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One of the subplots in the trans support organisation saga involved the group Instagram account. Bob, who started the group, was really passionate about art, and he wanted every single Instagram post (e.g. announcing the date of the next meeting) to feature original artwork by the volunteers. Unfortunately most of us were not particularly good at or interested in art, and we joined because we wanted to help the community, not because we wanted to showcase our art.

Anyway, over time Bob became increasingly stressed with the workload of running something like this. He started to express frustration that none of the rest of us were contributing artwork because the "original artwork" policy meant he was having to make the artwork himself every month.

So I wrote a message explaining, from the perspective of someone with more experience running things like this, he was putting far too much pressure on himself and was just going to burn out. I said a group that is imperfect but can run for years is better than a perfect group that collapses because you burn out in a couple of months. I said original artwork was a "nice to have" but not "essential" part of a trans support organisation, and it was great that it made us stand out from the crowd, but if it's causing him too much stress we can always re-use old art or make a bland post with no art at all.

He got upset with this, said that the art was really important to him, and I was denigrating what to him was the most important part of the group: the art. I said conciliatory words and we moved on (I assumed) with no hard feelings.

Bob quit a few months later for unrelated reasons, I continued to run the group for months with occasional help from Charlie (another volunteer and friend of Bob), and then one day suddenly found that I had been locked out of the Instagram and email accounts. It turned out Bob had mentally reframed my concern for his burnout 6 months earlier as "I think Instagram is a waste of time", and thought it was unfair that I should get to keep using something that he set up and I had said was useless, thus even though he was no longer involved in the group at all he kicked me out of it. And Charlie, being his friend, agreed that it was hypocritical of me to keep using Instagram when I had criticised it for being useless. I had to carefully explain, without getting annoyed, that I never said Instagram was useless, only that Bob's mental health should take priority over the "original artwork" policy.

But it made no difference. I, the only person trying to continue to provide community support at this point, was being kicked out by someone who had left months earlier, due to the classic transmisogynistic one-two punch of misconstruing your words and then blowing them out of all proportion. I never said Instagram was useless, and even if I had, would it have been proportionate to effectively close down a valuable community resource over it?

But after coming out, this whole problem has magnified by a factor of 10. Before, people just assumed I didn't like them, so they decided to not like me, but that was all it really amounted to, no actual conflict. Now, they read deep malice into every one of my actions. I can say something like, "I'm worried I'm not pulling my weight with [task], and you're having to do it all. Can you show me how to do it so I can take some of the burden off you?" and this will be heard as, "Show me how to do your job so I can force you out and take over." And then from that point on everything I do will be coloured by this person's idea that I not only hate them but want to eliminate them, and so when they try to eliminate me first they feel that they are totally justified in doing so, even though I didn't even do anything except genuinely try to help.

I think this is because people are primed to expect deceit from trans women, so everything we do is viewed through that lens. They don't realise they are doing transmisogyny, they just expect us to be deceptive so whatever we do, no matter how innocent, is subconsciously reshaped to fit the mould they have in their brains.

B is quiet, sweet and gentle, has predominantly female friends, loves animals, spends weekends doing butterfly conservation with a group of elderly women, none of that makes her an egg but it's definitely unusual behaviour for a cis man.

No, what makes B such an obvious egg to me is how she is treated by everyone else. A lot of men just avoid her, they think she's weird and effeminate. Women generally like her well enough, but they still tend to keep her at arm's length in a way they don't do with cis men. In a way she is being third-gendered already, like there's no established pattern for men or women to interact with someone like her, so they just avoid doing so if they can help it.

Last year she asked out this girl Alice, and Alice said yes. They dated for a few months, broke up, and continued to be perfectly friendly. Alice started dating someone else, everyone moved on.

Then these whispers started that B was actually really creepy, people started saying they had heard bad things about her (unspecified), that she had abuser vibes, that she had done all this supposed bad stuff but no one was allowed to say what it was, but it was definitely bad. And, really unusually if B was a cis man, all the men and women and non-binary people in her circle all immediately stopped being friends with her. She was uninvited from events, people even cancelled one-on-one meet-ups with her, she was barred from attending the LGBTQ support group she went to (she is pan). And bear in mind that all this is stuff I heard only from the people who cut her off, I am at best a distant acquaintance of B.

I ended up at an organised-at-the-last-minute drinks event that was hosted by a cis woman acquaintance on the same night that B had a month earlier organised a boardgame session, and everyone who had been planning to go to B's boardgame meet cancelled to go to this drinks event, to which B was explicitly not invited (I didn't find this out until later, I'm not really part of this circle at all). Incidentally, the woman who hosted the event made a point of telling me she was concerned for my safety out in public at night, and then proceeded to call me a man 🤷.

Several months later, the details came out: the "creepy" thing she had done was to buy Alice a birthday present. Alice thinks that's weird because it's not normal for friends to buy each other birthday presents and so she understood this as B expressing a level of intimacy beyond friendship. (Again, this is Alice's perspective on what happened). I know for a fact that B buys her friends birthday presents often, because I know some of those friends. If Alice had originally led with, "B bought me a birthday present," rather than, "B is being creepy, and I don't want to tell you how just yet," it probably wouldn't've worked to socially isolate her, so she let everyone's imaginations run wild with ideas about what B might've done. Only when everyone had cut B off did she reveal the details, and I understand B's social life is very slowly recovering but there is still so much suspicion about her.

I've talked to enough trans women in my time to recognise this story well. I personally have been lucky enough never to end up in that situation, but perhaps that is because I tend to avoid friendship groups where possible and prefer to have individual friendships that don't join up. Perhaps that is a subconscious defense mechanism to avoid stuff like this happening to me, idk.

But during this whole saga, a common refrain from B's cis woman and transmasc former friends was to respond to mentions of her unspecified creepy behaviour with "I hate cis men". That is, to position her supposed abusive behaviour within the context of gendered violence, even while not actually knowing what she did. And, having met B a couple of times and got a vibe, it fell to me to point out that some people that they consider "cis men" are actually not, which raised the whole "male socialisation" issue and whether trans women are oppressed before coming out, and then I decided I couldn't deal with that conversation with a bunch of non-transmisogynised people.

But at this point I am sort-of thought to be the "cis guy defender". People will say they hate cis guys randomly, and then apologise to me as if I am personally offended. No, I hate them too. But I feel that with a handful of alleged "cis guys" I can see the woman beneath even if they are unaware of it themselves. And the thing is, I don't trust non-transmisogynised people to be able to see that at all. Or rather, I think they can see it, but I don't think they realise what they are seeing, only that they instinctively hate it and want to kill it, so ingrained is transmisogyny in our society.

And the fact is that most of these "I hate cis guys" people don't hate actual cis guys. They love cis guys. They go out of their way to spend time with them, they admire them, they seek their approval, their favourite writers are all cis guys, their favourite actors too. And that's not to blame them for that, we live in a world where cis guys dominate everything, that's life. But it is a problem when your hatred of cis guys is expressed only against someone who (it seems to me) isn't one.

To deliberately cut off B's social life based on no information, even as you still support Neil Gaiman or Johnny Depp, is not the action of someone who hates cis men's violence against women, but of a transmisogynist who doesn't even know there's a name for the bigotry they are perpetuating. It starts to seem that, coming from certain people, "cis men", much like "AMABs" before it, often functions ironically enough as a slur against transfems. And that's not getting into the issue of those transmascs who say "I hate cis men" not as a fact but as an affirmation, that effectively misgenders themselves in order to label themselves as ontologically non-oppressive, which is a whole other (but related) can of worms.