Petra discovered herself and was largely embraced. Bowsette learned that masculinity is a prison and cartoonish violence is optional. "Draco Malfoid" is openly about turning an evil faggot into a woman and punitively violating her/"it." Coming from dyed-in-the-wool misogynists, it is repugnant shit.
![For instance: I’m a lesbian, and that subjects me to a level of pressure from outside (homophobia) and inside (internalized homophobia but also this schema-pressure about my gender, which many lesbians resolve by doing something. No thanks. Not me.). And I’m not like, happy, but that’s just something I have to live with, since the alternative isn’t something I’m going to ever do.
That pressure — of living up to what ‘a woman is supposed to be’, — is gender dysphoria. Obviously there is a difference in the ways it hurts. I’m not that feminine but people see me that way and one of the things that does for me, besides obligating me to get really annoying about it, is it helps me ‘pay off’ the pressure of that dissonance. I’m happier this way. Trans women are under much more pressure because of their deviance, and they’re usually much less good at woman stuff because they were punished for wanting it and nobody just tells trans women things. nobody tells them!!!!]. I was raised to varying measures of success. And you have it much worse, of course.
But
there are ways to deal with it.
gender dysphoria is relational, and I’ve found that to be true. Nothing soothes my anxieties about being insufficient more than spending time with other women, and the single most important trans woman is spending time with other women, trans and otherwise, who allow themselves to share that they have also had trouble feeling like they deserve to be considered women.
A girl might develop swimmer’s shoulders — and if she spends a lot of her time with, her art, this isn’t going to extract so much of a cost as it otherwise would. The body becomes more normalized for her if she spends time around the cost, or remove the source, or harden herself nacre against the pressure, or titrate out various allowances of deviance, or even get surgery about it. That’s fine.
I’m not against cosmetic surgery for the same reason I’m not against makeup, or clothing. The face you show to the world is a…](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:p2qfuvgcp2fianaliz5grt2w/bafkreid254r4poz2snxzsqdmkoxbhe5ieiq4oxjtpwy52xloih4zov4s2m)
