#tranfem

A while back I joined a discord that had a lot of other openly queer folks, so it felt nice talking about my own experiences. I introduced myself, said I was nonbinary and used they/them, and so on. Everyone was pretty welcoming.

I remember getting my first skirt and loving it (“skirt go swishy” really is life-changing) but finding it weird that one of the girls on the server reacted with an egg emoji to my post. I decided not to ask why (she often reacted to posts with a variety of emojis, often pretty odd ones).

A few days later some of the gals were talking about HRT and I chimed in with “yeah E is great, I’ve felt so much better after starting to take it.” Same girl as before started cheering and said she was proud of me for finally coming out. I was obviously very confused and asked what that was supposed to mean. She said she “clocked you as one of us” since I joined because “saying you’re nonbinary but having a fascination with girl stuff is classic egg behavior”. She also immediately switched to using she/her and feminine terms for me.

When I told her that, no, I’m still very much nonbinary and have no intent to be a binary woman, and to please not misgender me, she got mad! Said I had been leading her and the other girls on, that she was disappointed in me, that they were all wondering when I’d finally be my “true” self, and even accused me of being “afraid” of being a girl.

I tried to placate them all by saying that I do, in fact, identify as transfem on top of being nonbinary, so I can still relate to many of the experiences and memes and whatnot, but this only got the group even more mad because apparently you can’t be both transfem and nonbinary because “transfem means you’re a girl and nonbinary means you don’t have a gender”. So this apparent contradiction made them all call to question if I was even being truthful about my identity at all.

(Mind you, we had been constantly talking about embracing “weird” identities and talking about how societal gender is fake and stupid and saying we’re “proud queer freaks”)

The server was basically just a small impromptu friend group so there wasn’t any kind of moderation I could ask for help from, and everyone else was just kinda awkwardly watching from the sidelines. I politely asked if we could just drop the issue because it was too stressful and it was obvious we needed to step back and recollect ourselves — to which she and her friends all said I was silencing them, that I was making the place “unsafe”, and that the others should feel ashamed for letting me lie to the group for so long.

I left, obviously. A friend that was still in the server sent screenshots of the aftermath. The girl who egged me said she felt “unclean” because of this, still kept referring to me as she/her, and went on a rant about how this is the reason you can’t trust “nonbinaries” because we’re all just trenders that invade the space. Other folks quickly left in short order and AFAIK the server dissolved a day later.

The fact that they all doubled down like that when I defended myself was gross but also. The fact that only one friend on there (who sent the screenshots) actually tried to come to my defense and checked in on me if I was okay while everyone else just quietly let this happen made me feel real terrible too.

this is exorsexism

nonbinary doesn't just mean "not having a gender" it can mean having multiple genders or fluctuating genders or partial genders. also its a dick move to assume you know someone's identity better than they do.

nahhhh the way she looks at ribbit.