This one is dedicated to all the neurodivergent transfemmes who have an internal counter for “times someone has said 'u guys' and then trailed off.”
The transformation comes with change. It kind of has to. That’s kind of the point. Some folks are better than others at handling / addressing change. In themselves, others, the world around them. Change can be difficult. Transformation is a process. That process can be terrible at times and wonderful at others. The results are literally life altering, inside and out.
The outside changes are pretty easy for some folks to address. Others require grace and patience as they figure out how to deal. People do so ever love the boxes that they put other people in. Breaking out of them can often hurt feelings and invoke trauma cycles, but it always happens because it’s very hard to ignore the physical changes.
At a certain point, resistance to someone’s transition becomes quite the ridiculous affair as their metamorphosis continues and it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to see them as anything but their chosen form.
When an ally says something that makes us “wince in trans” we find ourselves faced with a slew of choices. We’ve all seen it happen. Scratch an ally, find a transphobe. Is today the day we really want to find that out about this one? Is this a teachable moment? Do we have the time? Is this gonna become a whole thing? We’ve known this person for how long now? Yikes and sadface emoji.
Such allies expect infinite grace about it yet refuse to do the most basic of work themselves. Miss the point of what “the basic work” even is. Pronouns are easy if you practice (and you aren’t ashamed to be consistent).
Gendered language is all habitual and habits are just practice that becomes automatic through consistent reinforcement. It’s literally how the processes of language and the identification of things work, so can we please stop giving weaksauce allies accolades for getting the most basic elements correct while absolutely failing at the deeper aspects of trans recognition and affirmation?
They are so consumed by sweat over social embarrassment that they completely ignore how they actually treat the trans humans in their lives. How they treat the people they call friends.
We become random encounters instead of people. Tests of an ally’s conflicting social norms & morals instead of a person. Someone it feels good to talk to even though you don’t really know them and you’re not really trying, but a Trans is giving you their time so you must be a Good Ally.
Instead of a friend you have conversations with we become someone you start talking about more than with. Someone you eventually stop talking to at all.
Because talking with the Trans Friend is hard. We have perspectives that are scary. Many of us learned how to defy gods as children. Our very existence proves that no one is truly stuck. It’s just a matter of safe access, of support. Of kindness and understanding. Change is always possible. With help, it can even be easy. How much of the world is built on the idea that change is hard? That helping is difficult? That transitioning itself has to be difficult? We prove all of that wrong just by hanging out, through the very act of being ourselves. If we’re able to. If we’re safely allowed to.
Transition is akin to an xray lense. The experience, if you’re paying attention, reveals so many things Assumed to Be True about the world are just, made the fuck up. We all know how easy transitioning could be. How many of us get into hypno or scheme of time travel and egg cracking? Or the simplicity of transitioning while growing up somewhere with access to affirming humans and medication. Too many of us have spent their whole lives waiting. Died wishing.
Those of us remaining get it. It can’t be helped, we’re living it. Allies have a harder time about it, and that’s fair. It ain’t their struggle. It’s a hard thing to grasp if you’re not used to juggling world shattering concepts. Even a lot of trans folk find themselves suited just fine to their chosen gender role within the cishet world. That’s right for them, of course, but it is easier in some ways. It’s not breaking a paradigm, it’s just altering your situation with it. For some folk that’s enough and gods bless em but the rest of us mutants need a lil bit more work out of the people who want to claim closeness with us.
They need to truly change the way they view us as entities, and that’s a tough thing. Altering your perceptions and habits takes time. Investing that kind of thought in another human is effort, and some of us are fickle, shapeshifting creatures. Others contain multitudes. It’s a lot of work, arriving at a state of being that allows genuine understanding of such things.
So an unfortunate thing occurs.
The internal changes often go completely unaddressed, or worse, become lamentations. Anchors of the pre-metamorphic state for the ally to cling to despite “doing the work” of “getting it right.” While getting it regrettably wrong.
Some allies focus so intently on their attempts to aggressively affirm outward expressions of gender that they don’t even see that they’ve yet to actually change their treatment of a person despite adopting loads of affirming language.
We’ll get gendered correctly, but not invited to events socially designed around gender. We’ll be given things, but not taught how to use them. Hit on instead of courted, or the reverse if that’s your preference. The changes we go through internally just don’t get recognized by others. Often it simply unnerves them. They miss the old us, who did all the {old gender} things.
It’s hard to wrestle with having the memories you have of a person become memories of someone who no longer exists yet persists in a new form, but that’s how it works for some of us. Paradoxes can be difficult. Ya’ll can deal with it. Especially because ya’ll make transitioning so difficult. Every damn day. Over and over again.
Some people will share trans related “news” with us constantly and never check in with us about how we’re actually doing. Others just refuse to bring it up at all directly while crooning about their “trans friend that they Support So Much” where it can be seen.
Some of us go through a series of abandonments as friends just simply fade away. Some of us go through a process of realizing that we were making memories with people who were just killing time, and that often comes with a sense of “never again” about the time we invest in other people.
We can become so easily disinclined to participate in the superficial. We’re chasing genuine moments of connection. The eternal pulse of life and the trans experience can be found within those moments and so many others, but they have to be real, and if you’re not confronting your internalized anti-trans biases constantly, are you really doing the work?
Do you actually treat the trans people in your life according to their chosen gender? Do you truly know how they even perceive such things? Do you categorize them or treat them in the same way as others you know of the same gender?
You exist in a world where genderless entities openly walk the earth, where girls are boys and boys are girls and someone out there wants to be every flavor of in between, sometimes all at once.
Are you really loving and supporting your trans friends/family, or are you just avoiding the tough conversations?
Cherish the trans people in your world while we are still in it. Engage with us sincerely. Consider how simple it can be to truly affirm and support a gender and maybe brainstorm ways to do that instead of spending all your energy trying to avoid pronoun rakes and other learning experiences.
Cause while ya'll are out there quibbling over whether or not it's safe to transition ya'll are ignoring the fact that trans kids being denied access to affirming healthcare are being forcibly transitioned into the incorrect gender. Ya'll are worried about supermutants in ur violence spectacles while ignoring the children you're forcing unwanted mutations upon.
Ya'll are ignoring the fact that ya'll are the ones that make it unsafe. Some folk operate under the delusion that being trans is too easy and that they must make it more difficult. A lot of those folk act as gatekeepers. See it as their duty, that they are deity-driven to prevent transition. Their delusion hangs on a world that doesn't exist, one where kids are speedrunning their surgery goals in a summer. An imaginary reality where doctors don't just decide what to do with a fresh human's physical form, casually and on the regular. A fake place where parts aren't harvested primarily for profit.
A made up world where there are no gates to transition, where death by a thousand barriers isn't a thing that gets one of us every. single. day.
Transitioning isn't a milk run, but it could be. It should be. The alternative is shackling celestials. The alternative is an unwanted transformative change that more often than not results in death. Some of us get lucky. Some of us get to survive, get to exist, get to change into forms that suit us. Most of us don't get it quick. Too many of us don't get it at all.
We yearn for change, inside & out, so we demand it. Within ourselves and others. Our relationship to the concept of change itself is, maybe must be, different.
