When trans people make posts that are like “hey if you ever feel like you wanna be a boy/girl, you can be!” all of these cis people who inherently have no idea what it’s like to be trans (and occasionally transmedicalists who are just hugely misunderstanding the post) flock to it to to yell about how “being trans isnt a choice you transtrenders!!!” but like……. That’s fundamentally missing the point of what those posts even mean.
For tons of trans people, you don’t figure out your identity by going “oh man I have such bad dysphoria, I must be trans!” When you combine it with the internalized transphobia that all trans people deal with, dysphoria hardly ever manifests itself as immediately magically knowing that you’re trans, let alone even knowing you’re allowed to be trans.
For LOTS of questioning/potential trans folk, they’ll have a feeling that really is along the lines of “I wish I was a girl but I’m not” or “I wish I was a boy but I’m not” and what opens the door to them accepting their transness is… literally just accepting that it’s okay for them to be trans. For me, I had a feeling that fits the “born in the wrong body” narrative pretty closely, I basically felt like I was “meant” to be a boy and had somehow been “born wrong.” I would’ve said the same thing when I was a questioning trans kid – “I want to be a boy.” Not I am, because I didn’t know I could be.
Just learning that you’re allowed to be the gender you want to be can be the final thing needed to help a trans person figure out they’re trans. Because we aren’t told by society, by school, by the media, by our parents, or anywhere else that it’s okay for us to be transgender. We literally are not born into a world that tells us it’s okay to exist the way we are. So many trans people start off by saying, “I wish I was a different gender” because we don’t know it’s possible to say “I AM a different gender.”
This idea that you can’t WANT to be trans is so fucking harmful to questioning trans people and I want to kick every cis anti-sjw in the face who’s screencapped posts that say things like “hey if you wanna be a girl that’s okay you can be!” to make fun of it and call people fake/transtrenders. Fuck all of you for laughing at things you have absolutely no personal experience with.
The post that needed to be written ^