Untitled

This can be in small degrees, sometimes to a large degree, but what makes this hard and gets in your head is that it's 1) very frequent 2) gets applied to things you actually did wrong on top of positive and neutral actions.

For example:

you hug your friend -> to tme people you are trying to grope them

you are being sarcastic -> to tme people you are demeaning

you are overwhelmed -> to tme people you are manipulative

you are frustrated -> to tme people you're an asshole

you are mean -> to tme people you are abusive

This one time, I overheard a cis friend on the phone with her partner. She told her that I was being creepy because I sat down next to her on her bed when we watched a movie. She put the laptop there. There was no couch to sit on. There were two feet between us when I sat down.

That experience was a real eye-opener for me. It was rarely that clear to me what was going on. I ended the friendship just shortly thereafter.

There was another time when I started playing an TTRPG with some friends. There, this pattern started showing where most of my ideas were being shot down in unison. Meanwhile, the others acted like the speech and actions of my larger-than-life bard were my own. It was this paradoxical scenario where I got to contribute less and less to the direction of the game, while the unspoken consensus seemed to be that I was trying to commandeer it. Consequently, I got more irritated and impatient as the game went on, and that shone through.

When I tried to gracefully leave the game, saying that our play and communication styles seemed to differ too much, I was called an asshole and excommunicated from the friend group.

That one really got under my skin, because I can see that I was acting a bit like a know-it-all a couple of times when I got frustrated. I was not acting my perfect best. But I shouldn't have to act my perfect best to not be called an asshole and kicked out.

Even when this transmisogynist pattern is not as overt as in those examples, you can see it in the way other wince at you are avoid you, even when you are doing something harmless or mildly inappropriate.