• 1 Post
  • 64 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: November 11th, 2024

help-circle





  • So I can only speak to my own experience and I’m still a baby trans woman, so I’ve only gotten a small part of the experience. It’s hard to explain, but I literally have never felt better about myself in my entire life than I do right now, by such a wide margin it makes me believe I’ve probably never actually felt good about myself before at all, I was just experiencing various degrees and flavors of self loathing. Yet to most people almost nothing is different about me yet. It’s profound and subtle and life changing. There was and is a lot of fear but that’s more about other people than me. I would still transition if I was the last person on earth.


  • I mean these things weren’t taught through anything as explicit or obvious as physical abuse (except spanking I guess… hmm). No one would know how painful my childhood was if I didn’t tell them, and even if I did a large proportion of people wouldn’t see any problem at all. Mostly it was constant negative feedback for perceived shortcomings or disobedience, and the complete lack of positive reinforcement or affection. Their authoritarianism and the impossibility of their punishments changing my fundamental nature meant punishment eventually extended to denying me anything they could think of. Anyone on the outside would probably say my parents were doing their best with a “difficult” child. That their actions came from a place of “love”. But really it was two neurodivergent people passing their trauma and abuse onto me. It was subtle, slow, and insidious emotional damage, accumulated over years.





  • I’ve got some

    • enjoying things is a sin and if you enjoy something it will be taken from you or used to punish you
    • wanting something is a sin and expressing your desire means you will never get it
    • having emotions is a sin, and expressing your emotions is a sin, unless they are emotions you’re supposed to have
    • disagreeing with an adult is a sin
    • children are property with no rights at all








  • Oh same on the internalized gay is bad. Growing up I got made fun of for anything that I did that could be remotely interpreted as gay. I didn’t really accept myself being bi until my 30s because I felt this intense shame every time I felt anything towards men. I was constantly hiding my real self and so paranoid of anyone noticing something real about me in case they would start to put it together and expose me. I still haven’t really gotten over those feelings completely. A lot of that is neurodivergent masking as well. Shit’s complicated.


  • So here’s a weird thing to think about. I’m a bi trans woman, and for a large part of my life I was unaware of those things about myself. I sometimes felt sexually attracted to men but I never enjoyed seeing gay men do stuff romantically or in porn and found it uncomfortable. This was very confusing for me. The reason it was uncomfortable was because I was trying to put myself in their position in my head, but because I’m not really a man it felt wrong so I thought I didn’t really like men. I’m not saying homophobes have that experience, they probably don’t, but ones own sexuality can be very confusing when you aren’t living your own truth because you drank the coolaid of heteronormativity.