There's this new tendency to think of adult trans women in the early stages of transitioning as somehow adolescent and it really bothers me. I have seen this a few times on "trans influencer" clips that come up on my instagram feed and I'm kind of baffled that it's other trans women coming up with these. Two examples:
One woman was talking about how (male) chasers are typically most interested in trans women before they've started hormones or in the early stages of hormones—in her experience at least. She insisted that this made their attraction to trans women something akin to pedophilia.
These two women were talking about Dylan Mulvaney taking a lot of flak for her (very public) transition. They were likening her initial stages of experimentation with femininity to what a child does and drew attention to men "hypersexualizing" this phase of experimentation and called it gross and creepy. There was also this insistence that being an adult transitioning makes you something like a teenager, who is not in command of a bunch of volatile and exciting new emotions.
But like I'm sorry but I don't think of it this way and I haven't experienced it this way either! Like yeah, you are bad at being feminine at first and the clothing situation takes a while to sort out (and is expensive). I sucked at it at first. There are things you have to learn to do. But that doesn't make you a child. It just means you're at the start of a learning curve.
Being and adult isn't just about going through the complete transformation of whatever hormones are running through your system. It's about having experience and practical wisdom, having a developed persona that cannot be easily pushed around by the whims of a dominating other. It's about having a robust sense of self and emotional maturity to navigate complex emotional situations with competence, grace and dignity. It's about having experience fending for yourself and navigating the adult world. I just don't think transitioning altered my sense of these things about myself. It's not as though I had to start all over and I think that matters morally! And it's not as though my body didn't develop. Like 20-something pre-hormone trans women do not have the bodies of children. They did go through puberty.
Sometimes I feel that there's this condescending attitude that people who have been transitioning develop, where they basically tell younger trans women to wait years of their life before they're allowed to be loved or receive sexual attention. And now it's hypertrophied to the point where trans women who are literally like 25 are considered too much of precious babies to consent to sex. Like what are we doing? "You must pass at least this well to fuck." Come on. I resent people trying to impose childhood on me when I'm a legal adult.
