Before I got testosterone prescribed by an endocrinologist, I had to sign informed consent.
The problem is, that it seems to be quite impossible to fully understand what you’re consenting to. And no one was able to explain me all of it.I fully understood the physical consequences that I could expect, that were known. I knew about the facial hair, body hair, balding patterns, libido, oily skin, muscle mass, probably becoming infertile, fat distribution, acne, clitoral growth, change of body odor, etc. I had researched it all, for years.
I also understood that the hormones wouldn’t exactly change my personality, but that they could change the way I felt things and how I’d react. I understood it could become harder for me to cry, that I might get angry easier and that emotions and events could affect me less or more intensely.What I didn’t realize, is that one day, I might actually meet women
that are just like me (in real life!), but don’t change their bodies.
And what I definitely didn’t understand was that these women and
lesbians would not recognize me, but see me as a cisgender man instead.
And treat me as such.
No one could have explained me what this feels like.I did not understand at that time, that when I consented to being assigned to use male bathrooms forever, it didn’t just mean that I would never get angry and disgusted stares from women anymore. No one told me that in many cases, the stall is closed/non-existent/too exposed, or so dirty that I can’t sit. No one told me that if you very often don’t sit or try to pee as little and as quickly as possible, you can get some trouble with your pelvic muscles. I have problems with relaxing in any kind of situation now.
No one told me that taking testosterone could make me feel even more alienated from both men and women.
No one told me that straight women being attracted to me feels very different from lesbian women being attracted to me.
What I didn’t understand was that I could one day change my mind, and stop taking any kind of hormones.
I also didn’t realize that I’d become sincerely afraid of the tissue of my reproductive organs being changed in some kind of way by the high levels of testosterone. In a way that’s dangerous to my health.No one could tell me that I hadn’t met the right people yet, before I could make a proper informed decision.
No one reminded me that until that point, nobody had really loved me romantically exactly for the way I am. I had only been loved despite my butchness, or despite my body. And nobody told me that it is actually possible to be loved and desired the way I was, in a way that I could believe.Nobody ever told me that it wasn’t necessary to take testosterone if I wanted to get a double mastectomy.
I couldn’t know that I consented to something I could actually regret.
I didn’t know I consented to something that would at some point make me feel like I betrayed myself, and the girls like me.I didn’t understand what I consented to and I don’t think that that endocrinologist will ever be able to understand this.
I am not against informed consent. But there has to be some kind of way to improve the information and the deeper understanding of the consequences.
Tag: genderqueer
when u trans but also goth 💀💉🦇
(T injection travel kit in an old customizable fang coffin box, feat. Halloween bandaids)
I coined the term “genderqueer” back in the 1990s in an effort to glue together two nouns that seemed to me described an excluded and overlooked middle: those of us who were not only queer but were so because we were the kind of gender trash society couldn’t digest.
A prominent gay columnist immediately attacked me in print for “ruining a perfectly good word like ‘queer.’” (Harrumph!)
Joan Nestle, Claire Howell, and I then used the word for the title of our anthology of emerging young writers. But I don’t think anyone expected the term or the concept to really catch on.
Then one year I was attending the Creating Change conference and using the (wonderfully gender-neutral) bathrooms, and saw someone had posted a sticker on the wall that read, “A Genderqueer Was Here!” I thought, Hmm … that’s really interesting. Someone is using that not as a descriptor, but as the basis for their identity. So it begins.
Fast-forward about 20 years and I was just reading Matt Bernstein’s anthology Nobody Passes, and in it writer Rocko Bulldagger bemoans the term’s very existence, declaring, “I am sick to death of hearing it “
Such is the arc of a new idea.
But if you opened your eyes at all, you could see all this coming a long way off.
At Camp Trans, outside the now-defunct Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, I’d meet one young person after another simply known as “boychik,” “demigirl,” “transmasculine,” “tryke,” and any number of exuberant genders few of us had contemplated.
Camp Trans itself was always overrun by one set of teens and 20-somethings explaining patiently, if exasperatedly, to their lesbian mothers — who’d brought them in tow to experience the beauty of womanhood — that they needed to move beyond their transphobia and accept trans people as women and not men. And a totally different set of teens and 20-somethings were joyously destroying by example the categories of men, women, lesbian, and transgender.
We’ve spent almost 40 years fighting for a bunch of identity categories that are based entirely on the implicit acceptance that there are two and only two basic sexes, with the associated possible gender identities and sexual orientations that come from them.
And now young people are about to blow all that up.
I was reminded of this while watching Showtime’s hit TV show Billions, which introduced a new character, Taylor, whose gender I was having fun trying to puzzle out.
Taylor is an intense, brilliant intern, who wears a shirt, tie, and buzzed crew cut, but otherwise has no identifiable landmarks by which the viewer might navigate the gender terrain.
Finally, they are introduced to Bobby Axelrod, the head of multibillion-dollar hedge fund Axe Capital.
As played by Asia Kate Dillon, they reply: “Hello, sir, my name is Taylor. My pronouns are ‘they, theirs, and them.’”
Cutting-edge stuff. And a signpost for where the gender dialogue is going. Just like when student Maria Munir, 20, came out to a nonplussed President Obama as “nonbinary.”
In a recent article at Refinery29, Dillon explained that they didn’t just read for the part. As they read the part, “I did some research into non-binary, and I just thought, Oh my gosh, that’s me… When I read the script for episode two and I saw the ‘they, theirs and them,’ that’s when the tears started to well up in my eyes. Then when I read Axe’s response, which is, ‘Okay,’ and then the scene just continues, that’s what ultimately moved me to full-fledged tears.”
This is powerful stuff. And it’s only the start. The trans movement is going to have to accommodate and open the boundaries perhaps more than it would like.
But if it’s the job of young people to expose and explode their elders’ paradigm, these young people are off to a wonderful start.
“Hello. My name is Riki. My pronouns are ‘they, theirs, and them.’“
Riki Wilchins, “Get to Know the New Pronouns: They, Theirs, and Them
are you a plant nb, space nb, or robot nb?
2013/2018
they/them
I’m happy to say I am legally Zya Jade De La Rosa and my legal gender is Non binary in the state of California. ✅
every time I see a post differentiating between being nonbinary and being trans I lose a week off my life
nonbinary is a kind of trans y’all
NONBINARY IS A KIND OF TRANS
As much as I like the non-binary flag I’d prefer it if people could just remember that the white part of the trans flag
represents non-binary people and stop treating people who don’t fit the gender binary as “less tans” than binary trans people
Lots of non-binary people have felt worried about if they’re allowed to call themselves trans, or if they’re “trans enough” to use the trans flag or join in during trans events like trans visibility days without even knowing that the white stripe on the trans flag is for us non-binary/genderqueer/genderfluid/agender/intersex/etc folk.
I feel like it is important that the white stripe is recognised because currently so many people who don’t fit the gender binary feel less valid as trans people than binary trans people.
nonbinary is a subset of transgender. anyone who does not identify with their assigned gender is, literally, by definition, transgender. reducing trans identity to binary folks is ahistorical and inaccurate and afaik it comes from bullshit truscum ideology.
we’ve always been here and we always will be! nonbinary people are trans!
all the doctors are friends (but not *our* friends)
this is just because i’ve been having some conversations about kids and gender and transition and puberty-blockers and so on. and having some feelings about that.
(to get a few things out of the way as a preamble)
what i want in the world is for folks (of all ages) to be able to make and put into effect any decision they want about what to do with their bodies – which means, practically, working for there to be more and more possibilities available to more and more people. in the realms of gender and sexuality that includes access to all kinds of body modifications, whether towards or away from any particular socially recognized gender position, and also access to all kinds of options for reproduction, from permanently or temporarily preventing it to actively facilitating it. what’s important to me is the possibility of real, meaningful choice, and the removal of restraints on that.
probably because of coming up right before and after the arrival of antiretrovirals, i think about most of the access-to-medical-transition stuff as a “drugs in bodies” question, through the analogy of AZT. in the absence of much actual decent research on HRT drugs (either to learn more about their longterm effects or towards making better ones), we already know they’re generally shitty, but bad drugs in living bodies is better than dead bodies.
(and here’s the meat of the post)
so: in the current conversations, mostly things are framed as a fight in which advocates for kids’ access to puberty blockers face off against advocates of “reparative/corrective therapy” to normalize kids to their assigned genders. that’s how, for instance, julia serano sets things up in her mostly useful piece on Medium last year.
and that’s generally how things play out among trans community activists, parents, TERFs, and other folks outside the medical institutions involved.
but here’s the thing: that’s not a divide that exists among the doctors.
the best-known puberty-blocker doctors and the best-known “reparative” therapists work together, publish together, and generally see each other as collaborators rather than opponents. kenneth zucker and peggy cohen-kettenis, for instance, co-wrote the chapter on “gender identity disorder in children and adolescents” for a 2012 “handbook of sexual and gender identity disorders”. and that’s not an anomaly: even a mild bit of googling finds the two of them as co-authors on papers all the way from the late 1990s to the past few years (with at least a few also including ray blanchard in the credits). and that collaboration isn’t just on the page: well-sourced gossip tells me that before zucker’s clinic was shut down (finally!), he was known to send so many kids who didn’t respond to his “conversion therapy” bullshit to puberty-blocker clinics that he was considered one of their biggest referrers.
whether or not you agree with the analysis i lay out in the rest of this, if you care about trans lives, you need to think long and hard about that. not just the fact of the collaboration and mutual support, but also the fact that it’s not part of the public conversation (even the parts of it that well-informed folks like serano help to shape), and the amount of work that has gone into keeping it out of the public conversation.
I hope it’s ok to pull out one sentence from below the cut here, bc I really strongly recommend that folks read the whole piece:
what [these doctors] agree on is a vision of the world where there are as few trans folks as possible, and where the ones who do exist are as indistinguishable from cis people as possible.
alder-knight 