Let's have a thread about What TERFs Want (ft. framing device: My Life)

I was not a trans kid as we currently understand them: I secretly, desperately *wanted* to be a boy, but I also understand that I was not one and could never be one

Some kids pray for a magical change. Some kids assert their self-knowledge in defiance of their assigned gender. I did neither.

I understood the possibility of being a boy to be preemptively foreclosed to me. I wished to be a boy; I wished to have a talking dragon friend; both wishes occupied the same realm of fantasy.

When I was a teenager, I read The Silence of the Lambs. The words "he's not a transsexual, but he thinks he is" seared themselves into my brain. It was clinically official: *wanting* wasn't enough.

A "real" transsexual would have external validation. There were definitive tests. It was like diabetes. My mere *wanting* wasn't, couldn't be, diagnosable.

What changed me, what made me completely reject this stifling medical model, was liberation internalized from multiple sources: the feminist blogosphere of the late 00s (for all its flaws), queer theory, and most importantly knowing actual trans people

It's not hard to imagine my life without this liberation. I'd've kept muddling through, disconnected from my body and my emotions, experiencing the world as if through a thick fog, sorrow aching in my bones too deep for words.

And I would *never have known* that I didn't have to live like that. I would have functioned, more or less, and I would have suppressed and suppressed and suppressed, and that would just be what it was like to be alive.

Transitioning for me was an opening up, a reorientation to the world; if you will, a conversion experience. It shifted the frame of what I understood as possible – for myself, and for society as a whole

TERFs don't want that frame shifted. Their primary commitment is to cisness. Cisness undergirds how they understand themselves, society, humanity. A threat to the structuring primacy of cisness is a threat to the very core of TERF being-in-the-world.

To the TERF, my alternate life path sketched above isn't a living death; it's maturity, acceptance of the way things are and must always be.

For TERFs, preemptively foreclosing the possibility of transness is desirable. When I think of my childhood, I ache for what might have been had I only known what was possible; TERFs don't want transness to even be thinkable.

The thing is, they have already lost. The genie is not going back in the bottle. Transness IS thinkable, IS visible, IS possible, and we're not going away. They can't make us unthinkable.

But in the halls of legal, medical, social, and media power – where the forces of UK cisness wield enormous influence – they can narrowly circumscribe trans lives, squeeze and choke them into unbearableness

They can't make us unknow the possibility of trans existence, but they can sure as shit make trans lives functionally unlivable, and by god they're trying to

If transness isn't known to be possible, an untransitioned life can be lived (if coldly and sadly); but if you know, you KNOW, it's possible, to live without it can hardly be borne

This is why what's happening in the UK is a severe, death-dealing crisis. It is an attempt to make transness impossible; what it will do is kill trans people.

In the ideology of cisness, dead trans children are an acceptable price to pay for the maintenance of cisness. They are a necessary sacrifice for the overall goal of making transness impossible again.

I don't believe they can succeed in the overall goal. But their path to ultimate retreat will definitely be strewn with trans corpses.