#all apply to my current experience there is some residual' and also because I don't feel comfortable talking about stuff that private

[ablednt]

Honestly though, while of course not even remotely to the level where I’d imply that I experience transmisogyny or am transfem or anything (I very much do not), I will always relate more to how transfems talk about and view their womanhood than I ever will with cis women, as a disabled person who simply was not ever viewed like my nondisabled dfab peers were.

I grew up Desperately just Wanting To Be A Girl, in my case it differs somewhat in that I was also Expected to be a girl but like I guess if you haven’t grown up having your girlhood denied on the basis of your disability and/or another marginalized feature it’s not really something easily understood but I was treated like a pet by everyone I have never had the same kind of dignity around gender that people extended to abled cis girls around me.

So I spent my entire teenage years desperately expending spoons I didn’t have shaving and putting on makeup that made me look less like I had dwarfism and chronic illness and desperately mirroring my peers to try and mask my autism but all that ever got me was being pulled along behind the Real Girls so they could check off their charity for the week (literally happened to me multiple times) and people joking about me being like their pet and such and always being berated by adults in my life for Not Being A Girl because I was Just Something Else.

And it really makes me feel like even though recently I’ve started to connect to womanhood a lot more than I did last year when I was going through some real bad dysphoria, it’s not even remotely in the way that cis women do it. It’s this inherently nonbinary presence for me because in a (metaphorical rather than physical) sense I am transitioning into this state of being, it’s like, for me I’m taking a dignity and sense of self that was never offered to me.

And it’s like, no even if for whatever reason I decided that the only thing I wanted to identify with was womanhood (not going to happen) I’d inherently not be cis because cis girlhood was literally never extended to me the same way it was for nondisabled cis girls. I cannot relate to their lives, their perceptions of their own gender, and frankly I don’t WANT to be them anymore. A lot of my dysphoria came not from being feminine but from the trauma of spending years Desperately fawning on and pandering to the girls around me only to be repeatedly mistreated and rejected.

It was never my choice whether or not I was a girl before, growing up, the only times that anyone ever acknowledged my girlhood were if it was to impose some kind of unpleasantry upon me (cause even if people will outright admit I barely register as human to them let alone someone with a gender, it’s not going to free me from misogyny </3) so in that sense I feel like I grew up in a nonbinary state and like I have very little common ground with abled cis women, ESPECIALLY if they’ve never felt signifigantly dehumanized.

For me becoming a girl, or more girl like, is a small sort of transition because it’s a reclamation of and an indulgence in something that was never extended to me.