/soy/ - Soyjaks

People who mock trans individuals often underestimate the extraordinary resilience required to navigate that experience. Consider what it actually entails:
Constant social navigation: Every interaction becomes a calculation. Will this person respect you? Will you be safe using a public restroom? Should you correct someone who misgenders you and risk confrontation, or let it slide and feel diminished? Most people have never had to strategize their basic existence this way.
Medical gauntlet: Accessing gender-affirming care often means years of appointments, gatekeeping, insurance battles, and invasive questions about your most private experiences. Then there's the physical reality of transition itself - hormone changes, potential surgeries, recovery periods - all while maintaining work and relationships.
Psychological weight: Facing regular discrimination, from subtle exclusion to outright hostility. Watching strangers debate your right to exist. Risking rejection from family, friends, employers, and communities. Studies show trans people face significantly elevated rates of harassment and violence.
Economic vulnerability: Trans people experience higher rates of unemployment, housing instability, and poverty. Many face workplace discrimination or are pushed out of careers. Some lose family financial support.
Political targeting: Being made a wedge issue, having your healthcare legislated, bathroom use debated publicly, your participation in sports analyzed endlessly by people who've never met you.
The people who casually demean trans individuals often crumble under far less pressure - a bad Yelp review, a critical comment online, being asked to show basic consideration for others. They've rarely had to defend their fundamental identity or maintain composure while others debate their humanity.
Trans people aren't superhuman - they're ordinary people handling extraordinary circumstances with whatever strength they can muster. That daily endurance, that persistence in the face of systemic resistance, requires a fortitude that casual critics have likely never been forced to develop.