There’s like a million interesting conversations that can be had about the trans experience that collectively, both ourselves and cis people are like three fucking giant leaps behind in terms of understanding and are too clouded by bad faith takes that they’re impossible to actually talk about
Okay so here’s two things that I think are dog whistles and red flags with no further nuance or context, but have a lot of value in discussing:
- “You need dysphoria to be trans”. I actually, kinda genuinely think this is true, WITH THE KEY FUCKING DISCLAIMER that dysphoria is not a diagnosis, expressions of dysphoria are not intrinsically tied to medicalization, and the definition of dysphoria is WAY more extensive than any current perception. Eg, a lack of “euphoria”, or happy moments, and a reduced ability to feel them, is something that, imo, can be described as dysphoria. This is mostly a linguistic thing, but I think its a good explanation for a recurring phenomena I’ve noted: trans people who were comforted by the “you don’t need dysphoria to be trans” line pretransition, but later realized that their baseline mental state was actually dysphoric, they just had no standard for analyzing that.
- Being sexualized from a REALLY early age as a cis woman is genuinely horrific. It’s a different experience, but I actually do think it has a transfemme analogue- being rapidly sexualized during early transition while an adult, but without nearly as extensive of a support network for it or survival techniques for it. Genuinely a really interesting conversation to have with cis women where you both start learning extremely helpful things from each other. But, “the unique traumas of girlhood” is way too often used as a TERF dogwhistle.
And lots of others, but those are two that have been on my mind recently.
Reminds me of the whole missed possibility of learning if there’s a nuanced answer to “nature vs nurture” for sexual attraction. We all had to get in line behind people being born gay or not because of the legitimate horrors of conversion therapy and it was a decent compromise to have made culturally. However it’s something that could be incredibly interesting to study and figure out how attraction actually forms if it weren’t for the evils of how some people would seek to use that information.
yuuupp
See also: the instant shutdown some people have towards the idea that HRT can change your sexuality.