Hi. I am a trans person in 2019. I spent a lot of time and effort helping out with grassroots community organizing alongside wealthier cis people for free, wound up homeless twice, lost housing once to a gentrifying landlord, ate dumpster-dived groceries, got boomers up my ass calling me lazy and a spendthrift when I was saving every penny from my shit gig economy job, then moved into tech because I needed to be in a field that would actually give me money to live.
I have friends who've done sex work to make money to survive.
I used to go to a trans employment support group where another trans guy told me he sold plasma until he moved here, where it's illegal.
The only jobs they told us about at this group were, "re-traumatize yourself in front of cis people and tell them your story".
I participated in this project they told me about, where a grad student "helped" me tell my story to an audience. I had more writing experience than he did.
In 2015 and 2016, I was doing research studies on trauma to make money. I was traumatizing myself for science, because I was so broke. And that's not even rare for us, is it? We do these studies telling cis people about how they've fucked us over, because they don't listen otherwise. I feel so mad sometimes.
It pisses me off that I am 1) extremely lucky by trans standards and 2) that my story is not even that uncommon among people of my age and gender identity.