“I know trans women are women because I can’t make them cum either”
Does that mean all immigrants are women
The difference is immigrants are scawy
I’ve had several trans women tell me it’s gender affirming to be harassed / belittled by men and I can’t decide if that’s a fetish or just a really fucked up toxic coping mechanism (or toxically coping by developing a fetish?).
Having been born female a lot of the things my trans girl friends report as being gender affirming actually have very little to do with the lived experience of being female that I’ve shared with my non trans female fiends. Like one friend told me it’s not gender affirming even just to shave, she MUST be lasered hairless at all times and like. It’s wild to me that feminism came so far just to have transgirls get stuck back in the 50s somehow. I guess maybe they have to start over from the beginning idk. Or maybe it’s gotten so tied up in fetishism due to wider societal stigmas that even they themselves struggle to separate the two.
Idk but in the end it’s super uncomfortable to be told that a negative thing that has pervaded my life, threatened my physical safety, and limited my opportunities for social and professional advancement since birth is “gender affirming.” Like one friend literally told me word-for-word “I want to be afraid to go out alone at night.” It’s pretty disrespectful / insulting actually, and I could not get her to understand that.
Hi, trans girl here. I’ve made a handful of jokes about how being belittled or harassed by men is gender affirming in the past, but that doesn’t mean it’s something that I seek out or something that I enjoy outside of the affirmation. It’s something that cis women also experience, and that makes me feel affirmed in my gender, but I’d definitely prefer if it didn’t happen at all.
On the topic of hair stuff, you’re projecting your own experiences onto others there a lot. I find a greater sense of euphoria from being completely hairless because it makes me feel more feminine than just shaving, especially because hair comes back so fast from just a shave. There’s a factor of overcorrection as you mentioned, perhaps, where people choose to express their gender in some extreme ways, but that’s a choice that each person gets to make and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. There’s a massive difference between society pressuring every woman into being completely hairless and someone deciding personally to do laser hair removal because they find that feeling affirming. In no way is this meant to imply that cis women are in any way less valid in their experiences than trans women, and I fully support the right of everyone to choose how they express themselves. I love it when cis women decide to go against societal gender norms and show off muscles or body hair, but that’s not something that I want to do as I associate those feelings with my life pre-transition and masculinity which brings about feelings of dysphoria.
As for the feeling afraid to go out alone at night and limited social opportunities, I can’t imagine that being a completely serious comment. Obviously the fact that women are mistreated in society sucks, a lot. I don’t think any of those comments were meant to belittle the struggles of any women ever. However, experiencing those same difficulties as a trans woman means that society at large essentially views you as a woman in every context, not just in ways that benefit you. It’s a sort of social side effect of transitioning. Its not a goal, but it is a side effect that affirms your identity. It essentially equates to a desire to pass at all times rather than just when “girlmoding” or whatever, which is very gender affirming even if it obviously sucks that all these challenges exist and society would be better if nobody had to experience any of them.
I can understand the confusion between gender affirmation and thinking these things are good experiences. Something can make you feel like a woman without being a good experience, and that can be difficult to understand for people who aren’t trans. I don’t want to belittle your experiences, say they’re not valid, or anything like that.
By the way, I don’t appreciate calling gender affirmation a fetish, that really rubs me the wrong way.
Yeah. It rubs me the wrong way to hear jokes about being attacked at night being a good thing, and I’m trying to find a reason people would keep making it to me even after I ask them to stop that’s maybe trauma based in the setting of how they’re perceived by the wider society instead of them just being assholes. This is also exactly why even if I do turn out to be a trans dude I’ll still probably never interact with “the trans community.” I’ve never encountered a group of people less willing to discuss how gender dynamics actually play out for me in the world I’m living in. I’ve had MAGA coworkers who are significantly more accepting and validating of my evolving gender expression and how it’s affected me than other trans people. People also don’t like hearing that as a trans dude I’d still be unable to empathize with a lot of my patient’s lived childhood trauma of being raised as a cis male to the extent that my cis male coworkers can. Part of that is people just not believing that trauma exists (which is it’s own issue) but a lot of it is just people so deep in their own specific traumas around invalidation that they’re just completely unable to have a constructive discussion about how their actions affect other people even within their own community.
The word in trans communities for this is “ew-phoria”. Calling it a fetish is also kind of… Not great. Fetishes are tied into sexual gratification and gender euphoria /dysphoria is an independent mechanism that ties more closely with identity. It doesn’t make trans people horny and the idea that that’s what is what is happening is used often to trivialize trans experiences.
Think of the typical nature of being cis as (mostly) ascribing no value to sexually dimorphic physical features. Like you can have feelings about whether those things are attractive and the validation you receive for meeting a social standard but that’s an external reinforcement system working its way inward.
Being trans is the opposite. Every sexual characteristic is not value neutral. Perceiving sex characteristics in relation to yourself either makes you feel amazing like someone has shot dopamine directly into your soul or bad like you are not actually a human. All forms of perception of these characteristics causes this effect and it is automatic and instant. Logically even if you believe these things should be valueless, obtainable by all genders if you have this feedback system you don’t get to decide on how or what these things make you feel or in what proportion. The source of the feedback is entirely internal which is why it is often is at complete odds with external systems of validation and if you tried to logically explain it or lessen these feelings with logic you often just can’t. The heart doesn’t only want what the heart wants the heart has a shock collar on you.
In the case of facial hair particularly because it’s not something you have to experience with your eyes to know it’s there touch is fundamentally important. Remember dysphoria is more than being strictly about being perceived by others it is about being perceived by yourself. Other people looking at you and using your pronouns is just another way of perception of yourself. Like other people performing the job of being a mirror. Experiencing your own body however is in things like how you move, what bits of your body bump into things, your height, your weight distribution. Imagine if everytime you touch your face the slight scratch of the existence of thicker hair caused your neurological system to fire depression meds directly into your system. That’s what’s happening. Touch perception.
Sometimes this internal reward systems finds things about a social portion of experience that people that sucks really bad but because it equates to other people reacting to your body’s sexually dimorphic characteristics when it happens to them it hits the same feel good button of other positive external recognition by a third party of having those sex characteristics.
So even while you experience the massive illogical dopamine hit from the internal reward system you can recognize logically at the same time that the phenomenon causing the reaction is a societal problem that is bad and should not exist.
Hence Ew-phoria.
something i have to remind myself is that the average person kinda sucks and most people often have bad takes, and that’s true for small minority groups. and obvi, the smaller the group, the smaller the sample size ppl meet. gender is also like a weird thing, since it’s intertwined with physical and social difference, and we’re living in a moment where i think both corporate and political interests are vested in amplifying what differences there are for their own gain. and, i think a lot of ppl early on in transition just don’t understand how to navigates themselves and the world, but idk
so, just to help you diversify the pool of women you know that are trans–i’ve got winter leg hair, and a whole lot of angst about how profoundly diluted a lot of feminist discourse is in america right now, even in academic circles lol
And secretly want to fuck them.
Apparently Louisiana and Mississippi are the epicenter of femboy thirst.
Reminds me of the times I’ve been approached by men as a man and subtly hinted at wanting to fuck. But when I make it explicit, they panic, back out, and start talking shit about me to other people. Like, bro, you started this.
Entirely unrelatedly, I think I’ve concluded that black men are also real women.
And by extension black women are double women. Extra un-gay, very heterosexual.
The piece you’re missing is the “scawy factor”. Conservatives are dismissive and controlling of women but they think black people and immigrants are scary (or as a child might say “scawy”). So same attitude and methods, different goals.
Which is to say its unsurprising that the results are so similar given their methods.
“content not viewable in your region”
slaps robot
it can fit so much woke in here
How can she slap
It gets hate, but I loved i Robot.
I liked it well enough! Bit much on the product placement, and no, it’s not much like the original books, but it hits on the murder mystery aspects of Asimov’s work.
Asimov’s mysteries always hinged on the laws of robotics. It always seemed like a robot did something, but if the laws of robotics were in force that couldn’t have happened. But, it was always explained in a way that left the three laws intact.
The “I, Robot” movie abandoned the 3 laws of robotics when convenient to the plot. That takes away the entire tension that made Asimov’s stories interesting.
