Trans diary (6/20):
Gonna start in media res. I feel I can barely keep up with all the new links forming in my brain as a result of realizing I'm trans. It's not just the usual "oh, that makes sense" retrospective reassessment of my life story. It's other things too. Like this: transgender people are beautiful, and they deserve love and protection, right? Then the same must logically be true for me. I'm being given permission to stop hating myself. I can see now how much that self-hating neurosis was forced on me by internalizing the way other people saw my younger self. I interpreted their irritation, avoidance, or condescension toward me as an objective confirmation of my own weirdness and worthlessness. But this is totally relative. The children and adults who didn't treat me well as a child were acting on their own subconscious beliefs, and transphobia must surely have factored into how I was treated.
In fact it's hard now not to think of how often, for no apparent reason, people didn't seem to like me. And it's not like I was some kind of angelic child either. I was def bratty, stubborn, arrogant, and annoying plenty of times. But they knew something I didn't. They could see things that I, as a gender-confused autistic child very much locked within my own perspective, could not see about myself. They knew what I was instinctively, and many must have harmed me because of that. Not even intentionally -- or, at least, not always. Just pure, socially-constructed bias that manifests in human interactions, leaving the recipient always confused why they seem to be treated so badly everywhere they go.
This ruins lives, I hope you understand. I don't know if I would want to speculate about it without having some claim to oppression myself, but now that I do, the conclusion seems undeniable. What if more often than not, every time you talked to someone new, they already disliked something about you through no fault of your own? What's the more likely explanation, especially for a young person with no understanding of social norms? That many people in the world are misjudging your character independent of one another? Or -- seemingly much more plausible -- that you're just inherently weird, bad, broken, etc. etc.?
My heart breaks for all the children who receive this message. Now that I know what it's like not to believe it after a lifetime of telling myself they were all correct, I can see how heavily that lie shadowed my life. It's like seeing in 3D what you could only perceive as 2D before. Other people are wrong, often! Social hierarchies are unjust and based on exploitation! The way you're treated does not affect your worth! You know your worth best, but there are people out there who will treat you like you deserve to be treated! Even if there aren't any in your life right now, it doesn't mean that there won't be, and it doesn't make you any less valid!
The exclamation points above are just some transliteration attempt at communicating how ground-breaking and pleasurable my new realizations are. They're all coming rapidly after one another, augmenting the one that came before, setting the conditions for the next to come along. I feel that all my specialized knowledge is being united into a framework that provides irrefutable proof that I'm trans and that I'm lovable. The work of several decades is being beamed at high intensity deep inside me right now. I'm just laying in my bed letting thoughts of self-love, pride, and healing wash over me. I don't know if I've ever felt this good before in my life. It feels like the glorious reemergence of my true self, the painstakingly-maintained false self falling away into useless bits and pieces.
