What are old-school transsexuals?

They are the ones who made it into the media, or the front of a tabloid, the ones who had the juicy details of surgery that made people wince or cross their legs while reading it.... clickbait, before there was anything to click.

1/

What you hear about old-school transsexuals or 'OST's' is largely the witterings of cishet transphobes who have constructed a MYTH.
2/
If you listen to accounts from transsexuals in the decades gone by when trans care wasnt available for 99.9% of trans people, what is a recurring theme is that they made incredible sacrifices to forge a life for themselves with no other option but assimilation.

3/
What often goes hand in hand with these stories, is prostitution, sex work, risking their own life for basic healthcare and treatment, many never got that far, many were MURDERED, and swept under the metaphorical carpet.

4/
Thats before they even got to surgery, which was equally dangerous and precarious unless you somehow managed to raise enough money to go to one of the very places in the world where the operations were performed with competence and care.
5/
Did all OST's have surgery??

Here's the trick...

If you had surgery you could be called a transsexual....

If you didnt, you couldnt...

So we are not comparing people, we are comparing outcomes.

6/
If you take two trans people who absolutely 100% want surgery, with identical psychological profiles and manifestation of GD...

One is prepared to die for surgery, the other isnt.

7/
Imagine that scenario where one trans woman risks everything and forges herself some happiness...

The other trans woman didnt get surgery, she suffers more intense GD for the rest of her life and is called illegitimate in her identity.

hardly seems fair.

8/
How many OST's can people name?

I bet you a thousand people together couldnt name more than 10 pre 1990.

With checkable surgery.
9/
We've all seen photos and footage and various anonymous 'transsexuals' from era's gone by, are we supposed to believe that more people got trans surgeries in the 30s/40s/50s than they do today?

Some people literally pretend more trans surgeries happened in the past!!

10/
In truth gender incongruence has always been a spectrum, there was never a discrete and separate group as transsexuals, and everyone else....

It has always been a blurred mush of different manifestations of gendered identities.
11/
Gender identity is in the head.
Its in our consciousness and its in our psyche.

How people interpret that and other frameworks of anthropology, sociology, culture... individually... with bodily autonomy to seek peace of mind, is absolutely nobody else's business.

12/
Of course socially conservative people loved it when trans people wholly assimilated as cis people...or were murdered trying...or were forced to hide from polite society.

They love the 'queer bashings' of anyone who didnt try to pass as cis.

13/
Nothing has changed.

Not a damn thing.

The cis community, the trans community....whatever labels were used.....human diversity is the same today, as it was 100 years ago, and 1000 years ago.

14/
The difference is today, more and more of us, dont give a fuck about kow-towing to dreary conservative people, we express ourselves as trans people, not framed by cis people.

15/
The vast majority of trans people targeted on social media have AT LEAST a formal medical diagnosis....

The vast majority are also taking hormones, which cause real physical changes.

That is a fact.

16/
I know plenty of trans people for who this alone has caused immeasurable peace, and has quieted the mental tempest GD can cause...

For those, surgery for themselves, would bring no extra peace. So why should they have surgery to make transphobic cis people happy?

17/
Old-school transsexuals, is a term mired in suffering, and forced mental subservience to public attitudes.

Now we have become a political movement, a homage to the trans people who came before us, who suffered whilst being the ones who built all of our foundations.
18/
Our respect and gratitude to trans people of the past, must never be sullied by deplorable, pathetic transphobes trying to use their lives against us.

And by the way, plenty are still around, and fighting with us every step of the way!!

19/19

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