something i’ve noticed is that, even in left-leaning spaces, cis people love to deny the existence of pre-transition trans people. you will propose the idea of ralsei being a trans woman and people flock to the comments saying “he’s a feminine man! he doesn’t need to be a trans woman!” you say that jax is trans and people tell you “he’s just gender non-conforming”.
if you told a 2016 undertale fan that mad dummy is a trans woman, they wouldn’t believe you in the slightest, but now that we have mad mew mew in the console ports and Pink in deltarune, they’re fully willing to accept it.
cis people will readily accept canon trans characters that say they’re trans, and headcanons of trans characters (so long as they’re post-transition), but as soon as you say “i think this character’s an egg” they start to get defensive. they bring up feminine men as an excuse for eggs to be cis. they say that you’re erasing feminine men, that you’re upholding gender norms and the patriarchy. you tell them about symbolism and they call it coincidence. you show them the in-character evidence and they say it doesn’t mean anything, men can do that too. you tell them about your shared experiences and they say you’re projecting, you’re just seeing it that way because you’re trans.
they tell you trans people can’t exist pre-transition. they’ll never say those words, because it sounds so obviously transphobic, so ignorant, but they’ll gladly uphold the idea; they’ll gladly tell you that a character can’t be pre-transition because there’s no proof. there is no such thing as an egg. there is only post-transition trans people, and what they were like before they came out.
