So last night I heard a transwoman speaking at an event about people getting over tough times in their lives. The transwoman was talking about the first time they felt the stirrings that later on would become their gender confusion – and it was when they tried on a dress at their friend’s house. This person talked about the dress in such sexual terms – the feel of the satin on their thighs, the way they looked in the mirror, imagining breasts to fill out the top. Then the person went on to talk about how they used to get turned on by wearing their girlfriend’s panties, and how sad they were that their girlfriend didn’t get turned on seeing them in the panties. They talked about masturbating to a kind of anime that featured people with two different sets of genitalia, and in fact, masturbating to the idea of femininity was a recurring theme during the whole monolog. They talked about wanting to wear makeup and wanting to wear women’s clothes – especially panties and bras – in such warm tones that I have expected them to get an erection on stage.

Meanwhile, I sat in the audience, thinking about how I’d been leered at by a weirdo on the train that night; how I was currently suffering from intense menstrual cramps that I wasn’t socially allowed to speak of; how I’d recently lost a client because when I was assigned to him through my company he said he wanted to only work with a male; how I’d recently been shut out of a comedy event because an organizer legitimately believes that women aren’t funny.

And here this person was talking about wanting to wear women’s silky panties and putting on winged eyeliner as if it was the sum total of womanhood, as if it was totally ok to take on that “fun” stuff, and know that you’ll never, as an obviously male bodied person, have to deal with the other stuff.

I’m a compassionate person, but I had to sit on my hands so that people couldn’t see me balling my hands up into fists.