This is a story about an incident that occurred between Genevieve and I.
If you are trans and don't want to hear that other people may hate you for reasons other than "They are irrationally biased because I'm trans!" I suggest you walk away NOW. If you are trans and want to hear another explanation for some of the hostility you experience, buckle up because it's likely to be a bumpy ride for you.
Genevieve was not just trans. She was also ADHD and had been horrifically abused her entire life.
I've been told kids with challenges are fairly often abused by frustrated parents who don't know how to deal with these kids. I imagine that applies to not only kids with learning disabilities but also the LGBTQ crowd.
And it means when I tried to give her practical advice for finding real solutions to various things, she frequently shot it down as ridiculous spin doctoring. I've touched on this a bit before.
It also means she didn't know where trauma from abuse ended and issues from being trans began, so in her mind being trans was extremely extremely extremely terrible and I couldn't understand how bad it was and I didn't have REAL problems. No one but her had REAL problems.
So one day when I was trying to tell her to list out the positives of being trans, she very hatefully told me that was like asking her to tell her to appreciate having CANCER.
First, I have an extremely deadly incurable condition and HAVE, in fact, thought a lot about what positives come out of that, so I don't actually think it's inherently wrong to tell someone "So, tell me, what's GOOD about having cancer?"
This angle apparently never crossed her mind what with my deadly Dread Disease not being A REAL PROBLEM in her mind anyway since only SHE had REAL PROBLEMS.
But the thing I most wanted to say to her and didn't was that cis het women live in fear of unintended pregnancy and I've seen the comparison made between a fetus growing in you and a tumor. You know, speaking of cancer.
Genevieve spoke of wanting to get a uterus implanted and of wanting to have a baby and how much pain she was in over the fact that this was unlikely. Plenty of cis women have fertility problems as well but something I think doesn't really get talked about that much is how deeply fear of an unintended pregnancy shapes our every decision and haunts our every step.
If a woman gets pregnant out of wedlock, she's evil.
If a woman has an abortion, she's more evil.
And you don't have to be sexually active to end up pregnant. You can end up pregnant from sexual assault.
And my impression is that MtF trans individuals desperately crave all the makeup, jewelry, frilly clothes etc and seem oblivious to the fact that cis women often feel burdened by those social expectations and have very mixed feelings about them.
MtF trans individuals talk like they hunger for that expression of femininity denied them but I suspect they long for it in a way cis women do not because even if they were sexually assaulted, they can't get pregnant.
So I think there is an enthusiasm for feminine clothing and other outward signaling of femininity not because they've been denied that expression their entire lives but because the worst case scenario for them is sexual assault resulting in an STD and not sexual assault resulting in a bastard child.
That bastard child conceived via rape comes with the agonizing decision of whether or not to abort the baby or give it up for adoption or raise it. If you raise it, you're raising a child you will never look at without remembering possibly the worst thing you have ever experienced while everyone acts like you're a whore for having gotten pregnant out of wedlock and there's absolutely NO good answer for how to protect both yourself and your child from all this SHIT people will hang on you while you try to figure out the least worst answer for what to tell the kids, what to tell other people, etc.
So I think one "positive" of being trans is that MtF trans individuals seem to enjoy clothing and other expressions of femininity in a way and to a degree cis women typically do not because it means completely different things to these two populations. And I imagine a lot of cis women resent that enthusiasm and the way trans individual talk about it, possibly for reasons they either cannot quite put their finger on or wouldn't dare say out loud if they do know exactly why it bothers them.
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