#I’m not tagging it ‘not transandrophobia’ bc that has very much played a large role in all this especially that first ER visit

[trans-androgyne]

Just got out of a work training that addressed racial trauma and damn do I have a lot that I haven’t unpacked. Minority trauma in general really but definitely racial trauma, specifically with regard to the symptom of distrust for systems. I don’t trust one single institution or organization in existence; I don’t even trust individual people I meet to be decent about all my marginalized identities and it leads me to distrust them in general. I’ve had experiences that have instilled that in me and I’m not sure where to go from here now that I recognize it.

I specifically have generational racial trauma on the mind. I’m the oldest child of a very brown woman, much darker skin than mine and very much treated like it. I’ve “known” practically all my life that doctors are not safe people. She never told me exactly what happened during my birth but I could tell she wasn’t listened to and it caused her immense pain, physical and mental, that she took with her to the rest of her births. When I tried to seek therapy as a kid she said some horrible things to me about getting hooked on meds that were clearly taken from similar situations. Once I did finally have a terrible experience in the ER at the hands of a cis white man with a “thin blue line” pin, it just felt like a confirmation of everything I already “knew”—that as someone perceived as a queer woman of color this isn’t a system or a world safe for me. To the point where the next time in the ER when I had an actually positive experience I was just waiting the whole time for the other shoe to drop.

I don’t have somewhere I’m going with this, just needed to get all this off my mind. Maybe it’ll encourage some folks to reflect on their minority trauma too. Maybe it’ll encourage others to have some compassion towards people who hold the same kind of distrust I do. And maybe someone very much like me will tell me whether it’s even a good idea to try to trust anyone again.