the thing that happens to trans men's pasts is different from what happens to trans women's pasts, and i think the difference matters even though i almost never see anyone name it.
trans women get their pasts thrown at them constantly. every conversation about whether trans women belong in women's spaces eventually drags out "but you grew up as a boy," like that's a gotcha, like twenty years ago is more real than right now. their history gets used against them. everyone knows this. it's one of the most recognizable forms of transmisogyny.
trans men get the opposite. nobody throws our pasts at us. they just quietly pretend our pasts didn't happen. i lived as a girl for over two decades. i was treated like a girl. i was targeted like a girl. i was assaulted as someone the world had filed under "girl." and the second i came out, all of that became — what? practice? a rough cut? it's like people decided the person those things happened to was a character i was playing, and since i stopped playing her, the things that happened to her aren't mine to carry anymore.
except my body doesn't work like that. my body still does all the shit it learned to do during those years. i still flinch at the same things. i still can't go into certain stores without my chest locking up. whatever people decided about the legitimacy of my girlhood, my nervous system was not consulted.
and what actually pisses me off is that both of these things — dragging the past forward for trans women and deleting it for trans men — end up doing the same job. they both make sure trans people can't be whole. you either get chained to a version of yourself that never fit, or you get cut off from the version that did exist, and either way you end up with a gap where a continuous life should be.
i don't have a clean ending for this because i don't think there is one yet.
titsay
ellievsbear
vaporwave
gummygunk
turnnoffyourmind
andulkaphoto
