In the family I grew up in and in the town I grew up in, being forced to survive as a trans femme kid rescued me from becoming a terrible person.

I look at my bigoted, reactionary family, and my equally awful home town, and I know with near certainty that it took the abuse and trauma of my childhood to shake me loose from being raised to become a terrible person.

If I had been born a cis girl in that family and that town, I would have become a younger version of my sister.

That thought makes me shudder.

In this life, I would choose to be trans or I would choose to never have existed.

I'd rather choose to grow up in a different family.

When I see the lives of my cis female friends—women who did not grow up in a family and town of wretched bigots—I long for the lives they have lived.

I long for what other women take for granted.

I long for a life that has fewer jumbled and missing pieces.

It would not be perfect. There would still be trauma and ruin. No life is perfect. No life is free of trauma.

But I'd have a body that did not stab my soul with knives. I could figure out who I am without growing up surrounded by people who insist that I'm not even female.

It's rather basic but I don't expect most cis people to understand what I'm saying.

There are fundamental aspects of life and humanness which you take for granted that I have had to fight for from the earliest years of childhood onward. https://twitter.com/timberwraith/status/1302755402224939009

That's not resentment, btw. I'm just stating fact.

I wish I were one of you.

I wish I could take all of this for granted.

And live in ignorance of what I know in this life.

Maybe the next time around?

We'll see.

I won't know, if and when.

I'll take it all for granted—the unrealized calm of a longed for ignorance.

This thread is a companion to the thread below. (Of course.) https://twitter.com/timberwraith/status/1302741989046325250