...

i feel like i’ve been openly trans long enough to deal with so many people trying to tell me what’s wrong with my head & attempt to transplant some neurosis in there and it’s so easy to just be like. no, that’s not me. that’s actually not how i think at all and i don’t worry about the things you think i do. i’m not “trying to be” anyone or anything, i just am.

& then i start to recognize this pattern happening over and over again with not just other trans people but systems & therians et al & it becomes so obvious that it’s all just about trying to fit everyone into an experience/being-in-the-world that just does not line up with the actual multiplicity of experiences that people can attest to. it’s as arbitrary as the gender binary or cissexism or any arguments about heterosexuality being “natural” or whatever, & it’s enforced the same way - through pathologization, through positioning differences in experience of self as being deformations of some platonic ideal individual human self: a concept of self that goes back to liberal enlightenment thought & then further back to the christian idea of the human soul, socially constructed, and therefore, while in a sense “real”, entirely possible to change to account for those hurt by it. it’s all an attempt to reconcile variation by forcing it into strict boundaries, by making all variations subservient to a particular one given higher status in our culture, same as conversion therapy, same as coercive surgeries on intersex people, same as “gender identity disorder”, etc etc, it’s creating a problem where there is none, treating an “illness” that is social/political & not medical.

that’s why i’m here for any alternate conceptions of self - i just trust people to know who they are more than anyone else does, & it’s clear that calling these people crazy does absolutely no good for anybody. what harm is there in letting someone be multiple people or an animal or whatever, if that genuinely can make them feel more connected to themself, their community, and the world at large? there is so much more potential for what people can become and therefore what people can do when we stop projecting the exact same internal life & experience onto everybody