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+Title: On gender, transition, and re-transition
+Category: Blog
+Date: 2020-06-18
+Tags: /dev/diary, culture, gender
+
+
+It's pride month.  Which actually has nothing to do with this post,
+but might have inspired me to write something.  Anyway, if you're
+someone who doesn't like thinking about gender, and only follow me for
+my `s p i c y    r u s t    t a k e s`, maybe skip this one.  Also, if
+you're a TERF and use any of these words to harm anyone, go choke on a
+brick you fucking piece of human garbage.
+
+Cool, that's the disclaimers out the way.
+
+
+## The part that's all about me
+
+I guess this is a kind of coming out: I'm trans!  I've been "on the
+internet" for a while now, and have way too many people following me
+than is reasonable for my boring life.  And I guess a lot of you might
+not know this.  I've never made a point of it, and I know from
+personal experience that people read my gender _very_ differently.
+
+Some timeline stuff I guess.  I'm not gonna do the "I've always been
+trans" thing, because I know that's not true.  That being said that I
+was quite miserable before my transition for a few different reasons I
+won't get into right now.
+
+I started socially transitioning around 2011, then started HRT in
+2013, and then...well, just kinda lived my life.  I'm not gonna sit
+here and pretend that transition wasn't the correct thing for me to
+do, and I am a much happier and well-rounded person now because of it.
+
+
+Why am I writing this?  Because after all I've been pretty happy just
+being stealth (meaning not being public about my trans-ness) for a
+while now.  And I'm not the kind of person who wants to share my
+personal life all that much.  It's weird being on the internet when
+everything you say is gonna be seen by thousands of people.
+
+Well...the reason is that my gender identity is changing.  Has
+changed.  I guess I've always been a little butch, but in recent times
+(meaning the last ~6 months or so) I've been feeling explicitly more
+masculine.  I've wanted to go by he/him pronouns, wear different
+clothes, express myself differently in public, grow a beard (something
+I've always failed at lol).  It wasn't just that my idea of what being
+a woman meant changed, I think fundamentally the way I related to my
+gender changed.
+
+And this is where things become really complicated.
+
+
+## The part that's about society
+
+The way that our society at large handles transgender discourse is
+toxic.  From the very beginning of my coming out, there's been an
+inscrutible focus on "why" people are trans.  There must be medical
+reasons.  Look at this brain scan of this one transgender lady.  Her
+brain looks like a cis ladies brain.  This will once and for all prove
+that trans people are _trapped in the wrong body_! ...
+
+I understand why this framing has come about and stuck, because it was
+a great way for somewhat liberal people to convince more conservative
+people that "no actually trans people are like...real, and not just
+making it up".  This line of reasoning is called "trans medicalism"
+and it's rooted in the idea that trans people are _scientifically_ the
+gender that they say they are.
+
+This approach has several problems.  It is extremely oversimplifying,
+and makes assumptions about the nature of gender that many people
+would not agree with.  Worse, even the people who don't really believe
+in it, who only use it as a weapon against the TERFs, to defend their
+own identity, end up upholding the European gender model binary, one
+that would rather many non-binary and even transgender identities
+didn't exist in the first place.  It is a model that will never truly
+accept you for being trans, only sort of tolerate you, because maybe
+you're close enough to the status quo to fit in.
+
+And a lot of trans people start internalising trans medicalism as a
+survival mechanism.  This is where this discourse becomes harmful.
+Because not only does it prevent some trans people from actually
+expressing their non-binary gender identities, now you have insecure
+people who are threatened in their identity by the idea that there's
+no medical truth to being trans, and bully people who don't conform to
+this.
+
+Even worse, they will sometimes align themselves with TERFs to defend
+the "true trans people", before "the younger generation ruined
+everything".  And this is where this all comes back to me.
+
+
+## Gender isn't fixed
+
+During the last few months I've been trying to find experiences by
+people similar to me, and it made me very very scared.  I didn't
+really know what to call myself.  Because I'm by no means a cis man,
+but looking for people who "de-transitioned", I found a lot of people
+who were hurting, who felt they had been pressured into transition,
+and who were being rallied around by TERFs who thought these poor
+souls proved their bullshit points of views.
+
+And I saw a lot of trans people yelling at any trans person even
+considering "de-transitioning", as some kind of traitor.  I guess I
+understand why.  You don't wanna be giving the TERFs more ammunition.
+You don't want to undermine your own identity.  Maybe you don't really
+believe in it, but your self esteem is built on trans-medicalism.  How
+do you deal with people who de-transition?
+
+I'm still not really sure what I would call myself, because I think
+de-transitioning is the wrong term for what I would want to do.  And
+really, I think I'd like to think about it as just another section of
+the life-long transition of my gender.  To live means to change, and
+my gender will change until I die.  There's nothing I can do to stop
+it, and I think trying to control it will inevitably fail.
+
+I think it's also important to point out again that I regret nothing.
+I'm glad I've been living as a woman for close to 10 years.  I don't
+know how I want to express my gender identity, or on what scale
+neccessarily.  Maybe I'll use different pronouns with friends, maybe
+only from time to time, maybe I'll change nothing in the end because
+this is all "just some phase".
+
+But I think it brings me to the core point I want to make here:
+
+**Stop pretending as if transitioning into a gender is the
+end-all-be-all of your gender identity!**
+
+So what if something is a phase?  In my opinion it doesn't make it any
+less valid.  Transition is a journey, not a means to an end.  And
+transitioning to femme, and back to masc (MtFtM), or vice versa
+doesn't make someone less trans.  How can people believe that gender
+is a spectrum, while not accepting that people will move around on
+this spectrum?
+
+The worst thing is: this is something I would have expected to explain
+to my mum, but I didn't expect this to be such a controvertial thing
+in the trans community itself.
+
+
+## Why write this?
+
+I was thinking about writing this article for at least a few weeks
+now.  And undoubtebly it'll be many days between writing it as a first
+draft, and the finished thing on my website.  I revealed a lot of
+personal things in this post, things that I wouldn't otherwise want to
+share.
+
+I think ultimately I want to be a voice of support for anyone who's
+feeling similarly to me: "older" trans people (I'm not even 30 lol),
+who have been doing this "new gender" thing for so long that it became
+normal, who might feel themselves wanting to either express themselves
+in much more feminine or masculine ways than before, or at different
+intensities, or more androgynously.
+
+I think it's important that we remind ourselves that transition isn't
+a means to an end, that gender is ever changing, and normalising the
+idea of re-transition.  And this doesn't just apply to cis people!
+Trans people carry the trauma of society with them and can be just as
+toxic in this matter as the TERFs.
+
+Life is too complex for anything to remain the same forever.  We all
+need to become better at embracing this.