I’ve ended up in a few conversations recently where someone has basically said to me “I don’t mind trans people I just don’t get it.” My response is along the line of “the body fucks up and has birth defects all the time, some people are born with a cleft lip or an extra finger or shrunken limb and some people are born with the wrong genitals and hormones. Theres no real difference and you certainly would support a blind person getting their eyes fixed so of course you should support transpeople getting their genitals fixed.” So far for most of the people I’ve talked too this has been like a light bulb going on.
However I don’t currently have any irl trans friends to bounce this off of and I want to make sure I’m not being an idiot and framing it in an offensive way or missing something I should really be adding to the conversation.
Transmedicalism isn’t a great way to agitate a pro-trans perspective. It might do in a pinch in a person to person and both of you aren’t super well versed in how to describe/understand the subject.
Not every transgender person suffers from body dysphoria. Not every transgender person seeks out hormone replacement therapies. Not every transgender person seeks out gender reassignment surgeries or gender confirmation surgeries.
It also leads down the path of implying that a transgender person ISN’T their gender UNTIL they’ve completed a full range of medical therapies and interventions. So a transgender man doesn’t have to be considered/treated as a man UNTIL they’ve gone through every possible procedure to “make” them a man. Which… isn’t a good or correct way to think about the subject.
It also leads down the path of implying that a transgender person ISN’T their gender UNTIL they’ve completed a full range of medical therapies and interventions
I’ve tried to been real careful to avoid this, basically if she says she’s a woman she’s a woman no matter what ended up between her legs. How she chooses to deal the “problem” has no bearing on who/what she is .
Yeah, but if she’s a woman with a penis and perfectly fine with that, you’re still framing her genitals as a birth defect, which is incredibly insulting and just plain wrong. The assumption of “being born in the wrong body” on its own automatically leads to the whole nine yards of transmedicalist bs because on its own, it automatically operates within a coercive, inherently violent gender binary. Transmedicalism is a dead end, you’re shortcutting the conversation that actually needs to happen, which is that gender identity is completely independent of both biology and gender as a social construct and that people should have autonomy over their own bodies that is not dictated by a medical establishment. There is no actual acceptance of trans people until that happens, you’re just shifting our opression from outright rejection to pathologization, gatekeeping and belittlement, and as somebody who has had to and still has to endure a massively transmedicalist healthcare and legal system, i can absolutely assure you that this is still coercive, transphobic and inhumane.
It’s honestly worrying how many people itt are totally incapable of critically engaging with and refuting inherently transmedicalist ideas. It doesn’t really surprise me, the trans inclusivity of hexbear has very clear limits that you see every time the subject goes beyond the most liberal, harmless, status quo affirming discussion of gender, but still, i hadn’t assumed it’s this bad.
One of the earliest corrections I got on this site from trans people was “not everyone has body dysmorphia” and I think that was really important. You have to at least sow the seeds of gender being a social construct otherwise things will be even weirder down the road. Genitals have noting to do with gender. Please correct me if I am wrong!
Body dysmorphia is entirely different from gender dysphoria (or gender incongruence, as it is known nowadays). Trans people can have both at the same time, but there are working treatments for body dysmorphia in anorectic people that would be outright conversion therapy and totally unworkable in dysphoric trans people. If somebody has dysphoria, the cure for that is transitioning. That works reliably with a completely outstanding success rate. You can’t tell an anorectic person who can’t view her body realistically anmore to just lose some weight, but in trans people, just taking hormones works perfectly fine.
Also dysphoria isnt an entirely physical thing, either, there’s a lot of dysphoria that relates to social phenomena - having to wear clothes that do not align with how you want to present your gender, being adressed with the wrong name and pronouns, being forced to use the wrong bathroom / locker etc. are all common causes of dysphoria.
But yes, being trans does not require being dysphoric and if we focus the conversation on dysphoria, we automatically take validity away from the trans people that do not seek to medically transition, or whose transition goals do not meet a cis and binary norm of how bodies are supposed to look, and it introduces problems such as having to pass. There’s basically an entire power structure in place that is not touched by the “trans people are just born in the wrong body” narrative and it remains in place and extremely harmful because this is the way we still commonly present the issue.
