Today I went to Trans Pride in London. I wanted to go with just one or two friends because I'm really burnt out from organising atm. But I knew several trans people who wanted to go but had no one to go with, so I ended up organising a (mainly transmasc) group anyway because no one else was going to do it and I didn't want them to miss out. I had an OK time, but 90% of my energy was spent on making sure everyone else was having a good time, which is exactly what I'm burnt out from, so that was frustrating.
On the way there, one of my transmasc friends asked if I was coming climbing tomorrow. I didn't know what they were talking about, so I asked and it turned out that another transmasc mutual friend had organised a climbing session for a small group of us who used to climb together last year. Except they hadn't bothered messaging me about it because apparently they thought I would find out through other people so there was no need to contact me directly. They even explicitly mentioned that I might be coming to others, they just never told me.
This mutual friend is someone who I went really out of my way last year to incorporate into our pre-existing small climbing group. I knew that they were new in town, unemployed and lonely so I made a point of deliberately inviting them to join us and even rearranged the times of our regular climbing sessions to suit them better. They moved away a few months ago, but they've come back for a week and organised this meetup, only without messaging me.
The clincher is that everyone in the small climbing group apart from me is a cis woman or transmasc. This is a group I went out of my way to create to help specific people feel included. And the twist is how easily it lapses into an effectively AFAB-only climbing group just through these little accidents and oversights that I would never dream of doing in reverse. And that me trying to explaining how the fact that it is coincidentally the one transfem who is mysteriously "unintentionally" sidelined, is so easily brushed off by others as an overreaction by me to an accidental oversight.
I am so so tired of being the one person who goes out of my way to give a damn, to care about others' wellbeing, only to never get any of that in return because I am mentally categorised by others as something less than a full person. It is always weird to be in a group of people who, deep down, almost certainly believe that they have a more innate connection to womanhood and misogyny than me, while I'm the one actually doing the feminised labour of caring for them. And that I, like the trope of the overworked mother who is "accidentally" left out of a family activity that her husband and kids are off enjoying, can't complain about it without seeming like a petty harridan.
Update to this post: the morning after, I got a text from one of the transmasc attendees at the Trans Pride group I organised accusing me of ableism and hypocrisy (since I have criticised ableism in the past, and there's one trans man in our social circle I specifically criticised for deliberately excluding disabled people from his events). The evidence was a comment I made about how difficult the London Underground is as a wheelchair user. This he decided to interpret as a comment about how annoying wheelchair users are to cater for. He is not a wheelchair user himself, to be clear. Although both I and my wife have been at times and I am well aware of the issues from both the PoV of a user and a carer.
For context, one of the people who I organised the trip for is a wheelchair user. He had expressed sadness about how inaccessible London is for him because of the transport system, and so he never got to go to Trans Pride. I said I would make it possible for him this year. I made a full plan and itinerary of how we would cover the various parts of the journey, taking into account which forms of transport don't require ramps (parts of the Elizabeth line and Jubilee line mainly) and which parts require ramps but where we can phone ahead to the station to make sure they are aware we are coming. I posted this in a group with my transmasc friend who read and thumbs-upped it.
In the end, the wheelchair user couldn't make it for different reasons, so we ended up not using that itinerary but a different one I also planned based on minimising steps because of people's tiredness. My comment about the unusability of the underground was a reference to how the route we ended up taking would've been horrific for a wheelchair user: a lot of stairs, dense crowds, it just wouldn't be possible.
I can't help but feel that this transmasc friend has been waiting for an opportunity for me to slip up, even if he has to manufacture it out of nothing. I don't think he's doing it consciously, I think on some level he's frustrated that an uppity woman criticised a man for something and is just exercising his class solidarity to say "see, you're not so perfect yourself". And now my (calm) explanation back to him that he misunderstood my meaning is clearly being interpreted as an inability to take accountability for my sins and an example of my fragility.
Except I can help but notice that out of everyone in our social circle I am literally the only one who did anything to make the wheelchair user able to attend. My transmasc friend could've gone out of his way to do that too, right? Except he didn't bother and so it fell to me as it so often does. Why is it that the one person who goes out of their way to help a disabled person is also the one who gets all the vitriol? It's ok, I know the reason. It's called womanhood.
