claire, lesbnyans~ 💜⚸ @DarkWitchClaire@computerfairi.es

Something that cis people need to understand, being trans is like going through water torture.

Almost all transphobia is indirect, it's noticable if you're the target, and it's not something you think twice about otherwise. No single instance of transphobia is enough to make someone beat up a trans woman, or to push someone to kill themselves, but... it adds up. All of these building up an implicit assumption that trans women are pretending, or are sex fetishists. That trans men are just confused women.

From going outside and people openly guessing your genitals as you walk past, to every instance someone calls you "Sir" or uses the wrong name or pronouns, stuff like, cheap jokes about transgender strippers that didn't even need to be in the source material for the joke to work, or trans women being played by men/vice versa.

All of it reinforces the harmful ideas that lead to that one man getting angry and grabbing a baseball bat. All of it gradually wears you down. Each drip becomes more harmful than the last, even though no physical or large damage is happening. And the extent to which this pervades society means it is *impossible to ignore*. You can't even turn on the tv and retreat into a show, because tv -- especially comedies (of which most have a "trans episode" if not a running gag about trans people throughout the show), are terrible with this shit. Hell, you can't even open up a presumably ok thread on the internet without encountering people continuing this shit.

So part of a community being a comfortable place for trans people, means actual *effort* from cis people to:

a) understand that when trans people get angry, it's out of years, decades, of frustration at having to point this shit out, of having these conversations over and over and over

and, b) try not go on the defensive, understand not to take it personally, just take what you can from the message, and work on it. And that effort cannot come /close/ to what trans people expend regularly just having to deal with all of this with /little to no/ help from cis people, with nobody else picking up the slack of dealing with this. With having to educate every single cis person we come across, even though statistically trans people occur at a higher rate than people with red hair, or people with albinism.

I don't blame other trans people for being angry, from snapping at cis people. I don't think it's a good way to get people to engage, but I can't fault then becuase I very intimately know where that frustration comes from