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Trans @lemmy.blahaj.zone
dandelion (she/her) @lemmy.blahaj.zone

what's a misconception you had pre-transition?

The way I understand my feelings and experiences has changed so much pre vs post transition.

I wanted to see what other small misconceptions you all had from pre-transition that you see differently now, or that maybe you wish you had understood before.

There are so many to choose from, but I'll start:

Probably as a coping mechanism I never saw the gendered components to my self-loathing.

For example, I hated my breasts because they were malformed-looking, to me. I would sometimes think, if I were a woman it would be worse (like the same, but larger), but I never once thought having a flat chest would be better. Instead I seemed to need to feel having female breasts would be worse, so I could feel better about my situation.

Or how I always loved how little hair was on my body, but never thought that was abnormal. I never got back hair and only had thin hair on my belly and a small, thin strip on my sternum. I never thought of this in terms of gender, I never thought about how my body ideal was curvy and hairless, or feminine. It bothered me when I was compared to male beauty icons, but I never could quite be honest with myself as to why.

I ignored (or repressed) the gender in everything, but it was still there.

So my misconception was about gender itself, I thought of it as primarily social and malleable, and thus was some great social evil, gender was The Enemy or The Problem.

Now gender is extremely important to me, but before I would say being a man was irrelevant to me, or even obviously unwanted - it was a moral choice, to be a woman was to be a better person in my mind, to abandon a toxic social role in favor of an enlightened one.

Now I think you can't really choose, that we have these implicit gendered feelings that we can't really change, and so being a woman feels good to me because of what I am, and now being a woman is just a precious gift, rather than a moral imperative.

I totally botched this post, I wanted this to be succinct and lost my sense of purpose and have rambled along.

Looking forward to hearing from you all. 💚

29 comments

  • I grew up in the 80s and 90s, and many of my misconceptions were shaped by that.

    I used to believe that femininity/masculinity, presentation and gender were intrinsically linked. I don't really have an attachment to femininity, and so, for a long time, I thought that meant that I wasn't trans, wasn't a woman etc.

    I used to believe that all trans women wanted bottom surgery, and didn't understand how one could be trans and not want it.

    I used to believe that to transition is the same thing as wanting to pass as cis.

    I used to believe that gender was binary.

    I used to hold vaguely transmed beliefs. I didn't so much believe that you had to have dysphoria to be trans, but more, it never occurred to me that it was even possible to experience trans identity without dysphoria.

    I never used to realise that trans men exist

    I used to believe that being queer, and being part of the queer community was just a practical/pragmatic thing, and not an important part of my identity, and something valuable in its own right.

    Lets just say, my understanding of trans identity has changed quite a lot since then :)

  • Good question!

    Regarding transition, I though I'd probably always look pretty clocky (I wanted to transition anyway, though!). Now at almost a year in I don't have much trouble seeing a girl in the mirror most of the time, even in a T-shirt and jeans with stubble and no makeup!

    I thought I was shy. Turns out I just didn't like pretending to be a man.

    I thought I was self-conscious. Turns out now that I like my body more I want to show it off!

    I thought wanting to be a woman was just a sexual fantasy. Everybody knows that one.

    I thought estrogen would turn me into an emotional wreck. Actually I'm much calmer than I used to be.

    I thought transition was something that other people did. I was wrong.

  • @dandelion I guess one misconception I had before transition was that I thought you needed to know you wanted to be a different gender early on as a child. The thing is when I was a child I never even put any thought to what I wanted to be or what I looked like. When people told me I was a boy I believed them because what do I know. I might as well have been a pair of floating eyeballs because I had no sense of my body. Only when puberty hit did it occur to me that I would rather be female because of the changes to my body and sexuality.

    The misconception I mentioned was something I used as an argument why I could not be trans, ignoring that there were still signs when I was a child, just not obvious ones. I think I used it as a coping mechanism since transition seemed so far out of reach in my early adulthood.

    • This was a major hang-up I had, too - I basically thought as a child I had to know I was a girl and not a boy, which did not mesh with my experiences, so I thought I was certainly not trans.

      I would say I didn't live happily as a boy, but I certainly adapted and lived as a boy without what I would consider constant and severe distress. I did have to adapt, though - once I transitioned, a lot of memories came back that I had not interpreted through the lens of gender, which I realized were probably related. Being upset that my parents wouldn't let me have or play with dolls, for example.

      After a while I recalled when I was maybe 5 years old being recounted a story about how everyone in the family thought I was going to be born a girl, and they had even bought girl clothes and so on, and I remember thinking that made sense because I felt I was supposed to be born a girl (like on the inside, it felt that way, it didn't feel "right" that I was born a boy, and for the first time they were giving me an explanation for why I felt that way!). So I figured there was a kind of cosmic error, but I still thought I was born a boy, just that it was a mistake somehow and I was supposed to be a girl.

      Now that's what a psychologist would look at as evidence from early childhood that I knew I needed to be a different gender, but I never saw that memory that way.

      A lot of my misconception is in interpretation of my experiences, I didn't have the tools to understand my feelings or what they meant. It's made worse when you adapt and cope well to life in the wrong gender, it masks the symptoms and leads to strange places (like taking on a mentality of assuming all men wish to be women, and so on).

  • I thought transfems (me) would have their voice change from HRT in the opposite way to transmascs. Sad that's not the case :(

  • I started off pretransition believing that you can't choose your gender, and now I would say one can choose a gender. It reminds me of the free will vs predestination arguments from the churches I grew up in.

    There's a lot that has changed about how I view the world. My transition was fairly easy, all things considered. I eventually settled on labeling my gender as dragon. I couldn't find a premade gender label that described how I understand myself so I made my own. Another label that I've taken to using for some forms and such is genderqueer. Mostly because I've realized there are different levels to how much of who I am I want to share. At a basic level, most people perceive me as a woman. It's an easy shorthand for many interactions but it's a perception, not who I am. I choose to play that role in certain situations because it's good enough for that.

    So, in a certain sense, I choose my gender on a case by case basis. Choosing what and how much I share about myself.

    In the same way, I have different names in different contexts. All of them are my true names, and all of them I chose.

    There's probably a lot more I could go into but I'm kinda tired rn anyways.

  • That there's a strict binary between trans and cis.

    Some cis people might be gender nonconforming, some trans people might keep some gendered aspects about them from pretransition, nonbinary people aren't binary trans. And most importantly, when I thought cis/trans was a strict binary, I told myself I must be cis then because that's Normalℱ, and trans, in my mind being the complete opposite, was too far outside my comfort zone.

    • yeah, reading the Joel MRI studies on brain sex were really fascinating because they found like 95% of people had brains that wouldn't be considered male or female, there is way more variety in the biology of sex differentiation that people realize, trans people are not the only gender-diverse people.

      Honestly I live a more gender conformist life as a trans woman than some cis lesbians I know, who are more masculine in their gender presentation.

  • I was under the impression gender was skin deep. I did not realize that feminems could make you grow titties. Or shrink your feet.

    • What do you mean by skin deep?

      I was pretty surprised about the feet too, and that some trans women become shorter (apparently due to changes in the shape of the spine), I wouldn't mind that 😅

      • What do you mean by skin deep?

        Not of the mind. That a woman was a woman because she had a woman's body and a man a man by the same rule. That if you stripped that away then what you're left with wouldn't really change from man to woman. And by the same token there was nothing you could do to change which body you were given. That gender was body and body was gender and nothing ran beneth the skin.

        I should note that I'm
 not exactly agender, but going by inate sense of gender I might as well be. I call it Gender CIPA, because I'm immune to the pain of gender dysphoria even though its still killing me, or bad gender interoception because like a lot of other things including hunger and temperature my body is too autistic to tell me when something's wrong in that department.

  • That all trans femmes would grow chests like the other members of their genetic relations who had endogenous estrogen

    That lactation happened sometimes

    That erections would no longer be possible

    That genitals would shrink by a major amount

    That it'd still be possible to release fluids from genitals under circumstances similar to before

    That orgasms would be possible, feel amazing, and could be multiple

    That horniness would feel different

    That muscle mass would naturally be lost

    That fat distribution would be much different

    That feet would shrink

    That faces would look more 'feminine' to a certain degree, naturally

    That attraction to men would happen, or that attraction would change much at all

    That head hair would get a lot thicker and more volumous

    That's all we can think of for now

  • There was a common sentiment of "you'll never pass if you don't transition before 20" when my egg cracked. I thought, fuck it I'll do it anyways.

    And I pass perfectly fine!

    • I had this misconception too! I decided to transition without any hope of ever passing, and within a year I was passing full-time đŸ€Ż It took a lot to get there (including luck), but I really never thought it would ever happen, and I still have a hard time accepting or believing I pass (constantly afraid people will notice).

      I affirm the therapeutic value of transition even if you don't ever pass (it made my life so much better in many ways, even before I was passing), but it's nice also that I got there.

      Do you remember when you started to pass or what that process was like of that misconception being reversed?

      • I think for me it was the first time I was called "Ma'am" in person. I was in line at the mall shopping for Christmas presents, around 9 months after I started HRT.

        The guy tried to call to me and let me know there was an open register, and it took him saying "ma'am" like four times for me to turn and look, and realized he was talking to me!

        Was honestly shocked.

        I still get "sir" mostly on the phone, but very rarely am clocked in person.

29 comments