From gender confusion to gender revolution.

2024-10-01

"Imposteress."

I was looking at my blogs, and everything I do starts with a simple presentation of, hey, I'm Plume, here are my pronouns (She/Her, by the way), blah blah blah.

I had a weird moment that I didn't have in a while where I was looking at my name, and it didn't feel real. For just a second, but still a second too long, it felt like it was just an alias. Like I was back to using that name as something that was exclusively online. Even though now, if I put out my wallet and take out my ID, it's the name that's on it.

In the end, I think it's just gender dysphoria speaking, but getting dysphoria with my name is something that is, I wouldn't say new, but it's very much odd compared to the usual. It feels the same way as when I'm looking at myself in a mirror and my brain sees me as a man before realizing that it's me and therefore getting anxiously confused.

I sometimes feel this weird imposter syndrome, And I know it's been kind of beaten into me. We live in a transphobic society, it will leave its marks on people, even if they're trans.

These lines of questionning things like, am I faking being a woman? Am I just pretending? They are not coming from me. They are not real. They are just internalised transphobia.

It is what I've been made to believe about myself and trans people my entire fucking life, and therefore it still applies to me, especially considering the beliefs I was exposed to as a kid from within my family.

What's hard to deal with here is that it's not self-hate. It's not me going to myself in the mirror, you will never be a real woman or whatever, when I'm feeling extremely awful about myself for some reason or another. No, it's just confusion about my own identity that comes up.

It's the kind of things that we as trans people are not supposed to talk about. We are not allowed to feel any sorts of confusion about our gender identities. Because if we do, we will be perceived as not being trans enough, as being unsure, and then the whole bullshit about regrets and so on will come up. And this can have consequences.

It can go from your family just not accepting who you are and refusing to take you seriously, because they're self-convincing themselves that you're just a confused person. Or it can go to more extreme scenarios such as doctors acting as gatekeepers between you and your hormone treatments and deciding that you're not sure enough or not trans enough to be worthy of them.

It quickly became a reflex that I've adopted. Refusing to question my own self even though questioning it is what ended up getting me to figure out what and who I was.

Because if I do question my own gender identity, it means that maybe I am not trans. You know, as if it somehow invalidates all of the feelings I've had for years and years and years about not feeling like a boy and then not feeling like a man, but then really enjoying when my partner — who I've been with for seven years and has been doing this for just as long — genders me femininely...

Am I... non-binary?

Lately I've been questioning if I'm non-binary. And I mean... no? Like, I don't know? Don't think so. I'd describe myself as a trans woman. I love my trans side, yeah I have broader shoulder (barely actually) than the average cis-woman and so on, but I'm still a woman, you know? I want to wear my trans-women-ness with pride... it's just that sometimes, I question it. It leaves me kind of unsure about it.

But the thing is, it started because the notion of women doesn't make much sense to me, actually. I feel like one, but I can't explain you for the life of me what is a woman or even why I feel like one. I just do. It's a nebulous concept that I barely understand and yet somehow resonates extremely strongly within me.

The truth is that the question "what is a woman" is a deceptively simple one that a fucking doctorate in gender studies would struggle to answer. All the people that pretend that they can will end up saying something completely fucking stupid. Because gender is made up. It actually doesn't exist. It's like money, we believe in it, because we made it up, but it's not real. It's fake. It's fiction. We made it up. This one was invented by our writers. And therefore its rules can be whatever the fuck we want them to be, because it doesn't exist. No matter how much we pretend that it is, it isn't a natural force that can't be moved.

Even if you go with the biological route, which is already completely fucking stupid, it's wrong. It doesn't make sense. Any serious biologist will tell you that the idea that we can easily distinguish from what is a man and a woman is stupid. Take chromosomes, there are so many variations. Like, intersex people are a thing. And they make up a shockingly high amount of the population compared to what people believe, actually.

So what does it all mean? I have no idea, and it makes me scared and confused to think about sometimes. Gender is something that puts a lot of pressure onto people for no valid reasons. It's at the root of so much damage in our societies.

So what if we lived in a genderless society? On paper, I gotta admit, it sounds cool, but then I would be lying if I didn't say that yeah, it does make me a bit uncomfortable. I don't like the notions of man and woman, but obviously I'm attached to them, otherwise I wouldn't call myself a woman... but then I think about it, and I'm thinking to myself that even in a genderless society, I would still be trans!

My identity doesn't end at what I'm saying. I'm going through a lot of medical effort to go through this. I've been taking hormones every day since the end of December of last year and I'm planning on eventually going through a very extensive surgery, vaginoplasty, which most people will never do something like that. Sometimes you replace an organ, sure, But this is turning one into something else.

It's a very hard and intense procedure that I'm going to put myself through. And I'm not doing it because I want people to see me as a woman. No, I wear clothes for that, among other reasons of course but still. Gender presentation is a thing. It has nothing to do with this. It's the same thing with my breasts. I'm not taking hormones just so I can look feminine in public. No, I could just wear some push-up bra for that. I'm doing it for me. I'm doing it because it's something that I feel at the core of myself somehow. And I can't explain it, but I need it.

I'm looking down at myself and I'm thinking: This part of me that I have between my legs, this part of me that is there, I don't recognize it. It's not supposed to be here, it feels so alien, so foreign to me, and I've been feeling that ever since my puberty started.

I realized a while back why I couldn't stand to be shirtless. It's because, well, I have lots of insecurities about my body, but it's also because my chest was flat. Something felt like it's missing. And even though it is taking it's sweet time, that is changing now.

So what gives? What am I in a gender-less society? And what am I in this gendered society? How can it be something that I can't explain? How can we play a game if we don't even know the rules? Because what are the rules of gender? They change constantly. It's hard. I'm not sure. It's very complicated. And I shouldn't have to feel as if I need to justify my existence, especially to my own self, but I've been made to believe that I need to.

I guess the more interesting question isn't what makes me a woman, but more, how come, despite a society being so gendered pushing onto me that I was supposed to be a man from the day I was born, I still ended up feeling like a woman? To put it more bluntly: Why didn't my programming stick?

Gender Revolution.

The truth is, the reason why transgender people especially get so much intense hate and violence thrown against them is because transgender people, by their very existence, are revolutionaries. We are going against the status quo, which is the one thing you're never allowed to do in our society. The societal status quo is at the very core of our society because it's what is keeping the economic status quo in place.

Every time it moves, there is a chance that the whole thing may be offset or even crumble. Or at least, that's what the people at the top of this bullshit pyramid scheme we're all stuck in seems to believe in, and therefore want us to believe. Otherwise, they wouldn't be funding conservatives, which are hell-bent on keeping a strict societal order.

How many time did we hear about the fact that basically the existence of trans people was a sign of the end of Western civilization? Or, you know, something something, homosexuality, something something, fall of Rome?

Transgender people, by their very existence, question a part of the status quo that has been maintained for a long time. Gender itself. Because if "a man can indeed become a woman", if the concept of man or woman actually doesn't mean anything, why do they get treated so differently? Why do women consistently get paid less? Why are men constantly at the top of every company's? Why are they always the richest people on the planet?

Questioning the status quo is about revealing what it's made out of, revealing its systems and why it exists in the first place. It always pretends to be the natural order of things, but it never is.

It's very much a slippery slope argument for the people that are at the top of this society, the richest among us, the bourgeoisie, dare I call them... those who hold the means of production. And you can tell that it is, because that's consistently the type of arguments that are used against marginalized people, every time.

It's always the same rhetoric. It's always about protecting women and children.

The second you bring up the idea of childrens being in danger, the critical thinking part of the brain shuts off in a lot of people. Because not only are humans hard-wired to be very protective of their young, but our society is already pre-disposed to not to consider children as humans. It's therefore very convenient that women are constantly being infantilized. Because we live in a patriarchal society which sees women and children in a very interchangeable way. It's got its benefits for the system in place.

If you start making women and children interchangeable, all of a sudden, more than 50% of the population are basically subhuman that needs to be protected, both from a big evil and also from themselves. It's why children have so little rights, especially when it comes to self-determination, which only get more and more fucked up the more they grow up. And it's also why we are constantly trying to control women's bodies.

That is a lot of people, a lot of interests to protect. That is a lot of dirt to plant seeds of moral panic in. A lot of ground, to cultivate a status quo.

The cycle will continue.

"We can't let immigrants come into our countries because they are going to rape our women and murder our children." It's a very old trope and yet one that is still used because it is still very much effective.

And look at us trans peeps. Before us, it was the gayz, the "homosexuals" as some like to call us. I say us, but I'm more of the lesbianz variety, if you catch my drift. Well... same type of arguments. Protecting the kids. They're gonna turn the freaking kids gay, and all that. And then you make a bullshit slippery slope of arguments about pedophilia and that instantly shuts people's minds off.

For trans people? You make the same types of arguments.

So, for trans men, you talk about fragile girls being manipulated into "cutting off their breasts". Which is more of a UK's transphobic specialty. But because they're not seen as men, but rather confused women, well, what do you do when you see a women? You just go full misogyny on her, of course. And because women are stupid little things that don't know any better, we can't possibly let them make decisions about their bodies... ahem, abortions, anyone?

But I mean, the whole mutilation thing is quite typical to use against trans people. The whole "cutting dicks off" is quite a popular brain parasite among transphobes.

And for trans women, you push the whole pedophile thing again. I mean, it worked against gay people, so why not do it again, eh? Then you get situations like Florida. Where Ron DeSantis kept equating trans people and drag queens (which is also some very typical bullshit), with pedophiles... but then also conveniently started talking about how pedophiles should get the death penalty. My, how very genocidal of you, Ron.

Trans women typically tends to get most of the transphobic backlash, ironically because of a double form of misogyny. On one hand, trans guys are dismissed as confused women because women are constantly infantilized. But at the same time, trans women are perceived as overly feminine men which is the worst thing a man can be because it's not in his nature and because femininity is perceived as inherently inferior.

On top of the pedophilia thing, you make up stuff about men dressed as women going in women's bathroom and women's spaces to rape them. Men in women's prison and so on... which of course never happens but who care because bam! You got yourself a successful moral panic. All of a sudden, you need to protect 50% of the population from what is more often than not less than 1% of the country. But that 1%, that tiny handful of people feels like a huge threat to the bourgeoisie whose whole world rests on these types of social norms.

Interestingly enough, this tactic used to go against trans women, was also the same one that was used against lesbian women. We can't let lesbians go into our spaces because they're going to look at our wives they're going to lust after them, these degenerates freaks. And it wasn't just men saying this. It was also women doing this. Women can very also be oppressive, we could talk about racism here like, how many white women got racialized men killed by cops for no reason (especially in the US), white feminism and so on but I'm just rambling on my blog, I don't have a fucking PhD in this, hell, I would barely call myself an activist. That being said, it's actually essential that women also be oppressive for this to keep going. They need to be convinced of these lies for them to, A, keep other women in check and B, for the bullshit to be effective enough to work.

Throw some stuff about women acting like they're men, typical lesbophobia and you also get some kind of like proto-transphobia in it, because the truth is transphobia is just an extension of homophobia, which itself is just an extension of misogyny, which itself is just about protecting the status quo...

Once the more binary trans people are accepted into our societies and it becomes just a normal thing, which will happen, by the way. It's an inevitability at this point. We have got too much exposure for us to disappear again. So when the status quo finally manages to integrate us... it will go after the non-binary trans people.

It will be claimed to be an existential threat to society. Saying that "men becoming women" or "women becoming men" is okay but "this nonsense about it being something else entirely?" That's unacceptable. Something about protecting women and protecting kids from non-binary people will creep up again. And what I'm telling you is not fiction. You can already see signs of that happening here and there, even within trans circles.

The cycle will continue. Unless we break it.

It's all made up, it's all bullshit, we could tear it all down and the world would probably be a better place. But it would also be a world in which I would still have no fucking answers to the question I was asking myself when I started rambling in my phone about this in the first place.

But at least there will be a better and much safer place to think about these things.

...my god, how the fuck am I going to name this blog post?

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