so true, and such a good example.

Personally as a kid I never exercised unless forced to (e.g. the annual 1 mile run in gym class) and didn't enjoy sports, even before I realized I was trans.

This was for so many reasons, too. For example with swimming, not wearing long-sleeves & pants was unbearable in social situations as a kid, let alone taking my shirt off & wearing swim trunks around peers.

I also had very poor body coordination / awareness ("proprioception"), and frequently was injured when I would play.

(I was hit in the head by balls so many times in sports it became a running joke with friends and family - I have distinct memories of having painful experiences being hit in the head when playing basketball, baseball, and kickball, some of these happening more than once.)

As an adult I learned coping strategies, and I adapted to living as the wrong gender and dissociating from the body. Looking back, it was dysfunctional the way I used my self-loathing and gender dysphoria as tools to push myself to endure physical suffering that wasn't safe or healthy. I also had a hard time gauging my body's needs and injured myself many times, and I now have life-long conditions as a result.

I have heard similar stories from other trans women IRL about not being able to read the body and injuring themselves, and about poor body coordination / proprioception. There is also just the obvious discomfort of the way sports puts you into your body in a social context, and for trans women the way sports is male-coded and all the complicated social dynamics around being "athletic" or into sports as being masculine.

What were your experiences, and do you have any advice for trans people wanting to be healthy with movement?

ah, freedom from gender norms! I think everyone, cis and trans, has different tolerances for the extent to which they feel comfortable adhering to or violating gender norms. Ironically, transitioning has been so great for me because it allows me to finally be "normal" by being conformist.

As a man I was always wrong because my natural inclinations made me gender non-conforming (making me seem like a gay man). It was very stigmatizing living that way, but once I transitioned it's like everything lined up and now for the first time every I "fit" society, and I just live as a relatively normal woman without stigma.

However, my sexuality still makes me non-conforming, but in women that seems to be more ignored or overlooked compared to men (esp. when you are feminine / conforming in your gender expression). It's only when it's made explicit that people seem uncomfortable, and even then the average person seem more accepting than of gay men, at least in my experience.

That said, it makes sense that being trans would lend itself to seeing the possibilities in gender and the freedom from gender norms that can be accomplished.

The popularity of beyond-the-binary ideas of Kate Bornstein and Leslie Feinberg and the increased adoption of non-binary as a political identity show a thirst for tearing down gender norms and replacing them with gender freedom (particularly focused on individualist ideas of gender expression and non-conformity).

Though I am ultimately skeptical that this is how gender works, and it reminds me of the failed political lesbianism of second wave feminism, the problem then was that sexuality was not wholly cultural or political as mistakenly assumed, and you cannot will yourself to be a lesbian and build a new utopian society on that basis. Straight women exist, and they will continue to be attracted to men even if it's they're told it's wrong. Still, it's exciting to see movements like this push to create space for gender non-conformity, that's a win regardless in my book.

that's a good one, I like to send people the Nature article "Sex redefined", which talks about how binary sex is an outdated model.

Genuinely look forward to the temperature thing, I've been boiling alive my entire life :/

That's the funny thing, I never doubted women's accounts about temperature - and yet, I somehow had discounted or downplayed the severity of it (it makes me cringe to say this, I hate fitting the profile of a sexist stereotypical man that way).

Transitioning has really opened my eyes to how much of my mentality and expectations I have for the world and others is rooted in my own narrow experience in the world. It makes me feel alarmed about my lack of understanding of other minority / oppressed lived experiences. Despite all the effort I have put into reading and understanding disability, race, etc. I still really don't understand it in the most fundamental and important ways I need to.

Re men and women being similar, I have had this thought too - while all the differences are being highlighted and are on display as well for me, I'm shocked at how much of a woman I can be biologically, having been born with a male body.

It really turns out the body is a lot more flexible about sex than I realized, and estrogen dominance can really change the body and brain in ways I never expected. For example, the idea that trans women can experience PMS seemed very unlikely to me before I transitioned, and yet it is a real thing! (For clarity, some trans women experience something like a menstrual cycle, but they obviously don't bleed or menstruate - the PMS symptoms might be caused by estrogen sensitivity and changes in the hormone levels, just like in cis women.)

The idea that the hormones regulate practically everything: temperature, drug tolerance, fat composition, and brain composition is fascinating.

What I am left wondering is what fundamental differences are left between me and a cis woman, biologically?

What relevance is having XY chromosomes to my physiology and biology, when injecting estrogen and having removed testes?

When you focus on functionality and practical differences, the bio-essentialist mindset starts to weaken. The main medical differences between me and the average cis woman are that I don't need a pap smear, I can't get pregnant, and I might eventually need prostate exams. That's about the extent of it - otherwise, I'm medically / biologically like any other woman, and that blows my mind.

OK, but I have to ask - what do you mean about women being boob-obsessed?

And no worries, it doesn't have to be trans-specific, just something you wish cis people knew based on your experiences as a trans person (could be anything, for example when I first transitioned and was a visible trans woman, I was shocked at how women were so tolerant and polite, and how it was primarily men who stared at me aggressively - there were shitty, transphobic women, but mostly they were not confrontational; I didn't expect women to be so tolerant and accepting).

The only time I experienced a sensitivity to the cold was during a short period where I think I was a little anemic. Estrogen has definitely made me more sensitive, but I such a ridiculous starting point that I still have cold tolerance. Funnily, a cis person brought up how me (and two others who were in shorts+Tshirt) were warm because of T (I hadn't come out to her yet).

Yes, such a great one - it's so hard to believe that gender dysphoria is real, people seem to want to think it's just delusions or trauma or anything but what it is.

It's incredible to me that the conservative medical establishment has endorsed gender affirming care and transition for trans youth and adults in this country, over centuries and decades trans healthcare has developed to this point while the culture at large continues to lag behind.

It is like the gradual process of (largely Christian) scientists ruling out creationism over a period of centuries and decades, but we're in a time still when the majority of people still believe in the religious explanation rather than the scientific one.

It makes me feel like I'm living in a kind of medieval era of sorts, when people are still largely uneducated and in the dark, a time when the gap between what humanity has discovered and what most people know is huge.

!!!!! REAL !!!!!

I spent so long putting off estrogen and when I went on it I magically felt better and started getting excited at the changes in my body???

I’m in the demi sort of space and when I got rid of the “boys” downstairs no one but my partner and mother knew and it remains that way even to this day.

It wasn’t about others it was about my body and how I felt about it. That’s it.

Real, they won't be able to put me in their camps

unfortunately they might, at least in the US there is a learned callousness to suffering and "not my problem" individualism, which is ironic given the significance of taking care of the poor, unhoused, and travelers in both Christianity and ancient Greece and Rome, the supposed cultural foundations of the West.

edit: oh, I've been meaning to ask if you have a gofundme or way to send you funds, you are on my mind a lot

Well said, social reality is just as real as any other kind of reality - the language we use is part of how we reify our concepts and regulate others within them.

Such a great point, being trans is made into an exotic fetish, but it's rather mundane really. This is a lot like how women are treated under patriarchy, to be honest. They are made into mysterious, sexual creatures rather than just people like anyone else. They are extended into the "Other" and alienated from common humanity.