As someone who is 15 years into the situation OP described - yes it’s somewhat of an oversimplication of how it all works… but broadstokewise it’s on the money with the right partner and mindset. Whether your marriage works this way or not comes down to how fungible you both believe your partner to ultimately be and how much you dedicate to being each other’s joy.

Thinking being pessimistic in the face of romance is just “reality” means your chances of experiencing that kind of romance become mighty slim. Optimism and trust are nessisary components to making it happen but are sadly also attractive to abusers. End of the day I wish OP the very best of luck because coming home to your partner excited to see them every day for years on end really is worth the attempt.

Yeah dysphoria/euphoria runs a gamut of severity. Some folk only experience the effects of the dopamine hit of it being what you want, some just have the perpetual downer… most of us it’s a combo plate of both.

And anorexia does have a somewhat similar approach to lessening body dysmorphia. Stay away from mirrors, avoid people who focus too much on your appearance… We as a society just have come to a concensus that making commentary about people’s weight is really rude and harmful. Anorexia however is socially based. It’s a response to a societies beauty standards and you don’t find it in cultures that don’t have those beauty standards. Transness however just pops up everywhere often in complete opposition to beauty standards, cultural norms or religious doctrine across time and place.

A lot of us go through this phase right before we accept being trans where we try to be like the apex version of our birth sex. We try to over gender perform because if you are the perfect cis man or woman you should be fine living off the external validation of others the way cis people do… But when that ultimately fails to fix the problems and actually often makes them worse the reality becomes there are only a few options. Be miserable until you run out of strength and die either by suicide or a life shortened by stress… Or you explore ways that might solve your rocksolid internal need but also potentially cost you family, friendships, careers, respect, safety and basically turn up the heat on external pressures to conform.

QED the pilot thing was probably a bad example I won’t use again.

How about this, if someone changed their name and you saw a picture of them from before that update… Maybe a baby pic let’s say, what name would you use when identifying the person in the picture?

How does one actually identify if they are a “man” or a “woman”? What list of criteria makes one of a certain gender?

Okay so “am I a trans person? 101”. A lot of what cis people perceive as gender is best described by gender performativity theory. Basically at birth you were coded using physical sex characteristics as a guideline and a whole complex kicked into gear. You were probably praised for performing gender well and informed and shamed by others when you did not conform. This creates an external goad of social expectation that trained you how to feel about yourself. Most cis people don’t appear to really question this because as long as nothing interferes with your ability to fit this model and cause social friction it’s fine. Some challenge the conventions but not really identity. Gender is a thing you do rather than are under this model because it’s a mass social phenomenon of culture clustered vaguely around sex characteristics. Being a Femboy for instance is something you perform. It’s not a trans identity even though they might be easily mistaken for a trans woman.

But then there’s a VERY different experience… And this is the rough thing to explain to cis people because it literally does not make sense. That’s the hard part in this dialogue. How gender works for trans people is strictly not logical and if you experience this phenomenon you cannot logic yourself out of it no matter how hard you try… Because now we are dealing with a subconscious function. Importantly this is not a delusion. A delusion would be belief in something that doesn’t exist, this is the opposite. This is intense but uncontrollable feedback about observable physical reality.

It you are trans, for whatever reason, your brain has an internalized feedback system that targets your physically held sex characteristics. Your perceptible sex characteristics make you feel things completely independent of anything external. You feel intense envy for sex characteristics you see other people have that you do not. Emulation of those characteristics make you feel incredible for literally no logical reason…it’s like getting hit by a truck full of dopamine even when you acknowledge it makes no sense to feel that way. Reminders that you don’t have those characteristics make you feel completely deficient. You can feel disconnected from your body and in social spaces you can feel fake or invisible, unable to express yourself. Oftentimes this friction between constant internal feedback and external pressure to conform to the opposite of that feedback causes stress which means you get stress related illnesses. Digestive issues, headaches, skin problems, harmful nervous behaviours, depression, social anxiety, escapist self medication or addiction issues… Some get metaphysical about this in the idea that there is a sort of spiritual aspect that never aligned but it’s probably some kind of brain structure thing. But the idea of “being a (enter whatever here)” stems from the very consistent feedback that aggregates around a specific sexual phenotype. If you feel like your life essentially sucks because you don’t have the physical characteristics that come from a masculine puberty then you can backwards engineer that feeling into the sentiement “I should be a man”.

So when you face this friction between external feedback and internal feedback you have two routes to combat that stress.

Option one : You physically change the features that cause the feedback. You no longer are envious because you have the feature you want and you don’t feel deficient or self conscious anymore because your physical reality has changed. The internal feedback loop is satisfied and you get that nice hit of dopamine from all forms of witnessing your physical body in action.

Option two - you remove the external feedback.

One way to not obsess over what you feel you are missing is to not be constantly reminded. Changing how everyone addresses you is part of this. When people generally call you a woman for instance what they are doing is adding up all your physical features, coming to a conclusion based on what they physically witness and spitting it back out as a physical assessment of you. Your internal feedback system is VERY AWARE of this computation happening and reverse engineers it instantly. Internally it is something like this : "This person called me ‘she’ because they noticed my high voice (oh how I wish my voice was lower!) and because I have boobs (fuck I wish I could just slice the damn things off) and because of my narrow shoulders (Gotta work out more) and is now creating an expectation of conforming to a cluster of social garbage and treat me like I am different from men which sucks but makes sense because I have a high voice (fuck I should talk less) and boobs (maybe if I starve myself…) " and the thought spiral continues.

So what you can do is trick the brain. You ask to be called by male forms of address and ask to be treated as culturally male and what happens is basically your mind fills in the empty room. You might not have the physical characteristics but it becomes theoretically possible to the mind that maybe those physical features aren’t actually being noticed. It creates a sort of protective uncertainty. It obscures the witnessable physical assessment aspect of someone else’s calculation of your sex. Even if logically it’s pretty obvious what your birth sex is and you are absolutely sure someone is just gassing you up it denies that internal feedback immediate purchase. It creates room to consider - maybe my physical features aren’t all that different from what I desperately wish they could be. “Man” in this usage is not just a social category. It’s verbally applied medicine.

Of course the issue with option 2 strictly is that it’s kind of only good at handling the feedback that comes from interacting with other people. No amount of people calling me a man is gunna help when I am in front of a mirror, or when I talk and hear my own voice or demonstrate some kind of physicality that my cis male counterparts do not have. But sometimes you get what you get and it has to be enough. Not all fully baked transitions make us perfectly indistinguishable from cis people. The process is imperfect so we ask other people to socially make up for physical shortfall.

A lot of trans people realize how important these things are once that friction is resolved. Like if you suddenly have like five different physical maladies that suddenly clear up because they were caused by stress you have normalized your entire life and you suddenly feel like going outside your house takes half the energy it used to it becomes really obvious what you’re doing is working and nessisary. The experience can be a lot like quiting a very bad job that was slowly killing you.

I suppose that assumes a woman cares about fashion and that fast fashion is something every woman wants to buy into. A lot of women I know shop vintage because they want items they can wear reliably for years and modern items do not offer that level of quality. If you want to buy out of the fast fashion assumption of “need” it seems like you have to literally go back in time because if you buy fast fashion it is literally trash in a year. Nobody will thrift it worn because it will be worn out. It doesn’t seem like brands have options for women that lie outside of this system in addition to those junky options or offer those junk items at a lower cost. If all you can buy new is junk then stepping outside of the system requires you to avoid the ease of simply buying new off the rack. It requires work and luck. If you grew up inside that system that’s your established normal.

We can say that mens fashion is static… But why can’t both gendered fashion silos have more static options or at least price fast fashion at a different price point to reflect those cheaper materials? It seems like saying one sex has inherent requirements for fubgibillity which seems honestly kinda sexist. There’s a lot of men who want more interesting fad like stuff and women who want staples that will last a decade.

I mean you can get it or not it’s not a debate. Trans etiquette is something that a concensus of trans people request of other people and we set the standards based on how gender makes us feel, not how cis or even isolated trans individuals understand gender. This isn’t an exercise of strict logic. This is dealing with a culture of people dealing with a problem you don’t have and telling you where their pain points are. You don’t have to listen just like you don’t have to obey another culture’s etiquette when you are abroad… but expect to be treated as out to lunch or annoying to deal with. If I took you to meet other people in my community and you did that to one of their past photos I would be embarrassed on your behalf. If you did that to me I would probably not bring it up but internally wince because unless you were a friend I would treat you as a temporary inconvenience.

When someone says “I used to be a woman” my reaction is largely that is just incorrect. I never was a woman there was simply a stage of my life where I was afraid to be a man or unaware that other options were possible. In short - I was coerced. Other people identified me as a woman based on the sex characteristics I had and I identified as a woman because I did so out of fear of social reprisal or because I was kept in ignorance by dint of a society refusing to treat that knowledge as something I was allowed to have. Saying I “was a woman” would imply that I chose to do so freely, which I did not. Quite frankly when they look at a picture of me and read my past self as a woman it’s a reminder that to a lot of people that presentation and body type is all that they need to misgender me in a round about way. They are referring to a time when I was a prisoner to a system and identifying based on what they think I should be coded, not how I code myself. You think it’s fine to say I changed from woman to man because of social category and that it’s a construct - but to be honest that’s a pretty cis take. I react negatively to my SEX characteristics and use gender performance to stop people from bringing up my assumed sex characteristics into conversation. Language is a mirror through which we catch glimpses of ourselves. The mirror does me damage, I don’t linger in front of physical ones and I ask people not to use linguistic ones. When you call me “she” even in past tense you are referring to aspects of my body that I do not have the capacity to feel neutrally about.

I know a fair number of other trans folks who wish to expunge every pretransition photo from existence in part because they invite people to comment on this sort of temporal understanding of gender. If we could have you forget we were ever our birth sex we would. Instead most compromise by asking for a retroactive update.

It was actually super cool, when Elliot came out he went to the showrunners to let them know they had nothing to fear, he wouldn’t change his appearance or anything because he was signed on for the show length.

And the show runners in an industry first established a new gold standard by telling him “Nah, how about we just make Vanya into Victor and make it canonical.” So they worked with Page giving him a lot of creative control over the character’s personal journey and showed probably the best depiction of early transition on tv.

Trans etiquette wise you aren’t correct. If someone transitions you apply current identity to all photos taken beforehand because the person is the same person. In the same way a picture of a pilot taken before they got their pilots licence is still a picture of a pilot your current understanding of a person updates to current and is retroactively applied.

Saying " this is so and so back when they were a woman" is considered rude since people generally look at their pre transition selves as not having a gender that aligns with their birth sex but rather a stage where they and other people around them did not know their current needs. People will generally not check you on it though if they think that your understanding is very basic. Proper nuance would say “Back when they identified as a woman” because then the implication is that the person didn’t nessisarily change, but the general understanding and social category did… but functionally speaking it’s close enough for someone who isn’t up on best practice.

So general flow chart here starts with context. When an actor plays a character that character’s gender is considered before the actor.

In this case this picture is from Umbrella Academy but before the character comes out as a trans man. The role was specifically altered for Page by the show runners to make the role more comfortable for the actor (he offered to delay transition goals for the production but the production being incredibly awesome decided that this was something they could flex) so this meme is referencing one of the most recognizable trans actors in the world in a part where the character’s coming out was basically happening during Page’s transition.

Since the character is trans but this pic is before the transition it follows real world etiquette where pre transition photos should use current preferences of identity.

So the answer is from the trans community standpoint is that unless you jumped out of the series before that reveal and were fully unaware then yeah, making this meme with this pic with this specific context is pretty gauche but an easy mistake.

Actually the character is canonically a trans man named Victor… This is from Umbrella Academy but before the character came out. You are correct in general respects just this example particularly is both of two men both canonically and non canonically so its actually kind of not super cool to use this particular image for this gag but largely forgivable if someone honestly was completely unaware of that context when making this meme which if you peaced out before the next season would be a very understandable mistake.

Probably more Non-binary my dude. Bi is more about what type of appliance voltage you’re attracted to rather than what you got in your house.

It’s a lot more than socks. Went looking for a duffel coat once for work and checked both isles in stores. Mens coat - nice woven and well fulled 100 percent wool, thick quality stuff, Women’s isle, cheaper felted wool half the thickness… Same price, same basic style, same store.

Ever since whenever I go looking for stuff I check both isles. Higher quality fabrics are generally reserved for men’s items though women’s stuff is priced the same. You’d never know the difference if you only shopped one gendered option.

Dunno what to tell yeh mate, it’s about as oldif not older than Furry culture. Weeki Watchee springs started a whole thing with their Mermaid shows and the subculture basically took off from like the early 60’s… And was probably about as horny as a lot of other subcultures that started around the same time.

Uh… I hate to tell you this but people absolutely dress as mermaids and do conventions… There’s a whole home industry of people who make custom silicon tails.

https://aquamermaid.com/blogs/news/mermaid-convention?srsltid=AfmBOoofN82kC8kQ_774E8rKcE1-Mi9CBZXEfvIqLckEK1cq7bXWHFum

https://www.themernation.com/silicone-tail

Nope, different nerd culture entirely. Seriously, they have their own conventions, instead of fursuits they do custom silicone tails and train to swim in them, have contests and pagents and things. There’s basically no overlap between the two communities. Scaleys are folk in the fursuit community who do dragon and lizard personas.

I have odd connections. Being in the film industry I have friends through props depts who do furry cons and one of my coworkers does underwater photography for people in the Mermaid subculture.

You see but here’s where how you’re putting this works together with other things. You are looking at trans people on the whole as a safety issue to the population at large. The framing of trans people on the right always places us as a problem l. That is an outright dehumanizing tactic and the answer is always left kind of purposefully vague because the answer is “we aren’t supposed to exist.”

The outcome of all this discussion is basically to raise the hurdles of being trans in a pubic space. To be frank, they know that basically making life miserable enough for us will solve their “problems” because when life gets too hard and devoid of joy and relief death becomes viable.

So they frame us as a public safety problem, a categorical problem, a mental health problem, a medical problem, a “ruining your fun” problem, a freedom of speech problem because they know every time they do so that you will think of us as a group a little less in terms of being people and a little more as a sacrifice that deserves what we get.

It doesn’t matter that prisons don’t change their design to fit us because as long as we’re the ones getting raped the system is fine.

It doesn’t matter that public toilets don’t change their design to make everyone safer as long as we never go out in public long enough to use one.

It doesn’t matter that basically it only takes six months to dial in what your dosage of hrt and from then on it’s just a prescription like every other you pick up monthly for any other medical condition . As long as we’re interpreted by the system as an ‘undue medical burden’ we can basically just allow stress to ruin our bodies so we die faster and voters can feel like they’ve saved resources.

It doesn’t matter that we have kids of our own because us “not being safe to be around children” means that we are banished from parental and teaching spaces and the child protection services can be empowered to take our children away to raise them “safely” .

The arguements that never frame systemic solutions that include trans people are paving the way for our genocide. They are designed to get you to stop thinking right before you ever consider us worthy of accomodation. You are supposed to look at us as taking YOUR resources away, making YOUR spaces less safe, ruining YOUR culture so that you feel unsafe and attacked even when those things aren’t actually happening. This effect is called creating a “Moral exclusion” and it is the first steps to creating outcast sections of society who you are not supposed to question where they SHOULD exist because you are primed to only think about them as in terms of where they should NOT exist.

There is good reason why we do not soothe your fears about evil creepy cis men in women’s bathrooms. Because it’s bad faith rhetoric designed to give us no recourse to argue that we should have as much a right to be safe. The fact is the numbers are in. In the ten plus years in my city where trans inclusion is the norm there has been no uptick in stalking incidents regarding bathroom use. Just because you are being engineered to feel less safe by politicians doesn’t mean you actually are less safe but you are making US less safe. But that’s not a problem because you aren’t supposed to value our safety or comfort even a little. Your not caring is useful to specific people so they are going to keep training you to do that and to never ask where the trans people went. Because unless you have the misfortune of being one of us or loving one of us enough to care we are just a problem.

That’s the thing, I am not so sure. Like ask for what the reason behind that discomfort would be and a lot of the time it still has it’s root in other people’s perceptions. There’s a lot of muddling factors, internalized misogyny and the need to project “manliness” as a distinct comparison is still basically an external training to feel that way about that feature. Things like fatphobia work off of external training to social body standards and a lot of that dynamic is at play in cis spaces…but doesn’t well graft one to one with the trans experience of dysphoria /euphoria.

It’s a difficult knot to dig down to it’s source but I think it’s a way more of a distinct difference of operations than people think hence why it’s so gorram hard to explain to most people what is going on.

To confirm this would require a bunch of study which isn’t really happening because cis people don’t really deeply examine or know where to start even into exploring what being cis actually is. They don’t really have to think about it. The only reason we trans folks have to do so much introspection is because we can’t just be left to do what we need. We have to quantify it and examine it to self advocate… And then when cis people render our situation back to us in completly dismissive nonsensical ways it prompts one to wonder. Maybe there really is a physical difference, some chunk of development that created an inflexibility where normally there is flexibility. A trans brain might exist in a subset of cis people and align internally (I have definitely met folk like that) but unless cis people talk to each other we might not be able to confirm.

That’s not quite what I mean. A lot of people basically just equate sex and gender as the same thing.

But what I am talking about is demonstratable this way : ask this to a cis person pick a sex characteristic, any physically dimorphic sex characteristic. How does the existence of having that physical characteristic make you feel? Your answer cannot include how comfortable physically the ownership of that characteristic (like if we’re talking something that causes physical discomfort like period cramps as example) is or an evaluation of how attractive or not to other people that characteristic is. It is not an evaluation of the individual nature of how yours compares to other people’s. The rubric is just its pure existence of that characteristic in isolation. What emotional reaction do you have to possessing that characteristic?

Cis people generally return an answer that those sex characteristics don’t really cause them to feel anything. They just have those things. Like they might have learned reactions to their characteristics if they don’t fit a beauty standard and are made to feel deficient by other people… But otherwise on their own those things don’t make them feel either happy or sad . The possession of those features have a neutral value.

They also don’t seem particularly attached to their innate characteristics in theoreticals. Ask them what they think it would be like to swap to the opposite sex phenotype and they don’t tend to report back any anticipated bodily sense of horror or loss. Most often they just display curiosity and a tabulation of things they would be able to suddenly experience or would change. More often than not their primary initial concern would be whether they would be attractive or not.

I think what makes most people cis is actually a lack of ability to care about which body phenotype they are riding around in. Their sex characteristics don’t actually mean anything to them on their own.

After damn near a decade of discourse with cis people I think I have an insight into the problem.

We as trans people assume cis people have an internalized gender that matches their sex… But in talking with cis people I actually think it’s something else. I think the vast majority of cis people’s experience of gender only comes from external influences… I have met cis people who recognize what we’re talking about when I talk about this sort of internal compass that sends feedback completely isolate of any social influence but like it’s actually rare.

So we are in the unfortunate position of having to explain an internally experienced phenomenon that cis folk literally do not experience to a bunch of skeptical people who’s entire experience of gender is performance based… So they fill in the gaps with motives that makes sense to them that involve the nessisary involvement of some kind of external social or stimuli because they cannot conceptualize anything different while we have to render the problem using analogs cis people are likely to understand… But are also based off of externalized influences and thus completly imperfect.

Honestly depends on your state and institution and overall is incredibly vibes based. Like depending on the state the system might be on the hook to allow a bottom surgery… But whether or not you “fit the requirements” won’t be determined until after the fact. If the people running the system are anti-trans you will be lucky as a post op trans person to be allowed horomones at all. There’s documented situations of trans women basically entering a sort of menopausal state and having their horomones witheld indefinitely by wardens basically because there isn’t a lot of oversight or consequences for doing so.

It’s also taken as kind of a given that sexual assault of trans people is just a thing that is accepted as a cost of doing business. This is something actually that Trans men stuck in women’s prisons also report as a common experience. The system as it is designed raises the risk for a lot of trans women in prisons seeking transition because if you get bottom surgery and you are denied transfer your sexual assault chances skyrocket to “expectedly matter of course” .

So while the 15 people who have made it all are fully medically transitioned, fully sterilized and been on hrt for longer than the required time for athletes the answer regarding requirements is generally “at the pleasure of the administrations in question which is most often not at all”