Sometimes I have a flash back to being 17, exploring concepts of gender and sexuality primarily by interacting with folks on livejournal and very early tumblr. My context for terms like transgender versus transsexual versus transvestite came from whispers on forums and rocky horror picture show, dear lord I knew nothing. Somehow I came to the conclusion that “trans” was a catch all term for all those things, and tr*nny was a diminutive term for the same concept, and I said the tslur out loud once in reference to someone cross dressing, because I thought cross dressing => transvestite => trans => tr*nny. Idk, people don’t talk about those things in high school, nobody ever taught me what a slur was. My parents hardly speak English and I had no friends. How was I supposed to know these things.
In the next few months I was bullied by a girl pretty badly (by the standards of the honors roll class, it mostly came in terms of talking over me in class and isolating me from the others in class) and I had no idea why. It wasn’t until recently, over 20 years later, that I remembered she had responded pretty harshly to what I said in the moment and I realize now she probably thought I was transphobic. Incredibly funny to think that little genderqueer me who was seriously trying to figure out if I should have been born a guy was being bullied for being transphobic. I kind of wish I could tell her what that was all about.