Offshoot of another Twitter conversation... I have no patience for people who aren’t supportive or kind to trans people because I feel like if I can do it, anyone can - I CANNOT understand how it feels to be trans. Totally baffling to me. I’ve tried and I just can’t grasp it.

I do not understand why trans people feel such pain at being dead named or why pronouns mean so much to them. I really can’t. I’ve tried SO HARD and I just... can’t understand. But that doesn’t mean that I can’t CARE. I do care, and I can see that their pain is real and valid.

We don’t need to understand a person’s pain to respect it. My spouse has never been through childbirth and can’t possibly understand how that felt. But they still saw my pain and believed it was real and valid.

You know how I believe trans women are women? Because they say they are. No one has ever asked me to display proof that I’m a woman. It’s a weird thing to want proof of, quite honestly. When I was a kid sometimes I’d be asked if I was a boy or a girl. My answer was accepted.

When I said I was a girl no one ever demanded proof, and if they had I would have told the teacher some kid was trying to see my privates. It isn’t a thing we require proof of. It’s one of the only things I have NEVER had to prove.

I say my name and I’m asked for ID. I say my address and I’m asked to show one of my bills to prove it. I’ve had to prove that I’m married, prove that I’m Canadian, even prove that I am employed. But I’ve never had to prove that I’m a woman.

So why should I ask proof that someone else is the gender they say they are? I mean, you’d think they’d know, right? And as far as I know, being a woman doesn’t get me anything. That’s why I never have to prove it. Therefore people are whatever gender they say they are.

It’s easy enough to respect someone’s feelings. Just like I don’t need a DNA test or a pants-drop to believe someoen’s gender, I don’t need to see paperwork for believe that something is painful if they say it is.

I’m not even going to say “it doesn’t hurt anyone to call someone by a different name” because sometimes? It does. I fell in love with a man of one name: and now I’m married to a non-man of a different name. And that does hurt. A lot. But you know what?

It still doesn’t hurt to use my spouse’s name. There’s no twinge of pain when I say my spouse’s real name. If anything, the pain is stronger when I hear the dead name, because I loved that person and it’s like seeing an old photo of someone who isn’t around anymore.

Except deadname never existed. They were never real. I fell in love with and married an illusion - a mask. Using the deadname wouldn’t change that. It would feel like lying. It’s the real person in front of me who matters, and I have no problems with their real name.

Because I love my spouse and their happiness matters to me, it’s a minor thing to change the words I say. It isn’t always an easy thing - habits die hard - but my slips are of the tongue, not the spirit.

I can change my spouse’s name and gender in my mind because it matters to them and they matter to me. It’s as simple as that. It’s largely irrelevant that I don’t understand at all why they feel the way they do. And I really really can’t.

It’s not that I don’t understand gender, because I do. I’m so cishet it’s awful, and my strong attraction to the male gender makes it clear to me that gender does matter. It’s also clear to me that gender and sex are separate.

I am perfectly capable of understanding the separation of sex and gender. Maybe a little too well. I have a feeling of gender, but I don’t understand what my sex has to do with it?

I was always violently opposed to girly stuff as a kid. I owned no barbies, and I loved Adam West’s Batman, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, transformers, and He-Man. I had crushes on pretty much all of them but I didn’t identify with the female characters in those shows.

While I crushed on Optimus Prime, Rafael, and Batman, I never imagined myself as a woman character in the show with them. If I was a transformer I was a normal transformer not the One Woman Transformer. I was a turtle, not April.

But even though I didn’t particularly identify as female, I was perfectly content to be a girl. It was being human that bothered me. I had no interest in being human. I was an animal nut I only ever pretended to be an animal. Sometimes male, sometimes female, whatever.

I have since come to terms with my humanity, even if I’m still uncomfortable with femininity. If I had to pick a gender I’d say it’s Ellie Frederickson with some Vanellope Von Schweets - feminine but barely. And I feel like if I had a male body, that would STILL be true.

I thought about it a lot as a kid and kept coming to the conclusion that if I had a boy’s body, I’d be gay as the day is long. That’s one of the reasons I’ve always considered myself a queer/gay/trans ally. I feel like a lucky flip of a coin is the only reason I’m straight.

I don’t think I would have cared that much if I had a boy’s body. I would have been grown up a very feminine gay boy instead of a rather masculine straight girl. My life would have been a crap ton harder, that’s for sure, but I still don’t think I’d be trans.

No matter how many times my spouse has tried to explain how it feels to be gender fluid, and no matter how many trans friends I have seen suffer from excruciating pain from being deadnamed or misgendered, I can’t understand where that pain comes from. But - I don’t have to.