I wonder what it's like to be cis

Specifically I wonder what it's like to not have such a large part of your existence defined by a difficult and oppositional relationship to your own body, and a struggle against society and the entire world to transform your own body into something good and joyful and authentic

Probably no-one actually has that because we live in a capitalist hellscape which exists largely to cultivate insecurities about our body in us, so it can monetise selling us the solutions. But even so, white cis able people obviously have it a lot better than trans people

Schopenhauer believed that our direct experiences of our own bodies were the lens through which we achieved consciousness and gained metaphysical knowledge of the world. And he was kind of a bitch and a fairly mediocre philosopher but I still think about that idea a lot sometimes

Because it implies that having a radically different-to-the-norm relationship to your own body radically transforms the entire world of things that you experience and how you know and conceptualize yourself in every single way

That would imply that trans people (along with disabled people, racialized people, women etc) truly have different modes of existence. Like we're just fundamentally different.

Which is kind of a scary idea given how much we rightfully demand to be treated normally but honestly it feels true to me most of the time. I don't think we should shy away from the idea that we are just different to cis people and that's ok. That's fine actually

Every trans person I know can talk about how their earliest memories and experiences are coloured by transness even if they can only see it in retrospect. I don't think you can experience yourself like that for years and years at a formative age and then just become normal

So, when I think about this, and I end up wondering what it's like to be cis, because it's simply a different world of experience to me. It's like trying to imagine what's like to be a bat, or something

It probably sucks though. Being trans is pretty great