And some people will accept explanations for being trans that they wouldn't accept for being gay. If I said my relationship with my mom had given me same-sex attractions, a lot of people would object and say that sounded like internalized homophobia.
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The same people might think that was a perfectly reasonable explanation for why I was trans. A good chunk of the people I hung out with were lesbians. They accepted explanations for why people are trans that they would reject if the same theories were directed at lesbians.
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We live in a culture where it makes sense to a lot of people to see being trans as a mental disorder/development gone wrong. In such a culture, it's easy for people to see conversion therapy/practices as sensible treatments for trans people instead of psychological torture.
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And it's easy for trans people to get a lot of positive reinforcement and praise if we come to believe something really is wrong with us and we're just traumatized, had a bad relationship with our parents, got caught up in a cultural trend, brainwashed by patriarchy, etc.
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A lot of the stories I told as a detrans person don't make sense when I look plainly at my life instead of trying to make it fit inside specific theories. There was a lot I had to ignore or distort to make the theories work. Some of what I used to believe seems so bizarre now.
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I got so much encouragement from other people when I told them these stories that I ended up believing in them for years. Transphobic people can't handle our reality so they encourage us to believe in their false views of us. They reward us for making our lives fit their ideas.
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They want us to lie about ourselves and believe the lies. And they convince themselves this is for "our own good". They're fighting to get their view of our "wrongness" into our heads and coming out of our mouths. It's fucking vile.
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Replying to @reclaimingtrans
I remember when I was in the earliest stages of coming to terms with my desire to transition, I was really conscious of the psychological need to reshape narratives to fit one's current reality."
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Replying to @e_urq @reclaimingtrans
I was genuinely a bit neurotic in my desire to avoid doing that- not to say "I always knew" when I most definitely did not, and not to paint myself as some hardcore tomboy from young childhood.
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Replying to @e_urq @reclaimingtrans
I was also determined never to blame all my past mental illness on undiagnosed gender dysphoria, and on that one, with the benefit of 5 yrs on a treatment that worked when no psych med ever did anything, I can confidently say that I was overly cautious.
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But, anyway, the interesting thing is that I intentionally ran a little experiment on myself. "Would these treatments- binding, hrt- work at all if I rejected all impulses to make a smooth narrative of my transness or use transness to explain all my problems?"
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Replying to @e_urq @reclaimingtrans
And, obviously, they worked fine even with me actively resisting any impulses to smooth things out psychologically by reshaping my own narrative.
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Replying to @e_urq @reclaimingtrans
(I was still very skeptical of transness and very TERF-influenced in my beliefs during early transition, so I ran these little experiments on myself to figure out if I was suffering from internalized misogyny, etc.)
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