don't use "ftm" it's outdated and offensive. it implies that the trans person was their agab, which we never were. i was always a boy, never a girl who became a boy.
i’m 35 years old. i’ve been IDing as trans or something similar to trans for nearly 20 years. i was probably calling myself FTM while you were playing tag during recess, anon.
i WAS a girl. i IDed as a girl early in my life. i recognized myself as a girl, called myself a girl, lived as a girl, and was a girl. who then IDed as a man. hence, F t M.
spend more time worrying about yourself instead of strangers on the internet, anon.
sorry not sorry if this comes off as needlessly hostile, but i’ve been getting a lot of shit from a lot of teenage trans kids about the language i use to describe my own goddamn experience, and i’m growing real fuckin weary of it.
i have elder trans friends who call themselves transsexuals and transvestites and trannies. are you going to seriously go to a 60-year-old trans person who survived the reagan years and tell her she’s not allowed to use certain language to describe herself because it might offend the delicate sensibilities of some teenager on the internet?
do yourself a favor and log off, find some real-life trans people who are over the age of 20 or 25, and spend time talking to them instead of getting all holier-than-thou at random strangers on tumblr.
It may be weird to encounter because it’s not the trans narrative that the media sells to us as ‘the only valid way to be trans’, but the 'I always knew I was x’ is not all-encompassing.
Anon there are more people than you think who were girls who grew up into men, or boys who grew up into women, or girls or boys who grew up to be nonbinary. There is a rather obscure theory that girl and boy are distinct genders from man and woman and while the most common trajectory is that boys grow into men and girls grow into women it’s not the rule.
Let people define themselves.
also if you think genderfluid people are real and you’re not just humoring us, you by definition have to allow that gender can change over time. I was a girl once. I am not a girl now.
Chiming in with solidarity to OP.
I feel very protective of my former identity BECAUSE there’s so little room in the Mainstream Trans Narrative ™️ for allowing gender to change.
I was a girl. Now I’m genderqueer. Maybe later I will find different words for myself.
There has to be room for all of us in the trans community or there’s no point to any of this.
Ive been here long enough to see words like ftm/mtf, afab/amab, transmale/female, trans man/womanall go through the cycle of ppl telling you to “Dont use X word its out dated. Now use this Y word”. Only for a year or two pass and suddenly “Y word is outdated. Now use Z word” like yall this is exhausting. Just because a word is old doesn’t automatically make it a slur or offensive.
They’re pulling high school clique bullshit out and just replacing 'uncool’ with 'problematic’ and pretending it’s activism somehow. We’re trying to get work done here not everybody is going to keep up with the ever-rotating lexicon of words.
I used to be a member of the commentariat where I learned the phrase
THERE IS NO QUEER REVIEW BOARD
Which has kinda helped me be a bit better at being decent
hate how so much of adult friendship relies on updates, experiencing your life through pictures and tidbits. we had it good with childhood friends, could spend years and years basking in the same circumstance. now i just float through clouds of strangers, hungry for something solid and warm. yes i carry your heart within mine, yes i see the world through your eyes. but in that very moment i still feel alone, still know it’s poor substitute for same room, twin smiles.
the worst part about being an adult is thay its no longer socially acceptable to just roll down a really big hill and then run back up it and roll back down again. “oh is this a syphilis metaphor” passerby would ask. “is this for a tick tock”. no i just wanna come home covered in dirt and scratches and bask in the the solace of childlike mirth
One thing that’s vitally important to remember is that feeling “weirded out” is not a form of harm. It is a completely normal part of socializing. It is the feeling of encountering something unfamiliar. In order to be a kind person, you must learn to how to distinguish between “harmful” and “weird.” And then you must accept the weird.
god also I fucking hate “it’s just a phase” cis people bandy about. they feel so smug when they see a trans person slowly shifting through identities over time as if that confirms anything they have to say about trans people. like one who cares if it’s a phase that doesn’t mean it’s less authentic or valuable two your peabrain could not possibly comprehend the titanic effort it takes to abandon cishood. transness is not a discrete event that concludes like a childrens book its an act of continual becoming bitch
In the alpine region, many traditions that predate Christianity are still alive and revered by the local folks. One of them is the “Klausentreiben” during the night of the sixth of December. Young males dress up like animalistic spirits, like the bear, the deer and the wolf, and roam the streets while making loud noise. That was supposed to banish the evil spirits from the underworld that were believed to gain strength during the long winternights, threatening the well-being of the village folks and their livestock.
on the one hand it’s pretty cool when athena disguises odysseus as an old man, but what if that was a lie to spare him from the pain of knowing for certain that no one could recognize him anyway?
Not once in her entire immortal life has Athena ever lied to spare someone from pain.
It’s fucking hilarious, though, that Odysseus rolls up in Ithaca, immediately starts telling everyone he meets different incredibly detailed lies about who he is, and of all the ways people have of recognizing him, the hair-trigger paranoid shenanigans are the most inarguably on-brand ones.
