🫂

omg

didn’t know what you meant at first, but now I see it’s a comment on the TubeFedere site:

As far as I can tell, species dysphoria, otherkin, and related ideas are not related to gender dysphoria and natural variation in sex and gender. They are radically different, and we can’t conflate one with the other (just like we wouldn’t say trans-racial identity is similar or related to transgender identity).

I think the reason you might run into hostility is that the anti-trans movement tries to conflate transgender identity with otherkin identities. The public at large already has trouble accepting a transgender identity, despite the scientific evidence and the established cross-cultural and historical record of transgender identities, it strikes most people as wrong - even the idea of transitioning itself is considered immoral to the majority of Americans even as the majority signal support for gender affirming care. In that context, conflating trans identity with something even harder for people to accept (the idea that someone is authentically a different species, i.e. is not a human in their identity / mind) is a win for the anti-trans movement, who primarily want to show that trans people are illegitimate, indefensible, contrary to nature / reality / truth, and are in some way mentally delusional or ill because of their identity.

Matt Walsh, the far-right anti-trans activist, interviews Naia Okami in What is a Woman, his anti-trans “documentary.” Naia is a part of the furry community and is a trans woman and identifies as a wolfkin, here is a clip I found.

Largely this kind of rhetoric is successful at convincing people that transgender identities are illegitimate.

We know even just transgender visibility generates harm to trans people, like from this interview with the trans legal scholar Florence Ashley in The Scientific American:

Trans culture is more visible today than it has been in the past. Does that help, or is increased visibility stirring up the anti-trans movement?

Florence Ashley: Visibility is very much a double-edged sword. There are good sides to visibility, of course. It helps people realize that they’re trans. You have more access to trans narratives, which gives you more space to understand yourself, and that’s very positive. But at the social and political level, it has been quite negative. We’re seeing a lot more people who vehemently hate trans people, who are even willing to harm trans people. Whereas people who are favorable to trans people largely just leave us alone. And a lot of reforms that we were able to achieve with relative ease, in a less visible manner, are now being rolled back.

The trans backlash and moral panic is partially due to the increased visibility and exposure of the public at large to trans identities, and the right-wing anti-trans activists know they can push that alienation and moral panic further by connecting and conflating transgender identities with people who identify as other species.

All this said, even if the trans movement might have some pragmatic reason to maintain a level of respectability with the public, I don’t want to ignore that respectability politics has a lot of downsides. Respectability politics is the idea that some within the community are more respectable than others (i.e. more palatable to the public), and this often leads to pressure for only those respectable elements to be considered valid or legitimate and to receive publicity and support. Undesirables are identified and ostracized from the group to protect the more respectable minority.

This is precisely how you end up with a concept of transgender people that you commonly see in the media: that trans people immediately and always knew their gender identity, that they communicated their identity as soon as they could speak, that trans children refuse to live as the gender they were assigned and insist to live the other way, and so on. (This narrative was on full display on The Problem With Jon Stewart a couple years ago, here is a clip.)

This narrative does describe some trans people, and notably it describes the trans people the public are most likely to have sympathy for, but it leaves a lot of trans people out of the picture (consequences of this include many trans people never realizing they are trans, and others being gatekept by others and being told they aren’t trans). And even worse, the clinical guidelines for trans healthcare started with gatekeeping rules that aimed to maintain that kind of narrative about trans people. The Harry Benjamin rules were aimed at total integration of trans people into cis society, for example by suggesting trans people lie to cis people about their trans identity, to concoct false stories about a childhood they never had, and to even move to another town or city where nobody knew them from pre-transition.

So while we can’t ignore the rhetorical and political impact that trans visibility has in generating backlash, we also can’t ignore the nightmarish gatekeeping and oppression that results from an overly zealous focus on respectability. This is precisely what fuels transmedicalists and enbyphobia - which does result in people who have entirely legitimate gender identities and rights to gender affirming care to be mistreated or ostracized within their community and excluded from potentially life-saving care by medical gatekeepers.

All this to say, whatever problems there are with respectability politics, this does not make transgender identities and otherkin identities the same. There is an overwhelming medical and scientific consensus that transgender people exist, have valid identities, and that trans-affirming healthcare is safe and effective. There is now a significant body of evidence that explains the causes of gender dysphoria, as well as an extensive record of trans identities throughout history and cultures.

As I understand it, this is not the situation with trans-racial and trans-species identities. We are not in the same epistemic position with these other identities, we do not understand why people have trans-species experiences, we do not have the same evidence about the best ways to approach those identities from a clinical perspective, we do not even have a model for thinking about how a human could possibly know what it is like to have other-animal experiences. The philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote a famous paper called What Is It Like to Be a Bat? which poses problems about the limited capacity for human minds to comprehend other minds, for example to know what it is like to actually be a bat - who have consciousness but have perceptual experiences and qualia that humans will never be able to experience themselves precisely because they are not bats. Nagel’s point is that human cognition allows us to try to imagine what it is like to be a bat (flying, navigating by sonar, eating insects), but this never allows us to actually experience what the bat experiences.

There is a lot to unpack about a claim that someone has a non-human mind inside a human body, and that situation is quite different (in terms of evidence, plausibility, etc.) than claims that a trans woman has the mind or identity of a woman. (It is not surprising to read that otherkin are seen as a kind of religious movement, and the animal identity for many otherkin is explained in terms of a spiritual experience.)

So while it’s easy for me to say that otherkin and similar identities should be tolerated and respected out of simple principles of politeness, I do think they are unrelated to transgender identities and should not be conflated.

While I am not inclined to immediately assume you are trying to mock transgender identities by claiming to be trans-species, I also understand why trans people especially would be sensitive about this in a time of extreme anti-trans backlash and when trans-racial or trans-species identities are being exploited by anti-trans activists to de-legitimize transgender identities.

Online it is especially difficult to tell when someone is intentionally trying to undermine or corrode trust in transgender people, and it can be hard sometimes to discern a well-meaning and genuine otherkin person from a troll who is using an otherkin identity as a wedge, demanding the same tolerance, understanding, and validation in trans spaces as transgender people ask for, while knowing that otherkin identities generate disbelief, aggression, and are used to weaken support for transgender folks. Most otherkin are not trolls, and the overlap between otherkin and transgender identities is strong (especially since the transgender community has larger numbers of neurodivergent and plural people, which overlap heavily with otherkin identities).

tl;dr

• otherkin identities aren’t related to transgender identities,
• we should tolerate & respect otherkin people engaging in good faith (i.e. not trolls),
• hostility towards otherkin from trans people in particular is probably due to otherkin identities being weaponized by anti-trans activists to whip up moral panic about transgender people.

still good to get this above the wall of text I put before it 😄

more people will see it this way

yes, I think it would communicate the wrong idea to people, that you’re critical but from a right-wing perspective.

It’s also a little confusing to me personally, the way “feminazi” has been used in the past and what it conjures in my mind is an overly zealous feminist who corrects people’s politically incorrect language or something like that, similar in concept to something like how “Social Justice Warrior” was a term of abuse for a while.

It is funny to me that TERFs as right-wingers are actually closer to “feminist Nazis” than the original meaning of “feminazi”, lol

I’m not sure there was ever a legitimate concern about social justice movements in the U.S. being genuinely authoritarian, even if we all don’t like change, being corrected by moralists, etc.

All that matters is that you are engaging in good faith and have a good heart - thank you for listening and reading my comments, it means a lot to me ❤️

I’ll be here whenever you want to chat, I know it’s a lot to think about and to process (I spent months working through a lot of this myself, I know what it was like to be on the other side).

Gender essentialism doesn’t make sense, in the end the idea behind essentialism is that “male” and “female” are two categories that are clearly differentiated by a set of essential, inherent characteristics. Basically a woman is someone who meets a set of criteria, and those criteria are never particularly work to actually include all women and exclude all non-women.

Most TERFs are biological essentialists and many will say a woman is someone who produces the large gamete (i.e. eggs, as opposed to sperm). It’s not clear to me that essentialists like this have any sufficient response to the fact that there are very real (even cisgendered) women who are sterile and don’t produce eggs - are they not women because they lack that defining characteristic?

Other essentialist definitions focus on other biological components, like having XX chromosomes, or having a uterus, or the capacity to bear children (again problems for how to make sure sterile women are correctly categorized as women) … None of these definitions work, there are exceptions to all of them because human biology is very complicated and there is a lot of natural variation. (If you’re curious about the science, this Nature article is fairly accessible.)

Another problem with this kind of essentialist thinking is that we clearly operate in a social context where we do identify people as “women” and “men” without knowing their chromosomes, genitals, and so on. (I notice you didn’t answer my question about how you know you have XX chromosomes … I know my chromosomes because I have taken a karyotype test, but it still didn’t tell me anything about my gender.)

Gender dysphoria might have biological causes and might not be curable through therapy or brainwashing, but that doesn’t exactly give us an essentialist account of gender. The biology is also not the only factor, just like gender itself is complex and multi-faceted, the social context plays a role in shaping dysphoria and the distress experienced by trans people. A trans man might feel uncomfortable wearing a dress - whatever biological causes there were for the gender dysphoria did not include specific discomfort with dresses, the dresses are an arbitrary aspect of the way gender manifests in our society. In a society where people would not be put in strict gender roles the shape of dysphoria might look different for trans people than it would in a society where gender is put upon people and enforced.

I don’t conform to the woman stereotype therefore I am not a woman

I don’t think that is accurate, as you point out a tomboy is still a woman - not conforming to stereotypes doesn’t invalidate your gender. You seem to understand this already, so I’m not sure why you make this statement.

I think most people see gender as very important to identity and i dont understand that.

Some people are “agender” and don’t have any notable or strong gender feelings. It’s OK not to understand from a first person perspective what it’s like for people different than yourself. If you’re really hoping to empathize and understand better, one way to help with perspective taking is to read fiction works that take those perspectives - Stone Butch Blues for example might help you understand a trans perspective better.

I might also point out that you likely don’t understand what it’s like for cis men who are very masculine and who enjoy having hairy bodies, broad shoulders, and a penis and so on - but you don’t seem confused by the existence of cis men or their preferences … Maybe your confusion around trans people is similar to confusion you would have with cis men, from your account I could assume it’s general like that.

On a more personal note, it’s interesting the way you talk about gender, it reminds me of what I was like pre-transition. I somewhat hated gender and wished people would just shut up about it, and I wished they would stop gendering me (either way). I didn’t particularly care about my body and I would not have said I experienced anything like “gender dysphoria”. That’s not to say you’re trans or that these perspectives indicate a trans experience, but it is a bit surreal for me to be on the other side of transition and to see how radically different my interpretation of my experiences pre-transition are now. Where before I might have taken gender abolitionist positions and felt some affinity for agender experiences, now I am much more clear about how unconscious gendered preferences impact my life, and while before I coped with those through repression, I just relate to them differently now.

Anyway - feel free to DM me anytime with questions, this is admittedly not the right place to explore these kinds of questions.

Yeah, this is strictly a safe space. I’m happy to continue the conversation in my DMs if you would like, however.

TERF stands for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist”, and originally it designated anti-trans feminists, like Janice Raymond (The Transsexual Empire), Sheila Jeffreys, Mary Daly, Robin Morgan, and others. A lot of these feminists are part of second-wave of feminism. Contemporary TERFs however are arguably poor feminists, and many of them even refuse to identify as feminists as they make alliances with right-wing movements. Basically, TERFs today seem to be more anti-trans than they are feminist. (More here about TERFs if you are interested.)

Since by definition TERFs are anti-trans, they would not agree with “trans women are women” or anything like that, they believe trans women are delusional men and invaders of women’s spaces. You could not be a TERF and believe trans women are women.

I consider myself to be a woman because i have 2 x chromosomes.

Did you have a karyotype test, how do you know you have XX chromosomes in particular? Even so, why do you think having XX chromosomes guarantees being a woman - there are certainly men who have XX chromosomes (for example trans men - I assume if you think trans women are women, you agree that trans men are men).

It seems to me that not only do chromosomes not guarantee a gender, but most people don’t actually know their chromosomes.

If we were being pragmatic, we might say you’re a woman because society perceives and treats you as a woman, but this can be a problematic definition for trans-inclusiveness. Simone de Beauvoir, the famous existentialist philosopher and foundational feminist thinker, in Second Sex, writes that what makes a woman cannot be reduced to just physiology, i.e. she rejects biological essentialism and the idea that something like a uterus or XX chromosomes makes a woman a woman, instead she points to the larger context of the way women are fashioned as subordinate to men and as an “other” in society, some important quotes from Second Sex:

If her functioning as a female is not enough to define woman, if we decline also to explain her through “the eternal feminine,” and if nevertheless we admit, provisionally, that women do exist, then we must face the question: what is a woman? . . . The fact that I ask it is in itself significant. A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male. But if I wish to define myself, I must first of all say, ”I am a woman”; on this truth must be based all further discussion.

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.

In the end I understand Beauvoir to be arguing that there is no inherent thing as being a woman, and that we should instead see view people as primarily human, the very same way that men are often perceived as human first (as the default / universal) and not particularly gendered or othered in their gender.

But this creates a problem for trans identity, and it does not accord well with certain facts about biology - for example, the common belief that gender is just a social construct, which came from feminist thinking and finds its roots in Beauvoir, resulted in the sexologist John Money deciding to have a baby boy whose penis was damaged by circumcision be raised as a little girl - after all, gender is just “socially constructed nonsense” and what does it matter. Money thought it would be better to raise the kid as a girl because it was easier to construct a vagina and give the child a normal life as a girl rather than raise them as a boy without a penis. The baby would never know they were born a boy, and they performed corrective surgery to give the baby boy a vagina and raised him as a little girl without his knowledge. This boy’s name is David Reimer, and he contrary to Money’s theory, he struggled to live as a girl and by the age of 15 rejected being a girl and lived to be a boy.

Now, this is an example of a cis boy who was raised as a girl and who experienced gender dysphoria trying to live as a girl and who eventually realized something was wrong and was able to transition back to being a boy.

What was going on with David Reimer, if gender is just a social construct, why did he struggle so much to live as a girl? He was pressured and expected to be a girl, and he conformed in many ways, but he was particularly rowdy for a girl, and he was, well, boyish.

Well, it turns out there is a growing body of evidence that indicates gender identity is actually a part of our biology, and there have actually been dissections of trans women’s brains that show particular structures in their brains that are more like cis women’s brains in terms of volume and density than cis male’s brains (even when the trans women did not take hormones or transition medically). We now know it’s a lot more complicated than brains just being “male” or “female” and there is a new model called the brain mosaic, so it’s complicated.

But the main take-away is that gender identity is biological not something we can mold with social influence - this is why conversion therapy is not successful, and why the only evidence-based and effective treatment for gender dysphoria that has ever been found is gender affirming care. We also now know that gender dysphoria is genetic, though likely caused by a complex set of traits rather than a single gene.

So why do people change their bodies? They got unlucky and inherited a genetic condition that causes their brain to feel like a different gender from the sex they are assigned upon birth, and that results in discomfort similar to if you took a cis person and tried to raise them as the opposite sex. This is all oversimplification and leaves out a lot of the complexity and diversity of trans experience, but hopefully this helps give you an initial idea.

I’ve thrown a lot at you, but in terms of “what you are” - I can’t answer that, nor can anyone else. Unfortunately nobody can inspect your gender identity, even if they can try to infer your gender from your body and gender expression. And even the inferred gender that society places upon you is not necessarily who you are in inherent sense. There might just not be any essence of what you are, or that gender essence might be too complex to fit with our current gender concepts. The “brain sex” that plausibly explains gender dysphoria in trans people is so complex that it is not clear we could ever construct something like simple categories or a taxonomy of sexes or genders from it, which is why the researchers describe it as a mosaic. It’s not even a spectrum, it’s too complicated.

If you are wondering if you could be a trans man, you could see if your experiences are like other trans men, here are some videos that may help explore that.

You might also find the Gender Dysphoria Bible worth reading, even just to learn more about trans people out of curiosity.

I think most parents are inclined to say there were no signs, even my supportive mother thinks there were no signs even as I can find a childhood full of them. Sometimes I wonder if it’s because she experiences some difficult emotions about not recognizing those signs, or something like that. Hard to tell, though.

Either way, I’m sorry your parents aren’t supportive 🫂

yes, the whole idea that some hobbies are “male” and some are “female” is traditionally sexist / stereotyping. I do suspect there might be some biological role in how some of the gender differences get expressed (like, the way I played with my male-coded toys was different than the way other boys played with them, and I think my lack of interest in toys like trucks and machines related to the way my gender preferences), but the idea that the biology wholly determines these preferences (or worse, that biology determines what you should do) is obviously bunk. As usual, this stuff is extremely complex with biological, social, and psychological factors.

And even so, trans people often occupy fuzzy boundaries in terms of sex and gender, and so it makes sense we would be exactly the cohort that would challenge stereotypes and be the exception to the rule (even while some of us conform entirely to gender expectations). I would imagine the experiences of being raised as boys is likely to impact those psychological and social factors I was talking about, leading many of us to have different experiences and preferences than some cis women. But this is not special to trans people either, cis people are also diverse in their gender and experiences - and as you are pointing out, cis women can and are into cars and motorbikes or other “male” things. Some cis women have affinity for masculine coded things, it’s not like being gender-queer is reserved for people who transition or who identify differently than their assigned sex.

Anyway, I’m rambling - but I agree that gatekeeping based on stereotypes is ick, lol.

There is a really old narrative that the only valid trans women are people who as young children refused boyhood and only wanted to play with girl-coded toys and so on. Even though we know that’s not true now, the narrative remains strong and it’s how the mainstream media portrays trans women still, etc.

So it’s not surprising the therapist might be really worried her patient might be making a mistake if they don’t match the narrative she has come to accept as the paradigm of a valid trans woman. She just isn’t familiar with the fact that lots of trans women, probably most in fact, have “normal” boyhoods and are able to socially adapt to living as a boy. A lot of times the problems don’t start until puberty, for example. Even David Reimer, the cis boy that was forced to grow up as a girl, didn’t have any awareness about gender problems until ages 9 - 11, and didn’t actually insist and start living as a boy until 15. That’s with a cis person that we know was born a boy.

A lot of these bizarre hesitations and extreme expectations, like a child at 3 - 4 years old being able to articulate and fight for their gender identity, just come from the discomfort cis people feel about trans people - when people are more worried that a cis person might accidentally transition than they are about preventing further changes to a trans person’s body, it shows a clear bias and preference for cis people over trans on no other basis than their being cis and trans. Wrong puberty is wrong puberty, and if a cis person accidentally gets gender affirming care that causes them to undergo the wrong changes - well, that’s exactly the default that will happen to trans people without the intervention of gender affirming care! The therapist should be worried about their patient not getting on HRT soon enough, about the harms that might be caused by delaying life-saving treatments.

Even so, your therapist should also know that doubts and hesitation are very common with trans people. The second group of psychologists I had to see to get an independent letter for vaginoplasty talked about how it’s very common for trans people to even experience regret and doubts immediately after the surgery and how those tend to melt away after a few months, etc. It just really sounds like your therapist is not up to date with current clinical guidelines and not familiar with trans patients generally (this is unfortunately common with therapists and doctors, tbh).

And HRT doesn’t melt your muscles away like butter, especially not if you’re working out or remaining active. I’m over a year on HRT and my calves are still so muscular they make me want to puke, I would love to lose muscle mass, and it’s just not happening. I think I have lost a little strength in my biceps, but I have also completely stopped a lot of the activity that maintained those muscles, in addition to the estrogen.

You know cis women are able to build significant muscle right? You can definitely build and maintain muscle while on estrogen, you might just find it requires some minor adjustments to diet and exercise - increasing protein and increasing weight or frequency to maintain the same bulk. It might just require more effort to achieve the same results that you found easy to achieve on testosterone.

Either way, I wouldn’t be too worried about this - maintaining your muscles on estrogen is within your control. If that’s your only hesitation starting HRT I think you will be fine, there’s no reason to go with low doses and so on.

Also, so weird that you’ve heard of going to Planned Parenthood as DIY, that’s wild, lol. It sorta makes sense to me because informed consent feels like you’re deciding for yourself and it feels like eliminating the gatekeeper, but it’s still very much under the supervision of a doctor and with safety-regulated hormones.

feminazi is a right-wing pejorative term for feminists, I wouldn’t be using that term (even for TERFs) unless you want to be perceived as right-wing.

yeah, agreed - TERFs are mostly not feminists

but I do think the anti-trans movement that styles itself as feminist picks up a lot of average people who are like I’m describing, middle-aged second-wave feminists, and they are duped into anti-trans positions. However, the ideological core of TERFs is now anti-feminist as far as I can tell.

yes, please don’t take my post seriously, it’s meant in jest 😜

if we were being serious, I would claim TERFs don’t qualify as feminists, they abandoned feminism when they started working with misogynist right-wingers (just like the SWERFs in the '80s) and started making essentialist claims about women that most feminists reject. It’s hardly surprising when TERFs like Posie Parker (the woman who popularized “adult human female” as an anti-trans slogan) started off with feminist styled transphobia, and as soon as she started collaborating with right-wingers suddenly she identifies as “not a feminist” and started calling herself a “woman’s rights activist” instead. (I could be getting the timeline mixed up, so take this with a grain of salt - but I think the point still stands about how TERFs quickly become “not feminists” in the name of their anti-trans views. The transphobia is much more important than whatever feminism they might have had.)

Some things I wish your therapist knew:

1. being masculine and enjoying hobbies that are male coded don’t invalidate your gender, e.g. there are women body-builders, there are also legitimate trans women who have male-coded hobbies - there are also tomboy trans women and so on
2. HRT can be diagnostic - you can stop after taking it for a couple months without any long term changes and that time on HRT can be useful to help evaluate whether long-term HRT is for you or not
3. some trans people don’t ever take HRT but socially transition and live full-time presenting as their gender; some people take HRT and don’t socially transition - transition and HRT are related but not the same

It sounds like your therapist might have outdated information about trans people and transitioning, for example expecting strong commitment and fully girlmoding before starting HRT sounds like old Benjamin rules to me. WPATH guidelines have changed significantly and no longer require “full-time real-life experience” before starting hormones.

All that said, your body like many bodies, probably will need sex hormones or you might experience some symptoms. Starting HRT and then just stopping is probably not a realistic way to approach this, but I do know some enbies who maintain low doses of estrogen to achieve their goals. Still, if you go that route you will want to watch out for signs of menopause and avoid hormone levels that are too low. Your experiences and desires might also shift once you start HRT, they certainly did for me.

This is a minor point, but going to Planned Parenthood and getting HRT is called “informed consent”, not DIY. DIY is when you buy your hormones from a grey market without a prescription (or homebrew it yourself), which doctors see as more risky. At least your hormones through Planned Parenthood are sourced from a regulated pharmacy, for example.

Either way, congrats!!

DIY enanthate vials usually have 40 mg / mL, so 0.15 mL should be 6 mg?

Using the injectable estradiol simulator, this is what levels would be estimated to be over time:

Notice how it takes nearly a month to even get to a steady state … EEn has a half-life of 5 - 7 days, so it takes a week to peak and another week to eliminate. This is compared to estradiol valerate (EV) which has a half-life of 3.5 days, so EV peaks faster and higher, and eliminates much faster than EEn.

When I first started EV injections, I could feel changes the night I injected, but I didn’t feel any obvious benefit or mood change until the third day or so.

But it’s important to note that not all trans women react to estrogen the same. Some feel no difference at all. Others actually have worsened dysphoria.

So early on you are not likely to notice many physiological changes. In my first month or so of HRT, the earliest changes I noticed were softening skin, changes to body odor (less spicy / less smelly), and fewer involuntary erections overnight and in the morning when I wake up. I wonder if you will start noticing these soon, too.

EDIT: I had sore breasts pretty quickly, too - I think it was a matter of weeks, but I was taking EV which brought my E levels up quickly. I would expect breast soreness in 1 - 3 months with EEn, but I’m not certain - I bet others have written about their experiences starting with EEn.

Pre-transition, I just wore cheap silicone rings because they were pragmatic.

As soon as my egg cracked, before I was passing or on HRT, my partner put a ring on my finger and had it resized to fit my fingers. Around 8 months-ish on HRT had to get it resized again when my fingers became slimmer.

Honestly, I think it’s mostly a matter of money, your gender presentation, and how much this matters to you and your partner.

I was fortunate that my spouse already had a ring on hand, I was already socially transitioned and presenting as fem full time, and I was fortunate enough to be able to afford the resizing - so it all worked out for me.

If I hadn’t fully socially transitioned, I might have only worn the ring in certain situations.

If I didn’t have the money, I might have waited and saved up money for just one resizing.

If we didn’t already have a ring, we might have waited and saved up for a ring.

It’s up to you and your circumstances, though - there is no one way to handle this. 😊