It sucks. I hate it. And I hate that I have no other choice.
I thought I passed pretty well and for a good bit now, and there where no indications that I didn’t. I’ve been on HRT for over 1.5 years now and it has done a lot too.
Yet lately, especially at work, the misgendering has been getting worse and worse. Both from colleagues that knew me from back then and colleagues that are relatively new.
Why… How… What changed… I don’t get it. What is that people actually think about me. I know what other people think of me doesn’t change who I am but it’s still just such a punch in the face every time.
Why couldn’t it all just be different… Why could I not have been born the way I want to.
Edit: I don’t want to be trans, I don’t want to hold the trans label and I don’t even want anyone to remotely think about that. Not because I’m ashamed of it, just because I just want to live a normal fucking life the way I want to live.


My guess as to what changed: people’s inner insecurity levels are on the rise due to the stress of an increasingly uncertain & unstable-looking future. it’s a highly subconscious thing, so if you ask them they’ll instinctively deny it without any real thought. People tend to react to such subconscious stress by overcompensating for their insecurities via looking for other things to put down so they can feel “better” about themselves.
The problem is that it effectively becomes the same as any drug addiction, albeit a technically legal one. The dopamine hit becomes less powerful each time (in part because it’s now expected), and so they chase that “high” by doing it more and/or more intensely. Ultimately it’s never enough, and a lifelong bully is born.
IMHO, if we’re ever going to reach the ideal society we all long for, bullying will have to be taken even more seriously as a problem than even drug & alcohol addiction have ever been.
That would make sense if people would misgender me on purpose, but that’s just not the case. Some people even correct themselves and say sorry, tho even that never used to happen in the past… And a few times it’s not even a thing of them having to get used to me being trans now since they haven’t known be before.
It just is such an obvious punch to the face of “no matter what you think, you don’t pass”.
I think it’s helpful to remember that people who knew you before you transitioned will continue to see you as you were before, no matter whether you are passing with new people. There’s this great part of Julia Serano’s Sexed Up that describes this:
Needless to say, changing jobs and moving away from the town where I had lived as a man really helped me live fully as a woman - interacting with people who knew me before I transitioned creates a lot of stress for me, and “degenders” me in a real way - I can tell they don’t see me as a woman.
I think maybe all the anti-trans propaganda spread by lobby organizations and many political parties around the world had something to do with it too :P
Is that not bullying to you?
ETA: it’s all driven by an utterly insatiable need to dominate and control, which comes from deep insecurities preventing acceptance of what they don’t understand for fear it could hurt them.