Transmen, Weight and the Pressure to Work Out

In just flipping through about 30 TV channels this morning, one thing stood blatantly out-MISOGYNY!

Nearly two thirds of the channels were shows or infomercials geared towards improving women/womens bodies and of those shows, nearly two thirds had to do with weight loss. Whether a pill product, an exercise  product or some type of program diet, all had to do with slimming down and/or reshaping the female body using these products. Whether we like it or not, the constant barrage of negative messages aimed and shot point blank at females, gets under our skin and buries itself into our brains. Nowhere is this more evident than transmen.

Within trans trending there is another trend just as self hating, prominent and displayed all over the likes of YT and the pages of every ftM forum, website, blog or tumbler. The trans trend within trans trending is working out. Not simply exercise for good health benefits, but exercise to reshape the female form. This is self hatred within self hatred. Testosterone therapy may redistribute some body fat, but it will not make you thin, nor will it add tons of manly muscles.


Female transitioners transition as an out to the terrible internalized misogyny and external pressures of being a woman. Many express the horrors of having to live just one more day as a woman. But just like the misogyny that informed their transition, misogyny continues informing how they perceive themselves as transmen. With the same critical eye they judged themselves as women, they judge themselves as transmen and judge other females who transition. This is a VERY female judgment, one based in having been raised female under patriarchal structures. So while transmen sidestep their womanhood, because those patriarchal structures still firmly stand like the erect penis transmen will never own, transmen still continue to punish their bodies which remain imperfectly female.

Transition does absolutely NOTHING to destroy the powers that be, patriarchal powers that teach females self hatred before we're out of the nursery, self hatred that follows women, even after transition.

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Trans Trending-Who is Transitioning

More girls lost within the suffocating gender straight jacket. Where is feminism here?

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Straight butchy Women? Gay Transmen?

I received these questions in an email last night and decided to answer them here as similar questions have came up in comments:

What about being butch and straight? There are no shortage of tomboyish/butchy straight women, there is also no shortage of straight males who find them attractive/desirable. 

What about transmen who like men? A high percentage of dykes who transition, after injecting testosterone for a spell, wind up wanting to be fucked by men. And with the increase in hyper femininity becoming the norm for females, many straight females are rebelling against hyper femininity by transitioning. Similarly to their dyke transitioning counter parts, after a spell, most will wind up desiring females and will ID as "bi".

I've always been very butch but I'm not attracted to women. I love big strong hairy men. Where do women like me fit in, dirt? Why would you want to "fit in" anywhere? There is no reason you cannot be you, fall in love with a big hairy guy and live happily ever after. If you require validation from externals for who you are and who you desire, you will never be happy. 

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Dare to be Different: Hermann Hesse

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"Ah, but it is hard to find this track of the divine in the midst of this life we lead, in the besotted humdrum age of spiritual blindless, with its architecture, its business, its politics, its men! How could I fail to be a lone wolf, and an uncouth hermit, and as I did not share one of its aims nor understand one of its pleasures? I cannot remain for long in either theater or picture-house. I can scarcely read a paper, seldom a modern book. I cannot understand what pleasures and joys they are that drive people to the overcrowded railways and hotels, into the packed cafés with the suffocating and oppressive music, to the Bars and variety entertainments, to World Exhibitions, to the Corsos. I cannot understand nor share these joys, though they are within my reach, for which thousands of others strive. On the other hand, what happens to me in my rare hours of joy, what for me is bliss and life and ecstacy and exaltation, the world in general seeks at most in imagination; in life it finds it absurd. And in fact, if the world is right, if this music of the cafés, these mass enjoyments and these Americanised men who are pleased with so little are right, then I am wrong, I am crazy. I am in truth the Steppenwolf that I often call myself; the beast astray who finds neither home nor joy nor nourishment in a world that is strange and incomprehensible to him." (Hermann Hesse-Steppenwolf)

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Female-Who and What is SHE?

How do we describe "female" in the absence of patriarchy's constructed "femininity"?

Wittgenstein said : “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

Sara Lennox writes in her Cemetery for the Murdered Daughters: "Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina is about the absence of a female voice; in some respects it reads like an illustration of the feminist theory which has evolved since its publication to explain why, within Western discourse, women are permitted no voice and subjectivity of their own. It may be that feminism is the collective struggle of women to constitute that voice, but that battle has barely begun. In what voice, then, does a female scholar write about the absence of a female voice? I have realized that my struggle with Malina, Bachmann’s struggle to write it, and the struggle she describes in it are all part of the larger war in which we women (against our will and often without our conscious knowledge) are combatants—and which may have killed Bachmann".

"The dilemma that Bachmann confronts and represents in Malina involves women’s place in the symbolic order. How can it be possible for her, a woman, to write about women when exactly what she wishes to assert makes her own position as woman wielding the pen impossible? This awareness of oneself as a contradiction in terms traces its way through Malina in recurrent phrases which express both extraordinary pain and perseverance: “Those who have to live a Why can endure almost any How,” and, most poignantly, in view of Bachmann’s own death by fire, “Avec ma main brulée, j’écris sur la nature du feu” (with my burned hand, I write of the nature of fire). Damaged herself, she will insist on overcoming her injuries to write of their causes".

Janet Frame says at the end of her novel The Edge of the Alphabet that those who live at that Edge are like: "those yellow birds that are kept apart from their kind —you see their cages hanging in windows, in the sun—because otherwise they would never learn the language of their captors".

A voice without language exist only as a scream, unfortunately the collective voice of females sans language, beneath patriarchy, exists as a silent scream. I asked what should have been a simple question the other day, describe female. There have been no concrete answers, most replies didnt even make the attempt. I do not believe that those who responded didnt try, but that those who responded had little or nothing to try with. 

Under patriarchal structures, like Frame's yellow caged birds, females are "kept apart" because we cannot communicate with each other given that the only available language is the language of our "captors"! Since men created language, it has been use to hold women down, keep women in horrific relationships, sexualize females from infant to elderly, buy and sell females, legally blame us for our own rapes and trounce our bodies till we learn to do it ourselves with even greater precision ad infinitum. 

If as Wittgenstein said, that the limits of language means a substantial limit to the world, females are like infants, pre-verbal. How can females fight for equality when the very thing we must use to fight with, is absent? It is through this absence of a female language that Butch Invisibility has manifested. This is why any female who exist outside of how males have defined "female" is often labeled "masculine", "manly" or "mannish". 

Language informs how we see each other, it also informs how we feel about ourselves. Which is why when we cannot see ourselves in the male defined female that we feel alien or "not female" or do not "feel female". The absence of a female language alienates us from our very selves, body and soul! And when there are only two primary positions to take, that of female or male? If we do not "feel" female, we leap to what seems to be the only logical conclusion. That somehow, through some cosmic joke or mistake we must surely then be male! 


Until the female sex can put herself into female, female must be stripped of all male desires, definitions, decrees and delineations. We may not be able to describe her right now, but lets at least stop her from being described as what she isnt. Monique Wittig warned us decades ago: "There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that. You walked alone, full of laughter, you bathed bare-bellied. You say you have lost all recollection of it, remember . . . You say there are no words to describe this time, you say it does not exist. But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent." 

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The Female Sex

What are some of the characteristics/qualities of Female? Note, I said "female", NOT femininity.

 The quality I admire most about females, is strength.


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