Have any queer vibes to share? Here’s your place! 
Talk about what’s happening queerly in your life - like coming out, getting HRT, questioning, and all that good stuff.
No cishets allowed! 
Have any queer vibes to share? Here’s your place!
Talk about what’s happening queerly in your life - like coming out, getting HRT, questioning, and all that good stuff.
No cishets allowed!
bruh i am not doing well. found the notes from surgery in the hospital patient portal and read through every step. cried at work, felt lost in a fog, and i feel so detached still
i said i would at least try to dilate regularly but every time i plan on it i fail. it’s probably been three weeks since i last dilated
Look, i get that this is painful for you and you need to vent, i understand and respect that, and i feel super fucking bad for posting this, but could you please put your future posts about this in spoiler tags? I’ve completely stopped posting on here about how i’m struggling through the approval process for my own surgery entirely out of consideration for you, and this happens to come at a time when the entire coverage of gender affirming surgeries through the public healthcare system in my country is under attack,
CW: discussion of gatekeeping, sui***idality, surgery, bottom dysphoria, legal struggles
while some of my friends are openly losing their will to live because they do not know if they can ever afford their surgeries and live dysphoria-free when they have to pay out of pocket for it, while my own case file is lost somewhere in a buerocratic limbo with the threat of termination looming overhead, and the best case scenario for me is that i will still have to wait for over a year until i get the genitals i need to live a dignified life, if it ever comes to that in the first place,
and then i have to see posts like this in a thread that should be a safe space for people in my situation. That’s just too fucking much. I can’t handle that any longer. It fucking hurts every time and it’s not getting better and nobody else is saying anything about this.
Once more, i can relate to your pain, and you have as much right as i do to share your story here. That’s valid and ok. I’m not denying that, i do not want to belittle or downplay your experience even when experiences like yours are actively instrumentalized to harm our community and me. That’s not your fault, not your intention and you shouldn’t receive any blame for that. I’m just saying that what you are posting is highly triggering material for many other trans folks for the reasons i’ve outlined above and you shouldn’t just put something like that out there without an appropriate warning.
this is also my community, i’m not going to be curbing what i post. anyone else is welcome to post their experiences as well. there are many good outcomes with surgery and there is 1-2% that aren’t and are belittled and asked to be quiet by everyone. it’s not happening. why do you think i’m not in your community now? i’m still trans. i still take estrodial every day and i’ll still be trans when i (hopefully) get phallo one day. that doesn’t negate my identity or exclude me from the community
also to add on, in no way am i bothered at all or have i ever asked for people to not post about getting surgery. i’m happy for people making progress and my heart breaks for people who are gatekept
I wasn’t asking you to “curb yourself”, i was opening up and trying to have a conversation about why your posts are nauseating and rage inducing to read for me and if you could set a spoiler tag. Didn’t expect a hexbear mod to react like that to a request like this, but i know where i’m at now, thanks a lot for that insight.
you were genuinely being transphobic to me in your response and you’re trying to moralize to me now. that’s pretty shitty
consider reading my edits and doing any self crit as to why you see me outside of the trans community
I’ve edited that part now. As far as i’m concerned you can leave the quote up unaltered so people understand our exchange or delete it, i don’t mind it either way. I get how hurtful that sentence is in your situation and i’m genuinely sorry i made that mistake. Because that’s what it was, a mistake. Not an expression of some transphobic belief that excludes people with regret over a transition step, because that’s not a belief i hold and i ask you to please take this in good faith, not because i want to get out of this but because i do not want you to walk away from this with the impression that somebody here is trying to invalidate you for your struggles. I was at no point trying to make that kind of statement, i used the wrong possessive pronoun in that one sentence because i was referring to my local community of people i know irl, in person, who live in my jurisdiction and face the same specific legal and medical situation as me. Not our global trans community of all trans people, but the specific people i’m personally in community and organizing with. THAT is the entire reason i originally wrote “my” instead of “our”. I’m not saying that to excuse the choice of words, it was wrong regardless, you’re absolutely justified in finding it exclusionary, it is guaranteed to come off like that on your end and once more, i am sorry for the pain that has caused you on an already shitty day. I really am. I just feel the need to clarify so this does not become more painful for both of us than it has already been.
Edit: To put this into context, i’ve spent half of the evening discussing a recent court order that could nullify cost coverage for any and all gender affirming care in my country, and if this gets through this could mean it gets nullified indefinitely because we’re about to slide headfirst into fascism again, i’ve had to talk a friend out of spiraling into sui***al ideation because he does not know how to get mastek when this gets through, i get anxiety attacks over never having the sex life that i want because of some transphobic judges because vaginoplasty will never be affordable to me if my insurance stops covering it, i get more thought spirals thinking about all of my friends and lovers who are not yet as deeply into in the entire inhumane gatekeeping ordeal as me and have much higher chances of being affected by this development than me. I realize in hindsight it was a really bad idea to go to another trans person who was having a probably much more distressing day and tell her to pay more mind to the problems of me and people around me when she already has way too much on her plate, but i could not keep what i wrote in my original post to myself. I just couldn’t. That was just too much for me, and i still have to leave that up.
I’ve been thinking about how to respond to this and, unfortunately, I really do think you see my struggle as lesser than trans people getting surgery for the first time. Even though I’m struggling to convince therapists to write me new letters for gender affirming surgery (working on a second letter now) and will struggle to find a surgeon willing to do phallo when I’ve already had vaginoplasty, that seems to be hurtful in some way? I don’t see the parallel at all between what you’re dealing with. I’m dealing with it too. I may not even convince the other therapist to write me a new letter. What then? I want to have sex again without using a strap on. I want to feel good in my body too. Why does that strike such a different chord than what you and your friends are going through?
I never said anywhere it strikes a different chord at all. You being able to get phallo is fundamentally the same struggle about healthcare and bodily autonomy every other trans person seeking gender affirming care goes through, i do not see a difference there, it’s all the same fight to inhabit a body that matches one’s gender identity. And that should never work along a predefined pathway of the “correct” way to transition or be misconstrued as having to fall within a binary, cisnormative, endonormative understanding of how bodies are supposed to look like within a gendered context. The states of our body and how we perceive them do not allow others to draw conclusions about our gender identity. That’s up for ourselves alone to decide, not for anybody else. I’m not denying any of these positions. My approach to trans, inter and nonbinary liberation is full acceptance of self identification and bodily autonomy, and that fully includes recognizing that people may change their mind about specific transition steps without that invalidating their gender identity and without voiding their future access to gender affirming care. A truly gatekeeping-free approach isn’t even possible without that part, without recognizing that in some cases, it’s necessary to try a certain step and then, afterwards, be able to correct it again in the unlikely case it didn’t work as intended or expected. That regret can happen should neither restrict access to gender affirming care nor sideline reconstructive treatments for people with regret. Regret should not be weaponized against you, it should not be weaponized against me, it should have no bearing on the care either of us receive. That isn’t what this is about.
The reason i asked you about using spoiler tags is the simple fact that issues regarding dysphoria / gender incongruence, body image etc. can routinely be difficult and painful to other trans people. This applies to all kinds of subjects and does not touch upon the validity of these feelings. It applies especially when these feelings resonate with the reader in some way - if your struggle was entirely unrelated to mine, how could it bother me to read about it? Why would that hurt me? Why would i care? Like i said upthread, i routinely spoiler my own dysphoria posts because i know from personal experience that kind of material can exacerbate dysphoric symptoms in other trans people and lead directly to painful dysphoric episodes. I don’t know if this is as bad for you as it is for me, we all react differently and have different strategies to handle these feelings, but back when i still used reddit, i had to unsub from entire trans subreddits because they worsened certain forms of dysphoria in me, to the point i had to talk it though with my therapist. But at the same time, trans people absolutely need to vent about such issues. For many of us, there are days where we just need to scream into the void how much we hate the parts of ourself that cause us pain. That’s perfectly normal, valid and necessary. From all i can tell,
CW NSFW stuff, bottom dysphoria, bodily functions
me getting nauseous when i feel my balls, me feeling anguish and frustration when i can’t be fingered when my friend is touching me, me feeling that my shaft shouldn’t exist and that my clit is sitting in the wrong place and that i can’t even pee in the right way
is not fundamentally different from what you experience post surgery. It just relates to having or not having certain parts and how these parts are arranged, but the feelings are fundamentally the same. That’s why your accounts get to me in the first place. For me, having to read about your surgery regret actively worsens my own bottom dysphoria in complex, roundabout, but very tangible ways. That does not mean your regret is wrong in any way, or that i want to prevent you from expressing it, it just means that it is distressing to me when it pops up out of the blue, that it had gotten to the point where i was mildly anxious to read through the weekly queer thread because of it, and that it was emotionally devastating to me when i came across it on thursday evening, after all i dealt with on that day. And my normal reaction to that is to just spoiler that stuff so that people can still post it freely whereas others can simply scroll past it without having to read it. To me, that’s a completely normal way to keep online trans communities safe and accessible for everybody, to give everyone the room we need. It’s in no way different from any other post about bottom dysphoria, i see it as perfectly normal practice to put a CW on all of these accounts.
If that’s not how you want to handle these things as a mod of this comm, that’s fine with me. I get that now. It’s just not what i would have expected here, i seriously thought that my request was completely within the ordinary and i’m sorry it still makes you feel hurt and belittled. I feel especially sorry that it ties so strongly into how you are treated in the medical system. I can relate way too well to that, i think many of us do, and i just wish i could reverse this entire exchange because of it. I should have thought twice before … no, that’s not right. I sat in front of that original post for almost an hour because i was unsure how to word it. I did not think twice about it, i mulled it over again and again, unsure how to approach it just like i’m unsure how to approach this post and i came to the wrong conclusion. I thought i could write that in a way that does not hurt you, and i was wrong about that. I hope i am right this time.