Content Warning: Transgressive. Unneeded qualifier: I am a trans woman.
What are we going to do with transgender people, who exist, and the overwhelming amount of people who disbelieve their validity as sane human beings?
How do we balance the nuance of it all in such a complicated and ever changing society which is broken in its reliance on capitalistic moralities and already underserves far, far too many?
How do we take care of everyone while addressing these matters?
It starts with the big problem in those questions.
What People Don’t Get About Trans People
We know what sex we were born as and you do not need to tell us.
Normal trans people everywhere are not a monolith with the enraged and obscene voices chosen for amplification by the algorithms designed by… who?
The sentiment—’trans people just want to survive’—is not a platitude at all. We want to walk outside at the park and take our own damn self to the movie theater and push our children in the cart at the grocery store and we don’t want to worry about some insane guy who has been riled up by dastardly politics to wish us dead for existing and take efforts to make us feel unwelcome or far worse. That’s not something we like having to deal with everyday.
Trans people everywhere are tired of idiots repeating the birthed sex of our bodies to our faces. These are the very same people who repeatedly deny a simple truth; there are social constructions of gender which are concepts of culture and they have been traditionally binary. People don’t fit in all kinds of ways. The roles are broken and incomplete and dreadfully incompetent at holding the nuance of truth. Everybody is everything. Still—we’ve been made the people we are—that can’t be changed—it is not a mistake. The world made people who they are for a reason. When folks are different there is a purpose. We cannot aim to destroy the will of people who exist in a way we do not like and that is not the same thing as maintaining this right to do that to another. You can’t gaslight us any longer—no matter how much you gaslight us that the term ‘gaslight’ is some kind of gaslighting. Stop being stupid and just listen.
When people who were coded into the binary fit backwards, certain things make sense to them. That’s not being gay. That can happen at the same time or not at all and it is nobody’s business. We need to stop that conflation immediately.
I’m gay for women—ask them. It’s not a thing we can truly quantify. Language is malleable but there is a very real truth to that, I promise you. It is not the same as the way a man wants a woman at all—please trust me. This has been my life’s greatest confusion.
I only knew of gay people growing up and that was not me when I was living the lie of boyhood. It took a movie when I was seven years old, and then a tv show when I was about twelve. The first taught my heart of exactly who I wanted to be and what I felt myself as in that most precious place; a woman and a mother in my heart. It was the clearest thing. The second was a bad episode of a pretty lame show in retrospect. There was a trans woman who was not treated as a prostitute—not a ‘transvestite’—they were just a different kind of woman and I recognized myself immediately for the very first time. They ended up being a lesbian too. No matter how poorly the production value or script might have been, the message to my heart was clear again; that’s me—that’s what I’ve been looking for. Still, 1999 was not a time when I would have ever pursued transition.
It would take the availability for the possibility of a menial place in society where I could exist as a respectable human and sometimes be recognized as a woman—from at least some portion of the populace—where I wouldn’t have to abandon all connection to my entire life and become some kind of prostitute to live as myself—where I wouldn’t have to justify myself to some clinician who didn’t understand the concepts of my being in the slightest. Informed consent is a start. Guided and informed education and consent is where we go, but guided by the people who would know what the fuck they are talking about.
The denigration of trans women into sex slaves and prostitutes happens all around the world to this day. It is the worst perpetration of civilizational self-destruction we’ve ever done and it’s getting worse than ever, in certain places, because we are at the inevitable precipice of actually healing the wound and growing up. It’s our greatest failure to ourselves and it’s because of two things.
The world’s many cultures are misogynistic at root nature.
Everyone has sacrificed to fit within the gender roles which were provided us by our forbearers and people have become engrained in the concepts out of spite for how they’ve suffered through it and made that some kind of honor to live by in their minds. They punish everyone who hasn’t done the same with their projected self-disgust.
The Overwhelming Circumstantial Evidence of Hormone Replacement Therapy’s Greatest Confirmation
Science has not established through any complete and justifiably-deemed peer reviewed science of the scientific ‘why’ behind transgender people. The way has been pointed in data and some propagated studies have findings which might be confirmed in time, but the true scientific method has not even begun to run its course on the reason for trans people’s existence. The common person’s assertion it has been proven come from the way all of science and news is absurdly impossible to pick any truth from at our level of perspective amongst the layers of battling propaganda.
The lived experience of trans people needs to be accounted for because it tells a very solid and consistent tale that must be heard now.
Hormone replacement therapy proves the reality of our existence in some future science’s proofs by means of the holistic healing it offers our entire psyche and body upon actualization of its full effects.
For the many, many people like me—everything just gets better, everything. Wrong flips to right in a multitude of ways that are uncountable near instantaneously. It feels right and cozy and like we are living as ourselves for the first time in our lives. That means something profound when you live it. It proves who you are as more than some delusion of a culture gone wrong, as so many would chose to maintain knowingly false belief of for fear of what that might reflect about themselves.
Bathrooms, Shelters, Community Spaces, and Sports—Oh My!
We need more money for facilities—boom. There are the first two; bathrooms and shelters. Men should have equitably available shelters as well. Bathroom construction should just be hallways with single stall gender neutral stations. It’s not that hard. We just need to put money in the right places. Do we really need to build THAT MANY planes and shit we will never use. Can we just admit that money is made-up-as-fuck and give people enough to actually live no matter what? Housing is a human right. Food and healthcare is a human right. Why do those things need to conflict with the abundance of the wealthy? Why can wealth not be retained in a way that is healing because it allows the world to grow steadily towards the place it needs to be without a great rupture and fall?
Fixing access to community spaces is up to all women. Trans women need to understand lines which are drawn in early transition. The womanly concept of mutually respect and heartful support needs to be empowered in both directions. Everyone needs more compassion for each other and to take accountability of the spaces they create and how they use their voice.
I don’t mention trans men because I’m being honest to acknowledge that I have a unique perspective and the focus of this piece is how misogyny itself sees trans women into the deepest crack of civilizational misunderstanding and holistically applied prejudice. We are misogynist’s ultimate scapegoat—no matter sex or gender—and in more ways than any. We’re the whipping girls.
While trans men face erasure at an even higher rate—people disregarding their very existence—broadly affecting, overt, and traumatically difficult prejudice is routinely placed upon trans women in unique ways. Many parts of this piece written exclusively from the perspective of a trans woman will apply directly across the line to trans masculine people. A trans man will need to speak on the rest and tell me if I’m wrong.
People need more money—systems of capital must be rebuilt. The entire infrastructure of civilization has been collapsed for decades and we just keep propping it up with nonsense. Let’s just admit we fucked up the math and FLEX on China then start all over and let them cry about it.
Inclusion in sports is complicated—very complicated—especially for trans women. More completed science is needed for drawing from fact for answers either way. Data does prove that capabilities in all children are equal until puberty when removed from societal conditioning. That science has been seen through as far as I’ve been able to glean from my place as an average citizen. It feels impossible to know for sure to me.
The lines on when it is appropriate to allow transgender women with history of testosterone based puberty—those people seen as having most advantage—along with the inverse of trans men remaining in women’s sports while beginning transition—will need lines drawn on when that testosterone becomes a disqualifier for admittance.
I can only speak of my opinion but I like my opinion a lot on this one coming up. Full contact sports should just be a ‘no’ for trans women who have undergone any significant portion of testosterone-based puberty—unless it’s fully and independently agreed upon by the participants and is not a part of anything but a private sporting venture.
The effects of testosterone on trans women erodes as time goes on as long as they are undergoing hormone replacement therapy. That doesn’t mean we should have access to play football or fight or smash in hockey or whatever. It feels innately wrong for these same trans women to play in leagues where other women might feel forced to compete and be stripped of scholarship, accolades, or livelihood. Still, trans women should be allowed to skip their torture-puberty and let science allow them the life of their dreams. If a trans woman has only had an estrogen based puberty—no matter if its from pills—than they should have fullest access to it all. Recreational sports and teenagers playing fucking volleyball should be entirely relaxed about either way.
If we’re going to be fair and honest—that feels fair and honest.
Children and Gender Identity
There should be an honest effort to deconstruct all preconceptions of gender expectation for children which continues at a reasonable pace throughout society’s future until it is gone. We deserve better for our future than to leave people unpacking who they really are as adults.
If we stop putting people into boxes which are strictly defined then we’ll find an ease to the way people settle into their authentic expressions as they reach adulthood and much confusion can be avoided.
Kids who’ve known who they are for a long time should get to do the puberty which allows them their best life. Teenagers who are stricken by hormonal urges to transition should have a real and well thought out path to walk which does not push them along, nor scare them away, where they are allowed to explore that reality. Teenagers make mistakes and that needs to be protected against. If there is a path to living as who they want then we can save those kids lives who figure it out late and will inevitably follow through.
For example; imagining I had grown up these days and finally de-compartmentalized the knowing I had been holding as a teenager—those secret wishes in bed at night and feelings watching movies and reading stories, experiences sharing spaces with women—then realized who that meant I was and desperately wanted to transition just as my testosterone based puberty kicked in; how would I handle being told I then had to suffer through it until I was fully ‘disfigured’ and riddled with dysphoric self-hatred—as it would feel—before I’d be able to live within the comfort my mind and heart had been waiting for my whole life, and I knew was right there? I’d need some plan where I could work towards it and not just have to suffer.
Even if it took a year. Even if it took two. No matter what the science really proves on puberty blockers—which does not seem bright—it should not be black and white. Sometimes even teenagers really know themselves and we have to meet people where they are and make them feel accepted or they will keep killing themselves.
Early Transitioners and the Mentally Unstable
Early in a gender transition is the hardest time imaginable. It is a life reformation beyond the pale of ‘normality’. That does not mean the people doing their best to work through it and maintain an adult life in an already stress-ridden and velocity fueled society who show their ass are all insane. It means being a teenager again while you are an adult is not something there is a playbook for.
Still, there are people who are genuinely unwell that get some form of protection by transgender people’s paltry levels of acceptance. Not as commonly as many people would have you believe, but it happens, and that should be accounted for—just like teenagers and health care mistakes. Smart and well thought out checks and balances where we earnestly do the best for everyone need to be created and upheld.
‘Young’ trans people need to observe etiquette that is oft unignored because it’s disallowed to be spoken of; while we still live in a world with gendered bathrooms and locker rooms and shit like that—sometimes—trans people should bite the bulled until it makes fucking sense. That’s not law. That’s education.
Lingering Problems
Everything else—in the country I live in—stems from the problems of America in general; the burial ground we are built upon that is never acknowledged, the boxes of perception we force upon children and then punish those sometimes violent unpackings of, the horrible way we stigmatize changing minds and push people into prescriptions which don’t allow them to see through that change but instead apply a perpetual quick-fix so they can be sent back to work; witches being burnt.
People need to be accepted as they are even when its different than what people have seen before and it doesn’t hurt anyone else in a way that’s not of psycho-social reflection.
Medical autonomy and the ability for that to not affect our livelihoods is crucial all the of way around. Everyone needs to stop being a hypocrite. Making people take pharmaceutical company’s drugs that were cooked-up fast and we will be seeing the true fallout of in years to come was the most blatant and heart-wrenching propaganda of our generation. It was shameful. Covid was real—the consequences of our societies unable to respond and protect most concerning. Making people jam shit in their arms which might fuck them up because big pharma owns our ass—to keep their jobs and go to school—is not acceptable. We all know it. This concession must be made by liberals who believe deeply in mandated vaccination. Just as conservatives must reject projecting conscious ignorance over the reality of transgender people’s existence to take away their chance at happiness through modern health care; for better or worse.
Everybody gets freedom—that is the answer. Nobody gets left in the cracks of civilization’s apathy. We never stop working until it is perfect even though it never will be. Most of all—it will not be respected or given credence when ignorant idiots disbelieve someone else about who they are—ignoring everything which doesn’t align with their own dogma—then claim that a belief of their own.
