
M.A. Linguistics, B.Sc. Computer Science. Also interested in art and music theory. Tumbling through life. Navigating the universe. Laying on the floor. Profile Picture by ikimaru on Tumblr; Header courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech.
oh no, im sorry for the bad experiences you've had being queer in russia! it seems like a dangerous place to be queer :( is it at all possible to emigrate elsewhere?
yes, but you have to understand, emigration is an incredibly complex and stressful process. it's not easy to just get up and move someplace else, especially if you've been living your whole life here. even if i had the money, which i do not, i would not want to move to another country. i have a life here. i have put effort into building it. i don't want to just abandon it all, on the off chance that it might be better someplace else. it's a very big risk that i'm not willing to take.
Not the asker, but something about your story of transness and queerness felt beautiful to me, even if there is a sadness to it as well.
I don’t think there is something wrong or strange about wishing you could reinvent yourself as something else entirely. Some of my biggest wishes and desires for what I wish my body could be like are impossible. The way in which I wish I could be perceived by the world seems improbable.
Thank you for taking the time to write about your experiences with gender. It made me feel like I could really relate, because there is something very relatable about these feelings of gender yearning, even if what we yearn for is different.
"Identity is a journey" but you seem to have experienced that personally enough already.
every journey must have its end, and i would really like for mine to reach its own. preferably soon. this is getting ridiculous
i always feel a little frivolous going on a heavy, thought out post to just comment "yeah, i get that. that makes sense to me", but i do wanna say something. so...yeah, i get that. that makes sense to me
Someone very close to me has had similar experiences. Speaking as a trans woman, I can't tell you how emotional I get at the idea that someone could want to be like me, or have a body like mine, which is normally regarded as so perverse and unnatural as to be a joke.
To me, there is nothing wrong with what you feel. You have the right to change, and change again, to be as many different people in the course of your life as you desire. I wish I had the power to take you away from that isolated place on the other side of the world, but at the very least please know that you are not alone, and there are people like me who appreciate you and what you do very much.
As a trans woman, reading this post... I wasn't sure what to feel about it at first. I don't like my body much most of the time, even though partners and metamours insist it's beautiful and I don't give myself enough credit. I was already disabled before I realized I was trans, so beginning my transition was like stacking additional burdens on top of burdens I was already born with and suffering through, and it was frightening. Although I am obviously happier for having done so, it's still sometimes overwhelming.
And to read your words, that someone would want to willingly become like me, through even higher barriers... it means a lot. Your post is beautiful and I'm glad to have read it, and I wish you all the happiness in the world.
Thank you so much for writing this all out; you are not an idiot or a chaser, and you also aren’t the first trans person I’ve met who feels this way.
I think trans women have a tendency to feel (and be) isolated from and othered by the rest of the trans community, and there is a fear of our gender identity being defined for us by someone who doesn’t understand our experiences; a fear of being defined out of your own identity by a more visible party.
I understand and respect where this fear comes from but I think it is often misguided. I’ve felt like my gender has been defined over my head by other trans women just as much as any other trans demographic; and the longer I’ve been trans the more I feel like defining ourselves around labels like amab and afab hurts and chokes us more often than it helps us understand and explain ourselves.
I’ve always assumed you were afab, and honestly there was a time when I was afraid, back before Kotya (the non-robot version? My memory is poor lol sry) was explicitly a trans woman, that because you were transmasc yourself the masc part of her was “more significant” than the fem part. I was scared to attach to her too strongly in case she wasn’t a girl in the same way I was, and I was just projecting myself onto her. Sometimes I feared that afab people felt they understood womanhood better than I ever could and that they were just humoring my gender identity, or something.
But I know better now, and you didn’t deserve all of the assumptions I made purely because of your gender assigned at birth. It is, in a way, a form of misgendering, or at least the pit it leaves in my stomach feels exactly the same.
As trans people we all have so much more in common with each other than we acknowledge and respect… I see myself in your art and I want to embrace that without feeling like I’m projecting my gender over yours or yours over mine; And I can relate to Kotya so much because she is like me, and I see so much of my relationship with gender in your own, even if they aren’t identical.
I’m struggling to explain it but it just feels right, and safe and true and familiar. So thank you, and I strongly believe that you have every right and reason to ID as nonbinary transfem if you wish
(And to echo some other commenters it really does mean the world that somebody would actually want to look similar to me)
it was always important to me that kotya is a woman, even back when i was still figuring out her identity. the masculine parts of her have always felt secondary to her primary, feminine inner self. the only reason i have ever held onto using he/him for her, and writing her as a closeted, non-transitioning trans woman, which is especially noticeable with "original" kotya, is because i am projecting my own feelings about transitioning onto her to comfort myself.
i have always thought about transitioning as some "far in the future", "when i grow up", "when the time is right" thing, so i kept putting off even looking into it, and i hesitated for so long that enough time has passed for the country to make transitioning illegal. this will sound very bad, but somewhere underneath, a small part of me felt kind of relieved about that, because now that the choice was forcibly made for me, i don't have to worry about it anymore. in a very russian fashion (because we are known for being pushovers, there is even a word for it here, "терпила", which i cannot even hope to accurately translate for you. it's kind of like if the word endure was very negative and accusatory), i have made some weird peace with the idea that i will probably never transition, because, even on the off chance that it would make me happier, it would jeopardize my entire life. ruin my already shaky relationship with my family, invite harassment, make it incredibly hard to get a job, you know the works. i feel safer not transitioning, and not being openly out to anyone but my close friends.
kotya is russian, too, and i wrote her experience with gender from the perspective of someone who knows what it's like to live here. which is why it brings me a lot of comfort to think of her as someone who maintains a male identity to the outside world, for safety and convenience, but is still secure in her own identity as a woman, just privately, with only close friends and immediate family (i.e her daughter. fun fact for you if you didn't know: original kotya has a daughter) knowing about it. so no, to me, she was never a guy who is maybe a girl, for fun. she was always a woman who happens to present as a man sometimes, for personal reasons.
i am also not transmasc, or at least i would not use that word for myself, personally. i don't know, maybe it's just me having weird feelings about it, but it seems like such a loaded word compared to the way i present myself. i mean, i don't know, i guess i am? but i kind of feel like just Me, you know? just doing my own thing. it's very hard to put into words. i generally prefer to say "whatever the fuck i am" when i have to mention my gender in a conversation, because i genuinely have no words for it. none pizza with left beef, or something.
i appreciate your words about identification, but (forgive me if i say something offensive) i genuinely do not think it would be right for me to identify that way, even taking into account everything that i talked about in the post above. if i did do that, i would always feel like i am forcibly inserting myself into spaces and categories of people i have no right being in. i think it wouldn't be fair to actual, real transfem nonbinary people, who aren't just pretending to be who they are, like i would be. i could also never use she/her pronouns without feeling like the person i'm speaking to is just affirming my cis womanhood. i don't want to mislead people, and i feel like it would only offend others and lead to harassment. i'm okay with being just nonbinary. the transfem part will always be just a private feeling that i will keep to myself.
Yaa, I can understand that ❤️ You have every right and reason to use the transfem label imo but I can definitely understand your reasons for not using it. I’m really sorry about the state of things in Russia, that’s completely fucked and you deserve better (I also didn’t mean to force the label of transmasc onto you, sry, I was just trying to describe how I was being presumptuous in the past and apologize about it, i also think it’s a loaded word in general)
i have a very similar experience of gender, and similar self-doubt. this was really very validating to read - thank you for sharing your experience.
I know a lot of other people have already said similar things, but (from the perspective of a trans woman) there's absolutely nothing wrong or bad about your feelings, and I do believe I've heard of other people who have the same or similar experiences. Hope your journey and your situation get better in the future <3
to be completely honest, i never understood the idea of an afab person being transfeminine until reading this. i've heard of it before, but it baffled me, and now it's a hell of a lot clearer. i wish you the best in your journey and hope you can make peace with that side of yourself, and thank you for putting this out there cus its been plenty enlightening