Anonymous asked:
were you ever a genderist and what changed your mind
I never believed in nonbinary genders, but I was what I think they like to call a truscum? I believed in brain sex, so I thought dysphoria was caused by a mismatch between brain and body. To me, phrases like “trans women are women” referred to brain sex, but I thought it was common knowledge that their body was still the other sex, and that homosexuals would not be attracted to them pre-transition. I was supportive of dysphoric people having full access to transition, but I was always very skeptical about the number of people I saw IDing as trans in the late 2010s; I thought they were trenders, and that “true” trans people existed. I was very aware of detransitioners, and as time went on I began to see more and more, which was unsurprising and upsetting to me. I always felt that transition should be the last step taken after verifying that someone was truly dysphoric. It did not occur to me that dysphoria could have external causes, because I would not have considered that dysphoria. I always thought men and women should be able to dress however they wanted, but I also thought trans women who did not perform femininity (and as such had no chance of passing) were unlikely to be “true trans”. I did not fully conceptualize the distinction between sex and gender, so I was almost farther from peaking than your average “tucute”.
What changed my mind was the realization that my beliefs were a) NOT based in scientific reality (brain sex isn’t real) and b) that “trans women are women” did not mean what I thought it did. My perspective had always been that I was a lesbian because I liked “people who looked like women”, and so if a trans women could pass so completely that I wouldn’t be able to tell, I could be attracted to them. Of course, this is impossible, and I did not have the experience to understand that an inverted penis cannot ever come close to what women possess. I didn’t understand the horrifying complications that can result from taking cross-sex hormones and having genital surgery. And when I was faced with the reality that “she doesn’t pass as a woman” was NOT considered a good enough reason to reject a trans woman, it all came crumbling down. I was told, by people who claimed to be my friends, that my attraction to my butch (now ex) girlfriend was equivalent to someone’s attraction to a nonpassing transwoman (WHAT), that my beliefs were deeply hurtful regardless of whether they were true, that being a lesbian meant being attracted to ALL kinds of women because it was about internal feelings. And I realized that all the reasons I thought nonbinary genders were bullshit also applied to binary transgenderism. I started looking at what the “terfs” I’d found myself agreeing with on occasion were saying, and I realized they were saying exactly what I’d thought for such a long time. For the first time in a very long time, I didn’t feel alone.
