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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   11596 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 2025

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If MtFs transitioned but didn't call themselves female or otherwise associate themselves with femininity, then why did they transition?

Well, for a start, they might think it feels good, and/or makes them attractive. You may be interested in parts of this Ozy post, though it's not making this argument:

I inject testosterone once a week. I have the changes everyone admits: my voice deepens, my chest hair thickens, my face grows a beard. But I also become stronger and more athletic (…) I stop crying at movies. My sexuality becomes more insistent and ever-present. (…) These observations are commonplace among trans people. Everyone knows that testosterone makes you more athletic and that hormones change your sexuality and your emotions. (…) I feel more like myself when my system runs on testosterone rather than estrogen — a phenomenon that is harder to explain if you don’t know how pervasive its effects are.

Indeed, even today there are people who seek hormone therapy without shooting for a binary transition - starting with various non-binary/genderfluid types. I know many vaguely nonbinary transmasculines who are happy going by "he" or "they" but don't break off in hives at being "she"-ed. (As a matter of fact, Ozy is one.) Those people would still seek breast reduction and testosterone injections even in a world where there was no concept of social transition and they remained classified as women, which they'd be basically fine with so long as they got to be very butch women.

As such:

This scenario would mean that they're physically altering their bodies to crudely resemble women while vehemently denying that they're doing so for any reason having to do with women--their chosen method of surgical self-expression just happens to be sorta based on physical attributes of women

This feels like a strawman. My proposed gnarglebargles don't pretend that it's a coincidence that transition makes them outwardly resemble the other sex in some ways. They would just give up on the semantic debate, and admit that their lifestyle still leaves them closer to very committed crossdressers than to the sex they emulate. Compare furries, who don't need to pretend that their aesthetic is completely unrelated to dogs to acknowledge that they have little in common with real dogs, and generally don't want to be exactly like real dogs anyway.

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