You really shouldnt care this much about men get access to WOMEN's stuff lil bro
TW depressing shit ahead.
When I was 14 or 15, I met my first ever non-blood brother. He was younger than me, and small for his age. Smaller than even me. He'd never really had enough food. i don't know if he would have been bigger had he eaten well, but I think he would have been shorter than me anyway.
I'd just left behind a huge family, and basically landed myself in a trafficking ring. I was relying on nothing but sheer willpower and luck to not die. I was in no way ready to take on this other child, but he was smaller than me, and I'd had little siblings before, so I couldn't help myself. We would share our little food, I taught him to siphon as well as steal if it meant he got fed right. Where fruit was easiest to snatch and what places were close enough to our errands to not draw suspicion.
Finally around the same time, both of us had gotten enough nutrition to get back some semblance of a period cycle. For him, it was his first. I got him pads, coached him through it, and myself too, for it had been a year and the materials were different to the cloth I was used too.
I told him my dreams of getting out one day, and he told me I could do it. He was younger than me but braver, with a conviction that i couldn't match. But when next to him in the covers, I began to believe. I would go to the west. To a university where they all spoke english- for that was my only knowledge of their languages. I would study and I would stay there and he would come with me.
I practiced english with him. I picked it up fast and i could see the pleased gleam in his eye when he stopped understanding what I was saying.
We saved up together, hiding the money in a plastic pack of pads, where the others wouldn't think to look. Soon we would have enough to bribe our way into a private room, and a private outside job. We got closer.
He told me he had lived close by, in the days when he was a girl. I told him that made sense. I'd run across the country in a panic to escape my family, but realistically no one would actually be looking for us. There had been no reason to run as far as I did. He laughed at me, and told me he was just a village or town north.
I'd love to tell you that he lives in the room next to me, now that I have my own room. But he was 14 when he died.
We'd been going out more often, on the brink of that relative freedom of a private room and a private job. We had been exploring the place where we would one day be able to roam freely. He should have run further. A town was not enough, and one day his older 'brother' caught him. He did not deserve that title, I was more his brother than that monster ever was. I wasn't around, but I did find my brother's body. Broken and naked, with the marks of a killing on his chest.
Honor killings aren't absurd, or even unheard of in my country. Especially not in these areas. But usually they are condemned. Often some piece of shit newspaper in our oh so progressive capital gets a new story, a new lobby to remind the government that marginalised people exist and deserve existence. Or if its the other side of the newspaper, maybe some drivel about how life under the russians was better and this is all the fault of muslims.
It wasn't care, but it was something. My brother got none of it. We have some 'WOMEN's stuff lil bro' as you said. For survivors of honor killings, or their family. In fact, Tajikistan is in many ways a progressive country. We have a whole system in place. They give you support if you survive, or a good burial if you don't. These women's charities, partnerships between the UN and the government. They give you a burial.
They did not give my brother one.
The money we had saved for first 2 months rent went to a bribe for his place in the earth and a stone marker. That was all I could give the 14 year old boy with a wide grin and a stupid haircut he let me test out on him.
He deserved the world but I could not give it to him. So now I argue online for what he should have had. For the empathy and logic that should have been extended to him. Trans men deserve a place in women's charities, in feminism. I know it might trigger some people's dysphoria but please. Think of the boys like my brother. The patriarchy is stabbing us just the same, can't you please just let us under the shield? Please.