I had to read this part aloud slowly: “Do I even want to convince someone who will only listen to me when they find out I’m a girl?”

Even being the supportive sister of a trans guy, that was the first time I became aware of my cis-privilege. Like a phantom-limb I’m just feeling now. It doesn’t heal the scars left by an abusive father, the assaults in high school, the years of secluded celibacy I led as a result of being a ciswoman — why would privielege heal any of that? Maybe privilege is just a dead space that your ear can’t hear as more than a buzzing until you tune the frequency just right.

My tolerance for misogyny plumetted over the years — it didn’t dull with time. But the oversimplified misandrist stuff never appealed to me. A lot of men practice the IDEA of masculinity and take it to mean hating women, asserting dominance and control. It’s a sickness of culture, not biology. That has nothing to do with maleness itself — not body hair, not baldness, not neckbeards, nothing biological.

It terms of what you say about how it’s pandering to encourage trans women to transition, I’ve been occupied with the other fight. Two close friends of mine, cis-women, confidently state that “trans women don’t need to transition, it should be enough for them just to present”. This ignorant presumtion that they know what’s best for someone whose life they haven’t led infuriates me to the point of angry tears.

But I’m just as incenced by the idea that you were made to feel like you had to play someone else’s game — fit into a cliche they might have seen on Maury — in order to have a valid voice worth hearing. You’re right; your point still stands even without your story. And it’s fucked up that I kept thinking “You should tell that bitch right now she’s talking to a trans woman and THAT WILL SHOW HER.”

This made me think a lot about how I had to become my own self-sustaining eco system and nurture my self-love to the point where I realized there was no one on the planet I cared about looking good for. Only THEN could I enjoy girly things again. We truly have to arrive at a place where we’re presenting purely for ourselves so that it’s not a political gambit, a bid for attention, a surrender disguised as a cliche rebellion.

I respect your self-awareness on this matter. And I respect your self-trust; you know yourself well enough that at 26 you’re not going to let anyone tell you who you are or how you should feel about yourself. Strange; I’m 27, and it happened for me at 26 too, when that happened. It was a drag queen who served as my primary role model for this self-acceptence. Someone who was so comofrtable as both a man and a woman that when he was the target of a witch hunt, he stood strong and refused to let anyone bully him into a ‘confession’ of his sins. Self-knowledge will protect us, like fluoride in the water, from the narrow minds that want to whittle us down into manageable packages.

And yet as much as I think I know myself, as much as I balance my current happiness on daily self-reflection, you were still able to surprise me with a perspective I hadn’t even imagined. I kinda wish I could get to know you! it sounds like not enough people have tried to; they’re too occupied with dismissing you.