m sorry this wound up being a bit of a ramble, but I’m sincerely touched by how many of you have kept in consistent contact with me, or are still giving me their support, and I’m trying to be more okay with being open and sharing things about my life and myself, as nervous as it makes me. More than anything, I’m thrilled to still be here, and to be sharing the things I love with you all <3

#it also feels nice to get some of this off my chest #I guess after a couple weeks ago I'm more grateful than ever for the good things I DO have in my life #and I don't want to give up on them #also I'm going to try to have something new up on ao3 within the week #depending on how busy I am #also since I get the feeling at least one jackass is going to have a go at me about making so called traumatic works #my therapist not only condones it but actively enjoys my writing #and I highly doubt you know more about my mental health and status than she does #so save it for a mammal that cares

33 notes · View notes

robotslenderman · 3 years

Text

Kicking around the idea that Sullivan tried to go back to his family after his Embrace and wound up violating the Masquerade.

When Sullivan's twins were six months old, his wife disappeared, and Sullivan ended up a single parent. His in-laws really stepped up to support him. They'd been iffy about their daughter getting together with another apparent woman, even more uncomfortable when the "woman" in question turned out to be trans... but when Sullivan's transition progressed enough it just clicked in their head that queer and trans people were just normal fucking people. They ended up being their biggest sources of support when Sullivan detransitioned enough to have the twins. Sullivan was glad to have had them, but was so relieved to get back on his medication and was like "I am NEVER doing that again."

So when his wife disappeared when the babies were six months old he was pretty close with his in-laws and they really supported him through it. Helped him raise the babies.

Then Millicent happened.

The twins were two years old.

Sullivan was in shock for nights. out of all my OCs, he was stuck in denial and dissociation for the longest. He'd gone from a normal fucking life to suddenly turning into a goddamn vampire, and one who'd been given a new name at that. He barely said a word to Millicent the first few nights except to bleat that he needed to get home to his daughters, and otherwise followed her around like a lost sheep. It didn't really sink in each time Millicent told him that there was no going back.

He thought that he was stuck in a dream.

But eventually it sank in that he wasn't waking up. And since it was important in this dream to get back to his children - well, he'd go back to his children.

So he did.

He turned up in the middle of the night after being missing for almost a week, barely coherent. He stared into space a lot and was incredibly confused. he didn't even know how to say what the hell had happened. At first his in-laws thought he'd had some kind of psychotic break, but he kept muttering something about a woman hitting him over the head with a shovel and dragging him all over the city. They still didn't know WTF was going on, but they figured he'd had some kind of assault - that he'd been targeted because he was trans and sustained a brain injury. They promised to take him to the doctor in the morning, since he refused to go to the ER just then and whatever happened had happened long enough ago that waiting til morning probably wouldn't do any damage.

Next morning he locked himself in one of the bathrooms and refused to come out, saying that the sun hurt his eyes. They tried to talk him into coming out but he wouldn't.

They managed to get him to come out that night and took him to the ER. The staff tried to do brain scans but he fried every machine that tried. Finally the staff gave up and just examined his scalp - no sign of trauma, no old bruises, no fractures. Since he wasn't a threat to anyone they wouldn't section him, so they wrote him a referral to a psychiatrist and let him go before sunrise.

His in-laws were... pretty freaking worried. Sullivan had never shown any signs of psychosis or mental illness up to that point. Now he was incredibly protective and doting on his children - more than usual - and kept making them promise not to let any old ladies near the twins, all in between moments of apparent delirium and fear.

Meanwhile Millicent figured out pretty quickly where he'd gone and was like "ah, fuck". She didn't even have his name, let alone his legal one - she'd been the one to name him Sullivan Blackmoore. But she had contacts, so she started looking for missing person reports that had recently been resolved. After a few false starts, she finally got a hit and was able to get a hold of his address.

By that point, local hunters had figured out that there was a Lasombra nearby - Sullivan's weird disappearance and reappearance had triggered a check, and him frying electronics and refusing to go out during the day, and not eating, confirmed it. They decided to go for him during the night because of the mortals he was living with - sneak in, stake him, drag him out and destroy him elsewhere. Much harder to do in daylight when there's civilians around. Problem was he'd be awake, but as a newborn fledgling he shouldn't be too much difficulty to take out.

Millicent showed up to the house the same night the hunters did. Almost the same time, even.

And she hesitated. He was just a shovelhead, why go to the trouble of putting her own neck at risk for him? He'd survived his initiation - if he was truly strong, if he was worthy of survival, he'd survive this too.

besides, there were hunters here.

it was a problem that was about to take care of itself.

She didn't think this through.

Because there was a reason Sullivan survived his first night when his brothers and sisters didn't - he knew how to fight. He knew how to scrap, and he knew self defence.

Oh, and did I mention his children were in the house? He went all papa wolf on those hunters. there were complete strangers, violent strangers, and as soon as they realised there were children in the house they moved to protect them - which sent Sullivan right over the edge. he stopped pulling his punches once he realised that they were going for the children.

So he frenzied. killed the hunters. didn't come out of it until his poor in-laws were like WHAT THE FUCK JUST HAPPENED

The bit Millicent did not foresee? Yeah, cops got called. And Millicent was like oh crap, well, this is going to be one hell of a mess now that more humans are getting involved. uuugghhh I suppose I'd better step in before the cops get here.

anyway her turning up in the bloodspattered lounge room almost made Sullivan frenzy again until Millicent told one of the in-laws to go to the children. Sullivan was standing over a few corpses. there's blood everywhere. he's covered in it. the in-laws are white. completely white.

she asked Sullivan how much he told them. Sullivan told her the truth - that he'd gotten hurt, that she'd done it, and he couldn't stand daylight now. that he thought he'd had some kind of head injury after she hit him with the shovel. made him hallucinate weird shit. made him think he was a fucking vampire.

and this was when his reality was finally beginning to sink in. and he was like... I thought I'd wake up by now. but I haven't woken up. what am I? why aren't I a person any more? what am I? what's happening to me?

and Millicent - totally expecting that she's going to have to commit a complete massacre here and put down her childe - just tells him, you know you can't stay here.

and Sullivan tells her, I just... I just want the babies to be okay. they've already lost their mother. I can't leave them. I can't.

Millicent just. looks at him.

she doesn't have to say anything and they both know it. they both know what'll happen if he refuses to leave the children.

Sullivan says, promise you won't let any harm come to the children? please?

and Millicent is beginning with think that maybe they can come out of this without any (more) bloodshed. she's not looking forward to putting Sullivan down - he might be newborn but he'd make her work for it. she's still got her shovel at the ready though. still waiting to have to put him down - and the witnesses. but she promises him no harm will come to the children. they're too young to remember this, anyway. she can't make any promises about the in-laws though - the Camarilla have contacts in the cops too, they'll investigate this. they'll notice the dead hunters. they'll trace it here easily.

and Sullivan just says. okay. then turns and just casually Dominates the remaining in-law, like he'd seen Millicent do. Makes him forget, tells him to tell his MIL that... that Sullivan got scared and ran. To forget that Millicent was here. that Sullivan was mentally ill, went apeshit on the intruders and ran in a delirium.

the FIL goes into the baby's room. Sullivan's newborn, that complicated Dominate won't work completely at his level of inexperience.

but Millicent supposes it's enough until the Camarilla step in.

Millicent's like... well... no point putting down a childe that's strong enough to survive hunters and smart enough to do basic damage control and learn from your mistakes. she's not Stalin, she's not going to purge a childe who learns from his mistakes. may as well keep you on if you're convinced you'll behave, but if this happens again I'll let the Camarilla take care of you this time.

Sullivan doesn't say anything.

Millicent says, we'd better go before they and the cops get here.

so they go.

And this time, Sullivan doesn't go back.

#transphobia mentions cw #Sullivan Blackmoore #Millicent Rue #VTM #VTMNR #homophobia mention cw #my OCs

5 notes · View notes

smartbutuncertified · 4 years

Text

So. Today I read J.K. Rowling’s essay on trans people.

I could spend hours finding sources to debunk what she said. I could yell until my fingers are tired that trans women are women, trans men are men, and nonbinary people are valid. I could cry. I could leave it to others. It’s been a long few months. I’m tired.

But I’m a trans man. I can see how she’s weaponizing our existence against our trans sisters. I can’t let that pass.

A lot of the discussion around TERFs revolves around trans women, and for good reason. TERF’s hatefulness is primarily directed at AMAB trans people, especially transfem ones, because of the mistaken belief that they are men invading women’s spaces. All that they are doing is striving to be treated as who they are instead of who others say that they are.

Because of this, much of the pushback against TERFs comes from a place of support of and defense for trans women. This has led to the TERFs developing a tactic that I’m going to name “Dysphoric ‘women’ in distress.”

Persistently attacking a group without clearly defending someone is a great way to get panned for being unreasonable. TERFs don’t want to be seen as a hate movement, so they focus their vitriol on trans women, and attempt to sweep trans men and AFAB nonbinary people under their banner. They’re protecting all “females”, see? No bigotry here.

Here’s a few passages from Rowling’s essay about trans men, and about biological sex, in the order that they appear. The bolding is mine.

“Ironically, radical feminists aren’t even trans-exclusionary – they include trans men in their feminism, because they were born women.”

“The fourth is where things start to get truly personal. I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because they regret taking steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility.“

“The UK has experienced a 4400% increase in girls being referred for transitioning treatment. Autistic girls are hugely overrepresented in their numbers.“

“The writings of young trans men reveal a group of notably sensitive and clever people. The more of their accounts of gender dysphoria I’ve read, with their insightful descriptions of anxiety, dissociation, eating disorders, self-harm and self-hatred, the more I’ve wondered whether, if I’d been born 30 years later, I too might have tried to transition. The allure of escaping womanhood would have been huge. “

“I’ve read all the arguments about femaleness not residing in the sexed body, and the assertions that biological women don’t have common experiences, and I find them, too, deeply misogynistic and regressive. It’s also clear that one of the objectives of denying the importance of sex is to erode what some seem to see as the cruelly segregationist idea of women having their own biological realities or – just as threatening – unifying realities that make them a cohesive political class. “

Trans men are not women. We are not girls. We are mostly AFAB, with some intersex and CAFAB men as well.

As an autistic trans man, autistic people may be more likely to transition, but that doesn’t mean that our transitions are less valid or more suspect. To say otherwise is both ableism and infantalization.

Lastly, the idea of womanhood being biological is as deeply offensive to us as it is to trans women. We share a lot of the health risks and need for reproductive rights and justice that cis women do, but this does not make us women. Trans women are women, not us.

Trans men are not delusional women to be protected from ourselves. We are not part of any “class” of women. This sickly sweet “compassion” because we “were born women” is not something that we support or want any part of. We are not and never will be women. The only people we’re in danger from are transphobes like Rowling.

This is not to say that trans men face the same things as trans women.

Trans women face a whole section of transphobia that transmasc people are exempt from, transmisogny. They are disproportionately targeted by TERFs and other transphobes.

Compare what she says about trans women to the statements about trans men. Again, the bolding is mine.

“Magdalen was an immensely brave young feminist and lesbian who was dying of an aggressive brain tumour. I followed her because I wanted to contact her directly, which I succeeded in doing. However, as Magdalen was a great believer in the importance of biological sex, and didn’t believe lesbians should be called bigots for not dating trans women with penises, dots were joined in the heads of twitter trans activists, and the level of social media abuse increased.“

“Examples of so-called TERFs range from the mother of a gay child who was afraid their child wanted to transition to escape homophobic bullying, to a hitherto totally unfeminist older lady who’s vowed never to visit Marks & Spencer again because they’re allowing any man who says they identify as a woman into the women’s changing rooms. “

“I happen to know a self-described transsexual woman who’s older than I am and wonderful. Although she’s open about her past as a gay man, I’ve always found it hard to think of her as anything other than a woman, and I believe (and certainly hope) she’s completely happy to have transitioned. Being older, though, she went through a long and rigorous process of evaluation, psychotherapy and staged transformation. The current explosion of trans activism is urging a removal of almost all the robust systems through which candidates for sex reassignment were once required to pass. A man who intends to have no surgery and take no hormones may now secure himself a Gender Recognition Certificate and be a woman in the sight of the law.”

“But, as many women have said before me, ‘woman’ is not a costume. ‘Woman’ is not an idea in a man’s head.”

“So I want trans women to be safe. At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe. When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman – and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones – then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside.”

“On Saturday morning, I read that the Scottish government is proceeding with its controversial gender recognition plans, which will in effect mean that all a man needs to ‘become a woman’ is to say he’s one. To use a very contemporary word, I was ‘triggered’. Ground down by the relentless attacks from trans activists on social media, when I was only there to give children feedback about pictures they’d drawn for my book under lockdown, I spent much of Saturday in a very dark place inside my head, as memories of a serious sexual assault I suffered in my twenties recurred on a loop. That assault happened at a time and in a space where I was vulnerable, and a man capitalised on an opportunity. I couldn’t shut out those memories and I was finding it hard to contain my anger and disappointment about the way I believe my government is playing fast and loose with womens and girls’ safety.“

Things to note:

She was concerned about trans men undergoing voluntary hormones and surgeries because they “have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility.”, but is repeatedly horrified by the idea that trans women could be considered women without them.

She is consistently pitching the narrative that trans women’s interests are men’s interests and in conflict with women’s interests.

The misgendering is about equal in both sections, but in this one, the misgendering is intentionally framed as trans women being deceitful men, whereas trans men are framed as women and “girls” in distress. Notice that the trans women are always “men”, never “boys”, for maximum implicit threat.

“’woman’ is not a costume” is a huge red flag. Trans women aren’t wearing costumes, they’re living their lives as women.

The narrative she’s weaving is that trans men are misled women who need help and protection, and trans women are potentially predatory men. She leaves caveats, such as the “self-described transsexual woman”, but even she is referred to as a former man, and we don’t know how that trans woman feels about that. She’s being used as a prop, framed as an exception.

This is all transphobia, and heavily leans towards transmisogyny.

In short:

Trans men aren’t interested in you persecuting our sisters to “defend” us. Fuck off, Rowling.

#transphobia #transmisogyny #trans man #jk rowling #long post

81 notes · View notes

pluralismajestatis · 3 years

Text

I want to write something about our transition, even though I'm not quite in the clear about it yet.

I've been dysphoric as far as I can remember; my earliest memories complaining about gender things trace back to when I was around four, and ironically constitute a big portion of my memories from my childhood, which I own approximate ten or so of overall. So not many, but about two, three of them are related to gender and identity. (We're working on recovering memories. It's slow.)

I've written so much about the subject of transitioning before on different blogs that I don't feel any need to dive too deep into it, but basically, when I was 13 in our Lord's year of 2004, I discovered that some girls identify as boys, and I knew immediately that that was what I was, too. I was afraid of it so I repressed it, fastforward to when I moved out on my own at 18, I finally had the freedom and privacy to try out different things with my gender, and went instantly full man mode.

I recognised very fast, after the honeymoon period of living as a man and starting hormones and so, that I didn't actually identify with manhood whatsoever, but it did good for the dysphoria. I'm 30 now, and after discovering my system, I've figured out that I might actually be a woman, just straight up GNC woman, but my strong feelings of masculinity came from the system, which is predominantly - overwhelmingly - male. We have myself (the host) and one little who identify as female, and the rest of us are men.

I know DID is used as a disqualifying diagnosis in the process of approving individuals for transition, but I also don't think that's a subject that ever came up in my interviews. In Finland, it's mandatory (at least it was back when) that you go through an evaluation period of 6 months, and live in your desired gender for 2 years, prior to receiving a diagnosis and being allowed on hormones. I don't know if this has changed, I haven't been involved in trans circles for around eight years or so now, but this applies to when I transitioned. So it's safe to say my identity was somewhat stable (when it comes to masculinity, identifying as a man - other than that, one primary complaint from my mental health contacts has always been that I don't have one) and they didn't screen for DID (which apparently nobody in Finland even knows about, according to my experience).

Now that I've come this full circle and realised myself as a gnc woman with a system of men, I wonder what that means for me, exactly. Overall, the personhoods that this animal contains are men, and it seems that our transition was a compromise between the identities, whereas I was left in the front to present however I desired, as long as the body was more compliant. I don't in any manner regret transitioning and I'm very happy with my body, but simultaneously it's gotten more and more evident the past few years, and especially now after I've been diagnosed with DID, that I don't want to live as a man or have anything to do with the male side of society as far as I'm able to separate from it. I very heavily identify as a female, especially as a same-sex attracted woman, and I don't have any particular gender identity beyond that; I don't identify, or desire to identify, as nonbinary or anything of the sort. (We have a nonbinary person in the system, however. His existence, and relationship to our female, transitioned body, is a whole another topic for him to write about, should he decide to.)

This whole thing just went from complicated to more complicated - being trans was complicated. Then figuring out you weren't exactly a straight cut trans person was complicated. Then figuring out you're not the trans person to begin with, and the transitioning part may very well have been a different alter altogether, made things even more funky.

I don't know what that makes me now. Am I detransitioned? How does that work out if most of us are still men? Does it just mean that I personally detransitioned, even if I wasn't even the one who transitioned to begin with? What if it was me, and I just changed along the way? Does that just make me the female in our male system?

I have so many questions that are inherently just about the semantics of everything and have no bearing on our real life. I'm taking the steps to living as a woman again, whatever that means - basically just that I'm not going to worry about binding anymore, but I also have no intentions of becoming more feminine, because that is the opposite of who I am and who we are in general.

Gender identity gets so fucking complicated in a system.

#k post #life update #did #detrans

2 notes · View notes

werewolffem · 4 years

Note

hey, i've been a trans man for the past 5 years now (on t for three, post top surgery) and i honestly don't know if i should detrans or not. it almost hurts to think about it too hard, but more and more i empathise with detransitioned women over trans men. i hate being called a woman, but i hate when other people see me as a man or say i act like a man, because that means nothing. i don't know even how to lay my thoughts out. sorry for bothering you, thank you for reading this

i was at this point earlier this year. i had been thinking about detransitioning for a year or little more and each time it did bring me pain as well to even think about it. i never thought i would do it. but those thoughts were true and to save myself medically physically and mentally, detransitioning was the best option for myself.

thinking into it more now -- i can change appearances, change my name, change my gender, change my manners -- but those are all outside appearances. i could do everything but actually transition to male which is what i wanted. what i wanted was impossible though and trying to keep up with appearances for other people and not me? stress and depression and anxiety galore. and appearances mean nothing and keeping up with them is just hell.

i hated to be called a woman for a bit, but then i grew back into it because that's what i am -- a female, a woman -- a woman who went through something some women don't. i realized and was okay with being called woman after playing Kassandra on Assassin's Creed Odyssey as silly as it sounds. i normally pick men, but went with the woman option and seeing her and playing as her made me realize that i didn't need to change who i was in order to be strong, i didn't need to be a man to be with women. she was a breakthrough -- some fictional character but she broke through to me and made me realize being a woman, being called one, being seen as one...its not bad.

i was on t for the same amount as you, although was never able to get top surgery but had a total hysterectomy and will be on estrogen for the rest of my life. i also identified as trans for 6 or so years.

detransitioning is entirely up to you, up to your well being. i just wanted to give you some background information of what i went through in case it helps you sort through things in your head and hopefully makes it easier for you to figure out what you need. give it time, it took me over a year to get to where i am now, so if you don't know the answer right away then that's fine.

if you have a therapist, i would suggest talking about it to them as well to help get your thoughts out and in order. or seeking one out who is friendly in this area and who WILL NOT push you to keep transitioning. do it for you and not for others as well.

there is a community on here, on twitter, and my discord (which I need to flush out more and get back on now that holidays are over lol) that are here to help. feel free to join the discord, it's for those questioning as well to get help and answers about this. reddit is very nice as well. and twitter has some amazing women on there who have detrans as well as some men i know. if you need contact with others, i can get you those.

if you have any questions, feel free to pop back in to my inbox and i will try to help best i can. :) ik this spot and it's hard and exhausting and lonely and sad but you're truly not alone in thinking this.

#anon #detrans

29 notes · View notes

azurowle · 5 years

Text

...is it just me, or do any other trans men feel like trans-exclusionary radfems seem ridiculously entitled to trans men/transmasc experiences?

Like...whenever I’ve shared my story with radfems they begin to immediately dissect it to see “what went wrong” and “why I’m not confident being female”. When they think they’ve found the answer they hold it up and say “ah-HAH! See, you’re not trans, you’re just *insert whatever the reason they think I’m transitioning here is*.”

It completely ignores so many aspects of my experience. I had depression because it was comorbid with my gender dysphoria. My parents being strict Roman Catholics who seemed to subtly favor my brothers over me ignores how my symptoms persisted even after I gained a degree of independence from them. They don’t take into account that I did have a pretty gender-neutral childhood and could wear whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. It doesn’t take into account that my connection to god was never terribly strong to begin with.

When they examine the way I was shamed for my fascination with same-sex attraction, or called a lesbian for not “properly covering up myself in the girl’s locker room”, they don’t think it’s relevant that I experienced almost zero genuine attraction to men or women, that I had no idea what a lesbian was at my age, and that I only ever felt a strong desire to write male/male romance. Not even sexual stuff - just fluffy cute things.

When they say they hope I can accept that I’m a “bi woman or lesbian”, they don’t take into account that my attraction to women is purely sexual and that I have zero desire to pursue a romantic relationship with them, while desiring a romantic/sexual relationship with men at some point. I do not particularly want to date or romance women. They seem to forget the stigma they place on bisexual women who pursue relationships with men and call them “privileged”, then wonder why so many trans men and bi women struggle with their own internalized biphobia. They call us “butch” while saying that bisexuals cannot use “butch”.

They pity us, and call our bodies “mutilated” and that we “self-harm.” As someone who has shredded their own breasts while drunk out of pure self-hatred the comparison of top surgery to my pain is insulting.

There is a post I wish I had screenshotted and saved of a radfem in the detransition tag who said she could now “appreciate [her partner] as a woman.” If that had been my partner and I’d seen that post, I would have packed up and left without a single word and cut all contact. Male or female partner my response would have been the same.

They say there are options to transition and then clam up when asked what those alternatives are.

Trans-exclusionary radical feminists say they fight for our rights by virtue of the bathing suit bits we have. They don’t fight for us, though. They fight for an idea of what we are. An idea they want to make reality.

#personal thoughts #anti gender critical #anti trans exclusionary radical feminist #anti terf #transmasc #terf

7 notes · View notes

destroyyourbinder · 6 years

Text

why not go to therapy for gender dysphoria?

I see this question often posited by both trans people and radical feminists, as well as garden-variety homophobes and transphobes. This is a brief attempt at an answer from my perspective. --- 1. The first reason is that trans people aren't stupid. They are right when they say there is no known therapeutic modality that is known to reliably reverse transgender identity or get rid of gender dysphoria. This does not mean that transition is therefore the best means of dealing with gender dysphoria, but it means you cannot currently just go to a psychologist or therapist and "get therapy" to make it go away. I’m tired of dealing with radical feminists or gender critical types who dismissively insist that this is currently a possible option. I am skeptical that you can ethically treat transgender people with the intent to change their personal identity anyway even if some sort of treatment protocol was developed. There may be some way to lessen gender dysphoria in a therapeutic context without major ethical violations, but few therapists are willing to try, and those who will work with people wanting to ease their gender dysphoria without transition often are working blind and therefore are liable to make mistakes that can harm already vulnerable patients. Even barring the political environment around transition right now, I am not sure therapists generally know what to do to help people or even how to conceive of the problems of those who come into their offices framing their issues as "gender dysphoria" but who do not wish to transition or who are postponing the choice to do so. When I discussed my gender dysphoria outside of a transition context with two different therapists previous to desisting from trans identity, one in about 2007 and the other in about 2014 or so, the first one told me I couldn't possibly be transgender because I was waffling on wanting a penis and attempted to get me to work on rejecting femininity by asking me to do CBT practices when I got compliments about my appearance, and the second did not even know how to deal with my gender issues at all, asked me to educate him on trans identity more broadly, and then tried to get me to accept that I was attracted to men because I considered myself bisexual but was not wanting to interact sexually with them. I ceased discussing it in therapy (and considered the times I had attempted to an unacceptable risk) because I sensed it was actually impossible for my feelings to be understood outside a transition-based context and at the time transition was impossible for me. The desisting and detransitioned women I know who are trying to reconcile with their femaleness seem to have had a very mixed bag of luck with therapists; the ones I know with positive interactions with therapists around their gender stuff have had to go through multiple therapists to find a decent one, and I know a few women who avoid therapists entirely now. Even if you go explicitly seeking a therapist for this issue as a full and competent adult with decent boundaries and deep pockets you will often have poor luck. 2. Those people offering means of getting rid of transgender identity or gender dysphoria are generally explicit religious conversion therapists or pediatric doctors using unethically coercive strategies to alter children's gender behavior. These are the last people you want to be in contact with if you have a gender or sexuality problem, and their strategies don't work except insofar as they might shame you into suppressing your feelings and desires. The doctors offering these therapies for children are direct descendants of therapists who used these strategies to prevent adult homosexuality, some of the older ones literally having studied under gay conversion therapists or at clinics offering anti-gay therapies, and I would guess they probably have similar outcomes in that they permanently traumatize kids. You would have to be extremely self-negating to seek these people out or literally under the pressure of authorities, which obviously isn't conducive to developing a way of coping with your body, sexuality, and gender structures that is healthy and promotes your well-being. 3. One of the hallmarks of being trans is wanting to transition, and one of the hallmarks of gender dysphoria in female people is either strongly wanting to be male or literally believing you are in some way male. Trans people do reach for "being trans" as a primary explanation for their thoughts and feelings about gender, even though they may have pervasive doubts and obsess over the question of whether they are "really" trans or their dysphoria is "real". Female trans people in particular often believe that if they aren't trans or don't have gender dysphoria, they must be "making things up" or that their suffering is stupid, only for attention, not as severe as they thought it was, and so on. The obsessing over whether you are "actually trans" or not ends up locking you into your dysphoria deeper than you might have gone otherwise, and means you will hold onto being trans as an explanation and the trans identity far longer than you otherwise might, because your dysphoric mind is telling you that if you aren't trans then you must really have been a stupid girl this whole time. The last thing a dysphoric female person wants to be is a stupid girl, so you will continue holding onto interpreting your experiences as trans or as gender dysphoria because that is part of the dysphoria itself. I don't believe most trans people look to transition as something they wholeheartedly "want" to do (and those that claim to are likely extremely dissociated from the reality of transition and their bodies more generally); most I think recognize to some degree that transition is risky, painful, socially isolating, legally fraught, and a medical nightmare. But the whole problem with having gender dysphoria is that it's self-reinforcing; if you are actively dysphoric, the way your dysphoria works is to propagate itself and that means you will not try a solution that invalidates "dysphoria" or "being trans" as the reason why you feel this way. Although in some sense nobody "wants to be trans", most trans people are relieved in some way or another when they find out transgenderism exists and that transition is possible, and most female trans people actually resist the possibility of therapy to get rid of their self-concept as not-female. I have not met a trans man who actually wanted to stop considering himself a man, although I have obviously seen many trans people want to ease the suffering caused by gender dysphoria and stop being subject to the negative social consequences of being trans or transitioning or being subject to misogyny/homophobia/transphobia. The reason why trans people reach for transition is because it purportedly allows them to maintain their self-identity and also get rid of the suffering caused by their body being incongruent with their self-identity. If you already conceive of yourself as trans or have extensive gender dysphoria it is unlikely you will reach for a solution that will invalidate your own perception of what's gone wrong, a.k.a. you will not go to therapy that will eventually cause you to let go of the idea that you are a man or not-female. The problem is that the self-identity is not separable from gender dysphoria, and interpreting your suffering as the result of the fact that your body is female but "you" are somehow not is a framing driven by the insecurity cycles and obsessions particular to gender dysphoria. You cannot ease dysphoria long-term without being able to recognize and confront that you are female in a value-neutral way. I honestly believe to the extent that transition can work, it works precisely because it allows some trans female people to let go of constant nitpicking at their bodies, it allows them to be among other female people who don't see them as worth less because of their bodies (albeit ones changed through transition) and in an environment where they can freely discuss their experiences together, and it permits some to actually experience being embodied without shame and distance from themselves. This should not sound unfamiliar to most trans people as it's exactly how the positive results of transition are framed. I just disagree that transition is necessary to achieve these results, that transition actually achieves them persistently in most people, and that to whatever extent they are achieved it means that trans people are right about why they happen (that it means you are a man or not-a-woman). 4. I don't think therapy to achieve peace in your body usually works if you are female, whether you are dysphoric or not, and it's because I think the therapeutic relationship and medicine more broadly are a small-scale replication of the authoritarian and misogynistic practices that cause female people to be alienated from their bodies to begin with. I don't think most female people want or need an authority implicitly or explicitly telling them that their bad feelings about their body are wrong when authorities have inculcated these feelings in us to begin with. Most female people don't end up with gender dysphoric feelings specifically, but I don't think it's an inherent sign of mental illness or irrational for trans men or other female trans people to avoid authorities trying to invalidate or reinterpret their experiences with gender, sexuality, and their bodies. Maintaining a core identity (even if it's a male one) that is untouchable by others trying to convince you out of rejecting womanhood, when "accepting womanhood" means a shitton of gross, dirty, and violating things, absolutely makes sense, and I'm never going to try to convince anybody otherwise. Therapy is inherently intended to guide you to "better functioning" and for most therapists, this means decreasing your friction against social reality so you can hold a job, housing, maintain relationships, and so forth. Obviously being able to survive is important, but being able to survive in this world means making some horrible bargains against your well-being (such as devoting forty hours a week to being captive to people who don't share your interests in a place you don't want to be so you can make enough money for shelter and food) and therapists do not usually frame these bargains as having severe costs. They sometimes actually frame you as ill precisely because you recognize the costs of these decisions, and because you fixate on trying to find a way to escape them. So why would you go to a therapist, then, so you can make yourself believe you are a woman again, if that therapist won't acknowledge the costs of everything required for you to psychologically adopt that identity as well as try to adjust as a "proper woman" to others and gives you a pathological label for insisting that the costs are real or too high? If you are a trans person attracted to your same sex, why would you try to go to a therapist to adjust to being a lesbian for example when few therapists even know what healthy adjustment looks like, nonetheless the kinds of terrible bargains you have to make to avoid or deal with homophobia? One of the most isolating and devastating things about having gender dysphoria is that nobody else seemingly sees how awful it is to be female, and the people around you who should be supportive of you (your female family members, friends, peers, coworkers, etc.) are invested in doubling down about how happy they are and how great it is to do things that you find invasive and traumatic, and seem to be in horrific denial of how it could possibly affect you and may even attempt to force you to adopt these practices and attitudes yourself. If therapy is supposed to get rid of these feelings and replace them with the feelings of the women around you, of course you won't go! Of course you won't go to therapy if the therapist herself is one of these women, or is a man who does not seem to get it at all. If "adjusting" and "functioning" means accepting your lot, trying to gaslight yourself into believing your shame about your existence was unwarranted, crazy, or came from nowhere, and fixing your dysphoria means learning to act and speak and think like these other women and to LOVE it, then hell no, most of us will not adjust or function until our feelings are recognized in some way or another. For some of us this means maintaining being trans and pursuing transition, and for others it means politicizing our experience and becoming active feminists and/or radically anti-authoritarian. It’s telling to me that the medical industry is supportive of one rather than the other, because the latter choice is more likely to indict psychology as a practice and transition is capable of being incorporated into medicine. But seeing it that way is a function of my political view on the whole thing.

#writings #dysphoria

156 notes · View notes

werevulvi · 5 years

Text

I've been thinking a lot more about Y these past few weeks or so than I usually do, and probably came to a bit of a realisation... It was my fault. Oh god just writing that hurts. It wasn't intentional, but the million walls I had built up within myself, and all the lies I was living without knowing, made me react badly. He sensed those walls. He more than just sensed them. But I deflected and deflected until I started screaming and calling him all sorts of terrible things. And it just kept escalating.

I've realised he did nothing wrong. Back then my gut feeling told me he was dangerous and manipulative, but I couldn't have been more wrong. He tried to help me, tried to talk to me, but as his questions started creeping in under my defenses they started attacking him as though he was the threat. Well yeah, he was a threat to my false beliefs.

I believed in them so strongly, that I genuinely thought I'd die without them, if they weren't true. And he ever so slightly poked at them. It frightened me.

There really isn't much of anything I can think I should have done differently, considering how very little I knew. Except I should have told him that I was scared, of what was going on in my own mind. And I should have told him he did ruffle my feathers more than I could handle although I had believed all my life that no one possibly could. I don't know if any of us could have figured out what was going on with me back then, but maybe, if I had stopped fighting and deflecting, if I had dared to trust him. We often did say that maybe we met at the wrong time of our lives. I think there was a lot of truth to that. Do I still love him? Did I ever love him? I don't know if I did or if I was just infatuated and attracted, beyond that I also thought of him as a very dear friend, but never got to actual love cause I held back so much. But I think there was definitely potential.

In case anyone's wondering why this lesbian is rambling about having been attracted to some past boyfriend... he's a trans guy. And I'm rambling about this here cause I don't know where else to. It's been 2 fucking years but I still cling to him in my mind. Obviously, I can't let go. So, some venting and digging through this heap of a mess in my mind might be necessary. And if I'm gonna write it all down anyway, I might as well post it too. Perhaps a small sliver of me still hopes he might read it. Although I think he blocked me long ago, so perhaps not.

I was angry at him, really, really angry. Cause I felt like he had abused me. Cause he told me I had abused him. Yeah, that's where it ended, when I broke contact in a desperate attempt to save us both from each other. A very difficult decision to make and my last act of care that he called me selfish for. That hurt, that too.

He was the first person I was ever truly attracted to and got to share that with, at age fucking 27. Cause I thought I had felt attraction to a lot of people before. It overhelmed me, and it scared me. I was afraid to touch him, cause I desired him with an intensity so fiery it burned me. Perhaps that sounds weird, but I was not prepared for that, cause I thought I was bisexual and into men in general but had little to no experience with women, I didn't think much of it when I ended up with him. My own attraction to him and the unexpected suddenness of it scared me so much that I held back so hard that I suffocated its flame. And years later I realise that I still find him attractive, and that I never actually stopped caring. No I don't want to get back together with him, but I want to let go and move on. But also I do miss him.

My own issues, my own pain, and my inability to communicate either, killed our relationship. And my absolutely misguided self-defense hurt him. I understand now, finally I understand.

I was still thinking I was a trans guy back then, and thought I was fine with looking like a man. I thought I was into men and although I much suppressed my attraction to women I acknowledged I had it and called myself bisexual, pansexual... something like that. I still believed I had lived a past life in which I was a male demon in love with a male elf, and I was blindly searching for the reincarnation of that elf who I called Caspian. It was a name I had borrowed and attached to what I thought was an actual memory, and I thought I could find Caspian in Y. But Caspian is not real, while Y very much is.

All those things, I believed in so strongly that I had shaped my entire existence around them, the meaning of my life, and even my afterlife. But completely unknowingly. Feeling them starting to break down, splitting at the seams, crumble... ever so little, when Y entered my life, scared the everliving crap out of me. I felt it as if it was my physical body breaking down with inexplicable random ailments, and my mind too with ever-decreasing empathy and loss of control of my emotions. It changed me.

At first I swung very strongly towards an even more masculine, "male-oriented" variant of my persona as in what I can only explain as extreme self-defense. I completely rejected and denied I had any attraction to women at all, I decided I was gonna get ftm bottom surgery to once and for all get rid of the last things female about my body, I became a "men's rights advocate" and rejected feminism, I made myself as masculine as I could, as my internalised misogyny leaked out and made me act and think in truly sexist ways. I hated myself so much. And I know now that it was because I couldn't handle Y's curious honesty and wish to help me that I eventually lashed out on him, abandoned him and then swung so hard into that "male extreme" at the same time.

I knew all along that he played a big part in how I eventually discovered I'm really a woman, my urgent need/wish to detransition, letting go of my obsessive childhood fairytale of demons and elves, how much my traumas really affected me, and even my lesbian sexuality... but I didn't think about it quite this way before. It was because of him that I finally figured it all out, cause he kept asking me about my past traumas that I had willingly told him about but didn't really know how or if they still affected me much. There wasn't much I could tell him back then. I know he kept asking me cause he wanted to help me cause I was hurting a lot and to understand the complete chaos of a mess that I was, and to get some kind of stability in our trainwreck of a relationship. I was such a crappy boyfriend myself, I mean god damn it. I couldn't admit to that back then because none of anything made any sense to me. I didn’t know there was anything to admit. I thought I was living my truth and defending my truth, when in fact it was all self-deception.

Back then I knew I had walls up between him and me, but I didn't know why or what those walls were telling me. I was scared to find out, yet I wanted to. Now I know what those walls were. They were my male persona, my internalised misogyny, my internalised homophobia, my broken childhood dreams that I kept trying to glue together, the many self-defenses my traumas had created for me. I know because they've fallen now. My refusal to look into them back then, and my lashing out at him for trying to help me, was what ruined our relationship. It hurts when I think about the times he cried cause he couldn't reach out to me and I was getting colder and more distant until I closed myself off entirely. I know he loved me. I know I broke his heart, badly.

No amounts of the words "I'm sorry" is ever gonna be enough to mend that. I know that. But I don't know what ever could be enough, if anything. But at least... if I could, I'd thank him for releasing me from the cage I had trapped myself in. No, I wasn't a monster, cause I never meant to hurt him, and cause I do feel remorse... but finally I can take full responsibility for that’s how it did in fact turn out, and oh god it hurts.

#personal #digging into my past again #not so long ago though #confession of sorts i guess #remorse #realising shit #cant quite let go #Y #past relationship

5 notes · View notes

transqueerquestions · 5 years

Note

So this may be a bit touchy: isn’t dysphoria like a mental illness like wanting to drastically alter your physical anatomy doesn’t seem like something to be celebrated to me(my mother had to get a double mastectomy, if medically unnecessary I don’t understand why it’s done) and I’ve seen statistics(idk how valid) that the suicide rate doesn’t decline after surgery. Anyway my question: am I missing something? cause I see lots of people encouraging surgery/getting it. I mean no disrespect Thx -kB

Howdy, Kadence here.

What I hear from you:

- is dysphoria a mental illness?

- it doesn’t make sense for someone to celebrate drastically altering their physical anatomy

- I’ve seen statistics that the suicide rate doesn’t decline after surgery.

- Lots of people are encouraging surgery, why?

Let me know if that’s not what you were trying to communicate.

Here’s what I have in response. (rather long, apologies!)

IS DYSPHORIA A MENTAL ILLNESS?

So gender dysphoria is a term in the DSM-5 (diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, edition 5) involving a difference between one’s experienced/expressed gender and their assigned gender, which causes significant distress or problems functioning. It lasts at least six months and is shown by at least two of the following:

A marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and primary and/or secondary sex characteristics

A strong desire to be rid of one’s primary and/or secondary sex characteristics

A strong desire for the primary and/or secondary sex characteristics of the other gender

A strong desire to be of the other gender

A strong desire to be treated as the other gender

A strong conviction that one has the typical feelings and reactions of the other gender

Here’s a link to more information regarding the diagnosis of gender dysphoria:

https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/gender-dysphoria/what-is-gender-dysphoria

So essentially, gender dysphoria is an incongruence with gender, meaning someone experiences distress or problems functioning due to incongruence with their body, specifically primary/secondary sex characteristics, social environment (gendered spaces like bathrooms, pronouns, gendered language, etc), and mind (how you see yourself, your own identity, expression of self). Having gender dysphoria creates significant problems for individuals who suffer from it, often resulting in a comorbidity (simultaneous diagnosis) of depression, anxiety, and general mental health symptoms. There is debate on if gender dysphoria is to be considered a mental illness, or is simply a human experience, as many other cultures represent identities outside of modern male/female experiences without the lens of being ‘wrong’ or ‘ill’.

Here’s a link to an ask where I described gender dysphoria a little more detailed: http://transqueerquestions.tumblr.com/post/182072129871/hi-ive-been-questioning-my-gender-for-a-couple

It’s important to differentiate the presence of gender dysphoria in the DSM, VS the celebration of someone’s identity as a trans person who experiences dysphoria. You can have bipolar disorder, but not feel guilty for your diagnosis and the challenges you face, similar to how you can experience dysphoria which has significant impacts on your mental health and well being, and not feel guilty or shame in your celebration of overcoming or experiencing the challenges you face. I mention this because a “treatment” for gender dysphoria is transition related procedures, in addition to support and acknowledgment from your community. When you have an incongruence with your primary sex characteristics, social interactions, and self, you are experiencing distress 24/7 that your body and identity is not ‘correct’, that you constantly feel uncomfortable. You may become unable to hold relationships, attempt to avoid gendered situations, develop depression and anxiety, thoughts of suicide, or experience depersonalization (form of dissociation, a separation from reality). To mitigate these, transition procedures (surgery, hormone replacement treatment, name change, pronouns, etc) is what can alleviate these situations.

WHY ARE PEOPLE CELEBRATING SURGERY? WHY CELEBRATE DRASTICALLY ALTERING YOUR BODY?

When people are celebrating/encouraging surgery, they are doing so as a way to express their freedom from this constant emotional and mental pain. A vague comparison is an amputee who decides to remove their limb. This individual might have a technically working limb, but due to an injury or medical situation, they experience chronic pain, prohibiting them to engage in life to their fullest potential. They may make a choice to drastically alter their physical anatomy, but it is for the betterment of their health. Here’s two videos describing their experience with choosing to amputate:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaIIu6bFKVo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BefxfzARZwA

When you speak about your mother getting a mastectomy, she did it for the betterment of their health, just like someone experiencing gender dysphoria does so for the improvement of their health. The difference is just less visible and more mentally based than physical, so it’s more confusing to understand on a surface level. Even so, transitional related surgeries are medically necessary, because not doing so can result in the development of mental illnesses and/or suicide.

DOES THE SUICIDE RATE DECLINE AFTER SURGERY?

When I got my top surgery, it allowed me to comfortably wear clothes, exercise, breathe better, have an increased sense of self-esteem which has lessened my feelings of depression and suicidal thoughts, and more. I am currently on hormones, which are slowly changing my secondary sex characteristics, to help me feel more at home in my body, and to also help alleviate my social dysphoria, so I am not read as female. Surgery was scary, and I wish I didn’t have to do that as much as I don’t want to inject myself once a week with testosterone. But it has literally saved my life, and I would have likely died by suicide without it. I celebrate drastically changing my body because it drastically changed my life for the better.

While this has been my experience, it’s important to understand that everyone is different. Sometimes experiencing gender dysphoria for so long without intervention leads to the development of mental illnesses that need further treatment, that may contribute to suicidal thoughts. In regards to what you say about suicide rates, you might be referring to this study which was done in Sweden:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3043071/

They concluded that people post-op in gender reassignment surgery (specially bottom surgery or genital surgery) did not have their suicidal thoughts decrease. They theorized that it’s because surgery does not “”cure”” transsexualism (a rather outdated term). But it’s also important to remember that this study was done only in Sweden and just with 324 people, which doesn’t come close to representing the community of people from a variety of backgrounds. This was also done in 2003 when not as much information was available, and only based on bottom surgery, not other surgeries such as a bilateral mastectomy or hormone replacement treatment.

Here’s a related article:

https://thinkprogress.org/no-high-suicide-rates-do-not-demonstrate-that-transgender-people-are-mentally-ill-5074c09a5827/

There are also incidents of individuals undergoing transition related surgeries or treatment, and then needing to detransition. These individuals did not experience gender dysphoria, but their trauma and dissociation (depersonalization) or other situations manifested themselves in a disconnect from identity, and transition often became a means of coping with said trauma. It’s important to remember that these are not transgender individuals who experience dysphoria, and their experiences to not represent trans people, or prove that transition doesn’t fix anything.

Here’s a short film of a woman’s experience with detransitioning:

https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/562988/detransitioned-film/

It’s also a common misconception that surgery, hormones, and transition will cure dysphoria. This often isn’t the case. Dysphoria will likely be with you for the rest of your life, just how most mental illnesses stay with you. When individuals complete their transition, there can often be an increase of distress, because there are no more measures to be taken. But, just like any other mental health disorder, they can be improved, and coping skills can be in place to live a better life. Transition is a means of making life more manageable, even though it may not fully remove someone’s dysphoria.

IN CONCLUSION

I hope this helps better your understanding of transition related surgeries and trans experiences. While this will always be a safe space to ask any and all questions, keep in mind that not all trans people are open to answering to those comments. Find ways like this blog or other resources to ask questions and further seek knowledge, and avoid asking people who experience gender dysphoria in your own life unless they express that they are open with speaking about it.

Hope that’s helpful! Feel free to contact us/comment if you have any further questions.

#kadence answers #answered #dysphoria #surgery #transition #suicide #detransition #gender dysphoria #DSM #diagnosis

1 note · View note

weather-witch · 5 years

Link

by Inga Berenson It was a hot summer morning. I was nine or ten, riding my pony from our farmhouse toward the barn where my father was working. This was the first time I had gone riding since a string of bad falls had caused me to lose my nerve, but I loved riding, and was determined to be back in the saddle. So far, things were going well. The gravel road between our house and the barn was about a mile long, and I was halfway there. My usually cantankerous little mare was being perfectly docile, but I was approaching the house of a quirky neighbor who kept a menagerie of animals – donkeys, zebras, buffalo, and a gaggle of dogs that barked at every passing car. I was mostly worried about the dogs and how my pony would handle the barking – it sometimes made her nervous, but there was no dog in sight as I rode past the house. I was thinking I was home-free until I heard a commotion from the paddock across from the neighbor’s house. I looked around and saw a giant draft horse push through a dilapidated wire fence and come galloping toward me, neighing and grunting in what I later understood to be equine lust. In an instant he was beside us, rearing and pawing his great, hairy hooves in the air near my face. I thought that was the end of me and my pony. Then all of a sudden I heard my mother’s voice. I looked around and found her running toward us, yelling and hurling gravel at the big horse. She distracted him just long enough for me to hop off. My pony raced off into the safety of some low-hanging trees, and the neighbor came running out of his house to capture his oversized horse. As I stood there, weak-kneed from my near-death experience, I saw my mother’s car parked a few yards down the road, the driver’s-side door still open, and I knew what had happened. She had been worried about me, so she had followed from a distance, just to be sure I made it okay. I’ve been thinking about that story a lot lately. It was about four years ago that my daughter first told me she thought she might be trans. I believe her story is a classic example of social contagion, since she had never expressed any discomfort with her sexed body until she got Tumblr and DeviantArt accounts and began spending all her time on her phone. Since then, I have felt a bit like my mother, standing in the middle of the road, hurling gravel, trying to protect my daughter from an ideology that has sought to convince her that she was born in the wrong body. I am fortunate. Unlike some of my friends with kids who became convinced they were trans, I feel reasonably confident that my daughter will not medically transition. She desisted from a social transition more than a year ago, and she told me recently that she no longer identifies as trans. However, she still has many friends in the gender-queer community, and I know we’re not out of the woods. When she turns 18 in a few months, she may exercise her right as a legal adult to start medical transition, and there won’t be anything I can do to dissuade her. This worries me greatly. So, as a matter of self-preservation as much as anything, I’ve been asking myself, what if she does transition? How will I cope? The short answer is I don’t know, but I certainly won’t disown her or ask her to leave my home. In fact, of all the many gender-critical parents I know who have trans-identified children, I know absolutely no one who has disowned their child or kicked them out of the house. I’m sure it must happen, but I don’t know any. Of course, all parents say things they regret – especially during the highly charged arguments with teens who are demanding immediate medical interventions. In one such argument, one of my best friends even told her then-trans-identified daughter to get out, but she immediately regretted it, took it back, apologized, and asked her daughter to stay (which she did). I also know at least three mothers who have lost contact with their trans-identified children, but in those cases, the kids themselves severed the relationship, not the parents. In fact, the mothers continue to try to reconnect with their children, despite being repeatedly rebuffed. Although I know I won’t disown or reject my daughter, I also know that I won’t affirm her decision to transition. It’s not really that I’m deciding not to; I simply cannot bring myself to do it. It would be dishonest for me to call her my son when I don’t believe she’s male. Plus, I don’t think it’s helpful for me to allow my daughter to dictate how I define words like “male” and “female.” Does this mean I love my child less than the mothers who affirm their children? Since I cannot occupy the mind of any of these other mothers, I guess I’ll never know. But I do know that my love for my child is so deep and strong that the idea that she has been misled to believe that her body is wrong depresses me to no end. I am angry — bitterly, bitterly angry that this ideology has taken up almost four years of her life so far and god only know how many more years it may take. Maybe the reason some parents affirm their children’s transgender claims and some parents question them lies in the parents’ own experiences of puberty. When my daughter felt embarrassed about shopping for bras at 13, I was not surprised because I remembered that feeling vividly. I hated it. I hated knowing that people could see my developing breasts and the outline of the bra straps under my shirt. I especially hated the very feminine bras – the ones with lots of lace and little pink bows where the cups joined in the middle. They made me feel vulnerable and exposed and miserable. I also know I got over it – for the most part, anyway. Trans activists claim that the number of trans-identifying people has increased so rapidly not because there are more trans people today than in the past but because society has become more accepting and they are no longer afraid to come out. But if this were the case, why are the greatest increases occurring in the population of female teens? Why aren’t middle-aged women like me queuing up for hormones now that we can come out? To me, the answer is clear. Women like me had a chance to come to terms with our bodies and accept ourselves as we are. My daughter didn’t have that chance because an insidious ideology was waiting in the wings to convince her that her feelings about her body meant that it was wrong. But maybe the mothers who readily affirm their children’s trans self-diagnoses didn’t have this experience at puberty. Maybe they were lucky enough to sail smoothly and happily from childhood through puberty, unambiguously pleased to watch their bodies go from child to woman – so, when their children expressed unhappiness about their developing bodies, they were genuinely puzzled and could only agree their kids must have been born in the wrong body. Whatever the reason for the difference between those parents and me, I resent the fact that the mainstream media will tell their stories, but they won’t tell mine. I resent the fact that my daughter looks at those parents and wishes I could be like them — because I never can be. If my daughter does eventually decide to take hormones or undergo surgery to medically transition, the only way I could fully support it is if I had clear scientific evidence that she had a condition requiring such an invasive treatment. If there were a definitive medical test – a brain scan, for example – that proved my child’s distress arose from an incongruence between her brain and the rest of her body that could only be alleviated by transition, I think I could go along with it. But there is no such test because individual brains don’t break down neatly into pink and blue categories. Sexually dimorphic brain features are subject to averages just like other physical characteristics. In general, men are taller than women, but if you plot their height on a bell curve, you will see lots of overlap between the sexes. You’ll also see outliers on the “tails” of the bell curve—6’4’ women, and 5’1” men. This is true with psychological and neurological traits, too. Also, trans activists justify their born-in-the-wrong-body claims by pointing to a few studies which indicate that the brains of trans-identified people are more similar in some respects to the opposite sex than their natal sex. But these studies do not control for many factors, including sexual orientation, and we know already that people who are same-sex-attracted have some brain features more similar to the opposite sex. Without tools to reliably predict who will benefit from transition, I simply cannot support medical interventions for young people whose brains have not fully matured (generally understood to be around age 25). I want desperately for my daughter to accept her body and to avoid the irreversible changes and the many health risks that are inherent in medical transition. But she will soon be 18 years old, and she will have the power to transition no matter what I want – even though she is still at least seven years away from brain maturity. There’s a real chance that she could. Would that be the end of the world? No, I know that it wouldn’t. As worried as I am about this outcome and as fixated as I’ve been on preventing it for four years, I do have to remind myself that her transitioning would not be the worst thing that could happen. Plus, I will still be able to hold onto the hope that she will detransition before the hormones can cause too much damage to her long-term health. Every day it seems that I read about a new detransitioner. More and more young people are saying enough is enough. They are reclaiming their bodies and their lives, and I find their stories inspiring. A few days ago I watched a video in which four young women, who formerly identified as trans, answer questions about their experience and share their insights. Their video gave me hope for a couple of reasons. First, they acknowledge the role that social contagion plays in driving the huge increase in kids (especially girls) who are identifying as trans today. It takes real courage to speak up and share stories that contradict the popular understanding of why people transition. These stories not only challenge the narrative of why people transition; they also show that, for many young people, transition does not make their lives better. But another reason that video gave me hope is that I can see these girls are all okay. In fact, they’re better than okay. They are strong and smart, and they are living with purpose and a sense of future. They reminded me that transition – even medical transition — is not the end of the world. Three of the girls were on hormones for more than a year. Their voices are changed, but they are healthy and well, and that’s a beautiful thing. Detransitioners have been giving hope to me and other parents for many years, but the relationship between the groups has been difficult at times. Some detransitioners have understandably resented how parents sometimes try to use their stories as cautionary tales to warn their kids about the dangers of medical transition. A big part of the problem is the language people sometimes use when talking about medical transition. For example, referring to the bodies of detransitioners as “mutilated,” their voices as “broken,” or their stories as “heart-breaking” has not been helpful. One of the most powerful and positive messages of the gender-critical movement is that no one is born in the wrong body. Gender-critical parents like me are constantly trying to encourage our kids to accept their bodies just as they are. Yet I believe we need to extend that same acceptance to all bodies – even bodies post transition. To feel good about themselves and their lives, all people need to be able to accept themselves physically and mentally, and words like “mutilated” don’t help them do that. Online, the interactions between detransitioners and parents has also been a little rocky at times because parents sometimes overstep boundaries that detransitioners need to be healthy. Parents often reach out to detransitioners for help with their personal situations – to seek parenting advice and guidance. But most detransitioners who speak out publicly are quite young; they don’t have children and they aren’t parenting experts, nor is it fair to saddle them with the responsibility of helping us. They’re dealing with their own issues, are often most focused on helping each other, and they don’t (and can’t be expected to) understand the situation and struggles of parents. What’s more, many have written or vlogged about their own, often fraught, relationships with their own parents, so when other parents reach out to them, they can feel “triggered” by being reminded of their own family relationships. These young people are still maturing and processing what their transition and detransition mean to them. They need time and space to be able to do that, and desperate appeals from parents they’ve never met, for help with kids they don’t know, could interfere with that process. Also, detransitioners are not a monolithic group. Not everyone who detransitions regrets transitioning. Deciding that transition is not right for you and regretting transition are not necessarily the same thing. Detransitioners who do not regret their transition naturally resent it when people use their stories to make a case against medical transition. At the same time, those detransitioners who are willing to speak out about the harms of transitioning and the power of reidentifying with your birth sex can be powerful allies in the fight to raise awareness about the regressiveness of gender ideology and potential harms to other young people – whether we’re trying to raise this awareness in the culture at large or just in our own homes. I hope my daughter will listen to the stories of some of these detransitioners and decide to first try some other strategies for becoming comfortable in her natural body. If, however, she does eventually transition, I hope she can be honest with herself about it and accept that she can never be male – however much she may be able to look like one. I follow several gender-critical trans women on Twitter. Although they have sought medical intervention for palliative reasons, they acknowledge they are male and support sex-based protections for women. They don’t demand that the world repeat the mantra that trans women are women. They have a healthier outlook on the world and a healthier sense of self because they aren’t trying to change anyone’s perception of material reality (like male and female). I appreciate the courage they are showing. Their stance as gender critical has cut them off from the support of the larger trans community, which regards them as heretics and traitors. And it must be noted that they’re not universally accepted among women who are gender critical, some of whom regard them with suspicion. Of course, my daughter may never come to recognize the bill of goods she’s been sold. She may transition, remain transitioned, and remain committed to an ideology I find regressive. If that’s the case, it will be my life’s task to love her and support her in spite of these things. But that doesn’t mean I will ever abandon my own sense of reality, because doing so would be inauthentic, and parents should not have to subordinate their own authenticity to their children’s quest for it. What I can do is look after her, help her financially to achieve non-transition-related goals, cook her favorite foods, hold her hand when she’s feeling down. I can even go out of my way to avoid gendered language so as not to provoke or upset her, but I simply cannot utter beliefs I don’t hold. Our relationship needs to be based on mutual respect. I must respect her autonomy, but she must also respect mine. Also, I want my daughter to understand that it’s ok for other people (even her parents!) to disagree with her and hold different views; that doesn’t mean we don’t love her. Far from it. I want my daughter to be strong and resilient enough to face the reality that life will be full of other people who disagree with her for any number of reasons. I’d rather she learn resilience than fragility that is triggered whenever she encounters disagreement or disapproval from others. I feel such a sense of solidarity with the other gender-critical moms I’ve met here on 4thWaveNow, on Twitter, and in real life because they’ve seen what I have seen – that this ideology has made our children less resilient, it has alienated them from their families, their former friends, and, worst of all, their own bodies. Most of us have watched as our children went from well-adjusted kids to teens preoccupied with online worlds, feeling oppressed and seeking medical transition. For our efforts to call attention to the regressive nature of the ideology, we have been called “bigots,” “transphobes,” even “Nazis.” So-called gender therapists gaslight us and pretend to know our children better than we do. And some journalists, blind to their sexism, have dismissed us (in one case, as merely a “bunch of mothers”), despite the advanced degrees and professional careers many of us hold, not to mention the voluminous research we have done to educate ourselves about this particular subject. And, yes, we have made mistakes. We are certainly not perfect. There are so many things I have said to my daughter that I wish I could unsay or at least say differently. There are so many times when my strong emotional reaction to things she was telling me created a barrier and shut down communication between us. Of course, she has said things that hurt me too, but as her mother and the adult in the relationship, I rightfully bear a larger share of the burden to try to make things right between us. I can’t change the past, of course. What’s done is done. But I do know this: My mother has been dead for more than 20 years, but I think about her every day. She was far from a perfect parent, but she loved me fiercely. The love she gave me in the first 30 years of my life still sustains me today. I know that now, in a way I didn’t fully understand when I was younger. I don’t know what the future holds for my daughter. My fervent hope is that she will reject the idea that she needs to change who she is, but whether or not she does, I hope one day she will look back on my resistance to her transition as the act of love that it is. I hope that her knowledge and memory of the fierceness of my love will sustain her, as my mother’s sustains me.

#detransition #detransitioner #gender critical #4th wave now #4th wave #mother trans daughter #love your body #peak trans

0 notes

healingbymyself4myself · 7 years

Text

Sacred contracts

Sacred Contracts Freaky Loops Synchronicity

I feel them coming on like a seizure, I don't smell peanut butter, I have no warning signal Or

Warring symbol

Soaring high above my path

Like the heron that enters my view

I know exactly where to point in the sky,

Even though the heron is not yet in my sight

I sense the heron's wings spreading as it prepares to take flight

I know the messages it brings to me Patience child

Slooooooow the fffff u c k down Stay the course yes

But stop running

Stand still

Open your eyes

Focus And wait

Focus and wait for IT to come to you Like the fish that forgets these "sticks"

Are actually legs

Like the fish that swims to me

Like the meal that delivers itself Offers itself

Like the meal the heron was meant to have

And so with that majestical bird the Freaky loop begins

I point to the Sky with a grin

And I know it's time to learn something.

Like the loop I had about Dads:

One Sunday I ran into an old lover My old lover was with his child

I thought "oh Sunday visitation"

I learned they were there for a play date with a school friend.

I watched as my old lover scanned the faces of every mother in the room, hoping he would recognize the parent of his child's friend

I learned that they actually had just come from Sunday visitation

He had just brought his daughter to visit with her mother

He was the full custodial parent

This child has not been able to live with her mother for years

This old lover is a warrior raising a daughter in this world

This old lover feels the pain that I have felt each day, each night, fearing that one parent, for a child may not be enough

This old lover knows how it goes when you're exhausted and still your kids need you, because afterall,you are all they have

This old lover is a real Dad---flip LOOP

Later that day I took the oddest route home,

Meandering for miles

Drove right past an old friend

This old friend has 4 kids, 2 baby mamas, Trauma from Vietnam, sickness from agent orange, guilt from all the Vietcong he slaughtered

He's tired from carrying all the labels they've given him, weathered from all the years making art on the sidewalk

This old friend would've gone unnoticed If Just if I had passed him, him driving his car, me driving mine

This old friend would've gone unnoticed If Just if I had gone home any of the other 10 more popular and direct routes

This old friend would've gone unnoticed If he hadn't chosen the moment I passed him to hop out of his car and close his trunk

This old friend would have only been traveling this road if he had just driven over 1 hour to see his sons,

This old friend drives that road several times a week to support his sons

This old friend has two trans teen sons that need him

This old friend is a real Dad--flip LOOP

Even later that day Another Dad, another Dad, another Dad Father figures Farther Farther

Fathers being good Dads Fathers being real dads

I had no fucking idea what to make of it

Ok Heron I'm waiting I'm waiting I'm sloooooowing the fuck down

Me? Slow? Not really, not often

Like when I met a guy he told me he wanted to stop T, told me he wanted to use his uterus, told me he wanted to give birth, so I found him sperm by our 3rd date, we inseminated 3 weeks into dating,

by our one year hook-up-aversay we were:married with two kids, 1 cat, two cars and we'd bought a house.

By year three we were:

divorced with 1 restraining order,

Still 1 cat, I got both children so I kept the house and BOTH cars

He'd broken my knee and both of our kid's hearts.

Yeah, at that point I'd probably never met slow,

but I know fuck real well and I definitely have experienced down

Ok Heron?! Dad Freaky Loop shit All weekend long. I'm slowing, I'm waiting, where is the lesson? I am truly sloooooowly waiting but if you could hurry up a little? Please?

My ex husband writes an text message from 1,000 mikes away

He hasn't seen our kids in months, He is not a good dad, He is not a real dad, He writes to say he is no longer a dad, He is no longer identifying as male

She has detransitioned

Back in her home town she has chosen to go back to her old gender, her old name, her old clothes

She wants to be viewed as a mother now She wants my title, my name

She wants my children to call her mom, She says And I fucking quote

"I still have deep parental feelings, motherly feelings, for both of them.

I would appreciate the opportunity to speak with them on a regular basis, to be available to them and love them, in the capacity with which I can offer"

Did you catch that?

Motherly love dot dot dot in the capacity with which I can offer!?!? Does not compute

No comprende Nope. That. Is Not. A THING

Mothers love in the capacity that is required,

Mothers love when they are too tired Mothers love when they are too hungry

Mothers love when they are mad, sad, glad

Fuck Mothers love when they breathe

that's what mothers do! And Because

The Heron taught me, so do real Dads--flip LOOP

When do sacred contracts begin? Did I bone that ex lover in a vodka black out (several times for several years) Because our contract was for him to show me about Good dads? Did I befriend that street artist when I was 17 because I needed to see him closing his trunk as I sped by on a Sunday?

None of those by chance intersections of our paths would've meant anything out of context, without previous contact, deep soul sharing, knowing one another

None of the lesson would've been learned if it weren't for the bird, That heron

That lesson

That taught me

To let one door close

To be open To opening To the possibility of

1 Good Dad

Thank you to my current slowly building partnership

Thank you to my partner Morgan for being

the one good dad

my kids (and I) deserve.

Thanks universe for all the lessons learned, relearned and unlearned

Thanks for synchronistic freaky looped sacred contracts

Thanks to the heron that travels through my sight and sets everything right

0 notes

werevulvi · 5 years

Text

I... probably should have known this would happen to some degree or another, but somehow I wasn't prepared. I think I've lost 2, if not more, friends. Both trans. Obviously due to my views on trans stuff having changed, and me daring to be vocal about it. Like what else...

One of them still interacts indirectly with me on facebook by liking some of my comments/posts, but he has seemingly stopped speaking to me, since about a month ago. I've only met him online, since about a year or so ago.

The other one... well he's the trans guy I had such a huge crush on for several years but he didn't reciprocate my feelings, and we even thought of each other as pretty much best friends for a couple of years, then drifted apart a bit but kept in some kind of contact. Until I broke up with my ex Y. I know that Y (whom I broke contact with cause the relationship went bad for us both) most certainly warned my friend about me being a "toxic" person, and unfairly so.

Since then he hasn't said a single word to me, or even acknowledged when I've made friendly comments on his posts, etc. And I just now noticed he has blocked me here on tumblr and unfriended me on facebook. Without a word. We were friends for over 10 years, maybe 12. It does hurt, but I do understand. No reason for me to be mad at him about it or try to contact him. It's his choice. And most likely because of what I've posted and reblogged here recently, which I know is entirely on me. But it's just hard to see that friendship die like that.

Cause these past few weeks or so, I've been suspecting more than usually that my best friend has abandoned me just the same as well. Like I felt the last few gasps of our friendship dying, and I've panicked. She always sends me a text message for Christmas. She didn't this time. I could have sent her one, but then I couldn't. My heart sank too much. Her birthday is tomorrow, as she turns 30, and I can't decide if I should force myself to send her a hopeless "happy birthday" message or not, still desperately holding on to a dying breath.

I've been thinking about writing her a letter, by hand or something. To tell her that I never wanted to lose her as a friend, but that I've felt it was coming to this for a long time, and that I'd accept it if she wants to move on, but can't pretend it doesn't hurt. If only I had her new adress... or her email. I do have her parents' adress though. Worst case scenario I could go via them, and ask them for her adress. I was always on good terms with her mother. She'd know it's not something I've done wrong, to cause me to drift apart from my life-long friendship with her daughter. Or I could just write the letter to have for myself if I can't figure out where to send it.

I'm pretty sure she unfollowed me on facebook sometime around spring last year, when I completely stopped getting any sort of notifications from her. I used to check her profile page every once in a while, maybe once or twice a month, cause my feed was getting too cluttered and she didn't post often, so I kept missing them. Her posts were mostly just about her kid which I couldn't relate to, so I mostly just gave it a "like" or "love" but didn't say anything, cause I just had nothing to say. I checked again just now cause had forgotten for a few weeks... but her facebook page is gone. She never told me. I dunno what's going on. She's had that account for as long as I've had mine... 9 years, and never even went inactive before. But now it appears her account has been deleted. You don't just do that for no reason, right?

Her husband is still on facebook and on my friend list, but I think he unfollowed me too, cause I haven't gotten any response from him for a really long time either. I used to be close friends with him too, since before they got together some 8 years ago. Last I ever heard from either of them was an invitation to a party, in the city they live in, back in November. I didn't go, cause I was in a terrible mental state due to my detrans-tragedy and couldn't handle traveling so far with flights and all. They didn't say anything to me, it was just a plain fb invitation, no explanation or anything. I thought it was odd and it gave a bad gut feeling. Not that long ago, but the next last thing I ever heard from them was when I texted her about my detransitioning, back in July, and she just stopped texting me back after a couple of days, without notice, which upset me. Before then... I don't remember.

I guess our friendship wasn't worth more than that to her. I guess I was right after all. That her boyfriend, then later husband and then her kid all just mattered a million times more than I ever did to her. I was the first person she ever knew except from her parents, when we were 2 years old and met in kindergarten, and instantly liked each other. We were classmates from grade 0 to 9th grade. She had a few other best friends until we really connected at age 12. I was never into her romantically or sexually (despite my gayness and her beauty), and she's super straight, but we did get a lesbian reputation in late elementary school, cause we were always so close. Losing her does break my heart, but why can't I even pick up the phone to text or call her?

I lost her the moment I moved to this island 6 years ago, cause I had noticed she seemed to care less about me a year earlier, and I think me moving halfway across the country was the death blow... and I never managed to rebuild my life since then, while her's flourished. Am I jealous? Well of course.

Early in life, we basically had the same potential... then we both had some issues with mental health, but she found love, got a job, got married, got a kid, bought a house, lives in the city we both always loved... whereas I got too fucking traumatised, wasted my 20's getting a sex change I then regretted, moved to an island I also regretted and can't move back, ended up in a series of shitty relationship with men until discovering I'm a lesbian, I'm single again, living on sickness compensation in a place I hate, with my anger issues, tragedies and inability to function well enough to even get a cat. How different life can turn out for two people, even though we were always so similar in personality, behaviour, humour, interests, lifestyle, the life goals we had, and even in our looks. I think about that sometimes, and how much I struggle to be happy for her. I guess I just got the short straw.

But even though I'm jealous that life went so much better for her, at least I still always cared about her as a person and the friendship we had. At least she always remained in my mind and in my heart. For recent years I've kept imagining I held onto her by my pinky finger, but my grip kept slipping by the day, as we drifted apart more and more. I think our bond is now broken. She let go of my pinky finger. That hurts more than I can let myself feel right now. How long were we best friends for? If I count up until today... then it was 17 years. And how long have we known each other as friends for? 28 years. It's a 28 years long friendship in our 30 years long lives. How she can just shake that off and move on, I don't understand.

The physical distance shouldn't matter... but it was what made her take distance from me, little by little. Like slowly pulling off a band aid. I should have been there with you when you got married. I wasn't. I should have been there with you when you got your daughter. I wasn't. I'm sorry I failed you, but you failed me too. Soulmate sister... may our past friendship rest in peace. I will remember you.

Every single memory I have of her flashing before my eyes. My entire body hurts. I feel nauseous. I can't process this, I don't want to feel this.

Correction, I've lost 3 friends.

#long rant #personal #sad post #lost friendships #feeling heartbroken #losing a life long friendship #like literally #i used to think this could never happen to us #but i guess everything is possible

1 note · View note