The San Bernardino County Sun, California, July 13, 1956
don't use "ftm" it's outdated and offensive. it implies that the trans person was their agab, which we never were. i was always a boy, never a girl who became a boy.
i’m 35 years old. i’ve been IDing as trans or something similar to trans for nearly 20 years. i was probably calling myself FTM while you were playing tag during recess, anon.
i WAS a girl. i IDed as a girl early in my life. i recognized myself as a girl, called myself a girl, lived as a girl, and was a girl. who then IDed as a man. hence, F t M.
spend more time worrying about yourself instead of strangers on the internet, anon.
sorry not sorry if this comes off as needlessly hostile, but i’ve been getting a lot of shit from a lot of teenage trans kids about the language i use to describe my own goddamn experience, and i’m growing real fuckin weary of it.
i have elder trans friends who call themselves transsexuals and transvestites and trannies. are you going to seriously go to a 60-year-old trans person who survived the reagan years and tell her she’s not allowed to use certain language to describe herself because it might offend the delicate sensibilities of some teenager on the internet?
do yourself a favor and log off, find some real-life trans people who are over the age of 20 or 25, and spend time talking to them instead of getting all holier-than-thou at random strangers on tumblr.
It may be weird to encounter because it’s not the trans narrative that the media sells to us as ‘the only valid way to be trans’, but the 'I always knew I was x’ is not all-encompassing.
Anon there are more people than you think who were girls who grew up into men, or boys who grew up into women, or girls or boys who grew up to be nonbinary. There is a rather obscure theory that girl and boy are distinct genders from man and woman and while the most common trajectory is that boys grow into men and girls grow into women it’s not the rule.
Let people define themselves.
also if you think genderfluid people are real and you’re not just humoring us, you by definition have to allow that gender can change over time. I was a girl once. I am not a girl now.
Chiming in with solidarity to OP.
I feel very protective of my former identity BECAUSE there’s so little room in the Mainstream Trans Narrative ™️ for allowing gender to change.
I was a girl. Now I’m genderqueer. Maybe later I will find different words for myself.
There has to be room for all of us in the trans community or there’s no point to any of this.
Ive been here long enough to see words like ftm/mtf, afab/amab, transmale/female, trans man/womanall go through the cycle of ppl telling you to “Dont use X word its out dated. Now use this Y word”. Only for a year or two pass and suddenly “Y word is outdated. Now use Z word” like yall this is exhausting. Just because a word is old doesn’t automatically make it a slur or offensive.
least favorite genre of post on here has gotta be “having mental illness doesn’t excuse bad behavior” from people with depression/anxiety, who mistakenly believe everyone with psychosis is simply suffering from distorted thinking like they are.
i have the kind of bipolar that causes psychosis under the wrong conditions and it is radically different from the distorted thinking i have when manic or depressed. “distorted thinking” is “there’s nothing wrong with stealing those groceries from a stranger’s car, they won’t catch you and you need it more than them”. “psychosis” is “you’re not stealing those groceries in that stranger’s car, they belong to you and those people are just holding them”. (never mind that “i haven’t eaten in days and they can afford a car” morally complicates either situation for a moment.)
i have been in a state where i earnestly believed things that were radically untrue and they lead me to cause harm to others. these were not minor distortions in an otherwise accurate picture of the world, they were fundamentally incorrect pictures of the world. some of them were fairly innocuous and are largely water under the bridge. some of them were serious and i still feel shame about them now. but i have also seen people hounded to the ends of the earth over shit they did in a delusional state which would be utterly out of character while compos mentis and it feels cosmically unfair.
Holy shit the notes are like magnetically repulsed from the point
Mental illness can and does often mitigate responsibility, excuse behaviour, and morally exempt you from “accountability” (social debt). You can’t voice agreement with the op and then add, “Well but of course this doesn’t make psychosis an excuse.” Yea, if you were delusional to the point you had no fucking clue what you were doing then it damn well does, that is the entire point
Anonymous
