@WrenArcher @FinalGirl

It's not even that. It wasn't trans girls who created this narrative.

It was the cis doctors. They *required* it if you were to access medical transition. They had a very limited set of criteria, and you had to match 'em all to get on the bus.

So the only people who could access transition, and thus exist as trans people, fit The Narrative, because of selection bias.

Didn't know since you were little? No.

Didn't play with dolls? No.

Didn't dress whenever you could? No.

Didn't look, to them, like you'd be attractive if you transitioned? No.

Had dark skin? No.

Weren't hetero? No.

Were fat? No.

Found enjoyment in your newly feminine body? No more for you, you AGP freak.

So it's no mystery at all where this came from. The doctors in charge of gatekeeping in the early days (and by this I mean through 2010 or so?) required that you fit into each of these boxes, and if you didn't, your gate got kept.

So the nuance is, it's not that trans girls just decided to start telling the doctors that they all fit this Narrative. It's that we knew that this was literally the only way we could access medical transition, and without medical transition, there was no legal transition.

The doctors set out to create a class of fuckable, consequence-free women for men to use. We had no other purpose in their eyes. To make us more palatable as potential sex partners, the narrative was designed to suggest that we were ultra-women.

And, frankly, they also knew that most of us, because of the difficulty in accessing legal transition (which required bottom surgery), would never be employable in the usual sense. So they were creating a class of women who'd have little choice but to pursue relationships with men, whether as sex work or as life partners.

It's insidious stuff. But make no mistake: the Narrative was a 100% Cis invention. We didn't do it. We suffered through it.