u/honeylettering

After yesterday, and after reflecting a little more on some of the things being said including what I said, I’ve been giving it all some thought. I wanted to share another post in the hope of opening up a more thoughtful and nuanced conversation around it.

I think the current discussion on fairs is collapsing several very different questions into one. I want to try to articulate something that I think is getting lost in the current debate.

I have always believed that being a trans woman who is attracted to men can influence your life in ways that are meaningfully different from being a trans woman who is not attracted to men. I do not mean that one experience is more valid, more oppressed, more authentic or somehow better than another. I mean different social positions can produce different experiences and sometimes people want a space where those experiences can be discussed without having to explain the basic premise first.

And for that particular point, I have learned, it do not think the decisive distinction is necessarily between exclusively straight and bisexual women.

A bisexual trans woman who dates men may share a great deal with a straight trans woman..the stigma attached to being a trans woman who desires men, the particular forms of fetishization involved, anxieties around disclosure, dating and physical safety, the question of how men perceive us. And all the contradictions surrounding heterosexuality when society often does not recognize our relationships as heterosexual in the first place.

There is also a historical irony here that I find difficult to ignore. For a long time, trans women were stereotyped precisely as hyper-homosexual men, essentially, so gay that they became women in order to be with men. That framework was grotesque and false. But in some contemporary queer spaces, particularly in the West, I sometimes feel as though the pendulum has swung into another strange position, where attraction to men itself can become morally suspect.. as though being male-attracted makes a trans woman an embodiment of patriarchy, cisheteronormativity, assimilation or political backwardness. I think that is a serious mistake.

A straight trans woman is not simply situated inside heterosexual normativity in the same way a cis straight woman is. "Straight" is a word we use to describe our own orientation in relation to our gender. It does not mean that the wider society consistently grants us the social status, legitimacy, or safety associated with normative heterosexuality. Quite often, the exact opposite happens... our attraction to men is interpreted through a homosexualizing or transphobic framework.

That is why I am uncomfortable when disagreements between straight and bisexual trans women are immediately described through a simple heterosexual-versus-bisexual power hierarchy. Discrimination against bisexual people is real. But I think we actually weaken those concepts when we apply them mechanically to situations where the supposed "straight" group does not possess the social power normally implied by heterosexual normativity.

At the same time, I also think experience is much more complicated than labels.

Two people can use different orientation labels and nevertheless have almost identical histories. A straight trans woman who only understood her attraction to men at 30, after decades of relationships with women, may have a very different developmental history from a bisexual trans woman who was •visibly• male-attracted from early childhood and was bullied for it long before she even understood what sexuality was.

If I grew up being called homophobic slurs as a small child because other people already perceived something feminine or male-attracted in me, that experience does not suddenly become irrelevant because another woman ultimately identifies as bisexual rather than straight.

Likewise, a bisexual woman who has dated men, feared men, loved men, been rejected by men, been fetishized by men and negotiated disclosure with men may understand parts of my life immediately that another straight trans woman simply does not.

Speaking only for myself, this is also why shared experience can sometimes matter more to me than the exact label someone ultimately uses. Yes, you are right, I may have more in common with a bisexual trans woman who, like me, was perceived as a gay or feminine child long before transition, was treated accordingly and grew up navigating the shame, scrutiny and hostility attached to being seen as f*g, than I do with a straight trans woman who only discovered her attraction to men much later in life.

That does not make her orientation any less real and it certainly does not make either of us more or less valid. It simply means that we may have very different developmental histories. Someone encountering male attraction for the first time at 30, 40, 50....or 60 may be working through experiences that are new to her, while for someone else those dynamics may have influenced her social world since childhood. Those differences can affect how we relate to dating, men, sexuality, vulnerability and even one another.

So for me, there is no contradiction here. I can feel a deeper sense of recognition with a bisexual woman whose history closely resembles mine while still understanding why some straight trans women may want a space specifically centered on straight experience.

That is why, personally, I would have absolutely no problem sharing a space centered on male attraction with bisexual trans women. If the subject is our experiences with attraction to men, dating, desire, stigma, fear, intimacy, rejection, safety, relationships, joy, whatever.. then the relevant commonality may very well be male attraction, not absolute exclusivity.

But I also understand why people create narrower spaces.

There is value in being able to say something and know that everyone in the room understands the context without a paragraph of disclaimers. That is not automatically an assertion that outsiders are inferior. It is one reason bisexual people should also be able to have spaces centered specifically on bisexual experience. Gay women should be able to have lesbian spaces. Straight trans women should be able to discuss experiences specific to straight trans women.

These things do not have to be mutually hostile.

What concerns me is when the existence of any narrower space is immediately interpreted as an act of domination rather than asking what experience the space is actually trying to make discussable.

And I really do not want this to become oppression Olympics. It well get really, really messy.

For what it is worth, I am not a moderator. I did not create the rule and I am not speaking for the mod team. I am only explaining why I think there is a legitimate underlying issue here even if people disagree about whether this particular flair rule is the right way to address it.

And I may be wrong. People are free to disagree with me.

But I would really like us to be able to discuss the actual differences and overlaps in our experiences without turning "straight" into a moral category.

Sometimes people want a room where they are understood without explaining themselves. I think all of us should be able to recognize that desire.

TL;DR: I transitioned when options were very limited, and I’ve been stealth for a long time. Now that more procedures exist, I sometimes wonder if changing things (like my voice or face) would actually draw attention to things that currently don’t get questioned at all.

This has been sitting in the back of my mind for a while, and I’m curious whether anyone else who transitioned a long time ago can relate to it.

When I transitioned, the options available were very limited. Where I lived, there was HRT, BA, SRS, laser and electrolysis, and that was more or less the extent of what was realistically accessible. Anything beyond that usually meant going abroad and paying an amount of money that simply wasn’t feasible.

FFS technically existed, as far as I remember, but it felt almost theoretical to me at the time. The same was true for vocal feminization surgery. You would have had to travel abroad and it simply wasn’t a realistic option.

So I made my life with what I had. And that worked out very well for me. I’ve been stealth for a very long time.

There are still a few things about myself that bother me, though, and one of them is my voice. I should probably say that this is very much about my own perception of myself. My voice does not clock me in everyday life. People don’t suddenly look at me strangely when I speak. If anything, I think my voice fits the way I look and carry myself pretty well.

I’m an artist, and I’ve even had roles and media work where my voice was part of what people liked about me because I can do quite a lot with it.

People describe it as a smoky, slightly husky radio voice. Not masculine, just a little deeper and more lived-in. More mature woman than ingénue.

And I actually love that sort of woman. She is fab! The elegant, slightly intimidating auntie ❤️ who has seen everything, has opinions about everything, and could sit at a table for hours philosophizing about life. Preferably with a cigarette in hand purely for the aesthetic, because I don’t smoke.

The problem is that this isn’t always how I hear myself.

Sometimes, in my own head, I hear my voice and think I sound like a gay boy. It’s such a cruel little thought, and I hate how quickly it can undo everything else I know to be true.

I never did voice training. Before I transitioned, people actually used to tease me for sounding too feminine, so when I transitioned I simply kept speaking the way I always had. Apparently, it suited me well enough.

And now, years later, there are all these possibilities that either didn’t exist for me or may as well not have existed back then.

There are little things I would change about my face if I could. I’ve never particularly loved my nose. There are a few features I sometimes catch in photographs and wish were softer. And then, of course, there is the voice.

The strange thing is that I now find myself wondering whether changing any of those things would create a problem where there currently isn’t one.

If my voice suddenly became noticeably different after people had known me for years, would they wonder why?

If I had facial surgery that subtly changed the way I look, would people simply think I had work done, or would it make someone look more closely at me in a way they never had before? There is something so deeply ironic about that.

If nobody is questioning me now, why give anyone a reason to start looking more closely?

Has anyone else ever felt that?

Like you finally have access to the things you once wished for, but the life you built without them has become something you’re almost afraid to touch?

This is probably not the first time anyone here has heard something like this, but I need to get it out of my system.

Cis people will misgender and deadname trans people behind their backs as casually as if they were commenting on the weather. Then, the moment that person walks into the room, they use the correct name and pronouns and act completely respectful.

Sometimes these are not even distant acquaintances. They are friends. They invite you to their birthdays, spend time with you, and move through supposedly progressive social circles. They have queer friends too, while still making strangely homophobic comments about them whenever they assume no queer person is listening.

The same people who misgender other trans people when they are not around will casually make a homophobic joke when they think the room is safe for it. They see themselves as deeply progressive. Everyone around them probably does too.

Of course this is not every cis person. But it seems especially common among people who are happy to appear accepting while never doing anything proactive, uncomfortable or meaningful as allies.

This is not a new observation for me. I have seen versions of it repeatedly over the past fifteen, almost twenty years. Still, tonight really got to me.

I have just come home from a small private gathering of very grown adults from an extremely progressive social circle, in a cosmopolitan city known for its queer community. There were many gay people there, and at least two people I read as trans.

I am stealth, listening to the way people spoke when they believed no trans person was in the room. It was revolting.

Being correctly gendered to someone’s face means very little when the respect disappears the moment they leave the room. That is not acceptance.

I am just so angry and disgusted by it.

Before anything else, this is not meant to provoke anyone or start a fight. The question has been sitting with me for a while, especially since I started spending time in trans spaces again.

Whenever I see someone very young say that they are trans, or hear about a young person beginning to understand themselves that way, I feel a small ache in my chest. Not because there is anything wrong with them, and not because being trans is something tragic in itself. It is more that I know how much pain, fear, rejection, and uncertainty can come with it, and part of me wishes they could be spared all of that.

This is not quite the same as asking whether someone wishes they were cis because of dysphoria. It is not really about the labels cis and trans at all. It is about everything that can follow from being trans in the world we live in.
If there had been a real choice, some kind of magical option to live without the rejection, the danger, the medical strain, the legal battles, the losses, and the constant need to survive, would you have chosen that life instead?

There is no judgment in either answer. Saying yes or no does not mean that being trans is bad, shameful, or lesser. Cis people are not inherently better, and a cis life is not automatically happier or easier. The painful part is not being trans. The painful part is what so many trans people are forced to endure because of it.

My own answer is shaped by what happened to me.
Long before I transitioned, I was already rejected for being too feminine, too flamboyant, too far from what people wanted me to be. That rejection became abuse. It became homelessness while I was still very young. It became violence.

I transitioned at fifteen while living on the street, mostly alone, and survived through sex work. There were so many things I had to do simply to stay alive. So much fear. So many people lost along the way. Relationships carried their own strain. Medical "care" is still emotionally exhausting. The legal process was excruciating. Every part of it felt like something I had to survive rather than something I was allowed to move through with care.

Somehow, I made it. A life was built out of all of that, even though the odds were very much against me as a migrant woman of color who grew up in poverty. I found some peace, yet, there is guilt in having survived, and there is still grief for the person who had to survive it. If there had been some magical choice, had there ever been another way, one that meant I didn’t have to go down this path, I would have taken it.

At this point, the hypothetical version of me would not even have to be a woman or a man. What matters is the idea of a life without all that pain. A life without being uprooted. A life where a child was loved without conditions.

In the version that feels closest to my heart, I would have grown up as my family’s child. I would have received the love every child deserves, regardless of gender. Maybe I would be married now, with children of my own, carrying memories that did not hurt so much to touch.

It is difficult to imagine being anyone other than who I am now. Still, when I separate being trans from everything the world attached to it, my answer becomes clear.

Would you have chosen a life without all of that, if such a choice had ever been possible?

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Until recently, Reddit was completely unfamiliar to me. I had been looking for forums and chat spaces that offered a reasonable level of anonymity, mainly because, for safety reasons, I did not want to connect through social media accounts I already use.

After browsing a few larger communities that felt slightly uncomfortable and off, I found this one. For the most part, I feel more at ease here. There are still occasional posts that make me pause and wonder whether the person writing them might benefit from stepping back and reflecting for a moment, but that probably happens in every online community.

Since joining, I have fallen into several Reddit rabbit holes while also trying to understand the language and culture of the platform. Some of what I found shocked and unsettled me. There are entire vocabularies, theories, classifications and acronyms that I had never encountered before. Terms that I do not want to list all of here.

What stands out most is the intensity with which some spaces discuss transness, gender and transition. The focus seems to become so consuming that it feels detached from ordinary life. Everything appears to be interpreted through a reductionist lens that has completely hollowed out the actual meaning of the terms.

This is not coming from a conservative or hostile place. People should be free to understand themselves and build lives that feel right to them. What worries me is when the subject becomes an obsession rather than one part of a much larger life, and this then creates psychological distress. There are places to visit, things to make, people to meet, skills to learn. In real life.

The dehumanizing fetishization in some discussions is especially difficult for me to accept. Sometimes it involves femininity. Sometimes it involves trans women, transition or the idea of being different from the norm. At times, womanhood appears to be treated as a collection of fantasies or performances rather than a human experience. That makes me uneasy, particularly when vulnerable people are involved.

Perhaps this is simply the result of spending too much time reading very specific subreddits. Online communities can create their own language and reinforce their own assumptions until those assumptions begin to feel universal. Maybe I have wandered too deeply into a few intense spaces.

Still, I am curious how you see it. Is this level of fixation common on Reddit, or is it limited to a small number of communities? Have you noticed the same pattern?

Around twenty years ago, I was a runaway teenager living on the street without legal status, identification or any reliable adult support. The few LGBT services that existed for young people were not built for someone in my situation. They usually assumed that a teenager was still connected to school, social services, a youth programme or some other organised structure. Homeless queer and trans teenagers without documents did not exist within their understanding of who needed help.

Most of these spaces also were designed around white, at least middle class experiences. The focus was often on coming out, identity exploration or finding community. Those things mattered, of course, but they were very far removed from the immediate reality of trying to survive outside, avoid the police and immigration authorities, find somewhere safe to sleep and somehow access medication or medical care.

Spaces for “transsexuals“ were not limited to a specific age. As a teenager, already living socially as myself and obtaining whatever medical supplies I could manage on my own, I went a few times to one of them hoping to find support. Turned out, I was the youngest person there by far.

Many of the adults were at least ten years older, many old enough to be my parents. They were married, had children, academics and lived fairly conventional middle class lives. There is nothing wrong with any of that. The problem was the way some of them looked at me and interacted with me.

There was sexualisation. There was objectification. There was attention that did not feel caring or safe. So I stopped going.

The only real support available came from an informal network of other people living on the street. Some of the people who looked after us were only five or six years older, yet they became the closest thing we had to parents. Cis and trans women, stuck in survival sex work. They taught us how to survive.

They warned us about STIs and violent clients. They told us where it might be possible to sleep without being attacked, where medication could be found outside the official system, which doctors might quietly help, and which places should be avoided. They taught us to stay alert around the police and immigration authorities because many of us were not white citizens with secure documents. Many of us had extremely precarious status. Others had no legal status at all. Many came from South America, Central America, East Asia, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe.

At an age when we should have been thinking about school, friendships and what we might want from life, we were learning how not to die.

The people around me understood something that the official spaces did not. Stability was everything. Building some kind of stable life, even a very small and fragile one, was the only real way out. Very few of us made it. There’s still so much shame and guilt wrapped up in having survived.. Many died. Some were deported. Some disappeared. With those who may have survived, contact was often lost completely. People scattered, changed names, crossed borders, entered relationships, went into hiding or simply became impossible to find.

Later, after somehow managing to move from that life into school and a more stable social position, another attempt was made by me to enter those fancy queer and trans support spaces.

What was waiting there felt like a continuation of what had existed before. The spaces were still overwhelmingly white and middle class. Many people seemed deeply disconnected from the realities of homelessness, racism, insecure immigration status, survival sex work or the particular vulnerability of Black and migrant trans women.

Black and Latina trans women were mentioned often, especially around Pride or when certain names and historical figures were useful. But their lives were frequently treated as references, symbols.. a proof of political awareness. Their actual material conditions never seemed to shape how the spaces functioned.

People could talk about Marsha P. Johnson every year while reproducing the same exclusion, racial hierarchy and detachment from poor and marginalised trans people in their own communities.

There was also a strange kind of competition around oppression. Identities were collected, performed, borrowed or used as social currency. Meanwhile, people with direct experience of racism, migration, homelessness or state violence were questioned, tokenised, patronised, or pushed aside.

Passing was treated as something suspicious in my case. Being in a relationship with a man was treated as politically questionable. My background made people uncomfortable, but so did the fact that my life did not fit the role they expected me to perform. The message was repeated in different ways. People like me were not wanted there. Eventually, withdrawal became the safest option.

My work did not stop there. Support for refugees, migrants and other marginalised people became part of my life and remains part of my professional and creative work today. Mainstream queer and trans communities, however, are still spaces I avoid.

Too many of them remain racist. Too many are socially closed while describing themselves as inclusive. Too many have become detached from poverty, migration, homelessness and the liberation struggles they continue to appropriate.

Criticism of these dynamics is often met with immediate suspicion. People assume it must come from the political right, from transphobia or from hostility towards queer people. That is not where this criticism comes from.

Far right movements and fascists would gladly see people like me dead. Being critical of racism and exclusion inside queer and trans communities does not make someone aligned with those forces.

The criticism comes from the left, from lived experience and from watching spaces that claim to represent liberation become increasingly hostile to the people with the least protection.

Some time ago, I met a middle eastern trans man around my age who also has a refugee background and a history that closely resembles mine. He told me that he stays away from queer and trans spaces whenever possible. People make racist assumptions about him all the time, and they label him as homophobic or transphobic simply because of how he looks, as though he somehow does not look “queer enough“. What he describes reflects a much larger pattern in which our perspectives are treated as disposable, while only a narrow, Western, white version of queerness and transness is seen as legitimate. And even those spaces are deeply exclusionary from within.

Many people from older generations are not quietly drifting away. We are often excluded first, then blamed for no longer participating. Many of us learned very early that community is not always where the signs, flags or slogans say it is.

Sometimes community was another homeless teenager sharing information about a safe place to sleep. Sometimes it was someone only a few years older warning us which man had hurt someone the previous week. Sometimes it was a doctor who quietly helped without asking too many questions. Those were the people who kept us alive. The spaces that called themselves inclusive mostly did not.

This may be uncomfortable to hear, but it comes from a place of concern rather than hostility.

There seems to be a recurring pattern in which straight trans women enter relationships with people they understand to be men, only to learn later that those partners had already been questioning their gender before the relationship became serious. By the time the subject is disclosed, there may be years of emotional investment, shared plans, marriage or children involved.

Questioning your gender is not wrong. Taking time to understand yourself is not wrong. The problem begins when someone is already aware that their identity may not be what their prospective partner believes it to be, yet still enters a serious relationship without addressing that uncertainty.

A straight woman looking for a relationship with a man is entitled to take that understanding seriously. If her partner later realizes that she is a woman, the relationship has changed in a way that may be fundamental to her sexuality, attraction and sense of the future. She may continue to love her partner deeply and still be unable to remain in a romantic or sexual relationship. That is not automatically transphobia.

We would not ask a lesbian to become attracted to men. We would not ask a gay man to reconsider his sexuality for the sake of anything. A straight woman deserves the same respect. Love can survive many changes, but romantic compatibility is not guaranteed to survive every change and no one should be morally pressured into altering their sexual orientation.

Some partners do remain together through transition. That can be loving and meaningful. It may reflect a bond that is less dependent on gender than either person previously understood. It is still something freely chosen. It cannot become the standard by which every other partner is judged.

There is also an emotional burden here that is sometimes overlooked. Straight trans women are not automatically equipped to guide someone else through gender questioning or transition. For some, being placed in that role can bring back severe dysphoria. A partner is not a transition consultant and she should not be expected to absorb work that belongs with the questioning person, support groups or a qualified therapist.

This does not mean that everyone must have complete certainty before dating. Many people discover important things about themselves only after entering relationships. Those situations can be painful without anyone having acted deceptively.

If someone already knows that they are even remotely questioning their gender, that uncertainty should be handled before asking a straight trans woman to build a committed future around an identity that may soon change.

Rejection in these circumstances can be devastating. So can discovering that the relationship you believed you had is no longer the relationship your partner can offer. Both people may be grieving. Both may be frightened. Both deserve compassion.

What should not happen is the conversion of one person’s grief, sexual boundaries or decision to leave into proof of moral failure. Calling every unwillingness to continue a relationship transphobic does not protect trans people. It weakens the meaning of the word and turns a painful incompatibility into an accusation.

A more responsible conclusion is often much simpler: your partner wanted to be with a man. You may no longer be that person for her.

The moment anyone here even brings up racism, the downvotes seem to appear almost immediately.

That does not mean everyone in this space is racist. It does mean there are blind spots and sometimes those blind spots make it very difficult for us to speak about our experiences without being dismissed.

Many people here understand how isolating it can feel to be the only (straight) trans woman in a space. Now imagine carrying another kind of difference that follows you into every room, one that people notice before they know anything else about you.

There is nowhere I can go without being reminded, in some small or obvious way, that I am not white. I will never be perceived as white (and I have no desire to be). But it would be great to be able to speak about that reality without the conversation becoming defensive the moment racism is mentioned.

Peace is going to be very hard to find if your life stays centered around men, or if being trans becomes the main source of your identity, attention and emotional energy, even without you realizing it.

Before anyone takes that the wrong way, this is not about advocacy. Supporting trans people, protecting our rights and speaking openly about what we face matters.

This is being said with care, not judgment. You need to build a life that belongs to you. A life where you follow your interests, develop your passions, create friendships, learn things, make things and find reasons to wake up that are not connected to whether a man desires you or whether strangers recognize you as a woman.

Nobody needs to explain poverty, discrimination, or closed doors to me. Those barriers are real. They are structural and God knows they cannot be solved through individual effort alone. Pretending otherwise would be cruel. But those realities cannot be allowed to convince us, internally, that there is no point in trying to build anything for ourselves.

This comes from someone who crossed borders as a minor, survived on the streets and watched sisters die from things as treatable as pneumonia because there was no insurance and housing.

All I am asking is that you try to look beyond the limits that have been placed around you. Try to live as fully as you can, for yourself and perhaps also for the sisters who never had the chance.

Please seek stability wherever it is possible. Protect it when you find it. Slowly detach your sense of worth from male approval. It is difficult.

No surgery, no level of passing, no stealth life and no man will bring you peace if you never learn how to return to yourself. Those things may bring comfort, safety, relief, love, or joy. They can still matter. But they cannot carry the entire weight of your existence.

You deserve a life that is larger than being wanted and being perceived correctly. You deserve joy and a good life.

There’s a bit of shame in even putting this into words, let alone saying it to a friend’s face. There’s a coworker of mine... and I think I’m starting to fall for him.

We don’t see each other every day and sometimes we can go a week or two without speaking at all. But when we do work together, there’s this ease between us that I’m starting to feel a little too much.

Before we were even working together, he apparently asked to be put on a project with me because he knew my work and specifically wanted to collaborate with me. At the time, I didn’t think much of it. After a few months I have been noticing things about him that I guess I find harder to ignore than I want to admit.

What I noticed from the start is that he’s a doer. Gets things done, fully confident, almost arrogant even, yet not bragging about his abilities, so it never actually crosses that line. He doesn’t wait around to be told what to do, he just moves. He thinks ahead, he can handle things physically and he reads people well. Very emotionally intelligent. His BS detector is almost too good. If someone’s being unreasonable, he either calls it out without hurting feelings and he just finds a solution without relying on anybody else and doesn’t complain about it afterward.

And as I’m writing this, I can feel myself describing qualities I clearly find very attractive in a man.

He’s also a dad. He has two kids,...married and he loves them very much. Any time I bring snacks, pastry or something sweet for everyone at work (not just for him!), he packs all up for his family. It’s such a small thing, but it says a lot.

Before anyone says anything. He’s with the mother of his children. And I want to be very clear that I would never, ever do anything to interfere with that. He is completely off limits. As someone who knows what it feels like to be betrayed, I could never willingly put another woman through that. Or their children! It’s not even a question. I’m not going to act on anything.

The strange part is that, physically, he is not my type at all. Not even close. But yesterday there was this brief accidental moment where we were sitting unusually close during a larger team meeting.. and I brushed against him without meaning to. It felt electric. I noticed it. I think he noticed it too. And immediately I had this internal panic of, no, oh God this cannot be happening.

I understand, it makes sense to me in a way. He has all these qualities I admire, this do not try me energy, being protective, also very loyal, this gentleness that comes out in certain moments. He can be so self-assured, so unwilling to take nonsense from anyone and then when he talks to his family and children, his voice gets quieter. Softer. He always catches me off guard.

He also makes me laugh constantly. He calls me "ma’am” and boss all the time and I always tell him to stop. So of course he keeps doing it on purpose. And any day we work together, I end up laughing a lot.

And now I’m sitting here wondering what on earth I’m supposed to do with all of this.

I think I’m sharing it here because I feel ashamed saying it out loud to people who know me. At the same time, I don’t want anything bad for him or his family. I genuinely wish him, his wife and their children all the love and happiness in the world. I mean that without bitterness. From the heart, truly. I hope they’re happy together.

I just wish to find a single man with similar qualities someday. Good men still exists. They are just too rare.

I’m saying that as someone who genuinely regrets having gotten involved in some of the more heated discussions here. I keep seeing the same thing happen every few days... and honestly, I don’t even know why it keeps going this way. I mean, the obvious answer is right there. Society hates us and a lot of that hatred gets carried back into the room with us. Then it gets projected onto each other, because it feels easier to kick sideways or what we imagine is downward

I know this is an online space. I know anonymity does something weird to people. Anyone can be anyone here. Anyone can claim anything. I’m still pretty convinced there are some deeply strange predators lurking among us. Who knows. For all you know, I could be some 60 year old perv behind a screen.

The level of toxicity we keep recreating here is hard to watch. Sometimes it is aimed at people who are assumed to be extremely privileged. Or it comes from people with some privileges and who seem way too comfortable spitting on those who don’t.

There are topics we should be talking about and are controversies that deserve to be named. But the lack of decency and nuance is exhausting.

Someone here described it as polarization and it is true. On one side, there are people looking down on others with a distorted sense of themselves and their place in the world. On the other side, there are people stuck so deep in doomsday and resentment that every conversation turns into "everything is awful because I am suffering and fuck you all". This has to stop.

I don’t mean this in some soft liberal why can’t we all love each other BS. We don’t all have to love each other. We don’t even have to like each other. But some basic decency..., girl.. should not be too much to ask.

I don’t even know exactly where I’m going with this. As someone who is probably old enough transition wise, I’m starting to remember very clearly why I stayed away from communities for the last ten or fifteen years. There used to be something like sisterhood. Yes there was always bitterness, gossip, always people hurting each other. But there was also care among the real ones. We pushed each other toward better lives. Toward school, work, stability.

Now it feels like so much of what’s left is resentment. And I don’t think we have to pretend that everything is fine in order to be decent.

Chasers are gay or at least bisexual. And there is nothing wrong with either. The pathetic part is their cowardice. Their selfishness. The disgusting little performance where they use other people, especially women, because they are too weak to stand behind what they want and too fragile to face what it says about them.

If they are with a cis woman to keep up appearances, they are SCUM for that. She becomes cover and decoy. A person whose life, body, trust and time they are willing to burn through because their masculinity is too brittle to survive honesty. That is cowardice.

If they are with a trans woman obviously treating her like an object or like a filthy little shortcut into their own desire or identity, they are just as rotten. A waste of time. They are using her. They are feeding on her while still looking down on the very thing they came crawling toward.

I do not care how many of them are secretly trans, repressed, ashamed or whatever else they hide behind. None of it excuses a damn thing. Their fear is not a worthy excuse. Their shame is not a free pass to disrespect other people. Their pathetic crisis does not give them the right to hurt others.

If this were not already so dangerous, if this exact cowardice were not already getting women hurt and killed, I would use every ugly slur there is for them. Because they are disgusting and selfish. They would rather use women as shields, props, objects and exits than stand in front of a mirror for one honest second.

Take this with a grain of salt, it’s meant to be ironic.

I was at the grocery store today and noticed one of the cashiers again. She has stood out to me a few times over the past couple of months. She looks like she is in her late teens, probably a student. She had a textbook with her at the register, which I only noticed because it seemed unusual for a cashier to be allowed to study during a shift.

She was very sweet and polite, and I got the impression that she might be one of us. I did not say anything, of course. She was at work, I was a customer, and I would never want to put someone in an uncomfortable position like that.

My read could be wrong, but she seems very early in transition. I only go to that store every few weeks, so I notice small changes. Nothing intense or weird, just little things in her presentation that are different from the last time. And honestly, from what I can tell, she must have been boyfailing pretty hard even before this point. Good for her, genuinely. There is something very vulnerable about seeing someone at that stage, especially in such an ordinary public place, under those lights, scanning groceries and having to be polite to strangers all day.

The part I am unsure about is her presentation. For example, her eyeliner was a little uneven and I genuinely do not know whether that is simply her style, which would be completely fine, or whether she is still figuring things out. No shade at all. It just made me wonder whether a kind word from another person would feel supportive, or whether it would feel intrusive.

I would never give unsolicited makeup advice. I would never say anything that could clock her, especially not at work. I am more wondering whether something very gentle and very general, like a small compliment if it came up naturally, would be okay. Something that does not imply “I clocked you”.. and does not put any pressure on her to respond.

Would that make you uncomfortable? I am leaning toward saying nothing unless there is a very natural opening, because she did not ask to be perceived or helped by a random customer. At the same time, I know how much a tiny bit of warmth can mean when you are early on and everything feels visible. I really do not want to overstep. I just want to be kind in a way that does not make the situation about me.

Just to say this upfront, I am not trying to open some kind of discourse can of worms here. I do not mean this in an overly serious way, but I also do not mean it completely superficially either.

Every subculture, and I am not saying being trans is one universal subculture, has its own terminology. Language changes, new terms appear, meanings shift. That is completely normal and honestly fine. So please read this with that context in mind.

I am someone who transitioned a long time ago. Maybe not old in actual age terms, but definitely transition wise ancient enough to admit I am no longer fully up to date on newer terminology.

Lately I have been seeing the terms “doll” and “brick” a lot, and I am not entirely sure what people specifically mean by them. Does “doll” basically mean hyperfemme, and “brick” mean at least somewhat masc leaning?

The older terms I remember were things like “fishy” and “clocky,” but these do not seem like exact equivalents to me. Especially because someone can be very passable without being particularly feminine, and someone can be very feminine without necessarily passing. Conventional attractiveness and passing are also not automatically the same thing.

Part of why I am asking is because when I tried googling it, I found a lot of contradictory explanations.