you know something i figured out in therapy a few weeks ago is that i don’t feel like a woman at all, i have exactly zero interior sense of being a woman, and i think trans girls like me are baffling to trans girls who *do* have that interior sense, and vice versa
this probably isn’t a surprise for anyone who’s read On Liking Women but it was surprising for me to realize. my therapist was like, why don’t you think you pass? and i was like, lol bc i don’t. and she was like, uh yes you do. and i was like, well those ppl are just humoring me
and she was like, there’s all these strangers who are offering you recognition as a woman, why does that make you feel misrecognized? and the answer is that i’m just devastated that when ppl do give me that recognition, it doesn’t change how i feel inside, which is like a fraud
it’s almost like i’d rather be misgendered, then at least the stranger and i are on the same page. it’s like how it’s worse to have friends and still be lonely than to just have no friends at all. at least then you can believe things would be different if you did have friends
so i think this distinction—do you feel like a woman or not—is responsible for a real substantive rift among trans women, and it can be upsetting for all parties to confront it bc each side tends to think the other is mistaken or lying, in a way that feels threatening
and no i’m not talking about “internalized transphobia,” which is an ugly, moralistic idea most often used to shame ppl into submission to respectability narratives of transness. i’m talking about what it means to really live inside self-loathing as a structure of experience
anyway, i’m suicidal on TDOR which is very on brand for me but please love your trans friends enough to let them hate themselves
