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.
I just linked to this in a post, but I want to highlight it more explicitly. This guide is really illuminating, and if you are not a trans femme you should still read it too, because we all need to know what transmisogyny affected people are constantly going thru and how much danger we can present to them and how we fail them as bystanders
we are the daughters of witches that they could and did burn we are the daughters of witches that they are still burning & you know in my dreams, a woman keeps whispering: keep going maybe in the next lifetime we’ll make it to the water
trans girls arent required to be soft, frail, submissive, quiet, reserved, “well mannered”, “ladylike”, or motherly. trans girls can be tough, brash, loud, bold, butch, strange and lone wolves. trans girls can be whoever they are, as they are. there is no one way to be a girl
that being said, trans girls who are those things are wonderful. there are many ways to be a woman, there’s no right or wrong way. thats the point! we love you no matter what type of girl you are, don’t feel like you have to be any type of way
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.
its so surreal that like, every day the internet churns out videos of fucked up people doing fucked up shit, like fights in restaurants, naked people running into convenience stores to yell at the staff, all manner of “karens” and “crackheads,” and nobody bats an eye its just a normal type of daily content
but the minute a trans woman is in one of those, a statistical rarity bc there’s not that many of us, its a headline on Tucker Carlson and supposed to be some sort of conversation topic for our community and a bunch of women are supposed to walk around with shame that some random woman who they have nothing to do with far away was a freak and it got posted on the internet
and that’s why this idea of “we need to be normal so they accept us” is a losing game, because the content mill will always find someone somewhere acting weird and the right wing media will put it on blast, regardless of how shitty and judgmental you decide to be toward other trans women
Nef goes on to explain the difference between her photoshoot with Velencoso, versus how transgender women are typically photographed in fashion editorials. “Images of trans femmes being loved rarely exist outside of pornography,” Nef wrote. “We tend to be hyper-sexualized and objectified within the cisgender gaze. Either that or we’re dehumanized as scum or (just as bad) untouchable goddesses.”
Trans women will never be free until people stop having strong emotions about penises. Like we, as a society, have got to stop caring about dicks! Dicks have to stop symbolizing maleness, obviously, but they also have to stop symbolizing power, dominance, sexual agency and aggression, violence, and even sex itself. Like trans women can’t be free if the very conceptual presence of a penis represents an intrusion(!) of unwanted(!) sexuality(!) in public life. Like that’s why trans women are abhorrent to both male chauvinists and radical feminists, because both groups have extremely strong feelings about what a penis *represents*, and find the conceptual and actual presence of a woman with a penis to be simultaneously vile and nonsensical because they’ve loaded so much symbolic baggage onto both women and penises.
Anyway dicks are totally neutral body parts and seeing a dick, or a bulge in a swimsuit, or simply knowing that there’s a dick somewhere in the same bathroom as you isn’t harmful or violent
