The more you can accept the kyriarchy, the easier things are. It would be much easier for me if I could accept cis supremacy, if I could cower before the cis people who feel they deserve special treatment for taking spaces away from trans people. It would be easier if I could be happy with the support that takes little or no effort on the part of the people giving support. If I could tell myself that trans people are too complicated, that I deserve not to be treated as an equal, that I should be happy with the kind of transphobia that doesn’t involve spitting in my face. I’d have a lot more support, I’d be able to go through life feeling that things aren’t a horrible hideous mess.
One of the trans people at my school is like this. She can still go to the “trans” group and the “LGBTQ” center. She can talk to the cis supremacist asshole because she’s willing to bend to his will. But she isn’t really happier, not from what I can tell. I don’t want to sit there and smile and agree that cis people know best when around cis people, then lament to trans people that they aren’t doing what you need, that they’re disrespecting you, that it makes you so angry you want to throw a chair across the room. It would be easier. I would be able to delude myself, have the kind of support you get when you’re willing to swallow the poison they feed you. The kind that feels like strength in numbers but eats you up from the inside and and tells you that you deserve nothing more than to grovel at the feet of cis people in desperate hopes that they might toss you table scraps. You don’t even deserve the scraps, really, it’s pretty damn presumptive to expect them but you should grovel nonetheless because it pleases the cis people. And that’s all that really matters.
And there’s a person who recently graduated who tells me that I should be happy to be surrounded by people who want to support me. But they don’t. They want to fetishize and use me to support their theories and defend their bigotry because “look how accepting I am!”. I don’t fit their theories and I don’t take kindly to being fetishized and I don’t accept bigotry. They don’t want to support me. Supporting me takes some effort. They want to get all the benefits of looking good without any of the costs of actually supporting a person.
This isn’t true of everyone at or involved with the cisCenter. But the ones it’s not true of, I can perfectly well surround myself with without the help of that vile place. The ones that’s true of would not expect me to go somewhere that triggers me as badly as that place does. And it really bothers me that there are trans people who would expect me to do otherwise.
