Queer feels and nerdy thoughts
Some caveats before we begin. I will mostly touch upon the binary trans woman experience here, since that’s the target of the most hostility in this subject. I will briefly touch upon the transmasculine and non-binary aspects of this at the end.
I recently started thinking about 2 moments. The moment when Abigail Thorn, back in her egg days, in an amazing video breaking down the mechanics of transphobia, talked about being unable to be an expert on the subject of transphobia, on account of her thinking herself cisgender at the time.
You've probably heard this before, and you'll probably hear it again. These lines, about bodies and how they're “not your body” often get repeated. For some trans people, they may actually be an accurate description of their internal struggles. But the majority of us, including me, have a different internal experience. But we still often use these phrases. What I write below is not “the universal trans experience”. As I just said, trans people may very well feel disconnected from their bodies in such a way it doesn't feel like theirs. But I wanna explore these phrases, and what can hide behind them when said by people like me, who live in our own bodies. My body is my body, it's not “the wrong body”, I'm not looking to replace it with some other body, because that would truly be “the wrong body”.“I was born in the wrong body.”
“I’m a woman stuck in a man’s body.”
“I’m a man stuck in a woman’s body.”
Trans day of remembrance… It’s, a weird thing.
Yeah, I can never understand why would someone change their gender, but it’s their decision and I respect that.
an anonymous redditor
I will begin to say that, I know I’m lucky. Today, with the perspective of the present, and history in the past, I know I’m lucky. I’m not ungrateful, today, for the progress I made in the past. But living through it in the past wasn’t always as straight forward.
Okay, something that I see popping up time and time again is the “Is me not wanting to date trans people transphobic?” and “I don’t wanna date someone with a dick/vulva, is that transphobic?”. Let’s take a deep dive into those questions.
“We need to talk about the reality of women.”
So, I’m a girl. I know it with every feeling of my fiber, and that’s something I can’t explain, I know that is so, but, there are no supporting arguments I can give you to explain how that works. I can’t really, in any meaningful way, explain to you that my internal experience of how my brain operates makes “I’m a girl” an obvious statement. I can point to anecdotes, but the anecdotes aren’t my gender. The bigger question is “Now what?”. I’m a girl, sure, but, how does one be a girl? Or, to be more precise, how does one communicate to her surrounding “I am a girl”?
In an interesting turn of events, it turned out that a lot of my main issues in life had an explanation. I was able to finally point at something and go… “THIS, THIS IS WHY I HATE MYSELF”. This is my story, or the start of it at any rate. When questions I didn’t even know existed, started getting answers. It’s long, complicated, I’m sure to have missed something as I honestly have a bit of fuzzy memory of this time. But this is a text I needed to write.