Chapter 7: The community: friend or enemy?

About fragmentation and the pressure to be “the right kind of trans.”

Welcome to the family. Or more precisely: a club with initiation rituals, its own code, and mandatory trigger warnings. Everyone is welcome here – just apologize for existing first. The community is not the colorful parade from your Insta feed. It is an estranged panel with seventy-three opinions about your gender and zero capacity for your mental health. You are trans? Fine. But binary or nonbinary? Femme or butch? Passing or “visible?“ Are you into men, women, other trans people? Wait, you are asexual? Please leave. We’re here to fight for our liberation, not sexual restraint.

Pro Tip: Learn quickly which terms you’re allowed to use – and even faster, which ones are forbidden, even when they’re carved into your own biography. “Tranny?” Absolutely not, unless you reclaim it in exactly the tone only understood by people who’ve also spent some quality time alone with their bleeding nose in a public bathroom stall. The community is supportive, but selective. They love you, as long as you don’t speak too loudly about your violence, don’t remind them of the dirty fringes, and don’t contaminate the safe space with your past. What you call reality, is often considered “toxic” here. So please: partition your baggage into more digestible sentences. Rephrase your hardship as empowerment. And don’t forget to smile. Or at least post a reel with subtitles.

Keep in mind: The largest fear in the community is not the police, the TERFs, or the fascists. It’s a trans person misbehaving. And misbehaving means being discomforting, dirty, angry, sad, uneducated, or honest. So never do them the favor of being yourself. Consider being queer, genderfluid, or politicly correct instead. Welcome to the mirror maze of identities where everyone is searching for their soul and benchmarking each other. And those who don’t fit get pushed out. With a trigger warning, but without consolation.