Was just casually checking out some videos from this voice coach lady… when suddenly I find out she’s trans too! Kinda makes me feel inspired, with progress like that.
Was just casually checking out some videos from this voice coach lady… when suddenly I find out she’s trans too! Kinda makes me feel inspired, with progress like that.
Different people use different words about their transition, and I think you’re imposing your own experience onto others. To say that trans women categorically weren’t men in the past totally invalidates how I have always described my transition. I don’t share your experience, and I don’t describe my past self the way you seem to think I should.
I was comfortable with my gender, and I don’t think it was invalid for me to have identified as a boy. That’s not who I am now, but that doesn’t invalidate my identity for the first 16 years of my life. And I think if speaking, behaving, or filling the social role of a male doesn’t make it valid to say that I used to be a boy, then that feels invalidating to everything I thought made me a woman. :/
But I think all of this is heavily philosophical and subjective, so I’m not saying your feelings are wrong either. But to say that the only way for trans people to be is the way you perceive them to be is not just silly, it runs the risk of invalidating everyone else who doesn’t share your feelings on the matter. Our identities are our own to express, not yours.
If a gender diverse person tells me that their gender changed, then their gender changed.
If a cis person is assuming that a person’s gender has changed just because they transitioned, I’m going to correct them, because when held in ignorance, that’s a position that is generally based on harmful ideas about the trans experience. And if they’re interested in discussing it further, we can have a discussion of the nuance of how it all works.
Letting a cis person assume that all trans people’s gender changes when they transition does more harm than good IMO.
I am quite explicitly not saying this. If your gender changed, it changed :)
The problem is that you’re assuming the past gender of trans women categorically.
You said:
I’m trying to tell you that this claim is not just wrong, but it’s a harmful over-generalization. I was not a girl for the first ~12-16 years of my life, and that’s why I’m telling you our identities (past and present) are ours to determine, not yours. I was a boy, I did become a girl. I was comfortably cis for a long time, but things changed as I grew up.
Reading this stuff today only serves to drag those anxieties back up, because if we assume your claim is true then I either wasn’t a boy back then, or I’m not a trans woman now. I have to sit here and think about how you’re wrong, and why trans people don’t have to have always been trans in order to transition and be valid.
That’s what motivated me to respond to you. Whether or not you’re willing to grapple with the idea that you may be hurting people is your prerogative, I’m just telling you those claims have done harm to me in the past and may be harmful to others now, specifically young cis people.
To a cis person, to break a harmful stereotype in a snappy way.
This is not how I would talk about it to you, or anyone else that is looking for a conversation on the topic.
I used it for the same reason we introduce high school students to electron orbits as if they were little planets. Despite not being technically correct, it’s a useful generalisation for someone who lacks a nuanced understanding of the topic.
Most trans people, but not all, do not experience their gender as having changed, yet most cis people, assume that all trans people experience a change in their gender when they transition. That is the source of a lot of harmful assumptions about our lived experience.
The point of my comment was to challenge the cis person’s understanding so they question it, not to try and explain nuance. I absolutely acknowledge that it isn’t an accurate comment for all trans people, but I also believe that it wasn’t the space for nuance, because info dumping the person I was replying to would have increased the chance of them skimming over it without re-thinking their assumptions.
I don’t assume either of those.
Rather, I understand that the quippy one liner I used to make a cis person pause and evaluate their assumptions about gender isn’t sufficient to cover experiences like yours.