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.
I think sometimes it’s more comfortable being around queer folks because they’re at least substantially less likely to say some wild shit and get offended if you so much as blink. With cishet people it takes a while to know that they’re not secretly harboring some anti-queer bigotry to spring on you when you’re not expecting it. I’ve definitely met cishets who “tolerate” trans people but actually look down on us and will flip the moment we do anything at all to defend our rights or suggest that we should have rights in the first place. Usually it’s “apolitical” people who are actually just lazily conservative, but you never really know until it happens.
With queer people that’s unusual enough for it to be notable.
That makes sense, esp. for folks early in transition or who struggle to be seen as their gender. Queer spaces might be the only places that you are seen as you, let alone where you are tolerated and not glared at.
At some point though I started to pass and especially cishet people cluelessly just see me as another straight, cis woman - and while I’m not technically either of those, I am a woman and it is more affirming to me to be seen as a cis woman than as a trans woman. In that context I’ve started to have a harder time being around queer folks because they’re the only ones who notice I’m trans, and it outs me and I get treated differently and I feel degendered and dehumanized by it - instead of being a cis woman I suddenly become a trans woman (a woman*).