I’m scared of you, not confused about me.

Something interesting started happening in the last two weeks, specifically after changing my name on Facebook/in my work environment/everywhere I could do so without a legal name change. That thing was doubt. Some shit by TERFs/a gross gender-critical gay man made its way onto my dash that was basically “You fucked up a perfectly good lesbian is what you did ((re: trans men/trans-masculine people specifically)). Look at her, she has anxiety and self-mutilation.” It was gross and wrong but combined with other things it jarred me.

I spent a lot of time thinking about it, because of the thinking I’ve been doing about a legal name change. How I feel, if it’s worth it, if I really am a fake, etc. all the stupid shit that comes with being a transgender person.



The realizations I came to were such:

I’m not a fake. I’ve never felt so authentic, so right, in my life. The idea of dropping all these efforts and just being a queer butch girl causes horrific anxiety and nausea. It’s not right. It’s not me. I wasn’t questioning these things because of myself. I was questioning and anxious for the same reasons LGBT people are more likely to be depressed and anxious, which was negative feedback. It was those few places where I met resistance (my mother not using Edison/my pronouns, my office manager having had so much trouble calling me Em instead of Emily that she said she couldn’t possibly get this and asked if she could just call me E, certain friends not catching on, etc.) and the knowledge that disgust and denial could lurk in the hearts of anyone I met. If everyone were on board there wouldn’t be a hesitation. I don’t like people making a big deal of things. I don’t like making a big deal of things. It made me nauseously anxious when I politely asked if anyone knew where a can opener was, and it turned into a hunt for one. That small a thing really bothered me, being the center of an inconvenience. Making people relearn things about me is an inconvenience to them and my life has been such that being an inconvenience–especially on that scale, even when it’s a bigger deal to me than them when they mess up–makes me feel anxiety.

tl;dr: If cisgender people made socially transitioning easier, transgender people wouldn’t be so scared and worried during the process, duh.



Posted 4 years ago on January 20, 2016 with 15 notes.

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