Me and this trans guy who I'll call Jim jointly run trans events from time to time in an art centre that's the converted bottom floor of a 19th century mansion. It's in a pretty sketchy part of town when it comes to street harassment (not ideal but the owners let us use it for free which is why we don't go somewhere else) so, even though I could walk, I normally get someone to drive me so I can jump right out of the car and into the building.
The most recent time, I arrived half an hour before the event as usual, but the building was locked. We don't have a key and the door is normally left open for us. Jim shows up a few minutes later, we can't get in, and we're just standing on the street in a sketchy part of town.
I suggest we message everyone and move the event to somewhere else, a local bar that's very safe, it means we won't be able to do what we had planned but we can at least sit inside and socialise for an hour or two. Jim doesn't like this idea. So we wait on the street as several people walk past giving us weird looks.
After about 10 minutes, Jim thinks he sees someone through a window inside the house. We know there are theoretically people who live above the arts centre, but we've never seen them before. Jim starts hammering on the door, and the people on the street are staring at us even more.
Then Jim decides to stary yelling, not just "Hello", but "Hello we're from the transgender group!" at the door, really loudly. People are really looking now. He keeps doing this for about five minutes until eventually a man actually opens the door and asks "What do you want?"
I can tell instantly that this guy has *views* on trans people, gay people, the usual. But Jim just says, loudly enough for everyone nearby to hear too, "Hi, we're here from the transgender group, we're holding a transgender event in here!" This guy thinks for a second then his eyes narrow and he looks directly at *me* with a kind of vicious disgust that I recognise all too well.
I have to explain that Jim started medical transition very young. He looks and sounds totally indistinguishable from a cis man, to the extent that many people within the community privately doubt that he is trans at all (he is though). I don't mean to imply that he doesn't face transphobia, even the most perfectly "passing" trans man faces a ton of discrimination for that transness. I just mean to point out that this man looked down at us on the doorstep and saw what he would describe as a man in men's clothing, and a potential T-slur in women's clothing, and then heard Jim essentially say "we're transgender", and he knew that he had clocked me correctly, and that disgust I saw in his face was that confirmation that one of *them* was here in his house.
In the end, nothing bad happened, the guy stood there blocking our entry for a minute, but eventually grunted something and wandered off. But it took me a while to realise that I was actually a bit shaken up by the whole thing.
Seeing Jim so casually and repeatedly out both of us to the whole street and also this one guy, really hammered home the point that he is totally unaware of the gulf in danger levels faced by the two of us. And the frustrating thing is, even if I pointed this out to him, he would say I was overreacting because nothing bad happened, did it?
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