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I write a lot about my ongoing discovery of just how good cis women are to trans girls when they have not been preemptively made to fear us.
I write about how easy it is to get accepted as a trans woman, because I think a lot of transfems really have this fear of imposing. Because we have impostor syndrome for womanhood as social performance.
It is something that newly transitioning women need to hear. Our struggle and hangups and fears are parallel and often the same as those of cis women's.
They do not always understand the specifics of our circumstances, but the underlying struggle? They know.
And that's an important message.
But there's another angle I'm realising.
Cis women don't know that we don't know they know.
I'll give you a second to parse that one.
I think cis women do not fully understand our fear. They are welcoming, but I've seen them react to me gushing about how welcome I feel with slight surprise and minimising the things they said and did to make me feel welcome.
The reason is that they do not fully understand how fucking STARVED I've been of this stuff all my life.
A few years ago, here on Fedi, I read something that stayed with me. About how people who've been in an abusive relationship can burst out crying and have a huge outpour of loud gratitude after something absurdly trivial like their new partner offering them a glass of water or something. They act like nobody ever did something like that for them, to the bafflement of the other person. It's just a glass of water.
The reason being, of course, that in some sense they never DID receive this kind of small kindness.
A person that's been abused has a completely broken barometer of what is "normal". Treating people with basic kindness is the baseline, but to a person that's been victimised it feels like extreme, saintly goodness, at least initially. Because it's hard to realise that no, the horrors were not how people normally interact.
Same has been written about people leaving cults, abusive families, abusive communities.
Why am I mentioning this? Because trans people in general, and trans women in the specific, are kind of a demographic-wide example of that.
Like any abuser, a transphobe will make it seem like there's nowhere and no one to run to. Like they are the best we can get. Heck, some transphobic rhetoric will pose as the 'phobes doing us a kindness.
Here's the thing. Cis women do not necessarily fully realise that we never had a normal girlhood or, for many of us, any interactions with women in women-dominated settings, AS women.
I mean, sometimes they know, but they don't KNOW, know.
Yesterday I wrote about a nice time spent with a few girls that I am only getting to know. And I was gushing, both here on Fedi and to the girl that invited me to the thing. And I thought about that and I am realising that she probably doesn't understand how big a deal this is, *even* when I say how big a deal it is.
Because she, presumably, had a relatively normal time being a woman. So she doesn't understand why women interacting in a friendly and casual way is blowing my mind.
Because it's hard to convey that all my life I was primed to think cis women would reject me and treat me like not just a man, but a predatory, dishonest man pretending to be a woman. I know it's not true, but I've not *experienced* it being untrue.
Transphobes badly need to convince us (and themselves) that all, or most, cis women do not want us to live as women.
Most cis women don't *know* these words are being put in their mouths.
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Alicja
in reply to Alicja • • •Sensitive content
This is one reason why I talk so much about being trans, both to cis and trans people.
(I mean, other than the fact that I'm an attention whore /hj )
People are not mind readers. They will only know your experience - be it one particular to you or shared with one group of people or another - if you tell them how it is for you.
I didn't know how much I had in common with other trans women before I started having conversations with trans women about their experiences and mine.
And that helped me realise I'm a woman.
And later, I didn't know (and maybe still don't know) how much I have in common with cis women, too. And that knowledge is making me more bold, happier and I think a better person to others.
So I know super well that this kind of sharing can be a game changer for a lot of people. Some people figure things out looking at others, but some do need to share, or to hear someone share, before they realise "oh! So that's how it is. So that's how I am the same/similar/different to that other person".
The best way to defeat "divide and conquer" tactics by evil people is to communicate. As taught by every shitty TV sitcom from the 80s and 90s.
May 🌸 ~美~ 🌸
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MinmiTheDino
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honk if you want to honk
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spiegelmama
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Sundial
in reply to Alicja • • •It’s obviously different, but as a cis woman I empathise deeply with this.
I was diagnosed autistic in my late 40s and spent most of my life feeling like an alien, especially among women - not like I wanted to be a man, but like I lacked whatever quality made womanhood come naturally to others. I never felt like I fit in, or was interesting to be around, and I was genuinely astonished, if a woman wanted to know me.
Your post is powerful, really thought-provoking.
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EinsPossum, Hass-Ära 2.0
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Alicja
in reply to Sundial • • •@GoingDownWithSundial
Thank you! And thank you for sharing ❤
Silly Sarochka
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Nora, of the E-gemony
in reply to Alicja • • •Gin Kangaroo
in reply to Alicja • • •Only since my mid-30's / early 40s have I begun to deliberately cultivate groups of women friends.
The love and acceptance that I find in these groups is nothing like I experienced in my childhood. I know that it can't compare to not having a girl childhood, but I also find it wonderful and precious to be accepted in groups of women. ❤️
Alicja
in reply to Gin Kangaroo • • •@GinevraCat
Thank you for your comment ❤
Yeah, children and teens, girls included, can be vicious little beasts. I hear the support and sisterhood part can be somewhat hit and miss for many.
Irina
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lia
in reply to Alicja • • •I made quite similar experiences actually.
Most clueless cis people I met sure weren't very sensible about word choices and reading the room ("so i was wondering, ehh, are you a boy or a girl??"), but once you gave them an answer to whatever they were wondering, they just would shrug, accept it and move on with our activity at hand.
They'd then include me in gendered activities and spaces without any awkwardness or second thoughts at all, they'd be super relaxed about it, they'd clearly just take my gender as truth, and they'd get irate on my behalf if people misgendered or excluded me because they were genuinely baffled why people would mistreat me that way. It was as natural to them as anything else that I was a woman, it didn't even occur to them that it could be "wrong".
It took my middle-aged, cranky, Yugoslavian coworker who never heard of trans people exactly two days to completely understand my womanhood. When I eventually talked to her about the whole thing, she was surprised I brought it up, but said something that stuck to me ever since:
... Show more...I made quite similar experiences actually.
Most clueless cis people I met sure weren't very sensible about word choices and reading the room ("so i was wondering, ehh, are you a boy or a girl??"), but once you gave them an answer to whatever they were wondering, they just would shrug, accept it and move on with our activity at hand.
They'd then include me in gendered activities and spaces without any awkwardness or second thoughts at all, they'd be super relaxed about it, they'd clearly just take my gender as truth, and they'd get irate on my behalf if people misgendered or excluded me because they were genuinely baffled why people would mistreat me that way. It was as natural to them as anything else that I was a woman, it didn't even occur to them that it could be "wrong".
It took my middle-aged, cranky, Yugoslavian coworker who never heard of trans people exactly two days to completely understand my womanhood. When I eventually talked to her about the whole thing, she was surprised I brought it up, but said something that stuck to me ever since:
That she met a lot of unique and surprising people in her life, and that you learn things about the world and other people every day. And that it was just an interesting medical fun fact about me. And that's all. She said that to her, it was no different than when she met a black guy in our village and then found out he and his family are actually natively German. She compared me to her grandma, who apparently had a lot of facial hair, which ran in her family. It was just a fun fact about me that I'm trans, nothing more.
The validity of my womanhood was never in question to her, just whether I was a woman at all. That's the main thing really.
You really hit the nail on the head: transphobes really, really want to make us think that we're alone. That everyone naturally sees us as freaks by default, except those we have successfully 'convinced of our ideology'.
It's actually the same mechanic at play as with conspiracy types, crazy conservatives or elderly people refusing to go with the times.
They want to use "common sense" as a backup to try to convince you that their irrational fears are actually normal and how everyone else thinks. They're super afraid of having to change their world view, of being wrong about something. They want to make us feel like we have no support, not necessarily to hurt us directly, but because they themselves secretly feel ashamed and insecure about the world moving past them or judging them for something they don't understand. (Ideological transphobes who know what they're doing nonwithstanding, they're doing it on purpose).
That's also why allies can sometimes be insidiously worse than clueless folks. Allies might just as well have the same thought patterns as transphobes, but end the thought process on "...but it would be mean to misgender them, I should be nice and supportive."
They still fundamentally think we're freaks, they just think it's ethically good to be nice to freaks.
Before my coworker experience, I always felt that even if cis people accept us, they at best mentally create a third category: women, men and "trans". Or that they'd always see me as a guy who wants to be a woman and who they needed to be respectful of not to hurt their feelings. But that isn't the case. They just see me as a woman with a medical history.
Transphobes are the only ones questioning people's genders' validity. Normal people don't even have that thought process, because validity isn't an idea they associate with gender.
Jacqueline
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