what does being visibly trans mean to you? like, emotionally. do you think it’s important? is it something that you’re comfortable with?
i am, in my opinion, pretty visibly trans doing a pretty visible thing and the only time i really remember that is when people talk about how it’s important. i make a mental note of basically every time i’ve positively affected a queer person doing my stuff and those moments are some of the few things i actually keep in my memory when i need motivation. the best thing about being trans is the sense of community, even if not all of us hold exactly the same values. we’re all on this ride together, for better or worse.
i think visibility is important too, i just don’t see living my life as some sort of project or praxis. i’m doing the only thing i’ve ever cared about, as the woman i was meant to be, and i’m not gonna let anything stop me, especially not a transphobe. it feels like cognitive dissonance and it’s progressed to the point where i literally forget i’m trans in public until i’m in a situation where i am acutely aware of it, either by someone mentioning it, being around another trans person, or being painfully, obviously alone in a sea of cis people. how the fuck do i keep forgetting a pillar of my existence despite actively being dysphoric almost every day? i’m torn between my identity being a foundational part of my personality and just wanting to forget about it when i’m out. i think passing fully would be great but i don’t know who i’d be if i lost that thread tugging at my heart when i’m waiting in line at the store or whatever.
maybe that was all rambling and i’m doing my best not to give away too much info but it is something i’d like to get some perspective on. would you rather pass fully and live your life without any of the hard parts of being trans or would you rather live with the hardship and be a beacon for other trans/queer people to know that we’re existing in the world and they can too?
I 100% just want to stealth all the time. It gives me significant mental pain when I get misgendered or encounter someone that refuses to gender me. I just want to fit in and not be noticed.
That being said, no matter what, I’m sure that other trans folk will always be able to clock me and that doesn’t really bother me at all. I just don’t want the cissies to figure it out.
All of this is why I’ve moved at the speed of light to achieve my goals. I just want to be another face in the crowd. I’m in my 30s and want to live the rest of my life in peace. While maybe a day may come that gender nonconforming folks will eventually be the norm, it is not today and I just don’t want bothered, especially by people that are dangerous to my personal safety. Maybe my thoughts will change someday, but who knows.
This will probably be one of the very few times I actually say this out loud. I don’t know why, but this point of view seems very unwelcome in some groups. Perhaps I am wrong. Couldn’t tell you.
some people feel like being loud and proud and making the cisses uncomfortable is inherently praxis/revolutionary in some sense. I don’t think it really is, but I had leaned that direction in the past (from a position of complete comfort/hypocrisy…)
Nowadays I think what’s much more important than physically standing out at all times is maintaining community, political consciousness, solidarity with other oppressed groups, etc. It turns out that rainbows and drag shows and all that stuff can be coopted by capital, but true, unflinching solidarity with all oppressed people, that cannot.
Something like that anyhow, I sound more confident than I am
I still often feel like safety, both real and perceived, can be invoked to justify a lot of bad shit (calling the cops, increasing surveillance, breaking solidarity, etc), but presentation is a personal choice that doesn’t involve making society worse for others.
i don’t view it as a matter of right or wrong. the reason i asked is because it’s a question with a million different answers depending on who you’re talking to. i completely understand wanting to opt out of the bad stuff, especially with how things are going. i don’t view my being regularly clocked as some kind of duty i have, it’s just something that happens and i have to deal with it somehow. if i could get rid of that, i’d most likely do so
I feel similarly to @ashinadash@hexbear.net. Personally, I spent a few years stealth and doing everything I could to cut being trans out of my life and it only led to the one of the hardest situations I’ve ever had to deal with. On a less uniquely me problem, it also left me so alienated when talking to cis people and even more so when talking to trans people. It felt like I could never be truly honest with everyone. I hated that. Anyway, I do pass now but I don’t ever try to hide the fact that I’m trans. It’s something I’m proud of and, given the chance to be cis or trans and live another life, I’d pick being trans 10/10 times again
Second one easily. I used to be a selfhating dork who wanted to assimilate 100% but that shit is so fucking lame. I wanna get gendered correctly but I have 0 desire to blend in or anything. It always makes my day whenever I see someone with like a pronoun or trans flag or whatever, and it would be cool if I could give that back to someone sometime. except once this person approached me while I was looking over a rack of DVDs basically staring at me and when I looked up they were like “Hi I was reading your hat!” Yes I have pins all over it but I fucking panicked and ran away holy shit sorry
I really desperately desire to feel a sense of community anywhere at all though so I don’t really wanna hide or be invisible.
i’m torn between my identity being a foundational part of my personality and just wanting to forget about it when i’m out.
Given that not forgetting about it when your out in this fuckin society can be exhausting and strenuous, I don’t think this is actually a contradiction? In a good world you could do both, imo.
it’s nice to have community and embolden other people, especially in the circles i’m in, but i don’t know if i’m strong enough to accept making a statement without basically being forced to
what does being visibly trans mean to you? like, emotionally. do you think it’s important? is it something that you’re comfortable with?
Well first of all, i have no fucking idea what “being visibly trans” entails as long as you do not hold up a sign saying “out and proud trans warrior”. I’m a bit over one and a half years into the physical part my transition (you can add two more years for questioning and transitioning socially) and i wouldn’t say that i have had particularly great starting conditions for passing, but it actually seems to work reasonably well for me since i got rid of my facial hair and started growing my boobs. I don’t feel as if i’m “visibly trans”, and that’s not even getting into how many trans people i know who do not have any commonly understood visible clichés of transness or how many cis people do have a ton of these supposed telltale signs. From my lived experience, i do not think that “being visibly trans” is a thing for most of us once we’re a few years into our transitions.
And then there’s girls who started transitioning literally 20 years earlier than me, who have much more visible curves, who i do not perceive as having bad passing at all, yet they make plausible claims that they’ve never gotten gendered correctly by strangers a single time in their life, and they have the history of being victims to hate crimes to prove it. And i seriously don’t know why they go through life with such hardships and i don’t. It makes zero sense to me. I don’t get what constitutes “visible transness”, there seems to be very little connecting the transfems i know who pass most of the time and there seems to be very little connecting those that don’t. It comes off as incredibly random in either case.
i think passing fully would be great but i don’t know who i’d be if i lost that thread tugging at my heart when i’m waiting in line at the store or whatever.
For me, it mostly meant that i stopped viewing transness as a deficit narrative and now view it entirely as a liberatory and subversive experience. When i do not pass, i violate established notions of gender because i refuse to be put in a neatly labeled box and confuse people with my gender presentation and when i do pass, i violate established notions of gender as well because i’m fully free from the restrictions people who want to assign me the wrong gender try to pin on me and because i prove the “you can always tell” crowd wrong. I win either way, cisnormativity loses either way.
And this is infinitely better than all this dysphoria-centric bs and all this passing-obsessed bs that i’m so fucking fed up with. I’m not a fan of how our community commonly talks about the trans experience, hexbear isn’t even a particularly bad place in this regard and reading the mega is still a minefield of self hatred and internalised transphobia where i just scroll past all the spoilers, and past all the shit that should be spoilered and wonder what i’m doing here. I do not let myself be defined by suffering and pain and never being good enough, fuck that noise. I’m free in a hundred ways cishets can’t even conceive off, i’m out there finally being me and finally living the life i’ve always deserved, why should i feel anything but joy about being trans? And don’t give me any of this “but being cis would be so much easier” crap, i do not know a single cis woman who’s happy in the way i am.
I just live my life assuming everyone will immediately know that I’m trans. It makes it way more fun when they don’t. I also live somewhere where being trans hasn’t come with many disadvantages so I have the luxury of being openly trans.
I spent years obsessing about passing, but it was deeply unhealthy. I have really inaccurate self-perception so even letting myself care about it caused massive amounts of stress over every aspect of my appearance.
If I could just be cis, or just look cis, I would still take that option though. Not because of external societal forces, but because I am a maelstrom of dysphoria and dysmorphia and I think it would shut my brainworms up a bit.
i share a lot of those feelings and sometimes i wonder if it would ever be enough for me. maybe it’s good that i have to eat shit sometimes because i think i would be a terror if i never had to encounter any sort of hardship
I’ve been taking hrt for 5 years, i used to care about ‘passing’, wanting to change my body, but now i just effectively live as my agab because its easier and people are just wrong, thats on them. Yeh I’m a man with a cups and a womans name, good one. I swear it just looks like i have mad pectoral muscles or something.
it was a lot of mental work though, i tell ya
I dont particularly care for anyone knowing i’m trans but in reality I dont want anyone to know anything about me. Solidarity with the people I see who do wear pronoun pins and the like, Ive never had a good time doing that though.
okay, let me ask a question:
what does being visibly trans mean to you? like, emotionally. do you think it’s important? is it something that you’re comfortable with?
i am, in my opinion, pretty visibly trans doing a pretty visible thing and the only time i really remember that is when people talk about how it’s important. i make a mental note of basically every time i’ve positively affected a queer person doing my stuff and those moments are some of the few things i actually keep in my memory when i need motivation. the best thing about being trans is the sense of community, even if not all of us hold exactly the same values. we’re all on this ride together, for better or worse.
i think visibility is important too, i just don’t see living my life as some sort of project or praxis. i’m doing the only thing i’ve ever cared about, as the woman i was meant to be, and i’m not gonna let anything stop me, especially not a transphobe. it feels like cognitive dissonance and it’s progressed to the point where i literally forget i’m trans in public until i’m in a situation where i am acutely aware of it, either by someone mentioning it, being around another trans person, or being painfully, obviously alone in a sea of cis people. how the fuck do i keep forgetting a pillar of my existence despite actively being dysphoric almost every day? i’m torn between my identity being a foundational part of my personality and just wanting to forget about it when i’m out. i think passing fully would be great but i don’t know who i’d be if i lost that thread tugging at my heart when i’m waiting in line at the store or whatever.
maybe that was all rambling and i’m doing my best not to give away too much info but it is something i’d like to get some perspective on. would you rather pass fully and live your life without any of the hard parts of being trans or would you rather live with the hardship and be a beacon for other trans/queer people to know that we’re existing in the world and they can too?
I 100% just want to stealth all the time. It gives me significant mental pain when I get misgendered or encounter someone that refuses to gender me. I just want to fit in and not be noticed.
That being said, no matter what, I’m sure that other trans folk will always be able to clock me and that doesn’t really bother me at all. I just don’t want the cissies to figure it out.
All of this is why I’ve moved at the speed of light to achieve my goals. I just want to be another face in the crowd. I’m in my 30s and want to live the rest of my life in peace. While maybe a day may come that gender nonconforming folks will eventually be the norm, it is not today and I just don’t want bothered, especially by people that are dangerous to my personal safety. Maybe my thoughts will change someday, but who knows.
This will probably be one of the very few times I actually say this out loud. I don’t know why, but this point of view seems very unwelcome in some groups. Perhaps I am wrong. Couldn’t tell you.
some people feel like being loud and proud and making the cisses uncomfortable is inherently praxis/revolutionary in some sense. I don’t think it really is, but I had leaned that direction in the past (from a position of complete comfort/hypocrisy…)
Nowadays I think what’s much more important than physically standing out at all times is maintaining community, political consciousness, solidarity with other oppressed groups, etc. It turns out that rainbows and drag shows and all that stuff can be coopted by capital, but true, unflinching solidarity with all oppressed people, that cannot.
Something like that anyhow, I sound more confident than I am
I still often feel like safety, both real and perceived, can be invoked to justify a lot of bad shit (calling the cops, increasing surveillance, breaking solidarity, etc), but presentation is a personal choice that doesn’t involve making society worse for others.
i don’t view it as a matter of right or wrong. the reason i asked is because it’s a question with a million different answers depending on who you’re talking to. i completely understand wanting to opt out of the bad stuff, especially with how things are going. i don’t view my being regularly clocked as some kind of duty i have, it’s just something that happens and i have to deal with it somehow. if i could get rid of that, i’d most likely do so
I feel similarly to @ashinadash@hexbear.net. Personally, I spent a few years stealth and doing everything I could to cut being trans out of my life and it only led to the one of the hardest situations I’ve ever had to deal with. On a less uniquely me problem, it also left me so alienated when talking to cis people and even more so when talking to trans people. It felt like I could never be truly honest with everyone. I hated that. Anyway, I do pass now but I don’t ever try to hide the fact that I’m trans. It’s something I’m proud of and, given the chance to be cis or trans and live another life, I’d pick being trans 10/10 times again
Same same, after a few years it was like, fuck talking to cis people sucks and I miss being around trans people…
I love trans men and recognising trans men and being recognisable as trans man. Cis people should just not interact with me tbh.
when california breaks off from the US and floats into the ocean, we will finally have our paradise
Big agree. I love and treasure all the time I get to spend with the trans men in my life.
Dudes rocking
Second one easily. I used to be a selfhating dork who wanted to assimilate 100% but that shit is so fucking lame. I wanna get gendered correctly but I have 0 desire to blend in or anything. It always makes my day whenever I see someone with like a pronoun or trans flag or whatever, and it would be cool if I could give that back to someone sometime.
except once this person approached me while I was looking over a rack of DVDs basically staring at me and when I looked up they were like “Hi I was reading your hat!” Yes I have pins all over it but I fucking panicked and ran away holy shit sorryI really desperately desire to feel a sense of community anywhere at all though so I don’t really wanna hide or be invisible.
Given that not forgetting about it when your out in this fuckin society can be exhausting and strenuous, I don’t think this is actually a contradiction? In a good world you could do both, imo.
it’s nice to have community and embolden other people, especially in the circles i’m in, but i don’t know if i’m strong enough to accept making a statement without basically being forced to
That’s absolutely fair too of course, makes sense that if passing’s like not an option you might have different feelings about it too.
Well first of all, i have no fucking idea what “being visibly trans” entails as long as you do not hold up a sign saying “out and proud trans warrior”. I’m a bit over one and a half years into the physical part my transition (you can add two more years for questioning and transitioning socially) and i wouldn’t say that i have had particularly great starting conditions for passing, but it actually seems to work reasonably well for me since i got rid of my facial hair and started growing my boobs. I don’t feel as if i’m “visibly trans”, and that’s not even getting into how many trans people i know who do not have any commonly understood visible clichés of transness or how many cis people do have a ton of these supposed telltale signs. From my lived experience, i do not think that “being visibly trans” is a thing for most of us once we’re a few years into our transitions.
And then there’s girls who started transitioning literally 20 years earlier than me, who have much more visible curves, who i do not perceive as having bad passing at all, yet they make plausible claims that they’ve never gotten gendered correctly by strangers a single time in their life, and they have the history of being victims to hate crimes to prove it. And i seriously don’t know why they go through life with such hardships and i don’t. It makes zero sense to me. I don’t get what constitutes “visible transness”, there seems to be very little connecting the transfems i know who pass most of the time and there seems to be very little connecting those that don’t. It comes off as incredibly random in either case.
For me, it mostly meant that i stopped viewing transness as a deficit narrative and now view it entirely as a liberatory and subversive experience. When i do not pass, i violate established notions of gender because i refuse to be put in a neatly labeled box and confuse people with my gender presentation and when i do pass, i violate established notions of gender as well because i’m fully free from the restrictions people who want to assign me the wrong gender try to pin on me and because i prove the “you can always tell” crowd wrong. I win either way, cisnormativity loses either way.
And this is infinitely better than all this dysphoria-centric bs and all this passing-obsessed bs that i’m so fucking fed up with. I’m not a fan of how our community commonly talks about the trans experience, hexbear isn’t even a particularly bad place in this regard and reading the mega is still a minefield of self hatred and internalised transphobia where i just scroll past all the spoilers, and past all the shit that should be spoilered and wonder what i’m doing here. I do not let myself be defined by suffering and pain and never being good enough, fuck that noise. I’m free in a hundred ways cishets can’t even conceive off, i’m out there finally being me and finally living the life i’ve always deserved, why should i feel anything but joy about being trans? And don’t give me any of this “but being cis would be so much easier” crap, i do not know a single cis woman who’s happy in the way i am.
i’m glad you figured it out, i hope to get there someday
I just live my life assuming everyone will immediately know that I’m trans. It makes it way more fun when they don’t. I also live somewhere where being trans hasn’t come with many disadvantages so I have the luxury of being openly trans.
I spent years obsessing about passing, but it was deeply unhealthy. I have really inaccurate self-perception so even letting myself care about it caused massive amounts of stress over every aspect of my appearance.
If I could just be cis, or just look cis, I would still take that option though. Not because of external societal forces, but because I am a maelstrom of dysphoria and dysmorphia and I think it would shut my brainworms up a bit.
i share a lot of those feelings and sometimes i wonder if it would ever be enough for me. maybe it’s good that i have to eat shit sometimes because i think i would be a terror if i never had to encounter any sort of hardship
I’ve been taking hrt for 5 years, i used to care about ‘passing’, wanting to change my body, but now i just effectively live as my agab because its easier and people are just wrong, thats on them. Yeh I’m a man with a cups and a womans name, good one. I swear it just looks like i have mad pectoral muscles or something.
it was a lot of mental work though, i tell ya
I dont particularly care for anyone knowing i’m trans but in reality I dont want anyone to know anything about me. Solidarity with the people I see who do wear pronoun pins and the like, Ive never had a good time doing that though.