Catboy Kate Bush 🐈‍⬛ Wire Mother

It’s really funny how y’all (transmedicalists) are so emotionally immature that you always assume every single trans person who philosophically disagrees with you about gender issues has never had to go through similar hardships to you. When that simply is not true. Plenty of anti-assimilationists have had similar struggles with severe dysphoria, that have led us to very different conclusions than transmeds come to.

It’s also genuinely quite sad how so many of the people regurgitating this kind of bullshit are minors and/or “baby queers” (for lack of a better term, I don’t intend to use it in an infantilizing way) who have the audacity to call other people “chronically online” for having a more complex understanding of gender theory stuff, while themselves having VERY little experience in queer circles online or in real life outside of a small insular bubble, and usually only for a few years at most too. Meanwhile, my multiple different circles of queer friends and long term acquaintances and I, both online and irl, who are all anti assimilationist- are overall mostly people who have been in a wide variety of different types of queer spaces online and irl over the course of around a decade, at least- different spaces with heavily varying views.

A lot of my friends who I met from various different circles had transmedicalist, assimilationist, reactionary phases when they were very young and still new to queer spaces, because they thought being “normal enough” and “not being cringe like those microlabel queers” would save them from discrimination from cishets, and even if they were gay or trans at least they’d be “one of the good ones”. But, after enough time trying to fit into the role of “one of the good ones”, you will start to realize how conditional their “acceptance” of you is. How the goalposts will always shift.

For example- maybe at first it’s “I’ll only respect your identity if you change the way you dress”, so you do, and then it shifts to “I’ll only respect your identity if you go on hormones”, so you do, and then it shifts to “I’ll only respect you if you get surgery” so you do. But the type of person who only conditionally respects trans people will STILL find a way to continue to move the goalposts forever and find excuses to never fully accept, respect, and support you- it doesn’t matter what you do to try to earn it. You can try your absolute hardest to squeeze yourself into a box of acceptable gender presentation, and it’ll never be enough for the kinds of people who just fundamentally don’t respect trans people.

I made myself miserable for years sacrificing my self expression trying to fit into the gender stereotypes opposite of my AGAB just to try to get certain people to- not even actually accept or respect my identity- simply not misgender me (because, like I said, I do suffer greatly from dysphoria), and for years, they did nothing but continue to shift the goalposts further and further out of my way no matter what I did to gain their approval. I don’t regret transitioning, and the further into transitioning I get, the more I doubt I ever will regret it. However, I do regret wasting years doing that (trying to “be normal”) when I could have been authentically myself, even if that means that now I have no real choice but to exist outside of the types of boxes small minded people expect everybody to fit into. I refuse to make myself small anymore just because my androgyny and gender ambiguity, the state I am the least dysphoric and most (relatively) comfortable with my body in, “confuses people”.

Assimilation will not save us in the long term, but liberation from patriarchal gender norms will.