#everyone's always talking about how medical transition isn't necessary to be trans

[rjalker]

Medical transitioning isn't required for being trans.

And neither is social transitioning.

They reasons for you not transitioning literally don't even matter.

Even if you're the only person you ever tell you're trans is yourself, you're trans enough.

Being trans isn't /about/ transitioning. It's being yourself, even if the only person you can be yourself with is /yourself/.

#trans #transgender #nonbinary #transnonbinary #genderqueer #MOGAI #Queer #LGBT #LGBTQ #LGBTQ+ #LGBTQIA+ #everyone's always talking about how medical transition isn't necessary to be trans #which is obviously correct #but it does forget that some people can't socially transition either #and I'm not even gonna list reasnons why that happens because again. #the reasons don't matter #not as far as ''can I call myself trans?'' matters #the answer is yes: you can. yes even if you don't tell anyone ever.

[softfists]

I'm a year and a couple months post-top surgery now. Pics are a couple days, a month, and a year post-op. One of the best decisions I ever made. You can see the remnants of a seroma that never fully drained, which is a little annoying, but which hardly matters next to all the other benefits I've gotten out of surgery. I intermittently think about writing or talking publicly (irl) about my transition and how life-changing it's been for me. If I wanted it, I have access to a fairly large platform professionally. I think about this whenever there's some new legislative or culture war bullshit (which is all the damn time now), then never do. It never feels worth it to put myself on display and risk creating the impression that my private life and medical history are, broadly, other people's business -- especially when I'm early enough in my career that most of the people I meet outside my immediate professional circle don't know I transitioned. To be clear, I'm not ashamed of myself, but there are material social/emotional/professional consequences to people knowing you're trans.

What I keep coming back to is this: there's nothing novel or insightful I can add to the conversation about why gender-affirming care matters that hasn't already been said by other trans people. The problem isn't that we haven't made ourselves clear, it's that cis people can't or won't listen. The fear and discomfort they feel about transition (and gender more generally) will always be prized over the benefit transition gives us. And I understand why: if you've never experienced dysphoria, it's next to impossible to conceptualize. Even the best metaphors are ineffectual, and appealing to universal feelings of "discomfort in your own skin" just gets weaponized as a reason why transition isn't necessary, because doesn't everyone feel uncomfortable in their own skin sometimes?

It's like how someone who is blind can touch a spherical object and recognize other spherical objects by touch, but if they saw one, they wouldn't be able to connect the visual and tactile information. If you've always been able to see, that a sphere feels spherical is not only so obvious it's redundant, but so obvious that imagining a sphere that doesn't feel spherical is impossible. Imagine how frustrating it would be to explain why a sphere feels spherical, and how you know this, and you begin to approach what it feels like to explain gender dysphoria and the necessity of transition care to cis people. The empathy gap is just too big, and like pretty much all empathy gaps, it can't be plugged with facts. That just isn't how our brains work. It doesn't matter how many studies about the benefits of transition you produce. They'll always be less real than a cis woman's conviction that it would be awful for anyone born with breasts to "lose" them, because it would be awful to her to lose hers. Transphobic detransition narratives are powerful precisely because they affirm what cis people already believe about transition and require no empathy to grasp. I've wasted so much brainpower trying to find the perfect way to explain all of this, but now I think it's less important that cis people have a perfect understanding of transness than that they recognize how that lack of understanding colors their feelings about trans issues.

#personal