I love VRChat, probably more than most people with my insane 750+ hours in it, but god fucking damn. You genuinely just cannot be publicly trans unless you only ever go into queer spaces there just like a certain planet I live on. I try so hard to find chill places where there aren't dumb kids or trolls, and have found some genuinely good ones, but even still I regularly get approached by people who feel entitled to debating me about the validity of my and my siblings identities. Luckily it's easy to weed out the trolls and people who are completely coming at it from bad faith positions—people who are 'unconvincable'—but even still, I really don't want to have to convince every other man I meet (it has only ever been men for me) that I am a woman and my identity is real and should be respected.
As a weird consequence of this, I've gotten really good at hitting all the gender theory talking points, reframing issues of differences in sex/gender as differences in body types, emphasizing that everyone is different and trans people are no more a monolith than cis people, helping people that are sort of on the fence about accepting trans people see that there is nothing to be afraid of when it comes to abandoning the gender norms. Turns out people can be persuaded sometimes.
I think my favorite way I convinced a guy that he should respect people's gender identities comes from this one dude who insisted that he wouldn't call people their preferred name or pronouns until they "earn his respect, show that they're not just vying for attention, etc." so I told him "If you go out on the town for a night, hit some bars, and refuse to call any of the men you meet anything other than she/her or 'pussy' until they earn your respect, you won't use he/him all night and will only earn yourself a bloody nose." Somehow that was the series of words that got him to feel bad for all the trans people he'd been a dick to and to try to be a little more compassionate and respectful. All I had to do was make him consider what it might be like for a cis man to be treated that way ig
It's exhausting as hell, and I know it's not my responsibility to convince random transphobes that they're wrong. But it feels like if I don't nobody will, and when I think someone is genuine and wants to know my perspective, why not hit them with these weird skills I've developed?
