the_river_cass [she/her]

it’s the assumption of default masculinity, in part at least. I think if pronoun tags become more widely adopted, this will change. like look at the beauty parts of reddit - the accounts are as anonymous as the rest of reddit but people are assumed to be women, talking about stuff that interests women, and they post there by the millions.

oh, maybe. haha, I’m wired to read “masculine energy” and recoil so I’m not the best judge of intent here

no, they’re right. masculinity comes off a lot of the stuff here in waves.

this place is 70-30 cis male / everyone else. that’s… not great…

now imagine that the whole society is like at least this stupid and genuinely believe stuff even worse than this about you and it has real fucking consequences for your life… and yeah… being trans is a lot of really dumb, pointless shit that only exists to make your life harder.

…

/sigh I’m grumpy

yes, yes it is. but 70-30 is very dude heavy but not quite enough to assume everyone you’re talking to is a dude. the assumption has the consequence that women, femmes, and enbies, don’t feel comfortable speaking up unless they’re comfortable with people assuming they’re men. even a lot of cis women aren’t comfortable with that. remember when reddit used to whine that women would disclose their gender in posts “for attention”?

yea, I had the same realization after the pronoun tags were first turned on. I’d always thought this was a more dude heavy space, just given how people behave and interact.

it’s actually done a lot to affect how people relate to each other here. there’s a lot less masculinity being flung around here than on the old sub. it’s still not great but it’s better than it used to be.

it’s good for all of us, not purely for us transes.

too horny. cass is the short form of my name.

if the fash don’t like it and my comrades do, it’s the perfect name :cat-trans:

they’re complaining this isn’t the old sub

stupidpol chud came all the way here to tell me he didn’t like my name. I’m so touched.

the only tears I see are nazi tears :stalin-joking:

there’s someone JAQing off about Chinese authoritarianism and an ex-poster from here going off about (I think?) the USSR. :soviet-hmm:

I meant the user who posted the “I’ve been unbanned” bit. idk who mrzbry is.

they’re in that thread going ooooffffff about how they’re oppressed by the admins, lmao

@Collummcjingleballs

so my point is that all of these things are equally well explained by the notion that sexuality/gender identity are mutable and do change. there’s no reason that mutability can’t be constrained to just two or a few options (and so swapping alters would still land one with the same sexuality each time). the core question is why should I prefer your explanation to this one? they seem equally justifiable to me and that it would be extraordinarily difficult to truly prove in one direction or the other, in some objective fashion.

It only becomes a hidden variable when these effects are too subtle, covert, and thus difficult to control.

yeah, that’s what I was pointing out.

Just shifting from predominantly testosterone/visual to estrogen/progesterone/context based libido is complicated enough in how that interacts with orientation. And there is often a reduction in derealization/depersonalization, often with worsening dysphoria too. Many repress their sexual orientation either before or after transition; but statistically most trans people are double-gay despite their best efforts.

yeah, this is essentially my experience. but I’m able to understand it one of two ways. first, that the hormones and my own desire to be as much of a woman as possible + a healthy dose of internalized queer phobia have led me to reconstruct my identity in such a way that I stayed straight through my transition. or that undoing repression and dealing with dysphoria have allowed me to surface my actual, androphilic sexual orientation. I lean towards the latter because it helps explain more things and is a bit kinder to myself, but I leave room open for the former to be true (or that they’re both true to varying degrees). I’m reading you as saying that I the latter explanation is more likely to be correct as the former probably isn’t possible and I’d love a solid justification of that so I can put this to bed for myself :).

I do have a suspicion though that gender identity and sexuality are parts of our identities that we construct as much as any other part of our identities. that’s a fairly hot take, though, and I haven’t worked through even my own objections to that yet, and it runs extremely counter to orthodoxy on these issues.

Last I checked did not find any neuroscience studies comparing fixed gender identity, gender fluidity, and gender in dissociative disorders. I guess there is stigma around dissociation as if that were some abnormal psychology thing; even though it is ubiquitous.

ahh, I was hoping you had something on how disassociation affects gender identity and sexuality and can cause them to fluctuate as I thought that’s what you were saying. maybe I was reading you wrong though.

(i would argue all shifts in gender/attraction are dissociative processes, but normies are not ready to hear or understand that)

I want to hear all about this :)

so in this, you’ve given a couple examples of mutability:

• gender fluidity and bi/pan cycles
• sexuality shifts during transition

it seems like mutability or not are lenses we can choose to apply or not but I’m not seeing what leads you to prefer one.

the point is that probably no, it is not mutable, rather some people have more complex / complementary / contradictory attributes that vary in the extent of their momentary activation / expression / repression / dissociation.

like this is a solid hidden variable theory but the other explanation is that sexuality just changed.

that said, I also prefer to consider these things immutable but I know others prefer mutability as an explanation. what leads you to be certain that you’re correct? personally, the immutable view is convenient in a number of ways so I’ve been slightly discounting it because of that internal bias. or said another way, my personal experience agrees with you but I’m hesitant to universalize.

that deals with the people getting misgendered part but 👀 the transphobia in this thread. that’s a whole other thing we also have to deal with.