Thread by @reclaimingtrans

I used to believe that I transitioned because I was a lesbian suffering from internalized homophobia, a belief I picked up from transphobic lesbian feminist propaganda that TERFs have been spreading for decades at this point.

https://twitter.com/trasinscneach/status/1500111068953300994?t=1JXiPY-4OnNdjXipGJkFxQ&s=19

Transphobic lesbians use the idea that transition is kind of "medicalized homophobia" to gaslight and psychologically abuse transmasculine people and try to keep us in transphobic lesbian communities. We're encouraged to see our transness as something harmful to be overcome.

This hurts not only trans men but transmasculine and genderqueer dykes. We're told that to accept and express our dykeness we have to reject & work to overcome being trans/genderqueer. I ended up in deep conflict w/ myself, thinking I had to kill a part of myself to become whole.

Later I researched the history of medical transition and learned that most doctors believed that being trans was much, much worse than being gay and if they thought there was a chance their patient could live as a gay person they would bar them from transitioning.

So much for transition as "conversion therapy" to "trans the gay away". I found cases of patients being encouraged to be gay instead of trans but none of the reverse. Closest was some doctors who thought some trans men were self-hating lesbians who wouldn't respond to therapy.

But even then, it was clear that if they thought they could "cure" these trans men with therapy and "help them accept their lesbianism" they would've preferred that outcome. Over and over, I found medical professionals who saw trans people as being much "sicker" than gay people.

Meanwhile, the longer I tried to live as detrans lesbian, fighting against my transmasculinity and genderqueerness instead of seeing them as inseparable from my dykeness, the more I suffered and felt like I was destroying a part of myself. That shit nearly killed me.

The idea that trans people are self-hating gay people is bullshit. So many people are both. I can't be the kind of trans person I am without being a dyke and I can't be the kind of dyke I am without being transmasculine and genderqueer. I need to accept all of it to be whole.

If you teach a person who's both that they can't be one without rejecting the other, you set that person at war with themselves, you encourage that person to destroy part of who they are and that can only result in suffering & fragmentation. It's an incredibly cruel thing to do.

But transphobic feminists and conversion therapists encourage it so they can control and exploit self-hating trans people. Lesbian TERFs try to recruit transmascs to keep their shitty subculture alive, conversion therapists to make money or get off being a authority figure.

There's no basis for the idea that medical transition is anti-gay conversion therapy but there are plenty of unscrupulous therapists trying to prey on trans people's suffering and self-hatred. Stella's part of long history of conversion therapists abusing trans people.