Thread by @SecretGamerGrrl

So as we all sit here having to once again reassure people that bigots just lie all the time and you don't have to take anyone's word on it but their own, but if you really need to just read this... pinknews.co.uk/2018/12/07/ant…

I have to remind you that despite all their ravings, the

average transphobe is so far removed from reality they don't even know what trans people even look like. It's not that they've never seen a trans person. While we're a small percentage of the population we're evenly distributed. Anyone who spends any amount of time in public sees

us every day. But you know, part of the whole "trans women are women, trans men are men" thing is that when you look at a trans woman, there's no real way to tell you aren't looking at a cis woman, and ditto for men (I AM leaving nonbinary people out of that, only because there's

no real default broad cis understanding of what a nonbinary person looks like for people to make assumptions from). We are, essentially, invisible.

And it sure as all hell isn't true that they don't think they've ever seen a trans person. It's just that somewhere between none

and almost none of the people they see and go "aha! Look! A trans person!" are actually trans. They've all trained themselves to keep their eyes peeled for people with a certain set of traits that are in their minds "proof of masculinity" which are informed by all their other

serious prejudices- Having short hair. Being heavyset. Wearing flannel shirts and jeans. Having bone structure in their faces outside the very narrow range typical in extremely white catalog models. And then they walk out into the world, point at people and shriek, "I found one!"

But the person they're pointing at is, in fact, cis. Just you know, over the age of 50. Or a proudly butch lesbian. Or a completely typical man. Or black. And then they really start freaking out because wow, look at how many of them there are out there!

Meanwhile, some time ago,

I actually put this image-filled primer together to ground people who have been exposed to too much ridiculous bigoted propaganda- secretgamergirl.tumblr.com/post/186627278…

You will notice if you just scroll through the photos that none of their preconceived notions come anywhere close to what we

actually look like, and if you were to actually use this collection of actual photos of actual trans people as a guide to spotting us in the wild, you'd just sort of end up going "WOW! That person over there is freakin' hot! Must be trans!" To be fair, when putting that primer

together, I did explicitly look through articles rounding up collections of openly trans models to be sure everyone I featured consented to having their photos shown off... but to also be fair, if I had instead just gone around asking a random sample of the trans people I know,

you would still just kinda have the takeaway that the way to spot a trans person is to see if they're really hot. Honestly it really isn't actually a bad metric to go by.

I mean, I got such a weird microcosm of this not too long ago. I had one of those nights where bigots kept

spamming me and various others with the latest badly photoshopped variations of that "what I really really look like" image they've buried searches for my name under. And then I had to spend a full day in the hospital for something, where I was making it a point to announce I was

trans, and getting all sorts of incredulous looks and follow-up questions about whether I'd had any sort of surgical procedures done, or whether I had implants of any sort. And I mean, yeah, standard hospital questions, but my answers kept leading to raised eyebrows, big stares,

and a noticeable number of follow-ups to verify that I really hadn't in any way gone under the knife for anything of any sort, ever.

It was a pretty nice ego boost, but again, it really illustrates this just absolutely massive gulf between assumptions and reality on this subject

So all the "Oh I totally notice when there's a trans woman in a bathroom I'm just too paralyzed with fear!" talk is just kinda like if you have one of those dogs that starts barking like crazy anytime someone walks past, and that dog was lobbying politicians to do something about

the 20 murderers who tried to break into your home every day last week. There's no murderers out there, Spot. Quit barking and go lay down for a while.