forced him & forced her
im confused can someone explain this to me?
left one is a boy trapped inside the body of a girl, yet everyone around him keeps impossing him all the girls’ stardarts (that’s why they’re coloring him pink); right one is a girl trapped inside the body of a guy and the same applies for all the hands touching her
thank you so much for explaining
So….I saw some tags on this that were like “but some trans women may be cool with masculine stuff, and some trans men may be cool with feminine stuff so maybe this is less applicable to those people”
Let me explain something to you: this visual, the one right there, it has nothing to do with masculine and feminine. I am an incredibly feminine trans man. What this is depicting, though, is the experience of trans people people being invasively dehumanized and made to appear in the form of another gender. That I am a man who enjoys many very traditionally feminine things does not make this less applicable to me. It makes it more applicable.
When people tell you that makeup and nail polish (two things I adore) make you a woman…. you feel like your gender has just been scrubbed away by someone else’s hands. As though they are coating your body in a lie you can never explain to them is so wrong you want to scream.
Feminine trans men and masculine trans women face all the same struggles as cis people who cross traditional masculine/feminine boundaries and then some. Because our gender has to be earned and proven, in a way cis people never have to do. People ask me why if I like makeup and nail polish I don’t just “stay a woman” and I can never really seem to make them understand that I NEVER was a woman. That I did not “become” a man. That I always was and my presentation as feminine in some ways did not make me female.
It feels like someone else, painting over our truth, hands like ravaging wolves, words like stinging cuts, judging eyes like daggers. It is invasive and terrifying and most of us experience it when we are so young we simply do not know how to respond.
So we fold ourselves into foreign shapes. Pretend that who we are fits the cis/heteronormative standards of masculine and feminine. And we are still so very much that image up above. It is still someone telling us what our gender should be, painting over our truth, laying us bare as though they own our bodies and our minds and our souls.
So please, friends. Don’t imagine that because I like nail polish and eyeliner that the above does not apply to me. If anything, it applies MORE, because people try to convince me on a regular basis that those two things should mean I am a woman, because women are feminine and they like nail polish and eyeliner. But the truth is, none of those things determine my gender.
Stop putting your hands on my body, stop painting over my truth, stop imagining for a moment that you know what it feels like to be forcibly removed from who you are. Just stop. And let us be who we are. Free from the expectation of your narrow ideas of male and female and masculine and feminine.
Please. Take your hands off me. And all my brothers and sisters.
(via goblinbutch)
