Jealousy of opposite-direction transsexuals?

[Anna]

Or, you could go to Elspeth's profile, click on "show posts", and browse until you find it.

Ah. So that's how it's done. Thank you. I just didn't want to appear rude  & IMO being rude is worse than looking stupid on a thread.

[milktea]

I used to make a joke with my male pals on the street, where you see this chic in front with a real fancy coat/dress... I'll say I really like that dress, go beat her up and grab that dress for me!!

[aleon515]

Elspeth, This is a really good post. I agree with most of it too. I feel it's male privilege. Last night I found a sort of a sick thing about trans guys. And one thing it said, which I will clean up is basically everyone agrees with them because being a guy is better (I think in this case meaning more status).

T really helps. It's kind of opposite. One thing I have read here is that hormones do better at adding than subtracting. They can lower your voice but not raise it, give you hair and not take away, etc. I agree about the less hand wringing more practical approach. I think it is based on two things: one is that obviously being male is more accepted, dressing male is more accepted (so we can experiment with presentation more easily-- who cares, no one has given me a side-long glance). And two, I can't explain it, but if you look at the posts the mtf ones focus on a lot of feelings and are deeper. The ftm are a lot more practical concerns: what packer, what binder, where to go for top surgery, the T shot, etc. There could be quite a few reasons for that-- men tend to be more practical and so on, or FAABs are socialized to be more helpful, or estrogen is more associated with feelings and their expression, etc.

BTW, there *are* advantages that mtfs have. For one thing is that SRS actually works pretty well. Not saying that no ftm is happy with it, but a lot of guys are just not. It probably took me MUCH longer to figure out I was trans, because I didn't know I could be trans. Though I think that's pretty much not going to be an issue any more.

As for jealousy, funny thing. I have the feelings but they don't worry me or anything. I feel they are normal. My girl friend and I joke about it ALL time. We could also trade sizes, that wouldn't hurt either. I don't think, unless it is all consuming and wrecks up your life, that it is a too important topic for therapy. I think a certain amt of it is just built in.

BTW, there's a collab channel that calls the spiritual aspect of trans-- trans-mission. Kind of cool, though I think of car parts. I don't see being trans as all negative either.


--Jay

[suzifrommd]

Honestly it's pretty hard to use any positive words to describe being born trans...

I console myself by telling myself that I know things that cis women never will. I've seen the world from the other side. They never have. When my transition is mostly past, I will have experienced 100% of the gendered world, while cis people never experience more than 50%.

[Elspeth]

Maybe it's different from the perspective of someone who transitioned from a more full, normal life as their birth sex that they could at least cope with.

I wonder whether this describes the pre-transition life of anyone born in today's culture? I feel like I avoided some self-damage and self-hating by embracing who I was to the degree that I could, but much of doing that, for me, is an act or reframing my past and those experiences, in the best light possible, and trying to extract whatever good I can find in those experiences. There are plenty of incidents and insults I could dwell on, if my aim was to keep reminding myself how painful my childhood and many of the years since then were for me.

One of the reasons I keep harping on (and am likely to do so as long as I'm breathing) my feeling that we need to change society to embrace gender non-conforming children, and stop assigning gender at birth has to do with those kinds of common insults and injuries. I haven't met anyone yet who wasn't damaged by them in some way. Not sure that the most unequivocal cisgendered person isn't also damaged by that basic falsity that's built into the social structures most of us have to cope with from birth onwards.