It sounds to me like you are on the verge of having a lot more freedom in your life - if you are college-aged, you are likely the age of the majority and at least should have the legal rights to make your own medical decisions. (I know it’s often not that simple, if you are economically dependent still, etc.)

If you do end up in college, try to access the mental health resources they have - people often don’t realize that students have access to free therapy on campus, this is a great time to start building your autonomy and independence and therapy can be a useful tool to that end.

Thanks, but this doesn’t really answer my question, even if it is helpful.

Scanning through the article, the main conclusion I draw is that the mistreatment of intersex people in society is very similar to mistreatment of trans people.

One of the main ways intersex people suffer that trans people do not is involuntary and / or coercive medical procedures to conform intersex bodies to cis standards. Unlike the false concerns anti-trans activists raise, intersex activism is actually focused on ending involuntary child mutilation.

What I was hoping for was a book or article that focuses more on anti-intersex attitudes that aren’t just the same stigmatizing attitudes people have which make up a lot of transphobia (basically stigma against ambiguous gender, gender non-conforming bodies and behaviors, etc.) - and it seems like the surgeries and medical contexts are one of those places where these kinds of differences come up. I was wondering if there might be other examples, or even theorists who are working on analyzing anti-intersex attitudes.

Dysphoria causes distress, and it makes it that much harder to succeed in other areas of your life.

It’s hard to overstate this, before I transitioned I thought transitioning was selfish and mostly a way for me to finally wear women’s clothes outside my house, etc. - I focused on the social and personal benefits, which were small compared to the risks.

But the reality is that testosterone was destroying my mind and made me a completely miserable, dysfunctional person. I didn’t transition because I finally could prioritize what I thought was a trivial desire to be a woman, but because I learned it could be the cause of a lot of my mental health problems. I realize now that testosterone was wrecking my life and I was hurting the people I love.

Now I realize transition is more medically necessary than I could have understood (or more importantly, been willing to believe). I still, even now, have a hard time believing this, and I regularly doubt my experience.

In the U.S., the X passport gender marker was only created in the first place by a lawsuit by an intersex non-binary trans individual who did not identify as either male or female. Obviously not all intersex individuals identify as non-binary, many identify as a man or woman for example, and so the intersex struggle overlaps with the trans struggle significantly this way.

https://www.intersexequality.com/intersex-history-of-the-x-passport-marker/

The X isn’t meant to mean intersex or in-between:

The use of “Indeterminate” instead of “Intersex,” and the inclusion of representation for gender identity, was intentional, for reasons outlined below.

“The creation of any new category to be designated intersex poses several problems. First of all, there is no firm definition of intersex. Definitions are constructed in relation to medical norms that stigmatise particular kinds of bodies. … Secondly, intersex people are already assigned female or male, and most are raised and identify as women or men. To construct a new category called intersex unavoidably calls into question their sex assignments and gender identities, and suggests that they are not valid or correct. This is not acceptable. … We base our legal arguments on the right of every person to determine their own identity, in the hope that eventually there will be no attempt to impose legal sex categories on anyone.”

The X is thus an opt-out of gender rather than an assertion of a gender, if that makes sense.

how does 19864 differ from 196? how did the subreddit differ from /r/196?

yeah, I thought the whole point of lemmy was not to centralize everything … it’s nice when things are spread across separate instances, as long as the instances federate

I’m the cold one these days.

I see you getting rid of that NSFW tag 😏

Oh of course, I didn’t think you were advocating for conversion therapy 😅 It’s just where my mind happens to go when I think about fluctuating sexuality - just thinking through what does it mean to have a belief that sexual orientation is fixed while recognizing all the variety and fluctuations in my actual sexual experiences and desires, esp. one where I went from being only incidentally attracted to men to becoming almost as capable of feeling those desires as for women. One way to look at that might be to think I went from being mostly gay to being bi, for example.

But yeah, even past that there is a lot to think about the way sexual desire works beyond gender, like you mention. It’s honestly more than I could even begin to speculate about.

Honestly I have the same fears and situation. One way I approach this is to have intentional plateaus or even weeks where I intentionally let loose and gain a little weight back. This allows me to cycle my fat, having periods of losing and gaining weight, compared to always losing weight.

That said, I would prioritize your health and make sure you get enough nutrition and hydration, avoid starvation diets and extremes, aim to just reduce calories by 100 kcal on a daily basis so you have slow and steady weight loss.

Americans don’t know any better, tbh

omg, it’s a remake of the video!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVQplt7Chos

I remember when he took down the original Sex and Sensibility video, but I didn’t know he was working on a new one!! 🙌

EDIT: I’m only 40 minutes in and I would say the old one was better for the average person - the new video is much more dense and packed full of facts and information at a fast pace, the original video did a better job staying focused and engaging. I have a pretty strong tolerance for dry content and even I found my mind wandering and having to intentionally stay focused, and if that’s happening I know a bigot is not going to make it even minutes into this video before tuning out.

Part of the reason right-wing, anti-trans rhetoric’s message is “common sense” and “it’s simple: male and female” is because it’s good rhetoric. You lose people when you start to get into the technical details, and if there is any anti-intellectualism bias, that works against you even more.

Will have to finish the video, but so far I’m disappointed in the changes as a tool for helping educate and change minds, even if enjoying all the new content - I had no idea that every cell with XX will choose one X or the other to be expressed, and that this is how calico cats get the random pattern of hair colors!!

Yes, transition has been a lot - it’s hard to describe accurately.

I also don’t know how to think about my shifting sexuality - part of me is adamant that my underlying sexual orientation didn’t change at all, that I’m just as “bi” now as I was before transition. However, it’s undeniable that my actual feelings and experiences of attraction changed. Still, it doesn’t feel like I became more “bi” even while it feels surprising to experience attraction to men more strongly.

Part of my resistance to thinking my sexual orientation changed has to do with the lack of evidence for this in the scientific literature, and also the dubiousness that changing sexual orientation is possible in contexts like conversion therapy. That’s where this attitude of openness seems threatening to me, I don’t feel comfortable implying that orientation can change based on mood, for example - it seems dangerous to me. I know it’s not meant that way, but I worry that a perspective like that could accidentally be used to justify conversion therapy in a courtroom, for example.

No worries, I understand you are just trying to help OP understand why they might get some hate for pretending to be trans, and I think you have a good point - it’s more sensitive to pretend to be an oppressed minority than for example to misrepresent yourself as a dominant group, e.g. straight (lots of people are closeted and we don’t think it’s appalling to pretend to be straight, it’s just pragmatic / survival for a lot of people - there is immense pressure to be straight and cis).

I didn’t mean so much to disagree with what you were saying as much as address what you anticipated as getting you hate - I just wanted to show how we might approach a situation like this without gatekeeping, but while being clear-headed about the wrongs here.

We don’t have to gatekeep OP’s identity to acknowledge that OP pretending to be trans is wrong and upsetting.

i’m so dumb, at first I thought the headline was a resource for trans women to learn to drive trucks

depends on the girl :-)

That’s a good point - why think the feelings are non-platonic? I hope OP responds to your question, I wonder what she would say.

Hopefully it’s OK to share my experience - feel free to ignore this if it’s off-topic.

Before I transitioned I was a lot more like OP, but about men - I could tell I was bi, but it was rather theoretical. There had never been a man or boy that I was actually interested in romantically or sexually, and it wasn’t easy to feel stimulated by gay porn for example. At the time there was a real question of why I thought I was bi, and ultimately it came down to some deeper sense of openness and that I found I could be sexually aroused by men in some situations even if it wasn’t that common. In some sense I was “incidentally” bi in this sense. Unlike OP, though, I didn’t want to be gay or bisexual. (Though I was part of gay rights student activist organizations, I identified as a straight ally.) So I basically hid this aspect of myself and only shared it with one other person growing up. Even now that I’m out I still consider my sexuality something private, and I don’t particularly need or want to be seen as gay or bi (though it’s unavoidable now).

However, when I transitioned, estrogen really changed my sexual feelings. Though I am aware the same underlying theoretical capability for attraction to men was still present, I found the incidents of attraction towards men increased significantly. There are times I am in public and I am suddenly struck by how attractive a certain man is, and that never happened before estrogen. Overall, though, even if I were single I still wouldn’t want to date a man, but for reasons that don’t have anything to do with my sexuality, which is not the issue. 😅

I can’t afford a lawyer and all these facial creams 😭

no worries - I figured you might have missed part of the post or something 😅 I swear as I get older my reading comprehension is slipping (and I make so many typos now too) 😭

Hopefully you agree, but I just want to suggest we should keep an open gate, so to speak. One doesn’t have to suffer or struggle to be gay/bi or trans - that’s just not how that works. OP might still be some kind of trans (or not), that’s not really the issue here.

OP happens to have another post talking about how they identify as bi even though they are hardly attracted to women, so your comments about faux-bi women might come across differently to her, FYI.

In the end, the community respects self-identification - and this is just how that works. It’s not really appropriate to gatekeep identity on a basis like questioning how sincere someone’s capacity for same-sex romance is. There are some biromantic-heterosexual women for example who might find it possible to have a romantic relationship with a woman, but generally wouldn’t want to have sex with a woman. This is part of why it’s pragmatic to respect self-identity, because it’s complicated and we don’t want a gatekeeping culture that victimizes people with less understandable sexualities or identities.

However, that’s not really what’s going on in this post - she said she likes to pretend to be a gay trans man to explore non-straight attraction to men, in this case she isn’t actually identifying as a trans man and she is admitting to pretending. That’s what makes it dishonest and thus problematic.