What I've Learned About Toxic Masculinity As A Trans Man

[stumbledin]

I read this article thinking it would be about how a woman who had decided to transition then found herself part of the patriarchy.

But in fact what it says to me is that young people are being educated to not know or acknowledge the reality of biological sex. And because of this are left trying to understand their reality and the impact of society's gender stereotyping while denying the underlying basis of sex / sexism.

Far from helping young people as they grow up and try to work out how to be comfortable with themselves, trasn activism and language is imposing an additional, and purely notional, social straightjacket that creates further disassociation.

The politics of identity, whose hazy concepts and doublespeak, is an obstacle race that many young people just dont need in their lives.

www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/toxic-masculinity_uk_5d78ed0fe4b09342507cb2cf?guccounter=1

Sometimes I'm not sure if it's defaulting to Male as much as wanting to remain flat chested and child like. (Which is concerning from the POV of who would find that attractive) I do remember having mixed feelings about them growing and missing my flat chest a bit on the one hand, on the other feeling like I fitted in to my peers (I was a late developer.) wanting to squash them down to avoid being noticed but then also being proud I was finally growing up.

I think a generalised traumatic reaction to the way the patriarchy objectivifies, vilifies and controls the female body and breasts especially is a factor in the non binary binding and mastectomy stuff.

At the end of the day I very much doubt the nbs males are chopping their dicks off however.

it is also about everyone else buying into the version of reality. I do understand this and why it is but it seems to be placing one's own happiness hostage to what every one else thinks!

On a very fundamental I believe this is true.

I just phrase it slightly differently, to emphasise the point. It's about which interpretation of reality we've had installed inside our own heads through our four-dimensional experience - the socialisation process on a much broader scale, in other words.

I think my words are getting a little too far out of sync to make much sense to everyone (although I have clocked that they're connecting with others whom I know think in ways that have triggered a flag for incorporating an ASD lens...).

But yes. I agree. And it extends outwards. Feeling happy when we can control our environment by having our minds accommodated rather than battered down into submission is a basic human thing. We all do it all the time. It just smacks us down so damned hard on the gender front that we've noticed the gendered aspect of the system, so we've polarised into a domination/resistance dynamic.

Btw, they "identify as autistic" because by installing the interpretive lens of that model into their brains they're able to process their internal experiences in a way that helps them integrate with society. Autism-awareness has reached the point that the rest of the world is generally okay with the principle of accepting that someone else's brain works differently and that's okay.

The lens of ASD offers a mechanism to both understand the internal while also having a decent chance of not triggering everyone else's "that doesn't make sense to me personally so it must be bollocks" response. It gives them a better way to communicate because it makes people more willing to pause a moment and listen instead of instinctively turning away. And it's all rooted in how we invented words in order to analyse, process, and navigate.

They fucked us over big-time by establishing an associative link between "systematising" and "our oppressors", by the way. It's crippling us, because it's polarising us. And the associative link between "empathising" and "we the oppressors" is the flipside of the same basic universal human trait that cripples them, as individuals and as a class.

Jesus. I tried reading this thread. I really did try. I just don’t know anyone who worries about any of this stuff and I cannot see why anyone would.

Neurotrash agree 100% that for girls, developing breasts is often a really negative experience as its when you start getting objectified left right and centre and, just. Everything changes.

When I was a girl, the thing to do was Steve yourself and wear baggy clothes to try and disguise your developing body.

So the reason that all these women and girls give for wanting to remove their breasts, I suspect are not quite the real deal. It's not unusual for women and girls to dislike / have negative feelings about their breasts. About their whole sexed bodies. The breasts are the things men focus on though. Usually literally!

If it were non binary it wouldn't make sense. As no breasts is not non binary. It does make sense in removing a major signifier that you're female and a body part commonly fetishised by men in a sexist society.

Steve yourself 😁

Awesome Autocorrect 🤣🤣🤣

I believe they've appropriated autism.

Using the "gender is a spectrum" analogy; except that's defunct and rather offensive now being much more of a colour wheel. the-art-of-autism.com/understanding-the-spectrum-a-comic-strip-explanation/
Which if they try to use this analogy proves that everyone is unique and individual and it's personality.

And via the neurobiology, that 'brains can be neuro diverse' and so they believe that therefore brains can be 'gender diverse' and that therefore means you are completely different sexes.

There seems to be quite a bit of overlap with autism, both in use of language but also individuals. And it goes both ways.

Steve yourself! Or Tarquin yourself if you're posh. Not sure what word autocorrect might turn into Tarquin...

When I was a girl, the thing to do was Steve yourself and wear baggy clothes to try and disguise your developing body.

Am I the only one on this board who didn't self-starve as a kid? I wonder if going to an all-girl secondary protected me. We had one girl get anorexia in my entire 150-strong cohort and she wasn't trying to be thin, she felt undeserving of food when people in Ethiopia had none.

Plus I hit puberty at eight (hence my sexual assailants commenting on my pubic hair) so by the time my classmates were reading about diets, I was already in D+ cups and adult clothing sizes and the objectification ship had long since sailed.

I went to an all girls school as well, I'd say about half were always trying to lose weight, there was a fair amount of puking in the toilets etc.

I also didn't but I think it was because I had other issues taking my attention at the time.

It's fairly well known that teenage girls quite often have a difficult relationship with their food and bodies isn't it? I mean, you seem to imply that it can't be true because it didn't happen to you, or maybe I'm reading the post incorrectly.

maybe I'm reading the post incorrectly.

Yes, you are. I'm startled at how many posters had childhood eating disorders, not disbelieving, but horrified at how commonplace it is.

I had a difficult relationship with my body too, being objectified to the point of sexual assault at age eight will do that. By the time anorexia was on my radar, I was wearing D+ cup bras, adult-sized clothes, and the possibility of starving my way out of an adult body and puberty was long since passed. I remember being aware from an early age that all the kids who beat me up and groped me were boys and that none of the girls did that, which informed my insistence on attending a girls' school. I think my early pattern recognition protected me from eating disorders by allowing me to characterise male violence as "something they do to girls and each other[1] because they're shits", rather than as something I could opt out of by starving my body into androgyny.

[1] Recalling standing between a bully and one of my male[2] friends that said bully wanted to beat up, was a lightbulb moment of "wait, boys do this to each other too, being a boy won't protect me"[3].

[2] Yes! I had male friends, so don't bother saying NAMALT because I know that.

[3] I wanted to be a boy for quite a while in infant school, before I realised that boys were shit to each other as well as to girls. I even cut off my hair to try to become one. These days they'd have me on blockers faster than you can say "lupron".

I think my early pattern recognition protected me from eating disorders

Reading that back, I want to make it very clear that I am not blaming women who developed eating disorders. I was bloody lucky to have a mother who helped found one of the early women's shelters and a single-sex school, both of which shielded me from the worst aspects of patriarchal conditioning and allowed that pattern recognition to develop unhindered by messages blaming me for men's actions. Other women were not so lucky and that is not their fault.

single-sex school My mum didn't found the school. I went to the school. My proofreading is pants today.

I have thought for a while that the young women wanting binders and mastactomies, whether they say the are trans or non-binary, is the same as girls trying to starve themselves out of puberty.

I remember when I first started to go through puberty, I hated the physical changes. And it wasn't because I associated them with men's interest or anything like that, it was at least at first more primal - it felt a bit like an out-of-body experience, like I was no longer looking like myself. It was extremely unpleasant, in some ways more than male sexual attention which I at least had mixed feelings about, since I was quite interested in them as well.

I find it interesting that when I was growing up, and 'gender bending' was fun and normal, and people seemed to feel freer to express themselves how they wished ,I seemed to imbibe the message, 'be yourself, do what you want, you can do anything, and change the world' - and a lot of us naively believed it. Of course most women found that many of the men didn't want their world changing, in fact many of the women who depended on the structure of society to get where they were, didn't either. So the bubble burst somewhat.

And the next message I felt strongly was, 'you can't change someone else you can only change yourself' - which is great advice within the context of how a relationship works, except the full message is often that if you do change yourself the dynamics of the relationship will change, and either the other will too or it will end. But I see again and again, in any difficult situation, 'you can only change yourself' so maybe the whole, 'I can't fit in so I have to change myself - radically' is really quite logical if taken from a naive and vulnerable position.