lov u 2

The 4 or 5 years old child who was born with a penis grasps at the thick wrists with their hands of painted nails.

The mother is watching, silent, outside of the child's focus. What is she doing? Does it matter? At any rate she is silent and distant.

"No!" The child lies through tears from pain, from fear, from betrayal.

Years pass, the child no longer paints their nails.

They ask their mother for a doll. She tells the child "dolls are for girls" as she hands the child the ugliest action figure they had seen yet.

As a child they had been (not so subtly) taught that to be gay was to have a target on one's back. A lesson they had witnessed be beaten into their peers.

Despite limited exposure to media, the child is still exposed to enough to witness "man in a dress" tropes and how such figures are viewed and treated.

As the child becomes a teenager they begin to meet and interact with queer people who were not in the closet.

The teenager becomes friends with a bisexual girl, her lesbian older sister and the sister's girlfriend who would later come out as a trans man to begin with.

The teenager is still closeted and repressed but does understand they are not the cisgender heterosexual boy their parents have forced them to be.

The teen is unable or unwilling to talk about the full extent of the abuse they went through, terrified to talk about what they know as the cause.

When the teen leaves their parents house and finally establishes a sense of safety for the first time in their life, they attempt to come out to these queer sisters. She is dismissed.

"I've known you since middle school, there were no signs" said the bisexual girl who applied makeup to the teenager for the first time.

"I don't believe you. You know we're accepting, look at [trans man]. If you were really trans you would have come out to us much sooner" said the older sister who was a vocal fan of rocky horror and silence of the lambs.

She cuts contact with the dismissive sisters.

She meets a gay man in college and become friends (who would realize that he's actually a woman nearly a decade later). This friend is accepting and supportive and encouraging.

Friend introduces her to a woman who went on to harass, stalk, intimidate into a relationship, and thoroughly abuse.

During a lunch with the abuser and friend, the abuser mentions that they'll never view the now young adult as a woman. The young adult finally found something that she could not tolerate from the abuser. The friend is wide eyed and silent through the exchange.

She finally cuts contact with the abuser. She hears from the friend that said abuser had failed an attempt at suicide. She is indifferent.

The friend invites her to a gaming group. She is the only non-man. Other members take an interest in making her discomforted. Friend joins in without fully understanding. She talks to friend about the issues but is ultimately unheard.

She cuts ties yet again.

The next time she hears from friend, friend has come out as a trans woman and begun transition. Friend feels terrible about what happened nearly a decade ago. She insists that it is water under the bridge and all in the past and that they should hang out again like old times.

Conflicts of work schedules.

She doesn't hear from friend anymore.

She is tired of cutting ties for her mental or physical well-being, she is tired of reaching out in effort to recieve support or to build community only to be slapped.