askchapo

I get there's a need to openly vent things that your average tenderqueer space will censor, restrict to an opt-in channel or outright ban you for. I've been in spaces that enforce toxic positivity, i left them for a reason. These places can function like cults.

The thing is, the cult aspect is even worse in the trans negative self hater spaces and the "hard truths" that get pushed there mostly aren't hard truths. When i tell people that hang out in such spaces that i've literally met cis people less transphobic than them, which is true, and hard to accept for a lot of trans folks, i do not get celebrated for telling a hard truth, i get added to the block list. Funny how that works.

Building communities that are emotionally honest and allow for articulating pain, despair and suffering but do not actively encourage this are not easy to build, but they are what trans people, particularly transfeminine people, need as a survival network. I've also found that this does not work as a public community, we need to build these groups on our own, for each other, with people we vibe with. This is why learning ways to set up and run your own online spaces is such an important skill. When you want to build a trans mutual aid group, it comes right after estrogen cook.