Ada

Admin of lemmy.blahaj.zone

I can also be found on the microblog fediverse at @ada@blahaj.zone or on matrix at @ada:chat.blahaj.zone

  • 392 Posts
  • 4.19K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 2nd, 2023

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  • The instance stance is that we don’t allow people to undermine other folks identities. Transmeds think they’re doing the “right thing” for trans folk because they think that they’re protecting the “real” trans folk. People who want to undermine non binary identities, people who want to undermine therian identities etc, people who want to undermine neopronoun users, will always have a reason for it, often based around acceptability in the eyes of broader cishet society.

    Just because you think there is a good reason to undermine those specific identities doesn’t make it ok. You and I, and anyone else is not the arbiter of anyones identities except their own, and the moment you feel that you do get to have an opinion on the validity of someone elses identity, is the moment you have put yourself above them.

    There are absolutely trolls who will misuse this kind of acceptance. But even that doesn’t make it ok for you or I to install ourselves as arbitrators of other folks identity. The answer to the trolls doesn’t change just because they’re trolling by bad faith use of identity. The answer still remains that you remove them when they’re trolling becomes apparent. But on this instance, that removal is done in a way that doesn’t empower folk looking for excuses to invalidate others.


  • I have complete aphantasia. No mental sounds, imagery, etc.

    But even so, I think I probably didn’t word my reply as well as I could have.

    Stuff with genuine interpersonal interactions, with characters that have personality and feelings, that stuff I can read. But that’s because it doesn’t rely on the visual.

    But if the erotica is just a verbal description intended to help picture a scene, then it’s not of any interest to me



  • So, much of gender is a social construct, but being a social construct doesn’t stop it being real. Society has a bias towards a gender binary, and that creates the social context in which we come to understand and experience our own gender. These social frameworks creates the lens through which we learn to understand ourselves.

    Lets say I grew up on an island full of men. I had never seen or met a woman, and didn’t have a concept of women. In that environment, my experience of gender would have been different. I’d still have experienced the discomfort, and disconnection, I’d still have experienced dysphoria, but it would have manifested very differently. I wouldn’t have identified as a binary woman in a world without women, and I wouldn’t have had the language to describe my experiences, but I’d still have had a discomfort I couldn’t address, and I’d still have known that I was different to the men around me in ways I didn’t have the language or the concepts to explore.

    But I didn’t. I grew up in country town Australia in the 80s, when societies bias towards a gender binary was strong. And my own gender is binary too.

    I do sometimes wonder what my experience of my own gender would be like if I’d have grown up in a different context, if society allowed space for genders that don’t have to fit a binary. Would I still be binary? The truth is, I don’t know. But what I do know, is that my experience of my own gender does fit on the binary, and knowing that, and thinking about it doesn’t change it, because however I got there, my gender isn’t a choice. It’s just who I am.



  • But my experience with being cisgendered is one of feeling like my spirit would belong wherever it was born to

    The few cases we have of cis people being medically transitioned in some way without their consent suggest that this simply isn’t the case, at least for many cis folk.

    Alan Turing and David Reimer are both examples of cis folk who were medically transitioned without their consent, one as an adult, one as a child, and both experienced severe dysphoria. They ultimately both took their own lives










  • For me, it looked like doing voice training. It was largely self guided, watching videos here and there. This was in the time when trans instructional videos were far less common than they are now, so it was a bit hit and miss. But, I got my voice to a point where people didn’t know how to gender me by voice alone, and looked for other cues and clues.

    Ultimately, I ended up getting vocal surgery to shorten the length of my vocal cords.


  • I’m a trans woman. I’ve never been feminine. No one picked on me because I was “girly”. No one secretly thought I was gay. My interests were geeky, but they were “boy” geeky.

    I don’t believe in gendered personalities. People have genders. Personalites don’t.

    it does seem like those with body dysphoria actually feel uncomfortable in their bodies, and want a different body

    That’s often a part of it, but it’s not universal. There are many trans and gender diverse folk who don’t experience things through this lens.

    if there were no gender norms or societal expectations, would you still want to transition?

    Yes, but it would look different. The social part of my transition was important to me, because it influences how people see me. It shapes whether they see me accurately, or see me as someone I am not. My appearance can cause them to stick me in the wrong gender box, and that is something that I needed to change.

    But if we existed in a world where there were no gender boxes, where gender was as diverse as people themselves are, then my transition would have looked different. I’d still needed to have addressed the physical aspects of my body. But socially? If my birth name didn’t automatically carry a gender with it, if my clothes and my presentation didn’t automatically carry gender with them, then my social transition would have looked very different.