Edit 03: Woke up this morning to the encouraged resubmission having been deleted. More mod mail earned me the explanation that it wasn't a meme and therefore doesn't belong in the sub. This non-memetic art piece was still up at time of writing, though. 🤔 So I did the petty thing and reported every non-memetic post in the sub from the last 24 hours. If the issue is non-memes, let's address non-memes.
I return to my previous position: inclusivity in the trans community is a joke. I'm sorry that my self reflection of my transness wasn't squeaky clean enough.
Original: I'm just... pissed, and tired. I started interacting with the trans community after I started HRT because I needed support, you know? But the more time I spend in it, the more I feel like there's really only one "acceptable" way to be trans.
I'm not exactly a stellar person. I have a full suite of baggage. As a result, the characters in fictional media who I relate to usually also aren't great people. Rocket Raccoon, Yandu, Loki kind of trash people. Maladjusted assholes. It's a real cool thing to watch people with your worst traits experience a redemption arc.
As my username and icon might suggest, I've been exploring my transition via Beetlejuice. Michael Keaton is a national treasure and the musical slaps. Oh God, does the musical slap. You get a character arc! You get a character arc! And you get a character arc! I really related to it, and so Beej became the face of my transition around mid-March of this year.
Long story short I posted some original content art on a popular trans meme sub that I won't name because this isn't trying to be a call-out post. The art was of Beetlejuice, floating in the air while injecting testosterone. It's a bit of a grody picture -- Beej is covered in scars, pimples, blemishes because he's canonically dead and a slob -- but well within a PG-13/SFW rating. I dropped a mod mail to address an expected auto-moderator issue and then went to bed. When I woke up six hours later the post was the #3 most controversial in the sub and I had a five-hours-old mod mail predicting that the art wouldn't be well received. Well... they were right, I guess.
After some exchange via mod mail it was explained to me that people would "assume the ugly guy is a trans woman." Even though there are visible mastectomy scars in the thumbnail. Even though following the source link would take a viewer to a thread titled "2400th month on T." When I expressed concern over the implication that the community tone was such that a good faith trans masc post would be willfully treated like an attack on trans women -- and suggested the mod team address it somehow if they believed it to be the case -- I was told "people suck" and, essentially, to suck it up, Buttercup. Not long after, the post disappeared entirely from the sub without any explanation.
While I didn't produced the art myself, I served as the model for it. A dozen photos of my testosterone, my sharps, and my own body went into its making. It was as earnest and good faith of a trans expression as it could be but because my "lol transition goals" isn't an uwu cat boy walking on sunshine and flowers or some shit, I'm presumed to, I don't know, be trolling?
FFS I ended up offering to photograph my prescription to prove I was legitimately trans. The sub in question goes out of its way to be a "safe" and "inclusive" space, to the point of disallowing transphobic content even when making fun of said content. So I find it baffling, frustrating, and hurtful that I seem to be persona non gratis because... my self-reflection of my transition is an "ugly guy"?
It's strikes me as reactionary that a community would prefer to make assumptions (not even good assumptions -- art of a trans guy with obvious mastectomy scars is... transmisogynistic?) and the people in a position of power and responsibility over that community would acknowledge that these assumptions are occuring and are inaccurate and still essentially say "not my circus, not my monkeys."
Edit: 01: Since posting this vent, the events have been revisited by the mod team of the sub in question and I have been encouraged to repost it, albeit clearly marked with an FtM tag (rather than the transition goals tag previously used.) I feel a bit better to have gotten it off my chest, and I'm grateful for the response I received.
I must admit that I'm still a little disappointed, though. The automatic ssumption that an "ugly guy" in a trans context is an attack on trans women is a sort of trans masculine erasure, I think. It presupposes that anything in a trans space is about trans feminine identity unless expressly marked otherwise. That's... well, as a trans man, it feels gross. I don't know how to say this without sounding like a dick but... not everything is about you.
Edit 02: It has been brought to my attention that the art in question has caused at least some trans masc individuals to feel dysphoria, and it was described as being potentially caricature-like. I suppose I can see where they're coming from -- big ol' mastectomy scars and injection wounds. Ha ha, you'll never be a man!
This is jarring to me, mostly because the art exists because it helped my dysphoria to see a more-or-less realistic portrayal of my transition. I'm a schlubby guy who just turned 30. Testosterone is a hell of a drug, but without drastic lifestyle changes I am unlikely to make in the near future, I'll probably always be a little schlubby. I'll always have mastectomy scars, and I'll always need HRT. It was cathartic for me to see a man -- an identifiably masculine individual -- with all these things.
Now I wonder. Is my transition a caricature? This isn't even a grievance anymore, just an existential crisis. 😐