this is me speaking entirely anecdotally and not attempting to give you a proper logical argument or to sway anybody's opinion or anything like that

i'm transgender: i've talked about that before on this site, a long time ago - i don't remember what i've ever said about it. i don't try to "pass" yet - people call that being "stealth" when you're not trying to live as your preferred gender. the most important thing is that, up until the last half-year or so, i essentially appeared entirely male.

i like to go for walks and sometimes i run for exercise. there's a small subdivision about 5 minutes walking to one direction, but it's not long (or interesting) enough to run through. the other way out of my house's street heads to a really busy highway, and if you walk along it for a while, you eventually get to the other side of a big lake and there's lots of houses and things that are pretty to look at / nice to run through (the roads, not the houses)

anyway, i go for walks at any time. i run at any time, during the day. if i don't catch the energy, it fades - so sometimes i run at night.

there aren't many people walking around here (because everything is designed for cars), and there's nobody along the highway walking (even with strip malls and stuff everywhere). so, especially at night, i'm just alone walking or running along the road

and i never felt like i was in any kind of danger until i started looking more female. nobody slowed down, nobody yelled anything at me (even when i was running! no "run, forrest" or anything!) - i got no attention. but about half a year ago, for the first time, some guy yelled at me from his car when i was going by. i had somebody slow down to look at me (at night when the road wasn't busy). there's a different timbre to the way people look at me now, the way men look at me now

and i don't really like it. and i'm ugly, too! i can't imagine what it would be like if i was born female.

i know a lot of women (cis or trans) that have been harassed in public like that. i know women that have been harassed by people they knew, or betrayed by close friends or family members. i don't think it's an understatement to say that it's a problem all women deal with, on one level or another, even just by having to change their behavior to feel (or be!) safer

there's a story that i remembered reading about that was about a mass killing of a bunch of cathars in france back in the day, and these soldiers were waiting outside the city for their leaders to give them orders, but they were impatient to start killing these people, so they looked to a priest for an answer - the leaders were concerned about how they would actually identify who were cathars and who were proper christians - so the priest (presumably shrugging) said something along the lines of "kill them all - god will sort them into heaven and hell in the end"

i can't bring myself to spend the energy to sort people out. that's not the moral of the story, but it's the moral i have

the gist of it is that when you see "injustice!" i see "omelette!"

and you can respond to this if you want to, or yell at me for not caring, but there is nothing you can say that will change my mind and there's nothing i can say that will change yours, so let's all lighten up a little bit and talk about something more fun