cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2844166

BABE WAKE UP, NEW PYRAMID INU VIDEO DROPPED

WITH BLACK DRESSES MUSIC IN IT AAAAUUUUUUOOOGGH

Laughingfish, more like fucks

I have never been so compelled to watch so many smelly shows.

But not those Conservative ones like Blaire White and Caitlyn Jenner.

That was the objective of defending against bigotry in the event of America going screwed out.

Turns out I’ve got major gender problems and wish I had been born a girl. [Removed as it was pointed out how problematic and doomer my sentiment was] I'm well past puberty and am very masculine-looking. The dysphoria’s gotten worse over the years though, or maybe the gender affirming feelings have gotten more tempting as I’ve stopped being in denial so much and have explored a bit of transitional stuff — shaving, doing my hair different, less masculine clothing. But I just don’t know what to do next.

I’m terrified by the idea of trying to hormonally transition, mostly because I have a very high sex drive and am very attached to it. Dysphoria about the shape of my genitals aside, I do want my dick to keep getting hard, I want to still be able to orgasm from using it, and I want to still produce cum for my partner to enjoy. From what I’ve read hormonal transitioning would eventually disable all of those, and I feel for me that would be even worse than not transitioning.

I’m also pretty strong and muscular, and I don’t want to lose that muscle and put on a bunch of fat from going on estrogen, which I’ve seen happen to couple friends who’ve transitioned.

So, hormonal transitioning looks too risky for me. Still, I thought maybe I could still achieve a good degree of comfort with non hormonal transitioning, maybe getting rid of all the body hair for a start. But when it comes to non hormonal transitional steps it all feels so incredibly daunting. I’ve been “blessed” with prodigious masculinity, the ability to grow hair all over my body like a beast. Shaving is a pain and I grow hair so fast that my face turns into stubble in less than a day after shaving.

Nonhormonal transitional steps I’ve considered: Shaving all over. Problem: I’ve only shaved a bit of my body and it gets really old and time-consuming really fast.

Laser hair removal. Problem: Supposed to be very expensive, and it works better on people with white skin and light, fair hair, neither of which have I (EDIT: CORRECTION: works better with dark hair so at least I have that going for me). In particular the at-home DIY machines do not work as well in those use cases, and without training there’s more risk of damaging your own skin trying to do it.

Electrolysis hair removal: I had a bit done in the past on my face. It was not super effective, takes a lot of sessions, and was very painful even with a local anesthetic cream. On top of that, while I might be able to have it done on much of my body it is impossible to have done on my face because of Covid — I’d have to take off my respirator and that’s not happening unless I could find a practitioner wearing an N95 in an isolated room with heavy air filtration.

More drastic nonhormonal steps — facial feminization surgery, breast implants — are even more inaccessible because at this point very few healthcare practitioners give a shit about Covid so it’s nigh impossible to see a surgeon or even get to a gender care clinic. Regardless, the uncontrollable hair is a big barrier — I wouldn’t want to consider other options before getting it dealt with in the first place.

Everything seems so painful, risky, and dauntingly expensive to the point where idk how I could afford it anyway.

Any advice would be appreciated. Thank you, comrades.

As some of you may know, I've just barely started the process of transitioning, and have been looking for resources related to this. I've found some pretty great ones, especially Trans Academy (which I somehow knew about from when I was "totally cis"), but most of the resources I've found seem a little scattered and I'd love to have some kind of a guide that may even include harder to find "DIY" tips that other groups might not address. Since there doesn't seem to be anything out there (to my knowledge) that includes all of the useful info someone who's starting out might need, I was thinking that this could be a good place to start such a project. So I had some questions:

1. Do you think this is a good or bad idea? and why?
2. What form should this take? Someone mentioned cryptpad.fr to me, and it seems ideal for what I had in mind, which is something like an easy-to-navigate wiki with contents and search, and if possible a list of sources/links for the info it contains. I'd love to hear other suggestions if you have them, though. Maybe eventually a website could work once a lot of the info has been fleshed out.
3. What should be the scope of the guide? I was initially thinking the focus should be on trans (masc/femme) and NB identities, but should it be expanded to include a much larger group?
4. What are potential legal issues, if any, with putting such a guide out there and what would be the best way to deal with that?
5. What would be the best way to collaborate on this? Should there be stuff like approval, version control, etc?
6. Is there anything else I'm missing here that you'd like to talk about?

This was just something I was thinking about, and I thought I'd make a post to see what others think, but please feel free to give honest feedback on whether or not this would be a good idea or if it could even work. Thanks!

it's definitely also out wherever you get movies illicitly, so you can watch it for free wherever you are. now there's no excuse not to watch it, for all the reasons i laid out in this post. great movie about drowning in dysphoria and suffocating in the closet

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https://fedi.aria.dog/notice/Aik7pFXuz2lNM3TMG0

Hey folks, the results are in and the vast majority of active Hexbear users say they are not cishet!

This survey had the same limitations of our previous transgender survey. This means we do not have the tech to make this survey more accurate through other means (more questions, more options, negative/positive answering, anonymous answering, etc). However, we do have a good sampling of the active userbase (about 1/3rd of daily active users answered) and combined with the transgender poll, we can conclude that Hexbear is an overwhelmingly queer instance that is proud of stating its queerness publicly.

You can see the graphs of the previous transgender survey here:

You can find the raw (public) data of the survey here. Feel free to audit my numbers and make sure I didn't hallucinate anything!

The total tally was

Yes = 114 
No = 195 
Unsure = 30 
Total = 339 

A number of people did not follow instructions properly, and I put them into the category that made sense based on the information they provided.

A number of people used the dean-malice emote which was not in the set of emojis I provided for responses. Most were merged into yes, unless they stated they were queer otherwise.

This survey is a little less complex than the last one, I kept it short and sweet and did not tally the pronouns.

Both surveys were done over three days and were pinned on the front page.

P.S. Thanks @ComradeEd@lemmygrad.ml for helping make this a bit quicker with your code here.

I hope you all have as much fun with this information as I did and I hope you all have a great Pride Month

It was the most trans movie I’ve ever seen and I don’t know what to do with it.

I’m not absolutely devastated like so many people have been but maybe I hyped it up in my head. I managed to avoid spoilers. But emotionally I had heavy expectations for it. I also can’t get it out of my head. It’s just swirling around in there.

I don’t know how anyone can watch it and not see the transness of it, but apparently some people do.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2679948

things are HAPPENING besties

Hey, we still haven't been able to find a secure way to poll everyone yet. I've really been wanting to ask (in the negative, to be more inclusive) what proportion of Hexbear is queer. This isn't going to be super scientific or anything as a result, but just a quick guess.

Please respond to this post with the following emojis :

For yes, you ARE a cisgender heterosexual (cishet):

For no, you are NOT a cisgender heterosexual (cishet):

For unsure, as in you are UNSURE or QUESTIONING if you are queer, transgender, a cisgender heterosexual (cishet), etc:

If you have anything to add, please use a spoiler tag below your answer like so:

Remember to respond even if you are cisgender, queer, or otherwise. Everyone should try to respond, if you feel comfortable!

I got pretty emotional over this video. Part of it is a conversation between current day Abigail and her old self when she was still living life as a man, and it resonated with me on a pretty intimate level. As someone who is still pretty early on in her journey, it was really touching to see how far Abigail has come, and how she refutes the internalized transphobia and the doubts she had that were holding her back from transitioning as a dialog with her old self.

i don't have the first idea of how to talk about this movie. you need to see it, especially if you're trans. even more if you're transfem, and most of all if you're transfem or questioning but haven't come out or started transition yet. i cannot recommend it enough, it's in theaters now and you should see it there if at all possible. this is going to be kind of a mess because this movie made me feel so many emotions i have no idea how to properly express, but i'll do my best

this movie is about you if you've ever felt trapped in your own body, feeling like you're drowning and not knowing why. if you've ever loved a work of art so much it became the lens you saw the world through and felt alienated because of how the people around you didn't get it. if you've ever been stuck in a small town and known something was wrong, this isn't how things are supposed to be, life isn't meant to be like this. but most of all, if you've ever looked at yourself in the mirror and cried because you'll die looking like this. if you've known you'll die as a man and nothing is scarier than that, but what other choice do you have? you might even know there's another option, but it seems impossible and it's almost scarier than dying like this

this is a movie about a lot of things, but first and foremost it is about being a transgender woman in that time when you know in the back of your mind that that is what you are but are too scared to truly let that out. some people are saying this is subtext, which is absurd. the main character is transgender. this is the text of the film

there will be some spoilers after this point, because i can't keep talking around the actual movie itself, though i'll avoid anything too major outside a spoiler tag

the main character (who i am going to refer to as isabel and with she/her pronouns because it makes me feel nauseous to refer to her with the name she goes by for almost the entire movie) is a closeted transgender woman growing up in the 1990s. the movie is about her and a friend (maddy, who is a lesbian) bonding over a show (called the pink opaque) that they connect to in a way they can't connect with the world around them. isabel is trans and in the closet and she never leaves the closet. she never says she is trans, or that she's a girl, or tries to live as a woman. she is in the closet, she is too scared to say the words. maddy recognizes this in her, tries to push her to express herself, but isabel doesn't. she lives her life as a man, pushes maddy away every time maddy reaches out. maddy gets out of the small conservative suburb they live in, changes her name to tara to reject the past. even so, tara never found a community. she comes back one last time to try and get isabel to come with her

spoilers for the end of the film

the most harrowing scene in the film comes after isabel rejects tara. she's too scared to leave the home she knows, deciding all the pain that comes with her life as a man is better than going into the unknown and living as a woman. as she walks home she passes by chalk writing on the street in the same handwriting and color as when she would get notes from maddy about the pink opaque back in high school. the chalk reads "it's not too late" and "there is still time". she ignores it, walks past it. in a voiceover she says "it was time i became a productive member of society, it was time i became a man." it still exists in her no matter how hard she tries to reject it, but she buries it as much as she can. we see her decades later, still living that life no matter how obvious it is that the pink opaque and her true identity are within her. there is still time but she doesn't believe that. she's convinced herself it's too late, that she's made her choice and has to stick to it. she accidentally lets some of these buried emotions slip out and as the film ends she's apologizing to everyone around her for making such a mistake as they completely ignore her, her alienation stronger than ever

some of the pieces of the transfem experience that show up in this movie i've never seen anything else touch on. the way that men around you will try and bond with you and you can't follow along. you fuck up, and they realize on some level that you're different and they grow hostile to you. the crushing weight of those around you constantly scrutinizing you for anything you do being too effeminate, and how even when that isn't the thing they're looking for it's what you're scared they'll find. the way many of us gravitate towards other queer people even when we can't define ourselves, and can't answer why when people ask

this movie is drenched in the crushing weight of dysphoria. it's impossible to describe to someone who hasn't seen it, or to someone who hasn't lived it. the one time a character's actor changes is when isabel goes from 7th grade, played by a kid of the right age, to 9th grade, played by an adult man. this shift in her body, the way she views herself, is so dramatic it feels slightly ridiculous, but that's how it is. when she looks at herself in the mirror, when she is talking to her father, when she deals with customers or coworkers or gets called "sir" at the drive through it feels like she's being hit with a hammer. it beats her down until she has no hope, no matter how much the world around her and the one person who sees her for who she is tell her otherwise. it's not too late, it's never too late. there is always still time. but she can't, she's been crushed into her assigned role and is too scared to leave. it's maybe the saddest movie i've ever seen

i know people who saw this movie and realized this would be them if they didn't find the courage to come out. a friend called her mom and came out right after watching it. on letterboxd several reviews are from women who only realized what they were through this film. it might be the single most transgender thing i've ever seen

i haven't talked at all about one of the major plotlines of the movie, because it's something i think would be better not spoiled and it's not as important for this pitch. and i want to be clear this is a kind of weird movie, it does not have moments of catharsis and it can be hard to follow from scene to scene. it's very lynchian in the truest sense of that, it's david lynch if he was a trans millennial. it's labeled as horror by many but it isn't truly scary, more existentially troubling. a movie that makes me feel like i'm dying, but not one that scared me in any kind of horror movie way

i wanna just put some words from other people here, add some slightly different perspectives

I Saw the TV Glow was so good, omg. If you have ever questioned your gender identity, or have even had empathy for someone who was questioning their gender identity, this one will probably hurt. But maybe in a good way

As much as I Saw The TV Glow is about the anxiety and fear that comes before you transition it's like. I think it's like, so great about showing what being a latent tgirl looks like and what it feels like and like yeah. Here's this person that looks like a dude and who thinks they're a dude but like it's just not-quite right, but still they have to play along w/ the whole boy thing no matter how not-quite-right it is just out of inertia and others' expectation. And here's how like this profound feeling identification w/ another girl and girlness in general looks like as it plays across their face. And this is how having that affects your relationships. Oh and here's the moment when they dip their toes into occupying a girl's role socially and it just makes so much more sense, but then how scary that is for someone that everyone expects to be a boy, or a gay boy or something. And here's how immense and valuable it is to them to have a relationship w/ someone who doesn't expect that from them. It's such a dramatic position to be in and like. God what a movie, it did it so well

quote source: https://archive.org/details/safonov-land-in-bloom/page/318/mode/2up?view=theater

Concerning his own future as a Soviet scientist, [Lysenko] speaks in the following terms:
“In our Soviet Union men and women are not born: organisms are born, but men and women are made—tractor drivers, motor drivers, mechanics, academicians, scientists. I was not born a man, I was made a man. And to feel that you are living in such an environment is more than being happy.”

(I collectivized this image btw)

Me:

from the artist who brought you

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last haus of decline for now

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Synthesized hormones are one of the truly greatest wonders of modern medicine. It's alleviated suffering and complications for millions of cis people around the world, let alone us trans folk. In this, we have a nuke against transphobic nonsense, and we need to get trigger happy with it.

For a long time now, hogs have been working towards getting HRT for all trans people banned in various states. I read an article recently where conservative Ohio local law makers expressly said that that was their intent to work towards and that banning it for kids was the first step, as well as their coordinated efforts to do the same in neighboring states. We've known for a long time that this is a pretty universal playbook, build the underpinning of your ultimate goal by passing less sweeping laws and gradually turn up the restrictions. Likewise, the tactics that they use in their rhetoric is to manipulate their emotions - tell people that kid's genitals are being mutilated and it'll get people riled up enough to not think critically about the premise. 'Who doesn't abhor the idea of children being abused?.. The blue haired communist abusers, that's who!'

This framing of course does not hold up to scrutiny, and I'm not going to preach to the choir on why - the point is this, framing is powerful. Even more powerful, is if the framing simply reflects material reality. If trans folks are actually abusing kids, it'd be pretty damning and then they can say 'see, bunch of sickos!' or whatever. Propagandists have manufactured hoax situations out of whole cloth to try do this, and they frequently fizzle out for obvious reasons. Then the think pieces and op-eds come out and say 'yeah, but what if they did abuse kids?!' to keep this thought in the news cycle and spreading the brain worms.

This weapon however, is a double edged sword, and we can wield it to greater effect because we have material evidence. Remember the hog politicians in Ohio I mentioned? Yeah, these freaks love to tell on themselves and they have been for quite some time. The goal is this - abolition of synthesized hormones - especially birth control. I'm not putting so much effort as to search out the reporting right at the moment, but we've seen it time and again that that's what they want. (CW: CSA/Incest reference in the following sentence) They regressed abortion in the US, and it's created an uproar and back lash when people read about the law trying to force a 10 year old to give birth. People were rightfully sickened by this, and it finally hit home for some. When people see the horrors of what these policies do, they run the other way. And people will start to become alarmed when you are able to frame things into something that will directly impact them. Abolition of synthesized hormones would mean that testosterone and estrogen wouldn't be able to help people through mid-life body changes. Low T sucks for men, low E is a part of the misery of menopause. In our conversations and rhetoric, we need to be hitting on this non-stop. Everyone knows someone who deals with these issues at some point, my dad is quite the hog, but being able to take supplemental testosterone has given him a new lease on life - he'll be able to understand this at a deep level.

Likewise, if you have these conversations, we need to call these things what they are - gender affirming care. The cis are more like us than they know, and they will sooner or later feel the pain of a body that is not doing what you need it to do and be. This is humanizing and normalizing a fact of life, while connecting it to our fact of life. These are talking points relate to every age, every walk of life, every income strata.

The enduring philosophy is that of human connection, not destruction. We can win this this battle, we can liberate ourselves and others from the misery of the past, and we can create a better world.

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