The Mundane Transfeminine

*the anti-ADHD playbook of course

Kind of irritating that people imagine that trans folk sprung into existence at the very moment they started hearing about them with any frequency and must have no history prior to that.

Respectfully speaking, no way has the anti-ADHD been around longer than the anti-trans playbook given that the first (pathologising, bigoted) medical text on transness dates back to the late 1800s with accounts of political repression going back millennia.

Maybe you just weren’t paying attention.

Though a change like this would certainly seem to be pretty uncommon, which could be argued as a reason for possible skepticism.

But ultimately no one else is privy to your thoughts and feelings, so you’re the only one who can ultimately decide what they mean.

In which case, you should at least be thinking about it as a possibility, even if seems impossible at this juncture to decide how you really feel.

We don’t understand phenomena like sexual orientation and gender identity well enough to explain it, but identity shifts can, anecdotally, occur.

I couldn’t say whether that might apply in your case, but at the very least it establishes that intrusive thoughts related to identity can and do arise and that you shouldn’t necessarily immediately read a lot into thoughts like these that depart from your previous self-understanding and upset you

I‘ve read that people with certain mental health conditions (OCD, perhaps?) are particularly prone to intrusive thoughts that undermine their sense of self and leave them in an unpleasant state of confusion and uncertainty, even when the things they come to fear about themselves aren’t true.

Plus it is very easy to read too much into idle, passing fancies.

Intrusive thoughts are a thing, you know? When I stand on the edge of a large drop, I sometimes feel the strong urge to throw myself off the edge despite not really wanting to die and finding the vivid mental images distressing.

But it should be instinctive to think of yourself existing in the physical and emotional state you’re accustomed to, and with that comes all your habits of thought and your expectations about others’ perceptions and treatment of you.

There’s a lot of room for distortion there, don’t you think?

But if you’re tormented by indecision then I guess one way to proceed if you don’t stop feeling like this would be to consider voluntarily (and perhaps temporarily) stopping HRT and seeing how that makes you feel.

Maybe you’re so habituated to your current state that you forgot some positives?

(Although actually it is presumably more a form of self-harm than it is wishful thinking; maybe I shouldn’t have written otherwise, but I think there can be a kind of ambivalence in cases like this…)

This would presumably be nothing more than wishful thinking on your part. The seeming truth is you don’t get to choose your gender and you’ll presumably be stuck like this until some better treatment than currently exists comes into existence and is made available to you (if that ever happens).

If you think your transition’s been a failure (a sentiment I seem to recall seeing often from you) then it might be a relief on some level to think that there might be some escape from your dysphoria and self-loathing, that you could somehow come not to disidentify with your body as it became.

It would be easy for you to conceptualise yourself as a man not because that’s what you actually are, but because you think that’s what everyone else sees you as and so you feel you have no choice to be anything else. It’s just another manifestation of awful body image.

It is very natural that you’d be hesitant to transition. Lots of us are, which is why you get people transitioning in middle age or old age.

Plus I think that the masculinisation from an unwilled puberty can play havoc with a trans woman’s self-perception no matter how long she’s been on HRT.

Besides, there’s such a thing as responsive desire too, you know?

How much you tend to feel aroused has a lot to do (at least for some) with whether you’re exposed to sexual stimulus, so you could, without having a low libido, just not think about sex at all because you’re focusing on other things.

I think there’s some overgeneralisation going on here.

As a trans woman, I can’t say I noticed much of a difference. Contrary to popular belief, oestrogen and progesterone also boost libido. I never saw myself in cis men’s accounts about how they’re constantly thinking about sex anyway.

(Also, if you actually think about it you’ll see that if Starmer had really believed trans women are women then he wouldn’t dodge the question of whether women can have a penis; he’d say yes)

It’s really easy to explain.

When he thought it was in his best interest to be seen as agreeing with the existing law and political consensus he lied about believing trans women are women.

When he no longer needed to present himself as a progressive, he was able to say what he actually thought.

When Discomfort Becomes Law: The Dangerous Logic of the Darlington Nurses Case How an employment tribunal turned prejudice into principle and left trans workers with nowhere to go

A good blog on the Darlington bigots ET tribunal decision today. A bad decision, which effectively says it’s reasonable to segregate away trans people. Not judicially precedent-setting but in the epilegal sphere of HR departments likely to be quite influential.

They nearly killed this woman. Then they went on national TV and tried to smear her.

"Material harmful to minors" means any description or representation of nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement, or sadomasochistic abuse when it (i) appeals to the prurient, shameful, or morbid interest of minors; (ii) is patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community as a whole with respect to what is suitable material for minors; and (iii) is, when taken as a whole, lacking in serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.

Virginia has become the latest state to propose a special tax (HB720) on whatever the state deems "harmful to minors." Not just porn, but sex ed, LGBTQ+ art, romantasy, who knows what else.

"The power to tax is the power to destroy." — Justice John Marshall, McColloch v Maryland (1819)

'Listen to women' NHS nurses say, after tribunal rules sharing changing room with trans woman 'violated dignity' However, the tribunal dismissed several other claims, finding that the trans woman had not harassed or victimised the nurses.

I find this sickening, tbh. The claim that simply being in the presence of a trans woman creates a “a hostile, humiliating and degrading environment” for cis women could not be more transphobic* if it tried.

*Literally: showing discrimination against, aversion to, or fear of, transgender people

“There was a lot of advice being put out on social media that was just plain wrong,” she said, with particular anger at the Good Law Project, which has brought a judicial review against the EHRC interim update, published shortly after the court ruling."

But while the Supreme Court’s ruling should have settled the issue, it instead promoted an “astonishing” backlash, she believes because “people were led to believe they had rights that they didn’t have." “I was surprised first of all, in the aftermath of the judgement, that there was any pushback really at all because I thought it was clear,” she said. “I understood that people would be upset, but I thought they might understand that this was the law."

Thanks to Akua Reindorf KC for crediting us for stopping the tsunami of bigotry she sought to start following the For (Some) Women Scotland case. 1/2

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The second question: Was UATX a hard-right project from the start? Based on my reporting, I don’t think it was. I was struck by the sincerity of the commitment to free speech and open inquiry from so many of the people with whom I spoke. A few were Trump supporters, but many more were best identified as anti-woke moderates or liberals. The university’s saga has a strong sense of historical contingency — that it could have gone quite differently had some high-leverage moments gone otherwise. A notable example is the episode surrounding Dan’s alleged violation and expulsion, which several former staffers and faculty suggested was exploited by the Straussians as evidence of dysfunction in their successful second coup attempt.

Politico:

"We've got the world's most credulous reporter here to tell you that a university sponsored by billionaires whose anti-trans faculty are at the cutting edge of 18th-century race science wasn't a hard-right project."

Jesus Christ.

🚨BREAKING: DEMS DRAW RED LINE IN DHS APPROPS: NO FUNDING INCREASE FOR ICE. POLICY RIDERS GROWING. STORY COMING IN MIGRANT INSIDER

I find it necessary these days to affirm the obvious because the descent into fascism is mostly a continuous, not discrete, process so here it goes:

these are internal checkpoints by secret police for what is routine freedom of movement.

The jackboots are out here saying "One heritage, one people" and liberals are like "One more training can fix this, just one more training bro please"