What is something you learned or experienced from being trans that you wish you knew pre-transition, or that you wish cis people knew?
I’ll go first: the temperature differences when going from testosterone-dominance to estrogen-dominance is not just real but significant, my body just puts out less heat and I feel colder much easier now even when otherwise maintaining a high metabolism, eating in excess, etc.
It may have just been my trans denial before, but I really wanted to believe that the difference was not that great and I was wrong.
What’s something you wish people knew?
That speech does in fact creates reality. Using the masculine form of a word to refer to a group of people does mean, that you actively exclude all the people who are not male. People may not realise and say “dont be so shiny about it”, but for trans people it does mean quite a lot how people refer to us.
Also that cis mans literally have to shut the fuck up if people would like, that others could stop using male words as default. Of course you dont feel excluded/discriminates, but I do since I Am definitely not a man and I do not want to be referred as one.
Well said, social reality is just as real as any other kind of reality - the language we use is part of how we reify our concepts and regulate others within them.
It definitely is. The Problem here is, that it is quite hard to communicate this to people who aren’t really aware of the situation. Before I had the realisation that I Am trans I also didnt really belief, that speech forms a reality and that using a male ford as a general word for all genders does hurt other people, especially trans people. The problem here is, that for understanding, why this is the case people kind of have to understand what gender dysphoria is and how it feels.
I don’t think you have to get people to understand dysphoria to understand the problem, just use the feminine to refer to a group and the men in the group will understand immediately how off it feels :-)
Fair enough. That’s a kinda good approach. If that doesn’t work it gets hard to explain the whole thing to others without taking a deep dive into Dysphoria
yes, I just don’t think cis people will understand dypshoria, even as a trans person I barely understand it tbh - it’s enough to just say it doesn’t feel good to be misgendered, and anyone seems to be able to understand that