I'm actually a trans woman.
I'll share with you my picture. It's my actual face with a wig - the original is much more homely because even though I did put makeup on, it doesn't really show very well unless you add it with the makeup apps. I am very poor - I live on $113 a week (a cut of $27 this year) from SSI benefits due to a long history of mental health recovery, and also I am blessed to have the EBT card from the food stamps program.
I know you "add[ed] it with the makeup apps," but honestly, if I met you IRL and you looked like this, I don't think I'd suspect anything.
This year has not been easy for me. I had a nervous breakdown back in August - two ERs, two crisis unit stays with three extensions, there's been periods when I've literally spent every day and night on the bathroom floor crying in agony and screaming at the wall.
Not sure there's much to say here beyond "That sucks", so that's all I'll say.
I wouldn't wish this life on anyone, not even my worst enemy. It is no way to live. You receive such hostility from society, such cruelty and it defies all logic because people just look at you and laugh.
I'm the subject of ridicule and mockery, and I've never been accepted as anything but "the other".
If it's any consolation, I constantly feel like I will never be accepted as anything but "the other", despite my having a
much easier life than you. To quote Bo Burnham, I had a privileged life,
and I got lucky,
and I'm unhappy. Even though I want to be proud of who I am, I also feel like I have to hide in order to be seen as just as much of a woman as my cisgender peers.
So all I can say is that my gender is female because I have always believed it to be so. I shouldn't really have to prove that I am a woman because quite honestly it's nobody's damn business what my genitalia is, and I don't need to be validated by every single person in the world.
Didn't you joke that election statistics get you "wet down there" in another thread? Of course, you probably could've been joking about your ability
to get "wet down there" as well, but still.
I don't really get why people have to judge trans people. I mean, we're not really doing anything that interferes with your life. Even if we need to pee and use the bathroom, that's not really something the State should be concerned about.
Isn't it obvious? People are assholes. That's why trans people are such common targets, because there are so few of us and so many of them (read: cis people) that the human species' inherent desire to hate those who are different kicks in even more often than they would if we were just as common as cis people.
The reality that you very well likely have already been in the same bathroom as a trans person - for most of you I imagine that would mean trans boys in the same bathrooms as you...
Frankly, I'm more offended by the fact that there are cis women in the same bathrooms as me than the fact that, before I started living as a woman full-time, I had to share a bathroom with trans men.
I never understood the obsession the religious right, and the broader modern conservative movement in America has with LGBTQ people. I mean, surely even the most bigoted people must have relatives and friends that are part of this community.
Oh, absolutely. They just don't know because they're too scared to come out.
Gay and trans are very different things - one is about your romantic attractions and desires, and who you fall in love with and marry, and the other one is about your innate brain sex, which develops, like your orientation, during fetal development.
And somehow I won the lottery and wound up being both. (Also, is it bad that the phrase "brain sex" makes me imagine brains
having sex rather than brains having
sex?)
You're not "born a man". You don't chop off your dick. You don't "pretend to be a woman" or try and fool or entrap heterosexual men (because they're the ones that are attracted to you, not the other way around).
Speak for yourself (although admittedly I'm more into homosexual women than heterosexual men).
You don't choose to be trans, or gay, just as you don't choose to have Down Syndrome or autism or a fetal disfigurement.
You're right, you just read
Dreadnought, or watch
Magic Mike, during a lightning storm. Before either of those came out, though, yeah, you weren't able to "choose".
Anyway, in regards to the actual post, which clearly Alben Barkley did not even care enough to comment on - and instead went right smack into an ad hominem attack on me - I don't apologize for anything I wrote.
He did, actually -- just not in the same post as the one in which he insisted upon calling you a dude.
Lately, on this forum, which I have been a member of for quite some time, I have received intense blowback for my opinions. That's what this site is all about... but I never thought it would ever get to the point where instead of just disagreeing, it became personal, and petty, and we started to go after one another's gender identity...
Hey, here's a fun idea, how about I start throwing bombs at cis people for being cis? (Not literally, obviously, but I mean pulling the sh**t Barkley did to them, although I believe him when he says he didn't know that you'd previously mentioned you're trans)
It's gotten really bad, but I keep coming back because so much of Reddit is under strict censorship.
Anyway, I think maybe I should just start up a YouTube channel and then people can really see me and hear me talk and see how I act before they really are able to judge me at all. Maybe I just need to get off this forum because I spend too much time on here, and it's not helping me feel any better.
It's just honestly becoming something I don't want to be a part of anymore.
For what it's worth, as weird as you are, I kind of hope you stick around, even if you don't want to keep posting. Even if you think I'm kind of gross for not realizing I was a girl immediately (or perhaps my sense of humor that is evident in the way I reacted to some of these paragraphs), my PMs are always open if you want to talk about things.
