Fundamentally, TADC just hits different as a TMA person because these people are Not Equals. Jax is abrasive, rude, mean, but she's also locked in a cage with people who all have power over her. She will literally never have access to another transfem for as long as she lives, which is apparently forever unless she abstracts. She has no social media, no communication with the outside world, no works on transfeminist theory to read, and nobody who actually could ever understand what she's dealing with.
The moment Kaufmo knocked on the door it hit Jax that Ribbit hadn't given her any power over her by opening up, but Jax had just given Ribbit the power to completely isolate her in this inescapable prison. And she was right. If Jax had come out, her options would have been continuing to get misgendered by Pomni and Zooble for sure, both of whom knew but Pomni misgendered Jax immediately after finding out and Zooble only used this information as a weapon to hurt Jax. People treat Gangle like she's a poor little meow meow but she's absolutely just as much of an abrasive asshole as Jax, and she would have exploited any power she had over Jax for the rest of eternity, as evidenced by every moment she ever had power over anyone.
Jax pushing people away was the only power she had in a situation where she would never have power. Her isolation was inevitable. The cast would not all have accepted her, and she's viewed eternally as the aggressor (like every TMA person in history) which means that every time someone was transmisogynistic towards her she would have had to either grit her teeth and bear it or be isolated for it as the cast flocked around the aggressor and protected their feelings, each of these moments tallying up over eternity until Jax was left completely alone. This was always going to happen, this was the only way that locking a trans woman in an eternal prison with TMEs could ever have gone, and Jax took power in the only ways she could. She collected whatever insecurities she could on the others, knowing that it would never amount to a fraction of the power they already have over her even in their ignorance, and she used it.
She pushed people away before they could reject her in order to wrest that power away from them, she made them hate who she is instead of what she is so she could at least be personned in her isolation, and then she took her only way out. And I would have done the same, because literally anything would be better than an eternity at the mercy of TMEs.
