@aredridel yes. thank you.

@aredridel I love you :heart:

@aredridel Thank you. My past is a complicated place that is only informed now by my gender in hindsight. I didn't even feel "wrong" until nearly 30... :-) So...yeah. Thanks. <3

If you want to argue with me about whether I'm _currently_ a woman, however, we will have to have a very nuanced conversation. Any blanket statement about whether trans women are women without the context of how gender and our notions of sex are socially constructed is a non-starter, as is a conversation that doesn't include us.

Gender construction cannot be applied to us without our participation.

@aredridel While I personally do feel that I was always a girl (or at the very least never a boy), I think it's destructive how the "born this way" narrative is used to justify being trans. There are many ways of being trans, but the dysphoria is equally painful. Thank you for sharing a different narrative.

@aredridel I agree. I'm not the escape or what survived from my masculine identifying years, I'm the integral of it. I'm still my mother's child, a programmer, a cook. I'm not sure I was a man, or a woman who didn't realize it, but I knew I was unhappy and that's what matters.

@aredridel I want to talk to you about this so much but also am simultaneously scared you'll convince me of something or we'll just sit there with differing views and just agree that we have different approaches and that's OK.

I find exactly nothing wrong with people who have complicated histories especially because I have one myself but I work hard to present a simplified view to the world because normative treatment is important to me.

@aredridel agreed, I have the same issue with referring to my birth name as a "deadname". There was no death, merely a phase change.