Member-only story
Why I Bought Myself Some Pepper Spray as a Trans Person
For whom does the cat call, if not for thee?
Ever since high school, I’ve hated teenage boys.
That’s not exactly true given the number of times my cheeks would flush involuntarily around some of them, even if I found them just a tad insufferable. However, hearing about how they treated girls like meat and treated each other so roughly in the locker room made it much easier for me to disdainfully keep my distance from them. All those fake, unnecessarily intricate (and ironically homoerotic) homophobic jokes peppered with unprompted yelling and light hitting… it was not my scene, lemme tell you. This was just the tip of the iceberg of the mindset that gave men the audacity, if nothing else, to feel confident in what mediocrity most of them possessed.
Am I being bitter because this is about catcalling? Hell yeah. I knew it was bad for girls, but I didn’t understand the feeling until I really presented as one. I even understood the magnitude of catcalling before transitioning, but the sense of vulnerability and danger was made tangible once it started happening directly to me (doubled because of the ever-looming possibility of being “clocked” as trans and then “clocked” as in punched lol). This was the most recent episode that inspired me to…
