I try to find community with the general public. Most people react with fear or disgust. Even more concerning, others evoke imagery of a wolf trying not to be seen.
I try to find community with queer people. They want to hang out with me! Oh, I think some of the people who work at that place are transphobic, can we go somewhere else? ... They go without me, I don't get invited out again.
I've made some nice trans friends. They tell me that I'm male socialized (or perhaps a kinder way to say the same thing) when I chime in on their conversation. Retrospectively there is humor in their dismissal of my opinion being so drenched in misogyny.
Years with these friends go by. We laugh. We cry. We change over time. One day, one of them wants a conversation with me. He says I'm being stolen from him. I look through our messages. Over 3 months, the only few times he's talked to me were attempts to get something out of me. He's upset that I no longer have sex with him. I stopped trying when he said he had no interest in initiating sex.
All of a sudden I am no longer friends with three of the 4 in this group.
I hang out with a non-binary person I met on a dating app. I ask if I can flash them. They say yes. They tell me later that I made them uncomfortable when I flashed them. This becomes a trend. I'm routinely blamed for sexual activity that was understood and consented to by both parties. A couple times I'm even blamed for advances I rejected.
The only time I'm allowed the grace of being seen as a victim is when the person who violated my boundaries was a trans woman herself.
I'm not perfect. I mess up. Sometimes the person trusts me enough to tell me. I do my best to understand how I got to the point of messing up so I can avoid it in the future.
Sometimes I'm told I messed up but it seems like the person had a problem with me then retrospectively found a reason. My coworker tells me it's inappropriate to give a customer my number. Her best friend, another coworker, is standing two feet from me. The best friend has had sex with several customers.
I have a coworker who's a trans woman. She's even my age! In the year where I got sick 8 times, she refused to mask when she was sick.
A friend's partner tells me they're a lesbian because they like "boobies and vagina". I'm a lesbian because I have yet to meet a man who, wearing pajamas with hair a mess, can make my heart flutter just by waking up and smiling at me. But their reason is cool too, I guess.
I go to a kink club. My trans-masc friend who works there said it would be comfortable for trans women. Another person who works there, a cis man, says he always found trans women so much sexier than regular women. When I tell my friend, they say he would never do anything to make me uncomfortable. He already has.
I've learned that I'm not wanted by people. If I say what's obvious, they'll disagree. They'll say anything to try to make me feel welcome. Their words are loud. The silence of their actions is deafening.
When I talk to trans women, it's not like this. They don't tell me they want to hang out then wait for me to make plans. If a trans woman wants to be friends, I know. I know because she treats me as an equal.
Obviously #not-all-tme-people are like this. But it doesn't have to be all of them. Just enough to make me scared to leave the house.
