what does being visibly trans mean to you? like, emotionally. do you think it's important? is it something that you're comfortable with?

Well first of all, i have no fucking idea what "being visibly trans" entails as long as you do not hold up a sign saying "out and proud trans warrior". I'm a bit over one and a half years into the physical part my transition (you can add two more years for questioning and transitioning socially) and i wouldn't say that i have had particularly great starting conditions for passing, but it actually seems to work reasonably well for me since i got rid of my facial hair and started growing my boobs. I don't feel as if i'm "visibly trans", and that's not even getting into how many trans people i know who do not have any commonly understood visible clichés of transness or how many cis people do have a ton of these supposed telltale signs. From my lived experience, i do not think that "being visibly trans" is a thing for most of us once we're a few years into our transitions.

And then there's girls who started transitioning literally 20 years earlier than me, who have much more visible curves, who i do not perceive as having bad passing at all, yet they make plausible claims that they've never gotten gendered correctly by strangers a single time in their life, and they have the history of being victims to hate crimes to prove it. And i seriously don't know why they go through life with such hardships and i don't. It makes zero sense to me. I don't get what constitutes "visible transness", there seems to be very little connecting the transfems i know who pass most of the time and there seems to be very little connecting those that don't. It comes off as incredibly random in either case.

i think passing fully would be great but i don't know who i'd be if i lost that thread tugging at my heart when i'm waiting in line at the store or whatever.

For me, it mostly meant that i stopped viewing transness as a deficit narrative and now view it entirely as a liberatory and subversive experience. When i do not pass, i violate established notions of gender because i refuse to be put in a neatly labeled box and confuse people with my gender presentation and when i do pass, i violate established notions of gender as well because i'm fully free from the restrictions people who want to assign me the wrong gender try to pin on me and because i prove the "you can always tell" crowd wrong. I win either way, cisnormativity loses either way.

And this is infinitely better than all this dysphoria-centric bs and all this passing-obsessed bs that i'm so fucking fed up with. I'm not a fan of how our community commonly talks about the trans experience, hexbear isn't even a particularly bad place in this regard and reading the mega is still a minefield of self hatred and internalised transphobia where i just scroll past all the spoilers, and past all the shit that should be spoilered and wonder what i'm doing here. I do not let myself be defined by suffering and pain and never being good enough, fuck that noise. I'm free in a hundred ways cishets can't even conceive off, i'm out there finally being me and finally living the life i've always deserved, why should i feel anything but joy about being trans? And don't give me any of this "but being cis would be so much easier" crap, i do not know a single cis woman who's happy in the way i am.