Just say it: Not in my name

Us trans women tend to disturb cis people when we start to speak out our experiences of forced masculinisation, and especially the anger and rage it produced. People don't like angry women.

Tell you what. I utterly don't care if you cis guys don't like it. It still happened. It's still real. I'm still angry at the injustices done to me and my sisters. I'm not gonna take it lying down.

It doesn't mean I'm gonna start a war, so to speak, with planet cis - while revenge would probably be sweet for a short while, I don't think acting out my anger would indeed help me, or make me happy in the long term. Which is what I want: I like being happy.

I cannot be happy if I have to carry injustices hidden inside me. I've got to bring them out into the open, and while I recognise that this is not fun for the planet cis, it can't be helped. It still has to come out into the open. That female anger and rage is shunned is a regrettable situation, but it doesn't change the necessity of speaking out against forced masculinisation of trans girls, and telling about the rage and anger it begets.

My case being myself, of course: I was forcibly masculinised throughout my childhood. It happened mostly through my peers. My parents were sort of indifferent to my apparent gender variance: I just wasn't the kind of girl to play with trucks or to admire excavators. My "peers" weren't indifferent, though. The boys I was to be socialised with were rather hard on me being different (i.e. being rather a girly girl): I was shunned at first, then ridiculed, then beaten. My feelings today towards those people are of quite an unpublishable sort - on a bad day, given omnipotence, I'd make them suffer eternally. It wouldn't do good to me in the long run, but, boy, is the urge potent.

So, dear cises (not that there are many of you reading this blog, but whatever: I'm still writing this mostly just to myself): tormenting your peers as kids makes the tormented angry kinda permanently. Do not do it. Every time you do, you make permanent enemies.

And if you're of the sort who didn't do it but just looked away: don't look away. I know it's difficult to step in and stop it, but if you don't even say anything, you really are complicit in the torment. A simple "not in my name" is a start. Silence in the face of an injustice kills. It corrupts your heart.

You might want to notice that the above doesn't have any references to trans women's bodies. That's because they're not the problem. Injustice and violence perpetrated by cis people on trans girls and women is.

(yeah, this is about me me me and not about all the other problems regarding cis, trans and violence: it may be applicable to an extent, but I can't pretend to speak for others, and I'm not a good enough theoretician. Not yet, anyway).