I peaked a while back but missed my chance to post on the old sub.

Honestly, I’ve grown up in a very conservative (read: racist, sexist, homophobic) area and when I went to college, naturally, all those prejudices I grew up with were called into question. I became much more liberal and a lot of the changes to my thinking were overall positive. However, in my rush to pull away from my right-wing roots I sort of missed the exit. I became a big fan of tumblr (first mistake) and started seeing a lot of LGBTQ+ and it all looked great.

(As a side note I found the term Asexual and got really excited about that because, “Hey, I’m not the only one!” So, that sucked me in more. LGBdroptheT has since humbled me a lot, but I still like having a label for how I felt so I was sympathetic to the ‘alphabet soup’)

I admit TWAW and TMAM never really rang true to me and GNC sounded a little silly, but I attributed it to ingrained homophobia and intolerance and didn’t listen to that little voice. Fast forward a few years and I’m back in the real world. Now this part is not entirely my story, more my friend’s, so I’ll keep it vague. My friend gets married, she and her husband are my Sunday School teachers. I was one of her bridesmaids. It was all rainbows and butterflies. Then, three years later, they get divorced.

Turns out, he likes to cross-dress in secret, which my friend could have lived with (she was hoping he’d get counseling and he would stop, idk) but the cross-dressing started escalating instead of deescalating like she hoped. Apparently, he would switch between “I just like dressing this way” and “I want to be a woman.” At first I thought he was just a closeted transgender and my Christian friend just didn’t understand that. I respected that she couldn’t live with it, though, and that she wasn’t attracted to him anymore. But I was still sympathetic toward him even though I didn’t really speak to him after that.

Then, my friend started talking more about how he acted when he would do his cross-dressing and long story short, that’s when I did some research and found out about autogynephilia and the old GC sub. That cracked the surface to me realizing not everything trans people said about ‘gender’ was gospel. To try and make this story even shorter, that’s when Rachel Dolezal happened (I actually watched that documentary with the same friend) and I recognized A LOT of what she said matched what TRAs claimed.

But she was a crazy person to think she could just switch race because of a feeling.

I swear, the moment I snapped was when I was desperately looking for some explanation of why trans people were different from Dolezal and I watched a video of an MtF saying almost verbatim what Dolezal preached and then the words, “I am living my truth. Rachel Dolezal is lying.” HOW??? Please, make it make sense???

You can’t, because it doesn’t.

So, that’s my story. It’s not that exciting but it was weirdly therapeutic to write it out. I’m so glad this space exists (and that the old space was there when I needed it) or I’d have thought I was going nuts.