Trans in 2018.

Man it's a strange thing to try to come out as transgender in 2018 with this political climate. It's difficult articulating what kind of happens when one tries to come out of this particular closet because I think a lot of people imagine what trans people are like while never actually meeting one or being aware that they've met one in their entire lives. To a lot of people who hear about transgender people, it's just a bunch of made-up bullshit. At its worst, they think trans people are perverts and predators masquerading as the other gender to rape somebody in a bathroom, which despite a rousing marketing campaign a lot of idiot republicans decided to run with, has yet to be met with any documented case of that happening in the US, let alone 10 or however many need to occur to make an argument that otherwise doesn't actually exist. Although there are plenty of cases where trans people have been assaulted for what they are, a Republican doesn't really actually care about predatory behavior considering they voted a bloated molesting husk into office while endorsing candidates that participated in sexual abuse, the more notorious recently being Roy Moore, a child predator and religious zealot so cartoonishly evil and anti-LGBT that he's convinced that me wanting to be a woman or get fucked in the ass angered God and caused 9/11, which I'm not even paraphrasing. Which could you imagine the kind of power I'd wield if that was true? If my ass was the Death Note and dicks were writing utensils, I'd be running the ink out of every pen possible just to see if I could give God carpal tunnel. Roy Moore I'd rationalize is on a personal level one of the most vile and outright evil men voted into office if the Zodiac Killer wasn't already a senator.

The strawman/woman/trans/thing that people invented always kind of scared me because of how flippant they are in really understanding or respecting what trans people. As somebody who knows a lot of trans people, I have never met a single one that insinuated that somebody “assumed their gender”. Like y'all know no rational trans person actually says that shit, right? In fact most trans people are terrified to even speak up and ask to be referred to by proper pronouns because we're terrified of the repercussions of people getting aggravated and mocking us or treating us like shit more. Because God-forbid out of the hundreds or thousands of words people can speak over the course of a day, that they'd have to change just one or two. The notion of a militant hyperdefensive trans person using made-up genders to identify as is either deep in the bowels of Tumblr where not even other LGBT people like them, or are concoctions fabricated by merciless incels and misanthropes somewhere in /r9k/, among the same people who thought it'd be funny to call in bomb threats to Twitch streamers while talking about how entitled they are to women fucking them. Like why would you want to make jokes about a group of people that most people at best are utterly indifferent towards their struggles and at worst vehemently hate them for a plethora of arbitrary reasons? When Ricky Gervais got defensive over making jokes about trans people equating them to monkeys, he wasn't being edgy. A middle-aged entitled white man with a lot of money and an enormous influential voice heard by millions making transphobic jokes doesn't make him fringe or confrontational or edgy, it makes him our president. And boring. The tired boring that's more expected than it is surprising.

I've seen some try to compare it to coming out as gay. Coming out as gay can't be really compared outside of “HELP CONSERVATIVES ARE OPPRESSING ME”. It's not like your actual appearance changes. You can hide being gay from your family (note: you shouldn't and it sucks that you'd have to, but you can). In my family it wasn't even okay to be gay. My dad told me if I had any gay thoughts at all, the fag scarabs would come out at night while I'm in bed and start feasting on my flesh and consuming my penis to rob me of my masculinity and I'll start craving the dick of tougher men out of envy. God forbid if any thoughts of being a woman crept in, it would've meant after the fag scarabs ate my penis they'd start tunneling up into my body creating some unsanctified vagina from carved-out flesh that actually functioned as a portal to Hell so Satan could send his unholy children into the world. None of this is actually true and to clarify my dad never actually said any of this explicitly, although if I could function as a catalyst between reality and the underworld that would be metal as fuck. Instead it's just hormones run rampant and make me dissociative at random intervals and I get emotionally volatile while despising the filthpit vessel that my soul is forsaken to be entombed in, which is far less metal and just kind of fuck.

My dad would sort of pretend to be supportive and say “if people want to be gay it's none of my business” but would go into flippant denial if I even hinted that I was anything that wasn't his manly son who should be giving him grandchildren and not looking at penises. And I liked looking at penises a lot, penises are pretty fucking sweet. My dad wouldn't want to believe that I might be gay or pan or just not wanting to fuck women instead, so what hope would I have that normal people would be accepting of it if my own flesh and blood wasn't? But my dad didn't even grant me the courtesy of thinking I might have PTSD after being raped in High School, so maybe he's just a shitty person. But trans people put up with a lot of shitty people, so most people would be surprised and kind of horrified at how common my circumstances are to a lot of them.

Probably the most unsettling thing I've dealt with in all irony has been the LGBT community itself, or in many cases just the LG community with the “bt” in lower case letters, frequently and crassly lobbed off much like they'd probably think I would want to do to my penis. Regardless of how “progressive” or “pro-social justice” people frame themselves as, it's vaguely amusing that these so-called inclusive groups are still human. They'll still look for a reason to look down on people, who they view as lesser or impure. I have met gay people who feel threatened by trans people, threatened by our desire to transition muddying up what it means to be gay to them. Where if I transitioned, I would not be a trans woman, I would still be a closeted gay man in denial. Because instead of just wanting to fuck who they want, they decide to make their label the central focus of their identity, and we can't be having any of that shit. Them cis-white motherfuckers are trying their best to be understanding and progressive, we can't go changing the game on them after they finally just started getting used to dudes wanting to fuck dudes being gay. If we start talking about pansexuals or asexuals or transgender people, they'll get in a huff and need to lie down before we get a chance to tell them that gender identity has existed as a construct to tell people what society expects of them based on the all-important factor of what's between their legs and hanging off their chests. And I haven't even talked about TERFs yet either.

TERFs are a strange bunch, who are typically withering relics of 70s militant feminism that are the same aging white moms who also probably think women of color have it easier than them because they can play the race card. While varying in age, the older, more unyielding and decrepit feminists generally are the ones to carry the bigotted flag, which I find ironic because they say I can't be a woman because I can't bear children, which my response is generally “give it a decade and I guess you'll stop being one too when menopause hits.” You would think a lot of feminists would be inclusive as Hell when it comes to trans women considering they're people who despise toxic masculinity and society's expectations associated with gender, two things that have just really fucked up that whole “feminism” thing that's been going on for about... ever.

Toxic masculinity is a poison, and just because it doesn't affect me in the same way it affects a woman doesn't mean it doesn't affect me at all. Just because I was born a man doesn't mean people get to handwave whatever problems I had with that good ol' chestnut “Well it could've been worse! At least I had male privilege!” Which is bollocks because I didn't want male privilege. I just wanted to be myself, I just wanted to feel like I could act a certain way or look a certain way that I'd be happy with without people wanting to kill me. And while saying they wanted to kill me is an over-exaggeration, let's talk about what being a man has done for me. I've never been bulky, I've always been skinny and even called dainty by a few people when I was younger, and girls and women certainly let me know that. I cried a lot and wanted to talk about how I felt when people treated me like shit, something I apparently could not do because I'm expected to save face AND MAN UP. For being quiet and delicate and timid but a boy I was bullied growing up to the point that I did not want to be alive anymore, and have attempted to not be alive on a handful of occasions, which much like everything else in life I've failed at doing. Just simple things like liking pinks or wanting to write romances or baking got me branded a faggot in High School. Being judicious and non-aggressive got me branded effeminate. My dad flying into denial every time I bring up the possibility of being gay despite him never seeing me date or talk about women in his presence would make me question how open I was allowed to be about what I really wanted to be in face of a bunch of stupid expectations a dick's placed on me.

I feel like it's a trend when people talk about what it takes to be a real man or a real woman it's generally the really shitty, terrible things about being those genders. Who the fuck would want to be a real man, where you're expected to be some cold unfeeling sociopath who shouldn't show weakness or emotional vulnerability and women are seen as objectives or people who need to be taken care of because you don't respect them enough to be equals or self-sufficient? Why would I want to be a real woman, where I'm just expected to have to deal with being objectified and disadvantaged in society my entire life, and having a bleeding hole that tries to kill me every month while worrying about an 18-year long mistake ruining my life? On a physical or societal level of expectations, if I don't experience these things why does it make me less of a man or woman? Why are these arbitrary barriers of entry I have to go through to define my identity? “You must be this oppressed/fucked by society to join.” Like fuck y'all, I'll take installing a pussy that comes without the menstrual cramps and capabilities to birth a child, it sounds buying a brand new computer without all the garbage firmware and junk installed that nobody likes or wants.

Talking to a lot of folks about transgender people has left me equal parts amused, scared, and baffled. As if they haven't been talking to one the whole time and they think they can get away with some of the naive or ignorant shit they say. It's like them assuming you aren't gay and after looking around to make sure all the SJWs are gone decide to go into a tangent saying “MAN SO HOW ABOUT THOSE FAGS AND MARRIAGE, AM I RIGHT?” I just... find it strange that so many have opinions about people whose lives do not affect you in the slightest, or at best mildly inconvenience you because courtesy is hard. Because you see me and go “Fuck, that person has enormous man-hands. Are they one of them trannies? I can't say 'tranny' anymore, shit. Fuck I gotta call that dude a she? A they? An it? FUCK, WHY ARE WORDS SO HAAAAAAAAAAARD?” And after nearly having a stroke attempting to unlearn your entire vernacular, you express begrudging acceptance of this weird amalgamation of shapes that doesn't fall under the easy readability of human gender you've been accustomed to your entire life and settle on accidentally misgendering them and then in an incredibly sarcastic and passive-aggressive tone say “Oh I'm sorry, I meant she,” which is like rolling your eyes at a trans person in audible form, like you had to imagine them saying “EXCUSE ME, DID YOU JUST ASSUME MY GENDER?” to feel slightly validated in your tone.

What I'm saying is, these observations coming out of the closet as some weird non-binary genderfuck is the most I'm willing to make a fuss about this. I don't actually vent this to normal or cis people in person. All this grandstanding has to be done in the privacy of online or people I could very easily cut out of my life because stakes are lower here. I can't be bothered in person. I—much like a lot of trans people—don't have that fight left in me. I don't want to deal with the repercussions of standing up for myself and I shouldn't be expected to when people could just not really be assholes about it. We live in a society where we still jump or even outright kill people for what they are, I can't risk that shit when I see the blood on the walls. I'm too tired of passive-aggressive surrender passed off as tolerance and acceptance, because we all know the moment it feels like we're encroaching on you to accommodate us so your behavior doesn't make us feel like garbage, y'all ain't having any of that shit. Unless you're getting paid to, because in most cases you sure as Hell aren't going to use words like 'faggot' around your boss.

I'd want nothing more than to be normal than to be a victim, I didn't want any of this garbage that comes with having an identity crisis about what I am. People who refuse to understand and choose to perceive trans people having victim complexes either never had a hard day in their entire life, or think that since they “got theirs” and overcame something that they're entitled to be an apathetic sociopath. Which you'd think that living a shitty life would develop empathy for struggling with finding one's self in the world, but I don't know. I'm a raving concoction of unstable hormones trapped in a sack of meat I don't like, what do I know about being mentally stable?