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.
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