fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #5593 ]

[ SECRET POST #5593 ]

⌈ Secret Post #5593 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.

__________________________________________________

02.

[Malcolm in the Middle]

__________________________________________________

03.

__________________________________________________

04.

__________________________________________________

05.

__________________________________________________

06.

__________________________________________________

07.

[The Owl House]

__________________________________________________

08.

[Doctor Who (2005)]

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #800.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Media in general had me thinking I was a transman because I could not, for the life of me, relate to any of the female characters. Turns out writers in the 90s couldn't write women for shit.

Did you know zero women in real life? Otherwise, I'm thinking that's a you problem.

SA

No.

I grew up in the south as a science loving asexual atheist. Women are supposed to love god, babies, and making a home for their husbands. Hollywood and TV are those heathen liberal devil worshippers. But the women on the tv were all men and baby obsessed, too.

It's definitely a culture problem.

I hear ya. I never got so far as thinking I was a transparent, but I definitely felt like a freak for similar reasons. Didn't help that I didn't know anyone like me irl either.

SA *trans mam

Got fucking dammit, autocorrect

How did you grow up in a conservative southern life and manage to learn what a trans man was before you learned that women in media weren't written like real women? I'm genuinely curious.

SA

The Hollywood liberal agenda, of course. I lived in the south, but Will and Grace was still on tv. And life in that culture is VERY binary. If you don't completely fit the mold of what SHOULD be, then you're obviously Not That.

I am, of course, using modern terminology. Back then, I thought of it as being a "man trapped in a woman's body", because that was the only frame of reference I had (very binary). From the TV, dontchaknow. Being asexual, I had no interest in men, but both southern culture and TV said that women were incomplete without men. Women are supposed to be a support to men, to give them comfort, to be rescued by them. They didn't do things, they had things happen to them. In real life, a girl's popularity and reputation in school lived and died on her boyfriend or her father (I was not popular, no BF, single mother). Almost my friends were male, and I do mean friends. While I would never have chosen to date anyone, I also wasn't given the choice as no one wanted to date me either. My deadbeat dad refused to help me apply for federal aid to college because I didn't need school, I just needed to find a husband. On TV, women only ever talked about men, and if they didn't, it was calculated to impress a man with how well she knew HIS subject of interest. I don't think I noticed anything passing the Bechdel test back then.

There were rarely if ever women on TV that weren't there to be a sexual object. Because I was more interested in exploring, doing science, saving the day, making things happen and being in an active role etc etc, I always identified with the male figures on TV. Male figures were also the only ones who could just be action or goal oriented, with no love interest/sexual object. Women were always primarily sexual objects. That was their purpose. I had no interest in sex, ergo I must actually be a man.

Then I moved to Portland for college. Met women who didn't have men and dating and relationships as endgame. And discovered asexuality. Then it dawned on me. Hollywood writers were mostly men, and they sucked at writing women.

SA

TLDR: Southern culture and Hollywood in the 90s had the same message. Women are for sex and love; men are for plot.

I had no interest in sex and love; all the interest in plot. Ergo, I must be a man.

DA
I am not even American, but same hat. A lot of people here had time in their life when they felt themselves being male. Some of this people aren't cis, but most of this people are cis usually queer women. TV (usually western because of course it is) and society tell you that you want to have romance, family and babies. Only men allowed to be something else

Somehow it just doesn't seem a logical leap for a conservative-raised 90s girl to go from "I'm not like the women I see on TV" to "I must be a man." (Hell, I was a liberal-raised 90s girl and I never thought me not wanting to grow up to romance and babies meant I was a trans man. Because even most liberals didn't know what trans was back then!) That kind of girl would think "Something must be wrong with me because I'm a girl who doesn't want the things women are supposed to want."

If this were someplace else, I might believe your story, but I'm with the other anon who thinks this is another subtle transphobic trolling attempt.

DA

And I agree as well.

DA - yeah, I was a conservative-raised girl in the 90s and figured that not being like the TV girls was a sign to dedicate myself to the church. Cis girls from less religious families trended towards "Maybe I'm a lesbian" or "maybe I'm just weird." Chaz Bono thought he was a lesbian in the 90s. AYRT is a not-so-subtle troll.

Re: What are you still mad about or at?

(Anonymous) - 2022-04-30 15:46 (UTC) - Expand

SA

Believe what you want. IDIC and all that. Someone asked me to explain, so I explained.

DA from everyone around - Wow, what a horrible thing to say.

So apparently being a cis woman who didn't relate to femininity in the, I don't know, 80s means being a troll. What the fuck. Look at yourself condemning someone for being a non "feminine" cis woman, frankly.

This is how angry I feel when I read things like "this long dead person was obviously trans, even if she didn't think of herself as such". Because apparently others can tell how one feels about their gender on the inside lol.

Nowadays people are supposed to be either cis or trans so I say I am cis because I have to say something, choose pronouns, whatever. And then some people have the audacity of attributing gender to others. You asked for my opinion, I gave it, now you're saying I am wrong - what the fuck? Think about it.

DA here and not a US citizen; having been born in a poor country you can bet sexism was rampant in the past century (not that it isn't now) and I desperately wanted to be a man. I mean I sobbed when I had my period. I mean I felt joy when I was told I could do this and that under my social condition "if I was a man". Pretty sure some people would like to peg me as trans for that, when I was just really angry at the idea that, like the other anon said, being a woman meant I had to like romance, having sex with men, being a wife and having children and all that. I wanted to study, be successful and rich ON MY OWN and break the dumb mould imposed by my sex. I still do, but at least now I feel less alone in that since I found out about feminism and all that.

What the fuck are you even saying. What the fuck.

Re: What are you still mad about or at?

(Anonymous) - 2022-04-30 16:04 (UTC) - Expand

Re: What are you still mad about or at?

(Anonymous) - 2022-04-30 16:30 (UTC) - Expand

Re: What are you still mad about or at?

(Anonymous) - 2022-04-30 17:15 (UTC) - Expand

Re: What are you still mad about or at?

(Anonymous) - 2022-04-30 20:46 (UTC) - Expand

Re: What are you still mad about or at?

(Anonymous) - 2022-04-30 21:18 (UTC) - Expand

Re: What are you still mad about or at?

(Anonymous) - 2022-04-30 16:49 (UTC) - Expand

This was a really thorough, thoughtful, and genuine reply, and I applaud you for taking the time and emotional energy to write it, despite the grossly dismissive and insensitive way it was responded to by one or two individuals.

Go to bed, Joanne. Nobody was transing you as a child. That is on you.

Fuck you Karen, you don't own or dictate other peoples' experiences.

Uh oh, Jo didn't go to bed and now she's cranky. :(

It's hilarious you have the audacity to call other people trolls. But it's nice that you showed your hand so openly.

Different anon, same response: Fuck you Karen, you don't own or dictate other peoples' experiences.

Did you... not read any books? Especially books written by women? I was in my teens in the 90s and it wasn't until my early 20s that it dawned on me that I might be bi because I felt the same about women and men, that is, nothing much toward either; but as a 17 year old I introduced myself to my second roommate, who'd just asked if I minded rooming with a bisexual, that "well, I'm nothing," because I didn't know asexual was a word. But I knew I didn't want marriage and kids and that women could have adventures that involved neither because I read constantly.

Going from "I'm not into kids and romance and homemaking to = "I must be a man" is a big leap, and I'm from a working class family with a stay at home mom and a manual-labor working dad.

SA
I think a lot of people in this thread don't understand what it's like to live without internet. I didn't internet access until I was in the 9th grade. By then, the culture had already steeped in.

I'm from a small town in Oklahoma, reading books was all there was to do, if you didn't want to spend every evening a church, or making out in the middle of a cow field (or watching the aforementioned TV, of which there were about 10 channels b/c we were poor). Naturally all the fictional books at the local library were "appropriate". Books written by/for women were romance books, or The Babysitter's Club style, Little House on the Prairie, etc etc. I didn't have the historical context to understand Jane Austin for anything other than, "Mrs. Bennet was right, the girls had to be married to survive". Everything else was John Clancy or Stephen King or from the 1950s. Not exactly going to get a lot of feminism there. Thankfully my mom didn't care what I read, so long as I did, so I bought a lot of books with my allowance when we went into the city. Mostly sci-fi. Not a lot of female characters in there to be found then, unless they're there for the sexy. Once I got the internet, it was easier to find books with female characters that had no romance, but only in so far as those books existed, which was still very few.

To give you an idea of what it was like, one of the two girl friends I had was VERY embarrassed to buy an educational book on sex. Obvs, if someone from our small town saw her with it, she was obviously going to have sex before marriage (she was) and it would ruin her reputation. We were in high school and the only sex ed we had was "If you have it before marriage, you'll get an STD and die", and thankfully she knew there was more to it than that.

I was embarrassed to buy a romance book. It felt like after my years of fighting against the whole "god/family/babies" thing, I was giving in and declaring I was interested just like every other woman because that's what being a woman was. Really, I was just really curious to see if I needed a "jump start" or something. Maybe I would like it?

As I said above, I'm very science minded, so I had no problem being seen buying what basically amounted to a technical manual on sex. Everyone knew I was a geek. She had no issue buying a romance novel, because, duh of course women read romance novels? So we went to the store and bought each other the books and then swapped in the car like a drug deal. I spent most of the romance book critiquing the character development and got really bored of the repetitive sex scenes.

I know NOW, of course, that most of any genre is crap, and I've found romance novels I do like (mostly gay ones so I don't have the possibility of projecting myself in there). But at the time, it felt like more confirmation.

AYRT--I didn't have internet access until I was, idk, 12? And by internet access I mean AOL chat rooms so a lot of being propositioned by creeps; didn't really get access to the wider internet until a couple years into high school. And I didn't go looking for sex and sexuality related stuff because I wasn't interested, just musical theatre, fantasy art, and animals.

And some of the books I read as a teen had romance and/or kids as the endgame for the main characters, but they did other stuff (that I was interested in) along the way, like fight evil sorcerers and talk to animals, or ride dragons, or survive on their own in the wilderness, or foil political conspiracies, or go to space.

And while my hometown had a pretty comprehensive library system and didn't forbid kids from checking out adult books, plus a decent used bookstore, I had a friend who grew up literally in the backwoods, with no electricity, no phone, and an outhouse, and her closest tiny library (one room, in the town with a one screen movie theater and her high school, about 60 miles away iirc) had most of the same kids' (these days some would be classed as YA) books, by Tamora Pierce, Patricia Wrede, Anne McCaffrey, Ursula Le Guin, Pamela F. Service... plus lots of adult fantasy and sci-fi.

I spent summers visiting and always loaded up on books every time we drove through on the way there, because there wasn't even a church, just one paved road about ten miles from where my friend and her mom lived, with a post office and a payphone.

Admittedly my parents didn't care what I read, although they sometimes wish I read less.

I'm sorry you grew up so isolated from the info that would've helped you. I never thought I was "a man in the wrong body," I just thought I was a broken weirdo for not caring about sex and reading about romance like I read about someone surviving a shipwreck by rowing a driftwood raft with a plank and eating raw fish and rainwater--fun to read about, but you couldn't pay me to do it myself.

AYRT

Same. I was 14 when I got a computer/the internet, and there was no google. AskJeeves was brand new, and AOL was the common gateway to the internet. I got kicked off every time someone called the house. I didn't even use the internet as a resource for school because the search functions back then were such shit. Also, there wasn't a whole lot of stuff on the internet other than really crappy text websites (no dark mode, RIP my eyes) and chat boards.

I was mostly in AOL chatrooms about Star Trek.

We weren't QUITE backwoods, since we had a library and all, but the town was very 1950s. We had a main street (helpfully named Main Street), with a general store/post office/soda pull (yes, all one store). We would go visit my great grandmother in her house in Dewar, where my mom's mom grew up, and the bathroom was an outhouse. So we weren't far off.

I think because my mom (who was the first person in our family to go to college) emphasized learning since I was born, I never thought I was broken, as a person. I figured if something was wrong, it had to be physical, like diabetes or something. I always had the framework of "This is the way things are, so what does that mean?" Men are interested in intellectual pursuits, or physical pursuits. Women are interested in love and men. I'm not interested in love or men. I'm also not broken as a person, because this is just the way I am. Ergo...

It was also the time when the mainstream was learning about the existence of the whole queer spectrum. Gay men first, lesbians second (with a scoff that they probably didn't exist except as far as it was for men to watch), and then the trans. But the idea of trans at the time, in my tiny corner of the world, was that it was a sexual deviant trying to make their perversions acceptable. I saw lots of trans panic defense in the news, because everyone in my neck of the woods thought it was perverts trying to corrupt decent men and the men were only defending their honor.

I met my first trans person in college and realized very quickly that that was a load of bullshit. Learned a lot about gender identity and feminism and sexuality and it was life changing. I got my first actual comprehensive sex education in freshman orientation, because I chose the college that was the most liberal and not-south that I could find. The official unofficial motto is Communism, Atheism, Free Love.

DA but in a similar vein: some of us didn't; I sure didn't read any books back when I was a kid in a poor family who couldn't afford them and there was no libgen or even a local public library. I dreamed of going to a museum or a library once I learned those were things (I believe I saw the Louvre on TV) because there were none in my town. I was raised by parents who did their best to raise me as a self-sufficient woman ... which effectively meant raising me to be a boy in many ways, because if I didn't dress up "appropriately" men would abuse me and stuff like that. I loved not having to be what I perceived as "feminine" in my small little "poor kid in poor country" world because my parents weren't as close-minded as, say, our neighbors. You're really not accounting for... people who live/d in different places, times and realities. Unfortunately to this day I am sure there are still girls in some places who can relate to this kind of feeling.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only