it’s hard for me to express how heartbreaking it is to see gay people, especially–but not exclusively–gay women, buying into this idea that the closet is an idyllic place to grow up as a trans woman. that we’re socialized–without complications–in the way that men are socialized, that we reap every benefit cisgender boys, teenagers, or men reap because of their gender.
like. gay women, do you remember growing up being told you were meant to find a husband, carry the children you have with him, support them and him first, maybe to the point of effacing yourself? and gay men, do you remember growing up being told you were meant to find a wife, get a good job, father children, and carry on the family name and everything that goes with it?
do you remember realizing that you could never be this? and that, at the end of the day, the thought of being it repulsed you? that you were fundamentally different–flawed, even–fundamentally wrong and that everything you needed in your life was immoral and unnatural, or at least a disappointment? do you remember that choice you made? between rejecting everything you’d been told was in your future trying to make something of that pain–and sacrificing a fundamental part of yourself trying to be something you weren’t?
do you think straight people go through that? do you think that, being told all the same things, they know what it’s like to feel that panic and alienation?
i don’t understand why they can’t see that our closets are like this too. that we didn’t grow up internalizing everything society prescribes for a man or woman–that we grew up full of dread, and horror, and constant questioning of what was wrong with us and how we could possibly exist in the world. that, even if we tried to fulfill those prescriptions, we did so at the cost of our bodies and personhoods. that, as women, we were reckoning with the confines and disenfranchisement of womanhood on top of this.
that denial of empathy and willful blindness is so painful, especially coming from people who share so much of our childhood traumas. like, that people are so inclined to see us as Other that they’ll look straight past their own experiences is so impossibly heartbreaking and demoralizing.
