#[ and we wish the best for the trans folks! we're making through the wonders and horrors with ours trans swag and we'll be all okay ♡ ]

[uncle-fruity]

I was literally JUST thinking about this! Wondering how many "women crossdressing for better opportunities" were really just trans men who were trying to live their best manly lives. And, frankly, I don't care what the cis have to say on this one, because they couldn't clock a closeted trans man if their life depended on it.

I'm not saying that there were no cis women at all who did this, but like... queer people have always been erased from history and art, forced to live in the margins, our existences explained away, forced to use code with each other so we can find each other in a world full of people who want to abuse and murder us. So idk I'm a little suspicious of cis women waving their hands and writing off any trans person who makes a claim that they see Obviously Trans Experiences in "women" who historically "crossdressed," by saying we can't apply modern standards to people. No shit, Susan, but if the guy says he always wishes he was a boy, grows up lamenting that he was "born a girl," and jumps through hoops daily to perform masculinity -- sometimes at relative personal risk -- well... he was probably trans.

Idk I think cis people need to be very wary of talking down to queer people when we see our experiences in historical figures. We haven't had the luxury of living openly as ourselves throughout history. Trans people have always existed, but we haven't always been included in history books. When we have, it's usually misgendered, with the trans thing sort of written off as a funny quirk, a minor personality trait. Dismissing a trans person's perspective about a historical figure's potential transness is uhhhh not a great look. Telling queer people to shut up about seeing ourselves in figures we will almost never be able to definitively prove are our own (aside from our intimate understanding of what it feels like to be trans) is just another way to silence and erase queer people.

The erasure from previous centuries is prime ammunition to gaslight trans people into believing we don't know what we're talking about and that we can't prove it because those people never explicitly said they were trans. But this isn't just a bunch of trans guys grasping at straws for representation. We are informed, primary resources on what being trans looks and feels like. Queer people have always had to secretly find each other, including in history. So, idk, miss me with that "you can't prove it" shit. Maybe if you cis folks didn't literally murder and abuse us, there'd be more explicit examples of transness.

u know when there's an article or something abt a historical person and everyone is like "don't try to apply modern gender labels to her, this was clearly a woman who cross-dressed for better opportunities/education/safety!" and I'm like sure that tracks, there's been countless women in history who were women but dressed as men in order to get an education/fight in a war and so on

and then I read the contemporary sources on this person and it's full of "he threatened to shoot anyone who called him a woman" and "petitioned the local government to legally consider him a man, on the grounds of 'I live as a man anyway'" and "he always said he should have been born a man and it was only by misfortune that he was born a woman"

like... babes, I do agree with not applying modern labels to historical people, but this does not sound like someone who just cross-dressed for better opportunities

[hinge]

Hinge presents an anthology of love stories almost never told. Read more on https://no-ordinary-love.co