12/10/25: Being Transgender

If you constantly doomscroll twitter during your free time and also happen to be transgender or have transgender mutuals, you have probably seen the tons of discourse about that one girl that wanted to tattoo her entire body blue that got backlash for stereotyping her shitty abusive trans boyfriend… or something, which then devolved into transfem/masc infighting about who has it worse in simple terms. God I love the internet. 

But not only has it devolved into infighting between the transgender community— conversations of whether you desire to medically transition or not have come into play, too. Which puts me between a rock and a hard place, considering that I genuinely have no concept of the transgender experience besides the suffering that comes along with it and my friends’ experiences. So here’s my two cents on the matter that you can choose to discredit entirely on that basis:

As a transmasc (before, trans man) stuck in a very small, backwards, poor rural town in the Bible Belt (in a state with one single HRT clinic hours away from me that receives bomb threats, no less) that can also barely afford to cater to its cishet population, much less a queer one, with primarily transfem friends and like one trans male friend that is literally my first cousin and best friend for lifers, I don’t think that any of this discourse is actually productive towards those living in the same situations as I have or worse. No, you should not center transgender issues on those who are closeted, neither those who can easily pass as their agab, or more especially as gender conforming, and for the most part avoid the social hell of being transgender, but I think it is also important to consider even them if your main goal is offering a lesser hell to this minority. “Hell” in the context of being transgender is a multifaceted limbo that is primarily systemic, then economic, political, social and so on; statistics agree. So arguing whether transfems on Twitter bully transmascs or if transmascs actually have the same privilege as a cis man holds about the same significance as a fly bathing in cow shit; sure, it’s natural to happen, but who cares? 

Let’s take two extremes. The transgender woman 5 years, give or take, on HRT in Seattle, Washington faces the same background horrors as the trans man who doesn’t know that you can just easily DIY testosterone in Podunk Hicktown, Hitlerville. The only difference is that the transgender woman may have a wider support group— access to transgender communities— while the trans man will not, still, they struggle with the social stigma of a predatory trans woman, federal legislation that primarily targets trans women (yet still harms trans men and gnc transmisogyny exempt people), the mental health and substance abuse issues that come with being a minority, and the proven economic struggles (even struggling to be hired) of a trans woman, especially when they are out and on hormones. Yet the trans man still struggles with an innate sense of othering relative to the expected roles of cis women that likely seeps into both the professional and personal life; for example, please try cutting your hair in a mostly traditional Christian community and see how many people at your job will take you seriously, therefore, how many people will consider you for a management position or even hiring compared to the conventionally attractive cis woman. Sometimes it goes as far as rape threats to correct you. Or death threats. Sometimes they try. They might not even know you’re transgender but you, as a defective woman, still suffer under an extreme form of misogyny that caters to “fix” you, or if you’re one of those stubborn blue haired liberals, you’re a lost cause and they’ll daydream about the day you’re dead instead. And you’re lonely and vaguely dysphoric above it all; best case scenario, you become a ghost in your own life. Well, that is just my experience, from someone who has purely socially transitioned because I am poor and cannot afford HRT. Wow, it seems like being transgender in any sense, in any *state*, in any part of the world, is generally suffering and we should be trying to uplift our community, right? Oh, to be free from that little pink and blue cage of dissociative resentment and bitterness based primarily off of your and your peers experiences… 

One thing to understand is that statistically, trans women, and secondarily trans men, still face lower wages, high rates of unemployment, suicide, and homelessness, higher rates of abuse, assault, and murder— primarily hate crimes— compared to their cis peers. That is transgender people as a whole, you don’t have to take into account the millions of factors that I listed above.  We are still below cis people even if you think trans women or trans men have it better. And, objectively, whatever you think is “better” is so marginal that it doesn’t matter at all. So essentially, practice intersectionality and support your trans sisters and brothers but please do not entertain these kinds of conversations that serve no benefit to the community.