something that’s been happening recently and really bothers me is the way people try to erase my transness.
a cis person telling me i “was always a boy”
being treated like a cis man
i know this is the way some trans people want to be perceived and i respect that. but. for me, being trans is integral to my identity. the way i move through the world and interact with others is largely shaped by the fact that i spent the the majority of my life being perceived as a girl/girlfreak/weirdgirlfag.
i’ve been publicly out as trans for almost 6 years but i did not pass in the slightest until about 10 months ago. i was not mistaken for cis until i started college. being trans is an important aspect of myself that people need to know about me in order to understand me as a person. when people choose to dismiss it as just a fun fact or something that can be ignored, even if in the name of allyship, they dismiss an important part of me.
i was not always a boy. i was a girl on the elementary school playground facing sexism for the first time. i was a girl on the soccer field where “feminist” was hurled at me as an insult. i was a girl on a wrestling mat, explaining to her coach that no one would practice with her because she was a girl. i was the only girl on my high school wrestling team for my first two years there. even when i knew i was not a girl, i was still treated as such so i still learned how to interact with the world as if i was being perceived as a girl.
and i am not a cis man. like i said, i spent almost 18 years of my life being perceived as girl or girl adjacent. while i do aim to look like a guy when out and about, i want the people who know me, the people who take the time to talk to me, to know i am trans. if i want to have any sort of relationship with someone, they need to know i am trans, the same way they need to know i am autistic. to treat me as if i am cis, as if i am incapable of understanding what it is like to be a woman, erases the first 18 years of my life. a friend of mine told me not to use “bitch” in front of her because i am a boy. and while i respect her request, i do wonder if the fact that i have been called “bitch” before ever occurred to her. i wonder if she’s placed me in the box of “boy” and forgotten that i could have once been in situations where i had to tell people that they could not call me a bitch in any context.
i wonder when we will be at a point socially where people realize that transness is not just something to be celebrated until it can be hidden.
