thescienceofneuroplasticity:

00queer:

i’ve seen more than a few comments about the topic of choosing your gender on my posts recently, as well as other people’s posts in the past, and like…

i want to make it very clear that the truscum (and others) who react to any post about this topic or any post that says “if you want to be a boy/girl/enby, you can be!” by screaming that “it’s not a choice” and that the people who make those posts are transphobic “transtrenders” are doing tremendous harm to questioning trans people.

for a lot of questioning people, the process of figuring out what hecking gender you are isn’t an easy one. not everyone goes to bed IDing as cis and then waking up the next morning going “wow, i’m so dysphoric! i am obviously trans and i know exactly what gender i am”.

one part that is very often included in the questioning process is thoughts and feelings of “i wish i was a girl but i’m not” or “if i could choose to be an enby i would” and similar things to that.

a lot of those thoughts, although maybe not all of them, have to do with internalized transphobia. because they were not assigned the gender they want to be, they feel like they can’t be that gender. so the thoughts are prevented from becoming anything more that “i wish i was that gender” because they don’t know that they can be that gender.

a questioning person saying “i wish i was a boy” is very often code for “i am a boy”. it’s just that they don’t yet know that they can be a boy, that they are indeed be a boy.

and that’s the people that those posts are often aimed at, even it’s not explicitly stated. the questioning trans people. those who don’t yet know that they can actually be the gender that they wish they were.

so. yes. go on and choose to be a boy, a girl, an enby. you are allowed to choose your gender, to choose what labels and words you identify with and want to describe yourself with.

the idea that nobody would ever want to be a gender other than their assigned one, that nobody would ever choose to be trans, is ridiculously transphobic in itself. but it is also directly harmful to the people who haven’t yet figured themselves out. so i want that narrative to get stomped out for good.

there’s also the whole thing about not feeling trans enough to claim the label, as if there’s an objective Trans Scale out there and if you don’t measure some arbitrary level of transliness by a specific age then you’re A Dirty Faking Special Snowflake Cis

like, rewind a few years and that’s where i was

and even still one of the main emotions i have about my gender is best described as Failing To Be A Girl. so yeah, i’ve chosen to be nonbinary. i’ve chosen to stop trying to shove myself into a box that doesn’t fit. and any truscum who take issue with this trans fact about me, a trans person, are cordially invited to shove it up their collective ass.