Portuguese listening practice. Been listening to podcasts.

One today, interview (cis female) talks to doctor (cis female) and mother of trans kid (cis female) about trans people.

And I have THOUGHTS about this stuff in English, and it’s going to be useful for me to formulate them in Português, but they’re basically this:

Cis people keep talking to cis people, for a cis audience about us. They decide what we are, and then they explain their thinky thoughts. Many of them, as these were, are well meaning. I do not want to piss these people off. They are allies.

But they talk over us, and some of the stuff they say is just plain wrong.

It’s the usual stuff: sex is about chromosomes and your body, gender is about how you identify, blah blah blah, social role, society imposes stuff, trans people feel uncomfortable from a young age. Now let’s talk about a girl who wants to be a boy, or vice versa.

NO!!!!

For the love of golf (that’s a typo, but I’m leaving it, because it’s funny)! Like, lots of trans people have thought long and hard about this sex/gender thing. We’ve developed some pretty complicated ideas. Nobody ever asks us about them though. Nobody ever asks us about who we are, and whey we do what we do. They tell us.

And the things they tell us are wrong, and we tell people that the things they tell us are wrong, and they don’t listen.

“Being trans is not a mental illness” - true.

“Trans people experience distress and a feeling of ‘wrongness’” - true, for the most part.

“Trans people have existed in every society and every time period” - also true.

“Transition alleviates the distress.” - generally true.

So given this, maybe instead of trying to shove us into your boxes of what it means to be male or female, consider that, given we keep popping up, give good accounts of ourselves, and transition (medical and social) WORKS, maybe consider that our very existence shows that maybe the way you think about how human sexual identity works is incomplete.

You have taken the sum total of humanity and divided it by two, and expected the answer to be an integer, because integers are all you think about.

Stop trying to make us fit that. Consider that the answer might have a remainder.

And for the love of golf (I’m keeping that), stop referring to trans women as “men who want to be women”, trans men as “women who want to be men”, and the same thing with kids. We have told you who we are, and we have used VERY SIMPLE LANGUAGE, because apparently it still fails to go in.

So I will reiterate. Trans women do not want to be women because we are men who want to be women. Trans girls do not want to be girls because they are/we were boys who want to be girls.

Trans women want to be women because we are women. It’s that simple. Why do people keep not getting this?

Trans women are women. Trans girls are girls. Trans men are men. Trans boys are boys. Non binary people are valid.

That’s why we are distressed without transition. It’s not because we are “unhappy with social roles” - if I was the only person alive on a desert island, I’d still be a trans woman.

I’d still be a trans woman, because I’m a woman. When I was a child, I was a girl. Always have been.

If you (the world at large) stopped talking over us and, given you agree that we aren’t “insane”, actually considered that we might have some insight into our condition, then we might be less “ooh, so mysterious, nobody can understand!”

You’d understand if you listened to what we told you.

Nada sobre nós sem nós - nothing about us without us.