I've been silent for a while. For good reason.

I've not been in a good place. At all.

I don't know how to explain it. Or I suppose, more honestly, I'm afraid to explain it. Partly because I'm terrified of the answers I'll get, partly because I'm afraid of what it'll mean that I'm even mired in these questions. I guess I'm really quite scared that I'll just be... cast off. Pushed out. Left behind.

And again, for good reason.

(A large part of why I disappear when I get upset, or distressed, is that I learned long ago that when I get that way, I am a burden. That talking about my feelings makes others uncomfortable. There are no answers, and my emotions don't immediately dissolve, so people get frustrated with me. I'll be consistently sad. Always depressed. And so no one wants me around, because nothing changes that, and they rightly don't want to be exposed to it.

Anyhow, that's a digression, even if an explanation. I apologize.)

Pride is hard for me. Pride's always been hard for me, but this year feels especially difficult, despite it being my first Pride on HRT.

A staggering number of bad things have been going on, and I don't particularly wish to enumerate them here. Regardless, these events have started getting more mainstream press, and more online chatter, and I can't help but notice. I've been seeing what they say about trans people. I've been seeing everything the right-wing chuds say about trans people.

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Part of what fucked me up in gradschool was the fact that, no matter what you did, no matter how well you did it, it was never enough. Someone in the audience will always ask you some question you can't answer, and pick some hole in your research - And they'll never pull you to the side afterward to carefully discuss those potential shortfalls with you. They'll always drop it on you in the form of "Can you answer THIS???" in front of an audience, simultaneously to make you squirm, and ensure the audience knows how smart THEY are.

You learn very quickly in grad school that these people are important. They're largely professors, important researchers. People who you /need/ to listen to. No matter how nitpick-y, no matter how asinine it sounds on the surface, you /listen/ to it. Because 75% of the time they're absolutely right, and the other 25% of the time it doesn't matter (Because they are your superiors).

So grad school largely becomes a lesson in "You're wrong, and you'd better show your throat". Every counter argument is one you have to take seriously. Every potential scenario you never thought is vitally important, and you must consider it.

That gets beaten into your brain. It becomes a reflex.

. . .

Well, imagine how that kind of reflex impacts you when you're suddenly confronted with numerous transphobic arguments.

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I fell down a pit almost immediately when the Dallax Drag Show Pride event got broken up by a mob of right-wing assholes. I saw what was happening, and I knew that it was an attack on LGBTQIA+ people. I knew it was an excuse - But I also knew that I didn't have an answer for what was being discussed.

The mob claimed the event was child abuse, a sexualized event that children were being exposed to. Grooming, of course, is the buzzword of the day. This was justification of it. This was concrete evidence.

There was, of course, misinformation (The photos of a child giving money to a cis burlesque dancer have been widely debunked, for all that matters). But in spite of that misinformation, there was still an event going on that was generally speaking, sexualized.

All of what I saw countering the right-wing arguments was couched firmly in "These are assholes who want us dead, and we do not take their argument seriously". I also saw an awful lot of "This is a grim portent of the future", discussions of how we should expect attacks from this rhetorical angle to happen moving forward, and quickly. But nothing countering the arguments from the right-wing.

I certainly didn't have an answer. So I tried to look for more information.

I only found more depression and hate.

In looking into the topic further, I fell into a deep, deep hole. I searched for what was being said, and how it was being said. And soon it was more than just the current events - It was the entire concept of being trans at all.

It was how people detransition, and how their transition left them permanently scarred and damaged.

It was about how trans people are overwhelmingly demanding, a constant drain and are largely problem-causers.

It was about how trans people are fetishists, bringing their sexual deviance to the public and demanding recogition.

It was about how transfemme people are invading women's spaces. How they are reducing women's safety, taking significant away from women's achievements, and cheapening women's advancements.

It was about how transfemme people can't even define what it means to be a woman, so how can they want that which they cannot define?

But more than anything else, it was about how trans individuals impress their identities, demands, and "delusions" onto other people publicly, constantly, and loudly.

I fell into the pit looking at all of it. And I didn't have answers for any of it. And I saw myself in all of it.

And I didn't have answers.

Yet I could see the future, where I transition publicly at last at work, and all of my coworkers force a smile and act very polite - but they're all uncomfortable inwardly. None of them actually accepting me as a woman, at all, but rather just feeling very uncomfortable with my making their bathrooms less safe, making them grit their teeth and pretend to acknowledge something they know inwardly isn't the truth. I could see the future where I am the *problem*.

Where I have no answers, and those arguments are ones that have power over me, and that I *must* acknowledge.

A future where I'll always be ugly, ugly, ugly. Where I'll never have even a remote chance of looking anything even a FRACTION like anything but a man.

And I have no answers.

All I have is this deep, despondent depression. The knowledge that I hate who I am and the body I live in, and the simultaneous knowledge that I have no opportunity to ever make it better. That all my attempts to make it better will only result in my making things worse somehow.

And fundamentally it makes me collapse inward. Because the only winning move seems like punching out of the game. The only way I could ever achieve peace would be to simply opt out of this reality that I'll never fit into.

And I have no answers.