Thread by @AlexandraErin

If you've got a bio that looks like this and you're following me, please unfollow. Your unscientific, creepy, extremist fringe gender ideology is a threat to my existence, and most especially to children like the child I used to be. I can neither countenance nor abide that

Dude whose bio that is has a pinned thread about how sad he is that the women he work with don't know what a woman is and that he's not allowed to correct them. Gender zealotry is a heck of a drug.

The greatest lie the devil ever told is that the people who are trying to rebuild the gender binary in reinforced concrete are "gender critical".

And I'm serious. If you're "gender critical" or had a "peak trans" moment or think that conversion therapy for trans kids is "evidence based" or "scientific" or whatever, and you're following me... stop. Don't. Go away. Fuck off directly into the sea, or at least unfollow.

I'm not sure if dude didn't know I was trans when he followed me or if I am quiet and polite enough about being trans that he assumed I was "one of the good ones".

Let me set the record queer: I am not one of the good ones.

I grew up in a tiny town that statistically you haven't heard of. Think of the smallest place you can think of in Nebraska. Which is probably Omaha, the only place you can think of in Nebraska.

Yeah, I'm from Not Omaha.

I grew up in Not Omaha, Nebraska. In a town so small our school district was one building, K-12 inclusive. The modern internet wasn't a thing when I was a kid and was barely a thing when I was a teen.

My sources of information about transness as a thing that existed were a Mad Magazine parody of Silence of the Lambs, Ace Venture, exactly one episode of Night Court and one episode of The John Larroquette Show that partly recycled the Night Court script.

As a tiny child I knew I was a girl and was confused and concerned that others didn't know it, but also I had a severe speech impediment and wasn't always able to make myself understood, it was frustrating to try for anything complicated or important.

My first dream I had that I remembered -- this was before Kindergarten so I was four years old or younger -- involved having a doctor informing my parents that there had been a mistake and I was a girl, and then "fixing me", physically.

It was a dream and I was a preschooler so this involved using a chunky plastic screwdriver and saw like I had on my Little Tykes toy tool bench. I'll spare you the exact details. It was surreal at the time and now, but it wasn't a nightmare. It was a good dream.

I got a little bit older and started schools and had the gender binary beamed into my head with sharp words and death glares and social isolation until I stopped trying to play with other girls, stopped playing with girly things, stopped talking about being a girl.

Now the "Gender Crits" will jump on that and go, "Oh, you think there are girl toys and boy toys? You think you have to be a girl to play with girls? We would have SAVED YOU, by telling you that you could do those things as a boy."

But to jump on that part, they have to skip over the part where I knew I was a girl, before I ever went to school or really interacted with people outside my immediate circle. I didn't decide I was a girl because I liked "girl stuff". I was a girl and I liked "girl stuff".

My parents definitely didn't "trans me". The "Gender Crits" would demand that my parents must have done something wrong, but what they did was what the Crits say they would do: let me play with whatever toys I wanted, play whatever games I wanted. Dress up. House, etc.

My mother explaining the (reductive, cissexist, binaristic) "physical difference between boys and girls" in age-appropriate terms actually directly preceded my dream about the doctor fixing me.

Now, the "Gender Crits" would probably also jump on that dream as evidence that there was some pervasive, all-encompassing "trans agenda" all the way back in the early 80s, but I swear to you I had no opportunity to learn about trans surgery stuff as a toddler.

Anyway, school taught me that it wasn't safe to be a girl, which made it, from a survival point of view, convenient to repress that.

And then I learned about being gay, which *at first* I learned meant being stupid, terrible, lame, unwanted, and basically anything else negative.

(True story: I was taunted for being a "lesbian" on the playground long before I was ever taunted with the f-slur. Gender Crits can't always tell, but other kinds of bullies often can.)

When I learned that "gay" referred to a type of person, and that this type of person was sexually oriented in a way that blurred the strict gender binary, and that gay men were often effeminate and sometimes play-acted as women... I thought, hey, I guess that's me, right?

When I told this story to a "Gay Not Queer" "Gender Crit" person on Tumblr, who was sharing his story of how he'd been "almost transed" and was happy as a gay man, his response was, "So you admit you were a gay man who was converted into a straight woman by transing."

I thought we could relate to having explored the wrong identity first because of what society happened to present with us, and I could talk him around to it being better for children to have *all* the information, not just whatever breaks through the filters adults put up.

Anyway. So I thought I was gay, and I thought that was a step up because it was a real thing a person could be. What *very limited* information I had about transness, mostly presented it as just an extreme case of gayness, which I supposed must be the case.

When we got the internet -- this was dial-up on not-great phone lines -- I took to looking for information on queerness when everyone else in the family was asleep. I would skip going to the bathroom before going to bed to make sure I wouldn't fall asleep too early.

And one thing I found was archives of gay erotica (text-based) from usenets and BBSes and things, which felt safer than looking at visual porn, and certainly loaded more quickly, and was more informative.

And it was a little confusing to me that I was as interested in the lesbian categories as the gay male ones, if not more so, but really caught my eye was the trans ones... which were usually things like forced feminization, sissification, bimbofication. Not super edifying stuff.

This is where the Gender Crits jump in with "Aha! So they admit they have an autogynephilia fetish!" And no, you half-empty jars of moldy chutney, I admit I was a teenager without any better source of representation, information, or validation than fetish board archives.

And as you can imagine this was not terribly helpful in terms of allowing me to figure things out. What DID help is when I was about 18 and I started hanging out in a trans chatroom, learning that there actually are differences (albeit porous in places) between trans and drag...

...and people with cross-dressing fetish and so on, and hearing other people who'd gone through a similar journey of confusion. I was still figuring things out when I left for college, and when I left college.

I had known I was a girl before I was in kindergarten, but I'd had a decade and a half of society reinforcing the cis version of the gender binary, the version that "Gender Criticals" worship and want to enforce as holy law, and it took years to get past that.

I don't want other kids to go through that. And that's not even touching on the horrors of dysphoria and being forced to go through the wrong puberty. Just the psychological journey and the scars it left me with.

Nobody wants to "trans" your kid. "Transing" isn't a thing that happens to people, outside of some very peculiar and highly particular forms of fetish fiction.

What we want is for kids who might be trans to not have to learn about it from fetish porn and movie parodies.

I mean, thinking I was a gay boy in a small town... being seen as one, suspected as one... was no picnic. I also have scars from trying to suppress homosexuality that I don't in fact have! It's messed up! I don't want any kids to go through that, either.

This is why kids should be taught about gayness, and about transness, and about queerness in general. Not teaching them about isn't going to stop any of them from being queer, but it will mess up the queer ones.

And heck, it messes up the rest, too.

You *might* luck out and get a kid who is accepting of other people after you spend their whole childhood hiding the existence of those other people from them like it's a dirty shameful sexually perverse secret... but if so, that's in spite of your parenting, not because of it.

I don't think there was a kid in my class who knew what "gay" meant apart from being an insult for anything uncool, gross, and unwanted, before they knew as an insult that meant those things. They heard older kids use it disparagingly and picked it up.

"But you're asking me to disbelieve evidence and science."

No, I'm not. I'm asking you to reject a harmful and limiting framework you've been using to interpret the evidence that's available to you.

Pronouns don't have chromosomes, Brenda.

If you could somehow, today, scrub every mention of transness, every trace of transness, from all of the media and records and human memory and human existence, there would be kids born tomorrow who were trans, just like I was, and who would be just as lost and scared as I was.

The push to eliminate transness -- to "morally mandate" an end to our existence and effectively ban us from public life -- is cruel and random violence that is inflicted on people, on children, who need information and support.

The push to eliminate transness comes from the same place as homophobia, from the same impulses towards sexual and social control and reducing humanity to two ironclad, concrete, and immutable gender roles. It's the same thing. The same deal from start to finish

And it is deeply unscientific. It ignores the evidence, the evidence that we EXIST.

You can deny anything you want. No one can stop you. You can deny that the earth revolves around the sun. Eppur si muove.

Maybe I don't come off as trans or maybe I come off as "one of the good ones" -- the moderate, well-behaved unqueer trans who would happily sign your petition to ban me from public existence -- because I don't talk about this enough, and if I don't, it's because I have scars.