Today I went to Trans Pride in London. I wanted to go with just one or two friends because I'm really burnt out from organising atm. But I knew several trans people who wanted to go but had no one to go with, so I ended up organising a (mainly transmasc) group anyway because no one else was going to do it and I didn't want them to miss out. I had an OK time, but 90% of my energy was spent on making sure everyone else was having a good time, which is exactly what I'm burnt out from, so that was frustrating.
On the way there, one of my transmasc friends asked if I was coming climbing tomorrow. I didn't know what they were talking about, so I asked and it turned out that another transmasc mutual friend had organised a climbing session for a small group of us who used to climb together last year. Except they hadn't bothered messaging me about it because apparently they thought I would find out through other people so there was no need to contact me directly. They even explicitly mentioned that I might be coming to others, they just never told me.
This mutual friend is someone who I went really out of my way last year to incorporate into our pre-existing small climbing group. I knew that they were new in town, unemployed and lonely so I made a point of deliberately inviting them to join us and even rearranged the times of our regular climbing sessions to suit them better. They moved away a few months ago, but they've come back for a week and organised this meetup, only without messaging me.
The clincher is that everyone in the small climbing group apart from me is a cis woman or transmasc. This is a group I went out of my way to create to help specific people feel included. And the twist is how easily it lapses into an effectively AFAB-only climbing group just through these little accidents and oversights that I would never dream of doing in reverse. And that me trying to explaining how the fact that it is coincidentally the one transfem who is mysteriously "unintentionally" sidelined, is so easily brushed off by others as an overreaction by me to an accidental oversight.
I am so so tired of being the one person who goes out of my way to give a damn, to care about others' wellbeing, only to never get any of that in return because I am mentally categorised by others as something less than a full person. It is always weird to be in a group of people who, deep down, almost certainly believe that they have a more innate connection to womanhood and misogyny than me, while I'm the one actually doing the feminised labour of caring for them. And that I, like the trope of the overworked mother who is "accidentally" left out of a family activity that her husband and kids are off enjoying, can't complain about it without seeming like a petty harridan.
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