bite-my-grimy-fleshy-ass Follow Feb19,2024
A cute guy likes me on a dating app. After chatting with them for weeks, we decide to go on a date. They are very flirtatious and forward over the app, but not when we meet in person. He admits he thought I was transmasc like him, we laugh about it because his mistake is funny and means I’m not passing but in a silly backwards way. I think his sudden awkwardness in person may be nervousness and flirt with him in ways less forward and aggressive than he’d been flirting with me earlier, and they become cold and distant for the rest of the date. By the time I get home they’ve blocked me on the app we met on. This case of being mistaken as a transmasc on a dating app will happen 3 more times, and in 2/3 times it results in a similar sudden lack of interest where once they were coming on to me. None of these people will be cis.
I am in a self defense class for queer people, learning hand to hand combat as a community. I have been here months. I notice I’m the only transfem in the classes but there are other trans people there so I don’t think much of it. Today I have some stubble as I did not have time to shave before the early morning class. When discussing unrealistic action movie and anime fight scenes I describe on of my. favorites, quoting the lines as I pantomime the goofy moves. They smile and laugh along until the word bitch leaves my lips in one quote, then the bisexual woman who only ever they/thems me glares at me like I’ve committed a grevious crime, and the rest of the class looks at me like a freak in awkward silence for a moment before moving on. I learn bitch is not a word a clocky bitch can "reclaim’. 1 am quiet in classes now, and when I go I focus primarily on the training, when I see other trans women try it out they often give me a sad look and do not return for a second class. I get a sinking feeling that if I ever use this training to save my life one day I’d be branded a violent man instead of a strong woman.
I am texting with a good friend of years who was one of the people who helped me realize I was trans like them and even the one who helped pick out my name loves talking about our shared interests and sharing their favorite smut with me. We bond over favorite stories, artists, characters, and kinks as well as our trans experience. Yet they constantly tell me they could never date someone who’s AMAB because of the trauma of being “female socialized" and their genital preferences for vulvas. Every compliment they have ever given me on my appearance or outfit is followed up by “but in a non-sexual way, I could never date you”. Today I finally have the courage tell them they don’t need to say that every time. They ignore this response. We keep. talking for awhile, but they start taking months to respond to my messages and respond with a short sentence at most. They no longer share details about their life and shut me out when I ask or share details about mine, even the most mundane and chaste details. I stop talking to them. A birthday gift I bought them months before this falling out happened looms at me in my closet. I cannot use it as it doesn’t fit me but can’t bring myself to throw it away, just in case we reconcile one day. I feel pathetic for craving friendship with someone who sees me as "abuser-bodied’, that so much of my early stages would’ve been impossible without their help. I feel a little more lost without them.
am at a queer/trans/enby kink dance party with some friends. I am scantily clad and wearing a skirt and high heeled boots. I do not pass well so this space is one of the few places I feel safe and free dressing like this. It is packed with queer and trans people just like me engaged in delightful debauchery and wearing very little. The music hurts my ears but I’m happy to be here, I feel overstimulated but alive and authentic. I am approached by a beautiful stranger from across the dance floor, she is graceful and stylish, like some modern Galadriel clad in leather, white lace, and industrial piercings with impeccable voice training. She compliments my outfit, I compliment hers. She tells me I need to shave my armpits if I want to look like a real woman. My two friends stand up for me and yell at her. They assure me she was just being an asshole, that women were supposed to be hairy, but I can’t help but notice how both of them have hairy armpits and yet the “advice” targeted me. The wide range of bodies that people here tonight find desirable on cis women don’t seem to apply to the women like me. I am the only one of us that doesn’t go home with a hookup at the end of the night. I realize now she likely spoke from experience. I am still hurt by her words, but realizing the kinds of experiences she must have had herself to feel her words were kind advice hurts far
worse.
Alocal queer photographer who’s work I follow is looking for women & non-binary models for a photoshoot. I have become comfortable with getting photos taken of me for the first time in my life since my egg cracked, and had a few small time modeling gigs under my belt. With something like this I could actually have the beginnings of a portfolio. I reach and am told that they are not looking for trans women models, nly women and AFABS’. Getting the same line I get from agencies from an independent queer photographer repackaged in “woke” terminology stings. I see many queer and nonbinary models I looked up to take part in the shoot. I have to wonder if they knew that the photographer’s definition of woman didn’t include trans women, or if like me in my martial arts class they noticed no transfems were there but didn’t think much of it because there were other trans people there.
Itis years ago and I am still an egg. I am with my partner of 4 years. I am exhausted after a long day. She asks me for sex in the voice that I know means saying no will hurt her. I learned from her long ago men have high and insatiable sex drives, therefore saying no meant I wanted to have sex, just not with her. So I say yes. The sex s painful and unsatisfying, and I simply do my best to thrust through the discomfort until she cums. I feel numb and hurt. She enjoys herself but seems sad I did not cum. I assure her I love her. When we hold eachother after my obligation has been met and I finally feel comfortable and safe. We begin talking. She talks about the trashy women she saw on the street today, describing their cringe outfits and ugly styles and bad hair. All the styles and clothes and hair I yearn to try myselfin my deepest and most repressed desires. I change the subject and ask her about work and family. She asks if Id still love her if she were a man and I say yes. She says she would still love me if I were a woman. Something in that statement feels like a lie. It is months later when we break up and I move out. Now that Iama woman I look back and know from our years together that if I were a woman then shed hate the kind of woman I’d become. That if I were a woman she’d still have the same expectations of me as a man, that her refusal of sex equated an impersonal not being in the mood but my refusal of sex equated a cruel refusal of love.
A lesbian group begins organizing a queer woman’s strip night event. A safe place for amateur performers to shine and women to perform and enjoy sexuality away from the male gaze. I see no transfems in the promotional material o leadership team, and I’ve learned not to think nothing of it just because there are other trans people there. I do not go.
I am talking with my therapist. They are trans too and an amazing therapist, often providing insights and advice only someone else with the lived experience of being trans can. I express distress and suicidal ideation at the fact I feel like I need to pass before I can dress the way I want. That until I get expensive hair removal procedures and FFS I can never feel safe and welcome presenting authentically. I lament how these things are expensive and may never be accessible to me. They tell me I need to deal with my "internalized transphobia’, as if these feelings aren’t a result of constant rejection and othering by external forces even within queer spaces. As if the scrap of womanhood others sometimes acknowledge in me does not rely on their perceptions of me.
There is a publication accepting works from trans people of all stripes to document trans experiences. It gets flamed for not having a single transfem as a contributor. The people behind it apologize profusely, they say didn’t notice no transfems had sent work in and would do a sequel publication that was transfem-centric. I wonder if anyone had noticed there were no transfems but didn’t think much of it because there were other trans people there. I think about the kinds of spaces I’ve seen like that, and the implications it has about how they treat transfems, and I am unsurprised no transfems submitted.
One of my closest friends for years is very supportive of me when I first begin crossdressing and experimenting with they/them pronouns. She gives me suggestions on cute clothes to wear and takes me shopping as well as asks for pictures. We had helped eachother discover we were both queer as young teens, come to terms with it, and navigate it in a hostile environment, so I have complete trust. We are close enough we are frequently asking eachother advice on serious life choices & relationships, sending nudes for critique + tips before sending them to our partners, and sharing our most secret and vulnerable moments. She often asks me for tips on getting her straight boyfriends into pegging and crossdressing that make me slightly uncomfortable but I don’t mind, she is a loyal friend I would endure a great many discomforts for. I host a lunch for us one day, and come out to her as a trans woman. I tell her my new name, say I no longer use he/him pronouns, and thank her for her support on my journey thus far. She launches into a monologue about how by changing my name I am throwing away all our memories together and spitting in the face of my family. Taken aback by her sudden heel turn after being so supportive of me being nonbinary and GNC, I excuse myself to go to the bathroom to get a break and give her some time to process. When I am in the bathroom trying not to cry, she is on the phone. I overhear her misgendering me as she is talking about me being bisexual in a frightened voice. She sounds truly afraid that I intend to be sexually violent towards her. When I leave the bathroom and sit back down I pretend not to have heard. She gets off the phone, saying she was just chatting with her boyfriend. We talk a bit longer, she explains how "the surgery” is dangerous and experimental and she hopes I won’t get it. I assure her I won’t and do my best to change the subject and hope she comes around after some time to process things, hurt and shocked that what I saw as a natural shift in the path I was already on marked me as frightening in her eyes after knowing eachother for over a decade. That a fellow bisexual suddenly saw my bisexuality as dangerous now that I was asserting myself as a trans woman. I say goodbye to her, and she says goodbye to me using my deadname, I do ot risk an argument to correct her. It is months after the meeting we have not seen eachother since and she has not responded to any messages I sent. After reflecting on her reaction further I decide that I don’t really want to spend time with someone who thinks these things about me for my own safety and mental health, regardless of our history. A friend of 14 years who supported my queerness and transness gone the instant I crossed an intangible woman-shaped line that marked me as a predator and invader in her eyes.
I log online and day after day see trans women getting banned and harassed. Seeing baseless callout posts calling them groomers and abusers getting taken seriously by other queer and trans people. Seeing proof that deep down so many people I consider kindred spirits see me and people like me as worthy of intense scrutiny and policing to keep "the queer community” safe and united. The blocklist grows but everything stays the same. I treasure the people in my life who don’t take part in this and would do anything for them, but it seems they get fewer each time.
'm not making this post to seek sympathy, I am used to this kind of shit and far worse has happened to myseif and others. I just make this to llustrate transmisogyny is not some "online-only” issue like people claim. Even if online issues weren’t "real” (as healed is fond of saying, “online is real”) this has tangible effects in the way trans women are treated offline as well. By communities, friends, partners, colleagues, systems, etc. That’s why we talk about it.
So much of the discussions people have paint transmisogyny as some online oppression olympics maliciously trying to divide the community, smear transmascs, and “reinvent bioessentialism’. That is not what it is about. Discussions about transmisogyny is about how we are treated for being what we are, and while related to transphobia and misogyny it is seperate because it often represents doors other trans people and women can walk through that transfems cannot. It has affected me in my most intimate moments when I was with other trans and queer people I felt safe around, and taught me that I need to carefully manage my persona and presentation at all times lest my authenticity be branded "male socialization’. I am even terrified to express attraction to people who express attraction towards me because I’m so used to being treated like a predator upon reciprocating or being used and abandoned by people I trusted. I am terrified to be too excited about shared interests with friends lest I be too loud or talkative about it and branded with aggressive male socialization. So I make myself quiet and small, and shrink from the community and people I care about, and become more and more isolated.
Anyways, stop platforming anons who spread lies about trans women, stop hopping on TERF harassment campaigns because the trans gal they’re smearing "gave you bad vibes’, and maybe consider carefully if in your own life where you draw the line for a transfem’s behavior is any different from where you’d draw the line for anyone who’s not one.
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Trigger warning; tough love that takes a form that may seem insulting to women, women-presenting, trans women, nonbinary people, and straight men who hate being lumped in with other, worse straight men. And if anybody can teach me how to mark for spoilers on Boost for Lemmy… I’ll add those.
I read likes 3/4ths before my ADHD brain did seven other things but I came back to say something I'm saying all the time to my trans sisters. Which is this;
Unattractive women are invisible.
Cis women have said this for years.
There are obviously people making efforts to rectify that, but the truth is, while many of these uniquely trans experiences are unique… many more are, in my opinion (which is admittedly from a different place) just a reinforcement that this writer is, for better or worse, a woman.
They talk about how hair on cis women is accepted and attractive. This is not the overwhelming truth. I’m as cis as they come, and literally five days ago someone noted I had underarm hair out loud, to my face, as if there was any reality in which I didn’t know.
I wish someone would go around telling my trans sisters that what you’re experiencing is the womanly reality. People feel comfortable targeting trans women because it’s shorthand when they do it for “I want to reject you, and here’s a more socially acceptable response aside from not finding you attractive, personally.”
If you weren’t easily identifiable as trans, you’d be getting rejected for the same bullshit. You’re a woman. Many people value you only for whether or not you make their dick hard or their pussy wet, and you’re going to have to get used to that. As a badass dominatrix said to me once, “Put on your big girl panties, don’t let them see you cry, and get back to work.” :::
Eta: attempts at spoiler
I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said, but, that doesn’t make it any less shitty. (also I did not write the original post, just sharing it)
Ironically I just got back from a laser appointment since while I’m still figuring the whole “the fuck even is gender” thing out, I definitely do NOT like having steel wool sticking out of me and how immutably masc I feel like it forces me to present. Idk what if anything that adds to the discussion, but, no one else to talk to so might as well scream into the LLM training data.
You’re absolutely allowed to scream.
Here’s a fun truth women don’t really about often enough; many women grow steel wool. And those of us who didn’t start growing it when young? Most of them will grow it.
I consider myself extremely lucky in this department and I’m stopping to pluck whiskers off my chin and neck literally all day. And not one at a time, either! And when I say “whiskers” I mean I’m pretty sure they can be sharpened and used to cut diamonds! Please be aware I’ve met seven or so women in my life with PCOS. All of whom cried countless tears over how “masculine” they were because they could shave in the morning and have a five o’clock shadow.
This isn’t to invalidate your struggle. It’s to validate it with the secret knowledge that fighting these things is something every single woman either does constantly (and something like 99% of us do, by the way) or she’s “brave” and gets stigmatized. See also; I had less than an eighth of an inch of hair in my pits! And it’s being pointed out and shamed!
Is it harder for someone transitioning? Sure. But I think a big part of why is because of the bullshit that is having to take your rightful place among womankind, which doesn’t mean that any of these stop being a fight. In some ways, they will always be more of one. Because all women are forced to have this fight. It’s what our culture and society have given to us.
In fact, I think that’s why so many ciswomen support the AFAB-only spaces idea. People are inherently self-centered, and when a trans woman says they don’t feel validated as a woman because, say, facial hair… all the ciswomen reading that see is an accusation. This trans woman believes she’s not woman enough because of her facial hair… and that secret voice in a ciswoman’s head says, “And if that makes her less of a woman, what does that mean about you?”
I know I’m inviting a lot of hate and accusations of transphobia, but as I like to say, I owe the world my honesty.
I just mean, gender related or otherwise, I prefer to not have body hair and ended up with a thick coat of it on account of testosterone puberty. My body is for me, not other people, so I make the changes to it that I choose.
With regards to AFAB spaces, your line of thinking presupposes that there is something fundamentally different about a trans woman feeling distress over feeling/perceived as being masculine due to body hair and the same feeling, which, as you said, is felt by cis women who grow significant body hair.
It doesn’t presuppose that they’re different. It says the quiet society part out loud; many of the ciswomen I know don’t actually share their fears of being less of a woman out loud very easily, and none of them do it online! There’s so much fear and shame wrapped up in it for them.
This is one hypothesis why I’ve seen other ciswomen, who consider themselves allies, turn TERFy.
no one else to talk to so might as well scream into the LLM training data.
too real!
That was great! Definitely stealing that one
the fuck even is gender
I once read from a wise internet sage somewhere, “gender is a fuck”
Gender is a fuck indeed.
I definitely relate though. Thought the same thing so many times since I began my journey.
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Spoilers on Lemmy work like this:
::: spoiler Text next to the arrow Text inside of the spoiler which can span multiple lines and can contain *formatting* :::which produces this:
Text next to the arrow
Text inside of the spoiler
which can span multiple lines and can contain formatting
The first word after the three colons must be “spoiler” otherwise it won’t work.
Support for these in mobile apps is somewhat lackluster. Sync for Lemmy did not really change their formatting code at all since they stopped being a Reddit client and virtually none of the Lemmy specific formatting features work. Voyager does not render spoilers at all. They work just fine in Jerboa though, as well as on the web (desktop and mobile browsers).
Thanks very much!
this is certainly one part of it. non-passing trans women being seen as predetory men, trying to invade women spaces and even less real women than passimg trans women is another big part of it and thats really not a universal women’s experience.
idk if u disagre with this, ur comment just left me feeling like u were making a point about the entirety of transmysogynie
I did try and add the implication that what I was saying wasn’t (and could never be) a whole picture. In the dealings of people, we could never capture the whole of a picture, even if we had infinite time. The ways in which people are uniquely terrible (and uniquely wonderful of course) is just too much subject matter to ever contain in one book, let alone comment.
Reading this was constant pain.
all these ‘not reading this’ comments make me feel sad
I understand why people don’t want to read it (long post/wall of text) but I care about this intensely
It’s super fucking depressing. But it’s also real, and it matters, a lot.
I totally understand not wanting to read every single trauma dump on the internet, because life is kinda shit for everyone without adding other people’s shit on top of it. But things like this do matter a lot.
Does it count if I stopped reading after the 3rd paragraph because it gave me bad anxiety due to bad memories? Because I want to know if I should try my best to give it a full read through anyway.
I’m fairly certain you especifically are not contributing to the problem, if it makes you relive bad memories, so don’t feel bad for not finishing it.
It doesn’t get better from there
I didn’t plan to read it at first, but I did, and I’m glad I did. It’s a new perspective I didn’t know about or remotely understood before.
A little more irritating that people feel the need to announce it, but, go figure, meme… Sublemmy?
People are justified and not wanting to read that though. It is easy to OCR images with text, and OP should have done that initially. They have done it since so it’s all good.
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This is a Very clear case of sorry that happened.
please do read it, this feels important
Holy fuck what a fucking depressing world we live in.
Damn. This is just horrible. I’m a cis Man and to be honest I don’t have much contact with LGBTQ+. But this is just so unbelievable sad. I just see someone who wants to be loved and accepted for who they are. (sorry if I use the wrong pronouns or anything, English is my 2nd language, and I’m trying my best). And this is something I can relate to. I don’t know how I can help or anything, but I just want to say, I feel you.
There is no way I’m reading that whole thing for a 196 post lol
Sounds like a skill issue to me pilot
Brevity is the soul of wit.
you want brevity?
try:
“the beatings will continue until moral improves”
That’s more words than I used which defeats the purpose.
This was a joke. I love your phrase and say it a lot in day-to-day life. It’s a great reminder to improve things wherever I can because our current systems are just that; beatings. For everything. Forever.
which defeats the purpose.
only if you are not interested in what the original said
It’s taken me a year to somewhat consistently not see myself as that predatory/awkward/appropriating man image, and that’s with a social network that has not once projected that onto me. I can only imagine how much harder it is when they’re not supportive.
Many folks just stay in the closet. I’m speaking from experience.
One of the saddest things I’ve read, ever.
That even their close friends turn away from them is hard to understand.
That was a rough read :(
I AIN’T READIN ALLOTHAT
Cool, shut the fuck up
Fucking christ, I’m used to censoring myself in polite company to not come off as weird, but dealing with this I could not imagine
I’m a straight man from the middle of nowhere, and reading this sounds to me like we have not made any progress in accepting the variety of ways that humans develop or accepting the need to make space in society for everyone to feel like there is no need to hide. It really does seem like we are, at least in some ways, going backwards.
When I was 12 years old I saw a documentary on the Discovery channel about klinefelter’s syndrome. The program was 45 minutes long but it briefly touched on various ways that the “third gender” had been expressed and incorporated into cultures around the world.
In this simple program from before the conversation about gender and sexual identity became a political cudgel to dehumanize a growing number of social groups, they didn’t discuss the politics at all. It was just the science.
It wasn’t controversial for '90’s era documentaries to simply acknowledge that the brain is just a part of the body like any other organ and can experience the same if not more variation that all of the other organs do.
Instead, the program seemed hopeful about this burgeoning new science of the mind and its ability to help us illuminate something we have known about for eons.
10 years later I read an MIT magazine article that reference brain scans of different people trying to identify gender identity versus sexual identity. They didn’t have a whole lot of conclusions but they found seven different clusters of data in the gender identity tests.
That seems to me a pretty strong indication that nature has at least a few varieties of human beyond man and woman, and although the science is encouraging…
It really shouldn’t require proof of anything to inspire people to want to be kind to each other. I don’t know that science can solve this, so maybe we have to find the faith and the hope to help it along.
Reading so many stories like this through my life, and now all this on top of that, is relying on the lived experience of transfems to make absolutely sure I never bother with it. I would love nothing more but I’ve already got too much to worry about. I don’t need all this, too. I wouldn’t survive it.
The way I see it, the rest of the world isn’t particularly amenable to my survival anyway, might as well live as I want to.
My lived experience as a trans femme is that despite all of this stuff, I never started living until I started my transition. I’d rather live with that pain, than never have lived at all.
