Another trans person wrote, in a secret forum, so as to vent:

“I can’t say I *am* a woman. Simone de Beauvoir said in her treatise ‘Second Sex’ "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”. Without having all the biology (a lot of it surgically removed) or growing up as a girl, or having society classify me as a woman (and deny me male privileges and access and power), or have any of the experiences of motherhood, or been in a relationship (of any significance) with a man… nope, not really a woman. I wish it was otherwise, if nothing else than to make life easier, but I’m just gender-queer as F*ck.“

Reading this I feel like drowning, like my lungs fill up with cold water and as though I am blanking out. I go back to that state which used to be so common, when all my attention focuses on the fear and the words like on a serpent threatening me, I set aside the wants of life and survival and achievement and of social bonds and pleasures, all that remains is to defend from the nothingness which is my dysphoria. I feel tears coming up in my eyes. I feel weight closing in from every side. I stare at the screen and my body freezes up as the world continue around me without me, because I’m not a person who can be present in it.

Then I steel myself and resolve that I must get as close to all of those things as I can, however long it takes. It’s a challenge I will succeed in no matter how hard. Unless I am a woman I cannot be a person. I will work to "become a woman” in the Beauvoirian sense as long as there is any life left in me. It doesn’t matter how long it takes. I will learn to pass if I have to, will do any surgery it takes, will train my responses if I have to. I will make the world classify my correctly and treat me as it treats women if that is what it takes for me to have the experiences a “real” woman should have had.

Because ultimately part of this is a wish to not feel like I don’t belong to a category I should belong to. It’s a social instinct, an ingroup pack instinct. It’s wrong and scary if I am somehow fundamentally unlike other women. And I’ll do whatever it takes not to be.

*

I will not comment there, I will not go down that rabbit hole. I have a life to live. And if I must be a nothingness until I can be someone, then at least I will be a nothingness that does its best to become real. While there is breath left in my body I will work to realize myself.

I wish I could stop crying.