Freya-Onions-report

I don’t use reddit very much anymore, but one of the few subreddits I actually regularly do read every so often is r/TransLater. Which is weird, because, as trans-related subreddits go, r/TransLater represents a kind of trans experience that is one of the furthest from my own. 

Most of the posts r/TransLater are written by trans women, as the title suggests, later in life. A large proportion of the community there are married, almost always to cis women, and their posts usually centre around them coming out to, and then navigating being trans with a cis female spouse. While most of Blanchard’s theory is nonsense, one thing that does generally hold true is that trans women who’re attracted to women tend to come out later, which I think is owed to a variety of factors, including the fact that they’re able to hide from and reject queerness, and by extension, their own identity, for longer because they live and present as cishet men.

As you can probably imagine, the posts on the subreddit tell stories of pretty fucked up situations. Because they’re older, many of the trans women posting have accrued far greater responsibilities on themselves and their choices than your average trans woman transitioning in her late teens or early twenties.

In many cases, the poster’s wife reacts badly to their coming out, pressuring them to not transition. Oftentimes, kids are involved, only adding to how monumental the stakes are. I’ve read countless posts where the OP is given an ultimatum: reject all thoughts of transition, and stay in the marriage, or, transition and lose their wife and family life. I cannot imagine how difficult these situations must be, for all involved.

The mere anticipation of such a situation, of course, forces many in the subreddit’s community to stay in the closet even longer, sometimes beginning taking estrogen while hiding it from their spouse. It sounds terrible. 

Any joy the OPs talk about are usually discussed in the most fleeting terms, “I got to feel like myself for the first time tonight”, then “I got home and my wife said I look like a man and I went to bed crying”. That kind of thing. 

As I’ve suggested, many in the subreddit are also early on in their transitions, and many, still go about their lives living and presenting as men, or, as they often call it ‘boymoding’- a word which I find cringe, but can see its purpose: it softens the alternative, ‘living as a man’. 

You get the sense that these people are living a double life- half on reddit, interacting with everyone else’s post on the subreddit, encouraging others: “you got this, Sis”, or “you look amazing, girl”, upvoting posts that represent things others have done, but that feel so out of reach to them- the other, living as a family man, a world away from transness.

I frequently find it utterly alienating: these people- trans people, like me- have lived a life so, so different to my own. But I keep coming back to it, partly because it puts my own life into perspective. And I don’t just think it’s because reading about their, sometimes unimaginable, challenges makes my life feel easier in comparison. Actually, I think a lot of it is because of their optimism in the face of their- admittedly quite fucked- situations.

While there are certainly their fair share of depressing, and hopeless posts on there, the overwhelming tone, in the original posts and the comments beneath, is generally positive. “You got this sis!” “Things will get better!”, giving advice on how to deal with familial loss, spousal ultimatums etc. 

Sometimes this positivity can tend towards the overambitious, with many thinking, for example, that their straight female partner will want to stay with them after their transition. The reality is that they almost certainly will not, and no one should expect them to stay with someone they are not romantically or sexually attracted to any more than a gay or lesbian should be expected to stay in a relationship with someone of the opposite sex.

The cases where it does work out in the longer term, from the posts I’ve read, are those where the OP’s wife is bisexual (makes sense). But the reality is that most marriages will not survive a gender transition, and of course the long term goal is to have an open and accepting enough society that trans people do not stay closeted and get married, only for their rejected identities to get the better of them later in life, when they have a partner, and often, kids.

But even in those cases where the optimism towards the viability of their relationships is misplaced, the positivity is admirable. More than this, I would say it’s essential: I think to be able to transition, you do need to be able to throw yourself into a kind of blind optimism, to, in a paraphrase of Rachel Pollack’s words, hand yourself over to a knowledge, a desire, a truth, that is beyond your world and your comprehension. To want to transition but not hand yourself into the world in which it is possible is to do so is, in a sense, to reject the core principles of the transition itself. For the individual, a world in which it is possible to transition and live a happy life is entirely discrete from the world in which it is unthinkable, or worse, impossible. Transitioning, but thinking negatively about yourself and your ability to transition successfully, is a sure fire way to fail. The positivity may seem naive, but to the world in which transition is possible, it is vital.

There’s another online community of trans people that I’ve loosely followed in the past that is unified by perhaps its total refusal of this principle, which for the purposes of this post I am going to refer to as trans doomerism.

Trans doomerism is, in many ways, the opposite of the community found on r/TransLater, though this is not to say that there is no overlap between the individuals involved in the two groups. Trans doomers are oftentimes much younger than their counterparts on r/TransLater; in many cases, they’re trans people from the same or a similar generation to my own, being those who went through the wrong puberty, but are transitioning in their late teens to twenties. Their lives are, compared to those on r/TransLater, decidedly less complex, and perhaps from an outsider view, easier. 

As younger people, they’ve often avoided the more brutal effects of decades on the wrong sex hormone; they’ve also, in most cases, not gotten themselves into a long term relationship that vastly complicates their ability to transition; in many cases they’ve got time in their side- as younger people, they’ve got many more years in which to live as themselves post transition. (Of course, one of the greatest obstacles those in r/TransLater have to overcome is how many years they’ve lost to a lie). 

But what unites trans doomers, is their negativity: they do not think that transition, at least for them, is possible. Much of this centres around what they see as their inability to pass, and thus, achieve the happiness they want. To trans doomers, the positivity of r/TransLater, would be seen as “hugboxing”, a kind of false, toxic positivity that, to them, ultimately only sets these older trans women for more pain and ridicule. As Contrapoints discusses in her classic video on Incels, ‘hon’ became an insult in the doomer-adjacent communities that she admits to have become all too close to in the early stages of her transition. ‘Hon’, she explains, derived from the perception of hugboxy communities like /Translater affirming each other by saying things like ‘you look great hon!’ when the opposite was the case, explaining in her video on the topic:

”hon”, [is] a slur used by trans women for other trans women, which basically means that you look like a man in a dress. Which is what every trans woman is afraid of. And there’s another commonality with incels too, with all bigots and self-loathers.

The comparison she makes between the ideologies of trans doomers, and incels is, I think, a correct one. She goes on to explain, referring to the community of trans doomers on 4chan’s lgbt board as ‘TTTT’: 

So the trans women of TTTT are tragic. They’re basically still in man mode, which is why they’re using 4chan and I bring them up because they remind me a lot of incels. For incels the core frustration is that they can’t get laid. For TTTT it’s that they can’t pass as female. Both groups post selfies knowing they’re going to get brutal unconstructive feedback. And both groups have a weird vocabulary with which to express their anxieties. 

(While most well known for their presence on 4chan, you can get an idea of what these groups are like on subreddits like r/4tran4)

In contrast to the comments sections on r/Translater, there is a total lack of positivity, and instead, posters revel in their own hopelessness and the unviability of their own happiness. All positive or hopeful comments, would to them be seen as a falsehood. The effects of a male puberty, even when the majority of posters are still young and have a whole life ahead of them, foreclose any chance they had at a happy life.

This, I think rings true to something more general about the way we think. For me at least, there is often the instinct that the more negative something is, the more true it is, the more untainted by phoney pleasantries or optimism. There is this idea of truth in our cultural imagination as that which is most brutal and unadorned. The more cruel, the more true.

In her video on Incels, Contrapoints describes how the way in which this community presented itself as unusually raw, brutal and cruelly honest allured her early in her transition- so much so that it started to get into her mind to the point where she would join in on the hopelessness, interacting with, and even posting into discussions herself. I’m glad that I never embraced any of this, and, especially early in my transition, was able to mostly maintain a positive attitude. For me, trans doomerism has always represented ‘the other’ to me, something I look at from the outside, like r/Translater, but this is not to say that their ways of thinking have not effected me. 

In fact, during April and later spring of this year, when everything in my life was feeling increasingly hopeless, I began to adopt many of the negative, doomer-y ways of thinking towards myself and my own life. Primed by the external things that were going badly in my own life, and knocked off course from my generally happy existence, I began to see more and more posts from people who I would now call trans doomers on Twitter, and, while I recognised them as such, began to tacitly adopt their headspace, though not their terminology.

I began to take on a hopeless view of my own body, and my chance at a future happiness. My positivity drained away, and more and more I found myself hating myself and my own body, thinking that I had failed, in a way. By no means did I actually take on their ideology- if anyone had asked me at the time what I thought about them, I would’ve honestly said something similar to what I have now-  but I found their negativity begin to seep into the wider anxieties I had about myself.

To make this worse, my Twitter feed was also filled with a particularly nasty group of young and insecure transmedicalist trans women posters at the time, who self identified as ‘hsts’ and would mercilessly mock those they saw as ‘agp’ to make them feel better about themselves. With these and the trans doomers filling up more and more of my feed, I began to be presented with two forms of trans womanhood, both of which centred on forms of self-loathing and cruelty. The angry young transmedicalists probably had an equally bad, though different effect on me during this time period, enough that I could’ve dedicated this post to that instead. More than anything, I’m focussing on the trans doomers in this post for ease and convenience.

But I think a big part of why I wanted to write this one about doomerism is because I’ve been able, more than I ever have in my life before, to reject it, truly reject it, over the past 3 months or so. As I described in my last post, I’ve been doing really good recently, feeling good about myself, having fun etc. And while I wouldn’t say that I’ve learnt anything about doomerism and its falseness that I didn’t know before, what I have been able to do is emotionally reject its premise of negativity and hopelessness. As I explained above, I think a utopian optimism is the precondition of transition, both before, during and after, and I think that that optimism is more true, and a more accurate reflection of the potential of transsexuality than a negative, hopeless one.

It’s a brain poison. What the doomers fail to grasp, like incels, is that it is their embracing of this false and life-destroying ideology that is the cause of so much of their suffering. Like, the first step to being a woman is to get off 4chan, sis.

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It’s a very bright morning in late October, around 10am. I passed 2 years on hormones this week, which is a big mile stone.

A lot has changed, even since last year when I was writing Reading 10 about passing my first year. People talk about having ‘a wobble’ mentally coming up past a year on hormones, where the initial wave of  satisfaction that finally comes with embracing what you rejected about yourself for so long- ’I just need to do this for myself’ and ‘My life is finally getting better’- begins to fade and you start to think of yourself more critically again, interrogate yourself and your body. 

It’s a well known phenomenon, and I think it happened to me, in a weird way. I don’t think it would’ve anywhere near reached the depths it did if it weren’t for the other upheaval that was going on in my life, but I guess I’ll never truly know. But yeah, I’ve been feeling good, and solid, for months now.

I know it makes me sound like a wanker but I’ve been getting back into ambient, which usually signals something good about my mental health (the old mh). 

Right now, I’m listening to a song called “Patchwork” by Laurie Speigel, from her 1980 ambient electronic album, The Expanding Universe. I think it’s brilliant- I recommend it. It really gets across a kind of precocious, explorative hopefulness that I want to feel right now, want to bask in.

I feel like you’ve gotta be in pretty good shape mentally to let your mind wander over tracks like this, as it inevitably does, but maybe that’s just me. When I’m in a shitty mood I usually want something I can just be overwhelmed by, rather than mull over.

I’ve been feeling great recently, like, really good. A lot of things feel like they’ve been put to rest, especially the crisis of dysphoria and hope I had over the Spring and early Summer of this year. And while Readings 14 and 15 definitely represented me coming off the back of it, and analysing some of its causes, I think I’ve only truly moved onwards and upwards in the months after. 

A lot has changed from this time last year though: it’s not just like I’m back to when I was before all this shit happened. I feel better, more confident, more secure in and happy with myself, than I think I ever have before. 

One of the things I struggled with a lot, over the spring and early summer was with what to wear. Maybe it’s just dysphoria that caused this, but I’ve sorta concluded that I’m more happy wearing one-piece outfits than two piece ones. 

It sounds weird, but I started to feel too disconnected between my top and bottom half, and thus more dysphoric about my top, from wearing items that split at the waist- for example, t-shirts and tops, with a skirt, shorts or jeans on the bottom. So I started wearing a lot of dresses in the summer, and felt better. More like I’m one piece, rather than an assemblage of disproportionate parts.

My two outfits for the office are a dark green dress, another one with a blue miniskirt, tights, white tee and huge oversized blue blazer over the top, bringing it all together into the one silhouette. I love them both.

I’ve enjoyed the weather getting colder. My birthday was a week or two ago- I’m 25 now, which feels like a good age, and I’m ready to live it. In fact, it’s possibly the first time I’ve been happy with being a particular age since I was 19. For years after, I’d almost felt like I was on stall, still wanting to go back and be 19 again. Maybe that has something to do with the my realising I was trans at around that time, and now I’ve just come out the other side of a ‘two year puberty’, maybe it’s just a coincidence and I just like the number 25. 

With the weather getting colder, I’ve treated myself to new outfits, mostly in corduroy. Two dresses, one pinafore in dark green, which is really pretty, and another in brown with a belt at the waist. And a pair of lighter blue-green dungarees, which I’m also really happy with. As I said, I’m only wearing one piece items now, and I’ve been feeling really good about it, so why stop?

The full length mirror in my bedroom, which I had had to confiscate from myself and take off the wall in the depths of my depression  over the spring and summer, is back up again, and I’m often happy with what I see. It’s not like I’ve got everything ironed out- far from it, but who does?- but I’m in a better place within myself than I think I ever have been. 

A huge part to play in this sudden rush of wellbeing and acceptance, I think, has been my taking up of yoga. After a decade of my mother trying to get me to try it, I finally gave in a few weeks ago and did a beginners session YouTube video in my flat. Almost instantly, I felt amazing- there was something so exhilarating  about it. 

I’ll probably write about this in more detail elsewhere, but there is something about doing yoga that just feels so brilliant to me. I think it’s something to do with the mix of control and ease at the centre of it. Like the elegance, mixed with the relaxation- it’s the combination of precision and strain with the rush of the surrender. One of the things I’ve liked the most is the feeling of surrender it often evokes, where you just have to feel the energy and give in to it. And you can feel your own energy and strength too, radiating, uplifting. It’s absolutely not something I would have liked, or allowed myself to like, a few years ago.

Maybe this is just my experience, but I think you have to be pretty at ease and comfortable in your body to be able to be fully present in yoga- which is precisely what the practice demands. There is an absolute simplicity to it- a being there in a corporeal sense that I’ve sorta always admired and wanted to learn. 

I’ve been doing yoga every few days, roughly, and I love doing it in my airy living room- with the light from the big windows coming in on a morning. It feels very freeing, and like I’ve come a long way, because the presence and the security I feel in the act of doing it is something that would have been impossible to me a few years, or maybe even just a year ago. 

I come away from my yoga practice feeling incredibly at peace, like I’m carrying it around as this big, dull soothing object in my brain. It makes me feel more alert, and calm at the same time. It’s like a very precious feeling I’ve felt before after a particularly good acid trip when I was in my late teens, but have been unable to resurface for years since- a feeling of love and acceptance of myself and others that I’ve always aspired to as a kind of ultimate goal.

It’s all part of a process, I’m still a beginner, but my taking up of yoga has only added to my general positivity, as it seems to address so many of the issues I’ve had, especially in making me feel so much more comfortable, and whole, in my body. 

After I finish a session, I sometimes put on another ambient album, Structures From Silence from Steve Roach (1984), which really chimes with the sense of wellbeing and ease brought about by the yoga. There is a sense of vastness, and a wonder, to that album that I really admire.

With my birthday money I bought what is perhaps my most outrageous purchase I’ve ever made: a sequin leotard costing £150 . I saw it online a few weeks ago, and toyed with the idea of buying it, unsure because of the price.

But, as my 25th drew nearer I thought better of my reservations, and just ordered the thing. It arrived in a cardboard box and, with a handwritten note: ‘hope you love’. It’s a bit of a ‘YOLO’ purchase, something I just wanted, so I bought it, even if it’s stupid.

And it does look great on me. It’s like an outfit from another world. The colours of the sequins, in changing lights, are just beautiful. In movement they shift from a crystal, snowy white through pale purples to a deep, shimmering blue. I really, really love it. And, as explained, I’m on something of an all-in-one outfit kick at the moment, so it makes sense. 

I’ve only worn it a couple times so far, and I’m hoping to find an event that I can wear it to. I’m thinking of pairing it with my oversized blue blazer.

When I think back to where I was when writing Reading 4, in which I describe my feelings of freakishness on wearing a one-piece swimsuit, I can really see how far I’ve come. Because, like I feel like this crazy sequin leotard does really look good on me. I mean, it’d look good on most any woman- it’s a brilliant garment- but it’s important for me because I used to feel much more hopeless, much more doomer-y about this sorta thing in particular. 

As I strike a pose in the light, the sequins go from purple to blue and back again. Periodically, I remember something I used to think a lot when I just come out of a particularly long through pattern while on an acid trip in my late teens: Wow, I had my head in a tunnel that whole time and I didn’t even know it. 

The last two posts I’ve done have sorta felt like “Look! I’m better now!” without much else to them, and I want to start doing more different, distinct, and less excessively sanguine posts again. Positivity is boring, I know, but I’m glad of where I’m at, and I just want to leave a marker of it. 

As my new YouTube yoga teacher says at the end of a video: ‘Move into the light!’. God, I’m insufferable.

27/10/24