Honestly, I would say that I’ve experienced transsexuality as a form of neurodivergence. And that this informs the way I understand my transsexual identity as fundamental to me, as a lifelong experience.
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the framing of transgender identities as a form of mental illness rightly get a lot of criticism. however, as a multiply disabled trans woman, the more i've learned both about my own relationship to gender/sex and about disability justice, the more i see the two as inextricably linked.
i don't see my transsexuality as a mental illness but i do see how society has constructed itself to disable transsexuals in ways very similar to the way it disables neurodivergent people and other disabled groups.
This makes a lot of sense. I know a lot of trans people engaged in masking-like behaviors at some point in their lives before coming out, and masking is 100% a trauma response that comes from living in a society that expects you to behave in a certain way, whether it be a social norm or gender role.
I look at it as my neurodivergence and transness are both inexplicably part of me, which means they’ve been intertwined my whole life. One didn’t cause the other, and for me neither exists fully independently either.
I might get stoned for just wondering this, but I do wonder whether there's a genetic component. There are quite a few small cohort papers observing a large number of neurodivergent ppl having EDS and being transgender. I had breast surgery due to a growth and chose a tg surgeon. 1/x
2/x when I said I have EDS he said that a huge number of his patients have, and anesthesia, without looking at the referring department guessed correctly just based on that. I wonder whether there's an overarching 'thing' that combines all three somehow. But my area of expertise is rocks, not genes
Hold on I know about the neurodivergent plus hyper mobility and EDS being frequent among trans people, but what is the anaesthesia thing? Does it have different effects too?
I think I was being unclear. It was just that when I mentioned EDS pre surgery to the anesthesiologist he guessed the transgender surgery guy sent me down to him because of how common this is.
oh! I wondered if you could add "needs a particular kind of treatment" to the collection of things that tend to bunch together with ND and trans people. Thank you for explaining
Oh, I don't know. I mean, I'm Enbi and chose to get rid of a growth with a surgeon that does transgender mastectomies. So I needed anesthesia for that, and in Germany you commonly have a discussion with them a day before. I do have a muscle condition that makes anesthesia more annoying for the doc.
Yeah, there’s no real question in my mind. Unfortunately, it’s a real tricky conversation to have due to the pathologization of transness and neurodivergence and not wanting to provide anything for the “just asking questions” crowd to latch onto.
I relate to this as well. My gender identity and how I navigate my life with my autism diagnosis are very intertwined.
I don't feel entirely human either because of it, and I never really felt like my agab. It felt the same when I would try to mask my autism as I would try to fit gender roles.
back when i could see my family, the way i described it to my nana and my great aunt is that your brain has a gender orientation, kinda like a sexual orientation, and my brain's gender orientation just points that way. like a man is usually uncomfortable being forced to wear a dress and lipstick,
it feels that way for me to wear basketball shorts and a guinea tee. the "opposite direction" just isnt how my brain's gender drive orients, like how you cant choose who you love, or being left handed. it doesnt have to mean anything complicated, it probably doesnt mean anything at all.
cis ppl have gender drives too. they get discomfort from being coerced to express and conduct themselves in a way that lines up with that, just the same as have sexual orientations and you dont really control what gender(s) you love, you just do, it just is. gender is kind of boring in that way.
i never really understood "identify as...." language. that never made sense to me. it's not really something i choose to do myself (one way or another) so much as gender is something i choose not to prevent myself from expressing the way i'm oriented.
this is basically the reason why i prefer calling myself a transsexual man specifically. i don't really identify as anything, i just exist in a way that gets labeled me as male and i had to medically transition to do that. so... transsexual man. idk why it's like that, it just is, whatever
i like to say transsexual and i probably would call myself that even if i didnt trans my sex which is just not a version of myself i can really conceptualize much but i am a bad bitch and transsexual is just a badder way of saying it u kno
I don't use that sort of "identify as..." language for myself anymore, but when I did, I think it stemmed from a sort of... dissociation from myself. I didn't feel like a real person, I felt like an external observer, like watching and controlling a flesh puppet from a console somewhere far away.
Because of that, any particular way that I felt about my puppet seemed... arbitrary. Like I had no actual power to modify its nature from my far-off control station, so how could I claim anything about it definitively? The best I could do was let everyone know that I 'identified' my puppet as a girl
it's stupid and bad for your mental health to force yourself to always be doing something that we all know is very uncomfortable outside of short bursts. we all know it's uncomfortable, it's why fraternities will make their new members crossdress as a hazing thing,
or how the meanest thing you can say to a girl is that she "looks like a boy". every cis person has had an experience like that, everyone knows it hurts. it's the same for me but the other way around, it used to be that feeling all of the time, instead of just times when kids are cruel on purpose.
“Wait is this thing I do masking my neurodivergence or my gender identity” often feels like an unanswerable question, because I can’t easily draw a line between the two.
I'm inclined to feel similarly about myself, tbh. One thing I've learned over the past few months especially is that it really wouldn't have mattered what I was born into because my identity doesn't map to cis bodies easily, and I'd have transitioned in some capacity to achieve it regardless.
Yeah, I think if I were born a cis girl I'd still be gender queer too. Probably not enough to medically transition, but probably still nonbinary, especially if I'd been born in this century rather than the last
Yeah, I feel that. Now that I'm more honest with myself about my transition goals I'm realizing that I'd have probably gone on at least a low dose of testosterone for a little while if not indefinitely.
It's interesting seeing your thoughts on this because I feel pretty similarly, but the ever-presence and innateness of it for me manifested as a profound sense of wrongness in everything I tried. It felt like observing people as another species and trying to parse what was Correct, like masking.
I understand why some other transsexuals might be uneasy with this idea because of the politics around brain sex, but I also don’t think I should have to discard an understanding that helps me parse and express my own life just because it could be politically misused.
I was transsexual from my earliest memories. My young child internalization of the concept of gender, and gender relations, was all filtered through my implicit transsexuality.
I explain down the thread. I don’t define transsexual as “someone who’s had HRT and surgeries,” but rather as an inborn constitutional difference. At least when talking about it for myself. Arguably there are different ways to be transsexual
no, there is a very clearly used definition by our community and the supporting establishment of this word that you are redefining for yourself. i do not recommend doing this for a million reasons, chief of which being that you muddy the meaning of the word.
When all is said and done, I find myself less concerned with whether I am precisely male or female, was a boy who became a girl, was always a girl, etc, than with the recognition that I am now and always was transsexual.
When teachers or parents said “you girls,” I implicitly took that to include me. When something was said to be for girls, I didn’t understand why it shouldn’t therefore be for me. I fully expected to grow up into a “normal woman”—that is, a cis woman.
oh god, when i was a kid i fully expected that puberty would give me a dick and make me 6 feet tall, it was harrowing the day i realized puberty wasn't gonna turn me into a cis man 😭 solidarity
This captures my pre-cracking experience succinctly.
After I came understand that my body was not to become "normal woman", the intuitive affinity I had for being one of "you girls" gave way to envy of and yearning to be such.
In fact learning that there was even a physiological difference between be a cis girls was one of the most formative and shocking experiences of my childhood, which began some of my most glaring early dysphoria.
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I don't feel entirely human either because of it, and I never really felt like my agab. It felt the same when I would try to mask my autism as I would try to fit gender roles.
I mean I had gender dysphoria as early as age 5, and I remembering “feeling like a girl” at age 3.
What is with these typos lol
After I came understand that my body was not to become "normal woman", the intuitive affinity I had for being one of "you girls" gave way to envy of and yearning to be such.