The hermeneutical injustice of being a trans child
#ThingsYouCantUnsay #trans #asexual #Polyamory #lesbian
Society hates trans people. Society is shaped by wealth, by the stories wealth buys, by the means of production wealth uses to produce more wealth and, incidentally, everything else that people consume. Wealth dehumanizes to procreate more wealth more efficiently; vibrant and varied humanity impedes that procreation. Trans people are VERY different, so wealth buys stories for society to teach society to hate the differences of trans people. For generation upon generation upon generation.
Similarly, society has been taught to embrace patriarchy, and patriarchy says women exist to be men’s property, a relationship that must be enforced with exclusive sexual access.
My asexuality, polyamory, trans femininity, and lesbianism are all anathema to society, and that’s the society my parents grew up in. A society that had torn apart the idea of transness to the point where the concept was largely illegible in the public eye. Where asexuality is ridiculed, polyamory is punished by the legal system, and loving relationships between women are treated as a fetish for straight men.
My parents successfully made homosexuality something I feel comfortable embracing. I feel the friction when I lesbian in public, but one of my earliest memories is of being taught that the lesbians next door were a normal couple, just another pair of loving adults.
But the rest? My parents didn’t know there were alternate ways to be that they weren’t making space for.
Whose fault was that?
It wasn’t my fault.
I was a child.
It wasn’t their fault.
Society made sure they were set up to fail.
That’s how hermeneutical injustice goes. We fail because we were systematically denied the information we needed to NOT fail.
But now?
Now, when I come to them, resplendent in my identities? Now, I expect better.
Now, when I speak of society’s hatred of me, I expect their rapt attention, when they are given an opportunity to heal wounds they made because society denied them the tools to not hurt me.
Now, I possess the knowledge. Now, I am grown. Now, I am an adult, and I have a duty to know myself. And now, if I so choose, I can share the knowledge of who I am, of what society tried to erase from the world.
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