also sorry if i gave the impression that i was saying that your situation with your mom is in any way better than mine, since maybe that’s what it sounded like. i guess i was just remarking on the stark contrast, since it’s so different to what i’m used to. but i wasn’t trying to imply that your relationship with your mom was any easier to navigate and i can sympathize with all the struggles and frustrations it would bring.
i was mostly joking on the last bit but there is some part of me compelled to believe it. maybe being on here too much is rotting my brain but i sometimes start thinking that all sexuality is comp-het or meta-attraction or something. i just don’t really have a good grasp on sexuality or attraction or even romance, honestly. i’m probably closest to pansexual if anything (although i rarely say it because if you mention being pan on 4t you get downcummied and called a blue-haired eff slur) so i realize that i’m probably just projecting here. but idk it’s always seemed really strange to me how people put so much weight on sexual compatibility and what not in romantic partners, when in my head that just “shouldn’t matter.” but like… you could say the same thing about gender and sex characteristics… which basically was my longest-lasting repper cope. so, yeah, i’m kinda just stupid.
so you’re wholly right about it being bad to project your own inclinations outward. i try not to be so insane, since i’ve definitely also been guilty of enlightenment syndrome before (particularly while repping.) even if i sometimes can’t help myself, i’m at least aware that such thinking does not lead to a healthy and open worldview. so it does irk me when people on 4tran4 get all holy with what sexualities / sex roles / types of dysphoria are righteous, even if it’s usually half-serious discussion. it’s funny to me that as much as we rag on tumblr vxlidity discourse, we’ve basically replicated the same debates, only for different topics and on even more dogmatic terms.
…interesting about your parents’ ages. mine also just barely make the grade for boomer status. and you’re not the first person i’ve seen on here with older parents. i’ve seen the theory floated before there could be some linkage between troonyism and having kids later in life—something like: old age -> mutated gametes -> higher risk of AuDHD comorbidity suite, possibly including transsexuality. but of course all that would also be schizo stuff that should perhaps not be entertained too seriously.
holy trainknee gene lmao… but also your mom sounds kinda based waow. we definitely have very different mothers though, despite them being similar ages (assuming you are using boomer literally.) i think my mom operates under the normative liberal “equality of the sexes” idea and can’t really understand why anyone would troon out. i’m kind of a gender abolitionist myself at heart but i think the notion is not really conducive to transsexuals being understood by cissies. she seems to think we’re all just trenders for that reason and i guess i can’t really blame her since she hasn’t ever talked to anyone with crippling dysphoria before and is probably still working off a sex essentialist mindset.
my mom has also mentioned that apparently my grandmother used to say she wished she were born a boy, but this was always presumed to be purely in a “social opportunity” kind of way, and not the repper kind. and at least from what i knew of her in her nursing home alzheimer’s-delirium, this is the impression i got too. my mom is 100% not a repper and has pretty much said as much. my dad on the other hand… well i’d feel bad saying anything even on a pseudo anonymous internet forum… but let’s just say i have reason for my suspicions.
also
She also thinks every single person on planet Earth is a repressing bisexual
she’s literally just right, no?
no, no, keep 'em coming. i always love reading people’s thoughts, even if they are insane and ramble-y (not that i really think yours are.) wish more people would be more effortful/open with their writing on here.
if you need to get therapy letters for insurance coverage, then pretending to be WPATH’s golden girl is probably the safe play—and lying to doctors is always good and justifiable anyway.
weirdly, my mom is kind of the opposite to yours. i have a female trans friend who she genders correctly (which ig bodes well for me) but she cannot for the life of her do the same for my enby(ish) friends. at first i thought she was doing it on purpose, since she would go through the whole “she- i mean he- i mean they” charade to such a ridiculous degree, but i slowly came to realize that boomers’ brains just melt down when faced with using neutral language. no clue how she truly views anyone, since she’s gone on a couple of “i just don’t get it” rants in regards to le troon uprising.
i still have no idea how i’m going to #come out to her, since i don’t want to tell anyone how to perceive me nor do i even know how i want to be perceived. i’m probably just going to write a novel-length letter about my dysphoria on my own terms (to the extent you can tell your parents) and not #identify myself as anything, and hope for the best.
i totally get you on feeling guilty about being bummed about your family though. like, i’m eternally grateful to have a libbed-up tolerant family that i know won’t kick me onto the streets but i still wish i could be understood instead of #accepted.
i find half the stuff you say infuriatingly deranged and the other half exceedingly based. there’s like no in between, it’s honestly impressive
sorry nona that sucks and, yeah, probably not much you can do to be truly understood :(
you shouldn’t feel guilty about “overcorrecting” as binary trans in order to be seen as some sort of enby though. lying sucks but all troons unfortunately just do not get the option of existing honestly in this world. whatever you gotta do to be seen the way you need to be seen is vxlid in my books.
okay, i think i more see where you’re coming from, thank you. idk i still really dislike the natural vs. artificial framing and don’t think it’s generally a helpful way to view things. but then again i may just be insane/stupid. so apologies for dragging this on so long; i do realize i can be a difficult/annoying person and that my brain is kinda anomalous in how i conceptualize stuff.
then what is your definition of natural?
all words and definitions are arbitrary
agreed, but i’m not talking about language and semantics broadly—i’m specifically saying that nature cannot be defined. unless i missed it, i don’t think you’ve given your definition of natural, other than providing some examples, and i’ve yet to see nature defined in a way that doesn’t arbitrarily center humans.
they cannot exist without human intervention.
that we know of; there’s nothing uniquely human required to synthesize them. theoretically, some alien species could come down and start making bronze or glass or whatever. or some other species on earth could evolve to do so.
and even if i were to concede that humans are somehow innately unnatural, where did humans come from? were the primates we evolved from also unnatural? humans are so deeply interconnected with everything else in nature that you can’t just remove them from the picture. we’re only biased towards humans because we are humans.
if you were just going to define nature as “not man-made” i would still have quibbles but i could accept it as a usable definition. but you said that humans were once bound by nature and now aren’t. so what is the delineation of natural and unnatural? why are bronze tools natural but hypodermic needles unnatural? like i get that this is kind of a pedantic “when does a hill become a mountain” thing but that’s what i’m getting at. that there is no meaningful way to define nature.
it doesn’t… i was speaking on a species level. troons obviously aren’t making many babies, hence why the rest of the species wants us dead.
that’s still all arbitrary. it’s just environmental manipulation and adaptation, something all animals do—just not on the same scale. you still can’t call this transcending nature.
we are not bound completely by nature anymore, and we havent for a long time
how so? i truly don’t think there’s any way to separate humans from other animals that isn’t just drawing arbitrary human-biased lines in the sand. there’s no way to delineate exactly when humans stopped being “natural” because there is no natural. everything is nature.
in that case i think we just have differing views on causality and predisposition
if a person eats an apple for the first time and finds out they like apples, did eating the apple cause them to like apples? i suppose there’s no way to strictly prove they didn’t develop a taste for apples in that moment but it would seem pretty silly to say the event was the causation.
we don’t live natural lives
this is just humancentric hubris. humans are very much a part of nature. everything that humans do will ultimately be to make more babies, because that’s the only way we can measure our species over time. no matter how civilized we pretend to be, we will always be chained to biology.
i don’t agree with many of the common conceptions of neurosex but i do believe in it because otherwise nobody would care about their bodies or be dysphoric. i don’t think it’s stored anywhere in the brain or body, specifically,—just like all of sex it exists as a suite of sex characteristics, probably far beyond our understanding of neurology. and for that reason i don’t believe it is malleable, to any significant extent, because it’s too widely incorporated into the entire psyche. so while i don’t believe in any faketrans/trutrans dichotomy, i also don’t think dysphoria is a product of nurture.
this sounds suspiciously like wanting to be a woman. but also same.
self-describes androphilia as heterosexuality
so… you admit you’re a woman, kath? :)
also, i guess i prooobably shouldn’t be calling my dad a repper since that really is all speculation on my part. i really don’t know. i’m mostly going off general miserableness that i’m interpreting as highly-masked repression (off my own experience) plus like one piece of somewhat-damning evidence. but i don’t think i’ve heard him actually talk about gender, like ever. which, in some ways, is maybe another sign.