you are so sweet, thank you!

Ada covered this well - generally trans people are afraid to use changing rooms and communal spaces like that, being trans is very stigmatized. There are a lot of trans people that don’t even use gender-segregated public restrooms at all because of this.

So I haven’t really heard of or considered a case where a trans person was flaunting their trans / gender non-conforming body in a communal, gender-segregated space. I suspect it’s a fairly rare issue, esp. since trans people make up 0.5 - 1% of the population.

You have to also wonder what it’s like for intersex individuals who were born with ambiguous genitals or who otherwise have bodies that don’t fit into either male or female categorization, how should we handle communal showers and changing rooms for intersex folks?

But in practicality, people with bodies that aren’t “normal” tend to try to hide their bodies and are less likely to use communal spaces where nakedness exists. Even before I transitioned, when I was merely a child, and I had to change clothes for gym class, I basically couldn’t do it in the male locker room. I had no idea why I was so extremely uncomfortable with it, but I just couldn’t. So I had my grades docked in gym class because I gave up trying to change before class - I would just wear my normal clothes, and the teachers would penalize me for it. I was a good kid, and I never broke rules - this was one major exception, and it bothered me.

When I started social transition, I did start using women’s restrooms in public, but I was never bothered by anyone or accosted, and I was usually accompanied by supportive cis women.

I’ve never been in a changing room or naked in front of others, though, and I wouldn’t have considered it. I also wouldn’t use gender segregated restrooms anywhere that I might run into people I knew. I only did it when I could remain anonymous and just slip in and out, and usually only because I didn’t have an alternative.

Now that I have had bottom surgery, I would be more open to using a changing room, but I would still be mortified that people would notice anyway.

I wouldn’t have even gone swimming around others pre-op, but now changing rooms and spas seem like possibilities for me. That’s part of why gender affirming care and access to surgeries is so important - it is part of how trans people are able to integrate into such a cis-normative society, it’s a way for us to fulfill the social expectations put on us, for our bodies to become more “normal”.

I’ve always found it strange that conservatives wish primarily to withhold that kind of care, since gender affirming care was originally developed around what made cis people comfortable - it used to only be offered to trans people who were likely to pass, who were straight, and who were willing to move to a new city and live a new life with a fabricated past. This erasure of transness is exactly what you would think conservatives would be on-board with …

is there there’s a shock that would come with a change from what you’ve lived, and that being cisgendered wouldn’t negate that shock, it would be miserable, but I don’t feel an attachment in the sense that I feel glad I was born a man.

I’m having a hard time making sense of what you are trying to communicate, particularly about a shock 🤔 You should know it’s not uncommon for cis people to not have thought about their gender or to have particular attachments to their assigned gender. Usually people just haven’t thought about it and have no awareness of all the ways they are attached to their gender.

Still, most men have some attachments, they usually would say they might be unhappy if their penis and testes were lost in an accident, for example. And most men would probably feel unhappy having to wear dresses and so on. All you have to do is imagine or actually attempt to live as the opposite sex and you’ll quickly get a sense of what aspects of your gender are important to you.

That’s what I meant when saying if I had been born a woman I wouldn’t be happy with the idea of changing to be a man.

If you were born a cis woman you would be happy being as a woman, but the question is whether you, as you are now, were born into a woman’s body and then given a girl’s name, and then expected to have tea parties with your girlfriends and do braiding circles and so on. Your parents would send you to school in dresses and expect someday you would get pregnant and marry a man, and so on. It’s really hard for cis people to actually consider what this would be like, I don’t really hold this against you, it’s genuinely difficult (maybe impossible, that’s my current view - lived experience and qualia just can’t be transferred).

But I don’t think it’s fair to reduce all mental illnesses to being not biological and being “solved with therapy or anti-depressants”, I think that is part of the stigma against them.

I don’t mean to communicate that all mental illnesses are addressed that way, just that some mental illnesses are addressed that way, and as a result a common line of reasoning is that gender dysphoria should be treated that way too. This isn’t the argument you’re making, but I’m raising it because this is a relevant point in the discussion about gender dysphoria as a mental illness and you’re not the only person reading these comments.

Physical treatments are often more helpful than those things, different illnesses need to be addressed in different ways, not treated as a generic umbrella for characteristics society doesn’t approve of.

I agree with this.

Sorry for not addressing all of it but I’m skeptical that you read what I wrote there because I explicitly spoke in favor of gender-affirming care as the treatment and your response reads to me like I was arguing against it.

I did read what you wrote, but people don’t always have awareness of their views or the consequences of their views.

I think you might be missing that the trans person you’re talking to is sensitive to a conservative anti-trans talking point being raised and argued for, and that merely disclaiming the common conclusion the anti-trans point is designed to reach does not completely address this. I’m not going to answer narrowly by ignoring that larger context, that would be irresponsible.

Hm, you’ve said a lot, so there is a lot to cover. I’ve been very busy traveling and haven’t been able to respond to comments like this, so apologies for the delay, the reasons for the delay were on my end.

First, I am hearing you disclose that you are struggling mentally, but it’s a bit ambiguous what you are struggling with. I hear you saying that you are sensitive to feeling criticized or attacked, and sensitive to having disgust or stigma as a reaction to your mental illness.

One aspect of the whole debate about whether gender dysphoria is a mental illness does have to do with exactly that stigma associated with mental illness, and a reason for that is that homosexuality was also stigmatized and classified as a mental illness. As gay rights were achieved, the stigma and classification of homosexuality as a mental illness was reconsidered.

I would like to hold space for both realities: that classifying something as a mental illness is a way society communicates stigmatized way of thinking about behavior, and also that this stigma can be an inappropriate response to mental illness (even classically stigmatizing mental illnesses, like psychosis).

It is also worth noting that I did notice you said you were in favor of gender affirming care as a treatment of gender dysphoria, even while still thinking of gender dysphoria as a mental illness. To turn this around a little, I wonder if you noticed that I admitted gender dysphoria could be thought of as a mental illness in some sense of what it means to be a mental illness.

I do think you might have missed some of my larger points, which were not primarily trying to convince you that gender affirming care is important or the right way to treat it (which you have already affirmed), but why that is true - this gets to the point about classifying it as a mental illness.

Gender dysphoria is a genetic, hormonal, neural, and physical condition that causes both physical and mental symptoms. It is not just a mental illness because it is also a hormonal disorder, for example. It is more like diabetes or hypothyroidism. You also experience mental symptoms if you are an untreated diabetic, for example. The brain develops a certain way, and the body develops another way, and as a result the dominance of the wrong sex hormones creates problems. As Ada has already pointed out, this is true for a cis person - if you take a cis person and raise them as the opposite sex, they experience the same gender dysphoria.

“Mental illness” is very broad and that gets into problems, though. Some mental illnesses are like gender dysphoria, caused by genetic and physical conditions which can be alleviated medically through various drugs, surgeries, etc. Sometimes the brain just doesn’t work for some reason that ends up being more physiology than psychology.

Other mental illnesses are caused by the experiences we have and our psychology. I suffered from an eating disorder at one point as a result of abuse from a family member. I have experienced hyper-vigilance and symptoms of PTSD as a result of abuse as well. Both of those were not caused nor solved through medicine or surgery, the problems were more psychological.

So what is so important about classifying gender dysphoria as a mental illness? Usually this comes up when conservatives wish to dismiss gender dysphoria as a legitimate or valid reason for someone’s gender identity to be respected. It’s a reason for them to not just stigmatize but dismiss - the conservative might argue it’s a mental illness like PTSD (and not a medical condition like diabetes). They then want to argue that social and medical transition is inappropriate and heavy-handed as a treatment, and instead it should be treated with talk therapy (which is conversion therapy), and so on. This is based on nothing more than discomfort and bias about trans people, there is no evidence supporting it (and plenty of evidence for why we shouldn’t treat gender dysphoria with conversion therapy - like, it doubles the risk of suicide).

I understand completely that this conservative “argument” is not what you are agreeing with, but you should know that the only reason we are having this discussion is because gender dysphoria has been framed this way by an anti-trans movement that aims to deny trans people their medical care. It’s a needless discussion and way to rationalize and wedge people on the trans topic - doctors are not wringing their hands over this or wondering whether it’s a mental illness. The doctors and scientists know now that gender identity is biological and genetic, that gender dysphoria is not like PTSD or other mental illnesses like that, and that the treatment is social transition, hormones, and surgeries as appropriate (i.e. as the patient seems to need it, based on the consensus of the patient, their therapist, and doctors).

So why is this so relevant? What does it mean to be a mental illness to you, and why is it so important to determine if it is a mental illness or not?

EDIT: I forgot to mention, one of the problems with thinking of gender dysphoria as just a mental illness is that this is often used to imply the experience of gender identity is delusional when it’s not according with the assigned sex at birth. A neurobiologist might argue that the brain is where a person’s identity exists in the first place, and if you were to choose between someone being their brain or their body, it is obvious people’s identities are in their brains. To this extent, trans women are women because their brains are female - their gender identity is biologically hard-wired, and not a delusion, and thus not a mental illness. The body is what is wrong, so it’s what gets changed.

EDIT2: oops, I didn’t forget to mention that, it was the first point I made in my initial reply to your comment 😅 We’re going in circles now!

I do think a lot of cis people struggle to understand gender dysphoria. Feeling neutral about your gender because you’ve never had to think about it is not the same as knowledge that you would be totally fine being born into the opposite sex. Regardless, it’s not the best way to reason about what trans experience is like, tbh.

it’s unpaid labor either way, it’s a bit arbitrary to say owning a car and commuting for a job isn’t time and money spent for the employer in your capacity as an employee

best soda, tbh

I had to leave my home and family behind in a conservative state to seek safety in a liberal state with trans protections on the books. I’m still unpacking boxes and wondering how soon I will need to flee the country … It’s like rock climbing, everything is dangerous and you just keep laser focused on what is right in front of you. The stress keeps you in a state of momentum and can distract you and give you a sense of agency. When there are gaps when I can lose my focus, I break down. It’s overwhelming, but there is no alternative - you don’t choose to be trans.

tbh even before hormones were changing my body, they drastically altered my mind and alleviated my depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation within a few months … while the dysphoria I feel about my body is severe sometimes, it’s much easier for me to live with than having testosterone dominance in my body and its impact on my mind

This is what I didn’t understand about transition before, that it can have these kinds of medical consequences. I thought of being trans more as a social thing, and that never seemed worth prioritizing. I had no idea the wrong sex hormones can cause depression and other mental symptoms (and not just those symptoms caused from being sad because body looks and feels wrong, I mean the sex hormones directly impact the brain and cause the symptoms).

there might be like hanky codes, but I just might be the wrong girl to ask, I’m the over-committed lesbian trope, have had a single monogamous relationship for over a decade 😅

If I were single, I wouldn’t be interested in dating or actively seeking out a relationship.

Honestly I am not sure there is a particularly perfect way to raise genital preference, but it is good to be transparent and honest about your preferences, it might be good to raise early and in a context where you are opening the floor to understanding their needs and preferences too, esp. around any dyphoria they might experience and what their needs are.

The majority of trans folks are pre- or non-op, so it’s best not to assume anything about their genitals, and if you have preferences it’s even more important to communicate about.

For transmasc folks you might need to examine your preferences and the extent to which female gentials make you see men as women (just like when men really enjoy penises on trans women), and just be honest with yourself and your partner, and be careful not to invalidate someone’s gender.

Tbh, this isn’t that far from talking about hair and sexual preferences with cis people, it’s just good to be sensitive because being misgendered can be really dehumanizing.

Another consideration is how the penis is related to in terms of your gender, if a guy is into the woman because she has a penis, does he see her penis as a woman’s genital, or is it still male?

One way to explore this is to ask how you would feel if the penis were not used for penetration, not even used erect - would you still be attracted to her if her penis remained flaccid and was stimulated more like a clit?

If you want her primarily to take a “masculine role” in bed, and you primarily want her penis to function like a man’s penis, the appeal might be motivated from a place that on some level still thinks of her and her genitals as male.

Sometimes it’s just about the novelty and taboo, which are frequent objects of sexual desire (think of how popular incest porn is, etc.). Sometimes it’s about a repressed bi- or homo-sexuality, where the woman with male genitals becomes an ideal basis for fulfilling some of that forbidden desire.

Simply seeing the gentials as male is probably common, and on its own isn’t the biggest crime, but if that translates to not seeing and treating her as a woman I think that can be really problematic.

The issue of objectification is separate, and I would even argue some objectification can be desirable in sex (or at least aiming to never objectify does not seem like an absolute ideal), we sometimes wish to be sexual objects (whether that’s healthy or not) - but we rarely wish to be seen as men.

I had to scroll too far to find this answer.

Most of the criticism of it I’ve seen is about how the concept’s been warped to mean women aren’t putting out enough for specific men.

this is it in a nutshell. Men clearly experience loneliness, what’s problematic is the way “male loneliness” has been weaponized against women, as if it’s not a byproduct of patriarchy but actually a result of women’s neglect (or worse, an insidious assumption that women have an obligation to date men because they are lonely).

survivorship bias is real

not sure I can speak to this, not really directly related to trans folks either

no worries at all, and I always encourage people to start with HRT because it’s fairly low risk, can be stopped early, if it’s not working or doesn’t feel good, without any long-term effects, and can have such an immensely positive effect when it is helpful. I felt like I made a mistake waiting so long to start HRT, estrogen was life changing for me. Plenty of trans folks don’t feel any mood or mental change when they start HRT, though - so remember your experiences can be different.

I wouldn’t characterize transition as decorating your flesh puppet in the same way that cis people do when dieting and plastic surgery … not that transition doesn’t involve those things, but there is a clinical basis of transition that is not there when just pursuing beauty. This is why your boob job may be covered when trans, but not when cis.

It can be really hard to understand why trans people transition - the answers are complicated and involve explanations of the neurobiology of sex and gender.

One way to help you understand is to imagine or even try out being in the wrong sex yourself - if you are male, imagine you were born a woman, they named you Sue and expect you to date boys, play with dolls, dress in frilly skirts and dresses, and so on. Why can’t you just be Sue authentically? Why bother with horomones and social transition?

When it feels wrong to be in the wrong sex, it is due to how your brain developed as a fetus, and you can’t help that the wrong sex hormones make you depressed and anxious, you can’t help that your body feels completely wrong, you can’t help that the only known solutions to the suffering is to take the right hormones, to fix the body and to live as your actual gender. Cis people don’t have to go through that struggle, so it’s harder for them to understand what it’s like to be trans. It makes complete sense you would have difficulty understanding, even as a trans person I struggled to recognize I experienced gender dysphoria or that I needed to transition - it was not obvious at the time.

+1, all of it is very individual and your mileage may vary

There are some patterns or common ways people are (like, it’s not exactly surprising when a trans woman doesn’t want to top and take a penetrative role in sex), but there is so much variation it’s best not to assume.

No worries, these are personal questions but that’s what I’ve signed up for.

The answer is that it varies significantly. It’s not uncommon for trans women to experience a reduction of libido on estrogen, but I experienced increased arousal and libido (much to my dismay, I wanted libido to reduce). However, I think viewing libido as just “more” vs “less” does not portray the changes accurately. Testosterone libido felt different, more desperate and animal-like. It was like a simple biological urge, like hunger or the need to pass a bowel movement. It felt imposed on me, and like a hijacking of “me”.

Estrogen libido was deeper and more meaningful, more emotionally connected and harder to just stamp out. Testosterone libido was like performing a duty, estrogen libido was like yearning, pining, burning lust. Estrogen libido feels right, testosterone libido felt awful (to the point where I wondered if I was on the asexual spectrum).

The further into transition I got, the more my dissociation melted and the more dysphoria I experienced as a result - and in this case, the more I experienced bottom dysphoria. I started to wear underwear to bed to hide my genitals, and I started to recognize when I was dissociating during sex, and trying to avoid it by opting to not be touched. I couldn’t stand being the center of attention in sex, focusing on me and my orgasm was very upsetting and usually I disappeared when this happened.

All this varies significantly among trans women - many of them feel no bottom dysphoria at all, and enjoy topping. Many of us feel varying levels of dysphoria, and either cannot use their genitals at all, or very little.

I was a middle case - I could have sex, but it required accommodations and working around my issues, usually by hiding the genitals and treating them more like female genitals (treating the glans like a clit, and so on). I found using a vibrator much more pleasurable on estrogen than before transition, and I really did not like having erections so I did everything I could to promote penile atrophy (but ultimately I didn’t have much penile atrophy - I would have trouble being hard enough for penetrating, but still technically could sometimes). This was all pre-op, obviously post-op sex changed significantly - I am finding I am surprisingly more comfortable now being the center of sexual attention, though I still have dysphoria and there are struggles I have to work around (like feeling my new genitals are like the old ones).

I’m not sure my prostate changed much at all, to be honest. I didn’t notice any difference, but post-op, vaginal penetration is prostate stimulating and featured more heavily. (Anal took more prep and time to do and could be painful, so it was admittedly done less frequently. Also, it could introduce gender feelings in a way, which could increase my dysphoria - sometimes gender-affirming activities can emphasize how much I’m not a woman, and can ironically backfire and make things worse.)