Hi Elle. I am just sharing how this is perceived by cis people. That is not “hollow support” — it is simple honesty without any judgment. Wanting “the world” to react differently does not make it so. Perhaps it will change over time.
The bathroom thing does not bother me personally: I am not modest — I would be perfectly comfortable walking around in public naked. But I don’t want to upset others, so I dress in a way that gets little attention. That is good advice for most people. If dressing as a woman, or a cat or a horse, would get the least attention, I would happily do that.
I feel no angst about how I dress or present myself — I choose “function over form”, as they say. My wife, on the other hand, chooses form over function, and I always make fun of her for it. In fact, I have told my wife that if I were a woman, I would dress the same way I do now: pants and a shirt, and no makeup. I am an admirer of Amelia Earhart: in her time, she dressed in pants, shirt, and jacket, and flew anywhere she wanted — and never felt the need to claim that she was a man. If I were a woman, I would be just like her. The way you dress does not define you.
Elle, when you wrote, “If my choices are being a woman or being a man who feels like a woman, then my choices are being a woman or being dead”, that reveals that this is a medical issue. Most people would not feel that level of angst. I know that your situation is very, very real. I know that living as a woman is right for you — it alleviates the angst that you refer to above. I support it — anyone who want you to suffer is cruel.
What concerns me is that if the medical profession is pressured to consider trans as “normal” then there will not be any research into how to alleviate the angst that trans people clearly feel. Perhaps there is a simple cause — we don’t know. I am not talking about being “female-like” in one’s thinking — I am talking about the angst that trans people feel if they identify as their reproductive sex. I believe that it is a compulsive disorder that has a biological cause; but we won’t know unless we learn the mechanisms in play.
