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Is it weird to be trans and feel indifferent about my genitals?

Is it normal and valid, as a trans woman, to feel indifferent to my genitals as they are? Thanks so much to the brave person who wrote in to ask the Trans Lifeline team this question. Our answer is: Absolutely! It is normal to feel indifference about your genitals as they are. It doesn’t make you less trans or less of a woman. All people, both cis and trans, have complicated feelings about their bodies—and those feelings usually evolve over our lives. Even amongst trans folks, there is no universal opinion or experience on how we feel about our bodies or if we choose to undergo medical transition.I can tell you from direct experience as a trans woman that it’s very typical to have these feelings, and they not only differ from person to person but can also change drastically within our lifetimes. My journey to self-exploration began when I transitioned as a teenager to later de-transitioning…only to eventually come out as nonbinary and restart my transition as a trans woman. Despite these shifts in how I identified, I never experienced bottom dysphoria—it just wasn’t an important part of my experience.The idea that trans women must have strong feelings about their genitals is based on transmisogyny, which is the combination of misogyny and transphobia that trans women face. Because of misogyny, women are often reduced to their genitals. Similarly, under transphobia, cis folks tend to ...

By |2022-12-23T12:10:52-08:00November 4th, 2022|Personal Stories, User Questions|Comments Off on Is it weird to be trans and feel indifferent about my genitals?
  • Illustration of three people with speech bubbles above them.

The Limits of Language in Describing Our Identities

The Limits of Language in Describing Our Identities As a person who learned English as a second language, I am fascinated by the complexity and nuances of words and meanings, and the attachment (or disgust) people can develop to specific terms and labels. So, I don’t find it surprising that within the broader TLGBQ+ community, our relationship with the language used to describe ourselves is just as complicated. What I’ve learned is that English TLGBQ+ jargon is a mix of community-generated slang, re-claimed slurs, medicalized terms, and old-fashioned language rooted in dated assumptions about TLGBQ+ people. Learning this slang and understanding if/when it’s appropriate to use is an ongoing process. I realized I was transgender in 2003 (though I’ve known it since I was maybe three years old). Back then, the typical gender transition journey, particularly a medical one, was very gatekept and was based on the mainstream gender binary—which limited the language used to describe transness. I knew I definitely was not a woman, so I seized on the only other option I knew. Though I didn't feel entirely comfortable identifying as a “man,” even a trans one, it was the language I had at the time. So for many years, I identified as a trans man, even though it didn’t feel quite right. It stayed like that until about five years ago, when I moved back to the U.S. from Mexico, that ...

By |2022-12-23T12:10:41-08:00October 27th, 2022|Personal Stories|Comments Off on The Limits of Language in Describing Our Identities