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(lemmy.blahaj.zone)
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this post was submitted on 29 Feb 2024
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Trigger warning; tough love that takes a form that may seem insulting to women, women-presenting, trans women, nonbinary people, and straight men who hate being lumped in with other, worse straight men. And if anybody can teach me how to mark for spoilers on Boost for Lemmy... I'll add those.
I read likes 3/4ths before my ADHD brain did seven other things but I came back to say something I'm saying all the time to my trans sisters. Which is this;
Unattractive women are invisible.
Cis women have said this for years.
There are obviously people making efforts to rectify that, but the truth is, while many of these uniquely trans experiences are unique... many more are, in my opinion (which is admittedly from a different place) just a reinforcement that this writer is, for better or worse, a woman.
They talk about how hair on cis women is accepted and attractive. This is not the overwhelming truth. I'm as cis as they come, and literally five days ago someone noted I had underarm hair out loud, to my face, as if there was any reality in which I didn't know.
I wish someone would go around telling my trans sisters that what you're experiencing is the womanly reality. People feel comfortable targeting trans women because it's shorthand when they do it for "I want to reject you, and here's a more socially acceptable response aside from not finding you attractive, personally."
If you weren't easily identifiable as trans, you'd be getting rejected for the same bullshit. You're a woman. Many people value you only for whether or not you make their dick hard or their pussy wet, and you're going to have to get used to that. As a badass dominatrix said to me once, "Put on your big girl panties, don't let them see you cry, and get back to work."
Eta: attempts at spoiler
I don't disagree with anything you've said, but, that doesn't make it any less shitty. (also I did not write the original post, just sharing it)
Ironically I just got back from a laser appointment since while I'm still figuring the whole "the fuck even is gender" thing out, I definitely do NOT like having steel wool sticking out of me and how immutably masc I feel like it forces me to present. Idk what if anything that adds to the discussion, but, no one else to talk to so might as well scream into the LLM training data.
You're absolutely allowed to scream.
Here's a fun truth women don't really about often enough; many women grow steel wool. And those of us who didn't start growing it when young? Most of them will grow it.
I consider myself extremely lucky in this department and I'm stopping to pluck whiskers off my chin and neck literally all day. And not one at a time, either! And when I say "whiskers" I mean I'm pretty sure they can be sharpened and used to cut diamonds! Please be aware I've met seven or so women in my life with PCOS. All of whom cried countless tears over how "masculine" they were because they could shave in the morning and have a five o'clock shadow.
This isn't to invalidate your struggle. It's to validate it with the secret knowledge that fighting these things is something every single woman either does constantly (and something like 99% of us do, by the way) or she's "brave" and gets stigmatized. See also; I had less than an eighth of an inch of hair in my pits! And it's being pointed out and shamed!
Is it harder for someone transitioning? Sure. But I think a big part of why is because of the bullshit that is having to take your rightful place among womankind, which doesn't mean that any of these stop being a fight. In some ways, they will always be more of one. Because all women are forced to have this fight. It's what our culture and society have given to us.
In fact, I think that's why so many ciswomen support the AFAB-only spaces idea. People are inherently self-centered, and when a trans woman says they don't feel validated as a woman because, say, facial hair... all the ciswomen reading that see is an accusation. This trans woman believes she's not woman enough because of her facial hair... and that secret voice in a ciswoman's head says, "And if that makes her less of a woman, what does that mean about you?"
I know I'm inviting a lot of hate and accusations of transphobia, but as I like to say, I owe the world my honesty.
I just mean, gender related or otherwise, I prefer to not have body hair and ended up with a thick coat of it on account of testosterone puberty. My body is for me, not other people, so I make the changes to it that I choose.
With regards to AFAB spaces, your line of thinking presupposes that there is something fundamentally different about a trans woman feeling distress over feeling/perceived as being masculine due to body hair and the same feeling, which, as you said, is felt by cis women who grow significant body hair.
It doesn't presuppose that they're different. It says the quiet society part out loud; many of the ciswomen I know don't actually share their fears of being less of a woman out loud very easily, and none of them do it online! There's so much fear and shame wrapped up in it for them.
This is one hypothesis why I've seen other ciswomen, who consider themselves allies, turn TERFy.
too real!
That was great! Definitely stealing that one
I once read from a wise internet sage somewhere, "gender is a fuck"
Gender is a fuck indeed.
I definitely relate though. Thought the same thing so many times since I began my journey.
Spoilers on Lemmy work like this:
which produces this:
Text next to the arrow
Text inside of the spoilerwhich can span multiple lines and can contain formatting
The first word after the three colons must be "spoiler" otherwise it won't work.
Support for these in mobile apps is somewhat lackluster. Sync for Lemmy did not really change their formatting code at all since they stopped being a Reddit client and virtually none of the Lemmy specific formatting features work. Voyager does not render spoilers at all. They work just fine in Jerboa though, as well as on the web (desktop and mobile browsers).
Thanks very much!
this is certainly one part of it. non-passing trans women being seen as predetory men, trying to invade women spaces and even less real women than passimg trans women is another big part of it and thats really not a universal women's experience.
idk if u disagre with this, ur comment just left me feeling like u were making a point about the entirety of transmysogynie
I did try and add the implication that what I was saying wasn't (and could never be) a whole picture. In the dealings of people, we could never capture the whole of a picture, even if we had infinite time. The ways in which people are uniquely terrible (and uniquely wonderful of course) is just too much subject matter to ever contain in one book, let alone comment.