So obviously this story is going to contain transphobic nastiness, so fair warning. I wish I could shrug it off, but I can't, so maybe talking about it with people who might understand will help.
I help to moderate a community where a lot of alternative religion stuff gets discussed, and at one point the topic of trans women in female spaces came up in the context of Wiccan/neo-pagan women's rituals. Mind you, many of these are done in a public setting, so the usual transphobic hand wringing about locker rooms or nudity or bathrooms is even less on topic than these discussions usually are.
A new member (a gay man) began the usual barely coded speech about listening to womens' voices within the community and talked about how powerful the experience of him doing something in a men's specific group was. I replied with the facts you'd expect, and all the while he kept up the facade of left-leaning/feminist talking points ("you're silencing women" and "stop using intersex people as your debate prop" when I tried to point out how much debates about biological gender and chromosomes also impacts them even if they don't fall under the trans label, etc) to try and make me look like the oppressive, bigoted voice. By this point he does know that I'm a trans man, as it came up int he conversation.
Finally he said I was being both homophobic and misogynist, and I asked him to explain to me how a gay man who was socialized as a woman for basically my entire life was either of those things. He then went off on me about how he was "going to let it slide" but me saying that infuriated him because obviously I'm just a straight woman who fetishizes gay men, I'll never understand The Gay Experience, and my partner of four years is a straight man.
Obviously I understand on every rational level that nothing he said even approached true. I'm comfortable in being a trans man, I previously identified as a queer woman (before realizing I was trans) who had dated both men and women, my partner is bisexual... it was all wild and baseless accusations, shifting the goal posts of what kind of bigot I was supposed to be, and a blatant transphobic attack by someone who refused to acknowledge my gender and would rather call me a liar because of some perceived threat to his identity.
But I can't stop thinking about it. It's been at least a week now, and I'm still thinking about it. I don't know if it's because someone was willing to say all that to my face for the first time (I'm early in my transition, sadly I'm usually just assumed to be female so I frequently dodge transphobia with automatic misgendering), or if it's because I got that much vitriol from someone not just in the LGBT community, but in a group I identify strongly with. Probably both.
I don't know how to stop feeling awful about this.
Topic: Verbally Attacked, Struggling to Move On (Read 3337 times)