Can’t say I ever fully bought that someone can change their sex. I knew about the tiny percentage of what we used to call transsexual people who deeply hated the bodies they were born in and just wanted to appear as the opposite sex without making much of a fuss about it, back when you had to go through actual therapy and so on to transition, and I was cool with that even if I didn’t get it.
I was around on Tumblr a decade ago and when I started seeing non-binary come up, that was instant alarm bells for me. I’ve never “felt like a woman”, I don’t even know what that means. I just am a woman. It’s not a feeling, it’s a biological fact. So this idea that if you’re not sufficiently feminine or masculine you’re something else pissed me off from the beginning. It’s so regressive, as someone who had a very “no such thing as male or female interests” upbringing with lots of family members who don’t adhere to gender roles, not in a “fuck the system!” show-off way but just in doing whatever they wanted regardless of sex.
Basically I don’t really care about the single-sex space stuff (nor do I call myself a TERF because I have issues with modern feminism and actually like men) but I hate the rebirth of strict gender roles through this new transgender lens, and especially telling children they need to fit into a strict girl box or boy box in all their appearance, behaviour and interests or they’re something other than what they were born as. Also I’ve always been quite critical of the beauty industry and plastic surgery, and I see transgender stuff as an extreme version of people changing their bodies instead of learning to accept them as they are.
Oddly, what really, really peaked me from a sort of “I don’t like it but whatever” to “I actively oppose this” was what happened to this site last summer. I just like laughing at people doing dumb shit, that’s why I come here. I don’t see it as different from how most celebrity gossip sites used to be. But seeing how the media and activists conspired to blatantly lie and paint this site as an evil Nazi far-right den that forces people to kill themselves just because a lot of the biggest sideshows on the internet are trans and they are above criticism? Despite the fact that several of the largest parts of this site are dedicated to making fun of alt-right figures? That as Null says, they were willing to destroy the infrastructure of the Internet for that? Nope. I can no longer trust the mainstream on this issue.
That led me to educate myself on what actually goes on when someone physically transitions and I think, as people here know, if most people knew what it actually entails, public opinion would be very different. I assumed they still had to go through psychological evaluations, live as the desired gender for years, all the stuff they used to have to do. The fact that where I live, as well as in many states you just have to go to a gender clinic, say you’re transgender and they’ll give you the hormones? The horrible outcomes from the surgeries and how the surgeons involved don’t seem to care or be able to fix it? That so many of them are left unable to pee normally or with massive infections and deformities? That most people’s mental health doesn’t improve (probably because their actual issues just get blamed on gender feels)? The detransitioner stories from girls who just felt uncomfortable going through puberty and got conned into thinking being an uwu boy would solve all their problems? How is any of this acceptable? How is the process to get on antidepressants or Accutane subject to more vetting than getting on hormones?!
Problem is once you become aware, you’re like, what can I even do about it? Guess the best thing to do is just laugh?
