This is basically contextualizing the fact that I'm trans and explaining transness to my best ability, in case you don't know about it. Just because I'm trans doesn't mean that I'm an expert on myself. I think it's similar to the fact that you're a baseball player, doesn't mean you know every little thing about baseball.

Okay, I'm trans. That's weird and maybe a lot for you to take in when, I'm assuming you just googled my name and so dealing with the fact that I'm trying to contact you is probably already a lot. I think you might not know I'm trans? I'm not entirely sure.

If you want more information, here's a couple of links that might help you understand the issue better

• here is my letter that I wrote to your parents when I first came out in 2022. I wrote it a couple of months after I learned I was trans, and I think there are some parts with I give up too much of my dignity, and negotiated against myself out of fear of how they might react, but I think it holds up enough. Also, I scrubbed your name from this in case some stranger comes onto the website
• This is the dysphoria bible, which was the resource I truned to after I realized I was trans.
• This is just a site that came from googling "explaining transness"

Also, here is a doctor in scrubs explaining the issue;

Transness is an incredibly big issue. Well, people make it a big issue. It's a thing in the news, it's a thing that bigoted legislators try to limit. Cisn-ess, which is the opposite of being trans (people who present as their assigned gender at birth) is not a big issue; people who match their assigned gender walk around in their gender expression all day everyday, and nobody really cares. It's only when someone realizes that their gender identity doesn't match what they were assigned at birth where everybody gets all weird about it.

I'm sober, I quit drinking years ago, and sometimes I'll be in social settings and people who drink will make fun of me for not drinking. It's a part of a pattern where I notice people will always get annoyed if you opt-out of something; if you don't eat meat, make the choice to not have sex, don't use social media, I think that it makes people feel threatened for some reason, and they feel compelled to let you know that what you're donig is "not right"

The consensous of the medical community is that trans-ness is just a part of human nature. It's kind of like how most people are born with ten fingers, but some people are born with nine fingers and some people are born with eleven fingers. The medical community says that it's not a fetish, and it's not a form of mental illness, unlike what a lot of people on Fox News will say. People who have a lot of money and power over other people want to hold onto their power over other people, so sometimes they use their power to make propaganda to make people hate powerless people. That happens with racism, sexism, and in this case trans-sexism, transphobia.

In many ways, I'm just an average woman, who happens to be trans. I go to work, I have friends, I pay taxes and go to church just like any other woman. I just happen to be different from most types of women. But that's true for all women; look around you and you'll see tall women, short women, white woman, Black women, cis women with hormanal imbalances that make them grow beards. Women with ten fingers and women with nine fingers and women with eleven fingers.

There's a lot of language out there about how the existence of trans women are "bad" for the world, but I think that's a little cynical. I'm a part of my community, and for me to say that I harm the community says that the people who love me and the people who I support and the people who support me doesn't matter.

A lot of trans people will use science as a way to justify who we are, and to justify The State not making laws trying to erase us from society. I, however, use religion; I practice a 350-year-old branch of Christianity called Quakerism, and we've had out trans people since the 1770s. The premise of our faith is that the light of God is in everybody, and so therefore that means certain consessions; for one, I can't punch people, because that means I'll be punching God. If God is in everybody, then that means when people speak, they're speaking through God and so that means I have to listen intently to the people around me, even if I disagree with them. When a homeless man starts babbling incohernetly in the subway, I listen to his words.

I might not understand the words out of his mouth, but I'd understand the song in his voice

Loving everybody around you means loving yourself. And listening to the spirit inside of yourself. And the spirit inside of me knows that I am a woman. I can't justify it, I just know that not living the life that this loud spirit inside of me demands I live makes me miserable. Because of my transition, I have been in poverty, spat at by strangers in the street, have food insecurity, have been fired . And yet that misery is still better then not living as my true self.

I don't know what else to say. I don't really like trying to justify my humanity to someone. And even if I did I think there's a learning curve to knowing trans people. If we ever meet, I can answer any question you have about it. I guess I'm asking to be treated with the same dignity and love that every person. The Light of God is in everybody