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Share some activities you’ve been interested in doing but couldn’t do because you’re closeted.
Transmasc, Transfem, Nonbinary, and Gender Non-Conforming answers are all welcome and encouraged here.
Share some activities you’ve been interested in doing but couldn’t do because you’re closeted.
Transmasc, Transfem, Nonbinary, and Gender Non-Conforming answers are all welcome and encouraged here.
When I was closeted I often thought about transitioning as just a way for me to finally wear dresses and skirts in public that I was secretly wearing at home. And when considering whether to take things further, I would weigh all the downsides of transition (the cost, the social stigma, the danger, relying on exogenous hormones the rest of my life, etc.) against those benefits and it would make them seem not worth it.
But in retrospect, transition was different than I thought - estrogen changed my mood and solved mental health problems I didn’t realize were even problems, that I had lived with my whole life and had internalized as normal and just part of who I was. I would have never understood how important or necessary transition would be to my basic health and sanity.
So yeah, now I get to make and wear amazing outfits every day I would have never dreamed of before, but that’s not really what makes transition worth it, it’s like a side bonus. The truth is that I needed those exogenous hormones, transition wasn’t choosing to need them, I needed them the whole time. The need wasn’t optional - in a real sense transition wasn’t optional.
I could have not transitioned, but the alternative wasn’t staying cis. The alternative was not growing old.
That’s about right.
It’s funny how I held on and didn’t transition for other people, but when I transitioned pretty much nobody cared that much. Transition felt impossible and so selfish before transitioning, yet on other side it seems like it was self-destructive to not transition and trivial compared to how difficult I thought it was going to be. (Though transition is difficult, don’t let me mislead - it’s just not nearly as bad as I thought it would be, and there are so many things that went better than I thought.)
I guess this is just a lesson in how easy it is to rationalize and build up your fears, and how you are your own biggest barrier.
I currently have a similar thought proccesss to how you described yours.
Transitioning feels like this super selfish thing, where many of my friends and family will just not accept it, and where I drag people more down than I help myself.
Unfortunately I have not convinced myself to another point of view yet.
People who would get “dragged down” by someone they know transitioning are doing it to themselves. There is no logic in laying the blame on the person transitioning.
It costs nothing to be kind and supportive to those around you, so I would consider those who won’t even do that, to be the selfish ones.
If a person struggles with someone they know transitioning, good, because maybe that finally provokes the introspection in them, required to become a better person.
If it doesn’t, I don’t know how to help them.
But I know how to help you. Transitioning is not selfish. It’s life-saving.
Yes, in my experience the only people in your life who really struggle are people who have their own issues (i.e. it never actually seems to be about you or your transition exactly) e.g. people who are closeted and who experience pain when reminded of their issues when they see you.
Usually even a bigoted religious person isn’t directly mean to you, it seems like the Christians generally reiterate how much they love you and so on (but they don’t want to talk too much about gender). In fact, I don’t find anyone wanting to talk about gender IRL, lol. Anyway, it’s hard to tell how it will go - I think it’s also different if you’re a minor living at your parents’ house compared to an independent adult. It also depends on who is in your life, and how they felt about you before you transitioned.
Either way, transitioning is like taking medication as a diabetic or someone with hypothyroidism - it really is life-saving and necessary.
To be fair, I never convinced myself of the other view point, even now I think transitioning is “selfish” in a sense, it’s just that on the other side I can confirm it wasn’t like I thought it would be and that there was also something “selfish” about never taking care of myself and being a burden on others because of that.
I think it’s OK to be selfish, so long as that means prioritizing self-interest over that of others, rather than being greedy at others’ expense. And transitioning does not cost anybody else anything: you don’t owe it to anyone to be anything other than yourself.
After all, nobody is going to look out for your well-being as diligently as you yourself.
I find that interesting because I really expected to wind up more butch than I did. I transitioned for the body and to be seen as a woman socially. I didn’t even really start wearing makeup until I learned eyeshadow while recovering from bottom surgery.
Huh, did you mean to respond to a different comment? Sorry, I’m just not sure how your story relates to mine. I’m interested though! What got you interested in eyeshadow at that point, and what was that process like?
Personally I learned makeup before starting hormones, and it was crucial for the months of waiting for my first appointment. There were times I became suicidal where makeup legit helped me recover emotionally. But I wouldn’t expect myself to be butch, I’m a femme (even though I’m not straight).
The differences between our initial approaches to our transness was interesting to me. Mine being “I may not even bother with anything beyond jeans and tshirts I just want a female body under it” vs your wondering if hormones would be worthwhile and wanting them to enable you to be comfortable dressing feminine everywhere.
I’d been interested in learning for a while but that was a period of about a month stuck at home with a huge financial burden finally lifted. And yeah I was in my process of accepting that I’m a femme I wouldn’t be taken any less seriously as a lesbian seeking badass vibes if I was a femme.
I had tried crossdressing for years before transitioning and it’d always only made me more dysphoric. The thing that made me embrace that I was trans was homemade breast forms. So to me a lot of makeup was also for a long while associated with that time period. I just wore eyeliner on special occasions.
Ah, I don’t think we’re that different, maybe just the timing of things were a bit different.
I didn’t take hormones to change my body, but rather on the possibility that it would help my mental health - wishing for a female body under the t-shirt and jeans was too much hoping for me, I think.
Meanwhile, once I socially transitioned, I felt going back to t-shirt and jeans was akin to going back in the closet, so I forced myself to stay femme so I would stay “out”. At first I really struggled with a femme identity and makeup, until I read Julia Serano and read about femmephobia and worked through the relationship between femininity and feminism. That really helped me feel like I could use makeup, and then I just saw it as a useful tool (rather than a betrayal towards women, which was basically how I felt before then about using makeup).
Crossdressing and anything feminizing also made me more dysphoric pre-transition, which I took to mean at the time that I wasn’t trans, lol. My transition never had to do with my body or exploration that way - I struggled with being a man in the world, and I wished I could be a woman. My egg cracked when I was looking for resources to undo male socialization because I didn’t like that I was acting as a man sometimes, and of course those resources were in the trans community and inevitably I found videos about whether you’re trans, and this video in particular about common excuses to avoid transitioning. The video so specifically applied to me and I had had those exact excuses, so I was sort of shocked to learn I really probably was trans, at least according to these videos. Previously I had only used the DSM-V’s criteria for gender dysphoria to define trans-ness, and I didn’t understand the shape dysphoria could take to recognize it. I actually accepted I was trans before I realized I had dysphoria or how bad it was.
That’s very fair lol. The militancy with which I’ve noticed many trans women approach feminism is also interesting. I to this day stand by my collegiate commitment to never wear makeup to work or to appear professional and to only use it to enhance or express never to hide perceived flaws. It’s important to me not to hold up the unfair expectations on my fellow women. And yeah Dr. Serrano also played a role in my willingness to embrace my femininity, but so did some very loud and outspoken femme lesbians who taught me to associate femininity with having the potential for power when I wield it for my own desire rather than for the desires of others. That said I’m still very much a lazy femme.
And I kinda get that feeling that going back to jeans and a tshirt would be like recloseting. I definitely cringe at how long I wore oversized men’s shirts. But for me it was always “well this is what the other women in my life wear.” And for me there was the big beard shave that was my crossing of the rubicon. There was also an element of the fact that I had a pretty bad nlog phase in response to the expectation of hyperfemininity that was just starting to be relaxed on trans women in the mid 10s. Hell I could do a whole rant about how the the expectations that had been placed on trans people by the medical establishment in order to transition fucked me up even though I managed to transition relatively young for the time and not be blocked.
And yeah I thought I couldn’t be a trans woman because I wasn’t hyperfeminine or boy crazy. My teenage relationship with femininity was downright normal by cis lesbian standards and my attraction to men was so mild and rare that I only really became fully aware of it when it went away after starting hormones. It took seeing trans women online who were just normal women (albeit normal by traumatized lesbian standards). Well that and they used to say that you shouldn’t transition until it was your only option to continue living. It was from an era where it was safe to assume transitioning would cost you everything, and well I waited that long. I just lucked out with how young I hit it.
And yeah, as I came out and began transitioning the social floodgates continued bursting open. And thankfully I got out of my nlog phase and got to know women who’d transitioned before me. It gave context and provided me with the opportunity to grow into myself. That and spending more time with other lesbians. Sorry for the history rant lol, idk how I got to act so damn old despite only being 30.