To me it’s like the wording “you’re a man who became a woman.” It’s offensive for many reasons, but I think the biggest reason why it’s so offensive is because at the end of the day, you still called me a man. If you were saying that I’m “a woman who used to be a man”, it would still be deeply inaccurate, but much less offensive, because, well, at least you’re calling me a woman this time around.

Either way, no matter how you say it, this obsession with what I used to be according to you is not only offensive, but it is kinda creepy. I am what I told you that I was.

Oh cool, just what I loved to see when I open Piefed/Lemmy. A fucking dead body with no content warning whatsoever. What the actual fuck, OP?!

While this is true, I am tired of cis people defending us as a means to an end. I’m tired of this constantly being brought up that if they take away our rights, they will also take away other rights. Our rights have value too. How about defending us because we’re humans and we don’t deserve this, instead of defending us just to protect your own ass?

Because that’s how we end up with people who are willing to defend our rights but are not actually willing to do anything more than that. They’re not defending our right, they’re defending the status quo, they don’t want to improve things. That gives you the all too typical issue of cisgender people who come to our events and constantly get deeply uncomfortable the second we remind them that they’re part of the problem and so on.

A lot of our so-called allies are only allied to themselves.

I’m gonna double dip on this post, because I have another one to share. From the point of view of a trans feminine person, I will say this. Everything that women tell you about their experience is true, but you’ve been conditioned to believe otherwise.

When I was still trying to be a boy, I would hear lots of women talk about how they felt and how they were treated in society. And I was believing them, but in my head, without really realizing, I was always downplaying it, thinking that they were just annoyed and overplaying what they were saying, that they were exaggerating. They’re not.

You will get constantly interrupted. You will get followed in the street. You will be harassed by random dudes. Your experiences will be dismissed. Trying to be friend with a man will become almost impossible. People will allow themselves to openly talk about your body and your appearance. You will be on your own if something bad happens to you publicly. And you will be told to shut up and put up with it.

When I came out as trans, I had something that lots of other transfem envy me for, which is mostly instant passing, and I understand how one can be envious of that, but that also came with the reality of all of a sudden dealing with this, full on, 100%, no time for adapting my brain to it or anything. I went from having the experience of a feminine guy in the street to the experience of a woman almost overnight. That made my social transition quite shocking and quite violent. Traumatizingly so, I would say, honestly.

Most men, even the most scaring, even the best of allies, have no idea what women are dealing with on a day-to-day basis. It’s fucking crazy, and the reality is that even cis women don’t realize it because of the fact that it’s their whole life and they’ve internalized a lot of it.