imi's thoughts

what follows is essentially my collected Postes i wrote while reading tgsm, i may expand on this more in the future, but for now this is where i wanna leaf it::

fuck i’m only a couple pages in and it already smacked me in the face:

i'm still practicing coming out to cis people and what to say to them, but i feel like they're always wondering if i'm going to get srs, or if i already had it. i like to tell them that i'm getting ffs, partly because i am and it's an important part of my process, and partly because i suspect like cis people won't think i'm actually trans unless they know i am getting my body cut open by a cis doctor in order to be regular.

so much about cis people's ideas of how trans people are Supposed to be comes from this notion that we are Supposed to get a surgery. you can see it in all discourses around trans people go everything from “oh just a man that's going to chop off his dick” or to “aw a poor sad little girl cut of her breasts”. we are in some respects “required” to get a surgery in order to “prove” we're serious but this also is “proof” of our “mental ilness” as well to these same types of people.

i know transmisogyny is real, obviously, but part of the brainwash that i experience/d from identity politics spaces and also just internalized transphobia is never being sure if it's real, if i'm secretly just an entitled man on hormones who loves his tiny boobies and his lingerie and who shouldn't get to talk about sexism because it's a system he benefits from. i'm trying to practice talking about sexism.

fuck i feel like this exact thing so often. and it's even more reinforced when i get comments from people in my “support network” tell me things like “oh you say colors like an amab person”, or “you don't talk about why you like things in a proper enough fem way, you are still talking about why you like things like an amab person” and like these types of phrases really reinforce the concepts i already have deep in my brain as these little worms burrowing deeper and deeper, like i don't “get” to speak on things like sexism, because i am still just seen as a boy in many aspects of my life.

i think i will look hot and feel good after i get surgery on my face, but i also need to get it so i can just walk around without being so fucking afraid. dysphoria is not merely about wanting to be hot, nor about my sick brain in my healthy body – it's about daily threats of violence, about not being witnessed or interpolated as i want to, and the ways people react when they feel fear about your transness.

passing isn’t “just” about wanting to feel pretty. it’s about wanting safety.

one thing hannah baer talks about in trans girl suicide museum is how when you’re the only trans person at an event and all of a sudden it becomes Very Important™ to share pronouns, and it’s obviously because they clocked you as a tranny

i don't want anyone to think they are entitled to an explanation of how i related to my gender and my body, and sometimes when i'm asked my pronouns i feel like that's what people are asking for.

this is exactly what contrapoints was saying forever ago what she got “cancelled” over. like she was saying how off putting it is to only have pronouns being discussed because they’ve clocked you and how that essentially outs you. and like i agree. it’s shitty for pronouns to only be a discussion when a tranny shows up to an event. and it’s shitty to be forced to define yourself to a cis audience.

i tell a trans friend that cis girls used to want to fuck me, and now they have no idea what to do with my body, are afraid to touch my penis. “of course they're afraid,” my friend says, “your body is haunted.”

fuck this quote.. i just need to process lol it's a lot

if we lived in a culture where one's sex and one's personal truth weren't seen as twinned, transness would be less of a revelation, less of a big deal.

yeag this is like an argument as i understand it, for like ridding ourselves of the biological categories that are seen as innate and immutable of “boy”/“girl”, “man”/“woman”, and if we did such a thing then the larger cis society it would not break their brains as much when people like us transition, because that category that we are assigned at birth would not be seen as immutable, as unchanging, like it is now.

this is a longer quote but i think it's worth it:

my friend denise, who i met at a retreat for descendants of holocaust survivors, studies addiction narratives, among other things.** denise told me this idea that i can't get out of my head and that i think is really beautiful, which is that when we talk about curing addiction in secular culture, it's predicated on this capitalist idea of a self-regulating subject, someone who, if left to their own devices, could control their own behavior and decisions. denise talked about how indigenous communities where people are more heavily connected to one another and dependent on the community to regulate their bodies and behaviors (rather than being alienated like white and/or capitalist communities and just having do self-regulation) often have different relationships to substances and addiction, but that when those same communities become colonized and start having more alienated capitalist first-world lives, addiction problems start to go up.

this idea made me think about austen riggs, a kind of progressive psychiatric hospital that uses community and interconnection as a technology to help people heal their mental health. at this hospital, there's no locked doors and patients have to consent to their treatments, and everyone in the community talks about their feelings about everything (like, even the janitors) as part of the community maintenance. when i talked to an acquaintance who worked there, i asked him “how do people ever leave? like if the mechanism of healing is the community?” he explained that leaving the hospital is an extreme trauma for some people, and many relocate to other kinds of intentional communities.

what does this have to do with transness? i guess i was supposed to figure out that i was trans alone- which if it's not yet clear, i didn't, a lot of other people helped me. but the idea is that i was supposed to have self-insight and then do self-exposition, and then make these different individual plans (like planning surgery on my individual body) to make my transness real. but what if my transness hadn't emerged in a context where we believe that people are self-regulating subjects? what if a community had unlocked my transness? what if instead of discovering my own transness inside of me, i could say g-d discovered it, that the g-d wanted me to be trans? or that i had it passed down to me from an ancestor? or that i was living a truth and struggle that was manifested in me by the community of all transwomen forever?

our culture forces us into these atomized positions and we're supposed to “just figure it out” on our own and that's kinda bullshit. like