This trope has come into play so many times in my life. I am a man who is transsexual–and I am also an unrepentant self-injurer, a lapsed anorexic and a former quote-unquote masculine girl. Medical transition is my primary goal, to have as close to a cismale physical body as is currently possible. This process has been riddled with setbacks and complications which I can’t begin to understand–as close to Hell On Earth as I hope no one else has to experience.

So, looking at the basis of this hateful trope, necessary surgery is defined as self-harm. But what is self-harm? The common definition is causing physical injury to oneself to alleviate emotional pain. Are the transphobes trying to say that physical dysphoria is not emotional pain? Are they seriously trying to deny that being shackled to a physical form with incongruous invasive elements is not and/or cannot cause emotional suffering that requires the risk of tissue damage to abate?

If medical transition is self-injury, and self-injury is wounding oneself to alleviate internal agony, then they are also condemning victims of FGM who seek labiaplasty. They are condemning women whose fathers throw acid on their faces for failing to conform to rigid norms, and who seek reconstructive surgery. They are condemning men whose phalluses are severed or crushed by hateful spouses, or other men with scores to settle, or land mines in war zones.

No surgery is without risk. No medical treatment is perfect, or one hundred percent safe, or pleasant or easy. For anyone. Cancer, for instance, is natural by their definition. You don’t hear anyone saying that tumor surgery or chemotherapy is unnatural or self-harmful, though. And chemotherapy causes much more pain and disruption than HRT or surgery on one’s physical sex characteristics.

It baffles me, how narcissistic people can be WRT forcing their experiences of their own body on others. What defines “mutilation?” Why should we have to define surgical transition in opposition to some other concept? Cutters might cut because it’s the only thing that works for them, to be a happy and whole person. Non-cutters don’t have a right, IMO, to call them sick and crazy just because they don’t understand and it’s socially unacceptable. And how dare they try and invalidate a person’s gender identity because that person happens to cut.

The entire concept of “mutilation” begins and ends with subjective experience. To me, shaving my armpits was mutilation, as did cutting my hair short. It felt like I had torn off a necessary part of me. To many people, though, it feels neutral and non-eventful. (It did to my mother, at the time. She was the one who forced me to shave my pits.) Thus, few people acknowledge that as mutilating. Why? Because it’s “normal.” Like breast implants are “normal,” but mastectomy isn’t. Therefore implants are defined as healthy and removal is defined as mutilation.

My hysterectomy was the healthiest thing I’d done in a long time. I felt so good once that organ was a relic of the past. Why is that mutilation, as opposed to other things? And I even had PMDD to the point I didn’t want to be alive anymore. The PMDD made me obese as well. All of that was gone after those internal organs were excised. So why did others have to pathologize me for it? Why did they have to insinuate that I was “running away from myself,” or causing harm that I would regret? The surgeries I’ve had aren’t additive or new, it just feels like I’m closer to okay. One less thing to think about.

So pretty much, they try to say trans people don’t exist BECAUSE of coping mechanisms those same trans people use to SURVIVE BEING TRANS IN THIS WORLD. What kind of circular logic brainfart sack of idiocy is that? The house always wins because the house always wins because the house always

Oh, forget it.

This. Whenever I read anything by transphobes, they seem to frame whatever they’ve got to say about us from the angle of “poor trannies, they have no idea what they’re on about”. It doesn’t seem to matter to them that many of us have written books, articles and PhD theses on transsexualism – we can still never understand it as well as cis people can.