Forgive me I don’t have a computer so I have to text all this out on my dinky phone. I am trying to be a better listener to my friends and loved ones, and my wider community who hates my guts right now, or at the very least feels deeply hurt and betrayed with me right now. This is unfinished.

Their beloved friend Skipdip, suddenly took a sharp turn to a state they had never seen her in before. She was running a million miles a minute like she was jacked up on stimulants. She would come into my room and talk nonstop for hours saying hateful harmful things, talking down to me, acting like she was smarter than me, acting like she had all the solutions. She would constantly gaslight me telling me that my experience was wrong, that my own intuitions were wrong. She would manipulate me into staying in a conversation with her when I didn’t feel comfortable. I wanted to leave but she guilted me into staying.

I saw her, who I sort of knew in college, but she was always kind of quiet and I never really knew her. She was showing up on my Facebook feed posting hateful stuff and I felt I had the responsibility to speak up to defend trans people. Transwomen are suffering so much. My friend Ella is one of the most troubled people I know. She deserves happiness, she deserves to be accepted for who she is. My friend Matthew has struggled so hard being seen as a girl, being prevented from being able to be a part of the guys, being treated as less than other men, being emasculated relentlessly. Who is this arrogant bigot bitch to tell them they don’t matter, that they are wrong and their struggle isn’t real. How dare she say that gender isn’t real? Gender is a construct but obviously it exists, it’s real. People experience it, it is part of our world. I identify with being a woman. I have seen strong transwomen talk about their extremely painful and difficult experience, they are women who defied the odds to claim their womanhood. They are !women! (and I feel really good about saying that. Every time I say that or say their proper pronouns or new name I feel good and powerful, like I am doing my part to support them. I am fighting for women.) trying to be themselves who had the misfortune of being born in a male body. And what about my non binary friend Ash who is really feminine but not enough to feel fully like a woman, or my friend Pheonix who is masculine but not exclusively, as man would be. They are the most revolutionary of all to push peoples biases about gender, and they should be allowed to be respected as the evolved people who were born outside the binary. For some reason non-binary people can be kind of difficult and abrasive sometimes I don’t know why... This white girl is that nasty kind of ciswoman. She is spewing hate and putting hateful thoughts and images into peoples heads, sewing seeds of hatred. She is actively contributing towards the hostility towards transwomen and transpeople which is killing them at really high rates. I think I heard it was like the highest rates of any group... or something like that I don’t totally remember. I definitely remember hearing about it from credible sources though. I’ve seen all the activists who have pictures of the transwomen and tell their stories. Martha P Johnson was the brave, tall, beautiful, glamorous, poor, black, (for some reason I dont know, on some level I associate her with the struggle of being a homosexual male, but I know in my mind she is a) straight woman who threw the first brick at stonewall. Oddly I feel relatively indifferent to other short, frumpy, poor, black, women, who were forced into the sex industry during that time. Women have always been sex workers. Women are always being coerced and trafficked into prostitution, there’s no way to stop it. It’s a fact of life. They’re probably asking for it. The men are too strong, we could never make them stop. I don’t like thinking about it because it is too painful. Plus I’ve never heard of a poor black woman in the sex industry back in that era say or do or produce anything interesting, I’ve never heard anything that made me feel connected to them, in the way I feel connected to trans women. How much can there be going on there? Not much probably, or I would have heard of it. I don’t know they probably were fine with their situation or else they would have changed it. It’s the natural order. If I thought about it though I would be outraged because I am a virtuous person and these are poor black women who are one of the most oppressed groups of all. I say all the time I care about black women and black lives. I feel a lot of the time like I am a person who cares about black people... and I guess black women too. Within that group of women, the trans subcategory of women is more oppressed than the cis subcategory of women. I have a lot more negative feelings about privileged shameful ciswomen than virtuous oppressed transwomen. This is not something I have ever really paid attention to, and even now as I describe it, it is a dreamy hazy background thing that I can only see when I’m not looking at it. If I were to look directly at it of course it’s not ok. But for some reason emotionally it’s easier to support a black trans woman than a black ciswoman. There’s just something about transwomen that just gives me such pride. Transwomen in general are more pure than ciswomen. I don’t know why, maybe it’s the struggle of having to fight to be accepted as the woman they were born to be. Ciswomen don’t have to struggle at all to be taken as the women they were born to be. Transmen are fine I guess, they’re men so it’s easier for them and I have less investment because I am a woman, but it’s bad for them too. Giving this arrogant bigot bitch even an ounce of my listening ear is charity. She deserves to be corrected.