If you're dating a transfem, especially a butch one or a tall one or a big one you gotta just... not treat her like something to be afraid of. Like in a world where we are constantly painted as rapists, aggressors, hysterical bitches, and monsters you gotta fuckin stop and wonder how many times your girl has defanged herself. How many times has she dipped her shoulders and bowed her head because she was scared of being 'the bad one'? How many injustices and slights has she let slide because she wants to be soft and to be loved?
What does it do to her when you're too scared to have the hard conversations with her? How does the person you love feel when you show her even at home she is reduced to a potential for violence? If you avoid her, what thorns and poison does she imagine within and around herself?
If you want to love us, give us the dignity of trust. Talk to us like reasonable adults and let us feel. Don't dodge us while you find the right words to say, don't scatter eggshells on the floor then make us feel guilty you're walking on them, don't use trauma as an excuse to traumatize.
I have so rarely been treated sweetly and softly by those who have loved me, and when you ask enough times and are treated like you are asking for something unreasonable, you internalise the idea that you are not worth being loved. It makes you desperate for connection but terrified of connecting, because the pain of making yourself vulnerable to someone and having them hurt you in the same way again is more terrifying than just letting yourself keep feeling that pain.
