trans women make me feel safe
I love that trans women exist. I love that they make me feel safe, accepted, understood, protected, and free. I love that they’re pioneering an understanding of femininity and gender that I can see myself in.
Despite being cis and assigned female at birth, I have struggled with gender since I was a child. I felt like everyone saw me as neutral, or even a boy. I craved feminine things and feminine clothes, but felt they looked awful on me - I thought I looked like a boy in them, but I didn’t wanna be a boy. It caused me a lot of distress and I felt like I was trapped in my body.
My demeanor, interests and monotone voice were often seen as masculine. Then puberty hit, and people started bullying me with “it” pronouns. I was then diagnosed with PCOS and therefore elevated T at 11 years old and I had to take T-blockers (cypro) and estrogen until I was 19.
That I was able to do that is clearly cis privilege, which is also why I think it’s nuts that we argue about this for trans children - they do this for non-intersex, cis children like me all the time, no questions asked. Hell, they give the same shit for other young women just for hormonal acne. For me, it gave me a chance at a gender-congruent development and also made me stop growing; I was otherwise projected to be 1,80m, but now I am 1,66m. Other people deserve this, too.
Over my 20s, I grew more comfortable in my body because it developed correctly thanks to medicine and is fitting with who I am. I very rarely feel too masculine nowadays. It was rough for a while on Prednisone because that messed with the androgens, but I’ve been off of it for a while now and everything normalized.
But due to these experiences, I just have a hard time relating to many other cis women. The lesbianism might also play a role, because a lot of things about feminine gender roles are rooted in heterosexual standards, but it’s mainly my relationship to gender and what I had to go through.
I’m glad that there are women out there who understand these things. I like that they create spaces where you aren’t under a microscope; you can just exist as you are. I relate more to their experiences of femininity and womanhood than any others.
Unfortunately I also get misdirected transphobia (and specifically, transmisogyny) occasionally, because some people think any woman interested in tech must be trans.
We also tend to have other things in common, like legally changing our first names (I chose it myself in 2018!) and some hobbies like Linux, coding, games, MtG and more, so that’s a bonus.
So thank you, trans women.
Published 06 Dec, 2024