How much pressure do you feel to transition?
Just curious: How many of you gender non-conforming girls/women feel pressure (from peers, media, whatever) to “transition” to male? Is it worse in some geographic areas or countries? There’s quite a bit of pressure in more urban or “blue” states here in the US. What’s your experience, girls on the front line?
(FtM perspective (sort of. I don’t know if that fits anymore. I stopped giving a shit a while ago))
I feel like one of the most dangerous aspects of the pressure to transition is that, often, it does not feel like you are being pressured. There are not many people saying ‘oh, you don’t make a good woman—transition!’ (though I have seen more and more of this over the last year or two), but rather there is a great deal of gentle coaxing and ‘innocent’ mistakes and assumptions (the preferred pronouns thing comes to mind here, or the stories I’ve heard from butch lesbians about being asked WHEN they plan to transition).
Obviously, there is and always has been a pressure for GNC women to become more gender conforming. Ten, twenty years ago, that pressure was for such people to act more like what society expects from a woman. But now, there is another option, and it is a disturbingly tantalizing one. Transition is an instantaneously appealing option, especially for those of us who deal with sex dysphoria and are promised (falsely) that it is a solution.
When you see the idea of transition or IDing as something other than woman, you are presented with so many new ideas about who you can be—FtM, NB, GQ, demi, or whatever other language is going ‘round the circles these days. And the moment you mention your desire to explore outside of what is traditionally associated with womanhood, you get so much support. Whenever you mention that you switched pronouns or came out to your parents or your best friend or that you talked to your doctor about T, you get patted on the back and told what a great job you’re doing and how people are proud of you. I can’t imagine how appealing this level of support is for a teenager.
(and don’t get me wrong, most people who offer support are not doing it with malicious intent. They are doing it out of the kindness of their hearts, and some of the most loving, generous, kind people I have met in my life are transmen. It’s a wider social problem that extends far beyond these individuals or even the trans community as a whole)
And worse, no one ever questions it. No one questions it! That is the scariest thing about this surge in trans politics. No one questions your self diagnosis. It’s outright taboo. During my transition, I saw a therapist. I had two doctors prescribing my testosterone. I had a third doctor aware of my transition, but treating a separate medical issue. I came out to my friends, my family, my employers. The only time that the motivation for my decision to transition was questioned was by my father. When I came out to him, he asked me if this was about liking women.
(It wasn’t—I like men—but it’s a perfectly valid question given the current state of trans politics)
I don’t know exactly where I was going with this, but I almost feel like ‘pressure’ is too simple a word for the phenomena of this massive spike in transition or female disidentification that we’ve seen over the last few years. It’s almost more akin to a mass psychogenic illness.
Thank you, genderdeceit.