ah, maybe I should clarify when I said looting wouldn’t have majority support, I was assuming a context where a populist movement (i.e. made up of the majority) was trying to find strategies to gain some economic independence such that they can afford a general strike- mutual aid might be a popular option (as well as how unions use their funds from dues to pay work on strike), but my point is only that looting is likely to be an unpopular option, and thus one that would harm the movement’s reputation and ability to remain supported by the majority on which it depends.

I did not mean that in absolute terms anything must justify its existence through majority support, as you pointed out that’s not how the worl works.

yes, I agree entirely- but I’m not sure what further point you are making or how it is relevant

oligarchy is supported by the rich and powerful which is how it exists against the majority; I doubt you’re suggesting looting is a feasible option for the same reasons…

looting will not be supported by the majority

I’m much newer to this, I socially transitioned around 2 years ago and medically transitioned around one and a half years ago.

It’s OK to refer to stereotypes, I tend to think it helps us communicate even if there can be a social injustice that comes from generalizing.

I also feel like I would just want to be a cis woman and so 100% female sounds very good to me, but my sense is also that I’m definitely not a guy. I certainly learned to live as one, and identify as one even, but I always felt a bit out of place as a man. When I was in middle school for example, I would have low grades in gym class because I refused to change in the boy’s locker room. When I would go swimming I often would wear a t-shirt because it just felt wrong. I didn’t like sports or athletic activities, and while some stereotypical boy interests and activities overlapped with mine, I found myself forming a strong preference for female friends by the time I was in the 5th grade (around 10 years old), and that became quite an extreme preference for me.

Nonetheless, I can feel some affinity with men - ironically, my dysphoria made me fit a certain kind of stoic male stereotype well. I think Imogen Binnie captures this well in Nevada - the sort of crust punk stoic who doesn’t take good care of themselves and so on. Outside of the trans context, I identified with the ascetic life of the Cormac McCarthy’s protagonist in The Passenger, rotting away sleeping in a hay bed in an exposed windmill or roughing out a winter in an unheated house in Idaho … I tend to think now that this was more about my own depression, dissociation, and general mental issues than about my gender - but I certainly identified with a certain subgenre of masculinity that emphasizes the virtue of suffering and not feeling anything.

I think for me what helped me realize I wasn’t non-binary or bigender was by interacting with other non-binary and bigender people - I met someone online who felt like their beard was a part of who they were, they loved their beard and shaving it was a huge mistake for them, but they were transfem and medically transitioning - so they a gender expression that includes breasts and jewelry but also a beard, and that feels natural and good for them. I find it hard to relate to that, my beard was good in many ways - it was nice to feel the air around me blowing (it was like an extra sense of sorts), and it covered my face and made me feel less social anxiety that way. It was also a perfect mask, it allowed me to finally fit in as a man after so many years of being perceived as too feminine and gay, or even just younger than I was. It gave me social acceptance of sorts.

But the beard was also sickening, even when I was pretransition and unaware I saw a picture of myself with a beard and I felt truly nauseated - it’s like seeing myself did psychic damage or something, I didn’t just hate myself it was disturbing to me that I could look that way. I just didn’t realize it was a gender issue - and since I’ve transitioned, what I see in the mirror feels better, and I feel more comfortable taking photos of myself than ever (I basically never took photos of myself and was upset if anyone else tried to - now I take photos of myself all the time and even feel good about some of them, something that had never once happened before).

My partner is someone who identifies as bigender, and for them they feel a great deal of openness and acceptance of gender traits, they say they would be happy in a male body as well as a female body, and they wear both male and female clothes. They have a particular gender expression that is both femme and butch that is hard to describe accurately - muscled and strong, but with long feminine hair and so on. The muscles on my body make me feel nauseous, I hate my calves for how developed they are, and I can’t relate to their preferences.

Now, those are just two ways of being non-binary / bigender, and it seems like everyone can be pretty different, which is why I like talking about it and learning, because I have so much to learn from people’s self concepts and the way they think about and use their labels.

I tend to think there is probably some super complex biology that makes me inherently a mix of gendered traits both biologically and otherwise, so it wouldn’t be surprising to me if I were technically non-binary, but I am not sure I really fit that label well and I don’t use it. What seems true is that I should have been born a cis woman, and I’m now doing what I can to compensate for the male body I have so I can integrate and live socially as a woman and feel more comfortable in my own skin. So far everything feminizing has felt great, and I haven’t had much trouble giving up being a man - there is nothing I miss or felt attached to that was difficult to lose. Being a man was essentially all bad, and being a woman seems all good for me.

Anyway - I would love to hear more of your experiences, or if you have any advice in all your years of experience, it would really be helpful 😅

interesting! I do think some people might view themselves as “non-binary” while feeling both male and female - it’s maybe just a different way to conceptualize it (because being both might be thought of as not just one or the other, hence the “third gender” or alternatively just the falling out of the binary / one or the other kind of thinking when being both).

Either way, thanks for the response - I always like to learn how people think about their gender, it’s interesting to me as I struggle to think about my own gender 😅

If you’re willing, I wonder what the “feeling male” is like for you.

For example, I don’t consider myself bigender or non-binary (maybe I actually am in some technical sense, so I’m open-minded and willing to acknowledge my self-knowledge is limited and subject to revision), but I definitely have what I would characterize as habituated ways of thinking of myself as male, and as I transition and increasingly occupy a female body and social role, I have that kind of “both” experience.

I just tend to not enjoy the "both"ness I feel, I did have a notion even when I was pretty young that I should have been born a girl, and being born a boy was some kind of unfortunate accident 😅 So I tend to think that doesn’t fit a non-binary experience - but since I’ve lived a whole life as a male, it’s hard not to have habituated some attachments or ways of thinking of the self as male, and that can then give me feelings that might fit with being non-binary, though I tend to think it’s habituation for me rather than non-binary-ness, it’s just hard to tell the difference sometimes.

is the distinction between what you’re feeling and non-binary that “non-binary” is like some “third” gender, while what you’re feeling is the two genders at once (not something else, but both)?

I don’t know anything about this, but you seem very aware of what your needs are, and so it’s more a question about the specific facility and their policies - it sounds like you need a facility that would be able to accommodate your needs, and you would want to talk all this through with someone from the facility to ensure your needs can be accommodated reasonably, and then to have contingency plans if things don’t go as promised.

I wish you the best of luck, I hope you are able to share your experiences to help others here - thank you for reaching out, I think this is really important to talk through.

The scrotum and phallus skin is removed and used as a skin graft and it becomes the lining of the neovagina. You don’t want hair in your neovagina. Besides the obvious discomfort with that, there have been cases where hair in the neovagina leads to infections.

Usually surgeons now will cauterize the follicles they find on the skin graft, but that only addresses the hairs growing in that cycle - you need to have removed the hairs over many cycles so new ones don’t come in after the surgery. That’s why it’s best to have cleared all the hair with electrolysis across several cycles - ideally over an entire year (even longer than that would be better because the following year you can kill any that were missed the first year).

it is interesting how JK Rowling hasn’t had the same boycott pressure than Elon Musk and Tesla, I think trans rights are just not as motivating to most people, unfortunately

I went through all of this too, and transition is weird in that it simultaneously decreased and increased my dysphoria.

When I first transitioned I wasn’t bothered by my deadname at all, but after a few months it really started to bother me and I even started to feel weird that I had ever been called that. It’s like the way I thought about the name had been rationalized and seen as “genderless” and just “me”, and only once I started going by a different chosen name did I have the space to see my deadname more objectively - the way it is gendered and used in a gendered way, and how poorly that fit “me”.

Also, yeah, I paid little attention to my voice before I transitioned and once I transitioned and started paying attention to my voice for practical reasons like wanting to pass for safety, I suddenly realized how horrible my voice sounds and how it isn’t “my” voice, etc.

On the other hand, there were also lots of moments of gender euphoria happening - dressing the way I’ve always wanted in public, and integrating as a woman socially was like a dream come true, a dream I had buried and suffocated and tried to kill but which somehow miraculously came to life anyway.

From what I’ve read these are common experiences - I know it seems weird for dysphoria to suddenly appear, but I think as coping strategies like denial and repression melt away, there is some instability as you pay more attention to your body and details that before you successfully ignored.

This is a challenging part of transitioning, but all I can say is that repression really is worse than transitioning and that it does (slowly) get easier. Also, the mental health improvements and joy that come from transitioning are a lot more than I ever could have expected.

I would agree it’s not misogynistic to think JK Rowling is one of the most infamous transphobes, but that wasn’t quite ContraPoints’ argument. I am admittedly sharing the conclusion without providing her argument, and I’m actually in the hospital right now recovering from surgery so my head is a bit fuzzier than usual. If you watch those videos it should cover that territory though, in case you are interested. Either way I get what you mean about Rowling being so famous and influential in her transphobia, I tend to agree with you.

EDIT: it’s the second video, the Witch Trials of JK Rowling that has the argument I’m talking about, the way that women bigots in particular are such popular targets of outrage. The first chapter of that video is entirely about Anita Bryant as an example.

thank you

thanks!! I’ll just be excited to be able to walk around again, being on strict bed rest is a lot more difficult than I expected, lol.

thanks 😊

yes, wait times can be very long and this is a surgery that requires a lot of planning. 6 months isn’t even enough time to get your hair removal finished, generally I see recommendations to have 1 whole year of electrolysis and at least 3 full cycles of hair clearance. That alone is a huge amount of work and time - I had 1 hour electrolysis appointments once a week. When you add in the typical insurance requirements to have been on hormones under the supervision of a doctor for a year and the requirement to get two independent letters from psychologists, you are looking at a lot of appointments with endocrinologists, psychologists, and eventually with the surgery team. It’s a lot - so start now if you think you might even possibly want it.

When I socially transitioned I practically promised myself I wouldn’t get a vaginoplasty, I only wanted an orchi … and that position was fully reversed after 6 months of estrogen. I wish I had taken the possibility of a vaginoplasty more seriously, and that I had started hair removal for that much earlier.

I DM’d you some details. My recommendation is to start electrolysis yesterday, lol - hair removal takes a very long time and it’s best if you can get at least a year of electrolysis so catch all the hair cycles.

thank you!! ❤️

thank you! 💗

I actually opted out so the chaplain couldn’t find me and somehow they still ended up dropping by during my recovery. Luckily this chaplain was pretty chill, it could have been a lot worse - but it was still a stressful event for me and against my explicit wishes and choices.

I wonder - what do you think the purpose of a chaplain is - all of this has made me think more about chaplains and their role. I tend to be cynical and think the worst, that being that chaplains are basically there to try to convert people when they are vulnerable (after a surgery can be a traumatic time, and a significant number of religious conversions occur after a trauma). There is also the opportunity to convert before death, so that might be playing a role too. But I need to actually read up on the history and context, maybe my cynicism is misplaced here.