I have just found this subreddit and I wish that it was more active as I love reasonable discussion about these kinds of topics especially given the current toxic political climate. I am a transsexual woman and have a couple questions regarding the perspectives of those with GC beliefs.
I would like to set the stage of this post with an outline of my personal perspective of transsexualism with the intention of adding nuance to my questions. Apologies if this ends up being a ramble (I don’t expect many people to read the screed of an aging tranny :-)) but I am interested in any insight and critiques of my personal views as well as answers to the main questions that follow at the very end. Much of our histories are passed through word of mouth in the TS community and not told publicly. I am only able to speak for transsexual women who are attracted to men since that is my personal experience. I use the term transsexual instead of transgender as it connects me to the strong and resilient women in the past who defied a society that wanted them to not exist and communicates that changing my secondary sex characteristics to be that of the opposite sex is paramount to my condition.
Being trans today is a different experience than it was in the past when I transitioned. Just a few decades ago transsexuals were still solidly in the realm of myth and urban legend to many in the general public beyond a few popularized special cases. This acted as a barrier to transition to many. Because of this I’ve seen a lot of people who hold the view that transsexualism is a new phenomenon or that it is something that hasn’t always existed as a quirk of human development. The reason why we don’t have very many elderly trans people to counter this belief is that not so long ago our life expectancy was very low across the board and most of us were involved in survival sex work. Many of us didn’t think we could be any more than that in this life as transsexuals. The police didn’t investigate trans murders, most doctors wouldn’t treat us even for non-transition related things and also allowed many to drop dead of AIDs, drug overdose and suicide rates were very high, and the inability to access transition resources pushed people in our community to pump themselves with illegal black market silicone which continues to kill many. We were forced to use illicit street hormones which had much higher cancer risks. This wasn’t very many years ago and things have sharply changed but we still live in a society that seemingly doesn’t want us to live normal lives. There’s a reason why you don’t see very many trans women who aren’t visible disasters get lots of publicity in the media — society at large doesn’t want to confront passing and normal acting transsexual women… they want to see us as jokes or very clearly as crossdressing men.
In that world minors still transitioned. There is a feeling of urgency that many minors have because they want to live life in the way they feel like they were meant to live. To be trans feels like you have a congenital birth defect and you just want to live your life and, at least in my case, almost nothing would have stopped me from getting access to HRT even though I was underage and transitioning on my own. Honestly it was dangerous and I don't want that life for trans kids. To transition you had to take hormones in secret. With the internet you could order them online. In the past it meant running away and getting drugs like Premarin from drag queens or girls on the corner. All of this raised the bar for trans people to transition and only the most serious did it… many of the kind of people today that you see would not last back then. This was the state of the world where we as trans people started to get our rights and we did it ourselves; other LGB people wanted to distance themselves from us and we weren’t welcome in many of those spaces since they wanted to be more palatable to the rest of society.
To that end, there will always be trans kids. I was one of them and I took black market hormones. I was involved in underage sex work to get them and thought that all I could be in life was a high class escort who could get what I wanted in life if I was just able to catch the eye of the right man. Most of the people I knew back then did not survive because of being murdered, bad surgery (ever hear of Dr. John Brown doing sex changes in a dirty trailer in the desert in Mexico? Nobody cared about what he did to trans women until he killed a man), and many other reasons. I do not want children to be exposed to that life.
I think that the spike in detransitioners is unsurprising when we have started to remove any sort of checks to make sure that this is the right path in life for kids before they are prescribed hormones. Back then nobody really thought about detransitioning because when a TS woman transitioned she was basically signing up for war and we knew that as kids as well. Trans people are socialized to feel less-than non-trans people and feel like we are not valid which puts us on track for lots of mental health struggles in life. Many people deny that this happens to us and want to equate us to just being men who have male socialization and don’t have a unique experience. Something that sets us up in life is the ability to pass and blend into the woodwork in society. Transitioning younger helps trans kids be able to live normal lives and saves lots of money in future surgeries. It also allows them to live a fulfilling life, if you are trans you know from a young age. It's not something you magically discover and most of us aren't able to live a proper life without transitioning. Even if there was no concept of being able to change genders, transsexuals would still get SRS and take hormones even if we said we were just men.
In the face of all of these bathroom bills, passing trans people aren’t going to be using the men’s restroom, most of us will just break the law or try and move. I have seen that many say that no trans person can pass. While many are delusional, there are those that can pass. There will always be someone in the world who doesn’t like how you (regardless of who you are) live life. If you were to capitulate to every person on the planet’s wishes for how you live your life it wouldn’t be a life at all. All of this is another way to humiliate and demoralize trans people and push us to be outside of normal society again while pornsick men in power continue to consume the trans porn they socialized us to take part in. I think that a lot of these bills are just going to make trans people move away from these states. This issue is central to our lives and we are willing to die for this… the stakes for those who oppose us aren’t the same and we are just a political point to them. That’s nothing new. We have survived much worse conditions not to distantly and our communities will pull together.
In todays world trans has become a sort of joke. The thinking in the trans community is much different. It’s the new midlife crisis and the new emo but trans people still exist. A lot of people are using it as some kind of weird path to become something else and run away from their old self rather than to be themselves as they've always been and transition to live a fulfilling life. People who don’t transition or have very strange transition reasons are centering themselves in our community and silencing actual transsexuals in our own spaces and it’s very offensive to those of us who have a real condition. Gender dysphoria isn’t seen as a requirement to be trans and any sort of gatekeeping for those that go the legitimate transition route isn’t in place. There is no desire for middle ground where there are stricter medical barriers to transitioning while still maintaining it as a possibility on either side of the argument. It is my opinion that this needs to happen for trans children who want to transition and it is effective and has been used before things started changing recently. The reason why you didn’t see many detransitions in the past is that this life wasn’t seen as an identity or something fun. There also needs to be a societal contract where you go into the restroom that you look like but banning us all-up is very reminiscent of forcing us back closer to a point where it was illegal for us to present as women and we were forced to sell ourselves in bombed out hotel rooms in the safety of the night.
TS women aren’t the same as female-sexed women but I do believe that we are a kind of women. I believe it is reductive to call us men and we don’t live life as men though it seems like many want to say that there is no difference. We are in a catch-22 where trans women aren’t seen as fully human and are seen as just being the same as men completely discounting our experience. The in-group nature of womanhood and female biology will always other us in the eyes of non-trans women and we know that we have to be careful around them. There are multiple realities for this condition and those that don’t pass and are “bricks” as we call them don’t live the same kind of lives as those of us who can blend in.
In the face of these ramblings my question is this:
There will always be a small amount of transsexuals that exist in society regardless of the culture wars or “the cult” being defeated. Should those that don’t comply with bathroom bills or those that take illicit hormones and are caught be punished legally? Can GC and TS exist with compromises and will GC speak up if Republican men in power make it illegal to be trans and try and make the past a reality again? I’m not worried since we have had it much worse and the public at large will get tired of this issue but the fallout left behind for us will remain and it will only exist as another reason why trans people will need to play catch-up in life to overcome hurdles that have been put in their way.
I know that I’ve definitely said things that many of you don’t agree with and I apologize. I don’t talk to many people about this issue as I live with my husband in suburbia without mention of these things so part of this was me organizing my thoughts in general given the constant media cycles of trans issues.
