Nervous Chirping

"am i normal" is not as helpful question to ask as "are intrusive thoughts causing me frequent distress?" and "would my life be better if i could find a way to feel less distress/learn to tolerate the distress?"

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Idk, probably existing just to serve others, never stopping to as much as think what they want, and terrified that if they don't perform the exact role of woman, wife, mother and grandmother that's expected of them, they will be punished, rejected and abandoned by everyone they care about? Which is what patriarchy teaches you.

Autonomy is a muscle you need to train. For a lot of older people performing the gender role of woman, it atrophied when they were teenagers.

I went silent because I was just hoping I wasn't going to get called a slur but what she said was 1000000x worse than getting called tranny or faggot or dyke. She said "you know, I thought the same thing when I was younger. but I had to give that up because I wanted to see my kids again. you'll grow out of it" in a wistful tone

That interaction threw me right back into being 15 and finally accepting myself as a trans man... with the idea that I had to give up on ever being loved romantically and having kids. And every single moment I spent pre-transition worrying about if I did something that made me fail at being a woman that day and get me harassed in the bathroom. And every single 'ally' who looked at my pre-transition, child-self and said "it's such a shame you're trans, you were such a pretty girl". That interaction said "this is your future if you don't get up and fight. this is your future if you keep letting people step all over you."

So for someone to be simply gay or lesbian in 1996 meant even if they were mostly safe (earlier you could be locked up for that alone) they’d never be able to have kids or marry. If you had kids you best keep your mouth shut and present straight.

My partner and I can't really move back to where we're from because we wouldn't be safe. Our home country might have legalized gay marriage recently, but that doesn't mean the general area we're from (very rural) wouldn't be very hostile to us being read as a queer couple and me being trans. The latter they'd absolutely find out about because people are nosy and everyone knows each other, including my parents.

Church of Prophet Elias. Amorgos, Greece.