your post about how trans youth experience different oppression because children are viewed as property made something click for me and i wanted to say thank you. when i finally got to see a professional about my dysphoria i really struggled answering the question "when did you first come out?" because i spent my whole entire childhood insisting i was a boy. technically, i came out the instant i was able to put together the words "i'm not a girl. i'm a boy." it just didn't work. i had to do it again and again and again. i couldn't possibly be serious. i was just a silly little girl, because that's what my guardian wanted me to be. and i had to be what she wanted me to be, when she had been so kind as to save me from going into fostercare. i couldn't understand before. because she treats me like a person now. and i always thought maybe if i had just been smarter, more articulate, more persuasive she would have listened to me. but it was never about me. i wasn't a person yet
Of course anon, that must have been such a frustrating and confusing situation with the added layer of the threat of going into the foster system.
It's deeply disturbing the way some adults will spend someone's entire childhood denying them their autonomy and then like a switch being flipped suddenly they're a person in that adult's eyes now that they're older. It's incredibly jarring and feels like something almost akin to gaslighting sometimes.
You were doing the best you could to communicate as a child, you shouldn't blame yourself for being a young person beholden to the wants and whims of the adult who was, by all accounts, supposed to listen to and care for you but failed you.
