i'm gonna relate a story i learnt when i was very young, apologies first if i bring it out different from the original story.
a man called akkosa once went to meet buddha, thinking he could outsmart buddha by arguing. when he failed to do that, he started vehemently insulting buddha with all kinds of filthy words. buddha didn't say a word, but stayed there listening patiently. finally, when akkosa was done with the insulting, buddha asked him calmly 'akkosa, do visitors ever come to your place?' 'of course, friends and family, many come to visit us.' 'when they do, do you treat them well?' 'yes we serve them with tasty food, sometimes prepared just for them.' 'what do you do if they dont like them and reject what you serve to them?' 'we take them back and either throw them away or eat them ourselves.' 'exactly akkosa, the same thing happens with your insults. you serve me insults, and i reject them as i dont need them. so you have to take them back.' hope you learned something to deal with transphobic insults
Thanks, that's definitely something to keep in mind.
I usually think about the 'insults' the following way: imagine they were insulting me in Bengali, a language I don't even remotely understand. Would I be affected? Well, very likely not. If I can't understand an insult, I cannot be offended.
So I just pretend that people are insulting me in Bengali. It takes two to tango — one to insult, one to be offended. If I remove the latter from the equation, the insult has no effect.
Words really don't have 'power', we just think they do.
Obviously this is not easy to do :)