When people keep telling you that you pass, you most likely do, and you’re most likely hella cute as well, because people conflate high passing and being conventionally attractive a lot. And some people, including a lot of trans women, just can’t handle that. Our society teaches women to constantly monitor each others beauty and put each other down both when we’re not pretty enough and too pretty, we’re forced to constantly square the circle, to navigate this ridiculously narrow corridor between supposedly being an unsightly mess and supposedly being a shallow skank. And like most of mysogyny, that gets amplified further when you’re trans. I keep hearing stories like yours and they’re always from really beautiful trans girls who are resented for looking conventionally hotter or more cis-like than the person putting them down. Like, i just met this super cute trans girl and took her to a local meetup because she was afraid to go alone after some other trans woman had trash talked her for not doing enough about her voice at another get-together years ago - not only is that a horrible demand in general, voice work is hard and not everybody has the talent or the ressources or the time or the lack of voice dysphoria to pull through with it, no, she actually has a lovely voice, low-pitched but very smooth and feminine, a voice i could listen to all evening. But that other woman saw her and probably felt threatened and had to lash out. I had to think of that when you wrote about your ex.

And no, you’re absolutely not a bad trans person for stealthing once in a while. It’s a scary time we live in, and while it’s important that we’re visible and outspoken and let people know we’re actual human beings they know and not just some abstract “gender ideology”, it’s hard to be visible 24/7. When you put yourself out there most of the time, and when you reflect the way you do when you do that, and give people the opportunity to learn, that’s more than enough. From each according to their abilities also goes for activism, and there’s no shame in not wanting to be in the trenches permanently. Our survival and continued existence in itself constitutes a revolutionary act. Reaction wants us dead and being alive as a trans person and living your best life in itself defies the necropolitics of today’s fossil capitalism. Being able to take a break from the struggle is a form of privilege, as is being able to transition at all, or having enough money to pay out of pocket for surgeries, or living in a place with easier access to public trans health care, or being educated and able to articulate your existence in a convincing way, or being binary trans, or having had a supportive home and being able to accept yourself in ways other people can’t because their parents didn’t give them the love they would’ve deserved, or being a white trans person, or living in an area that makes it easier to access queer networks, but none of these are things you shouldn’t use as tools for your survival if you’re lucky enough to have them at your disposal. Cisfascism wants all of us dead, and we have a right to fight bacvk against it with anything we have at our hands, we should just be aware of and mindful towards people who don’t share some of our privilege instead of throwing them under the bus like the actual assimilationists do.