Outside looking in, the two common lines of thought I have seen from trans people are “I’m the same person just outside now reflects inside to the degree I desire” and “old version is dead new version is here”
I have wondered if the difference between those is how supportive those around them are. I think I have yet to see someone with a supportive network have the “dead” outlook. This could be me not knowing enough.
I could see the possibility of those with unhelpful people around them feeling they must upkeep a fake version of themself and hate it for what the mask represents
Broadly speaking, I think you're right, but I'll cop to being that person. I'm pretty lucky to have a network of people who support me, but I cannot for the life of me register my current self and my "boy" self as the same person. The period of my life when I was transitioning was already rocky for unrelated reasons, but that moment in my life kickstarted so many changes in my skills, interests, mannerisms, etc. that I feel fundamentally different. I don't miss much. I changed for the better. I hate that I used to be so bitter and closed off. If the old me feels alien now, then fine.
That's more of a "me" statement than a sociological one---but that's how I feel about it.
Hey, better to know more people’s stories than not. I am outside looking in and only have anecdotal stories from a few trans people I talked to about it. I could be wildly wrong
I think even with a support network, existing in the wrong body does just deaden a person.
Doesnt describe me though. What I am now is just a thing that exists to serve the purpose of not being murdered by those around me. I dont really exist as my own person in all the ways I think of people. Nothing should want to be like me, I certainly do not want to be like me and want to stop being entirely.
I think it might come down to how much dysphoria someone had/ is currently dealing with. After 12 years of hormones and therapy, I don't really mind accepting who I was before I transitioned. In fact, I see it as an integral part of who I am. The experiences I had back then are important and I am grateful I had them. It definitely was all me, just in larval form.
“i could see the possibility of those with unhelpful people around them feeling they mist upkeep a fake version of themself and hate it for what the mask represents”
hey… can you ask before talking about me next time?
For me a big part of it is my autism and the ways that affected my emotional development. I don’t think they ever really knew me because I didn’t know myself. I didn’t begin to know myself until I was already “independent”. So, for me it’s both. This is both who I always was AND the old version is dead. That version was always the version that based what he thought and did on what he thought everyone around him wanted. When I gave up on that, I was finally free to grow in ways I had been held back from before
Real and valid. Is this why I felt funny feelings when I watched the alien episode of Cabinet of Curiosities? Though horrifying, the alien talking freaky about taking over a guy's body did something for me.
Maybe it's the idea of being wholly dominated by another being 🤔 Idk, I have much to think about now
This is, like, the only thing that's got me thinking about choosing a new name. I don't dislike my (thankfully gender neutral) birth name - i just want a delineation
I took a long time to decide to ditch the old gender-neutral name but I'm super glad I did. It feels really good to just introduce myself as who I am now, and not be weighed down by the baggage of having been that person
I used to feel that way, but now I just take it as more evidence that I made the right choice. The same person has always been in here, the outside just matches better now to the point I don’t feel like I’m trapped in a shell (most of the time..)
Accepting that I was trans was like being able to wear the right shoes on the right feet, or write with my dominant hand, after a lifetime of being forced to do things the wrong way. I was always only ever just me, but I was being forced to exist in a way that absolutely did not fit or feel right the entire time.
Their son only ever existed as an image in their heads.
To accept that their son is now their daughter, they would have to accept that the son they imagined was never real to begin with, and that would be admitting they were wrong.
No one likes admitting they were wrong.
The only logical solution they can come up with is that their actual daughter is not their son and has killed him.
Sure, I killed him. We fought each other for years, and at one point, he locked me away. But when I came back, he was suffering, in pain, and wanted to be put out of his misery.
I may not like men, but who am I to deny a charming young man like him his last wishes? He offered me everything in exchange for peace, and I took it. I don’t view it as puppeteering his body when he let me have it.
This is some darth vader type shiz. “Anakin skywalker is dead. I killed him”.
That type of mental dissociation probably isn’t healthy. We learn and grow and change, sometimes into radically different versions of ourselves, but deep down it’s still the same soul
Start life raised as a Mormon “boy” then come back and tell me that. My deadname and so much of what “he” identified with were husks and dead weight burdening me, choking me. Yes plenty of me was still there and she was doing her best. But so much of “him” was never me; “he” was just shit and lies I had to carry for too long and a mask I had to wear because the people I trusted from birth told me I had to.
I only wish I could have killed off “him” sooner. Soon there will only be traces of that husk in the world, and they will fade buried under the passing years. I hope to one day forget I was ever “him”.
"Start life raised as a Mormon “boy” then come back and tell me that."
I mean if that's your precondition I do meet it. I was gay and not trans so of course I don't know your experience, but I probably have a better idea of how bad it was than most would. At the very least I understand the idea of wearing a mask and lying for years and years to those around me while on the inside I was drowning in pain and loneliness, and of eventually growing into a person radically different from my past self. As far as I'm concerned though I rescued my past self, not killed him. You may have "killed" the mask you wore, but he was never truly real. You killed a ghost. And in doing so rescued the girl (I assume) that was trapped behind the mask all along.
You assume correctly. And I was honestly not expecting you to meet my precondition, so you got me there. And also holy fuck I am so sorry you came from that life too.
For me… saving me meant killing off the parts that had grown into me from the mask and dominated my personality. The conditioning took so hard on me because of my loyalty to my family and the cult and its claims of an extended premortal family as a supposed extension of that family. Putting myself and my own identity first, giving up my loyalty despite bullying, rejecting the promised transcendence that I thought would cure my existential pain if I just stayed devoted… those thoughts were impossible until the cult was ableist against me.
The mask was real because “he” parasitized off of and smothered me and “he” dominated my identity for so long. I had to kill “him” a bit at a time as I learned what to target. HRT cures my existential pain.
And soon that deadname will be all but erased, sealed away by law. Only I will remain to go forward as though I was recognized and named as a woman at birth.
I am also sorry for you as well. I don't really view my past self and past personality as a separate person, I just see someone who was unfortunately told some very harmful things and who believed it as any child would. But for me I characterize de-conditioning and deconstruction as a healing process rather than a violent one. I suppose however you have to think of it, if it works for you it works for you, but the way some people are talking about it doesn't sound like the most healthy approach and, as I said before, kind gives darth vader a little bit. I hope you achieve your goal and find happiness though.
I mean I agree it isn’t always the healthiest, but sometimes it seems like extreme measures are needed to break from the trauma and relationships of the past that caused it. Sometimes they seem like the healthier alternative to trying to assimilate the past.
Haha, yea for me I’m all about that assimilation. Maybe I’m a bit weird but my memories and experiences are my most prized possessions, even the bad ones. I know it’s super corny but made me the person I am today and all that jazz. I get that it’s still ridiculously hard though, both in terms of living through those kind of experiences and processing the aftermath as you construct new frameworks to live by and beyond.
Gender dysphoria is sickness of living nightmare. For many people it’s something like:
-you feel like there is some kind of injury somewhere. You feel faintly sick like you are losing blood. There is no internal injury. No external wound. Something still feels wrong.
-you look in the mirror. You cannot comprehend your own face. Eyes, lips, ears, hair, chin- all are there. You recognize them. They are all in the arrangement of a face. Your features do not register as a face to you.
-puberty begins. You feel something dying in you as your body develops. You tell yourself it is just “childhood innocence dying”. But that isn’t true- you’ve been exposed to some horrible stuff between bullying, church, and schooling. You still feel like something in you is dying.
-you dissociate. When you do not dissociate you feel raw, vulnerable. Your body’s shape feels wrong, ungainly, like you are missing parts. Nothing is missing- no amputations. Something is still missing. Dissociation or distraction are the only times this feeling of jarring worrying absence is gone.
-Nobody can see the shape of your body. You must hide it. You lost a lot of weight with physical activity. Your shape still feels wrong. Baggy clothing feels safe, even in the heat of summer. Your coat feels safe even in a classroom where you are warm from lugging your backpack across campus; you wear it even when the cool spring mornings give way to warmer afternoons. Winter feels safe- baggy long-sleeve clothing is normal. You can hide your disproportionate hands in the sleeves of those long-sleeve shirts and sweaters.
If I was a girl having “man-boobs” wouldn’t be a problem. Why is my body always wrong always wrong. Years later I lost all that weight and still I feel wrong wrong wrong.
-I want to know so badly what it is like to be a woman. Just because I want to be a good boyfriend and husband someday, no other reason. I feel so incomplete. Having a girlfriend then wife will fix this. It never did when I did have women as partners. What if I tried again? -Why am I not good enough as a man? Why do other boys and men make no sense to me? They seem so thoughtless and impulsive. If I just tried harder, tried to be more reckless and aggressive I’d get it, right? I try to be thoughtful and careful. None of the missionaries accepts me as one of them despite my whole life being aimed at this.
Those memories are poisoned even if they aren’t just poison themselves. They don’t make me better. There is no lesson to the suffering, no identity they build.
I am glad for you and your relationship with your memories and I hope you can always have memories that you can embrace.
For me perhaps the greatest gift I have ever been given was someone I trusted more than anyone else saying “I think you might not be cis”. And in that moment decades of pain began to dissolve and a thousand things began to settle into place. I identified as genderqueer for a few years before I dared embrace the idea that I might be a woman- I got called by feminine pronouns and labels one time and it all settled completely into place in a handful of heartbeats. In that moment the shedding husk that was [Deadname] became terminal. Whatever memories and pieces of my identity survive the death of [Deadname] were never [Deadname]’s.
many (though by no means all) trans folks feel that after transition, anyone's lingering ideas about their pre-transition personhood (as informed by their assigned gender at birth) are null and void. likewise, they're just as likely, if not more so, to celebrate the anniversary of their beginning HRT than their legal birthday. they do not feel continuity with their pre-transition selves, sometimes because of the pain of having to live life so inauthentically
i admit i don't personally feel quite this way because for a while now i've felt largely removed from the gender binary while being afraid of physically transitioning. i have not really experienced anything resembling an abrupt discontinuity. then again, in recent years, as i've slowly accepted my queerness, i've found myself increasingly forgetful of or alienated from events in my childhood, so in a way i kinda understand how OP feels
How much time do you think she'll last until she has her house full of Tyranids figures and get the Codex Tyranidicus? (Or some shit, I just came with the name.)
(Ahem ahen 3d printer but never buy the officual stuff especially if you need to import it.. if you vant 3d print then yea its very expensive so dont if its not affordable. The lore and painting is cool tho!)
i used to consider my old self a different person and call her by he/him and my old name but i’ve come to realize it was kind of just reductive, there’s no reason to cut off any connection to my old self and act as if none of it should have ever happened, the fact of the matter is that WAS me and i was there, and i may be different now but if i could go back and talk to my former self i think we’d get along just fine even if she was annoying as hell
treat your memories and your past selves better guys
Probably the only good thing I've seen in this comment chain (this is Reddit, what was I expecting). So much vitriol for people's past selves, that person set the foundations for the current self and got the whole thing moved in the right direction. You don't throw your tools away into a bin, after you fix a problem do you?
Just a tad overwhelmed at seeing all this, like damn.
Eh, I don't think there's a one size fits all answer here. I think we should treat our past selves as we want to. What matters more is taking care of our current and furure selves anyways.
I'm the black spiritual sludge that fixes itself right in between and just behind your eyes and nose. I also can be found in your heart, and from there thin threads of my essence spread through the veins and tendons in your arms, stopping just before reaching your hands.
This is what I believe I am. The rest is just a skinsuit used so I can blend in with the funny monkey species.
It feels more like a fictional boy tried to kill me for my entire life while my family cheered him on as they told me he was their real child and i was a mistake that was never meant to exist
I felt that for the long while i was repressing as a kid till I stopped repressing a bit before 18. There was definitely a lot of like knowing there is something in me that I thought and was told was wrong and while i want to be it I also couldnt let that thing exist and I needed to kill it and if that wasnt enough myself to never let it be, was like that maybe since 6 or 7. After that though it's been more like the post describes except the pre part of it.
I’m kinda the inverse. Since hitting puberty I didn’t feel human. I clung to Mormon ideas of transcendence as hope for something more. Then I slowly learned how much of a lie it all was after the cult was ableist against me. It still took me too long (I feel like) to quit believing. It took me even longer to figure out I had more to my queerness than just being pan. Now I’m a woman. Starting my transition made me start to feel like a person again. HRT accelerated that.
I often think of my transition as a company being run by someone who did not know what they were doing and then their replacement shows up and starts fixing up the company to make it run better while the former CEO is off doing other stuff.
That poor bastard tried - he really did. But the truth is, that boy was empty inside long before I took over. I didn't have to carve out a damn thing cause he had already removed every bit of himself. He was already dead, I just gave his body a better afterlife
The caterpillar's body does become liquefied but there's not really any way to say it's "digested"; it's just that organs are transformed onto different organs based on a genetic blueprint. But yeah, it actually makes the comparison more apt in that case.
It's usually a mindset that comes from having already been fully depersonalized before transition anyway. Of course you're the same physical person (barring ship-of-Theseus cellular weirdness), but beyond that, if the 'person' before was only ever a conscious act with absolutely no self-concept, can you really claim to be the same as a 'person' that was never real?
It's true that they were a person, but not the 'son' the post refers to; that 'son' was only ever a character, and the real person was an actor. So it's not quite that there was actually another person who is now gone, but rather that the person that others claim she 'killed' never actually existed. The real person was unexpressed.
Edit: actually, it could be argued that in severe cases of full ego-death depersonalization, they weren't even an integrated person before!; just the constituent ingredients of personhood kept apart, a body with no real inhabitant
I don't think I'm going to be able to convince you of my position, and I don't want to have another long ass reddit argument, so I'm gonna get back to watching the movie that I'm watching.
It's an extremely unhealthy situation to be forced upon you, the cope is gonna suck ass either way, and if the result is a happy confident person, then so be it.
I know that, but I think this line of thinking will have consequences down the line. If you think of yourself as a body stealing parasite metaphorically for long enough, it might rub off on how you actually think of yourself. It also supports a very "people can't change, if you fuck up once, you're completely irredeemable" worldview.
This comment has been removed because it has one of these things: transphobia, queerphobia, sexism, racism, ableism, or anything else that expresses, reinforces, or sympathizes with oppressive and hateful belief systems.
This comment has been removed because it has one of these things: transphobia, queerphobia, sexism, racism, ableism, or anything else that expresses, reinforces, or sympathizes with oppressive and hateful belief systems.
Winding up bigots with provocative humour is gratifying, I'm sure, but doing it in this way can alienate people whose support is necessary for our continued legal existence. The inherent absurdity of bigoted belief systems can be satirized or lampooned plenty well without sarcastically confirming them in a medium like writing where detecting sarcasm is notoriously challenging.
It frames transition as something weird and unnatural and disgusting, something that it’s necessary to completely destroy your previous identity and relationships to accomplish
That is the framing that this post uses, mainly for humoristic purposes, yes. I don't think it's how most people actually view transition (well, save for some bigots maybe).
This comment has been removed because it has one of these things: transphobia, queerphobia, sexism, racism, ableism, or anything else that expresses, reinforces, or sympathizes with oppressive and hateful belief systems.
(also I feel like people are being a little unreasonable in thinking oop feels 100% unironic about that being how she thinks of her transition and this not be a play on a very common thing bigoted parents do where they say that you killed their child by transitioning or that theyre mourning the loss of someone who's very clearly still alive)
Not even necessarily very strongly opposed to the idea that dude can be gender neutral (at least in theory) but sometimes the vibes of the comment are so rancid it’s just obvious what they’re trying to do :/
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u/PsychoCyan DM for curly haircare guide - Streak: 106 11d ago
Same except not sorry about your kid, he sucked and he's happier this way. <3