I wonder if part of the reason people still defend Ashten is because portrayals of abuse in media only show a very narrow range of ways that abuse can happen. And so if something doesn't fall into the category of the type of abuse that people often see labelled as abuse, people assume it's not abuse

It feels like in a lot of transfem spaces there's a bit of a tendency to assume anyone who doesn't fully fit into the expected gender roles of a man must therefor be a trans woman who hasn't realized it yet. And like, yeah, that's complete BS. You're just trading one arbitrary and overly-restrictive box for another. In my experiences I've noticed that a lot of people just assume I want, and try and encourage or push me to get, a body that is fully feminine. But actually I want a body that will look femme if I want it to look femme and look androgynous if I want it to look androgynous, which I pretty much have, and so, no, I really don't want to go any further in my transition as I might lose that. But people assume I'm 100% a woman and want a body that matches that. I do think there's a genuine problem of trans spaces on Fedi being hostile to anyone who isn't a binary transfem, and I don't really have a good and easy solution for that beyond just asking people to be better.