“This is not a hypothetical. You are less free now. Your security, dignity, and safety is in the hands of nasty, petty, monumentally stupid bigots. They can take it from you at a whim.”

https://www.liberalcurrents.com/the-end-of-trans-rights-in-the-uk-is-the-start-of-democratic-collapse/

At several stages in my career, I’ve been very fortunate to work with smart and experienced people who have been willing to listen to my ideas and tell me what I misunderstood or didn’t take into account and why they won’t work. I’ve learned a huge amount from this kind of interaction.

I find it immeasurably depressing to realise that there are large numbers of people out there like young me, who are talking to LLMs instead and being told that they are brilliant and their ideas are amazing. All of these people are missing out on the opportunity to learn and are completely unaware of it.

I write a lot about my ongoing discovery of just how good cis women are to trans girls when they have not been preemptively made to fear us.

I write about how easy it is to get accepted as a trans woman, because I think a lot of transfems really have this fear of imposing. Because we have impostor syndrome for womanhood as social performance.

It is something that newly transitioning women need to hear. Our struggle and hangups and fears are parallel and often the same as those of cis women's.

They do not always understand the specifics of our circumstances, but the underlying struggle? They know.

And that's an important message.

But there's another angle I'm realising.

Cis women don't know that we don't know they know.

I'll give you a second to parse that one.

I think cis women do not fully understand our fear. They are welcoming, but I've seen them react to me gushing about how welcome I feel with slight surprise and minimising the things they said and did to make me feel welcome.

The reason is that they do not fully understand how fucking STARVED I've been of this stuff all my life.

A few years ago, here on Fedi, I read something that stayed with me. About how people who've been in an abusive relationship can burst out crying and have a huge outpour of loud gratitude after something absurdly trivial like their new partner offering them a glass of water or something. They act like nobody ever did something like that for them, to the bafflement of the other person. It's just a glass of water.

The reason being, of course, that in some sense they never DID receive this kind of small kindness.

A person that's been abused has a completely broken barometer of what is "normal". Treating people with basic kindness is the baseline, but to a person that's been victimised it feels like extreme, saintly goodness, at least initially. Because it's hard to realise that no, the horrors were not how people normally interact.

Same has been written about people leaving cults, abusive families, abusive communities.

Why am I mentioning this? Because trans people in general, and trans women in the specific, are kind of a demographic-wide example of that.

Like any abuser, a transphobe will make it seem like there's nowhere and no one to run to. Like they are the best we can get. Heck, some transphobic rhetoric will pose as the 'phobes doing us a kindness.

Here's the thing. Cis women do not necessarily fully realise that we never had a normal girlhood or, for many of us, any interactions with women in women-dominated settings, AS women.

I mean, sometimes they know, but they don't KNOW, know.

Yesterday I wrote about a nice time spent with a few girls that I am only getting to know. And I was gushing, both here on Fedi and to the girl that invited me to the thing. And I thought about that and I am realising that she probably doesn't understand how big a deal this is, *even* when I say how big a deal it is.

Because she, presumably, had a relatively normal time being a woman. So she doesn't understand why women interacting in a friendly and casual way is blowing my mind.

Because it's hard to convey that all my life I was primed to think cis women would reject me and treat me like not just a man, but a predatory, dishonest man pretending to be a woman. I know it's not true, but I've not *experienced* it being untrue.

Transphobes badly need to convince us (and themselves) that all, or most, cis women do not want us to live as women.

Most cis women don't *know* these words are being put in their mouths.