My Gender? I Was Supposed To Bring My- ? *grumbling* No One Told Me I Was Supposed To Bring A Gender

my gender…? I was supposed to bring my- ? *grumbling* no one told me I was supposed to bring a gender to this thing

being trans is good. i do not fucking care like “oh it’s hard being trans there’s dysphoria” yeah i know asshole! i have it too! shut up!! at some point you either accept that you’re never gonna be cis and make peace with it or don’t, but if you refuse to make peace with it you cannot spew your self-loathing all over every other trans person who’s in a better place than you. you can’t say being trans is wrong or awful or disgusting and you can’t criticize other trans people for looking how you don’t want them to and wearing clothes you don’t like. 

i’m serious. nut up or shut up. i have ZEROOOOO sympathy for you the moment you turn your internalized horseshit on other people and start acting like being trans is some kind of shameful horrific aberration you need to punish the rest of us for not being as contrite about. grow. up. it’s childish and pathetic.

We need more trans radicalism. Throw away respectability politics, take the word "radical" away from terfs and embrace gender anarchy. Uplift the trendercore community, T4T, and start bringing the terms ftf and mtm into recirculation.

me: hmm i think im trans but idk really? who knows??

me: *if i could magically transform myself into a cis male right now i would without hesitation; i no longer use public bathrooms cuz using the women’s bathroom makes me super uncomfortable; when called by male names in public ei. “buddy” “sir” i feel happy; am scared to transition and come out, but still yearn for the day i have a flat chest, deep voice, and pass as male 24/7; hate it when other’s call me by female pronouns and names; wish i had a cis male body; flat-out wish i was a boy all the time*

me, still: HMMMMMM what if i’m faking it????? for attention? do i really feel dysphoria? i would not know,, trans? haha, not i. Simply a fake right here. YUp.

i remember being taught by my butch lesbian neighbor how to figure out if a button-down shirt fits properly, and her femme wife teaching me how to tie a tie. it was in my dining room that we used as a makeshift nursery for my sister. the walls were blood red, and the floors and ceiling were dark. the whole world felt like it was suffocating you in that room, much like life felt for me at the time. i was fifteen years old, and it had been seven months since my mother had last spoken to me. my father was drinking. i was failing my classes partially because my brain couldnt stop projecting old home movies onto the backs of my eyelids and i couldnt stay present and partially to see if anyone would notice.  no one did.  no one but my neighbors.

they invited us over for dinner. the butch always greeted us while the femme finished dinner and we took off our shoes and one would take our coats and the butch would clap her hand on my shoulder, and the femme would touch my elbow gently while she took out my chair. they fed us, we played board games, they talked openly about being gay. they held hands across the dining table, and twirled their wedding rings, neither seeming to notice they were doing it. watching them methodically work, hosting this beautiful dinner, moving together like two pieces of an intricate puzzle, like weaving together yarn and hemp, like gears, like one soul split evenly between two bodies–

i had never seen love like that. i had never met women like them. women who wore athletic sandals in november. women who wore sundresses with denim and cowboy boots and called her wife “sonnyboy,” whose wife was always quite put together, button-down buttoned to the top, tie straight (with the constant help of her wife), hair short & cropped to the scalp all the way round. women who both did the dishes. 

i didn’t know love like that was an option. i had only been shown angry, volatile love. i didn’t know i could be a woman like that. or rather, i didn’t know i could be loved as that kind of a woman. i had been taught that women like that are lonely. they’re ugly. but i watched her. her crisp leather jacket, her darkwash, baggy jeans on summer days that she folded once over her brown boots with the yellow shoelaces. she wasn’t ugly. i watched her, and i bought brown boots.