selfaware soup

Casual Cis People Bullshit

2019-08-18

(archived Twitter thread)

Thread about effects of different cis people bullshit:

(of course, my own perspective, ymmv)

I think a lot of people assume that the worst kind of hurtful communication towards trans people is the literal nazi trolls who tell you to go kill yourself via DM/Email and that everything else is easy to deal with.

While these direct verbal attacks are often not easy to stomach and put me in a kind of defence mind set in case on of them might actually want to hurt/kill me or my loved ones, they create a purely external threat. It’s clearly them who want to cause harm and not my fault.

Then there’s the people who know your proper name and gender and simply refuse to use them consistently. Often these are relatives or other people close to you and it signals a deep negligence and ignorance towards yourself which makes it very hurtful.

And there’s the random stranger who casually misgenders you for whatever reason. What this often does is cause myself to think “What did I do wrong this time? What part of my appearance wasn’t good enough?”. The threat becomes internal and the blame shifts toward myself.

This is why casual misgendering from strangers is anything but harmless although it might seem the easiest to deal with if you never had to go though this experience.