You know what I have zero fucking patience for these days?
Friendly fire from trans people at trans people, and especially body shaming or mean girl-type shit.
It is twenty fucking twenty five. We are facing a global goddamned pogrom. We need ✨community✨ right now, to support each other.
We are fucking adults. The trans experience is vast and varied and fucking weird, and I mean that in the most wonderful possible way. What works for someone else won't work for you and that's goddamned wonderful.
So fucking act like adults, now more than you ever have.
If someone is an annoying little shit?
Swallow your irritation and fucking ✨deal with it✨.
If someone's transition makes your skin crawl?
✨Celebrate it anyway✨.
They're trying to get us all to self-exterminate. It's the Playbook from The Transsexual Empire, word for word.
Build. People. Up.
If you absolutely cannot take a single further word from a trans person?
Block them ✨and then move the fuck on✨.
Act like the fucking adult you're supposed to be.
I offered a trans gal who'd just recently had top surgery some support today. She was freaked out by how big her tits felt right then. I told her about mine, and reassured her that they'd feel normal in a bit.
And she took the opportunity to Mean Girl at me and body-shame.
And you know how I responded?
I doubled down on the support, and gave her the benefit of the fucking doubt.
Because trans people ✨need mutual support right now✨.
And don't go fucking looking for where this happened, or with who. She deserves her fucking peace and gentle support in recovery.
As. Do. We. All.
The next four years are gonna be awful. And like any group of people, some of the trans people we share space with aren't gonna live up to our personal ideals. They're gonna piss us off.
As long as they're not actively harming other trans people?
WE GO ARM IN FUCKING ARM WITH THEM. PERIOD.
And to be clear, when I say harm, I mean ✨actual physical harm✨ and/or ✨direct risk for physical harm as a result of emotional cruelty✨.
Not "they implied something mean."
Not "they're problematic."
Not "they make the rest of us look bad."
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@Impossible_PhD Amen to that, but also how damn boring would it be if we went through all the pain and effort of transition only to all converge on one look?
One of the things I’ve always found wonderful about queer people is how free they are to just be themselves and damn the rules. Transitioning and throwing off a lifetime of restrictive conditioning only to immediately bind yourself by one standard of beauty, and even worse to insist that everyone else does so too, completely misses the point.
You are gorgeous, but even if you weren’t who gives a shit? The joy that you radiate just from being yourself should be evidence enough of the wisdom of your choices.
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@kelidanovus @Impossible_PhD And yet, my experience outside of one very special community has been that unless you end up transing in exactly the right ways, you end up isolated and unsupported.
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@Stormgren But do you really get supported if you transition right?
Because that's how misogyny works. It chucks people under the bus and then victim-blames by saying it's their own fault for not gendering right or otherwise following the rules. But that secret is that everyone gets chucked under the bus, they just move the goal posts around until you've missed one and that's their excuse.
Take women's business fashion for instance. How am I supposed to dress as a woman in an engineering leadership role? Even ignoring the fact that I'm trans, there is no right answer. Not because I can dress however I want and it'll be okay. No... Because no matter how I dress, someone will have an issue with it. You can't win. The only winning strategy is not to play.
Transition is the same way. You can't do it right. You can't do it right for the cis people and you can't do it right for the trans plastics, either. (That was a Mean Girls reference.) No amount of transitioning "the right way" is actually going to satisfy people who want to hold their gender over you.
@kelidanovus @Impossible_PhD
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@faithisleaping @kelidanovus @Impossible_PhD A pile of excellent points here!
What you've said are conclusions I came to a while ago, so I've chosen to just do my thing, go my own way, and still support and hold space for others, even if I'm not up to their shifting-target "standards" as a transfemme.
But damned if it's not lonely. It's hard finding other trans women in professional (especially engineering) roles to share experiences with. The ones I have connected with, I treasure greatly and thankfully we all respect each other's choices despite many of those choices being very different.
And really, yesterday, the loneliness was getting to me, and Doc's post, as has happened many times before, really resonated. (Darn it Doc, you really do have a way of doing that.)
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@Stormgren :people_hugging_purple: It's lonely being a woman in engineering. It's way worse being a trans woman, despite what the IT catgirl memes might imply.
I'm fortunate in that my tiny little corner of tech has a weird way of collecting transfemmes so I know quite a few. But then I step out into the slightly wider world and find myself the one trans woman in a group of 100 cis guys. 😫
I have one woman at work I've made friends with but she's cis and I think she's forgotten I'm trans. I'm scared to death to bring it up in case the friendship falls apart. 🫤
@kelidanovus @Impossible_PhD
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@faithisleaping @kelidanovus @Impossible_PhD IT Catgirl memes only apply to software devs, so far as I can tell. Running telecom infrastructure? More of us than you would think, but it's a very different world, you know?
And yeah, I work in R&E, and there's lots of us here, but if I go to a internetworking conference like NANOG or similar, it's a lot of dudes in button downs and fleece vests, and most of the women in general are not in technical roles. That is changing, but very slowly.
Thankfully, I have a whole pack of cis women who have adopted me because they want to see me succeed, and we have bonded over how isolating it can be being a woman in tech is, but yeah, we don't talk about the trans thing much.
As for that woman you're friends with, I'd say keep building the friendship and if it's solid, the trans thing probably matters less than you think it does. Lots of hugs though, I know that fear, and it's so nerve-wracking to feel.
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