i can't stop thinking about this one very formative moment i had while talking to one of my trans guy friends at the time. i was like a year or two into transition, and all of my friends were in person. he was talking about a trans girl who really annoyed him for some reason or another, but i distinctly remember that he was really annoyed that she would whine a lot about passing, how to pass, and if this friend thought she'd be able to pass. he whipped out his phone at some point and pulled up a picture of her and said something backhanded like "oh this is what she looks like btw. like i don't think she wants to hear what i really think"
at the time it was really shocking to me, because i was still like yeah the trans community is all supportive or each other, so at first i was just like wow, what a vile thing to say about someone who made the mistake of annoying you. and why would you say all this to me? but the more i thought about it after the fact, the more i realized that he and the friend group like, didn't see misgendering as too low of a blow. that if you're a trans woman who annoyed him enough, he'd label you as an annoying reddit trans fem, gossip behind your back, and purge you from the social circle. he told me all of that as either a threat - like he was telling me how i shouldn't act otherwise face the same treatment - or it was him sort of accepting me into the group. like, he felt fine telling me all this because he thought i was a chill trans girl rather than an annoying one. it was just, textbook transmisogynistic violence in action.
every time i see a trans woman being purged from a social circle it makes me so angry and i think back to this moment. and don't let anyone ever downplay this phenomenon or tell you it's an exclusively online problem
