We are all different, eventually you will see that this is beautiful
Sweeping statements about the trans community are always inaccurate and alienating and also the people making those statements are almost always baby-transes saying it in order to give themselves a stronger sense of belonging in their community because they are trans-young and insecure. Be patient with them and try not to be angry. Just explain that they're wrong. There's an endless supply of them so these sweeping statements and jokes will never die because your post telling people to stop saying that shit was made before that kid transitioned.
If your trans community is primarily online, you will be encountering more nerdy white programmers by nature of the venue. If your trans community is through the Attic Youth Center in Center City Philadelphia your community is going to very different.
As a librarian, I work with a lot of community centers and stuff. And lemme tell you, there's entire trans communities where nobody has heard of Discord and instead of joking that all trans women are programmers they joke that all trans women are nail technicians and hair stylists. But we're all still trans and have a shared struggle and we have to be in solidarity with each other and fight for each other and love each other no matter how different we are.
I've found that the less online trans people are better about immediately recognizing that we are a very very small demographic and need to hold a default stance of being on the same side. I've received a lot of immediate love from these total strangers because they're just glad to be working with another trans person even though I'm like a white autistic librarian and we're very different. When we're under attack, we don't need to be attacking each other.
Your trans sub-community is not the entire community and neither trans men, trans women, nor non-binary peoples have it easier nor are they afforded power because of their transition
Trans-young people always transition in some small trans sub-community in a discord server, subreddit, Twitter clique, college campus, support group, etc. and this community of maybe 15–100 people always seems like the entire community to them.
And trans-young people experience a lot more gender dysphoria and a lot of weird gender envy of the other trans-young people because they all have something you don't have and feel dysphoric about it.
And so trans-young people eventually endlessly discourse about how trans spaces are either "all dominated by trans men" and "trans men have it so much easier than the rest of us" or they say the spaces are "all dominated by trans women" and "trans women get all the attention and have it better." Sometimes non-binary peoples get dragged into this too even though that's not even a coherent category of one kind of gender transition.
And none of this is true. It's all geographically contextual, offline or online. The trans community in Western Massachusetts had a lot more trans men and when I was trans-young we complained constantly that trans men had it better and had all the power. Sometimes there would only be a single trans woman in an entire trans space and yeah it was tiring hearing the entire group just talk about binders and top surgery as the universal trans experience.
But when I shared that experience with a trans man living in a different city, he was baffled. In his city, trans women were the majority in trans community spaces and he would be the only trans man and get so exhausted hearing about girldick and vaginoplasty and push-up bras.
When these things get taken online, it escapes geography, and people living in different places just fight and fight because their experiences are completely opposite and so they can't possibly understand how someone can be saying the opposite of what they see.
This often gets corrupted with social justice language in trans men or women having "privilege" or "having it easier" but being the majority in our tiny little trans community spaces is meaningless in broader society. No transgender person in the entire world is having an easier life because they are trans. The cisgender world is hostile to all trans people and we get nothing out of being hostile to each other all the time. Maybe a trans-old trans man who really passes will get some sort of male privilege but often trans men and trans masculine nonbinary people do not ever get the sort of male privileges cisgender men get. Likewise, "straight" trans women are never afforded straight privilege. None of our subcategories of trans makes it easier for us and being envious and resentful of each other gets us nowhere.
The truth is, both directions of transition have huge parts that are easier and huge parts that are harder. Trans men have their voices and faces change with hormones, and trans women have to do voice training. So there's this perception among trans-young women that it's easier to transition for trans men because T does so much stuff that can't happen for trans women because you can't undo what T did to our bones and faces and larynxes and stuff during first puberty.
But the truth is, that from the other perspective, trans women are able to get a bottom surgery that gives us a vagina that is pretty much cisgender passing. They are less self-lubricating and less stretchy than a cisgender vulva but these aren't things people would really notice if they weren't looking. Our hormones give us full breasts, and if not, we can have top surgery to get the hottest breasts with no visible scars. And facial feminization surgery is a two week outpatient procedure. If you can get these surgeries, a trans woman can go "deep stealth" and even date a straight person and have them not realize they're dating a trans person. Just someone with a weird voice.
Trans men can get top surgery, which is great, and they don't need face surgery. But there is no bottom surgery available for trans men that will give them a cisgender seeming dick. Metoidoplasty and phalloplasty are nowhere near as advanced right now as vaginoplasty. You can't create a dick that is five inches, gets erect on its own, and ejaculates semen. It's just impossible right now. You have to like, use a pump or rod to turn a semi into a hard. It's still really wonderful for a lot of men who get it but I just don't think we can say that transition is easier for trans men when this huge part of gender dysphoria for them just can't be treated as completely as we can for trans women, where our only complaints are depth and lubrication.
There are privilege and power differences between people in the trans community but it's not because of the direction of your transition. It's because of race and wealth. White people who grew up in middle class families that enabled them to get a strong launch into the economy with degrees and stuff before they transitioned just have so much more power than people of color who didn't have the same opportunities before transition and face amplified racism every day. The power difference with the transgender programmer is because she is often white and attended coding camp at age fifteen, not because she's a trans woman.
And so I'll say this: as you get trans-older, you learn that the trans people of other directions are amazing people who you should love and celebrate and be in solidarity with and embrace. When, as a trans woman, you embrace and love trans men, and appreciate them, you will realize how amazing it is to have them fighting by your side. It is an amazing feeling when a trans masc person stands up for you before you have to. And the same goes vice versa. I've heard so many trans men and trans masculine people tall about how once they got over their trans-young jealously they formed amazing bonds with trans women and have learned to love trans women as fierce and intelligent and amazing women who are often the first to speak up and start the fight and do the work.
Isolation is brain poison and the pandemic has been awful for this due to how much isolation has become necessary. If your transition started since the pandemic began, you have probably never experienced significant offline trans community fighting together. Resist the urge to have in-fighting and discourse with other trans people about what trans people are good or bad are the best or have it easier. We are 0.5% of society and the current target of a new Santanic Panic. Snap out of your pubescent jealousy and see each other as beautiful and yourself as beautiful and embrace each other for our any differences and hold hands and love each other in solidarity because we need each other more than ever.
I don't talk about my advocacy work on here much because I'm trying not to doxx myself but like, you've seen the news right? Libraries are one the main battlegrounds over trans youth and the existence of trans people. It's a battle. I need other trans people to be willing to work together to show up and fight together.
The infighting feels better and easier because other trans people are right in your reach and you can just grab them and pull them back down into the bucket of crabs. But you need to stop that. It's pointless and goes nowhere. We all exist and we're all different and we're all deserving of love and dignity and we should remember that when they come for our rights and our medicine and our youth.
Before Laverne Cox was in the cover of TIME, it was so much harder to be trans. Nobody was your ally. It was impossible to get a job. Every single person regarded you as some kind of weird fetishist. I refuse to go back to that. I refuse to go back to the call center full of suicidal trans people. I refuse to go back to cisgender people not even knowing what we are or knowing they're obligated to at least pretend to respect us. I refuse to go back to insurance not covering gender affirming surgeries and it taking as long to get top surgery as it does to buy a house. Trans-young people maybe don't realize that in only 9 years we have it so much better than we used to and I refuse to go back.
Cisgender people aren't as different from us as we think and if we open ourselves to them they can become our greatest allies and a trans ally is actually a very good person to have
The surgeons who do gender affirming surgeries aren't weirdos, I realized during my stay in the hospital. 70% of a urological surgeons job is people dying from prostate cancer. Plastic surgeons mostly deal with horrible burn victims. Why do they sign up to do transgender surgeries a couple days a week? Imagine it from their perspective. Here comes trans people. Patients you can work on where they aren't dying of cancer. They're people who you can just bring pure joy to. You aren't constantly delivering bad news, you're hearing people express pure delight and euphoria over finally feeling at home in their bodies. It's an amazing bright reprieve from the grief and they can only have that joy because they feel true empathy for us and take true joy is our joy. They want us to be happy and it makes them happy. Even though they're cisgender.
As I said last night, dilators and hormones were invented for cisgender women who deal with the same issues that trans women deal with. And if you're not afraid to talk about yourself honestly with them, you can bond over shared experiences.
In fact, these days, in this post-Cox era, so many cis people are our fierce allies because they actually are capable of feeling deep empathy for us. Because cisgender people also feel insecure and awful about their bodies because of the society we live in and they also feel pressured to behave ways they don't want to because of gender roles and they absolutely can understand how it must feel to have that amplified by 100× and they often genuinely take delight in seeing us self-actualize and be ourselves. Many are inspired by us and feel liberated to be more themselves because they see us do it first and take that first step. Even if they don't want to transition genders, they too want to self-actualize.
Many cisgender librarians are my strongest allies in opposing pushes to be small and quiet around trans youth. Many have the fire and energy because these are kids and they want them to be able to grow up as themselves. I don't know how else to put it besides that many cisgender people get it and care while still being cisgender. Often they have a transgender friend or family member is it puts the fire in them. Watching one person they care about transition and seeing how much happier they are is enough to convince them how important this is.
But I've even just had coworkers get the fire in them because of having one trans coworker who they never even knew before transition. Because of worker solidarity. Because of unions. Because of simply knowing me and having empathy and being disgusted by the thought of my rights being taken away.
Yes, there is a moral panic of cisgender people who hate us trying to turn the world against us. But if we don't close ourselves off to every single cis person we meet, then we'll learn how many of them relate to our struggle on a surprisingly deep level.
Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters tells a very very trans story that you'd think no cis person could even comprehend, but it's an award winning best seller that millions of cis people found deeply meaningful and relatable. They're humans too. We're all humans.
Exercise will help with your joint pain you aren't dying
Testosterone gives you a baseline level of muscle mass without having to do any work. When you go off of testosterone your muscles decondition without regular exercise and that causes a level of hypermobility and joint pain. Additionally, for reasons we don't understand, neurodivergent people tend to have more hyperflexible joints. These joints are stabilized by the testosterone but when deconditioned without it become way too flexible and causes regular subluxations and chronic pain to a disabling degree.
But if you walk or bike regularly and get enough exercise, your muscles won't decondition and your joints won't hurt. If your joints get bad enough from deconditioning that you can't walk much, physical therapy to stabilize your joints is available and a highly effective treatment which can get you back on track to being able to do daily walks to keep those joint muscles healthy.
Also, bladder issues are very common among cisgender women and it's nothing to be ashamed about. Same with bowel and stomach issues.
Ok that's all.