What is something you learned or experienced from being trans that you wish you knew pre-transition, or that you wish cis people knew?
I’ll go first: the temperature differences when going from testosterone-dominance to estrogen-dominance is not just real but significant, my body just puts out less heat and I feel colder much easier now even when otherwise maintaining a high metabolism, eating in excess, etc.
It may have just been my trans denial before, but I really wanted to believe that the difference was not that great and I was wrong.
What’s something you wish people knew?
How many trans people completely give up not just sports, but many types of exercise altogether. Swimming is particularly fraught, but so are plenty of other activities. There’s this narrative that trans people are beating down the doors to all sports, but for plenty of trans people just being active and healthy is out of reach.
Edit: oop, sorry, didn’t realize this was posted in the transfem community 😅
so true, and such a good example.
Personally as a kid I never exercised unless forced to (e.g. the annual 1 mile run in gym class) and didn’t enjoy sports, even before I realized I was trans.
This was for so many reasons, too. For example with swimming, not wearing long-sleeves & pants was unbearable in social situations as a kid, let alone taking my shirt off & wearing swim trunks around peers.
I also had very poor body coordination / awareness (“proprioception”), and frequently was injured when I would play.
(I was hit in the head by balls so many times in sports it became a running joke with friends and family - I have distinct memories of having painful experiences being hit in the head when playing basketball, baseball, and kickball, some of these happening more than once.)
As an adult I learned coping strategies, and I adapted to living as the wrong gender and dissociating from the body. Looking back, it was dysfunctional the way I used my self-loathing and gender dysphoria as tools to push myself to endure physical suffering that wasn’t safe or healthy. I also had a hard time gauging my body’s needs and injured myself many times, and I now have life-long conditions as a result.
I have heard similar stories from other trans women IRL about not being able to read the body and injuring themselves, and about poor body coordination / proprioception. There is also just the obvious discomfort of the way sports puts you into your body in a social context, and for trans women the way sports is male-coded and all the complicated social dynamics around being “athletic” or into sports as being masculine.
What were your experiences, and do you have any advice for trans people wanting to be healthy with movement?
Would be a great idea imho to start organising queer&ally sport groups.
Regular swimming sessions in groups, perhaps?
that is a great idea! Rent out a pool or field, provide a safe space for trans participation in sports - I love it!
The proprioception thing is interesting because it’s also linked to things like ADHD and autism along with other sensory processing difficulties.
For me, my own poor proprioception actually feeds into my dysphoria on its own because it feels like somebody hit me with the Scale tool in Blender and added like 2 inches to all my bodily dimensions. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve just barely smacked my head or hands on things or kicked furniture and how much frustration it has caused me with this damned flesh prison.
yes, it wasn’t until I transitioned and read all the studies about shared genetic causes of gender dysphoria and autism, and the high overlap between the two that I finally took seriously the feedback I had been getting my whole life that I might be autistic - so my own proprioception issues might also be linked to neurodivergence. Estrogen seemed to help a little bit with my proprioception, but I am still clumsy and my spouse has noted that it hasn’t been fixed by transition.
I do feel like you that my body just feels too large, and I do think that’s part of why I run into things - the hormones haven’t fixed that, so maybe that’s a life sentence, unfortunately. And “damned flesh prison” is pretty much how I would describe my body since I was maybe 15 - 17 years old? But hey, still cis tho.
Gender is a social construct and you don’t have to ‘live up’ to any predefined ideas about what you ‘need’ to be, what you ‘need’ to look like, or what you ‘need’ to do.
ah, freedom from gender norms! I think everyone, cis and trans, has different tolerances for the extent to which they feel comfortable adhering to or violating gender norms. Ironically, transitioning has been so great for me because it allows me to finally be “normal” by being conformist.
As a man I was always wrong because my natural inclinations made me gender non-conforming (making me seem like a gay man). It was very stigmatizing living that way, but once I transitioned it’s like everything lined up and now for the first time every I “fit” society, and I just live as a relatively normal woman without stigma.
However, my sexuality still makes me non-conforming, but in women that seems to be more ignored or overlooked compared to men (esp. when you are feminine / conforming in your gender expression). It’s only when it’s made explicit that people seem uncomfortable, and even then the average person seem more accepting than of gay men, at least in my experience.
That said, it makes sense that being trans would lend itself to seeing the possibilities in gender and the freedom from gender norms that can be accomplished.
The popularity of beyond-the-binary ideas of Kate Bornstein and Leslie Feinberg and the increased adoption of non-binary as a political identity show a thirst for tearing down gender norms and replacing them with gender freedom (particularly focused on individualist ideas of gender expression and non-conformity).
Though I am ultimately skeptical that this is how gender works, and it reminds me of the failed political lesbianism of second wave feminism, the problem then was that sexuality was not wholly cultural or political as mistakenly assumed, and you cannot will yourself to be a lesbian and build a new utopian society on that basis. Straight women exist, and they will continue to be attracted to men even if it’s they’re told it’s wrong. Still, it’s exciting to see movements like this push to create space for gender non-conformity, that’s a win regardless in my book.
Our point isn’t that people can’t behave in ways they like more that they don’t have to adhere so strictly to gender roles, expression etc. They can still, of course, act in more ‘conventional’ ways but the point is that they should be able to choose that and if necessary choose to break that or merely change over time, nobody should be forced to behave or look a particular way nor feel they can only be those things and that is all forever.
So it’s not always exactly gender non-conformity more that behaviour and expressions shouldn’t be tied to gender, and roles shouldn’t exist at all. Just be you, even if most of the time that matches what society currently sees as matching what they expect, but you don’t always have to.
yes, such a good point, even recognizing there is a choice of conforming or not is beyond some people’s awareness (especially I think in more collective cultures, whereas individualism lends itself to people prioritizing their desires over social expectations).
I do think a lot of gender norms and roles are arbitrary (like blue for boys and pink for girls, or women only in the home and men only at work), but I suspect humans do have what we might categorize as hard-wired gendered behavior as well (though with considerable overlap, the idea of strict differences without overlap is just not evidenced).
Otherwise I’m not sure gender dysphoria makes much sense, since it seems to be a natural phenomenon rooted in the biology and found throughout human history and across cultures, and is even found to be genetic. That said, gender dysphoria is still worked out in a social and psychological context and is not pure biology either, so a lot of what you are saying here is relevant about how arbitrary social norms can be.
Thanks! Interesting point about different cultures, that’s why we think there needs to be a mix.
We agree about the colours and where people should be. Ah yes, humans might be like that because of that. It’s very interesting to us non-humans.
Biology, such as how much the body responds to hormones and how that destroys the idea of binary sex.
that’s a good one, I like to send people the Nature article “Sex redefined”, which talks about how binary sex is an outdated model.
That gender dysphoria exists
Yes, such a great one - it’s so hard to believe that gender dysphoria is real, people seem to want to think it’s just delusions or trauma or anything but what it is.
It’s incredible to me that the conservative medical establishment has endorsed gender affirming care and transition for trans youth and adults in this country, over centuries and decades trans healthcare has developed to this point while the culture at large continues to lag behind.
It is like the gradual process of (largely Christian) scientists ruling out creationism over a period of centuries and decades, but we’re in a time still when the majority of people still believe in the religious explanation rather than the scientific one.
It makes me feel like I’m living in a kind of medieval era of sorts, when people are still largely uneducated and in the dark, a time when the gap between what humanity has discovered and what most people know is huge.
If you think about it, cisgender people also can experience gender dysphoria, just not to the extent non-cis people experience.
Thinks like feeling uncomfortable with your body when you’re on your period (the bloating), even the blood and cramp aside. Or cis men being insecure about their dick size.
!!! REAL !!!
I spent so long putting off estrogen and when I went on it I magically felt better and started getting excited at the changes in my body???
I still can barely believe it, lol
Yeah, idk about you but I still have the underlying anxiety that I’m going to finish transitioning and not be happy. But I also have anxiety about pretty much every decision I make.
I can get that way too, but what I’ve done to cope is to recognize that my situation is vastly improved, and that’s good enough - transition doesn’t have to make me happy all the time, it’s enough that it makes me happy so much of the time. The same strategy was really important when deciding to get a vaginoplasty, and when choosing my name - because I had a lot of perfectionism and anxiety around both, and I had to realize that it’s about being practical and not about finding perfection.
Even just getting estrogen in me really changed my mental health for the better, even if that’s all I ever did, it would have been worth it.
That being this way is not at all for attention or anything like that. :')
They should know I’m gonna die in the street. They should watch.
Real, they won’t be able to put me in their camps
🫂
unfortunately they might, at least in the US there is a learned callousness to suffering and “not my problem” individualism, which is ironic given the significance of taking care of the poor, unhoused, and travelers in both Christianity and ancient Greece and Rome, the supposed cultural foundations of the West.
edit: oh, I’ve been meaning to ask if you have a gofundme or way to send you funds, you are on my mind a lot
I haven’t known how to respond. You’re in the middle of stressful shit too.
I wish more cis folks knew that to me, simply being me, is as normal as being themselves is to them. I’m not a walk on the wild side, nor a walking queer chyron. I’m not your token, your conversational curio. I’m not your unicorn!
Such a great point, being trans is made into an exotic fetish, but it’s rather mundane really. This is a lot like how women are treated under patriarchy, to be honest. They are made into mysterious, sexual creatures rather than just people like anyone else. They are extended into the “Other” and alienated from common humanity.
