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It's the [Trans thread]!

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Posts

  • DoobhDoobh She/Her, Ace Pan/Bisexual 8-) What's up, bootlickers?Registered User regular
    So, we're on page 100 and I've been thinking about subaltern topics that haven't been covered as much.

    A thread dedicated to disability (mental and physical) might be a good idea.

    to quote Son of Baldwin:
    "As I've said before, there are four forms of bigotry that Americans, in particular, don't regard as bigotry and hold as righteous and sacrosanct:

    Ableism

    Ageism

    Fatantagonism

    Transantagonism

    And they all manifest in chilling ways."

    Not to be confused with mental health threads (which are banned) or physical health threads (say like weightlifting and exercising).

    Miss me? Find me on:

    Twitch (I stream most days of the week)
    Twitter (mean leftist discourse)
  • Darth WaiterDarth Waiter Elrond Hubbard Mordor XenuRegistered User regular
    Hi trans thread. I'm having a super bad day today.

    Too bad, we love you anyway.

    Do you love us? Put a check in the appropriate box:

    [ ]Yes

    [ ]Lots

    [X ]You don't even know

    Today my mind is filled with Trans Feels(tm); that lovely mix of dysphoria, anxiety, depression, and frustration.

    One of the most important lessons I ever spoke to my gender fluid godchild about was the necessary acceptance of negative emotion.

    You got this.

    We got your back.

    The new Star Wars makes hopeful kids of us all.

    Carbon Monoxide is bad.

    New Coke can go fuck itself.

    These are all facts and they cannot be disputed.

    p.s. We love you for who you are not what other people think you should be.

  • PonyPony Registered User regular
    Dubh wrote: »
    So, we're on page 100 and I've been thinking about subaltern topics that haven't been covered as much.

    A thread dedicated to disability (mental and physical) might be a good idea.

    to quote Son of Baldwin:
    "As I've said before, there are four forms of bigotry that Americans, in particular, don't regard as bigotry and hold as righteous and sacrosanct:

    Ableism

    Ageism

    Fatantagonism

    Transantagonism

    And they all manifest in chilling ways."

    Not to be confused with mental health threads (which are banned) or physical health threads (say like weightlifting and exercising).

    that would be cool, as long as discussions of ableism can stay on point and not turn into the same kind of mire that got mental health threads banned

    ableism is a thing i give a lot of fucks about (I've talked a bit about being a disability rights activist and I do volunteer work for a disability lobbyist group) and it's a thing i have a lot of personal experience with

    i think there's probably a lot of forumers with experience with ableism, and a lot of people who don't have experience with it that could stand to learn a lot of things

    transantagonism does get discussed a fair bit in this thread from time to time, usually when it actually happens to people who post in this thread

    fatantagonism would also be a good discussion topic because it often relates directly to ableism (an overwhelming number of overweight and obese people have mental and physical disabilities which are actually unrelated to their weight, but are significant contributing factors to it and are worsened by their weight). and it's definitely a form of bigotry that many, many people feel perfectly comfortable in committing without thinking about it.

    ageism can be interesting to explore but given the average of this forum is people in the 18-35 bracket the ageism they will have suffered and known is being told they're insufferable, shithead millennials who are lazy and entitled (a recent thread in the new comic forum kinda exploded this way given that Mike and Jerry are cranky Gen X'rs)

  • PonyPony Registered User regular
    In a related bit of blathering about disability and also gender stuff (spoilered for my nonsense):
    So I've talked on occasion about how my spinal injury and the subsequent way it has physically disabled me has changed my life. My experience is hardly unique in this regard, and a lot of the depression, anxiety, and other issues I have been grappling are pretty common for people who suddenly have their life sideswiped by a disabling injury. I've done a lot of reading and learning about it, and in some ways its helped to learn I'm not alone? It has definitely helped me find specific ways to help myself, therapeutic techniques and positive life choices that are more specific to my circumstances.

    But something I've continued to grapple with is how this has really impacted my self-perception and self-image. This is something I've also talked about before, and I've had time to process a lot of it and consider where it comes from and what's really upsetting me.

    For basically my entire teenage years and young adult life I built myself into a very specific kind of person. I was hyper-masculine, strong, aggressive, forward, and if need be, completely willing and capable to be violent. This was something of a necessity when I was a teenager; I got involved in drug crime when I was 14, and that spiraled into some... heavy shit. To survive in that world, to survive the jungle that was high school in the 90's as a queer youth, I adopted a really aggressive and hyper-masculine persona. Elements of who I was conflicted with that persona (I was a huge nerd who was into D&D and Warhammer and I love "girly shit" like ballet and theater), but I would either de-emphasize those elements in places where they'd be a threat to me, or I'd openly accentuate them almost as a challenge. Like yeah, go ahead. Call me a faggot for being into ballet. See how that works out for you.

    I treated my bisexuality the same way. I came out when I was 14, and I dealt with any kind of bullying or attempt at rebuke at school in a very... Ender Wiggin kind of fashion. So it tapered off, and eventually disappeared (to my face), and as a result I lived a very privileged young life as a queer youth in the 90's with regards to people giving me shit.

    ...or did I? Or did I have to maintain that razor-edge privilege by a stressful state of constantly being an aggressive, violent asshole? Did I maintain that state by actually being pretty cishet normative, and getting really shitty about things like Pride, alienating myself from most of the queer community? Yeah, yeah that's actually what happened.

    Any time, any time I questioned anything about my body, my gender, my persona, I took those feelings and put them in a chained up box and stuffed them deep in the back of my mind. It was key to my survival that I not deal with them. The person I was had to stay that person. There couldn't be cracks in the mask. Anything that deviated, anything that made me look "weak" or "effeminate" was a carefully calculated decision.

    And I lived like this basically until I was 25. I was still involved in crime (after a few attempts of trying to get out) up until that point, but it wasn't until I got out of the life that things changed. The motivating factor was the fact that when I was 25, I had a brutal stroke that fucked me up good. It was the first thing that actually made me disabled in a real sense (although I had been diagnosed with mental illness years previously, I didn't consider that a disability at the time). I was suddenly weak, unable to escalate a situation to violence if it came to that, unable to posture up and use my physical presence and intimidation to bully my way into safety and comfort. It was also during this period that I was living with someone who had her own mental health problems, and she started abusing me, both physically and emotionally. The physical abuse, in particular, severely contributed to my growing feelings of emasculation and powerlessness. I started to think about my life, who I was, what being a man meant to me. What my sexuality meant to me, about my body issues over the years (I have struggled with eating disorders, unhealthy exercise and fitness obsessiveness, and various other dysmorphia problems), and so on. That was a dark and scary place, unpacking years of repressed bullshit. I noped the fuck out of that road fast after my second attempted suicide.

    Six months after the stroke, I got out of that whole situation. I broke up with my abuser, got back together with a woman I love very much (who later became my wife), and moved to another city, away from the majority of my criminal contacts and my really negative, parasitic social circles. I started over.

    But I also had no sense of who I was anymore. I mired in suicidal depression for a couple years, my then-fiancee trying desperately to motivate me to get employed and get help for my mental health issues. Eventually I got the "bright idea" to go into policing, so I went back to college to pursue that. While I was in college, I started working private security, since I had previously worked as a bouncer and such when I was like 19. When I graduated college, the police were in a hiring freeze, so I continued to work private security.

    Private security fed into and rebuilt my masculine persona of power that I felt the stroke had robbed from me. I had fully physically recovered from the stroke, and I got back into pretty good shape, even got back into Muay Thai for a bit. Things, on the surface, were going good! I was making more money (legitimately) than I had ever made in my life, and I felt strong. But my wife hated it. She didn't just hate how much danger I was in (which was significant). She hated how visibly, obviously stressed I was, how I would say I like my job and it makes me happy but I would come home miserable or literally shaking. The job was poison, and it was literally killing me. My blood pressure was fucking atrocious and I was in and out of the hospital several times, having a few bouts of angina.

    When my spinal injury happened (caused by being attacked by a guy I kicked out of the bar as a bouncer and his couple of buddies), it was like my stroke all over again and worse. I was listless, depressed. Weak. I couldn't just conquer everything and everyone like I could before. My security career was over, and my opportunity for joining the police was over before it ever started.

    So, again I descended into depression. This time was different, primarily because I had my wife at my side. She pushed me to get therapy, to seek out employment opportunities that used my mind instead of my body, and most importantly to stop fixating on what I've lost and stop seeing myself as fundamentally broken.

    A few years have passed since my injury and I'm in a much happier place now. I work in Tech Support and Systems Programming for a security company, I live in a lovely part of the country, financially we're doing pretty well (my wife's job is fantastic). And it's like, now I have time and mental space to look at that old, chained-up box in the back corner of my mind. That scary box of gender feelings and fucked up body issues.

    For months I've been looking at all that, trying to decide if I want to deal with. If I want to talk to people about it, if I want to see a therapist about it. If I want to talk to my wife about it. Sometimes, you might see me post stuff in this thread about it, and then hastily delete the post after. This is the bullshit anxiety and absolute terror I have with dealing with these feelings.

    I don't know what to identify as. I don't know how I identify. I stopped self-identifying myself as a cis man months ago. I don't say what I do identify as, nor do I correct people and say I'm not a cis man if they call me that. But I don't make that claim, because I look at how I feel, at the things I have felt, at the feelings I have repressed, and I dunno, man. I dunno.

    There are so many things I look at about how I feel and how I see myself and I am like "If I follow this to its logical conclusion, then... No. This does not benefit me to embrace this idea."

    Like, let's be real here: It sucks for trans people and non-binary individuals. It does. It just does. That is not news to any trans or nb people in this thread. Even if an individual trans or nb person might have a pretty good life and consider themselves privileged and doing pretty good, as a whole the challenges and pure bullshit that is facing that community right now is just insane.

    So even if I were to accept, at least in theory, the idea that things are not as they seem with me so to speak, where does that benefit me? Will it possibly alleviate feelings of dysphoria and depression and anxiety I feel about my current identity, appearance, and body? Maybe.

    Would it also be a potential fucking hurricane for me socially, professionally, financially, and medically? You bet your ass it would.

    So is it worth it? I don't know. This is what I'm struggling with. Can I be happy with just keeping all this stuff on lockdown for the rest of my life, or at least maybe until such time as when the world isn't losing its fucking mind over the issue? Maybe, I dunno, I've gotten this far... with a combination of depression, anxiety, self-harm, suicide ideation, and substance abuse.

    Yeah.

  • Curly_BraceCurly_Brace Robot Girl Mimiga VillageRegistered User regular
    edited May 2016
    V1m wrote: »
    Hi trans thread. I'm having a super bad day today.

    Too bad, we love you anyway.

    Do you love us? Put a check in the appropriate box:

    [ ]Yes

    [ ]Lots

    [X ]You don't even know

    Today my mind is filled with Trans Feels(tm); that lovely mix of dysphoria, anxiety, depression, and frustration.

    I have no idea about the first, but the rest I am plenty familiar with.

    Checking the basics: you got somewhere to sleep, something to eat?

    Yes and yes, thanks so much for your concern.

    And thank you Darth Waiter you put a smile on my face.

    I'm doing so-so right now. Just... not gonna do anything I planned to do today. Really out of it and it's super depressing. Maybe tomorrow...

    Curly_Brace on
  • Corporal CarlCorporal Carl Registered User regular
    Pony and Curly_Brace, have a big hug from me (before the thread ends)

    PSN (PS4-Europe): Carolus-Billius
  • RainfallRainfall Registered User regular
    edited May 2016
    Hmm end of the trans thread?

    I'm lookin for a psychiatrist/someone to help me sort out my brain but I'm pretty certain I'm trans at this point. I'm not in a relationship, my job is pretry secure from discrimination (nothing's perfect but it looks promising,) and I've got nothing holding me back, so.

    Time to lean in to it and figure out how I feel. It's really exciting every time I think about it, there's a giddy enthusiasm which seems to indicate I'm headed in the right direction.

    Thanks for being around, folks, this is one of my favorite threads on the forum.

    Rainfall on
  • DoobhDoobh She/Her, Ace Pan/Bisexual 8-) What's up, bootlickers?Registered User regular
    it might be good to talk to other trans folk you know

    I'm leery about recommending therapy because there's way too many therapists out there that will try to talk you out of it as a matter of principle

    but, hey, welcome to the shit

    Miss me? Find me on:

    Twitch (I stream most days of the week)
    Twitter (mean leftist discourse)
  • TubeTube Registered User admin
    Ok trans thread you were a good thread

    Geth, please close this thread.

  • GethGeth Legion Perseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
    Affirmative Tube. Closing thread...

This discussion has been closed.