doES ANYONE ELSE REALIZE THAT WE’RE LIKE, THE FIRST GENERATION ON TUMBLR
GIVE IT 10-15 YEARS AND WE’LL ALL BE GROWN UP AND AN ENTIRE NEW SET OF KIDS WILL BE ON HERE BLOGGING ABOUT COMPLETELY DIFFERENT SHOWS AND BANDS AND MOVIES AND BOOKS
THE ONLY THING THEY’LL STILL BE BLOGGING ABOUT THE SAME AS WE WERE IS DOCTOR WHO
HOPEFULLY
We’ll probably all be blogging about Sherlock season 4.
i’ve been thinking a lot about Old Timey Trans Folks and cross-dressing and progress lately.
like, back before women were socially or legally allowed to wear pants and in general when societal norms of gender presentation were way more strict than they are today, people passed as a gender other than their AGAB by just. dressing different and picking a new name and that was that. world’s most famous trans doctor James Barry sometimes got accused of being “effeminate” or lying about being older than he was, but it wasn’t until his death that the vast majority of people who knew of him found out that he was trans.
and like I’ve been dressing masc for years and haven’t gone by my deadname since i was 14. i have a man’s haircut, i wear men’s clothes, i wear a binder. and still i have never once been called anything but miss/ma’am/young lady by strangers in public. it’s so much more common nowadays for people to look however they want to, regardless of gender, that every non-medical effort i can possibly make to present myself as a man still isn’t sufficient to be seen as one.
and to be clear, strictly-enforced gender norms are an unmitigated bad thing. full stop. this is not a “born in the wrong generation” post. if I had lived any time before the present i would have died of bronchitis or infected teeth before I even hit puberty. progress is good. safety, visibility, and acceptance for gnc people of all stripes is good.
it’s just interesting to me, and also kind of sad, that i’m basically required to undergo medical, and even surgical, procedures that I’m pretty ambivalent about in order to be seen the way I want to be seen, when that wasn’t true in eras that were otherwise much worse for trans people.
