On transphobia.

August 14, 2024

6 years on hormones today and I’ve experienced the most outright transphobia over the last 24 hours than I have in the past year.

I sat across from a cis friend who told me about how she sent a trans girl home from her house in an Uber because she didn’t disclose her identity back at the bar while they were making out. She told her that she should be more careful, because someone else might not be nice enough to call her a car.

Trans women have to worry every second of every day that the cis people in the world may clock us and put us in harm’s way, and this is especially exaggerated in romantic and sexual settings.

If you disclose at the bar, you risk being rejected and publicly humiliated by someone you were just clicking with. If you wait until you get home with someone, you put yourself at risk of physical violence or death, especially if you sleep with men, and doubly so if you are a woman of color.

If you are a cis person who is attracted to a woman until she tells you she is trans, without mentioning anything about her body or how she likes to use it, and suddenly you are no longer attracted to that person, you are being objectively transphobic. If that last statement made you feel defensive, realize the responsibility to actively unpack your transphobia.

Tonight, outside a lesbian party, my friend was asked for a cigarette by a cis man walking past the bar. Instead of thanking her and moving on, he continued to try and engage her in conversation while she was clearly signalling that she was uninterested, and would not stop even after we explained that we were at a queer party. At one point, I heard him ask her if she were trans, and I lost it. Even after I loudly told him how rude it was to ask that question of someone, he confronted me until I told him to kindly fuck off and brought my friends inside with me.

Trans women do not owe you anything. Not an explanation of our identity, not private information about our bodies, and frankly, not our attention nor desire. Trans women are not deceiving you by maintaining our dignity and protecting ourselves. Trans women deserve to love and seek love without fear.

In spite of it all, trans girls still manage to radiate beauty and grace, even when the world fails to notice.

After I got off the train at my stop, I saw a cis girl by herself stumbling up the stairs, clearly drunk. I stopped and asked her if she needed help and I walked her 4 blocks past my house to her home, while she sobbed and told me that she has been drinking nightly to try and forget the abortion that she had earlier this summer. When we got to her door, she told me that in the 10 years she has lived in the neighborhood, no one had ever helped her like that.

She didn’t know I was trans, and will probably never know that it was a trans woman that kept her safe. Who knows how she would have responded if she learned that, but women look out for each other in a world that deprioritizes our safety, no matter how unique our experience of womanhood may be.