Trans PULSE Canada grew out of three concerns. First, while the original Trans PULSE Project published data on trans youth, Indigenous gender-diverse people, and trans people of colour, we often had a small sample size for these targeted analyses and couldn’t do all of the analyses that were important to community members. Second, there are still whole provinces and territories without any source of all-ages data on trans and non-binary people. Third, It’s been a decade since we started collecting Trans PULSE data in Ontario, and so much has changed. Our earlier results have been part of changes to identity documents, human rights, and protection of youth, but these and other changes also make the data outdated. So, Trans PULSE Canada was born.
Married activists Tiq and
Kim Katrin Milan have imagined their marriage – as a transgender man
and a queer cis woman. In this video they question our misconceptions about love and marriage and offer a vision of an inclusive, challenging love. Kim says:
“So often what we are told is The Golden Rule: That we should treat people the way we want to be treated. But the problem with that is that is that it assumes that we are the standad for ther people, and we’re not.”
She continues: “We need to treat people the way that they want to be treated. This means we have to ask. I couldn’t assume the knd of love Tiq needed was the kind of love I needed. So I asked him everything: About his fears, his insecurities, and we started from there.”
“For me, it was a milestone,” she said. “I had had several miscarriages. It was like, ‘Oh yay, I’m finally at a point in my pregnancy where I know if it’s a boy or a girl’ rather than ‘Let’s saddle this kid with a whole identity’. I don’t think anybody was thinking like that in 2008.”
The pioneer of pink and blue gender reveal parties has changed her mind.
Binders are made to compress the fatty tissue of the breast. Implants are made of silicone and cannot be compressed the same way. While uncommon, they are even known to rupture and pop, which could result in you losing not only your breasts but possibly even your life.
If you are a male-at-birth genderfluid person who has fluctuating chest dysphoria, please instead of implants consider:
-using breastforms
-using a push-up bra (this will be particularly helpful if you choose to start HRT, as you will start to build up breast tissue)
-If you happen to have the money and happen to get liposuction, it’s also not unheard of for people to have the fat “transferred” to their breasts. If you do this you will be able to bind because it will be the fatty tissue that binders are intented for rather than silicone.
As nonbinary people, our dysphoria is uncommon, and hardly ever talked about. Safety issues like these hardly ever come up for binary trans people, so we need to make knowledge like this more widespread to keep our fellow nonbinary people safe. Share to spread the word save a gendefluid person considering binding their implants.
Fluctuating chest dysphoria…that’s a legit, accepted thing??? O_O
Not only is it legit, but it’s common too! Even the most painfully dysphoric binary trans people say it’s not always constantly in their face. It can even be a subconscious thing in the back of your mind while you’re focused on something else. Fluctuating feelings of dysphoria are completely normal.
She says that her transmasculine image was partly influenced by artists like David Bowie, Bono (!), Liberace, Prince, and Austin Powers.
As a kid, they felt “really androgynous”:
“I wasn’t into the things girls were into, but I hated sports, or playing with GI Joe. I always identified with the word kid more than girl or boy.” In high school, they would have crushes on boys, “but I didn’t feel like a girl liking a guy. Love stories in movies were very alienating to me.”
Dorian does not define as a drag king:
“I’m not a woman dressing as a man, it’s so much more complex than that” – nor do they feel like a man all the time. “When I came across ‘gender fluid’, I was like: that term actually really resonates with me,” they say. “But the core of my being is not gendered at all – even ‘gender fluid’ is a form of identity that can put somebody in a box.”
They say culture is currently at a moment of admitting: “Hey, there are many boxes. And then eventually, if humanity survives, it’ll be like: actually, we don’t need these boxes any more. I do think that the labels are incredibly empowering though, and for people to fight just to be in the other box as male and female, as a trans person, is still enormous.”
On July 17 Dorian releases their debut album, Flamboyant. To Billboard they say that they are trying to reclaim ‘flamboyant’ as a positive thing:
“It’s been used as a derogatory term – a coded word for homosexual, queer, effiminate – and obvious as opposed to secretive, which is what you’re supposed to be in a society that doesn’t embrace you… Then, people started talking about it as something colorful or flame-like that you couldn’t look away from. ”
“I would say that the album draws a lot of sounds from everything from Baroque music- like a lot of harps and chords- to heavy metal with guitars and futuristic metallic drums.”
In this video trans woman Corey Bilous and her genderqueer friend Jamie Benz talk about how to learn how to love yourself as trans and queer.
Corey says:
“Another thing that people don’t understand is that as a transgender woman I kind of had this epiphany while helping Jamie through her stuff: That I wasn’t accepting myself for who I was. I was trying to love an image of myself and get to that point where I fit into society, and by doing that I kind of pushed everybody out of my life that cared about me and loved me for who I was, and I was trying to be something that I wasn’t. Kind of like what Jamie was doing before I accepted her for who she is.
So yeah it is awkward and yeah it’s hard because we’re both loving ourselves together. It’s not like I love myself already and Jamie is just there trying to love herself too. We’re both trying to love ourselves together and that’s hard, but what would be harder is doing that alone with somebody that doesn’t understand or without somebody that understands you.“
The character creator will give players
more options to make a version of the protagonist, “V” that’s more representative of
themselves. […]
An example of the options the company wants to offer player is that they can
sculpt V’s face with physical traits that could be assigned to to any
gender.
“The idea is to mix all of those up, to give them to the
players, as they would like to build it,” said quest director Tomaszkiewicz. “Same goes
for the voice. We wanted to separate this out, so the players can choose
it freely. This is something we are still working on, it’s not as easy
as it sounds.”
