i just think it’s exhausting that trans men are not allowed to talk about the things they experience and are effected by every single day, nor create our own terminology or engage with any existing terminology, because for some strange reason everyone assumes by saying anything about ourselves, we must be making assumptions about or discussing for any other person, and only in a negative way.
we are never allowed to freely discuss and create words for our own experiences and we are not also allowed to use any previously conceived ideas from anyone else to relate to our experiences… everything we say is not “correct”, somehow it is inherently harmful to someone else’s experience or idea of themselves, despite us just trying to navigate our own way as well, and instead of holding nuanced conversations about it we are shoved down and made fun of and turned into jokes.
and i hate that it’s assumed that by talking about my own life and what i experience specifically because i am a trans man, i must be saying something about trans women, or nonbinary people, or anyone else - when i just want to talk about my own life and how i feel about myself and how the world treats me!
but i think a lot of this really only happens on tumblr… social media in general. all the trans people i know in person, all kinds of trans people, even many GNC ~cis~ people i know… we hold a lot of conversations together that are just so enlightening and collaborative and i feel like there’s a disconnect here with the current climate on whatever side of tumblr i guess i’m on that i notice.
abandon the idea you have of trans men as holier-than-thou diabolical happy-to-be-privileged-and-oppressive (lol, as if) angry violent malicious completely inseparable and identical to “cis men” who secretly hate other people and want everybody else’s rights to be squashed so that we can stand triumphant or something… please. my words, when i talk about myself, do not have a secret undercurrent of “since i feel this way, X could not possibly -” full stop. my statements about my own body, my own life, my own experiences, do not reflect anyone else and i don’t want it to and i never want it to and i hate that i have to constantly put myself down in order to be allowed to speak for myself. i am not a compacted representative for the experiences of all trans people and that is impossible anyway. i’m talking for myself.
leave us to have our discussions of our rights medically, socially, leave us to discuss about our navigation of a world that has a lot of very specific ways it’s decided to deal with us - none of them nice, and none of them caring, or fair, or kind, or safe.