My introduction to trans people was the movie Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and as horribly transphobic as that movie is it was the first time I thought to myself "wait a minute, you can become a woman even if you were born with (as Ace would say) Captain Winky?" and I would have been about 8 years old at the time.
I also remember watching all those trashy talk shows that have trans people on and they were always treated like some sideshow but it still stirred my imagination, especially when I saw trans people who could pass as cis.
Then puberty happened and I just bottled all that sh*t up and tried to affirm my masculinity in pretty embarrassing ways for like the next 10 years.
And then in the late 00s I discovered websites like YouTube, Tumblr and Reddit that exposed me to other trans people and it was then that I started becoming increasingly fascinated with the subject while still denying I was trans myself because if I was trans I would have figured it out sooner right? The more and more obsessed I became the harder it was to deny my true feelings.
There's an old poll I made way back in 2010 where I asked Music Banter members if they were satisfied with their gender, I remember being upset that so many female members said they weren't and so many guys said they were, I think a lot of those answers may have had more to do with gender roles than dysphoria, but I was just flabbergasted that anyone would PREFER to be a man, all the while denying I was trans.
It's painful to look back at that thread, I was still using pretty transphobic language at the time.
And now I think about how much of that repression had to do with the deeply conservative culture that I grew up in, and how things could have been different if I was born somewhere more accepting.
Last edited by Queen Boo; 01-26-2023 at 10:40 PM.
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