a rant on label-policing in the trans community
You don't need to feel dysphoria to be trans. I've seen a lot of this bullshit label-policing around here, and i just think it's really damaging to everyone involved. First of all, everyone deals with emotions differently. I don't really notice when I feel terrible, often times. I repress it. It manifests as me not wanting to do anything, just feeling "alright", having no energy and no motivation. I only notice that things were off when i get stuff back in order and i actually start to give a shit about anything again. When i regain the motivation to do things. I don't actively feel terrible, i just feel like nothing. Same goes for dysphoria. I could go the rest of my life as a guy, and i'd survive, sure. I'd get by, I wouldn't have noticed anything was missing. But the moment i heard someone call me a girl I realized that maybe just getting by isn't all there is to life. That i could be confident, and to genuinely like being the person i am. It felt like i finally got a glimpse of what it means to actually be myself. Living in ambivalence fucking sucks. If I had some Jackass telling me that I'm not dysphoric enough to be trans, I'm not sure where i would have ended up. Emotions are hard. Not everyone knows exactly why they feel certain things, or what those emotions actually are or how to deal with them. It is incredibly important to let people freely explore their gender identity and sexuality and to try on labels without being chastised for it. Because this shit is hard. This whole purity bullshit is a great way to push people back in the closet. You don't get to decide peoples gender identity. If someone says they're trans, take them by their word. You can't know anyone well enough to decide that for them. "oh, what if they're just pretending?". For what? So they can get the privilege of having strangers on the Internet tell them to kill themselves? Fuck off. Maybe it later turns out they're not trans. Maybe they misjudged. Who cares? They discovered something new about themselves, that should be celebrated. It takes a while to figure out who you are, and assigning yourself a label to see how it makes you feel can help with that. What benefit does anyone get from policing these labels? To make ourselves feel more like some sort of special club? Fuck off, that's not the point. Yeah, maybe someone calls themselves trans and then proceeds to say a bunch of transphobic stuff. That just makes them a transphobic asdhole, it does not mean they're no longer trans unless they fucking tell you they're not. Trans people can be hypocrites too. Let people identify how they want. You cannot possibly know someone's situation well enough, because most people don't even know theirs. Policing what it means to 'really' be trans is bullshit. Do you identify as a different gender than the one you got assigned at birth? Congrats, you're in. You're not required to get surgery, or to 'pass' or to have to feel any specific emotion. Because it's your identity. Who the fuck cares if anyone passes some arbitrary purity test. Let people identify how they want to, because that is not your fucking business and it never will be.