[-] LadyAutumn 1 points 14 minutes ago

I maintain what I said. Everyone has a line. Murder, sexual violence, child abuse, you know everyone has a point beyond which they will no longer consume content produced by someone. By continuing to consume content produced by Joanne Rowling, they are saying that she hasn't done anything enough to actually make the content she produced unethical to consume. There are always exceptions when it comes to art. I'm never going to convince people not to like something. But they can and should have to sit with the shame of that. The least they can do is own it, "yes spearheading an international movement to attack the rights of queer people is not enough for me to give up my favorite childhood author". If that's it for them, great. They're people who should probably stay away from the trans community. But to try and act like "No matter what an artist does it doesn't matter, their art is still sacred on its own and enjoyable without any ethical implcations" is ridiculous.

We're adult members of a community facing an ongoing outside attempt to literally destroy us. She is the figurehead of a movement thats sole aim is to entirely drive us out of society, an aim she is aware will kill us. If thats not enough for someone to drop a fucking book series than clearly trans lives dont matter too damn much to them.

[-] LadyAutumn 3 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 25 minutes ago)

She will. Haven't heard her name in 5 months. I honestly think by next election she will be entirely forgotten.

[-] LadyAutumn 5 points 11 hours ago

I do think on some level piracy is more ethical than paying her money, but I still see consuming her work in any form as unethical. I think everyone has an internal line beyond which they will no longer consume or engage with art created by someone. Like child abusers tends to be a major one, or sexual assaulters or murderers. Not that these are hard lines that immediately disqualify any art from consumption, but I think most would agree that consuming art knowingly made by people who do those things is wrong and unethical. There's exceptions as always, loads of famous people running around who do those things who's art people love. But still I think that its hard to defend that, and that most people have a line somewhere.

By continuing to consume her work you are indirectly stating that she hasn't done anything to cross that line for you. (Not you specifically, the proverbial you) I don't think it's impossible to let go of content created by harmful people, or that anyone categorically can never do that. I think to suggest that is kind of ridiculous. Like I doubt many people would seriously defend listening to and enjoying Diddy's music.

[-] LadyAutumn 2 points 12 hours ago

She did later on, claiming that Hermione "could have been black" and that "she never specified her race". As though being black was so inconsequential that it would go entirely unmentioned through 7 books (when other black characters absolutely did have their race mentioned).

[-] LadyAutumn 8 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

Its not a matter of separating it from her. She isnt dead, shes still alive and consuming her work is kind of a passive endorsement. You know, sure she might be the figurehead of a movement that literally rejects transgender people from society, but thats not enough to give me pause in reading and enjoying her content.

Do you think listening to Chris Brown is cool? What about Diddy? You know separating art from the artist and what not. Consuming art is apparently an entirely neutral activity with no real world implications or consequences, so surely being like "sure Diddy is a serial sexual abuser, but I just adore his music. I'm capable of separating art from the artist" is also entirely valid in your view.

[-] LadyAutumn 32 points 22 hours ago

Or just don't. Accept that it was created by the figurehead of a widespread bigoted movement and move on. I read the series over 10 times. Read the 5th 6th and 7th books on release dates when I was a child. I discovered aspects of my identity through the Fandom. It far and away is the series I read as a kid that had the largest impact on me... well there were others that were close but still.

Haven't touched any of it in half a decade. I never will again either. I'm not invested in the creations of people who cause harm to me and those I love. I have no interest in anything produced by people who would bring mass violent harm against my community. I accept the influence it had on me but I let go of it and moved on. I dont believe that anyone is incapable of that, genuinely. There are other better things out there that weren't made by fascists.

[-] LadyAutumn 8 points 1 day ago

She was already very conservative during her upbringing. Her 'feminism' amounted to performative success for affluent women under capitalism. She has never been a progressive. She retconned her characters to minorities while doing literally no work to write the characters as minorities with the experiences of minorities. Feminism to her is an aesthetic.

[-] LadyAutumn 7 points 1 day ago

You have wildly misunderstood what TERFs are. They're buddies with anti-abortion activists. Politically they are aligned in interests with misogynists. They believe that gender is innate and unchangeable, which is the same thing that misogynists think. They believe that women are and will always be subjugated by men because men are biologically inclined towards rape and are categorically stronger than every single woman. They dont actually seek to change this in any material way. They just dont want to have to be around people they consider disgusting. They want to be upheld by white men the way they were in the 40s. There's a reason TERFs skew middle class and white.

Fun fact that during the build up to world war 2 a mass exodus of former suffragettes to the side of fascism took place in Britain. Even though fascists wanted to take their right to vote away again. The fascists upheld white British women as the pinnacle of femininity, and upheld them as an ideal in their state of subjugation. This presented a position of privilege over other women. It afforded them status and protection that being a political radical did not.

Not necessarily directly related to TERFs, just wanted to point out that if incentives exist to become a misogynist then some women will take the incentive.

[-] LadyAutumn 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I also experienced extreme bottom dysphoria. It was completely disruptive my whole life. It definitely got worse the longer I was out as trans. There were so many things I wanted to do that I didnt feel like I could. I'm very inclined towards feminine clothes and presentation and I pretty much never could wear anything explicitly fem. I always wore baggy clothes, hoodies and jeans in the middle of summer kinda vibe. It was awful genuinely I hated my body and wanted no one to ever see me. I didnt swim for over a decade. I felt out of place among other women, I felt repulsed with intimacy and avoided it as much as possible. I got misgendered a lot and just sort of accepted it. I was very unhappy most of the time.

I dont have any easy answers. It nearly killed me. I coped badly, to make a long story short. I waited a long time for surgery and getting it saved my life. Its been over 2 years now. I'm almost an entirely different person. Its hard to really summarize all the changes but I actually like who I am today. I love my body in spite of its flaws and I actually feel free to be myself, something I never did before. I'm better adjusted emotionally and much better at managing my mental health. I'm not entirely free of dysphoria now, but bottom dysphoria was far and away the worst for me.

The next 6 months before your surgery date will feel like the longest thing ever and also retrospectively like the blink of an eye. A light at the end of the tunnel exists. I'm very excited for you to get there. Be patient with yourself and focus on getting through each day.

[-] LadyAutumn 18 points 2 days ago

It's literally robbery. They're legal thieves. They collect until you're dead, and they sure as hell aren't lifting a finger to keep you alive.

[-] LadyAutumn 18 points 2 days ago

Its functionally legal to discriminate against gay people in America now. I see this as testing the waters more than anything.

[-] LadyAutumn 29 points 3 days ago

What a... grating comment.

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submitted 1 month ago by LadyAutumn to c/lgbtq_plus

They can't use this to make a useful database of we just flood it with whatever lol

Link for those who feel like doing a little low effort sabotage. I was trying to find conversion therapist info to report them but couldn't find anything. Could be an idea. Report transphobic businesses or doctors.

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submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by LadyAutumn to c/mtf

If you're out of the loop or intentionally avoiding social media and the news cycle, then I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this. Two executive orders were written yesterday by Donald Trump that specifically target transgender rights and freedoms. One targeting the rights of transgender members of the military, another targeting the healthcare rights of transgender youth. These orders state in no uncertain terms that trans people are unsafe evil liars deserving of contempt and exclusion. This is not an exaggeration, and the shift in the narrative behind these executive orders is extremely alarming and likely to be seen again as the basis for further attacks against us.

There is a narrative created by these two orders. A narrative that trans people are dishonorable, that trans people lack selflessness and humility, and that we are liars. That we are wrong that our existence is wrong. That it doesn't matter whether transition decreases our suicide rate, whether it allows us to live happy, fulfilling lives. That death itself is preferable to the existence of an adult trans person. That being transgender is by itself wrong and makes us worth less than cisgender people. A narrative that children must be protected from becoming transgender people, even if it means they die. That no one can be allowed to think that being transgender is alright, that it's okay to be a transgender person.

This cannot go unchallenged. It's not enough for trans people to resist alone. This has to come from as man voices as possible. The writing is on the wall. This amounts to dehumanizing persecution intended to foster perceptions of us as inhuman. It is going to get worse. This is week 2. What awaits us in a year no one can say for sure. We need protests we need civil disobedience. We need to help our most vulnerable get out. We need to protect trans youth.

Please refer to the transgender resistance network for mutual aid and help. I had tried last year to organize something here but was not capable of it due to problems in my own personal life.

We need solidarity. We need to help each other. And we have to resist. Not just these orders, not just this narrative, but we have to resist the fall into hopelessness and acceptance. We have to fight. Our lives have value. Our lives are worth the same as anyone else. Don't let them get to you, don't believe in the narrative. Transition saved my life, maybe it saved yours too. Transitioning and seeing others transition has been the most beautiful and rewarding experience of my life. I refuse to accept a reality in which we are forced into closets, forced into hiding. I beg of everyone to join me in refusing that outcome.

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submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by LadyAutumn to c/mtf

Like in 2016 a rising tide of conservatives emboldened by the Republican victory are starting to crop up online. Hate speech and random attacks directed at the trans community in online spaces will continue and most likely grow louder in the coming weeks. For our safety and mental health I encourage everyone to avoid online spaces that are not strictly moderated. Avoid social media where transphobia and misogyny are tolerated. The effect of constact exposure to hate speech is profound and horrific. We need to shelter ourselves from it as much as possible. I know it doesn't sound very brave to say that but its the truth. We need to look after each other of course, but first of all we have to look after ourselves.

Like everyone here I've been through a chaotic mess of emotions over the past couple days. I am furious, heartbroken, terrified, and sick with anxiety. I have picked apart everything thats happened in the past few months and tried to make sense of how this could happen. The hows and whys of it dont matter though. This is the reality we are confronted with and we have to exist within it. There is no use in praying for a different world. There is no use in lamenting the reality as it exists.

Trans people have made it through so many eras of open hostility towards us. Our community is built on the foundations laid by those who came before us. We persevere because of our solidarity, our empathy and our unity. We must now turn our attention to how we can fight back against this system. We must move our focus to how we can persist within a new world. Trans people still need hormones. We need ways out of hostile communities. We need protection and we need security. Our focus must change to how we can provide those things without the help of institutions. We need networks of supportive cisgender people throughout deep red states. We need supply chains for bringing hormones to people who cannot access them. We need communities online oriented around supporting our most vulnerable.

I am committed to this community supporting all of those efforts, and am looking to become personally involved in organizing efforts as time goes on. Channel your anger and your fear into action. Process your feelings together, support each other, and remember that youre not alone. We are not alone. Things aren't okay. They won't suddenly be okay tomorrow. But we can look after our community. We can push back. It's our duty to do so, for trans youth and vulnerable trans people who can't advocate for themselves and are subject to the whims of the system.

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submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by LadyAutumn to c/mtf

I don't know what comes next. I don't know what to expect. It's serious. It's real this time. Prepare for the worst-case scenarios and do not assume anything. A lot has been said about how this administration plans to handle queer rights. It could mean anything. No level of institutional violence against trans people is off the table as of now. Medications can be banned, non-conformity with assigned roles can be criminalized, conversion therapy can be accepted as widespread policy. I don't know. The end result is it's not good. Whatever this change in power means for us, it's not good. I don't want to downplay the seriousness of what's at stake here.

That being said, as escape and resistance efforts materialize, this community will support them. We will persevere as queer people have always had to. When the systems fail us, we rely on each other. Grassroots efforts will come together in the coming weeks and months. I encourage people to do what they think is right and to do what they think will keep themselves and their families safe. We have to stay together and we have to love and protect each other. No matter what happens. Unity and queer power doesn't stop now. Today is a day to mourn the loss of a safe world for so many queer people. Tomorrow, we should begin to steel ourselves for resistance.

I hope the best for everyone. This community is here to support us all as this unfolds. I'm so sorry. I wish there was more I could say or do. The waves of anxiety and fear have been washing over me for the past couple of hours. Let's mourn together, I guess. And get ready for what comes tomorrow.

There's some crisis lines in the sidebar I encourage anyone to make use of if you're unsafe right now. Those are all explicitly trans affirming support lines.

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submitted 11 months ago by LadyAutumn to c/mtf

I havent gone swimming in around a decade, and now that I'm a little over a year post up I really want to but I'm still so nervous to actually go and buy a swimsuit. πŸ˜… there's something intimidating or nerve wracking about the process.

Anyone have experiences buying swimsuits? Is there any tips going in I should know? I think I know what style I want, a 2 piece with high waisted bottoms and a top with an underwire.

40
submitted 1 year ago by LadyAutumn to c/mtf

I was thinking of making a community engagement post last week in the run up to the Easter weekend and transgender day of visibility, but it got lost under a recent promotion at work and a few busy days.

So yeah how was your Easter weekend / TDoV? 😊 Most of my family is on vacation so I just had a quiet weekend at home with my partner. All the drama that went down with TDoV landing on Easter Sunday was.. unsettling to say the least. I hope everyone was able to weather that storm of hate and propaganda safely.

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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by LadyAutumn to c/mtf

Hello everyone,

Just wanted to quickly add that the finalized format for requesting engagement has been decided. A commenter in the other thread suggested a similar format. (Thank you @Kayday@lemmy.world)

At the start of the body of your post, not in the title, the first line should look like the following.

[Requesting Engagement from _________]

For clarity purposes, this is the official way to request specific engagement groups. I'll respect other methods, but this way, it keeps things nice and transparent.

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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by LadyAutumn to c/mtf

Hi everyone,

I've been thinking over how to address large amounts of outside engagement disrupting the safety of our community. As Lemmy is a large space that extends well beyond the borders of our community, when posts hit front page we often start getting a lot of engagement on posts by people outside of the transfeminine experience. Often well-meaning people engage here and say things that are insensitive, require OP to further explain themselves and their experiences unrelated to the topic of the post, or disrupt the safety of the space for transfeminine people.

This is a problem that I'm taking seriously. The purpose of this community as I see it is and has always been to provide a safe supportive community to transfeminine people. So with that in mind posters are now allowed to request engagement from specific groups on their post. This can be gender diverse people, trans people with unsupportive parents, trans parents, people who have struggled with addictions, trans people of color, etc.

I've seen a few people make comments on engagement issues lately and so I've decided that this course of action makes the most sense to preserve the safety of the community while still allowing engagement from other people when that engagement is wanted.

How you choose to make this clear is for the moment up to you. You can add a tag in your title, state so explicitly in your title, or write it somewhere in your post (try and do so clearly as I might not have the chance to fully read your post in time).

Moderator action may be taken per your request. I'm choosing to keep a steady eye on how this affects the community and to ensure that it isn't being weaponized against marginalized people within our community. I ask that everyone is patient and expect some adjustment to this new rule. A certain amount of discretion will also be applied on a per incident basis, this is not a rule banning all non-transfems from the community just providing posters a choice with regards to engagement.

This new change has been added to the sidebar and is considered effective immediately.

Feedback on this change would be great. If you think some aspect of this should be changed or you have concerns please let us know.

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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by LadyAutumn to c/mtf

It's been a while since we've had a general discussions thread, and with the holiday season ramping up, I imagine a lot of us are feeling very stressed and worn out.

Spending time with family members is always a time, to say the least. Getting my family to respect my partner's they/them pronouns has been frustrating and exhausting. It enfuriates me that they can understand and respect my pronouns, but only because I'm binary gendered. Getting very sick of deconstructing the "them is multiple people" argument, as well as the "I'm still a lesbian even though my partner is transmasc non-binary" conversation. πŸ˜“

But aside from that, I'm actually excited about the holidays this year. And I hope everyone has something to look forward to, time with friends and family who love and accept us. We all deserve love, compassion, and acceptance, and to be able to enjoy a time of year that should be representative of all those things.

This space is 100% open and welcoming of venting, frustration, whatever you want to post here. And if you see cishet people disrupting you, disrupting the community, invalidating your feelings or opinions please report them and we will deal with them accordingly. I'm not handing out bans to every cis person who has an opinion on anything here, but this is not a space for cisgender people. If you're reading this and you're cisgender, you are welcome to post and contribute here. By all means, do so. But keep in mind that this space is not for you. You are a visitor in this community. How we feel, how we struggle, the experiences we as transfeminine people have come first every single time. I won't change that. And if you're going to participate here, you need to abide by that.

I just wanted to get that out of the way because occasionally we get an influx of people from other parts of the fediverse here and they are welcome but I continue to see cisgender experiences being used to invalidate transgender ones. And that's going to be a focus of mine going forward.

What are your thoughts on this time of year? What's been your experiences so far with family, the good and the bad? Let's all support each other through this. And what are your thoughts on how this community has been over the last few months? I'd love to hear it if anyone had any suggestions or thoughts on how our community has been operating.

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submitted 2 years ago by LadyAutumn to c/mtf

I'm starting to hit a bit of a wall with voice training lately. I can find my resonance, I can adjust the positioning of my vocal cords and where my voice is coming from. I occasionally pass on the phone, and I work all day over the phone so I do get pretty regular indirect feedback in terms of how my voice gets me gendered.

But I am very much struggling with pitch and maintaining consistent pitch. It's just not happening and even when everything else is perfect my pitch will slip, and then I'll get misgendered. I cant seem to find a specific pitch and comfortably rest there. I'm also 8 years in at this point, I've been doing voice training for a long time and I just think when it comes down to it I might be one of the women for whom training alone just isn't enough.

I've done a lot of research into glottoplasty and find myself in a financial position where I could hypothetically afford it. Most accounts from people who've had the procedure seem to indicate they've had great results with it, but there's a lot of people who swear that it'll basically render me mute if I get it done. Its minimally invasive and the surgeon I'm considering has good rapport with his patients and I'm confident he'd do great. But on the whole I'm hesitating a little bit and curious what other people think. I do IT work that involves using the phone quite a bit, but if I had to take time off work for a little while that would almost certainly be fine. I don't sing and really don't have any concerns with regard to vocal range either.

Are you considering vocal feminization surgery? Why or why not? Have you experienced similar things with regards to voice training, or has training alone been enough for you?

Feel free to chime in with whatever thoughts you have on the operation or voice training in general.

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submitted 2 years ago by LadyAutumn to c/mtf

I'd like to welcome @ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone to the transfem moderation team! πŸ€— Ada is one of the admins of the lemmy.blahaj.zone instance and a very active member of the transfem community. She has already been providing me with assistance in running the community and answering any questions that I have, she's a perfect fit for our second moderator.

The addition of Ada to our moderation team helps maintain the safety of our community and our readiness for more complex moderation issues. Please as always report any rule breaking you see and we will address it as soon as possible.

Thank you so much Ada for joining the moderation team! πŸ˜„

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submitted 2 years ago by LadyAutumn to c/mtf

I hope everybody's had a great week so far. I wanted to make some kinda post to engage everyone in a casual context. I was originally going to ask in the title "who has been really supportive in your life recently?" So if you want to answer that I suppose you can lol.

I myself have to work all weekend but its the evening shifts so I'll be fine. My best friend has been especially supportive of me lately, she took me out shopping when I was in between paychecks and even bought me a couple crop tops I wanted. I really appreciate her being so willing to do those kinds of things with me even tho she has social anxiety. Having supportive people in your helps a lot.

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LadyAutumn

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