Galat-ladki - Blah

You are someone. You may not know where you fit in, what your future holds, but you are someone. You will always matter.

This seal relaxing halfway under water 

(via)

I had a whole thing typed up but not in the mood. The original post was a butch women talking about her discomfort with people placing expectations of femininity on her. She never passed judgement on anything. And every post I see of this sort has other users butt in with "it’s okay to be feminine” which gets a bit galling since popular culture already says that all the damn time. It feels a lot like this. I’m sure you mean well but there is a time and place for these things.

being a girl and hitting puberty is so traumatic. you go from being a genderless little free thing to being hit with shaving and makeup and growing breasts and skincare and menstruation and suddenly being sexualised when like a few years ago you could take your shirt off to play in the stream and trade yugioh cards with the boys and come home covered in mud and not even think about it. and then you spend years hating being a girl and hating everything puberty did to you and wishing you could be a boy or be completely genderless again and it takes you Many years to come to terms with yourself Or you simply try to Lean In to everything and do makeup tutorials on YouTube and claim it’s for fun. like how can this be treated as normal

from the detroit gay liberator vol. 1 no. 6, december 1970

My Cat, Keiko Hiratsuka Moore.

Either I genuinely have good ideas in the shower or the lack of ventilation deprives my brain of oxygen to the point where anything seems profound, but I feel like I’ve finally figured out the root of my dysphoria. 

The gap between the way I want to look, act, talk, and be perceived and the way society expects those things of me is huge. Large enough for me to never feel comfortable in my “assigned role”. But at the same time, uncomfortably small. Too small for the expectations to ever be fully out of reach. My deviation from the norm is often seen as unacceptable, but never unfixable. I am still female, I am still a woman, and even if I need to learn absolutely everything about how to woman right, people refuse to give up on trying to teach me. And until two years ago when I came out as a trans man, I largely refused to give up on trying to teach myself. 

I was always confident that my dysphoria was the real, innate, unfixable-without-transition kind, because I genuinely wanted to be male. The idea of getting to be masculine as a woman offered me absolutely no relief from the unbearable discomfort I felt existing inside my own skin. The idea of getting to be male did. Men don’t suffer from this pressure, masculine women do. And while I won’t claim the pressure ever fully disappeared while identifying as a trans man (feeling it very strongly over the past few months is the only reason I’ve managed to come to this realisation), at the very least I was chasing the promise of relief. And the distress when I didn’t fully get it - when I still had to face my body and realise that it looked like something that could fill the role I was and am so deeply uncomfortable with. 

I feel almost stupid for coming to this realisation after being told over and over and over again that trans men are just trying to escape gender roles. But the difference for me is that the way it was talked about from either side never made the dysphoria that could come from this seem real. I’ve attempted suicide over my dysphoria, over the distress at the idea of never being able to become male. I’ve taken a knife to my chest before. I’ve never seen myself smile as wide as I did the first time I saw myself in a binder. I cried from happiness when I got my first packer because my body finally felt right. Everyone around me has told me how big of a change they’ve seen in me since I came out, how much happier I seem. With how dismissive people sound when they bring up transitioning as the result of gender roles, I never could’ve imagined it to be the root of my dysphoria. Mine was real, and severe, and had been with me for as long as I could remember. Any suggestion that seemed to invalidate that was not only offensive, but painful. 

This realisation doesn’t fix my dysphoria and there is very little I as an individual can do to fix the underlying causes, neither for myself nor anyone else. But I wanted to share and maybe get some people to reconsider how they view dysphoria, whether their own or other people’s. I honestly think the way it’s currently talked about is harmful to a lot of people. 

New lino print! Based on an old poster that I saw online but the source of which I couldn’t track down. They’re up in my shop if anyone’s interested! (shop link in tumblr header)

Ive spent the past few months reading some radfem and detrans related stuff, just curious and trying to educate myself. Then quite recently Ive basically started to feel like "oh shit maybe i actually should detransition" and its freaking me out. Im not sure if im just going crazy being in quarantine and making rash decisions, or if all the time as home gave me time for introspection to come to this conclusion. i feel so lost lol

tbh, this is how i found myself on a path to full detransition, not just stopping hormones. i just wanted some perspective—what i found was a full paradigm shift.

you didn’t ask for advice, so take or leave this: you don’t have to figure it all out right now. give yourself permission, space, and—importantly—time to see how you’re feeling, to understand what you believe about gender and sex and all of this messy shit. and if you get a handle on how you feel about that, then see what you want to do. you don’t even have to DO it yet, just see what you want. and if you continue wanting it, take small steps toward that thing, then pause and ask yourself how it feels. do you feel more authentic? do you feel less confused? are you afraid, and if so, what of? are these fears realistic? are they worth confronting anyway?

the time in quarantine has absolutely given you time for introspection, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to reach a conclusion just yet. there are actually no rules to how your life must go. that’s entirely up to you. all i can suggest is, spend the time asking the questions that come up for you, and try to answer them. try to figure out what YOU believe and why you believe it; am i living a life that satisfies me? am i living in a way that excites me? don’t worry about anyone else, what they might think of you, how they might react to your questioning or any conclusions you draw—the only person for whom those questions and answers matter is you. ultimately, you’re the person who is guaranteed to be with you your whole life—so that’s the person whose opinion matters most.

I saw that you mentioned butch dysphoria ... can you please post resources or just any knowledge that you have? Im trying to figure out who I am.

Hey there, that’s a huge question, but I’ll share a little of what I’ve learned as a dysphoric butch person myself. I know that plenty of butches experience dysphoria to varying degrees, including women who readily identify themselves as cis — it’s way more common among non-trans people than I think most people realize, especially among gay people (but certainly not limited to them)! You are definitely not alone, and you’re also not doing gender “wrong” if you experience discomfort with social roles or gendered aspects of your body but don’t identify as trans. And if you do determine that describing yourself as trans is the best and most accurate way to frame your experience in the world, that’s an ethically neutral decision despite The Discourse™️ suggesting otherwise. Feeling dysphoric also doesn’t mean you need to commit to any one specific course of action to alleviate your discomfort, whether that means binding, using HRT, or getting top surgery, and it also doesn’t mean that you’ve just got some internalized misogyny/homophobia to unpack and once you do your dysphoria will magically vanish overnight with sufficient therapy. It’s complicated and none of have the one “right answer” for what to do about dysphoria and how it shapes our concepts of ourselves!

It definitely does help to do some serious thinking about your dysphoria — what tends to make it flare up, what body parts or social situations it seems to be attached to, how it impacts your daily life — and then work from there to address it a step at a time. I’m dysphoric about my chest, and don’t bind regularly any more due to compression-induced nerve pain (which can and does happen even with high-quality binders), but I’ve done a lot of mental/emotional work on body image to push back against negative self-talk, wear clothing that conceals my chest without actively compressing it (hence that post on 80s fashion, though I dress like a Winchester brother rather than Marty McFly), and do physical activities that help me refocus on what my body can do rather than what it looks like, such as hiking and swimming. Friends with dysphoria (of various gender identities!) report that this combination of mental reframing of your body as Not A Bad or Wrong Thing, distracting yourself from your image on bad days, and doing positive and enjoyable body-oriented activities helps a lot, even when they’ve had surgery, taken HRT, or otherwise mitigated dysphoria physically. Hang in there! You don’t have to have the answers yet (or ever, honestly), but it helps to remember that you are you, fundamentally, and that any realizations you have and decisions you make about how you occupy your body and the language you use to describe it is just part of your continuing evolution as a human being.

Gender Troubles: The Butches