you're not meant to love me (so love me anyway)

The stuff you bring up about how people treat B is definitely similar to how trans women are treated. But I’m a little confused. Are you saying that you think she is trans because people treat her like a trans woman? I’ve read the post multiple times, and unless the post is glitched or something, that’s what it said.

And I don’t know B in real life, maybe it’s one of those things where you just Know someone’s like you, and also it’s really just not a big deal at all whether you think someone’s an egg/closeted or not.

Why would a (supposedly) cis man being treated by others like a trans woman make her trans?

I mean, idk if you have read my blog more widely but I run local trans support groups and events which are attended by anyone from "questioning" to "out for 20+ years". Meeting a lot of trans women irl, especially those who have just realised, really makes you very sensitive to common patterns and experiences, and you end up noticing these in other people you encounter. 99% of the time when I meet a "cis man", I don't want anything to do with him. 1% of the time, I feel a deep sense of kinship and desire to help her. And that is based on observation of how she interacts with the world, how others interact with her, how she looks in unguarded moments when she thinks no one is watching.

What I am often essentially looking out for is a privilege dynamic that doesn't seem to fit, like, say, a mixed group of men and women where exactly one of the "men" keeps getting talked over by men and women alike, and where that can't be understood as another form of oppression like racism. I can see her reaction to being talked over and it's the resignation of someone who this happens to every day. Maybe the group is talking about where to go next, she takes out her phone, does something, then tries to tell everyone that that venue is closed today, but no one hears her, or if they do, they're not listening. She is doing the feminised labour of social life admin for the group as a whole, trying to make everyone's lives better by preventing them spending money and energy on a wasted journey, but as so often with feminised labour no one cares. Maybe she goes to the bathroom and when she's come back the group has moved somewhere else and didn't bother to wait for her. That's a "cis man" who is somehow far below "cis women" in the gender hierarchy for some reason.

To be clear, not all closeted trans women's lives are quite the same as this one I've described. There is a whole spectrum of responses to the closet that vary wildly and result in greater or lesser levels of being transmisogynised while closeted, different amounts of "the girl beneath" that can be seen by others (even if they don't know what exactly they're seeing) and impact how they treat you. There are some women who come out and transmisogyny hits them like a big wave, there are others where it's more like an increase in something that was happening all along. We all get swamped by it eventually, but not all in the same way and at the same time.

This morning it was a message I got from a transmasc acquaintance after an event we ran together saying they thought it went quite well but they felt like they had done most of the work and I hadn't done enough.

This was an event to which they arrived half an hour late, so I had already spent half an hour doing all the set-up alone. "That's annoying" I thought at the time, "but maybe they can do the clearing up." Nope! They told me when they arrived that they would have to leave early, before the event was even over! OK, so I am running the last hour of a two-hour event by myself, and then I have to tidy up on my own, put all the furniture away, do the dishes, clean the floor, lock everything up, then I can go home 2 hours later than them. OK, but at least we were sharing the burden of buying drinks and snacks for this event, that was what we agreed, right? Nope! Sorry, but they forgot to buy drinks and snacks, so it's lucky I bought extra, which is what I was doing with my morning while they were forgetting to do anything helpful. And after the event is over, do I send a message saying "It's not fair that I did all the work"? No, of course not, I just say thank you.

So what, I wondered, are they talking about when they say I did nothing? I ask, and they say that they had to send out email reminders to everyone on a pre-existing list of emails. This took them half an hour, because they did it by sending each one individually rather than putting a list of addresses in the BCC bar which would've taken less than a minute. So from their PoV this is what happened: they spent half an hour sending emails and I didn't help. Then they came to the venue, we both ran the event for an hour, then they left. Therefore I did 1 hour of work to their 1.5 hours, which is unfair, hence the message.

I was trying to work out how the fuck this person could've reached adulthood with what appears to be a total lack of object permanence. As soon as they left the venue, the dishes ceased to exist, so no one had to clean them; the chairs ceased to exist, so no one had to put them away; the attendees ceased to exist, so no one had to run the event for another hour.

And then I remembered that this person grew up with paid domestic servants (and not for reasons of disability but rather for reasons of economics), and still has them because they live with their wealthy parents. This is someone who doesn't think about doing the dishes, because they have never done the dishes. This is someone who dumps their dirty clothes on the floor, and the next day they are clean and folded. This whole thing is about gender, yes, but I have known cis women and men who behaved exactly the same way, because it's also about socioeconomic class.

In my post about the mental health crisis line I used to work for, I talked about how charities like that often attract people from a high socioeconomic class who see working there as more of a vanity project that looks good to their peers than as a genuine opportunity to help people who are suffering. And if your volunteer team is of a high socioeconomic class, but the people you're helping are typically of a low socioeconomic class (as trans people generally are), it can be a really dangerous dynamic that becomes at best paternalistic and at worst pseudo-colonial, because the stark privilege dynamic means the volunteers are primed by their own bigotry to not care about the lived experience of those they are "helping".

So, after this criticism, the group has rebranded to "FLINTA", a category that explicitly includes trans lesbians, but also: all straight women, all intersex people irrespective of gender or sexuality, all non-binary people irrespective of sexuality, all trans men, and all agender people irrespective of sexuality. The majority of people on Earth are FLINTA, and the majority of them are exclusively attracted to men (because they are straight women)! That's not a sapphic group any more!

I found this really frustrating because the problem was never the admissions criteria for the group, but rather the fact that we couldn't know in advance how transphobic the organisers were. If a sapphic group is run entirely by cis women, that is frankly already an amber flag, and to counteract it it needs to say something like this: "We encourage all trans women and all non-binary people (no matter their assigned gender) who consider themselves sapphic to attend. We know transfeminine people have historically been excluded from spaces like this and we want to make it as clear as possible that we encourage you to join." Otherwise most of us will always be too nervous about abuse to attend at all.

Instead of doing that, they responded by also opening the doors to trans men and straight women, which is an extra insult because it suggests that they think trans lesbians don't count as "lesbians" in the first place. To respond to a request to be more accommodating of trans women by saying, "sure, what the heck, in fact everyone might as well join!" is just another way of saying you didn't really want us.

And even with these changes, I still don't feel welcome, because FLINTA (essentially "anyone but cis men") is a category that has historically excluded many transfems in practice even if not in theory. A cis woman can show up to a FLINTA event wearing whatever she wants and always be welcome. A trans woman will often feel compelled to present as femininely as possible, especially because FLINTA includes a lot of cishet women who will just call you a man if they clock you because they have no tact or experience with queer identities at all. If you show up in trousers and no make-up as a transfem there's a chance you might not even be allowed in the room, so it can often serve as a gender presentation barrier that is exclusively applied to us.