"you were always a man and you'll never really be a woman"

joke's on you i was a blend of twink, art school hipster, hikkikomori, and feminist academic who was passing herself off as a girl online from 14 and medically transitioned ASAP after undergrad

i've got the chromosomes and the manufacturer equipment and what i am now can be debated if you're rude, sure, but coming of age rituals for boys are present in lots of cultures for a reason and i do not rate "man" by any of those standards nor have i ever.

behaviorally, culturally, and for the most part hormonally i have literally never been what any reasonable sociologist or anthropologist would call an "adult man" and i promise i am as vexed by the black box of manhood as anyone who has never been one

re detransitioning, even if i actually wanted to do it i wouldn't even really know where to begin. for the most part womanhood (as understood by the culture i grew up in) comes pretty naturally to me, and i was awful at faking even low stakes childhood masculinity

appearance and clothing aside, it would be INFINITELY harder to learn how to pass myself off as a man than it was to stop hiding being a woman. the handful of times i've tried all i could think to do was be rude and playfully misogynistic, which is no way to live

thinking about this because of what happened in the UK, and that stupid vanity fair article that's dropping soon, and janice raymond's idea of morally mandating transness out of existence, and the idea that ~respecting my identity~ is some kind of lethal tyranny

passing isn't the be-all, end-all, of course, and it's always precarious and conditional, but i'm not the one who called myself "ma'am" and "miss" on the phone and at drive-throughs before i transitioned. i don't tell people what to call me now.

i seized the sovereignty of my body, changed it very slightly because its configuration made me miserable, started wearing the clothes i wanted to wear and acting the way i wanted to act, and the vast majority of people who encounter me go, "oh, hey, a woman"

the only people who fuck it up have known me since i was very young, due more to inertia and social autopilot than anything, or people who would like me to not be what i am, which, considering how i am gendered all other times, can only be naked and willful malice

TERFs and fascists (but i repeat myself) and reactionaries don't want me to stop taking hormones, get a double mastectomy, wear suits every day, cut my hair, and insist on correcting the huge number of people who would assume i'm a butch lesbian and call me "she"

if i did those things i still wouldn't be a man. i would be, politely, a small, melancholy, fey little queer or, impolitely, a sissy faggot, and the people who hate me for being trans also hate men who are like that! can't win for all the losing, so the best movie is not to play

i am what i am. i'm not gonna organize a struggle session if who you see when you look at me deviates from my sense of self, but i'm also not stupid and i know an honest mistake from the tip of a genocidal iceberg

post-script: i have been in bed with enough TERFs (i know, but i was young) and had my DMs slid into by enough fascists that i know they're telling on themselves more than anything, and isn't being punished for being desired the most Woman Quality of all? i ask you

reminded of this passage from infect your friends and loved ones

they are not afraid that lesbians or fags are disappearing. they are not afraid children might be harmed or led astray. the thought of us turns them on but, as our dialect of personhood remains unincorporated into fascist grammar, their arousal is a temptation into unpersonhood

what else COULD one do but seek to annihilate the caste of incubi and succubi gnawing at the edges of a brain which has found a comfortable place for itself in the brutal, racialized machinery of empire? existential threats require existential responses

anyway I'm looking forward to transness being integrated into the nationalist project so I can get my boot on the neck of the true sex/gender untouchables: onceler kinnies