Thread by @RatRace123, I got some new followers today, and I just now thought of [...]

I got some new followers today, and I just now thought of something I should’ve asked way before now:
Everyone following me is at least 18 or older right? ‘Cause IF YOU AREN’T 18 OR OLDER, I’m gonna have to request that you PLEASE UNFOLLOW ME.

I didn’t put anything like that in my bio, ‘cause I thought the fact that I’m frequently sweary and, as of this year, occasionally seen in various states of undress, should’ve gotten that message across, but in case it didn’t I’m going to edit my bio to include that right now.

Trust me, kids, you’re not missing much. I’m like the poor man’s medley of several much better, more insightful trans twitter accounts.
Plus I think I’m poorly coping with a quarter life crisis and that’s just not something teens and even young adults should be exposed to.

Trans youth should enjoy their youth!
At least wait until they’re my age before viewing the prospect of turning 30 in 2 years with equal amounts of dread and regret, partly because, ironically, they’re not old enough to comprehend and appreciate the fact that 28 is not that old.

And by “they’re” I of course mean “I’m.”

I can understand all of this stuff on a conceptual level, but I lack the lived experience to put it into any sort of emotionally understandable context.

I wonder if this isn’t more fueled by regret than fear. Regret that I didn’t get to experience any bit of my youth as my true self.
Not that I would have been capable of transitioning significantly earlier.

Even if access to hormones and blockers was as relatively accessible as it is now back then, the general attitude towards trans people (any sort of queer identity) in the Oughts was SUBSTANTIALLY more hostile than it is today.

To elaborate, in the oughts it was still “OK” to shout “Gay!!!” as a punchline. Not officially of course, it was against school policy, but nobody gave enough of a shit to enforce that policy or stop it when it was violated.

In practice, anyone who even slightly deviated from a rigid cis-het norm ran the risk of being ostracized, losing most of their friends, ‘cause if you were a boy most of your friends were also probably boys...

Dumb hormonal teenage boys, who generally communicated with each other through insults and juvenile humor, most of them desperately trying to live up to some narrow view of masculinity, not helped by a sex-ed class in middle school that used a lesson plan from the fuckin’ 70s!!!

We didn’t even learn about condoms beyond looking at a sealed one and being told “This is a condom. It protects you during sex. We’re not going to demonstrate how to use one because we don’t trust you to be mature about it.”
(That last one... yeah, OK, fair.)

Anyway back to what you could expect by either being queer or just by having some aspect about you that made people *think* you were queer:
After you’re ostracized and lose most of your friends, you’re then set up for targeted bullying and/or threats.

Or you get beaten up...

And that’s just for being, or seeming, or being rumored to be, gay. I don’t know what would’ve happened to anyone who was openly trans.

For the record all this stuff only really applies to AMAB people.
AFAB students endured a... different, more disgusting privacy invasiony type of reaction to their queerness. There was a persistent rumor through high school that a group of girls were having lesbian orgies.

Looking at it in hindsight, I’m gonna hazard a guess that it was a rumor started by the aforementioned dumb hormonal teenage boys, ‘cause “Ha ha lesbians hot.”
(I do agree with that sentiment, of course, but I now view it through a vastly different lens.)

Examining the rumor now as an adult, I have to say... Who cares if they did? It was never anyone’s goddamn business, and also I doubt it. I think it was influenced partly by the fact that the girls in my class were more emotionally intimate with each other than the guys were.

Because any sort of intimacy means “doin’ it.” Except when it comes to guys, any sort of intimacy between them is “gay” and “wrong.”

Speaking of rumors, guess which trans girl to be did have some rumors about her swirling around implying that she was a gay boy!

The ironclad logic behind that? I didn’t play sports, I didn’t like PE, I LOATHED changing with the boys before and after PE (CAN’T IMAGINE WHY!)

I will say now, these are all guesses on my part. I never actually learned the reason behind the rumors. So I’m spitballing.
I was widely known as weird, my lisp was way the Hell less under control than it is now...

And... well, not to brag, but for a brief period in my life, from, like, 10-13, before puberty completely destroyed me, I was kinda pretty for a boy.

So maybe it was some combination of all that, maybe it was because I was very close to my best friend.

In any case the rumors didn’t lead to anything happening to me, none of my friends believed it... or maybe even heard it.
All things considered, I got off easy. Kinda...

It did make enough of an impact on me to completely bury and stigmatize my bisexuality. I recall thinking to myself in my teenage years that it was wrong I was attracted to men.

I denied it and suppressed it and lied to myself and everyone else about it. It took me until I was openly transitioning to accept it and embrace it.

And I think I needed to become a girl in order for that acceptance to happen. I think the fear and the self-loathing, and the stigma prevented me from accepting I was bi as a guy. I created a scenario in my mind where I could not be both male and bisexual.

I had to break down that barrier, and start living as my true self in order to be comfortable with another part of my true self.
The hormones also played a big role. They greatly expanded my romantic preferences.

So I wrap this up by saying that the stigma I observed and saw around the idea of someone being gay makes me believe 100% that being trans would’ve been immeasurably worse. If I had the capability to transition during grade school, I don’t know if I would’ve made it to graduation

In that sense, I feel deep remorse, but also anger. I feel like years were stolen from me. I began pursuing transitioning when I was 25, and it took me a full year before I was able to get on hormones.

I know it’s never too late, but, Y’know, there’s a sense of mourning over the youth I never had, as a girl. I spent the last year of my young adulthood getting things set up so I could finally start becoming who I am in my first year of adulthood proper.

And see this is also why kids shouldn’t follow me. I have demonstrated terrible narrative cohesion through this thread!
After the first two posts were on point I then went off on a massive barely related tangent.
Which is accurate to how my mind works, but makes for messy threads

Latest Threads Unrolled: