@matigo HAHA yes very true!
// @JeremyCherfas
@matigo I feel like it wasn't too dissimilar when I was a kid. Sadly. Also I remember voltron being really boring and difficult to follow. And he-man and Shera were just stupid.
// @JeremyCherfas
@kdfrawg but I guess to follow on from that, the trans people and partners who are happily together (some of whom hooked up after figuring out gender identity, others with partners who could hack it) didn't describe things being that complicated or difficult, to the point where they couldn't easily describe to me how they met people. Like "it just happened and it was cool". Which I'd dismiss as an oddity but I think about half or more of the (predominantly young??) trans people are happily and stably partnered. So then I'm back to "Well is it then primarily my personality traits like being scared of relationships?". I don't know the answer.
// @indigo
@kdfrawg lately it's been in my head more like "maybe if I tell them then they'll stop being interested and then i don't have to have anxiety about someone being into me, which would be great. But maybe sad."
// @indigo
@kdfrawg yeah absolutely. It's not so difficult if you have it up on your dating profile (I do) or if someone openly hits on you the first time you meet and you slip it into conversation (which is what I usually do). But yeah, when there's someone who you didn't expect have a whopping great crush on you and you don't know if they know, and you don't know … Eesh, super awkward. Not all trans people "pass" so I guess it's one of those weird things.
// @indigo
@kdfrawg Omg I remember starting dating again at some point and having no idea where to start. I actually got nowhere, haha.
// @indigo
@kdfrawg being gay was so stigmatised when I came out. It was before Queer as Folk or the L word came out. All the gay characters on TV were a stereotype. Some of my friends shunned me, some people refused to believe me. Hitting on someone was terrifying in case they might get nasty (which happened to me more than once), and you couldn't really tell who might be interested and even if they were interested, you couldn't tell if they could get over the stigma of being with someone of the same sex. And having kids was impossible unless done on the sly.
However it was decriminalised, there was a pride march, there were some gay icons and there was a lgb culture. So it wasn't all bad.
In those ways being trans now is very similar to what being gay was like 17 years ago.
In other ways quite different - you don't need to see a doctor to have self actualisation as an LGB person. You don't need to worry about physical changes and shifts in gender role (ok you might if your gender expression shifts to be more reflective of your true nature I suppose) and you don't need to worry that your partner will stop being attracted to you because you've decided to be yourself…
(sorry, I don't mean to be argumentative, but more to explain what exactly I meant earlier which i didn't make very clear and was pretty confusing - i'm sure we actually agree)
// @indigo
@kdfrawg sort of. From what I've heard and read from partners of trans people and from trans people I know who've had long term relationships and dated, and comparing it to what my experiences were 17 years ago coming out as "gay", it seems about as complicated, but the biggest difference between gay and trans dating experience partners and trans people dealing with a social role and potentially physical appearance changing if they're together around the time of making those changes. Which can be quite confronting, often people go through a grief process or aren't attracted to their partner anymore, sometimes it's horribly traumatic for one or the other person.
The other thing is that ability to be attracted to a trans or genderqueer person of whichever gender identity is probably itself a sexual orientation - eg there are people who are only attracted to cis women and trans men (this is not uncommon at all and many of those people might ID primarily as lesbians), or people who are only attracted to women cis or trans, or people who are only into androgynous people, etc etc. We don't really have words for this in our culture. Yet. And we don't have many dating apps that support being trans as an option, or meeting people who are into trans people (outside of trans fetishists I guess).
The issues for someone starting a new relationship "post" the big changes at least in my experience, in Australia as a university educated middle class person living in a town of 400k, more similar to what it's like to be gay- worrying if the other party has the capacity to be into you, worrying about disclosure, etc.
// @indigo