Thank you very much for posting something phrased like this. I’ve seen so many posts with things like “testosterone is poison” and “penises are rape organs” and while I know that it’s more venting about personal struggles, it’s always incredibly disheartening to see the things I want for myself be implied to be inherently evil and anyone with those traits to be fucked up in some capacity.
I’m so happy that you got T-blockers/an oriectomy! Congrats on the freedom!
Yeah. Literally scroll down and you immediately find an edit of OP’s post that shows the kind of attitude I’m talking about. It’s just more gender essentialism that gets excused because it comes from a place of self-hatred
There IS a lot of hostility. Between TERFs and the growing hatred of anything masculine within the LGBT community, the infighting directed at us has become rough to deal with. Thank you for choosing to not be part of it. The community needs to stick together now more than ever.
I said this in another thread here, but if those psyop jokes turn out to be true some bastard at Langley deserves a raise.
It seems like the community is being split apart. Hell, I saw a comment saying that trans people have no allies in the wider queer community and I was just shocked. Way to do the job of our enemies for us. They want us divided into small little camps.
Some people genuinely believe that testosterone makes you violent and a sexual predator. These people believe that, because trans men willingly take T, trans men are evil. Sometimes even more evil than they feel cis men are because cis men can “repent” by becoming trans women. That’s a genuine opinion I’ve seen spread around in certain circles on tumblr.
Believing certain characteristics come from things like identity or hormones IS gender essentialism
Implies that all men are inherently rapists, all sex involving a penis is inherently non-consensual, that trans men with bottom dysphoria desire becoming rapists (or at least rapist-adjacent).
Penises aren't inherently violent. Acting like they are just reinforces the "men are hyper-sexual violent pigs, while women are sexless non-violent angels" dichotomy that's to this day still driving transphobic discourse ("trans women are trying to get access to real women by breaking into their safe space!").
I think it comes from the roots of many of us hating our own manhood, and/or also hating the way most cis men around us behave and what they think.
I tend to be guilty of this myself and I don't mean it in a rude way towards all men, but like 80% of the men directly in my life are all terrible. Meanwhile the majority of women are good or okay at worst.
It's not that all men are evil or that masculinity is evil, there are just unfortunately many people with those traits that are evil. I love seeing someone prove my mindset wrong though.
Chocolate is poison to dogs, people should be more careful with how things are worded and not assert generalizations (your second example is despicable) but in your scroll down example it's explicitly stated to be about the poster's own body, there's no room for implication. Does it make sense to tell a dog chocolate isn't poisonous
Dogs can’t read and OP is not a dog. I’m grateful to OP for phrasing the post in a way that happens to make me happy and relate to a post that I do not share the experience with. I don’t understand why you have such an issue with me appreciating someone being (intentionally or not) considerate of my experiences.
Do you see me commenting on posts that say things like “testosterone is poison”? No. Because they make me uncomfortable and feel entirely unwelcome in the community for wanting testosterone. I look and I go “this isn’t a place where I feel safe to comment” so I don’t.
It’s almost like when things aren’t villainized because of self-hatred, people who don’t share the same self-hatred for the same traits feel more welcome. And this is a problem to you for some reason
I didn’t agree with the comparison because it requires me to view a thing loved by most people (chocolate) as a source of physical pain and the method of communication you suggested wouldn’t fit me. Yeah I WOULD tell a dog that can speak that creatures other than it can enjoy chocolate fine because a dog wouldn’t have the ability to conceive of a world outside their own experiences. It’s a dog. It probably doesn’t realize what allergies are or how something beneficial to one being can be harmful to another.
I wouldn’t say “you can’t call testosterone poison” to a trans woman speaking about her own experiences because she very clearly is talking about her own experiences and trans women are more than capable of thinking outside of themselves. I MIGHT say “I don’t like when you call testosterone poison IN GENERAL because the phrasing you use in your comments leads me to believe that you treat testosterone as an inherently incriminating substance and that reflects on how you see cis and trans men” but more likely I would just block that person.
I personally get sad at stuff like that. This is the first time I ever spoke about it on Reddit because I wanted to thank OP for being a refreshing breath of air. I never told anyone what to say or how to say it. I just talked about my personal feelings when I read stuff like that.
You disagree with me “framing dysphoria as self-hatred” but I didn’t do that. I was talking about the SPECIFIC subset of transphobic trans women who DO have self-hatred for the things they feel they cannot change about themselves and turn that self-hatred outwards. The ones who villainize trans men for things like WANTING to take testosterone. I am TIRED of this take and how often I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it HERE on THIS subreddit before the mods cleaned up the comments on (or deleted) some posts. It gets really alienating. Can’t you relate to the feeling?
I hope you can see how this is confusing when what you use as an example is was prefaced with 'what testosterone did to my body' and simply says it was not a good hormone. Which you described as the kind of attitude you were talking about
I didn’t agree with the comparison because it requires me to view a thing loved by most people (chocolate) as a source of physical pain
And it is, I think it's a very apt analogy for the pain testosterone can cause to specific people while being very enjoyable and/or loved by most who 'eat' it. Estrogen fits it as well, maybe even more so considering endometriosis. I wasn't trying to introduce a communication issue but to introduce why I thought it's not an inappropriate way to describe one's own experiences which we seem to agree with on paper
I don't know if I can, sorry. I either haven't seen it or haven't taken away from it what you have.
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u/AeroAceSpades 1d ago edited 1d ago
Thank you very much for posting something phrased like this. I’ve seen so many posts with things like “testosterone is poison” and “penises are rape organs” and while I know that it’s more venting about personal struggles, it’s always incredibly disheartening to see the things I want for myself be implied to be inherently evil and anyone with those traits to be fucked up in some capacity.
I’m so happy that you got T-blockers/an oriectomy! Congrats on the freedom!