hi

That’s another key part of being part of the clique you want to be a part of. You have to make sure you make it clear how disgusting broad shoulders and body hair are on other women, make it clear you think they should feel ashamed for going out in public looking like that. You have to really sell that you’re better than those women. They really made that clear too.

I’m guessing you’ll justify that cruelty to your sisters as somehow transfeminist because you’re just trying to shame others into stick it to transmisogynystic expectations while you’re enjoying the “transgender” free space the clique carefully curates for you.

I have to be honest I knew people would start shifting in their seats when the subject of dysphoria came up but I was not anticipating this level of catastrophically bad faith reading of my discussion on it lol

"oh you don't like when tmes try to convince you not to get bottom surgery? oh so you HATE trans women who have penises and think they're disgusting?"

i see it now, too, in the girls around me. i'll ask if they want care – a home-cooked meal, relaxed company, sex without the expectation of reciprocation – and they say no, no, thank you, i don't need it; what would you like, what do you want, because in their head they're still doing that awful calculus, still training themselves to disappear in the eyes of the people around them.

i don't think i'd have died without transition – not in the conventional sense, at least – but to take that leap, i had to stop thinking of myself as a human experiment in fuel-efficient living and start nurturing the anemic, atrophied flame of desire in my heart. i had to learn to eat well, to exercise, to style myself beautiful, but harder than that, i had to learn to ask the people around me to work on my behalf in order to enrich my life and give me the things i wanted.

and i did it; i learned. and it was agony, but courage is a muscle you can train, and every day i get better at accepting gifts with the hungry gratitude i never learned in my years and years as a sad, scared, lonely boy.

so be patient with the trans girls in your life. better than that: be proactive, attentive, generous; be forceful, if you have to, and learn to distinguish real discomfort from the terrified reflex of self-denial that so many of us once learned to rely on.

so many of my siblings, especially those who are awaiting or beginning transition, step into transgender life as fragile, apathetic beings who have spent their lives being coerced, beaten, and tricked into winnowing themselves to nothing, doing the work of the murderers for them, because they have been taught to believe that trans people deserve to live suspended, half-dead lives as punishment for their abhorrence.

they do not. you do not.