[rant] Being trans is a blessing

Maybe it's just the stories I find myself attracted to, but it seems like a lot of those stories assume or even explicitly state that being trans is a curse; I've even read "nobody would choose to be this way if they had a choice." And I can't help saying to myself -- huh??

Well, I was assigned male at birth and though it was obvious to me (and to others) that I didn't fit, it was what I had to deal with. Even at age 6, all that stuff that being a boy was supposed to mean seemed just plain awful and stupid and painful, and I couldn't make myself do it. Being anything else was not an option in those days, even just being a "different" sort of boy was impossible. So I was exposed to all the awfulness of what is euphemistically called "male socialization."

It never took, probably because my inner self had no intention of letting it take. Maybe other AMABs learned to enjoy and feel proud of suffering all the bullying and masochism that being a proper boy or man is all about in our world, but my reaction was, I'm not nuts! I eventually learned to conform just enough to avoid the very worst and to hunker down and ignore the rest. But I never internalized it. And I survived, albeit with a bad case of complex PTSD that I will never really recover from.

But when I look around at the other AMABs who were more successfully socialized, I see people with warped and corrupted souls, people who've learned to see their humanity as a shameful flaw and to live and act in ways that damage their health and make them miserable, even if they try to deny it. I used to attend "men's groups" in the vain attempt to learn to relate to them, but I noticed that they don't relate, they just try to keep up a pose -- "beer, fart jokes, and misogyny" is what I called it -- because the masculinity they learned is about not relating to others (or even to themselves.) It seems to me that turning yourself into a Real Man™ doesn't decrease your suffering, it just teaches you to act like you like it.

So when I learned about what being trans really is, as opposed to the Jerry Springer/Dr. Phil caricatures, it was like getting out of jail. Wow, I can just walk away from all that @#$% ?! Heck yeah, throw me in that briar patch!

So I see being the way I am -- what we call "trans" -- as actually a blessing. Yeah, I went through hell for the first 20 years of my life, but I would have anyway -- becoming masculine doesn't decrease your suffering, it just teaches you to be in denial about it. My "transness" actually protected the Real Me inside, to the extent it could be protected in the anti-human society we live in. It taught me that you don't have to be what they say you have to be. It taught me that I can recognize the dominance heirarchies and the religion of exploiting others is just plain wrong. And it gave me a name for communities where I can more or less be myself and where people don't buy into all that @#$%. And, yeah, they might kill me for it. But I could also get run over by a bus tomorrow, we all die sooner or later. At least this way I get to live for a while.

Being trans is a privilege.