The Mundane Transfeminine

We don't need to.

Nonetheless I find that I do. And you yourself made claims about their motives that I don't find especially convincing (that they had no idea of the consequences of what they were doing but just semi-innocently wanted to make it all go away).

I merely wrote as much.

Those of us who aren't lawyers, on the other hand, need not cling to delusions about the apoliticality and detachment of judges. Judges are capable of hatred, and they usually know better than to be open about that hatred.

No, I understand that Mr Maugham, as a legal professional himself and having been trained to respect judges (no doubt also wanting to seem even-handed, detached, and objective) is reluctant to criticise the Supreme Court. I don't particularly care about that.

(It's like Hilary Cass pretending in her report that even though she claims there's no real evidence for the use of puberty blockers in trans kids, she doesn't want them to be withdrawn, and yet when they do get withdrawn and her report is cited as justification she says nothing.)

Because you said that they didn't understand the enormity of what they were doing, which is of course true in one sense, since bigots always lack empathy for their victims and always distance themselves from their suffering.

But in another sense it's false. They clearly knew but were lying.

In theory it shouldn't be necessary to prove bigotry to condemn bigoted behaviour, but in practice that's not really how it works. Bigotry is oft waved by adverting to legitimate concerns.

People are likelier to condemn prejudicial acts when they understand them to reflect underlying animus.

I don't think that people looking back on the judgement in decades to come will have any doubt that the ruling was only made possible by rank bigotry.

This is naive.

And you don't trade away someone's human rights to satisfy a group of bigots whom you presumably consider more important without having hatred in your heart, even if you're in denial about the fact.

Why would you imagine that contrarianism is in any way at odds with being keen to fit in?

Also an accurate one, frankly.

It's very clear that one reason Labour is bringing in these ill-considered and foolish reforms is that they don't like juries frustrating their desire to punish protesters and understand that the judiciary is much more inclined to be harshly punitive in these matters.

Most people? Aren't Reform on around 26%? That's hardly most people. Even if you add Tory voters, you get less than 50% of voters, no?

Anyway, the set of circumstances I mostly had in mind was juries judging protesters, and of late they've seemed more apt to be reasonable about it than judges.

Judges are conservative and reactionary state functionaries who with few exceptions see the world from the perspective of politicians and lawmakers and take a dim view of what they see as lawbreakers or troublemakers.

This bias leads them to make unjust rulings. Need I really explain this?

*the anti-ADHD playbook of course

Kind of irritating that people imagine that trans folk sprung into existence at the very moment they started hearing about them with any frequency and must have no history prior to that.

Respectfully speaking, no way has the anti-ADHD been around longer than the anti-trans playbook given that the first (pathologising, bigoted) medical text on transness dates back to the late 1800s with accounts of political repression going back millennia.

Maybe you just weren’t paying attention.

Though a change like this would certainly seem to be pretty uncommon, which could be argued as a reason for possible skepticism.

But ultimately no one else is privy to your thoughts and feelings, so you’re the only one who can ultimately decide what they mean.

In which case, you should at least be thinking about it as a possibility, even if seems impossible at this juncture to decide how you really feel.

We don’t understand phenomena like sexual orientation and gender identity well enough to explain it, but identity shifts can, anecdotally, occur.

I couldn’t say whether that might apply in your case, but at the very least it establishes that intrusive thoughts related to identity can and do arise and that you shouldn’t necessarily immediately read a lot into thoughts like these that depart from your previous self-understanding and upset you

I‘ve read that people with certain mental health conditions (OCD, perhaps?) are particularly prone to intrusive thoughts that undermine their sense of self and leave them in an unpleasant state of confusion and uncertainty, even when the things they come to fear about themselves aren’t true.

Plus it is very easy to read too much into idle, passing fancies.

Intrusive thoughts are a thing, you know? When I stand on the edge of a large drop, I sometimes feel the strong urge to throw myself off the edge despite not really wanting to die and finding the vivid mental images distressing.

But it should be instinctive to think of yourself existing in the physical and emotional state you’re accustomed to, and with that comes all your habits of thought and your expectations about others’ perceptions and treatment of you.

There’s a lot of room for distortion there, don’t you think?

But if you’re tormented by indecision then I guess one way to proceed if you don’t stop feeling like this would be to consider voluntarily (and perhaps temporarily) stopping HRT and seeing how that makes you feel.

Maybe you’re so habituated to your current state that you forgot some positives?

(Although actually it is presumably more a form of self-harm than it is wishful thinking; maybe I shouldn’t have written otherwise, but I think there can be a kind of ambivalence in cases like this…)

This would presumably be nothing more than wishful thinking on your part. The seeming truth is you don’t get to choose your gender and you’ll presumably be stuck like this until some better treatment than currently exists comes into existence and is made available to you (if that ever happens).

If you think your transition’s been a failure (a sentiment I seem to recall seeing often from you) then it might be a relief on some level to think that there might be some escape from your dysphoria and self-loathing, that you could somehow come not to disidentify with your body as it became.

It would be easy for you to conceptualise yourself as a man not because that’s what you actually are, but because you think that’s what everyone else sees you as and so you feel you have no choice to be anything else. It’s just another manifestation of awful body image.

It is very natural that you’d be hesitant to transition. Lots of us are, which is why you get people transitioning in middle age or old age.

Plus I think that the masculinisation from an unwilled puberty can play havoc with a trans woman’s self-perception no matter how long she’s been on HRT.

Besides, there’s such a thing as responsive desire too, you know?

How much you tend to feel aroused has a lot to do (at least for some) with whether you’re exposed to sexual stimulus, so you could, without having a low libido, just not think about sex at all because you’re focusing on other things.

I think there’s some overgeneralisation going on here.

As a trans woman, I can’t say I noticed much of a difference. Contrary to popular belief, oestrogen and progesterone also boost libido. I never saw myself in cis men’s accounts about how they’re constantly thinking about sex anyway.