I spent like 3 years in that subreddit without really believing I was transgender. Around 2021 I shocked myself when I responded to a bigoted comment and automatically wanted to say “we” when describing trans people. I was so immersed in trans culture and felt such an affinity for them that I was already thinking of myself as a transfem before I was ever consciously certain. Simply not knowing I wanted to be a woman held me back for my entire childhood, but because of r/traaa, I could finally graduate from ignorance to denial.
r/egg_irl had a big impact, but if hadn’t spent so much time in r/traaa, then the egg memes would’ve scared me off. If I haven’t spent so much time there, then I might not have cracked and finally gotten to experience actually living for once. If not for that safe space, I might’ve never been able to disarm all the internalized transphobia and gatekeeping that can be all too common in more pickme trans spaces. A big part of why blahaj.zone is so important to me is that it reminds me of that place which no longer exists.
Thank you so much for all that you do! It really means a lot!
You’re a huge part of making this place what it is so thanks for being here and posting.
Thank you, but I do wish I wasn’t so important. I wish more people posted so I was only one of many rather than half the posts here.
I appreciate you voicing this. There are a lot of affectionate jokes that people make about people who post often, but we don’t often talk about the pressure that this involves.
It’s part of why I make an effort to comment on things. It feels like it’s my attempt to make the people posting feel seen and appreciated, as well as doing a small part to try to help sustain communities until they have more people engaging. It’s odd to feel such a sense of duty over the notion of posting and commenting on online memes, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yes, please more “I didn’t know I wanted to be a woman growing up, I was missing the words to formulate this idea” representation! I felt sooo alone and doubted myself for so long because of that.
Ikr? It’s so hard only hearing about people who wanted it when they were a kid. No shade to those people, but only hearing their stories made it so much harder to accept myself. I never consciously thought that I’d want to be a woman, with only indirect signs that I never considered might be related to gender.
I didn’t realize that I obsessed over my classmates crossdressing because I was jealous. I thought I didn’t want to be topless because I hated being overweight. I thought I hated male locker rooms because my body was ugly, not because my body was masc and I was stuck in a room with men and boys. I couldn’t understand the way dudes socialized and never got why they were unwilling to talk through their feelings and interpersonal drama. I never considered that the real reason I played male characters in games was because I had internalized that being male was the only option that I had.
In hindsight all these things seem more obvious, but I can only recognize their significance in hindsight, long after I had cracked. If I didn’t learn the importance of valuing current euphoria over investigating my past, I never could’ve accepted myself. I will keep talking about my experience whenever possible, because I know that other people like me need to hear it.
Ikr? It’s so hard only hearing about people who wanted it when they were a kid. No shade to those people, but only hearing their stories made it so much harder to accept myself.
I’ve come to realise that ultimately, it doesn’t matter how close we fit the transphobic narrative that was drummed in to us all about what makes someone “really” trans, if we deviate from it in any way (and we all do) we will beat ourselves up over those differences.
Take me. I “knew” from a young age. But what I knew is that I “should have been a girl/woman”. Not that I was. I knew that I wished I was trans, so that I could access bottom surgery. But I told myself that was the same as wishing I could win the lottery. A nice dream, but ultimately a fantasy, not something to build my life around. And on top of that, I’m not feminine and never have been. I have no more of a meaningful relationship with femininity than I do with masculinity.
It took me decades to work through that stuff, even though I literally knew what I wanted in clear and explicit terms from a young age.
It’s why I value community so much. Because every one of our stories is different, but at the same time, we all have a lot in common. And it becomes much easier to understand ourselves when we can talk to people about their experiences and our own.
Are you me? Basically has the same experience lol.
I clicked here wanting to share how I spent years in r/traaa before I would acknowledge the possibility of me being trans (because obviously being trans is only for real trans people who definitely know they’re trans and the feelings I’m having are different to that and I’m definitely not trans still cis btw) and then see you already wrapped up what I wanted to say with a neat little bow.
I’m glad we still have our unapolagetically queer, safe and cozy spaces online, despite everything. Thanks blahaj, thanks beehaw, thanks queer admins and mods for all your hard work
Why’d it go down?
The infamous API changes that first caused Lemmy to explode in popularity.
In that case RIP to some real ones! I’m glad you’ve found a new home here
I graduated from traa and egg_irl before I left Reddit. I got to a point in My transition where baby trans memes were no longer relevant. But I’ve never felt the same way about Blahaj. I appreciate the more mature and confident vibe. Piefed and Lemmy transes don’t doubt ourselves so much.
I still find baby trans memes fun because seeing people discover themselves in that comments is so cute!
what happened to it ? i don’t use reddit for trans stuff
The API changes basically killed the third party moderation tools that the mods relied on, and they had no interest in continuing to moderate without them. Whenever I peak back on Reddit, it seems like more bullshit slips through the cracks than before and even the culture of the platform in the better subreddits seems to have regressed compared to the past. On top of that, users being able to hide their profiles causes mods to waste time finding workarounds just to see if someone is a troll or not. It seems like so many users don’t notice it because they’ve gotten used to the crap and every other corpo platform is somehow even worse.
Real
for me it was r/195 then r/196 then my egg cracked
I was really disappointed when I learned that some redditors made r/traa2
