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So, how does this category conflation of "woman" with "pretty" intersect with virilismia?
Often, when you see transphobes talking about the damage being done to our bodies with testosterone or surgery, what they're really complaining about is that we're being made less pretty. There's also a lot of this in the "lost butches" lesbian-TERF narrative.
You look at how prominent detransitioners are talked about, like Keira Bell, and it's dripping with an attitude of "this poor young girl was made into an uggo monster." The facial hair, the body hair, the deep voice- what straight man would ever want to have sex with us?
This is woven into counseling around testosterone, and gatekeeping trans male transition. "Effects are permanent. You can never go back." But, you CAN go back to thinking of yourself as a woman. You CAN go back to presenting femme. You can never go back... to being fuckable.
If being fuckable by straight cis men (and transphobic lesbians) is synonymous with being a woman, then transition becomes this one way door we can walk through... but never fully return from.
This attitude is very rarely challenged. The people who challenge it most often are radical feminists (which makes things A LITTLE AWKWARD), and trans women (also awkward, though less so, and for very different reasons).
Despite the awkwardness, though, I think trans men can look to radical feminist traditions and to trans women.
For instance, I've really drawn strength from comedian @rileyjsilverman (not, let me be clear, an ugly woman) and her embrace of the voice nature gave her.
These traditions suggest that women don't have to be pretty, and may, in fact, own their power by rejecting prettiness. But they can also provide a framework for naming and rejecting the pressure to be a pretty woman as a trans man or nonbinary person. /end
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