With that out of the way, i feel you on this. I'm a CSA survivor as well, like a lot of my transfem friends. My childhood wasn't that of a boy. I did not have a different gender identity as a child. I constantly failed to perform masculinity in the way my classmates did. My voice was too high, i cried too easily, i was too soft, i could not play ball and i failed to be a proper misogynist and homophobe. And i was punished for this mercilessly and without end. I was beaten black and blue, i was bloodied, i was attacked so hard i ended up in the hospital one time, and i was also subjected to sexualized violence by several different classmates.

I did not grow up with the privilege cis boys get. I was a girl that boys were allowed to hit and the only way out was to repress my gender identity, go through the wrong puberty, fail in relationships, fail to take the offer of joining the men's networks at work, and worse than any of this it made me deny myself, made me incapable to accept who i am and i lost decades not transitioning. Before i lived as a woman, i did not live as a man or a boy. I didn't live at all. I was a ghost, a shadow of a person, an assemblage of different masks that i switched between depending on which group i was in, always fake, always fragmentary, never whole, never a full person.

And that experience isn't universal among trans women in all of its aspects, but out of dozens, maybe over a hundred trans women i know irl, i do not know a single one whose childhood was that of a normal, happy boy. Not one. Each and every one of us was the most brutally bullied kid in her class at some point. A substantial number still have the exit plan they made during that time present in their mind. Some say they find comfort in the knowledge they could die at any time. When i say that we do not start being subjected to transmisogyny when we come out, i fully mean it. We have been hurt for who we are before anybody understood what that meant. We do not fit into patriarchy. Maybe you don't either, i can't speak for you. But i'm saying that trans people break the patriarchal modus operandi harder than anybody else and that we may not grasp the full extend of that by comparing ourselves to cis people of the same assigned gender. I cannot make sense of my life if i compare childhood me only to men instead of other women.

Sooooo. Don't get me wrong. I am not saying that when you make a claim that you had a childhood that still connects you to womanhood through shared trauma, this inversely implies i had a male socialization. You said that at no point and i will not put words in your mouth. In fact, i think that it's a constant among queer kids of all genders to be punished for our queerness before we even realize we are queer. And that in spite of that being different and unique between trans and cis people, between gays and lesbians, between trans men and trans women, between binary and nonbinary people, we share a common ground of being outsiders to the patriarchal system.

But i need to point to a decades-long and ongoing history of lesbian and feminist spaces excluding trans women and including trans men, not just nonbinary transmasc butches, but binary heterosexual trans men, while excluding us from these spaces in the most viciously misgendering ways possible. Once more, i am not pointing to that to say you are participating in it. I am saying that this history is pervasive in queer spaces that are largely comprised of cis women and transmasculine people, and that a lot of trans women are very painfully aware of this. Often because of direct lived experience, or because they have several close friends who have gone through that. Among many other examples, i have a friend who got told as a freshly outed 17 year old transfem, by a transmasculine person who was almost a decade older, that she had to put herself out on the frontlines at a protest in a city with the most violent cops in the country (which ended with her being subjected to traumatizing police violence and several days of being arrested and further traumatized) and later informed her that because of male socialization, she could obviously never be allowed in AFAB Only spaces and could not be trusted in the same way female socialized trans people were. Because she just lacked that connection to womanhood. Sometimes transmisogyny likes to wear the hyperwoke costume, but it still stays rancid terf shit.

And when you come into a space with all the baggage of having grown up as a trans girl, and a random trans man you do not know claims that he is connected to womanhood because of his childhood trauma, this history of brutal exclusion means that a lot of trans women will take that as an invalidation of their own trauma, their gender identity, their right to be in lesbian spaces, their right to have any safe space at all that is not exclusively for transfeminized people.

Once more, i did not take your comment to say any of that, but i know how comments like that often come across, especially if there is less context than in your case. This is why transbian seperatism is a thing, this is why i cringe at the idea of ever dating a cis woman again, this is why i reserve all my love and kindness for other transfeminized people. Because nobody else loves us. People say they do, but you cannot love what you don't understand and other trans women are the only people that truly get me. They are the only ones i can look at these scars with safely, the only people i can truly open up and be seen as myself with. I would not have been able to write this text out if it wasn't for the constant love and support of my best friend, the girl who is closer to my heart than anybody else has ever been. But even that is seen as offensive by misogynist trans men, who will throw a tantrum when trans women assert their boundaries and say they want to center other trans women in their lifes.