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“That is a very sweet way of being wrong,” they joked. They mostly dated cis people before meeting their boyfriend and naively assumed dating a trans person would mean reaching a magical state of pure understanding. And I answered very earnestly, and did not understand that they were flirting,” Osworth recalled.
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“They very sweetly asked me a question about teaching. Osworth, a novelist based in Portland, met their boyfriend, the writer Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, online a little over a year ago. Cis people don’t know what they’re missing.Ī.E. So for Valentine’s Day, I talked to some trans writers and artists about falling in love: The unique joys of loving while trans, the sexiness of it, the moments of self-reflection and growth. Thanks to the popularity and critical acclaim of work like Detransition, Baby, Framing Agnes, Gender Reveal, and so much more, the stories of trans people are finally being rewritten. Though I’m too shy to call myself hot on the record, my experience has been similar. Nearly one in two trans people will be sexually assaulted in their lifetimes.īut for Gill-Peterson, dating has “helped get over that internalized messaging really fast.” Translation: People found her hot. Trans people have a harder time accessing healthcare and housing. Over the last year, dozens of states have introduced anti-trans discrimination bills, many of them targeting children. I don’t want to give the impression that it’s not hard to be trans in America. These lies are largely made up of tragic tales of rejection and violence. “One of the many transphobic lies that we're told in this culture is that trans people are isolated and not lovable,” she told me. Jules Gill-Peterson, a professor based in Maryland, told me she was prepared to resign herself to a life of isolation after transitioning. I’m hardly the first trans person to have this concern. Worse, I believed I wasn’t deserving of love, or that the love I received would come with certain provisions and impediments. My greatest fear, however, was a bit more mundane: I was terrified no one would ever love me. The murders of trans people have only increased since then. In 2019, Human Rights Campaign declared the killings of trans people a national epidemic-in particular, the killings of Black trans women. The BBC recently ran a fear-mongering piece about cis women being “pressured” to date trans women. Rowling continues to attack trans people online, despite having everything better to do. Blatant and implicit transphobia is too often the air that we breathe. Both occurrences were scary, but they were, I believed, what I should have expected. The first time I ever went out femme in public, for instance, a car followed me around the block the third time, my partner-one of the first people I dated after coming out-bragged about doing whatever she wanted to me without verbal consent. They were valid for all the predictable reasons that prevent trans people from living safely. This doesn’t mean my fears were unfounded. Three years later, I can hardly remember the intensity of my fear. Nearly everyone in my life was supportive, and, in hindsight, my trepidation seems a little excessive. “That makes sense,” my mom said, over the phone.
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Over coffee with another friend, I muttered, “I think I might be trans,” after a half hour of blundering small talk that afternoon, she gave me a tote bag full of makeup. A week later, he took me out to gay bars to show me around. To one friend, I came out over text-my lede buried beneath apologies for even sharing this news. When I did, I was terrified of how people would treat me. I believed trans people were duplicitous I believed they were pariahs I believed they were worthy fodder for ridicule, but never- ever-worthy of love.
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Growing up, I developed a clear idea through TV and movies how to think about trans people.