prince of trail mix

oh-voldey-voldemort:

The last time I wore a dress was my grade seven graduation (though I do believe I wore skirt for a funeral one time after that, not that I wanted to) I remember feeling extremely uncomfortable for all of the graduation. I tried to look happy for pictures and tried to be comfortable but on the inside I felt terrible. It was one of the first times in my life I felt extreme gender dysphoria. 

My Mom and I were just looking through old pictures and she found the ones from the grad. She smiled and showed them to me, I didn’t have much interest in them, and I saw her looking at them, she looked a sad. 

I know I shouldn’t, but I feel so guilty. 

I know that feel, baby boo. It’s the worst feeling. 

You’re a human and your feels are valid but if she needs to process she needs to do so in a way that is not at your expense.

I love you, man. Be well.

feministguy:

…You get a lot of images that look like this. And a lot of links to websites for gynecomastia reduction. I’m about two weeks out from my surgery (which is, in many ways, similar to what those sites advertise). My chest is still swollen, still healing. I feel immeasurably better than I did before. But I can feel the creeping temptation to compare myself to guys like in this image. Unless I want to eat a whole lot more than I do now (I’ve tried; I don’t do well at that) and spend a lot more time in the gym than I do now (also not something I’m genuinely interested in, at least not given other priorities), I won’t look like him.

I’ll probably look more like this guy once the swelling goes down, though with a little bigger nipples and areolas. And that’s okay. I have, at various times during the day, been making myself look at every guy that I see around me to remind myself of the fact that bodies come in all shapes and sizes.

Looking around the Internet, there are plenty of (what I take to be) non-transgender/transsexual men who are worried about their nipple size. On the other hand, there are men who are trying to increase their nipple size (nipple pumps abound in online sex toy stores). What I am  self-conscious about is something that plenty of people find desirable—including, of course, my ladyfriend, who has loved me and my body for years, throughout its various changes.

Still, despite knowing this, I have, historically and intermittently, said  ”I’m going to get big!” and then proceeded to try to figure out diets or exercises to get me looking more like Hunky Dude above. I’ve said it quasi-tongue in cheek, but with a genuine wish that I could be more like him. Because that would make me more masculine, more attractive, more __[insert adjective here]__.

It’s something that I’ve seen a lot of in the few years I’ve frequented FTM-focused websites: young men who are focused on bulking up their muscles in order to be perceived as more masculine. That’s something that our current American culture emphasizes, but it is (like other standards of beauty) contingent. I’m sure it’s a struggle that I’ll continue to have. It’s a struggle that I also share with men who were assigned male at birth. It’s also a struggle that is, I think, particularly acute for those of us who have had to make major modifications to our bodies in order to feel “right” (which, I might add, is not a description only of trans* people—this kind of body dysmorphia happens to many kinds of people). And it brings up the question of motivations for such changes.

To what extent was the internal pressure to have my chest surgically altered of the same kind as the internal pressure I feel to look like Super Hunk? I want to resist the latter for political reasons, but I think that I did something that feels “authentic” in the former case. I want to affirm the action of preserving bodies as acts of political resistance to norms which are dehumanizing. But I also want to affirm the action of body-modification as resistance. And I don’t think that always it’s clear-cut when an action is resistance and when an action is participating in a dehumanizing norm (after all, some people argue that transsexual surgery is inherently “giving in” to gender binaries).

And I’m absolutely not saying that I’m going to personally shame people for making choices regarding their own bodies. I’m talking about reflecting upon culture and the way that it influences decisions—I’m reluctant to say I have self-knowledge about my deepest motivations and psychology, and am likewise reluctant to attribute motivations to others. I’m just interested in how society influences the kinds of chooses autonomous people consider as live options, how it influences our decision-making, how it influences the outcomes of these decisions, etc.

All this is to say that reflection upon one’s body and its relationship to cultural pressures is really complicated. These pressures aren’t going to cease just because I’ve had a certain kind of surgery, and I don’t get a free pass to stop reflecting. It doesn’t mean I can’t go to the gym, or work out, or even want to gain a little weight and muscle—but it does mean continued critical engagement with my reasons and desires.