Monumentally grateful for this epic look inside that child’s mind. As a writer you have a fine gift for taking people back to how childhood felt and thank HEAVEN I will be going to Pride knowing that gender dysphoric folk don’t need to hear ‘you look beautiful’ any more than I believe I am a good person mid-PTSD. “I don’t see you as X” is never affirmative, to my mind, it only bolsters the speaker and erases X’s battles and demons. It also doesn’t erase the hate of those who _do_ see you as “not X enough’.
As a cis bi disabled woman I’ve heard ‘bi is binary’ (and trans exclusionary) from people who were intensely transphobic with varying degrees of worship of the body-perfect. I’m hearing echoes of trying to reconcile the body I will never have that the LGBT community prescribes for people it wants ‘in’ and that doesn’t seem to include you or me except as fetishised or ignored beings. I’ve had trans friends cry on my metaphorical shoulder that other LGB people fetishise them and ‘you’re so brave’ them but don’t want to date them and I say, “I’d date you” and wonder if they believe me and live in terror that they won’t make it through. 
A supremely generous writer with real voice and compassion and honestly the first time I have read any thing on the struggles of the body that didn’t make me scream, “You don’t know disability!” I owe a trans man from college most of what I knew about LGBT, feminism, gender and disability as a politics and I hate the thought of being feared or seen as a TERF. So much to break down and I hope we can get better at it. Wonderful article and I read a LOT of LGBT stuff so I mean it when I say “WOW!”