What would make YOU want to Transition?

For non T taking readers, was there any time in your life, any experience that occurred that would have caused you at the time to consider transitioning? Or at the least, taking T?

Tell us what it was exactly and why it would have pushed you to the trans edge.

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Femme Shame

I have written a lot about Butch Shame and have mentioned it even more, but I have yet to solely devote a single post to Femme Shame. I preface this post by stating as I am not a Femme, I can write only about Femme Shame from the point of view of the bystander on one hand and an adumbrate on the other.

What is Femme Shame? The short answer is the shame a Femme feels when her Butch lover recoils from her physical desires, her needs and wants for some kind of intimate touch or taste which open the doors to a greater emotional intimacy.

Lesbians date and fall in love with each other because they are attracted physically and emotionally to each other. No matter the dyke, like any human we all have a natural desire and sexual need to want to make love to our partner. Due to Butch Shame, very often out of love and respect for Butches, Femmes hold back or outright forfeit their sexual desires, needs and wants. It is perfectly acceptable for a Butch to stare at her Femmes cleavage or breast and equally acceptable in a sexual situation for that Butch to reach for her Femmes breast, not so for Femmes. Butch bodies are often mine fields that Femmes have to learn to navigate with each Butch lover.

None of this is exactly news in Butch/Femme circles, but what we do not hear about is how Butch Shame issues create Femme Shame and how that dual shame disastrously affects Butch/Femme relationships. When Butches constantly push away their Femme lovers hand or mouth, that constant rejection will eventually take a toll on Femme self esteem. Femmes deal with Femme Shame in different ways, some give up on Butches and choose instead to date/couple with non-Butches in hopes of having a fuller physical and emotional relationship, others serial date/couple with a variety of Butches hoping to find that one Butch who isnt drowning in Butch Shame and others still who just give up on relationships altogether.

Many Butches rather than admit they are rejecting their Femme, try and smooth that rejection over by citing the "this is just the way I am" mantra that Butches everywhere are famous for. But make no bones about it, pushing your lovers touch away IS rejection and it DOES create a deep sense of shame, and pain in that Femme. But until we can admit that there is a problem, that Femme Shame is real as well as prevalent in our community, the Femmes we claim to love and admire will continue suffering in shame and silence.

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Femme Shame Video

Trans Trending-Who Is Transitioning

Female transitioning-misogyny in motion.

Stop female self hatred and help to put an end to this terrible disorder!

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50's Housewives the Future of TMates?

 The post derives from a study of female partners of transmen entitled Women's Work"? Women Partners of Transgender Men Doing Housework and Emotion Work by Carla A. Pfeffer.

From the article: Despite increasing family studies research on same-sex cohabiters and families, the literature is virtually devoid of transgender and transsexual families. To bridge this gap, I present qualitative research narratives on household labor and emotion work from 50 women partners of transgender and transsexual men. Contrary to much literature on "same-sex" couples, the division of household labor and emotion work within these contemporary families cannot simply be described as egalitarian. Further, although the forms of emotion work and "gender strategies," "family myths," and "accounts" with which women partners of trans men engage resonate with those from women in (non-trans) heterosexual and lesbian couples, they are also distinct, highlighting tensions among personal agency, politics, and structural inequalities in family life.

Continuing: Despite continuing rises in the numbers of women working outside the home for pay, concomitant with supportive social attitudes for women's equality (among men and women), women still report experiencing "the second shift" at home (Bianchi, 1995; Kamo, 2000). Despite increasingly liberal gender-role attitudes, heterosexual women continue to perform the bulk of household labor across both cohabiting and marital contexts (Bianchi, Milkie, Sayer, & Robinson, 2000; Smock, 2000). Even more surprising, some research demonstrates that men actually perform less household labor once married than when cohabitating with their women partners (Gupta, 1999) or when earning less income than their women partners (Bittman, England, Sayer, Folbre, & Matheson, 2003; Greenstein, 2000). One of the most lasting lessons from Hochschild' s (1989) study was that men and women who are ideologically committed to egalitarian relationships co-constmct elaborate "gender strategies" and "family myths," describing the division of housework as equal although women actually perform the majority of this labor. Rather than assailing women with claims of "false consciousness" regarding incommensurability between one's feminist self understanding and participation in traditional, inegalitarian, sex-typed divisions of household labor and emotion work, this work demonstrates the complexity and function of family myths and gender strategies. These family myths and gender strategies serve important personal and social functions, as they allow individuals and couples to retain and preserve deeply held commitments to egalitarianism and keep relationships and families intact (Hochschild, 1989).

And: The present study focuses on the primary research question: What do narratives from women partners of trans men, on the performance, structure and division of household labor and emotion work within their relationships, reveal about "doing gender" and "women's work" within contemporary families? This research question was designed to obtain an in-depth understanding of the various forms of unpaid household labor and emotion work that women partners of trans men report performing in their relationships as well as to tap into the various explanatory frameworks used to describe these forms of work and their division.  

Eligible participants included both current and former women partners of trans men who had been in a relationship with a trans man for at least 3 months. Three months was chosen as a minimum cutoff point for participation because I wished to gather data on perceived relationship dynamics from individuals across as wide a swath of relationship durations as possible, from those in the early stages of relationship development to those in long-term relationships. It is important to remember that the present study is only one component of a much larger project. As such, cohabitation was not a requirement for participation in the study. I sought to interview both trans and non-trans women as participants and all recruitment materials contained the recruitment phrase, "self-identified women partners." I sought to interview women partnered with trans men at various stages of trans identification and transition, from those who self-identify as "genderqueer," with no intention of taking testosterone or obtaining sexual-reassignment surgeries, to those who identify and are legally recognized as "male," who are taking testosterone and have had sexual-reassignment surgeries.

Women were recruited using List-serv, e-mail group, and paper-flyer postings targeting the significant others, friends, families, and allies of trans men. I employed Internet-based socialnetwork sampling, the primary method of purposeful sampling when targeting sexual minorities and their partners (Patton, 1990; Rosser, Oakes, Bockting, & Miner, 2007). The Internet serves as the primary site for transgender and transsexual community building, social support, and dissemination of gender transitionrelated information, making it likely that even those who are older and poorer have found ways to access the Internet for these purposes (Shapiro, 2004). I also formed partnerships with local, land-based, social-service agencies serving these populations. In addition, interview participants from geographic regions across the United States and Canada were recruited to distribute materials to potential participants. Each research participant was paid $20 per interview unless they declined payment. 

Most participants in my sample (93%) and their trans men partners (77%) were feminist. As documented in the previous literature review, one of the primary contributions of feminist social research, over the past 30 years, has been to document striking inequalities in division of household labor between men and women. The feminist women I interviewed were not immune to these same social trends, often reporting inegalitarian, gender-stereotyped divisions of household labor between themselves and their trans men partners. It is important to consider the ways in which these feminist-identified women negotiated and explained perceived inconsistencies between their personal politics and everyday family lives. Despite strong feminist self identification, the family myths and gender strategies that participants generated to explain these inconsistencies most often focused on individual choice and preference rather than systemic and structural gender inequalities.

 

Women frequently spoke about inegalitarian division of household labor, but rationalized the reasons for this division. Ani stated: "I do the dishes; but I'm so neurotic about having a clean house and he is not .... I definitely do more than he does but, again, I'm the one that happens to be a neat freak." Linda offered a similar description, echoing the direct reference to personal preferences, rendering the pattern more idiosyncratic or personal rather than a reflection of traditional gender roles: "I think I would play a little bit more of an active role in laundry because it's one of those things that I have to have my way. Like if he was doing it, for example, everything just gets tossed in, whereas I have to do it my special way." Lilia discussed some of the ways she experiences gender in relation to her partner and to household work:

I feel very female when I'm cleaning up his room. He doesn't ask me to clean up his room, he's just very messy. So I clean up on my own free will and try and take care of him, which, sometimes he'll let [my emphasis] me do . . . It makes me feel very female.

Some women partners expressed annoyance with (what they felt was) their partner's misperception about the division of household labor. Ani stated: "Cooking is definitely me, but he thinks he does more."

Several women went to some lengths to assure their partners (and me) that choices they made were based not on gender stereotyping or roles, but on autonomous personal decisions. Veronica told me:

I've been working full-time for a couple years now. My musical career has gone by the wayside because of that. So, for me, my own personality, I think I would be happier being at home, making a home, being able to work on my own, being able to practice and have that sort of freedom. And we were discussing it a lot and I made it very clear that if I do adopt those traditional roles, it's not because of gender issues for us, it's just because the nature of our own sort of goals and just the nature our own selves.

Linda echoed some of this same sentiment:

I would say he's definitely more of an outdoors person than I am. Like I don't know how to drive a car, I don't have my driver's license where he's driven cars from a young age. He fixes the car outside. He's the one who scoops up the dog poo. He putters around in the garden. I cook a little bit more than he would though I don't think we do things like that because we feel we have to but that's just what our personal interests are.

Kendra offered another individualist explanation for what some may see as gendered roles:

I'm the one who's always cooking, and I'm definitely more of a nurturer __ I could see how someone from the outside could say we have very gendered roles in our relationship, but I don't know that they're really that gendered. He's definitely going to be the bread winner, but that's because he's going to get his doctorate and I really have no desire to ... . But I don't feel bad about it because he likes to do it.

 
These statements reflected a general unwillingness - or, in some cases, outright refusal - to link women's personal preferences, at least in the area of household labor, to women's gender roles or socialization. In the quotes above, interviewees either never discussed gender or gender roles or expressly rejected any connection between inegalitarian division of labor within their homes and women's traditional gender-role socialization. These quotes revealed a conceptual disjuncture of the personal from political, as they suggested traditional division of household labor was a rather unremarkable matter of individual free will outside the realm of gender-role socialization and imperatives. Women's narratives on the division of household labor in their families also did gender as they reflected predominant cultural scripts for men and women dividing household labor in accordance with seemingly "natural" tastes and preferences. Given the scarcity of alternative cultural models for enacting nonhegemonic male and trans male identities, adherence to existing, predominant, and normative social models remains unsurprising.  

Women whose relationships began prior to a partner's transition and whose relationships were initially considered "lesbian" were more likely to report that they performed more household labor than their trans partner. They were also more likely to offer choice and free-will-based explanations for perceived inegalitarian divisions of household labor. Women whose relationship was never understood as "lesbian" and whose partner transitioned prior to the beginning of their relationship were the least likely to report performing more household labor than their partner and also the least likely to offer individualist, choice, and free-will-based explanations for perceived inegalitarian divisions of household labor.  

Emotion work often involves not only managing one's own emotions, but the emotions of others as well. The women I interviewed often detailed elaborate routines of attending to (and being accountable for) both the mundane and extraordinary organization of the details of their partners' personal and emotional lives in ways that revealed traditionally gendered roles. For women with deep commitments to feminism, enactment of traditionally gendered roles within a relationship can be conceptualized as yet another form of emotion work that can result in personal and interpersonal stress and strain.

Michele offered one of the clearest examples of a woman partner's investment of physical, psychological, and emotion work for a trans partner's primary benefit. When I asked Michele about how much of her life, would she say, is comprised of taking care of her partner and issues related to his transition, she replied: "A lot. I would say, percentage wise - and this is something I've been trying to change because I see it being a problem - I would say about 70% of my life. That's scaled back from what it was - which was, like, 80%." When I asked Michele to reflect on what this has meant for her in her own life, she stated:

I provide an enormous amount of support around maintaining the household, doing domestic tasks, I have assimilated massive amounts of [my partner's] own work - school work - to assist him in completely his work. [This is in addition to] a huge amount of emotional time spent in processing transitioning, family, frustrations around the transition process, ... a huge amount of work. I'm supposed to be writing a dissertation .... My own work has been very neglected ...... I put it off since [my partner] started transitioning.

 

Nina discussed her own involvement with organizing and managing both the mundane details of her partner's everyday life and his emotional lability:

I remind him to do a lot, and am the planner and really sort of controlling about a lot of things. He is the one who is super flaky and forgetful __ His mood changes every 30 minutes. So the dynamic is me trying to keep on the ball about things and him assuming that I'm going to take care of it. Then, him not being on the ball about a lot of things and me assuming he's not going to take care of it. Nina described this process as an exhausting, dynamic cycle.

When describing taking primary responsibility for organizing tasks and responsibilities, many participants' accounts portrayed these behaviors as a matter of personal style or a reflection of roles that were intrinsic or natural. For example, Charlene told me: "I sort of call myself the secretary because he has trouble keeping that sort of stuff straight. It's a personality-type thing - I'm very organized-sort-of-minded. One thing that he remarks is that I make lists all the time and he is more scattered that way. So I tend to keep track of that stuff." Robyn discussed the discrepancy between her and her partner's involvement in one another's lives:

I guess that's, like, one of the female roles I take as his partner - someone who will always support him. I'm helping him do his trans stuff and he doesn't really look at the stuff __ He doesn't participate with my stuff so much - which kind of falls into the . . . me-being-the-one-to-come-tohim a lot of the time [pattern]. Not that he doesn't always express appreciation for that, but it's the way things happen.

Robyn's description revealed a relatively unidirectional investment of emotional resources that she clearly understood as a gendered aspect of her relationship with her partner and one in which she (as the one occupying the "female role") got the short end of the stick.

Veronica stated: "I think that we're pretty much egalitarian. I think that . . . I'm probably more of the one who gets us to talk about things. So I kind of have to be the provoker ___ I have to be the one who gets him to say things. I kind of have to egg him on a little. I think that I help him be more expressive and he helps me to calm down my brain." Anna described a similar pattern:

I think he compartmentalizes. So he just doesn't like to talk about things. And not because they're things related to gender, but just like, "I don't like to process," kind of issues. I think about a whole huge range of issues. You know - his surgery coming up. 1 asked him, "Are you nervous?" He doesn't wanna talk about whether he's nervous. And his reaction is not just, "Oh honey, darling, I don't feel like talking about that," but kind of snappish like, [in a very annoyed voice] "Uggh, I told you already I don't want to talk about that." So yeah it feels like there's a whole huge universe of things that are off limits.

Lilia discussed some of the ways she felt her trans partner manifested what many might describe as male privilege: "He's very forgetful and he doesn't take care of himself and he's messy and all this other stuff ___ I feel like he's very specifically like a boy in this way. Like, this boy energy - being messy, not neat, being clumsy with my feelings sometimes."

Although the women I interviewed discussed engaging in a wide range of emotion work within their relationships, one of the most compelling, frequent, and sociologically relevant activities they discussed was the provision of both basic and complex medical or health advocacy and care. Although women whose partner transitioned over the course of their relationship reported providing the most transition-related support for their partners, women whose partner had largely completed his transition prior to the start of the relationship still reported providing a great deal of transition-related support (in the form of emotional support, advocacy, bimonthly testosterone injection administration, etc.). Indeed, transition should be considered an iterative, relational, and lifelong process. The women I interviewed revealed their multiple roles as personal advocate, mediator, and emotional supporter for their partners, especially in terms of dealing with a partner's medical and health needs.

In trans community, it's the idea that I will support my partner and will do cartwheels whenever he decides to [physically alter] his body and that I'll be really happy about it. Whereas, really, when my partner had chest surgery . . . [the] process for me [was] that a body I had always known changed. I think it's important to let partners have that grief. I don't feel like I was given space to really feel things that I was feeling because there was this expectation that I just was going to support it wholeheartedly. That was really hard. 

Women also expressed fears or concerns about their partner's risk of death during surgery, ways their partner' s body might change and/or the fact that they loved their partner's body as it was. Tiffany discussed emotions connected to her partner's impending top surgery:

It's kind of weird because you get so used to somebody's body being a certain way - especially somebody you're close to. You get to a point where you memorize every single part of their body. And so it's very difficult when something changes - especially that quickly .... It's something that's important for him to do; so by the time he gets it, I'll be ready for it and I'll be supportive. But I really wish he didn't have to .... Having that piece of him cut off and tossed away is very difficult.

Despite the numerous concerns women reported in being excluded from surgical decision making processes, considering possible negative surgical outcomes, and mourning the loss of a partner's familiar and beloved body, women still described enormous personal involvement with partners' surgeries and postoperative care. Willow told me: "Oh God. It was like being an advocate for him, getting him food, helping him with the pain stuff, helping him get dressed, keeping him company, just being there, helping him sit up, helping him walk to the bathroom."

By focusing on individualism, free will, and choice, it becomes more possible for this group of women to simultaneously acknowledge stereotypically gendered inegalitarian divisions of household labor within their relationships and to explain this inequality away by focusing on the specificity and exceptional nature of their current trans relationship in ways that are less likely to fundamentally challenge one's overall conception of self and behavior as "feminist" or "lesbian" or both. It is in this context of ThirdWave feminist discourses of individuality, free will, personal power, choice, and performativity that these women participants' explanatory frameworks for assuming gender-stereotyped or disproportionate amounts of household labor and emotion work can be better understood. Of course, to better understand and situate these explanatory frameworks does not absolve them from critique. Instead, we might call into critical question the problematics involved in feminist politics that obscure the mechanisms and processes of family inequalities under assertions of personal power and performativity. It may be time to reevaluate particular family dynamics to call for greater equality between partners (rather than "the sexes"). Indeed, this research demonstrates that sharing a particular chromosomal sex pattern with one's partner does not negate the powerful social pull and processes of gendered inequalities within the family. 

The work performed by these women constitutes critical involvement in a trans partner's medical and health care that has previously been invisible and undocumented in both the medical sociology and family sociology literatures. This study also documents the personal and emotional costs of "women's work" in providing unpaid, untrained medical and health care for a trans partner undergoing transition-related medical procedures. Women's reports of providing care are frequently tinged with feelings of anxiety, frustration, fear, and inadequacy. Study participants reported feeling alone, sad, disgusted, terrified, angry, exhausted, unsupported, neglected, confused, and unprepared. Furthermore, participants described how providing transition-related medical and health care and dealing with the attendant emotions (both one's own feelings and the feelings of a trans partner) can become a consuming process that draws time, energy, and focus away from other activities such as work, school, friends, family, and self-care.

For full study see link provided at the beginning of this post. Not that most of us had any doubts, but it is clear from at least this sampling of female/transmale relationships that their commitment to hetero-patriarchy and its familial roles is clearly why those transmen transitioned to begin with. They could not see past the hetero-patriarchal roles that likely existed within their own families growing up and that are reflected by society at large, rather than work to expand their female role to include themselves, they instead pathologized strict gender norms and conformed by becoming "men".

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Today's Dirt Workout Tips are for Shoulders (Delts)

Females generally have smaller upper bodies than their lower bodies, this often accentuates the female shape. Widening the shoulders through building a little muscle, will make the hips less noticeable and give the body a more balanced appearance for those that are uncomfortable with that aspect of their female shape.

Some great shoulder exercises are:

Arnold Dumbbell Press   For building muscle use a weight that is going to tax you while doing 4 sets at 6-8 reps. For toning a lighter weight at 3-4 set and 10-15 reps. Keep in mind, the shoulder is a small muscle, so if all you can do is a 5lb dumbbell, thats perfectly fine. 

Dumbbell Shoulder Press  For building muscle use a weight that is going to tax you while doing 4 sets at 6-8 reps. For toning a lighter weight at 3-4 set and 10-15 reps. Keep in mind, the shoulder is a small muscle, so if all you can do is a 5lb dumbbell, thats perfectly fine. 

Front Two-Dumbbell Raises For building muscle use a weight that is going to tax you while doing 4 sets at 6-8 reps. For toning a lighter weight at 3-4 set and 10-15 reps. Keep in mind, the shoulder is a small muscle, so if all you can do is a 5lb dumbbell, thats perfectly fine. This exercise can also be done alternating the arms raises.

One-Arm Side Lateral Raises For building muscle use a weight that is going to tax you while doing 4 sets at 6-8 reps. For toning a lighter weight at 3-4 set and 10-15 reps. Keep in mind, the shoulder is a small muscle, so if all you can do is a 5lb dumbbell, thats perfectly fine. 

Good luck with your workouts!

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Nurse Handing out Hormones and the Road to Conformity

I was recently emailed this tumblr, the young woman whose account it is says this:  

"so this tuesday (3/8) i have an appointment with an RN i found through a local transgender resource group who is going to give me my first shot of testosterone and a prescription for it. she specializes in internal medicine, and after meeting with her for the first time last week, i know she has my best health interests at hand".

 First, RN's do NOT have the authority to write prescriptions anymore than they have the authority to clinically diagnose "GID" which is required in order for "T" to be prescribed in the first place. Clearly this "RN" is pimping out her illegal services to a trans group or groups, while this young woman after "one" meeting with Miss RN believes Miss RN to be her trans savior sent to anoint her with blessed "T". 


She goes on to say, after she confesses to praying to the false postmodernism god:


"...for my transition to begin, it was necessary that i not be held down by the pathologization of the trans identity, but rather find somebody to recognize my different needs and help me work within my own frame of transitioning.  as much as i would like to do away with the pathologizing of trans, i wonder what it would ultimately mean for the community.  without it being deemed something needing to be corrected by medical intervention, would medical intervention even be allowed for trans people? if you don’t have a disease, how can a doctor treat it? or will there still be progressive doctors who recognize the diversity of the human population and adjust to each individual’s own needs"?

She doesnt want to deal with that troublesome "GID" diagnosis that signifies something is wrong with her as well as that troublesome diagnosis delays transition. She also brings up something I've written about many times here before myself, that if GID is removed from the DSM, there is no disorder and therefore there is no treatment. Hormones and removing healthy body parts do not fall under cosmetic surgery; goodbye T and goodbye to healthy breast removal, hystos, sewn up vagina's, clitoris snippings and plastic "penises" covered in arm, thigh or ass skin and yes goodbye to tax payer dollars and medical insurances covering these costly "procedures".

On a good note (if you can call it that) there are many large trans groups working diligently to have GID removed from the DSM. Many are hoping that could be as soon as two years away when the DSM5 comes out. It wouldnt stop the development of this disorder, but it would put a serious hamper on the trans trenders forcing many to grow up and mature past their self hatred. Thats the backasswardness of this situation, in order to "treat" or halt the current barbaric "treatment" of this disorder it has to be removed from being medically declared a disorder.


She ends her post with this gem:


"so on tuesday, when i enter my RN’s office, i’m going to poke my first antennae through my cocoon, hanging from a tree branch, next to many other cocoons and a kaleidoscope of butterflies, all individualistic and beautiful"."

Like so many many misbegotten youths, this young woman seeks individualism through mass conformity. The genius that was Simone Weil (one of my teen heroes) wrote that "there is but little hope for the individual and yet the individual is the only hope". The individual cannot be found in the bottom of a vial of faux hormones any more than he has ever been found amid any group or masses or trend and transition isnt anymore "individualistic" than it is "beautiful". Conformity is what it is always been, no matter how you arrive to its door, rote, ugly and routine. 

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The Feminist Promise: 1792 to the Present

A wonderful review to what looks to be a spark to the corpse of feminism.

From the review:


A key subtext to The Feminist Promise, then, is its unmistakable cry for a revitalization of the language of sexual equality in the public sphere. Anyone who believes men and women are now mostly equal and doubts the need for such a revitalization should be directed to the following facts: The US has the weakest support network for mothers and children of any industrialized country; most families with children in poverty are still headed by single women; about 18 percent of American women have been victims of an attempted or actual rape; and about two million women are assaulted each year by a husband or boyfriend. While white women make 75 cents to a man’s dollar, African American women make 62 cents, and Latina women 53 cents. Although women have made strides in levels of education in 2007 the top three jobs for women were secretaries, registered nurses, and elementary and middle school teachers. African American women do not have equal access to sex education and birth control and have twenty-five times the HIV/AIDS rate of white women. To quote Stanford sociologist Paula England, the gender revolution has been “uneven and stalled,” and it has benefited some women more than others.

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Children and Transition-A Discussion

Should children be allowed to medically transition? Yes or no.

If yes, what should be the earliest age they be allowed to transition?

If no, what do you feel should be the age of transition?

If against medical transition period, just indicate that.

If you leave a comment, please tell us whether you are female, male, intersexed or some version of trans.

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Edit to add from a comment by Canadian:

Further to this discussion:

Should parents be allowed to decide or have "medical professionals" determine that their child is "Trans" because the present behaviours that do not conform to norms. Once it is determined that a child is "trans" should that child be treated as a pre-op trans and have their puberty delayed? In such a scenario who truly decides?