I think I don't 'believe' trans people who don't try to transition? Like I remember this guy started talking to me on the street - full beard, leather jacket, rugged 60 year old, 100% male presenting, and he said he was a woman. Like, maybe, but it sort of felt meaningless.
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Sure, I understand this. His feelings are real and maybe he has serious dysphoria. But I don't know what the word 'woman' means if you can be a woman just by saying you are, yknow? He (she?) might be a woman to herself, but does not register as woman to me.
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As in: this person gets full 'male privilege'. They also described themselves as a lesbian, which puts me on alert as "older person with testosterone and a penis is into women and I need to sexually guard against them". My relationship to them was the same as if they were male.
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Sure, though I think you might be focusing on a different thing than me. I think two people's experiences can be incompatible and both extremely valid - my experience of this person has nothing to do with how important and valid theirs is. Their life can be very hard, or -
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they can have very good reasons for not transitioning, and this is fine and I'm not disputing that.
But their reasons don't change the way I experience them. There's nothing about them that makes my hindbrain believe they will act differently than a typical cis man.
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They are still going to experience an erection in response to my naked body, and I anticipate would be totally down for sex if I indicated that I maybe wanted it - which is something I *don't* assume about lesbian woman at all. They also experience people treating them as male,
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all the time - they probably don't get catcalled, and feel safer walking down streets late at night. This means they practically have a different experience in life than cis women do, which reinforces them inhabiting a 'male' category in my mind.
and again: this is all entirely independent of their feelings or reasons for not transitioning or how much they want to inhabit a cis woman's experience. That all is valid and often very sad and I feel empathy for them - but my experience of them as male is also valid.
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