curvy & trans

When someone says they want to go back to “the good old days”, they are inevitably referring to this 1950s cultural ideal that was manufactured in the post World War II American society. This culture was devastating to queer communities, and supremely oppressive of women’s rights. It is no wonder that this spawned the intense feminist backlash of the 1970s.

Mommy’s Little Helpers was the colloquial name for Diazepam, aka Valium. It was the best selling drug from 1969 to 1982, despite becoming a Schedule IV controlled substance in 1970. The nickname was popularized by a Rolling Stones song about the drug. Housewives across the nation were tranquilizing themselves so that they could handle the stress and anxiety of running a home without any help from their asshole husbands.

Kink. Belongs. At. Pride.

Far too much energy in trans rights discourse is spent trying to justify why we exist to people who aren’t going to understand the reasons anyway. What is more important is educating that we do exist, have always existed, and we aren’t going to go away. You can’t extinguish trans people any more than you can left-handedness, or autism (despite numerous people’s best attempts to do so). This is the same shift that happened in pursuit of gay rights; for decades there was intense focus on why homosexuality existed, to no answers. We still don’t know what part of human development controls what morphology a person is drawn towards, but it doesn’t matter, because the discourse changed.

Once science stopped trying to prove why homosexuality exists and people just accepted that some people are gay, thats when the tide shifted (at least, in North America and parts of Europe). While there are still many people who wish to suppress gay people, society as a whole accepted that doing so is …

Imagine that, having been diagnosed with a heart condition, or hypothyroidism, or asthma, or any number of other long term medical conditions, you had to get re-diagnosed every single time you went in for treatment. If every time you change doctors, you had to justify to that doctor that your previous diagnosis was accurate. If you had to prove that, yes, I am actually sick, even when you have been taking the medications for years.

That is the state of trans healthcare. Every every time you change prescribers, you have to prove to the doctor that, yes, I really am the gender I say I am and that’s why I’ve been on hormone therapy for five years. Every gender affirming surgery you pursue, even ones that don’t require pre-auth to do on cis people (such as breast augmentations/reductions), requires multiple new letters (they wont take the old ones) affirming that, yes, you are the gender you say you are and no you are not delusional or suffering from psychosis. This continues to be requ…

@DameKraft did a fantastic thread today about how a lot of trans people may be concluding that they are cisgender because their incongruence is not strong enough to feel like they have a right to identify as transgender. Firstly: YES YOU ARE TRANS ENOUGH.

Secondly, there is no such thing as “appropriating” being trans. If you do not feel a strong connection to your assigned gender, you can call yourself trans! You aren’t offending anyone (at least, anyone whose opinion matters).

I know how easy it is to fall into this trap, because before my own wakeup call I also was afraid to ever mention my feelings around my gender. I thought it would be insensitive or appropriative of “actual” trans people. It’s laughable when I think of that now.

It doesn’t matter if the world still thinks you’re cis, you know who you are, the people who know you know who you are, and that isn’t invalidated simply because you haven’t “transgressed” cisgender norms.

Ada…