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I missed the struggle session and I feel bad for opening the hatch again but I also want to share my ftm perspective (that might contain brainworms? idk)
Firstly I guess I realised by reading all that shit how hard some trans women have it with the fucking stupid expectations society puts on women. I experience(d) it from an afab perspective and I was very sensitive to it where I was always super aware of my appearance and never comfortable if I wasn’t sure that all my hairs were in place (or removed), my skin looked smooth and my clothes were clean and proper but not too boring.
I super much relate to comparing oneself with the prettiest girls and realising that I’ll never look like that. When I look around me now I see that a lot women don’t conform to the expectations I had set for myself, and those women are just living their life being pretty and comfortable and nice. I literally felt like the world was ending anytime I had a pimple that I couldn’t hide with concealer or I realised that some part of me wasn’t shaven well. At some point I realised my fingers have hair and immediately felt like everyone around me was looking at it while thinking I’m gross, so from then on I had to shave my fucking fingers lol. I’m not really sure how me being trans masc influenced this obsession I had with conforming to all femme expectations. Maybe I thought if I reached my impossible goal of femme perfection I would finally feel more connected to my body?
I stopped shaving at all a while ago because I realised that I didn’t dislike my bodily hair, I was just scared that other people would find my hair gross. Now that I realised I’m trans I stopped doing most of the things I used to do to appear like a proper feminine women and I notice a difference in how people look at me and talk to me. I get dirty looks sometimes and people seem more hesitant to approach me. This reaction was basically my biggest fear when I was younger and now I’m just learning to live with it because letting strangers dictate how I look and behave is silly and it made me very unhappy.
I sympathise a lot with trans women who struggle with these same insecurities and high expectations and I can imagine that adding being trans to the mix can make those feelings much worse.
When I read the part about cis women being lucky for having to put in no effort to look femme I felt a bit defensive about it though because of my own struggle with appearing femme enough even though I was born with the femme hormones.
But it also made me realise that me being trans masc makes it so much easier for me to deal with that internal struggle I had because I now know that I definitely don’t have to live up to the expectations of a gender I don’t identify with, and it feels like a huge weight taken off of my shoulders.
I’ll end my long train of thoughts by adding that I’m proud of this space for having some great posters with really good views on gender constructs to help combat unhealthy gender expectations.
Yeah, it can be a trip for fresher girls because they grew up in a very patriarchal male gaze society and never developed any of the internal defenses and now all of a sudden those standards APPLY TO YOU and they have a lot of it internalized. And they miss out on some of the sisterhood parts that help, just cause they're so new to womanhood. What is considered femininity is also low key racist, ask any black woman about just how white looking "femme" is - misogynoir is a while thing for a reason. The feminine ideal is very fake and was made up in a board room anyway, to me one of the best descriptions of feminity was in Manhunt and it was like "gentleness, violence, self-flagellation" and I vibed with it so hard. I mean, there's more to it and it's more positive but I did vibe with that description.
It's a relatively common trans experience that prior to cracking a given person goes hard on presenting as their AGAB. Not everyone was a super femme boy or super masc girl or whatever and then transitioned to no one's surprise, plenty did their utmost to present as how they were told to.
So is fatphobia which goes back to white European colonialism.
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CW: dysphoria, (trans)misogyny and related bigotry, 4chan internet archeology without the /tttt/ lingo
Yeah these were honestly the parts that really rubbed me the wrong way. There's a really brutal intersection between transphobia and misogyny that has put me through a ton of hurt over the last years and that all of my transfem friends suffer under to some degree, i'm not denying that the standards society puts on women bear down on transfeminine people extra hard, but you can't tackle the internalized part of that without plain old feminism that includes solidarity with cis women. And when there's a take that just puts all trans women in one box and all cis women in another where they have it easier than us, that heavily implies both a cissexist deficit narrative about transfems where we are universally painted as inferior to cis women looks wise and all cis women are considered to be the "fair sex" by default, and a strong dismissal of how patriarchal reality affects and harms all women. That was the point were it really showed that these are 4chan ideas - the trans subset of a cult of terminally online misogyny ultras will never come up with a non-reactionary take on femininity, and that obviously includes trans femininity. I'm not even getting into how fucking heteronormative and exorsexist all of this is as well.
I must stress that i do not intend any of this this as a callout of anybody, not only because these takes came from more than one user, but because i've spent way too much time on 4chan as an egg, fortunately before gamergate happened and before they talked much about trans stuff. But even back then, when i tried to talk sense into the incels on /r9k/ at a time when they didn't yet refer to themselves as incels, but as "foreveralone" or "permavirgin", i saw how deeply that hellsite can get their hooks into people and how hard it can be to let go of the ideas they infect people with. I'm not putting blame on anybody for struggling with these ideas. But trans liberation isn't possible when we do not fight this kind of ideology. You can't be a happy transfem when you aren't a feminist, and you can't overcome dysphoria when you do not put physically transitioning alongside a social and psychological transition. And as a community, we have to be mindful that certain transphobic ideas will eat at others and that we need a space where you don't get hit over the head with them.
GOOD comment
Good post c:
I epilate the hair off my fingers
A friend of mine described her hair goals as "as hairless as a boiled egg"
mood
Probably smarter than shaving. Once when I was shaving my toes I shaved the skin of my 3 tiniest toes
I really appreciate your perspective
Thanks
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