“You say that right now you don't want the eyes of the people who love you watching you. It is really difficult to bear the gaze of people who love you when you're having a hard time, but you can get over that. People who love you may be judgmental, but their vision is clear, merciful, and severe, and that can be rough, but it's just healthy to face clarity, severity, and mercy.” — Natalia Ginzburg, Happiness, As Such
Sharing your real experience in your own words and being understood and embraced by others is healing. That’s acceptance.
Repeating loaded language that covers up reality and demanding that other people subscribe to this vision falsifies relationships and leads to dissociation and isolation. This is what the trans community calls 'acceptance.'
It doesn’t matter how much of this 'acceptance' you gain. It will never heal you. Because it is not true acceptance—rather, it’s compliance with the fiction planted at the very center of your life—it will never be enough.
This is at or near the heart of how this ideology makes adherents so unwell and puts them on this impossible—and, in my opinion, cruel—quest to be 'accepted' as something they're not, which—again—wouldn't be acceptance anyway.
This estranges actually loving relationships with family and friends who don't buy in 100% and reinforces dependence on the trans community. (If this reminds you of cult dynamics, there's a reason.)
The trans community sets up unrealistic expectations for real-world interactions (that you will pass, that you will really become a man or woman, that only people who don’t care about you or want to hurt would ‘misgender’ you) that inevitably produce disappointment, pain, and rejection. As with Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, and Moonies (among others), who send young missionaries out knowing they'll be ridiculed, experiences of rejection by the outside world cement attachments to the cult. You come to believe that only the trans community can understand you, that only their language can describe you, that only those who observe their rituals can approach you.
Obviously I have a Whole Thing to write about trans community and cult-like dynamics and for now I'm just going to be parceling it out here and on Twitter because I don’t have the attention span to put it together neatly.
It's like the narcissist constantly begging us to stay fooled by their mask of fakery, even when they will never ever be. Great piece!
Beautiful. You’re right; the acceptance has to be total and absolute, and even then it’s not enough — because it was never the real solution.
As an ex-addict, I know exactly how that feels.