Yes, I do think people pay more attention to transfems for various reasons (mostly misogyny and anti-gay stigma), and like you I know more transfems than transmascs.

However, my primary care physician told me that I was their first trans woman patient, and he told me he has several trans men patients.

The local trans groups are mostly transfems, some transmascs show up but they are far fewer in number. I am not sure why, but trans men just aren’t as active, at least in my local trans community. I have sometimes wondered like you whether this is because they find it easier to pass and fit in with cis people, so they need the support groups and trans community less, and maybe it becomes a risk to associate with the trans community because it could out you?

All that said, I figure since the causes of gender dysphoria are biological I expect the numbers to be the same, so I wasn’t surprised to see they are the same.

Ah, I think you may have missed my point - I am responding to the claim that both parties are equally bad. While I can understand if you are primed to expect my points to be accompanied by a liberal attitude that voting is the main form of political action, let me clarify for you that this is not what I’m saying.

Obviously middle-class Americans have a tendency to think voting is the most significant political action that can be taken, maybe if they are really into politics they might make different consumer choices (avoiding Chick-fil-a, refusing plastic straws, etc.), and even more extreme people might participate in a peaceful protest.

Brick throwing on the other hand is something people who have nothing left to lose do, desperate acts from those who are barely surviving poverty, who are being harassed, jailed, raped, and killed by the police, and so on. Brick throwing isn’t done to carve out civil rights, it is survival.

To that end, Democrats who might advocate for and uphold civil rights have a pacifying and stabilizing effect in so far as some of those pressures that result in marginalized groups throwing bricks are alleviated. The GOP on the other hand seems to care little about stability, they are unskillful tyrants in that sense.

Ultimately all I am saying is that elections do have consequences, which is so obvious it should not have to be said. My statements do not imply elections are the only political events that matter.

For trans people in the U.S., the difference between a GOP win and a Dem win in the house, senate, and presidential elections is the difference between having or not having certain rights.

Federal prisons now will force trans women to be transferred to male prisons and they will be denied gender-affirming care like access to estrogen.

If you are a trans person in the U.S. there is a clear difference between the Dems and the GOP - one is clearly better than the other.

Nothing has responded to this, shown it to be false, etc.

It does not require that we overlook that the Dems have far-right policies, especially on immigration and international affairs. It does not require we defend U.S. imperialism to say the Dems are better than the GOP for trans people in the U.S. Both are true.

I understand the moral disgust and the impulse to see how villainous the Dems are, I feel the same way, but if you care about the political outcomes, you can’t ignore that there remain significant and tangible differences between the parties and their policies.

1 in 200 is trans people generally, not transfems. Trans people are about as rare as people with green eyes, or people with red hair (both are around 1 - 2% of the population, which is similar to the estimates of how many total trans people there are; interestingly, the number of people with “differences in sexual development” is similarly estimated to be around 1% of the population).

Over 1.6 million adults (ages 18 and older) and youth (ages 13 to 17) identify as transgender in the United States, or 0.6% of those ages 13 and older

Of the 1.3 million adults who identify as transgender, 38.5% (515,200) are transgender women, 35.9% (480,000) are transgender men, and 25.6% (341,800) reported they are gender nonconforming.

Research shows transgender individuals are younger on average than the U.S. population. We find that youth ages 13 to 17 are significantly more likely to identify as transgender (1.4%) than adults ages 65 or older (0.3%).

https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Trans-Pop-Update-Jun-2022.pdf

Over 1.6 million adults (ages 18 and older) and youth (ages 13 to 17) identify as transgender in the United States, or 0.6% of those ages 13 and older

Of the 1.3 million adults who identify as transgender, 38.5% (515,200) are transgender women, 35.9% (480,000) are transgender men, and 25.6% (341,800) reported they are gender nonconforming.

Research shows transgender individuals are younger on average than the U.S. population. We find that youth ages 13 to 17 are significantly more likely to identify as transgender (1.4%) than adults ages 65 or older (0.3%).

https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Trans-Pop-Update-Jun-2022.pdf

Most likely the actual number of trans people (people who experience gender dysphoria or otherwise have a gender identity not matching their assigned sex at birth) is closer to 1 to 2 in 100 people. In the U.S. only 1 in 200 actually identify as trans.

Or maybe more directly, referring to breasts as “breasts” does not in an absolute sense disqualify someone from being a man.

Even if this seems trivially true, it doesn’t stop people from taking generalizations (like men typically say chest rather than breast) and applying them in either a policing fashion or in a disqualifying / gatekeeping fashion.

OP might just need to talk to the therapist about the comment and walk through how they experienced it.

In voice therapy a trans person might intentionally train to mimic common stereotypes in gendered speech patterns, sometimes it’s just pragmatic and useful to be clued into those gendered generalizations to help pass - we don’t know if the therapist was trying to likewise be helpful and accidentally came across as policing or gatekeeping.

Wishing you luck OP!

Link to the actual article published in Molecular Psychiatry: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-024-02872-3

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) include harms that affect children indirectly through their living environments (e.g., parental conflict, substance abuse, or mental illness) or directly (abuse and neglect). The direct harms are commonly described as childhood maltreatment exposure (CME). CME is highly prevalent, as shown by a recent systematic review and meta-analysis that reported a pooled prevalence of ca. 23% in Europe and the U.S. for adults who reported at least one ACE [1]. Worldwide, as many as 12% of adults report a history of childhood sexual abuse, 23% of childhood physical abuse, and 36% of emotional abuse [2]. ACEs have numerous adverse consequences for later health, via a range of hormonal, metabolic, and immunological pathways [3], especially for mental health outcomes [2, 4]. In addition to affecting health later in life [5], accumulating evidence indicates that paternal ACEs /CME may also affect the health of the next generation [6,7,8,9,10].

Here, we report that CME [Childhood Maltreatment Exposure] is associated with specific epigenetic signatures in sperm. We identified differential expression of numerous sncRNAs and 3 genomic regions with hypomethylation in the high TADS [Trauma and Distress Scale] score group.

…

Intergenerational transmission of well-being, health and disease is an important research topic with many implications for health care and societies. It has been postulated that a key component of ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences), CME is the single most important preventable risk factor for future mental health [1, 4, 37, 38]. CME has also been shown to have effects on health outcomes even when genetic confounding is taken into account [63]

I feel like it can never be said enough: you are awesome, thank you for being so awesome. ❤️

Links to the two executive orders:

• Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness
• Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation

Coverage from Erin in the Morning, more on the military ban than the healthcare EO: https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/the-chilling-line-trump-just-crossed

Maybe a pedantic distinction, but executive orders are not bills or laws, they only reach as far as the executive branch has power.

This is relevant because he is writing many illegal executive orders, e.g. trying to end birthright citizenship despite being encoded in the Constitution. Likewise, banning trans healthcare for minors across the U.S. is something only Congress can do, and most of the things in this EO are attempting to defund or otherwise attack that healthcare rather than outright ban it like a law would.

It does seem like an obvious consequence is that Medicare and Medicaid won’t cover gender affirming care for minors (Sec. 5, part i), and he is going to try to use existing laws to try to bring prosecute people in shield states for providing that care, even if he fails in court it will do damage by scaring providers into voluntarily refusing care to avoid being involved in lawsuits.

Also it does look like this trans healthcare EO is trying to recreate the UK’s Cass Review, (Sec. 3, part ii):

within 90 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) shall publish a review of the existing literature on best practices for promoting the health of children who assert gender dysphoria, rapid-onset gender dysphoria, or other identity-based confusion.

By appointing loyalists across organizations he can force authorities on health to support anti-trans views on that are not supported by the evidence. Not unlike how he appointed anti-environmentalists to the head of the EPA in his first term, and suddenly the EPA was taking positions that were contrary to the role of the organization, like rolling back regulations on the coal industry.

Trump is just going to try shit, but that doesn’t mean it will work out for him in the end.

Thanks for clarifying! Also, totally up to you re the name, I personally don’t think it needs to be renamed, but having the sidebar clarify it uses lesbian to just describe any sapphic person might help? Or maybe it’s not necessary to do that at all, I actually don’t need to know this, I just didn’t want to offend anyone by being in the space as a bisexual 😅

Question: is “lesbian” here meant as an umbrella term for any sapphic people? I know some people get up in arms about “lesbian” being reserved for strictly homosexual women (in the worst forms this sentiment is also trans-exclusionary, but I assume that’s not the case here), just want to clarify whether the community is meant for bisexual, pansexual, etc. women (and transfem enbies?) as well.

lol, not stupid at all - it’s legit hard to hear ourselves accurately; I spent like six months stuck in a perpetually underfull place - it was really hard for me to habituate a smaller voice, especially using it fulltime and in public with people who knew be pre-transition.

Looking forward to future clips, feel free to @ me or DM me if you ever want feedback!

I had never heard of Rain, thank you!

Despite Trump’s claims about “transgender operations on illegal aliens,” to date the BOP has only provided gender-affirming surgery to two trans women in its custody, in both cases under court order to do so. In federal and state prisons alike, trans people have never had a legislative path to health care. It happens through litigation, or not at all.

This was new information for me.

C is a good writer, I rarely enjoy reading an article like this as much as I did.

I think it sounds a little underfull (kinda dopey / hollow) this probably means the voice is too large for how light it is. Work more on resonance and size, I recommend starting with the Size v2 clip here: https://selenearchive.github.io/

(If you are unfamiliar with “size”, large and small, and “weight”, light and heavy, as concepts I recommend listening to more of Selene’s clips as she demonstrates those qualities in a voice.)

The light weight in your clip is good though as that is one of the main ways a voice is gendered as male (from being too heavy). It is easier to keep a lighter voice when speaking quietly for a recording - the question I would have is whether you can maintain that light weight at louder volumes, like when trying to be heard across a room or over noise. You might explore these cases and try slides where you go up and back down in volume while modulating weight (try it while staying light weight, try it again where you increase weight as much as you can instead, learn to recognize and control weight semi-independent of the increased volume).

Keep up the good work! 👏 ❤️

😭

When I was a teenager still I was buying women’s clothes, trying to arrange a girl’s night with a female friend of mine, had picked and used a feminine name, and even painfully explained to my boss at the time (who insisted I was a gay man) that I wasn’t a gay man but actually it was like I was a woman on the inside so I was maybe a gay woman. Never did the thought even cross my mind that I might be trans.

When the idea came up later that I might be trans, I ruled it out easily. Trans women knew they were girls when they were three years old, and they were in medically significant distress from being in the wrong body. I had gone through childhood as a boy without any such self-conception as a girl, let alone severe distress. As far as I could tell, I experienced no dysphoria. I couldn’t have been trans, the DSM made that clear to me.

It was over a decade later before I learned that gender dysphoria can look like what I experienced, or that I actually had fairly common and stereotypical trans experiences, like dressing in my mom’s heels as a four year old and continuing to “cross” dress throughout my childhood and into adulthood. Oops.

For vegetarians & vegans: Happy Cow

have you tried the Old Testament? 😝

When I was closeted I often thought about transitioning as just a way for me to finally wear dresses and skirts in public that I was secretly wearing at home. And when considering whether to take things further, I would weigh all the downsides of transition (the cost, the social stigma, the danger, relying on exogenous hormones the rest of my life, etc.) against those benefits and it would make them seem not worth it.

But in retrospect, transition was different than I thought - estrogen changed my mood and solved mental health problems I didn’t realize were even problems, that I had lived with my whole life and had internalized as normal and just part of who I was. I would have never understood how important or necessary transition would be to my basic health and sanity.

So yeah, now I get to make and wear amazing outfits every day I would have never dreamed of before, but that’s not really what makes transition worth it, it’s like a side bonus. The truth is that I needed those exogenous hormones, transition wasn’t choosing to need them, I needed them the whole time. The need wasn’t optional - in a real sense transition wasn’t optional.