376
Transgender rights are under attack. But trans people 'just want to thrive and survive.'
(www.usatoday.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023
376 points (89.3% liked)
News
23640 readers
3316 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I mean the difference is likely not based out of a difference in the number of trans people but in the cultural risk one has in living out of the closet. Destigmatizing left handedness saw a sudden generation jump in people who were left handed. If you don't think you are likely to be accepted you struggle in darkness.
The covid bump has another possible explanation. My trans nature long existed in the shadow. My industry is such where it's all short term employment and causing your team any friction could mean falling to the bottom of the employment pool. I didn't try to be out because it came with drawbacks. Coming out to people is also the process of onboarding everyone and that transition period where people know but are still fucking up your name and pronouns takes a lot of your mental energy. It some ways it sucks less when people don't know they are hurting you. Then it's just not their fault. Once they know the struggle to switch how they think of you is plain. It's obvious they don't think of you as your gender, they just are faking it until they do and that disparity draws more attention to your own body and presentation and the uphill battle of true acceptance even if they are theoretically on board with trans issues. My Mom STILL fucks up my name and pronouns and even though she loves me it's like an admission that she will NEVER actually see me as I see myself. It's difficult to do that and work a soul crushing job at the same time so it was something I did one person at a time and I was a fucking hot mess in the process.
Then Covid happened and I was isolated in my cohort of friends and family to whom I was spottily out to. I had the time to DO the work and have the conversation and be the hot mess. I figured out I was trans back when I was 21 but there was a fifteen year gap before I came out to people outside because it seemed like a monumental task where I would risk losing a huge chunk of my relationships, risk my career and still have to juggle going to work every day even when I felt like dying. But since people started talking about it and showing trans issue support it gave me hope that there would be light on the other side. So by the time covid came around I was half-out.
But then during covid I got to live as myself full time. It's like having an allergy you are exposed to all the time. You don't realize exactly how shitty you feel until you stop being exposed to it and you realize that your capacity to feel generally more energetic and healthy is actually way higher than you thought... And returning to exposure makes it hit that much harder.
Returning to work I realized how bad I actually felt and felt more compelled to do something about it. Having the time to actually do the work, not on myself but on the people around me, gave me a taste of what it feels like to be healthy and it's hard to forget being actually happy and then willingly just go back to being miserable. From the outside it might look like being cooped up caused me to be trans but it's the opposite. Being cooped up gave me time to properly socially transition where the risks were lowered.
Probably. I ask cis folk about this pretty frequently because while I understand being trans I don't actually know what it is like to be cis, it is just sort of assumed mutual experience amongst cis folk. Trans is my lived experience and our society insists we need to defend our needs in ways that make sense to them but cisness is just as interesting. I encounter two camps. The majority of cis people I ask this question to just don't feel strongly about their body on the axis of their sex. They might feel dysmorphias around not looking good by the rubric of their sex that's more about how the privilege of beauty or ugliness impacts their lives.
I have also encountered a minority of cis people who are actually decently euphoric about their gender. Sometimes that has to do with the cultural bits of their experience and sometimes not. The one thing they have in common is they actually just really love what they got going on. Being male or female is an integral part of their self identity.
My personal COMPLETELY unsubstantiated posit that these two versions of cisness are distinct and the with the euphoric version they are basically experiencing the key component of binary trans nature with the one factor different being the body and mind are in alignment and not at odds.
Some of the non-binary agender experience seems almost like an extreme version of what you experience where the concept of gender matters so little internally that it's outside application to aspects of your life become a complete nuisance as if becomes an obstacle to people recognizing the actual person you are as they make too many assumptions about you based on a factor which is personally meaningless.
Not to say this is key to all agender folk. Some folk just react poorly to having any sexual characteristics at all. Non-binary as it's own spectrum is internally made up of such disparate presentations it is like comparing peaches to green peppers. Both are fruit but they practically nothing alike in experience.
The thing is in both cases it's hard for cis folk to really empathize with the trans experience because they either can't get a handle on what it is to care about gender at all or they take their comfort as a given and don't realize just how bad it is to live without that source of confidence.