as small as a world and as large as alone, Let me start out saying that I am a trans woman,...

9:54pm August 24, 2014

Anonymous asked: Let me start out saying that I am a trans woman, and I personally dislike that middle aged men that transition as a mid life crisis and leave their wife and kids are treated like legitimate members of the community. Being trans isn't something you wake up one day and realise, it's part of your life and if you know you feel wrong about your gender you don't get married and have kids! I feel that it gives real trans women a bad name. What is your opinion?

clatterbane:

ananiujitha:

lisaquestions:

icouldbejodie:

lisaquestions:

letsplaysocialjustice:

I don’t understand how a trans woman could call other trans women ‘men’ tbh. Like how could you misgender someone knowing what that’s like? Trans people find themselves at all points in their life, for all kind of reasons. It can take a person a long time to access the resources to even find out who they are, never mind accepting it. Being trans is absolutely something you can wake up one day and realise, because you have to be able to access the resources to understand what being trans is and that it’s possible to live that way. Then, a lot of things make sense in hindsight. And why can’t trans people get married and have kids? Why aren’t trans people allowed to live a life before they transition? Do you expect trans people to just pause and not live or love until they realise they are trans?

Anonymous probably isn’t a trans woman.

Anyway, whether anon is or is not a trans woman, she’s full of shit. Trans women I know personally who have transitioned in middle age pretty much always have experiences similar to trans women who transitioned earlier in life. I am not saying there is one experience, there are actually several, with different ages of realization and different levels of denial and acceptance.

There used to be this ridiculous distinction of “primary transsexual” who was someone who knew from an early age and transitioned asap, and a “secondary transsexual” who supposedly knew from a much later age and transitioned later. This distinction is bullshit if only because there are countless reasons a trans woman doesn’t transition as early as possible.

And I can’t even begin to guess how many trans women I have known who married and (sometimes) had children before transition. A significant number of these trans women stayed with their families. It depends on the people involved, and someone who transitions in adulthood after a marriage does not always end up with a divorce.

And as far as I can tell in the 25 years since I transitioned (at 18, to clarify where I am in this discussion), I have not encountered any sign that these women give younger trans women a bad name.

This… really upsets me.

Maybe the OP doesn’t really realize what it’s like to be a late transitioner.

I’m 41, and just recently started. I was married for 13 years when I came out to my wife, and now I’m divorced. My experience is not universal to all women who come out at this point of their life, but I imagine it’s hardly unique.

This isn’t about a mid-life crisis - it’s about a crisis that’s been ongoing for 25-plus years. I knew I was trans - I knew I wanted to be seen as a woman - for a long, long time.

Let me tell you about growing up in the ’70s and ’80s. There was almost no acceptance of homosexuality, and trans people were seen as a particularly pitiful subset of homosexuals. Yes that’s totally incorrect, but that’s the mindset I was brought up with. Trans representation is meager enough today, but there are a few positive role models. Back then, almost every depiction of trans women implied that they were masculine, ugly, usually gay men in drag. The only semi-positive portrayal I ever saw of one was *one episode* of Night Court - god knows when - probably around 1990. In 30 years, that was the one sympathetic trans person I saw.

And as cliche as it may sound, we didn’t have the internet to look for resources or to hear from other trans women. The web wasn’t around until the early ’90s, and god help you if you wanted to search for anything until Google came around in 1998 or so. Reading about other experiences, videos and guides about makeup and hair removal and surgery options - none of that was available until recently. Hell - if you’ve ever looked at porn online in the past 10 years you can’t avoid seeing the occasional picture of beautiful trans actresses. Just seeing trans women as objects of desire (as problematic as that may be) would have gone a long way towards making me feel more comfortable.

So no - I didn’t wake up one day and realize I was trans. What I woke up to was the realization that I could transition - that the pain of hiding it was worse than the pain of going through with it, and that I wasn’t alone, and that I didn’t have to figure everything out myself. Changing attitudes, more information, reaching a point in my life where I finally felt I had some agency, and also being fed up and deciding I don’t give a fuck - that’s what really motivated me. Not some midlife whim.

Now a lot of women faced even worse circumstances than I did, and still transitioned at a younger age. I don’t know why they chose to and I didn’t - I suspect cowardice on my part. There are also women who really didn’t realize they were trans until much later - in no way am I discounting their experiences or “transness.” I also don’t think that young trans women today have it easy by any means. But there’s a real good reason why the median age for transition is in the early 40s, and the OP should try to have a little empathy for those of us who have struggled invisibly for so long.

All this. I grew up in the 70s and the 80s, and everything I ever learned about trans people before I transitioned was do to happenstance and luck.

I grew up in to 80s and 90s, so more due to bullies.

A lot of us just didn’t have the info we needed, and we need to make sure that other trans folks have the info they need.

I think that we ought to write trans 101s for our younger selves, and for other trans people„ rather than just for cis people.

Did you know:

Most boys and men don’t constantly wish they were girls and womyn?

Many people feel happier with high levels of estrogen and progesterone and deeply unhappy and dissociative and not themselves with high levels of testosterone?

Not all these people are assigned female at birth?

Not a trans woman myself, but of a roughly similar age group. And this is a very important discussion. I have seen similar ideas used against too many people I care about.

Especially now that I’m having a hard time denying the fact that am galloping toward middle age myself, I also have some thoughts about the kinds of things that too often get dismissed as “mid-life crises”—as if that phrase did not contain the word “crisis” at all. But, most of these life crises did not suddenly pop up out of thin air, as nicely described above. People often get to the point where they just cannot continue living as they have felt like they were required to. This is not the time or place to go rambling on more about that.

I think a lot of people who are not actually trolling just do not understand/remember what it was like before: Once upon a time there was no internet. Maybe especially what it could be like for trans and assorted queer people. Just getting access to support and information online saved my life more than once, starting in the mid ’90s. Being less isolated can matter so much, to so many people. Knowing you even have liveable options available to you can matter so much.

Not a trans woman either – DFAB genderless person, sie/hir pronouns. Anyway, I don’t think people understand this either. And I don’t think they understand the courage it takes to transition late in life.

This reminds me of…

…‘gold star lesbians’, a.k.a. lesbians who have never in their lives slept with men, always knew they were lesbians, and lord it over lesbians who came out later in life or who had ever slept with men.

…those autistic people who think the earlier you were diagnosed the more authentically autistic you are. And that if you’re self-diagnosed, then screw it, you’re not autistic at all.

…all sorts of different ways where “I've always known who I am and you haven’t ha ha” becomes the actual level of conversation in a lot of communities.

And yes, a lot of this is spurred on by medical definitions of transsexuality, that trans people have since adopted as their own, no matter who gets hurt in the process.

When I was in the offline trans community, there were a lot of middle-aged and elderly trans men and women transitioning. And luckily they got the respect they deserved for the most part: The rest of us were in awe of the lives they had led in the closet that whole time, the pain and suffering that involved. The courage it took to come out so late, the danger they were placed in as a result of having come out after building relationships with a large number of people who were not necessarily trans-friendly. I like to hope we gave them the respect they deserved as our elders and as people who had been through things we couldn’t imagine.

This is what I mean when I talk about people who need our communities for survival. Just as trans teens thrown out on the street by their parents need the trans community to survive, trans elders, especially trans women elders, who may lose everything in their quest to transition, need the trans community to survive. Anyone who tries so hard to push them out is as good as saying they’re better off dead. No matter what their rationale, that’s what it comes down to in the end. They can’t see past their own egos, I can’t see past the body counts they leave behind them. :-(

Unfortunately, I do believe anon is a trans woman. Because I’ve met trans women before who hold that attitude. Just because someone says something that is horribly destructive to a group, does not mean they aren’t a member of that group. In fact, some of the worst hostilities I’ve seen in the trans community have been within-group hostilities like that.

I’ve heard the “primary transsexual” and “secondary transsexual” thing before, and that’s what makes me so sure that anon is probably a trans woman. Because there are always people who will cling, hard, to the medicalized ideas of the groups they are a part of, and who will try as hard as they can to be the “real” kind of trans person. See the kerfuffles about autogynephilia (I hate even typing that word) for more of similar ilk – arguments about whether there are some trans women who are real trans women, whereas other trans women are just men who sexually get off on the idea of having a vagina. And you’ll, there too, get people scrambling to be seen as the 'right’ kind of trans woman.

It’s so like the autistic community at times, that it’s downright depressing. "I’m a real Kanner autistic, not one of those Asperger types who have no real problems.“ (Most people who say that have never read Kanner nor Asperger in the original.) "I was diagnosed at the age of three, anyone diagnosed older is just a poseur who wants attention.” "I had real incontinence, you were just a nasty little NT boy who wet the bed.“ "I was diagnosed by a real autism expert, you were just diagnosed by a random doctor.” "I was diagnosed, you self-diagnosed people just want to ruin it for those of us with real autism.“ It goes on and on, and it’s the same bullshit, in all these communities. It just takes different forms. I’m highlighting the autistic community because, like the trans community, it simultaneously rejects and embraces its own medicalization, for complex reasons. But when medicalization is embraced solely as a weapon to bludgeon other group members with, that’s not a good reason anymore.

This sort of stuff shatters communities. These communities, whether you love them or hate them, are essential to the survival of trans women and other trans people. And especially trans women. Anything that attacks the community itself – the bonds formed between people, the friendships, the willingness to help each other out in a crisis, the things that make a community a real community, in short, the love!!! – is going to kill people. And I take that really fucking seriously. Without love and compassion and caring, you don’t have a community anymore, and that’s what some people seem to want to happen.

The best way to fight this stuff is with love, compassion, and caring. Make your community into one that welcomes everyone. If you’re going to socially penalize people, penalize them for being unwelcoming to middle aged and elderly trans women who need the community’s help. Penalize them for being unwelcoming to nonbinary and genderless people thrown out on the streets because our parents didn’t realize that nonbinary and genderless weren’t trans enough to count under their transphobia. (Yes, that’s sarcasm.) But don’t penalize people for being middle aged or elderly when they come out, for being nonbinary or genderless, for being some kind of trans person that you’re unfamiliar with or whose gender presentation or lack thereof happens to rub you the wrong way.

And if it does rub you the wrong way, don’t just go off and find some analysis that shows that their gender presentation is WrongWrongWrong on a political level. Really look at your own biases. You’ll find a lot more there than you’ll find in your toolbox of how to efficiently manipulate echo chambers. We all know that you’re capable of making it sound like some group of trans people don’t belong in our community, but it’s far more interesting and ethical for you to make the case that we all belong and that you had a lot of biases to work through before you could see that.

It’s easy to make a person sound like they don’t belong. It’s harder to admit that you were wrong in thinking a certain sort of person doesn’t belong here. It’s even harder to examine why you thought so, and examine it publicly. I would give massive kudos to anyone willing to admit, publicly, without any trace of defensiveness, that they had prejudices against elderly trans women transitioning, against nonbinary and genderless and neutrois people of any age, against people whose gender expression is "too close to their assigned gender”, against people of color who resent the trans label because in their own societies they are not trans, but who need access to the trans community because in this society they are regarded as trans… against anyone else who doesn’t quite fit who people think ought to be allowed into our community.

I’ve been watching. I’ve seen it all and more. It ain’t pretty. People die.

And that’s where it ends for me – people die. We can’t have more people going. The trans community, trans women in particular, trans women of color even more in particular, has a high enough body count as it is. The trans community willingly contributing to that body count makes me enraged on every possible level. The Grumpy Stick doesn’t even cover how pissed off I am about things like this.

Understand, there will always be communities who will welcome you. We will not always be the most visible or vocal communities, but we are out there and we will do our damndest to seek you out and provide whatever support you need. We may not be able, but we will try with everything we’ve got, because many of us know what it is to have been where you are, and those of us who don’t, have enough of a clue to shut up and support you the way you deserve. There is not just one trans community, thank all the gods that ever were, or we’d really be in trouble.