transgendernothings:

geekdawson:

transgenderarts:

forced him & forced her

So….I saw some tags on this that were like “but some trans women may be cool with masculine stuff, and some trans men may be cool with feminine stuff so maybe this is less applicable to those people” 

Let me explain something to you: this visual, the one right there, it has nothing to do with masculine and feminine. I am an incredibly feminine trans man. What this is depicting, though, is the experience of trans people people being invasively dehumanized and made to appear in the form of another gender.  That I am a man who enjoys many very traditionally feminine things does not make this less applicable to me. It makes it more applicable.

When people tell you that makeup and nail polish (two things I adore) make you a woman…. you feel like your gender has just been scrubbed away by someone else’s hands. As though they are coating your body in a lie you can never explain to them is so wrong you want to scream. 

Feminine trans men and masculine trans women face all the same struggles as cis people who cross traditional masculine/feminine boundaries and then some. Because our gender has to be earned and proven, in a way cis people never have to do. People ask me why if I like makeup and nail polish I don’t just “stay a woman” and I can never really seem to make them understand that I NEVER was a woman. That I did not “become” a man. That I always was and my presentation as feminine in some ways did not make me female. 

It feels like someone else, painting over our truth, hands like ravaging wolves, words like stinging cuts, judging eyes like daggers. It is invasive and terrifying and most of us experience it when we are so young we simply do not know how to respond. 

So we fold ourselves into foreign shapes. Pretend that who we are fits the cis/heteronormative standards of masculine and feminine. And we are still so very much that image up above. It is still someone telling us what our gender should be, painting over our truth, laying us bare as though they own our bodies and our minds and our souls. 

So please, friends. Don’t imagine that because I like nail polish and eyeliner that the above does not apply to me. If anything, it applies MORE, because people try to convince me on a regular basis that those two things should mean I am a woman, because women are feminine and they like nail polish and eyeliner. But the truth is, none of those things determine my gender. 

Stop putting your hands on my body, stop painting over my truth, stop imagining for a moment that you know what it feels like to be forcibly removed from who you are. Just stop. And let us be who we are. Free from the expectation of your narrow ideas of male and female and masculine and feminine. 

Please. Take your hands off me. And all my brothers and sisters. 

Preach. This is absolutely accurate. 

A lot of our lives as trans people ends up being a constant barrage of people telling us that they know better about our personhood, even (and especially) when they’ve never met us. Everyone experiences this to some degree within their lives and towards many different aspects, it would be foolish to say otherwise, but no disregard for any other of my own interests, experiences or opinions has been nearly as great or as heavy as the disregard for my gender. It’s one thing for people to deny that your opinions or experiences are valid, it’s another when they deny your gender. They aren’t questioning the validity of your interests or knowledge here, they’re questioning the validity of you. They’re questioning if you really exist and positing instead “no, what if you are this character over here? You’re basically that anyway, so I will regard you as them.”

When you’re trans, it’s easy to stop existing because you don’t stop being told that you don’t exist. I vividly remember living as a character even as a child because that’s what people told me I was; it was exhausting, weird, and resulted in total dissociation to my childhood. I never actually had a childhood. My life began a couple years ago when I transitioned. I didn’t have room to exist until that character was allowed to die. 

Being told so as often as we are makes it easy to not want to exist. I sure as shit didn’t for the overwhelming majority of my life and dealt with suicidality for well over a decade. People will probably never stop pressuring us to stop existing within our lifetimes, which is depressing and tiresome to even begin to fathom, but realistic.

This is something that I’ve come to conclude that cis people will just never truly understand. And that’s okay, you don’t need to understand, you shouldn’t feel like you have to understand, and I’m honestly glad you have never been in the position that would allow you to understand. But for god’s sake don’t pretend you understand because that’s how you trick yourself into thinking you know what is okay to push on us. You just need to know that this is a thing, that it’s a big deal for us, and let us roll the way we roll.