Cishet male here, so feel free to dismiss everything I have to say. I don’t even mean that sarcastically — 99% of the time, we’re awful and ignorant and can’t help but make things about ourselves. I get that. Thing is, this comment isn’t about me. It’s about you, and it’s about Jennifer.
Because this comment — the one you made, right here, on this post-is the most insensitive, hateful, cruel and sick comment I have ever seen anyone make. Yes, that includes racist screeds on Youtube videos, and death threats sent to female game developers, and the worst trolling 4chan has to offer. You’re worse than them. They’re horrid people who have created way too much anguish and fear, but I’m not entirely sure most of them know any better, and most of them are just unfocused haters looking for a target. They’ve hurt a lot of real world people, though, whereas you hurt just one. So, why was this worse? Well, because you should fracking *know better.*
Jennifer poured out her soul. You willfully misgendered her.
She posted various times throughout her life where she’s felt unwelcome in feminist circles because she wasn’t the “right” kind of trans-woman, or because certain activist rhetoric contrasted sharply with her own experiences of what gender was. You misgendered her again, and again, and decided she was attacking feminism because she had the audacity to point out that — in SOME contexts — SOME rhetoric can be harmful to SOME unsuspecting people, even if the reasoning behind said rhetoric is based around opposing a very real problem and serves a very real purpose the other 99% of the time.
But, you know, forget context. Forget pain. I guess you think a trans woman can never be a real woman, and is therefore a man. And while you seem to grasp that the self-imposed macho-posturing and emotion-denial men perform *is* tied in with toxic patriarchal structures, you *also* seem to conveniently forget that fact whenever it’s time to treat a trans-woman like she’s just another emotionally stunted dude, or when a guy says “I’d like to figure out how to seperate masculinity from *toxic* masculinity…” Nope. Bad. Slap it down. Well done! Way to reinforce patriarchal standards of behavior and gender binary!
And — the worst part is — you did all of this to someone who was *coming out*. Jennifer bared her soul. You slapped her for it. You’re no better than a cruel father who beats his son for being gay. You’re no better than an employer who fires a woman for asking for a raise. I have nothing but contempt for you, for deciding that your self-righteous ideas of how things ought to be, were waaaay more “important” than Jennifer’s first awkward steps towards being who she deserves to be.
Thank God you stopped reading a few paragraphs ago, because otherwise you might have to think about how nasty your reaction actually was.
