#dread.txt

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A few months ago I ended up having a very long talk with a friend of a friend. She told me that she'd never really spoken to a trans man before, the only trans people she knew were trans women. There was a point, after the third time I reminded her that I was a man, that she just sorta of slotted me into her mental box of "man", and I could tell that happened because after that point she started trying to explain things to me as if I was a cis man.

I categorically do not "pass" and likely never will. I'm very short, my hips are prominent because I'm fat, I keep my hair long, charitably I could be said to have a baby face, I have D-cups and cannot bind due to spinal problems. To the majority of cis people I do not "look like a man".

But for the rest of the conversation I had with this friend of a friend I had to keep reminding her of how other people are going to view me, because there was no room in her mental idea of "man" for a man who is not treated as one. This was not malicious on her part, she was very nice to me, and I believe her when she says she wants to support trans people. I do not think she was lying when she told me how horrified she was to learn about how her trans woman friends were treated.

She said she was envious of me going out alone and how I need to understand that's a facet of male privilege and I asked her to look at me and explain why I'd be any safer. She was shocked to learn that I've been catcalled, been assaulted, that I regularly get spoken down to by cis men, shocked to learn I don't have a single transmasc friend who hasn't. She couldn't understand that I'm going to be treated the same by misogynists as any fat cis woman who doesn't wear makeup. There was no room in her feminism for trans men, because there was no room in her understanding of gender for men who are not cis.

Everyone who had something to say about "do you want to be seen as a man or not" is proving my exact point that people cannot fully accept the notion of men who are not welcomed into the boys club of cis manhood. The notion of "Man" is entwined inextricably with Power, Control, if I am a man that must mean I wear The Boot because Man means Wearing The Boot. You want me to chose between my sense of self and my lived experiences because to you, a "real man" would not have had my experiences.

You people are incapable of understanding gender as an internal sense of self and not as a magic spell. You fail to progress your feminism past a no boys allowed sign hung on the door of a playhouse. You are deeply fucking unserious and it's frankly embarrassing.

I have faced violence specifically *for* being the "incorrect" type of "female" in a female only space, I have faced this before I even came out, before I realised I was not a girl. I know plenty of other trans men have, it's not splash damage, it's all punishment for existing outside of "safe" normality. A punch does not hurt less because the person who threw it thought I was something I'm not.

It does not take a huge amount of brain power to ask "would it possibly be terrible for some trans people to be forcibly legally trapped in womanhood? The same way it is terrible for others to be forcibly legally denied it?" And the answer is yes it is violently stripping people's self determination from them in order to force them into humiliating, unsafe, and outright dangerous situations. This is very bad. This goes double for intersex people who are already constantly under threat from a rigid sex binary being violently enforced on them, and drawing sharp lines in the sand around a specific gender does not bode anything well for folks with atypical or varied chromosomes/sex characteristics.

- Gender is an internal sense of self, not a magic spell, and does not guarantee anything. Listen to your trans siblings and give space for eachother's experiences.

- Intersex people are not a prop to explain the existence of transness. They are in the fight with you. Have their back or keep your mouth shut. We do not need to step on them to justify why we are here.

- Silence the devil on your shoulder calling other queer identities cringe. He's a fed.

- Yes this means softboi ukulele music transmascs/MTG doggirl transbians/Bungenders/Arsongenders(I've never seen someone call themselves this but I think it sounds sick as hell)/starplatonic aceflux demiro polyams/whoever the fuck you think it's ok to make fun of because you cannot kill the beast within that cringes at labels you don't use.