I love genuine questions and people putting in the effort to love and understand each other better. If you come at me just wanting to argue I’m going to troll you back. FAFO.

  • 6 Posts
  • 65 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle




  • Oh hey I’m AFAB but more or less NB at this point and let my gender presentation flux with both people’s perceptions and whatever seems to be working best in the moment, especially career-wise so I actually have a LOT of thoughts on this. A looot of this discusses societal stereotypes on gender, so while I think it’s shitty, the fact that a lot of people (wrongly) perceive trans people as their birth sex is of relevance to my perspective on this discussion. So, trigger warning: prejudice / transphobia.

    Background:

    • I’m AFAB so most of my upbringing was femme oriented

    • I also come from an autism / ADHD HEAVY family so I still missed some of the social aspects of gendered upbringing

    • my parents WERE fundies however, so my attempts at more feminine presentations (makeup, heels, etc) resulted in a lot of sex-shaming from my parents, but there was also a looot of pro-birther nonsense and everything about pregnancy just freaks me out. There’s probably a looot to unpack there as to how I wound up nonbinary, but ultimately I am what I am now, so it is what it is.

    • I spent the first few years of my career working on a psych unit for criminally insane men so the formative years of my young adulthood were spent learning how to speak from my chest and not look like a target

    • my current presentation is that sort of “no gendered features” / look like a clean shaven young man / lesbian (vs the beard AND boobs / “aaaall the gendered features” look). The only surgery I’ve had is my tits chopped off + tubes out. So I don’t look ooobviously trans, but a lot of people also can’t really tell what genitals I have at a glance which some people find …distressing. for some reason.

    • I’m also white which I think lets me “get away with more” than others.

    Thoughts:

    • I usually use the women’s bathroom. Sometimes I bring a she-wee to work but all the unit bathrooms are singles so it’s more just because I work with animals (male and female) who don’t know how to put the seat up when they pee standing / squatting. This is mostly because whether it’s reality or trauma based (see above work history) I don’t trust most men around me with my pants off vs women will be socially awful but I likely won’t have to come to blows over it. I do get some weird looks though, and some have stopped me, but then they just get this really confused / uncomfortable expression and ultimately leave me alone. But as far as your question goes, I do think I would get less backlash as a AFAB going into the men’s room than an AMAB gets doing the reverse, so there’s definitely an aspect of my vagina being inherently less threatening in vulnerable contexts… somehow?

    • sexually, I can be a top or a bottom (penatrator OR penatratee) and pussy vs bussy doesn’t matter too much to me other than that fitting things in the backdoor takes a lot more prep work (but I’ll talk more further down about how that flexibility is convenient for me personally). As far as gender relations go, I feel like I get more “girl power” brownie points for strapping on and pegging my male partner vs how men who receive anal penetration are perceived despite the fact that I’m essentially letting him do almost the exact same when he fucks my ass. I even typically use a “strapless” strapon (they still realistically need a harness to stay in) so I am actually being physically stimulated by the act, it’s not even (necessarily) a dominance thing.

    • work / patient care: I work high-acuity psych so every patient has to have their skin checked for injuries and contraband (particularly weapons). I usually count as female for the purposes of keeping things same-sex. As far as your specific question though, it’s also usually fine for me to count as female when searching men, even if the other person is also a woman. I usually try to have a male staff member with me as well, but nursing is pretty female dominated and I’ve noticed both in terms of patient comfort and working policy, two women searching a man is NOT as frowned upon as two men searching a woman. Do with that what you will. Same also goes for care / cleaning of genitals / breasts when patients require that.

    • In terms of responding to violent patients: it depends and I’ll change my demeanor as needed. If a patient seems like they’ll respect a man more I’ll stand taller, drop the pitch of my voice / speak from the chest, and be more directive. If I think they’ll respond better to me being more gentle / nurturing I’ll do that (although I’m not as good at it) but again as far as your question goes, I don’t think an AMAB person would be trusted the same way were they witnessed going back and forth like that.

    • That said, this raises the most important advantage to looking / acting masc - the high violence patients who respond better to gentleness are fairly few and far between. Patients who perceive me as more masculine are far, FAR more likely to cooperate with me being directive when I need to be. It’s also in most cases not a fear thing in that they perceive me as stronger / more powerful, it’s that they perceive me as more equal and worth listening to. I’ve had (usually boomer age) dementia patients in particular who gave every female nurse before me absolute hell for every single part of their treatment plan including the stuff the nurse has 0 control over but just went along with me saying the exact same things, then halfway through the shift they tell my coworker that “oh yes that nice young man has been so helpful!” It happens a lot actually, and I have a muuuch easier time with the sexist patients than most of my female coworkers. I recently did have one patient with homosexuality related delusions who targeted me a little, but that’s pretty rare (they commented on him mostly going after men in report last night and I was like “hey he came after me the other night!” and one of my coworkers actually turned to me and was like “I don’t think that counts as him targeting a woman…”)

    I guess my ultimate statement on it is thus: my particular combination of transness (including my race) is highly favorable considering, and I’ve heard that’s often true for transmascs which I think is highly reflective of societal prejudices based on birth sex. I still get the weird looks and called mean names, but I’m sitting in exactly the least taboo combination where most people can assuage their prejudices by categorizing me as a “tomboy.” People also often assume I’m a lesbian which is a little less favorable, but much more favorable than being trans (which is closer to the truth, I’m surgically confirmed and actually tend to prefer men).

    I’ve actually arguably been able to use my gender presentation to avoid violence in many cases, which almost universally cannot be said for transwomen or AMAB NBs or men or any other AMABs who find themselves with any kind of femme aspects in their gender presentation. I’m also fortunate that the dysphoria I did have tended towards removing gendered aspects vs adding them because that also gets a lot of backlash.

    I’m also almost entirely uniquely fortunate in that I don’t have any dysphoria that causes me inherent distress based on how others perceive me or how I’m personally acting outwardly. That makes my ambivalence an asset almost, since I can just do whatever seems to make any given situation go smoothest, and I don’t experience any emotional distress from doing so. I’ve noticed that lack of omnipresent dysphoria is almost unheard of in trans communities, especially for someone who got surgery (to the extent that I’m often actively unwelcome for expressing my unusual combination of lived experiences; I’ve actually felt far less welcome in trans spaces than pretty much anywhere else; and that includes on lemmy, a lot of my comments like this get removed with transphobia cited as the reason).

    Anyway that’s my garbled post 12-hour-night-shift stream of consciousness that I wrote and re-wrote a couple times on the bus ride home. Hope it was interesting but imma tap out and go nap before I have to go back tonight.



  • Honestly this discussion also highlights the issue that what’s considered inappropriate varies widely and often changes both in terms of prejudice and in terms of context. Most people would agree that an image of a penis entering or inside of a vagina is pornographic unless it’s a medical diagram laying out the anatomical and physiological aspects like the one in the anatomy book my otherwise puritanical parents let me read at the age of six. Most people would agree that nudity is sexual except for, again, anatomical diagrams, but also many classical artistic depictions such as paintings and statues. Hand holding isn’t generally considered sexual except to some people if the people happen to be of the same sex but not if you come from a culture where hand holding is a normal level of intimacy for non sexual friends. Breasts are for some reason considered sexual in most of the areas heavily colonized by people from the places where lactose tolerance past childhood evolved but not most other places which is super handy if you like being able to feed infants. Most people agree that kissing for an extended period while rubbing areas close to the genitals is sexual, but often not enough to restrict it from being viewed by teenagers.

    TLDR; what’s even considered “sexual” or “porn” can vary wildly and has historically been used to suppress education, various minorities, and general freedom of expression.


  • I flunked out of nursing school despite the content itself being fairly easy because I didn’t know how to deal with mean girl shit yet. I passed the second time by just doing whatever they told me to until I graduated. In particular, I remembered some advice from years earlier from an older roommate who had just gotten back from their coast guard training. They said their goal had been to go as long as possible before the instructor even knew their name. Honestly that’s been a pretty great strategy for me when I’ve needed to escape abuses of power ever since; keep your head down, do whatever they tell you to, don’t draw attention to yourself, then book it the first chance you get.







  • It would be nice to be able to have a view that only tallies the votes from your local server, but IDK about listing all the individuals in an easily accessible manner.

    What I really want though is a rolling deletion of my activity that’s older than 3-6 months. I understand there’s no way to erase these things entirely, especially from decentralized servers, but I do wish the internet could revert to being a little more ephemeral. You can also go look through public records and go back years in real life, but it’s not easy.



  • Honestly I’ve noticed a lot of it is confidence and mannerism. My partner has a friend who’s over 6ft and 250lb who got stabbed and mugged within a month of living in our city. I’m a little under six foot, 120lb, and I’m an acute psych nurse specializing in the management of high violence risk patients, and I’m friends with at least a few of the homeless dudes (they make great drinking buddies, they know all the best area gossip).

    While most of what I do is just not taking stupid chances, a significant portion over it is just “swagger” and being willing to take charge of a situation and get something done when it needs to be. I suspect it was a compliment because you were asking at the time why you’re not as well-liked or approachable as you’d like to be. I often have difficulty making friends because of how much living in that mindset for as long as I have has affected my hypothetical “aura.” People know I’m a protector / healer type, but definitely not in a hugger kind of way!




  • If you’re male you could actually probably make a looot of money doing bdsm asmr audio porn. Get an OF and just do a few themed ones as samples / grab-n-go purchases, then offer custom scripts; I bet you’d make bank. Maybe spend about $20 for a couple different women with OF to tell you how they actually masturbate (would help to tell them your use-case so they know you actually want the actual dirty deets) then record yourself ASMR style instructing a woman to do those things. Offer to replace “babygirl” or whatever pet name you decide on with women’s names for $20-50. Easy $$$.