Today I saw the tweet from Brianna Wu (if you've seen it, you know the one) in which she went full transmesicalist and threw half the trans community under the bus to... IDK what she thought she was going to accomplish. Convince someone of something, maybe? ️
Anyway, the details and her exact motivations aren't really my point.
In that anger-filled tweet, I saw a little piece of my past self. The scared person who was struggling to reconcile her transness with the transphobia that she'd taken as fact for as long as she could remember.
For those of us who've been soaked in transphobia, either as a kid or as an adult, coming out and accepting ourselves is a messy process. It's unsettling. We've just come face to face with a massive revelation that shakes our entire world. At the same time, our past is gaslighting us and everything we think we know says that transition is bad, evil, sinful, or even just really hard and painful. Reconciling that conflict is HARD.
In that moment, with your world trembling, it's tempting to try and hold on to anything you can. Whatever allows you to maintain some connection to your past, some stability, some sense of self. Whatever you can use to convince yourself that you're doing the right thing. Often that means holding onto your transphobia. ️
When my egg first cracked and I realized I had a lifetime of wishing I could be a girl, I was still pretty deep into Evangelical Christianity. I was so afraid that I would process those desires in a way that would lead me astray from my faith and cost me my soul. Whatever you believe about religion isn't the point here. The religion only lended moral weight to the transphobia. The point is that the transphobia had such a foothold in my mind, I believed it so thoroughly, that I was afraid to let it go.
I still thought transition was morally wrong, I just wasn't going to be an ass about it. At some point I went a little further and came to the conclusion that I wasn't going to silently judge trans people either because I didn't know what their circumstances were. Maybe they were just making the best of a bad situation? I had three people in my life at that point who were out to me as trans. I didn't want to be an ass towards them, after all. But that was as close as I came to being an ally.
And then my own egg cracked. :hatched_trans_egg:
Now what?!? I couldn't deny what I now knew was true about myself. I also had a head full of transphobia. Square peg, round hole.
So much of my first six or eight months of transition was spent just trying to justify my transition. I would go on long walks for two or three hours at a time, listening to music and arguing with myself. I felt the need to be ready to justify it to anyone who might ask. I needed to justify it to myself.
This led to theological argument after theological argument. I found a few trans people on Twitter who were nominally Christians and listened to what they said. I rolled over all the Bible verses in my head, trying to make sense of it all, to square what I was taught to believe with my own need for transition. I made philosophical arguments, medical arguments. You name it. I needed there to be a reason why it was okay for me to transition because the alternative was death. (I don't mean actual, physical death. Just that I was dead inside and my soul was starting to rot like a hollow tree.)
In the case of Brianna Wu, she basically made the argument that, unlike all those other trans people, her dysphoria was so bad that transition was necessary for her. (How does she know hers is uniquely bad? LMFAO. She doesn't.) It's the same thing I was doing. It's bargaining with the transphobia. It's trying to find an argument or an excuse that says your transition is valid but still lets you believe the same old transphobia rubbish as before.
(Her arguments are also medically rubbish but that's besides the point...)
As I've healed and grown into myself and gotten plugged into the trans community, my perspective on these things has shifted. I've realized that none of it matters. Those arguments are pointless. It doesn't matter whether you're trying to rearrange the Bible verses to show that being trans is okay or you're leaning on the DSM-5 and a gender dysphoria diagnosis. In either case, if you feel the need to justify trans people's existence, then you're just doing free emotional labor.
Trans people exist. I exist. I'm a trans woman. Anyone who knows me and has an once of sense can tell you that I'm as much of a girl as any cis woman. I love everything about being a girl. If someone else thinks differently, that's their problem, not mine. If my family struggles with their sister or daughter being trans because they think their religion says trans people are evil, that's not my problem. I'm not evil. That much is obvious. It's on them to square their beliefs with those facts, not me.
I do think there's a time and place for those arguments, though. When I went on those long walks and argued for hours, I wasn't just trying to prepare for a faceoff with my father. I was trying to convince myself. It was a central part of my emotional processing and healing. Healing takes time and it can get really messy. (Even 3 months into HRT, I still wasn't 100% convinced. ) Those kinds of arguments can help you to accept yourself. I'm still having those arguments with myself to this day, even if they've slowed down a good bit.
As necessary as those arguments were for accepting myself, I'm glad they're mostly over. I don't want to be fighting with myself for my own dignity. Goodness knows there's plenty of other people to fight. ️ Why fight myself?
And, by and large, that's where I think those arguments should stay. It's it occasionally useful to argue with cis people? Yeah, unfortunately. Especially when dealing with healthcare, dysphoria is the only reason insurance companies pay for anything. But at the end of the day, every time we have an argument about whether or not someone is really trans or really needs X thing, that person loses a bit of their dignity.
And throwing vast swaths of the trans community under a bus just to convince yourself that you're really trans? Unconscionable.
We're not free until everyone is free.