the issues you take with the first two paragraphs of my post are valid, and largely the byproduct of me rushing my post out since otherwise i’d never have published it at all. my psychological default is to be kind of cruel towards trans people, and the editing passes over this post i did bother to do managed to tone that down a lot, but artifacts of it remain. “either transness is incomprehensibly convoluted or trans people are lying to themselves” was very much an artifact of me trying to appease the part of me that’s hostile to trans people. (and, judging by the success of this post, which i assume was mostly upvoted by cis people who have some animosity towards trans people, it was a pretty effective rhetorical choice, albeit unconscious.)
re: the rest of your comment: the paragraphs in my post about my personality having something of a natively cutesy component, and my mention of having penis dysphoria, do point at potentially intersex-ish parts of my brain, which potentially pushed me somewhat closer to transition. i don’t think these alone would have been enough to motivate or justify transition on my part though. indeed, i’ve been pretty heavily considering detransition for the past year or so, and especially since July (at which point i did MDMA about this and accepted that some of me really does deeply want to detrans). i’d just been suppressing this for years, for fear of being rejected by the trans community + having to awkwardly re-integrate into the world of cis people.
in other words, i was kind of being steered by neurosis and denial of reality, when i chose to transition. it made me happier for awhile, because the trans community gave me lots of wanted i wanted. but what i wanted back then was a kind of pica, something that i technically desired, and appreciated on some level, but which didn’t really address my underlying psychological needs very well. currently, i’m mostly trying to address those psychological needs (e.g developing social skills and self-love). mostly separately, i might detrans if i ever decide the costs of losing my relationship and access to the trans community and so on are lower than the befits of going back to a social role my authentic self would probably be better suited to.
the success of this post, which i assume was mostly upvoted by cis people who have some animosity towards trans people
Thaaaat seems like a very weird theory. I expect it was mostly upvoted by cis people since most people are cis, but it seems way more likely to me that people upvoted it because it’s an attempt at taking an unflinching look at yourself to try to understand what’s real, independent of what you would prefer to be real — which is a major, explicit goal of this community.
That’s just my intuition, but I note that as of now the top-voted comment, by a factor of 2.6, mostly just says ‘This essay is introspective and vulnerable and writing it was gutsy as hell’. I would suggest taking that as probably-representative rather than imputing some other hidden motive to the upvotes.
Psychologically speaking, I wouldn’t expect your loathing of trans people to stick after you properly resolved such a big mental knot. If your theories were correct, trans people would be victims of a mental health crisis scarcely more accountable than people with untreated schizophrenia or agoraphobia. Pity, grief, and horror would make more sense than cruelty.
So I don’t think you’ve gotten to the heart of your own emotional matter. There is clearly part of you that loathes your current place in life, but I don’t think you’ve identified what it is yet. My ~70% confidence guess based on this post would be that you feel like you can only be safe if you’re socially accepted by loathing/denying yourself, either directly or by letting a group identity subsume yours.
Gender dysphoria and self-loathing can easily reinforce each other, but most trans people I know who experienced self-loathing before transitioning (myself included), the transition process alleviates the dysphoria enough that the self-loathing can be resolved with little or no therapy. I too visited /r/traa and /tttt/ early in my process, but I left those spaces once I felt more comfortable with myself.
I would recommend you go to therapy rather than try to find comfort in the support of others who “understandably have some animosity towards trans people”, because if I’m right that would just continue the cycle and get you to another place where you hate yourself. Self-love won’t come from being showered with upvotes for being cruel to your past self.
the issues you take with the first two paragraphs of my post are valid, and largely the byproduct of me rushing my post out since otherwise i’d never have published it at all. my psychological default is to be kind of cruel towards trans people, and the editing passes over this post i did bother to do managed to tone that down a lot, but artifacts of it remain. “either transness is incomprehensibly convoluted or trans people are lying to themselves” was very much an artifact of me trying to appease the part of me that’s hostile to trans people. (and, judging by the success of this post, which i assume was mostly upvoted by cis people who have some animosity towards trans people, it was a pretty effective rhetorical choice, albeit unconscious.)
re: the rest of your comment: the paragraphs in my post about my personality having something of a natively cutesy component, and my mention of having penis dysphoria, do point at potentially intersex-ish parts of my brain, which potentially pushed me somewhat closer to transition. i don’t think these alone would have been enough to motivate or justify transition on my part though. indeed, i’ve been pretty heavily considering detransition for the past year or so, and especially since July (at which point i did MDMA about this and accepted that some of me really does deeply want to detrans). i’d just been suppressing this for years, for fear of being rejected by the trans community + having to awkwardly re-integrate into the world of cis people.
in other words, i was kind of being steered by neurosis and denial of reality, when i chose to transition. it made me happier for awhile, because the trans community gave me lots of wanted i wanted. but what i wanted back then was a kind of pica, something that i technically desired, and appreciated on some level, but which didn’t really address my underlying psychological needs very well. currently, i’m mostly trying to address those psychological needs (e.g developing social skills and self-love). mostly separately, i might detrans if i ever decide the costs of losing my relationship and access to the trans community and so on are lower than the befits of going back to a social role my authentic self would probably be better suited to.
Thaaaat seems like a very weird theory. I expect it was mostly upvoted by cis people since most people are cis, but it seems way more likely to me that people upvoted it because it’s an attempt at taking an unflinching look at yourself to try to understand what’s real, independent of what you would prefer to be real — which is a major, explicit goal of this community.
That’s just my intuition, but I note that as of now the top-voted comment, by a factor of 2.6, mostly just says ‘This essay is introspective and vulnerable and writing it was gutsy as hell’. I would suggest taking that as probably-representative rather than imputing some other hidden motive to the upvotes.
Psychologically speaking, I wouldn’t expect your loathing of trans people to stick after you properly resolved such a big mental knot. If your theories were correct, trans people would be victims of a mental health crisis scarcely more accountable than people with untreated schizophrenia or agoraphobia. Pity, grief, and horror would make more sense than cruelty.
So I don’t think you’ve gotten to the heart of your own emotional matter. There is clearly part of you that loathes your current place in life, but I don’t think you’ve identified what it is yet. My ~70% confidence guess based on this post would be that you feel like you can only be safe if you’re socially accepted by loathing/denying yourself, either directly or by letting a group identity subsume yours.
Gender dysphoria and self-loathing can easily reinforce each other, but most trans people I know who experienced self-loathing before transitioning (myself included), the transition process alleviates the dysphoria enough that the self-loathing can be resolved with little or no therapy. I too visited /r/traa and /tttt/ early in my process, but I left those spaces once I felt more comfortable with myself.
I would recommend you go to therapy rather than try to find comfort in the support of others who “understandably have some animosity towards trans people”, because if I’m right that would just continue the cycle and get you to another place where you hate yourself. Self-love won’t come from being showered with upvotes for being cruel to your past self.