Asklemmy@lemmy.mlbydandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone
10 months

what questions do you have but don't feel you can ask trans people?

English

Politeness norms seem to keep a lot of folks from discussing or asking their trans friends questions they have, I figured at the very least I could help try to fill the gap. Lemmy has a decent trans population who might be able to provide their perspectives, as well.

Mostly I’m interested in what people are holding back.

The questions I’ve been asked IRL:

  • why / how did you pick your name?
  • how long have you known?
  • how long before you are done transitioning?
  • how long do you have to be on HRT?
  • is transgender like being transracial?
  • what do the surgeries involve?

For the most part, though, I get silence - people don’t want to talk about it, or are afraid to. A lot of times the anxiety is in not knowing how to behave or what would be offensive or not. Some people have been relieved when they learned all they needed to do is see me as my gender, since that became very simple and easy for them.

If there are trans people you know IRL, do you feel you can talk to them about it? Not everyone is as open about it as I am, and questions can be feel rude, so I understand why people would feel hesitant to talk to me, but even when I open the door, people rarely take the opportunity.

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    • Christian@lemmy.mlEnglish
      10 months

      This is super longwinded but I’m having trouble putting the ideas together concisely, apologies in advance to anyone reading.

      I generally hear people describe being trans as feeling like you were born into the wrong body, like biologically male with a woman’s soul in some sense. But my experience with being cisgendered is one of feeling like my spirit would belong wherever it was born to. I identify as a man and would feel out of place in a woman’s body, but if I had been born into a woman’s body I would feel out of place in a man’s. That’s my mental picture of what being cisgendered is. I’m not sure I’m articulating this great but hopefully it’s coherent.

      That gives me the impression that being transgendered is an emotional discomfort, and I’ve wanted to hear an opinion on if the resistance to labelling it as a mental illness is because of the societal stigma against mental illnesses and how some people think successful treatment should always mean suppression and never accommodation (which would look like gender-affirming care if being trans counted).

      Part of where this is coming from is I’ve been dealing with my own mental demons lately after some traumatic experiences in the past couple years, and the way I think about it is different when I’m looking inward. If it’s another person behaving strangely it is easy to say they are suffering and deserve care, but when it’s me I am a crazy person doing crazy things and I know better.

      I do feel inclined to see being trans as a mental illness (for the reasons I’ve given above). I believe I’ll be open to hear what I’m getting wrong there. It’s not something I’ve ever been comfortable enough to ask though because I expect that statement to be received offensively (for the reasons given above). I get a lot less hostility in general over who I am and I still sometimes have a very strong gut reaction to perceive that stuff as an attack.

      • dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        10 months

        The current science points to gender dysphoria being caused by the brain developing as one sex while the body develops as another.

        If you ask whether someone is primarily their brain or their body, I think most would say identity resides in the brain and subsequent mind. In that sense, gender dysphoria is a genetic and hormonal disorder, basically a condition of yes, having the “wrong body” for the brain they developed as a fetus. This glosses over a lot of details and sex is complicated, but that’s the rough sketch. The condition arises from the brain and the mind, and in that sense can be labelled a mental illness, but that would ignore a lot of context and evidence we have about what is going on.

        It is with this understanding and with the guidance of substantial empirical evidence that transition and gender-affirming care are recommended - it is the only treatment that alleviates symptoms (conversion therapy, for example, increases risk of suicide), but also these are treatments with a very high success to failure ratio. Gender affirming surgeries have lower regret rates than practically any other surgery, much lower than knee replacement surgeries, for example.

        So we deal with gender dysphoria differently than we deal with other mental illnesses because of what we know about the condition. We know that people with body dysmorphia like anorexics feel distress about their body and might seek surgery to “fix” their bodies, but we don’t have the large body of evidence that those surgeries improve patient outcomes, relieve symptoms, or are low risk. So we treat anorexia differently than gender dysphoria, because they have different causes and require different treatments.

        So gender dysphoria could be classed as a mental illness in a way, but it’s important not to be confused by this and think it’s a fabrication or that people with gender dysphoria could just think their way out of their condition - it’s biological and not able to be solved with therapy or anti-depressants. Trans people respond really well to living as their gender (go figure!), and we see the same with cis people who are raised as the wrong gender (like in the case of David Reimer). We also see that cis people who are forced to take cross-sex hormones, like when homosexuals were given criminal punishments of estrogen treatments in the UK as in the case of Alan Turing, that those people become gender dysphoric in the same way. Gender dysphoria is not just for trans people, forcing cis people to be on the wrong hormones make them depressed too - are cis people just mentally ill when they have symptoms from being forced to live and medically transition to the other sex? It’s not different for trans people.

        • Christian@lemmy.mlEnglish
          10 months

          Took some time to reflect, I communicated my question quite poorly and that is on me but I’m gonna try to ask it in a better way.

          I feel somewhat strongly that trans-affirming care is the only appropriate approach to treating being trans. I have the impression that as a trans person you feel this is wholly incompatible with my sense that it is a mental health issue. I’d like to explicitly ask why my two beliefs are contradictory.

          I’m asking because I am just in the past year or so suffering with severe physical and mental illnesses, and when I try to picture what the trans experience is like, I find that what I am imagining aligns very closely with my mental illnesses and not closely at all with my physical illnesses. I was extremely reluctant to accept that I have a mental illness because of both societal stigma and because in my situation, no one in their right mind would choose to treat my mental illnesses with therapy and pills when a change in living conditions would actually help enormously more, which seemed analogous to treating being trans.

          That is what’s made me feel my two beliefs aren’t contradictory - I hadn’t understand how deeply I had internalized stigma against the mentally ill until I was asked to apply it to myself. I am imagining that other people would resist identifying as having mental illness in the same way I was. I picture the trans experience as emotional anguish with all physical threats as consequences of that emotional anguish. One where, also like many cases of mental illness, physical treatments are the correct option. But I don’t understand a way to liken it to my experiences with physical illness, so maybe it would be helpful to understand the physical danger and physical suffering explicitly.

          I think there are extremely few situations where a mental illness should be treated as something to correct rather than accommodate without the patient being fully on board with thinking of it as something that needs to be corrected. In many cases, the only reason a patient would be fully on board is societal stigma and designed inaccessibility of accommodations, which is the impression I have of the trans experience as well. That’s the reason I don’t think of options other than trans-affirming care as okay.

          I reacted badly because of recently surfaced mental health issues (blehhh) where I obsess over my character and respond to perceived character attacks as an attack on my identity even though I should just be listening. Your response seemed to focus on why I should agree with gender-affirming care and I read that as a character attack, rather than considering that you don’t see it as even possible to believe being trans is a mental health issue that should only be addressed by gender-affirming care. I was being overly wordy to try to be clear that I’m trying to understand how your experience compares with mine, and look, we’re back again.

          Also I tend to read comments like that as a disgust and a need to distance from the mentally ill, and that’s something I very much need to work on because I know it’s not the intention at all. It stung more than usual in this case because I was looking to build camaraderie and tried my best to clarify that I don’t want mental illness to be an attack and that I am in favor of gender-affirming care.

          This time I promise I will have the good sense to wait at least a few hours in responding to something that makes me feel bigoted. I apologize for being hurtful earlier and I’m hoping this one is less so.

          tl;dr - The core stumbling block for me is this one - when I try to picture what the trans experience is like, I find that what I am imagining aligns very closely with my mental illnesses and not closely at all with my physical illnesses. I’ve elaborated way too much on why that is. I need to hear what I have imagined incorrectly, what I have overlooked.

          • felsiq@piefed.zipEnglish
            10 months

            There was something I wanted to say in response to your original question, but I forgot it because I was too impressed with your emotional maturity and self-awareness in your responses

            I might edit this or comment again if I remember, but for now I just wanted to say I really admire you for that :)

            • Christian@lemmy.mlEnglish
              9 months

              I genuinely do appreciate you saying this, because I felt pretty bad about myself and logged off for a while.

    • FisicoDelirante@lemmy.ml
      10 months

      Don’t you think transitioning reaffirms gender roles and stereotypes? I’m probably missing something, but why isn’t being a really effeminate man enough, that there’s the need to take hormones and change your pronouns?

      • dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        10 months

        I basically believed this most of my life, and it was a big part of why I never transitioned. I felt it was offensive to women for me to claim to be one. Even once I transitioned, I had a really hard time using makeup because I felt like a traitor.

        Ultimately, I found reading Julia Serano really helpful. I learned that my fear of embodying feminine stereotypes was more about not wanting to appear feminine (even as a woman), and that ultimately this was more about an entrenched anti-femininity perspective than anything like feminism. I learned that makeup is pragmatic and useful, a way for me to alleviate dysphoria, to help me cope, and that I am not a “traitor” for using it. Being pretty and feminine is important to me, as a woman, and it’s not surprising other women want to be pretty and feminine too. They shouldn’t feel bad for wanting to be that way, even if women should not feel obligated to only be one kind of hyper-feminine woman.

        Regarding being an effeminate man: I have had conservatives tell me this, that I need to just live as a really effeminate man. I just don’t know what to tell you, being a man is not right. When I first transitioned, I didn’t care as much about the social elements. It turned out testosterone was ruining my mental health - I had severe depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation - all of which cleared up quickly after blocking the production of testosterone and getting on estrogen. Estrogen consistently makes me feel high, it’s better than opiates. Not every trans person is this way, but a lot of us are. It’s called “biochemical dysphoria”. In a way, I would have been willing to settle for having an orchi and living as a eunuch with estrogen supplementation - it would be a lie to say I was a man, and I would know that, but if I could have estrogen and live without testosterone in my body, that is most important to me. Living as a woman has always been important to me, but I never thought I could - that was a dream too far, in a sense. It felt like how I should have been born, but since I wasn’t, I resigned myself to living as a man. That estrogen will make me look like a woman and i am able to live and be a woman now is like going to heaven, it’s a dream I never thought I would live.

        So, tl;dr I have to take hormones because I was born with a condition where my brain can’t handle testosterone, and I would have probably killed myself, and generally I lived a very low quality of life before HRT. I was a burden to those around me, and I transitioned for my health and to be a functioning person in society.

        I think we all live within the language of gender, and trans women who have lived as men and are insecure in their womanhood often lean heavily into feminine roles as a compensation. I did this even before I transitioned, but it didn’t feel like I was contributing to a stereotype of women as a man - I was “gender non-conforming” then. But as a woman the very same behaviors become stereotypical. I like to cook, sew, bake, etc. and those were comforts to me before I transitioned, but are also important to me now. If anything, once I transitioned I felt more freedom to stop clinging to more stereotypical roles, and the more I can validate my womanhood, the more freedom I feel within my womanhood. Either way, I tend to make an exception for myself when it comes to being stereotypical - I figured being trans is rough enough, I can’t solve patriarchy all by myself, and it’s not up to me as an individual to overcome such huge social and structural problems. I like being feminine, and I am lucky enough to enjoy it now, so I will. If anything, I’ve learned to stop judging other women for when they are feminine, as a whole I have become more embracing of women as a result of transition.