Despite how a lady at the bookstore “struggled with” my pronouns and bounced off “he” several times before settling on “they” cause apparently she couldn’t bring herself to say “she.”
Shit’s hard out there.
Despite how a lady at the bookstore “struggled with” my pronouns and bounced off “he” several times before settling on “they” cause apparently she couldn’t bring herself to say “she.”
Shit’s hard out there.
As a trans guy who is sort of non-binary as a shorthand explanation and mental crutch for a complicated resting state of not physically transitioning because of my long-term partner’s phenotype preferences I feel this so hard. My physical body does not sort easily into people’s gender code. I ended up going with they/them pronouns more as a defensive move.
In my case it’s the daily sacrifice in the name of love but fuck if it doesn’t destroy my confidence regularly and feel like a fey curse.
Just a gentle suggestion that not physically transitioning for your partner’s preferences is probably not healthy or OK, I know it’s difficult and you have to figure that out yourself - but I encourage you to seek counseling and find a way to help your partner see that being trans is a genetic and medical condition that for your health and well-being you really shouldn’t ignore and forego treatment on, esp. for something like their preferences. Not all trans experience is the same, but it’s probable that medical transition would significantly improve your life.
Also, I hear you re non-binary and they/them being used to just make it “easier” or more understandable for people, which is so ironic considering it sounds like you would be able to conform to people’s gender expectations and a binary model better if you were free to …
Either way, I’m sorry for your situation, that’s rough 🫂
In the nicest possible way - don’t. This is not your call and this is not good advice. The relationship is 16 years old and a been a constant sense of comfort through a number of life’s traumas and bumpy roads. I would happily take a bullet for him any day of the week and my choices are not founded on nothing. He can’t help having a phenotype preference any more than I can and the decision I made was in regards to a wholistic assessment of what my values are. He is very aware of the nature of transness and your assumption that what works for you is the best path forward is not welcome.
I accept the conditions under which I live as imperfect but preferrable by far then losing a partner with whom I share my burdens.
Yes, of course you’re right that this is not my call.
I am aggressively in favor of medical transition in these contexts not because I dogmatically believe it’s the best for everyone (I know for a fact it won’t be - there are plenty of trans people who respond poorly to HRT, for example), but because so many people who would benefit and arguably need gender-affirming care do not seek it for various reasons that we would never consider reasonable for any other medical condition. I believe it’s our culture’s anti-trans bias that makes it so easy for trans folks to sacrifice their well-being and delay or refuse treatment.
On an epidemiological level I think this results in worse outcomes and great harm & cost for society (suicides, drug abuse, etc.). So on principle it seems like good clinical advice to suggest people with gender dysphoria take it seriously and get treatment. That doesn’t mean it’s simple or that you as an individual are absolutely compelled to follow that clinical advice, esp. when the costs are so high.
That said, I respect your boundary and don’t feel the need to convince you, as I said it’s something you have to figure out for yourself, and I have already admitted it’s not always the best path in the end.
Sorry for over-stepping and creating stress, you shouldn’t have to set that boundary with me and I need to think more on how to best approach providing a different perspective without coming across as too prescriptive.
I appreciate the apology. As a suggestion it’s best to ask clarifying questions before handing down judgements about what counts as healthy for someone or offering advice. As a long term non-medically transitioning person I receive a lot of unsolicited advice about how to live my life from people whose circumstances are much more clear cut. It comes across often as quite condescending when someone extrapolates from a very small snippet of personal information that mine were not carefully thought out and reasoned choices that are made daily.
The choice to transition medically isn’t a simple medical question and in my mind should not be out of hand treated as if it were a straightforward form of medical treatment to restore function. The question we should be asking ourselves is always “are the decisions I am making wholistic towards the outcome of making my life the best it can be.” For a lot of people the decision to medically transition is a no brainer, there is nothing keeping you but for some it comes with a slew of either/or sacrifices that impact other valuable aspects of the human experience. For some of us there isn’t a good solution without pain of some kind and the only choice we can make is what is preferable to endure. The reasons other people have to make are their own to make and not seeking “treatment” is not a metric of whether they take their situation “seriously”.
There is a very big difference between how people carry pain endured for little to no reason versus pain that is the willing price paid for something cherished.
Of course, I’m sorry - I want to keep things wholesome. ❤️
That’s a good idea, leading up to it rather than starting with it.
That makes sense. I’ve heard similar stories about how binary trans people will tell non-binary folks about how they might not be non-binary, etc. - there is a lack of awareness of how many of these conversations you are having to field with others.
To be clear, I didn’t mean to imply you weren’t carefully reasoning or thinking through your decision … rather, my perspective is that any person that asks their partner to not medically transition because of their phenotype preferences doesn’t have their partner’s well-being as their priority. It comes across as a red flag to me, and I can’t see a way it can be justified.
If I put myself in the shoes of the person whose partner is transitioning, I can’t imagine ever feeling right asking the person not to transition. I can imagine the pain and grief of losing that relationship, or even sacrificing and staying in the relationship for the person even if it means losing that part of the relationship, but I can’t imagine asking them to not transition, or even without asking, being part of the reason that person doesn’t transition.
I would have never transitioned if I followed this logic, tbh. I underestimated and fundamentally did not understand the significance of HRT to my health and well-being until after. Now I balk at how I used to live, I don’t know how I survived.
Hmm, this is surprising to me - I am not sure I know anybody where transitioning was a no-brainer. Transitioning is usually an extremely difficult decision to make even with ideal circumstances. Many people lose their jobs (most trans people I know IRL lost their jobs when they transitioned). Many lose their family, their spouse, and face a long, painful, and expensive transition process without adequate support. We also live in a context where transitioning is subject to political scapegoating and persecution.
I consider my own transition conditions extremely ideal, and even so I rationalized myself out of transitioning for years to protect other people in my life, and in the end I did lose family due to transition.
It never seemed to me like you weren’t taking transition seriously or you weren’t putting thought into your decision. Usually, actually, I think people who don’t transition as a sacrifice for people in their lives are doing the opposite - they put a lot of thought into it, and usually they are making the difficult choice to prioritize others. This is not a bad thing in itself, I think the opposite mindset (not considering the impact on others) would be disturbing and would come across as immature. No, you strike me as mature and like someone making difficult sacrifices for someone you love.
I feel quite emotional reading your message. It reminds me of a part of Little Fish by Casey Plett where an older Mennonite woman turns out to have been a closeted lesbian her whole life but who stayed straight out of religious devotion, and when confronted by a trans woman about her sexuality, she says:
You’re not doing it for religion, but out of love for your partner. But you are not weak, it takes strength.
People make sacrifices in their lives, and it takes that strength to do so. To come out of the closet or to transition can really seem selfish. At least I always thought of transition that way, as selfish. I held on to that responsibility for a long time.
It was only when I learned that by not transitioning that I was hurting the people in my life that the logic reversed, and I realized I had a responsibility to transition. Yes, for my well-being - but I didn’t care as much about that as for the well-being of others in my life who were suffering because of me.
My experience is probably not relevant to you (even if it’s not surprising when other trans people do have similarities anyway). Regardless, I respect and understand your choice, I made the same choice for over a decade. I would still be making that choice, if not for a very particular set of circumstances that happened to me.
I wish you the best. Thank you for being so patient with me as I stumble and fail to handle this well. You’re really kind. ❤️
There is again quite an assumption here mainly that my partner somehow asked me to not transition, that again I am somehow being coerced to stay by a domineering voice.
This was a discussion, a frank one, where I clarified with him what the potential outcomes of a medical transition were in terms of our relationship and decided on my own. It was not something he was comfortable asking me to do on his behalf and even after making my decision he took some time to feel comfortable on his end with it because his concerns and lack of self confidence of being “worth it”. People have approached him in the past with the attitude that he’s doing me a disservice and it ruins him for at least a week.
You are also conflating my comment about medical transitioning being a no brainer with transitioning itself. I have still transitioned socially and have been impacted in losing career advantages, family and friends for my choices. All transitions carry risks regardless of the medical component and when you frame it in this way where it focuses on medical transition as the majority of the risk or defining portion of transistion it implies that non-medical transition doesn’t count as transition. Any transition should be approached as potentially having serious reprocussions. In many cases of my friends who have medically transitioned the decision to medically transition was ultimately a lot less difficult than the decision to socially transition because by the time they got there they’d already experienced bigotry and yes, their lives have gotten markedly better since… But they also do not pity me and that is the tone of what you give off here (particularly in quoting a book about a womam dealing with religious trauma and internalized homophobia) the sense that you aren’t simply empathizing or sympathizing with the aspects of my choices which are difficult but that you veiw those choices as harmful or misguided.
I am glad that you found happiness and comfort in your transistion. It’s obviously a great fit. Maybe rethink your approach to non-binary folx as it seems like you bring a little overmuch of your personal baggage with you.
Yes, in the absence of awareness of your situation, I make various assumptions or guesses about the situation. I had considered that your partner never asked you to not transition, but what happens I think is that all the other conversations I’ve had with people whose situation seemed similar to yours get conflated or generalized, and so I respond as though you are one of the many others.
This is of course a gloss, and that is unfair to you since it makes assumptions that aren’t true and aren’t relevant.
At some point I think I was aware of the irrelevance of my words to you and your situation - or at least aware of the likelihood of that.
I think this is part of why I said things like if I put myself in the shoes of your partner and imagined even if not asking just knowing I was a reason for someone not transitioning - it’s not that I absolutely ignored that possibility, I just didn’t know whether it was the most likely possibility.
So yes, assumptions were made - but part of that is because I don’t wish to pry or confront, to engage directly on your circumstances is not my goal, instead I just react to what you have disclosed so that I’m being transparent about my own hang-ups, faults, reactions, and so on - partially because I think I want this feedback from you about how to be better, and for that you need to see how I’m thinking in the first place.
You are absolutely right that I made bad assumptions, and I’m sorry for that. The assumption that your partner asked you not to transition was never so “solid” or sure on my end, but I can see how it comes across that I’m thinking it anyway.
I also think there was some conflation of medical vs social transition, but this was again just a generalization or a gloss, handling each separately didn’t occur to me as much in that situation, and maybe generally, for various reasons. To be honest, I think even if we split the two and talk about “social transition” and “medical transition”, we are still glossing and generalizing. To be honest a lot of this is just about the economy of language and thought, I am happy to be super narrow in my concepts but I think it can be tedious to read, and overly verbose - two things I already skew towards in my writing. Not every trans person has the same “medical transition”, for example, so often when I’m talking about “transition” in this context, I’m really talking about the (offensively assumed) “missing component” of HRT, even though the term otherwise implies much more (even HRT itself can designate different things, and depending on the route of administration and the dose, HRT can have dramatically different results for people and mean different things for people).
So, to continue in my thought-transparency (sorry, maybe this is not useful to you), I socially transitioned before I medically transitioned, and my own experiences certainly skew the way I think - particularly what I experienced was that social transition made my life worse in many ways and maybe wasn’t the best choice, while HRT was life-saving. Truly, HRT was the most clinically relevant component of the whole transition experience as far as I can tell. Social transition for me was just a way to force myself out of the closet and prevent further refusal to transition.
So this is pretty much my perspective too, in conflating social and medical transition I think the challenges of social transition were generalized and put together with medical transition… So of course I agree with you on everything. Surgeries can be quite painful and difficult to get through, but at the very least I think HRT is quite wonderful, and makes life easier and better. That’s the fundamental point I’m trying to get across here: it’s so great, you and every other trans person should at least try it to verify whether it’s also a life-saving medication or not. And again, that mindset is built on the empirical evidence we have that not doing it results in worse health outcomes and deaths while doing it alleviates those risks.
Oh, I didn’t feel pity at all, lol - sorry, maybe that would have made sense, but you just don’t know me and it makes sense you wouldn’t understand. I think what I’m feeling is maybe a connection to my pre-transition self and all the sacrifices they made, basically I haven’t really accepted being trans and I’m still occupying a mindset of believing what I’ve done is selfish and wrong, and so I basically glorify your choice to sacrifice for your partner by not medically transitioning (note here I’m making more assumptions, I have no idea if you have taken medical transition steps, maybe you just haven’t had surgeries but you’ve been on HRT and this whole conversation is just me making really dumb assumptions). I don’t feel sorry for you, I feel envious - I spent a lot of my life being “good” the way you are now, making that kind of huge sacrifice and carrying that burden. In all my self-loathing and guilt, I think I miss that - my fucked up psychology seems to feel it’s much better to be a martyr than to engage in self-care. The change in that perspective has not been complete.
I do think your choice is probably self-harming, but what you miss is that I think this is maybe a good thing still. I can’t help but still operate under that old logic, I am skeptical that taking care of myself this way is really justified. That said, I’m pretty sure that’s just my desire for punishment and suffering, and it’s probably not healthy or good - or even related to you, tbh. Sorry, I really am, I hope by being so transparent I’m helping somehow, but I worry it’s just indulgent and wasting your time.
So, I am confused, I thought this started by talking about how you use non-binary as a quick gloss of your gender, but that seemed to imply your actual identity isn’t non-binary, it’s just the result of this compromise you have made about transition … was I mistaken about that?
And yeah, a lot of personal baggage comes up with the trans stuff - I am projecting like crazy, making bad assumptions, etc. but I think the fundamental message still holds. Maybe an awkward analogy would
make this interaction so much worsehelp explain my perspective: imagine someone had cancer throughout their breasts, but the cancer had become dormant. Let’s say there is empirical evidence that this situation could result in increased risk of dying early, maybe the body isn’t as healthy with the cancer in it, maybe the cancer could come back at some point - the analogy here is the way that the “wrong” hormones in the body cause depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, etc. - it’s biochemical, the brain is altered by it. Let’s say the dormant cancer messes with the body and mind too, and so you won’t have the same energy, happiness, or general well-being unless the breasts and cancer are removed. It’s a stretch, but we can imagine it, right? So, what I hear a lot of people saying (not just you, mind you - this is part of what’s going on here, I’m interacting with lots of people in marriages who refuse to transition, socially and / or medically), is that their partner really likes their breasts, they are attracted to and attached to their breasts, and if they have their breasts removed it will be devastating to the relationship. Their partner won’t be attracted to them anymore and it will spell the end of the relationship. They can’t help that their partner is sexually attracted to their breasts, and so they have to choose between keeping the dormant cancer-ridden breasts and the risks and health consequences that come with it, or they can have the surgery and risk losing their relationship.I just don’t find keeping the cancerous breasts a reasonable option, ever. I think the trans issue is actually worse than the cancer, because it has to do with identity and who you are - living as someone else for a relationship is worse than just leaving dormant cancer in the body.
My view is that the only reason we think it’s reasonable to keep the cancer is because we have been acculturated to believe it’s wrong to transition, that it’s a betrayal of the spouse, and that it’s not that helpful medically. But that’s just not what the empirical evidence shows.
I think this might be my struggle with black & white thinking, there are a few things going on with me. I might also feel like I had to justify my transition and that requires an extreme position, otherwise I have to admit I could have been like the Mennonite and gone the rest of my life without transitioning and I should have just toughed it out.
Anyway, my point is that I’m not trying to apply this to you as much as I’m trying to show my hang-up, I guess I’m hoping for you to complicate my view, to show me why I’m wrong. Maybe you can’t do that, maybe it’s wrong for me to expect or ask. Either way, that’s how I think about this, and nothing you’ve said makes it make sense.
Of course, on the other hand I completely understand your perspective, that a partner is like your life blood, more important than even your own self. I would do the same.
Hm, we feel that us fey would not do such a thing. However, if it is as such we would gladly undo it for you.
A shiny rock or two would be payment enough.