Trans Megathread for the Week of 2025-01-06 to 2025-01-12 - Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Children of Time is a 2015 science fiction novel by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

In the distant future, humanity seeks to create new habitats for itself on distant planets, terraforming them and seeding them with life. Dr. Avrana Kern is heading one such project, orbiting the tentatively named "Kern's World", where the plan is to release monkeys le-monke infected with a nanovirus that will accelerate their evolution. Through an act of sabotage from an anti-technology group that has also destroyed much of Earth, the monkeys are never released, and the virus instead infects a species of spider, Portia labiata. The book follows the evolution of the spiders and their eventual civilisation, as well as a remnant of humanity that fled to Kern's World hoping to find paradise.

also children of ruin and children of memory, the sequels, are really good

Join our public Matrix server! https://matrix.to/#/#tracha:chapo.chat

As a reminder, please do not discuss current struggle sessions in the mega. We want this to be a little oasis for all of us and the best way to do that is not to feed into existing conflict on the site.

Also, be sure to properly give content warnings and put sensitive subjects behind proper spoiler tags. It's for the mental health of not just your comrades, but yourself as well.

Here is a screenshot of where to find the spoiler button.

278

You're viewing a single thread.

278 comments

internalized transphobia

Every time I go outside and see a cis woman my age I become jealous and sad. I feel so inferior to them. They're born with the right body, while I have to spend a huge amount of time, effort and money in order to change mine. I have to be on HRT for the rest of my life, do voice training and go through several major surgeries, and even then there's no guarantee that cis people will perceive me as a woman.

And will I ever feel like a real woman? Even if I reach the point where I fully pass, that won't change the fact that I've spent several decades living as the wrong gender, and that I'll never have periods or the ability to give birth
- mood
  
  While feelings of inferiority to cis women passed quickly for me, the sense that I've lost something I can't get back by not having the right childhood or adolesence definitely lingers, and the lack of those "universal" experiences of womanhood sometimes makes me feel like there's this huge gulf between me and the people around me. (even though i logically know they're not universal even among cis women)
  
  I try to cope with the otherness of it by thinking about how stuff like this affects a ton of people. A lot of people lose the opportunity have a "normal" adolesence for all sorts of different reasons, we as trans people aren't alone in this. Tons of cis people aren't able to have babies and don't function "right" biologically. And while I don't think it will ever not hurt it doesn't have to define us.
- spoiler
  
  So much time and effort to be seen as (and feel like) second rate. Sometimes I wonder what the end goal of this even is. I don't know if I like the idea of being stealth, if I even could be, and obviously we know how cis people see us. All the work and pain... for what.
  
  Thankfully I don't want kids, I'm so sorry.
- mood
- mood

You've viewed 278 comments.