Do you ever think about how the fastest way for a trans person to gain a following on this website is constant battles against transphobes, and how the second fastest way for a trans person to gain a following on this website is constant battles *for* transphobes.

I've been rewarded more by Twitter's algorithm and social dynamics for irate threads about transphobes than for my trans health advocacy and legal research, and certainly far more than I've been rewarded for my art. I hate this. It made it so much harder to break the cycle.

I am so glad that my transition and self of self were fairly established before I began engaging in battles with transphobes. I'm even more glad that I quit after around a year of it. Those battles mess you up, and I see a lot of early transition people become defined by them.

When you read trans history, you realise that this pattern is older than Twitter. A distressing amount of (white, middle-class) trans political writing has always been about fighting transphobes, particularly within feminism. I was shaped by that; I nearly lost myself to it.

This is not all our fault. Transphobia is an integral part of cisheteropatriarchy and other supremacies, and we are in struggle against it. The fight comes to us whether we seek it out or not. But trans people need ways to make the struggle against transphobia *liberatory*.

When you read trans history, you regularly come across beautiful, energetic, powerful trans women who become completely crushed by making their life about fighting individual transphobes and anti-trans groups. It breaks my heart. I'm worried it's now happening on a grand scale.

Ways of fighting cisheteropatriarchy that I find liberatory:
- Direct mutual aid
- Trans healthcare research and advocacy
- Researching and sharing trans history
- Declining interpersonal conflict, planning strategic action
- Making art about anything, present as trans

Most of all, we need transfeminist thought and action that is not *centred* on fighting-the-bad-people and debunking-the-bad-ideas, but rather asks: What experience do we bring to the world? What knowledge do only we have? What happens when we centre ourselves?