I appreciate your honesty in addressing your concerns about confronting people of other genders for the first time. That’s the only way to have an authentic dialogue about this and hopefully challenge assumptions. Though this is a phenomenon that has existed throughout history, a lot of people are now learning about it for the first time, and are encountering some upsetting misinformation, thanks to a backlash hate campaign to paint all LGBTQ+ people as pedophiles.

There’s a lot to unpack in this particular statement, along with this writing as a whole, but I wanted to maybe start by trying to address this. It’s a very common misconception about trans men.

1) As a trans man, I didn’t decide to change my identity because of injustices to women, as horrible as the effects of sexism can be and as much as my many years of being forced to pretend I was a woman gives me empathy for what many women experience. This is who I always was even as a child. I just found words to describe who I am as an adult and ways to show the world, so people could see me a little more clearly.

2) Throughout history around the world, there have been different words used to describe us, but I make sense of my observations through what the English language has offered me so far. White supremacy and colonialism have attempted to eradicate conceptions of gender around the world that don’t conform to common white cis heterosexual Christian assumptions. Exportation of these beliefs around the world have lead other cultures to change their previous values and attack LGBTQ+ people.

3) If I was looking to eradicate injustices from my life, telling the world my lifelong secret probably wasn’t the most efficient way to do that. I’ve experienced a wide variety of intense hate as a result. I’ve lost all meaningful connection to my biological family and am now starting my career from scratch. Going shopping or walking on the street in broad daylight has caused ugly things to happen. I spend much of my time explaining things like this to people. Being openly trans certainly isn’t easy. No one would “choose” this path for fun. Unfortunately, being secretly trans was extremely destructive to my mental health, causing a lifetime of near death experiences. As difficult as it has been to be openly a trans man, it may well have saved my life.

Thank you in advance for reading.