Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
its crazy how some names last forever and some dont. we had marcus antonius and guys today are still named mark or anthony. we had ten million english kings named charles or james or william and we still have those. hannibal was a carthaginian general and it couldve last longer as a name if it wasnt for hannibal the cannibal. but no guys are named gaius or octavius anymore. so many names are now considered old people names bc theyre not popular anymore. how do names go out of style or last so long like what the hell
TRANS MEN ! we need more gaius pompieus octavius titus magnus sextus the younger
trans men’s masculinity is so beautiful and so powerful.
trans men looked at something that they had been told they could never even hope to obtain, never hope to be “worthy of,” something that has probably even been weaponized against them, shooing them away, into their place, that said women can’t be this and men must be this, and said No.
No, this is mine now. this is ours. this is ours and it is home and it is good. it is caring and it is freedom.
it is whatever i make it. and it is good.
trans men’s masculinity takes as many forms as there are trans men, and it is so incredibly powerful.
I identify as an FTM, non-hormone, non-op, transsexual heterosexual man. That’s the whole string of it. I was in the lesbian community when I was younger, but I never really fit. That was the 1970s and there really wasn’t the language then about transmen or FTMs or any of that. I didn’t have that accessible to me as an identity. I thought, “I’m the only one on the planet like me,” but then in 1985, Lou Sullivan sent his little booklet through the mail to the archives I was working on. It was “Information for the Female-to-male Crossdresser and Transsexual,” a little booklet that he self-published with a little handwritten note that said, “Maybe some people in your archive would want to read this.” Even though he didn’t know me, he didn’t know who he was sending this to, I read it. I read it and within two hours I called him and I said, “I gotta meet you, because now there’s two of us, you know, on the planet.” And I flew to San Francisco to meet him.
When I got there, I dressed up super masculine. I even wore temporary facial hair, because I wanted to demonstrate to him that I was a man. So, he opens the door and he is this little frail ninety-eight pound gay guy with a t-shirt on and I thought, “Well, he’s a man and he’s kinda like me, but he’s kinda not like me.” We ended up talking for five hours straight in his kitchen. In the middle of it, he told me he had to get up and take his AZT. I hadn’t known that he had HIV/AIDS, but I realized then that I was making the closest friend of my entire life, the most pivotal individual for me, and that I was losing him at the same time. We corresponded until he died and when he died, I started the East Coast FTM Group because I had nobody and he had asked me to head up his group in San Francisco, which I couldn’t do.
I always felt some resistance to the fact that I didn’t transition medically, but over time I started to find transsexuals who had not transitioned medically, or who had transitioned partially and then stopped, like my friend Leslie Feinberg. Eventually I found more people with the idea that, “I’m already me, I don’t need any medical intervention to become me.” It took a ten-year journey with a gender counselor to give myself permission around this, because it is not popular, even in our community.
I’ve done a lot of organizing, much of it pre-internet. I did it the way Lou did it at first, all by mail. I remember the first big conference I went to, a True Spirit Conference, and I think there were 300 guys, FTMs, from all over the country and Canada, and I remember thinking, “It’s starting. The movement for FTMs is really starting, big time.” Now I have a vision for making the Sexual Minorities Archives a national comprehensive LGBTQ educational resource center with a museum and an art gallery with many rooms to show the collections, to have a youth room, to have a meeting room, to have a community room, and to be the preeminent LGBTQ archive on the East Coast. That’s what I’m most looking forward to as I age and that’s what I want to accomplish before I die.
From: To Survive on This Shore
Ben is legendary around here. He’s literally so sweet and everyone knows that.
Are you a trans man? Are you new to using Grindr and intimidated by the new platform? You don’t know where to start with the app, and you don’t know how to navigate it as a trans guy?
Biological anthropologist here: TERFs are dead wrong about estrogen/testosterone not changing the skeleton. They do so much to the skeleton we had to completely reassess one of the ways we estimate the biological sex of skeletons.
So, before the advent of cross-sex hormone therapy, one of the surefire ways to ID a biologically female skeleton of a person who had borne children (this is important) was by looking for pits of parturition. These form when the estrogen surge during late pregnancy tells your pelvic ligaments to loosen up in order to fit the baby’s massive head through the birth canal. Your pelvis starts to s There’s hypothetically only one normally occurring biological reason for a body to give that signal, and since you have to be nominally XX (or some variant of that where you can still carry a pregnancy to term), it was a pretty solid shorthand for sex!
Until we started looking for these things outside of female skeletons, and surprise! “Male” skeletons can have them too! Sometimes these are chromosomal variants, sometimes they’re men with a high estrogen or estrogen-esque hormonal component, and in the modern era? Sometimes these are trans women whose skeletons have undergone hormonal changes due to taking estrogen.
And then there’s testosterone. You know what that does, right. It makes it easier to build muscle. But what THAT does is put new and interesting stresses and pressures on the bones, making them more rugged and in line with the skeletal structure we see in people who have had high testosterone their entire lives. We don’t just see this in trans men- we see this in older cis women too. Once your estrogen production tanks after menopause, we see what we call masculinization of the face, where the features get more rugged and robust as tissue production changes. These changes don’t happen overnight, and we don’t have good data (yet) but my guess is that when we start looking at the skeletal remains of trans men who took T throughout their adult lives, their skulls are gonna look pretty damn masculine.
Now, hormone therapy isn’t going to change every aspect of your skeleton. Estrogen in particular doesn’t do too much to the cranial bones. Your skeletal height and limb length are unlikely to change. Things like the size and shape of the pelvic inlet, the sciatic notch, and other features that are used in sex estimation, are also unlikely to change. Professional anthropological sex estimation is a complex calculus where you look at many, many features of the skeleton to make the best possible estimation of what sex the person was. It has nothing to do with gender or gender presentation. It simply tells us the end result of your hormonal composition during life. So long as you’re taking hormones regularly for a while and giving your body a chance to change and grow, your skeleton WILL undergo changes based on your hormone levels.
[ID 1: digital drawing of a uterus in black silhouette, under blue text that says: “His body, His choice, Give Trans Men A Reproductive Voice”. The background is textured like parchment.
ID 2: close-up photo of a button with the graphic described in ID 1. It’s pinned onto a blue denim shirt. End ID]
Trans men are the same amount men as cis men. We are complete men, our maleness is no lesser than cis men’s, and we should not hold cis men as the gold standard of manhood and trans men as an aberration from the “true” men, or push the idea that we have to look like cis men in order to be taken seriously as men.
But there are differences between cis men and trans men, the most important of which being that trans men are marginalized on the basis of gender. We are gender-marginalized men, which means we tend to have very different experiences with gendered privilege and gendered oppression from a cis man.
Trans men need to be included in discussions of gender oppression as gender-marginalized men. We should not be included under the idea that we have some innate femaleness that make us oppressed, or that we are men-Lite and therefore not as scary as “real” men. And we also should not be barred from discussions of gender oppression and safe spaces for victims of it under the transandrophobic idea that because we are men we are essentially cis men and have all the power and privilege that comes with cis manhood.
Trans men are just as much male as cis men, and we are oppressed on the basis of our gender (transmanhood).
