A personal story about trust between “sexes”

I was around my 20th. I gave up on the idea that I can transition in Bulgaria, not I wasn’t giving up my identity core, my essence, my existential true. I was freshly learned what I am, I mean I had the word for that pile of knowledge in me. “Transsexual” was, at that time. But reading about transition-related care I just lost my hope to have that life and was ready to let myself go on the stream of the river of misery, called “my life”.

I applied for university. The university itself was far away from my own city so I needed to travel to it and to rent an apartment for the nights before the exams.

At my first exam, I was with a close girlfriend from school (not an intimate one, I didn’t have an intimate partner until my 30s), the first to whom I came out years later as transgender. The woman who rented us an apartment liked us and she agreed to allow us to stay for the next exam, a few weeks later.

Actually the next exam was only for me. My friend wasn’t obliged to come. At first, I wanted to bring her with me for support, then I decided that this is my own fight — the whole stay in that city, traveling through it, went to the exam, finish it and came back home. So, I decided to go alone. I was so nervous that I cut my friend off with one “NO!”, to her “Would you like me to travel with you?”…

Well, when I reached the apartment for my own exam, the evening before it I was surprised by the owner that there would be another girl who is alone and that she was expecting me to come with my friend.

Wow. Poor girl, alone with something like a man, with a female voice, and slim body, and presumed dangerous genitals. So Girlish if you want to see it.

So we decided to had this compromise. If she felt uncomfortable with me, she will get to the lady owner's apartment. And we sat and talked. My “inner woman” talked to her, nicely, melodically, with no signs of a threat on my disfigured face.

Many acquaintances say that I am sort of androgynous. My voice hadn’t mutated as well. So I was a target to toxic masculinity’s representatives and their girlfriends, long before I started my transition. I was good at bonding with women, and with men. But with women, it was kind of peaceful and right. They never felt me as a threat to them. My (female) colleagues and I even changed into out work-clothes in one room, without being worried or having “sexual predator” fear.

I am not attracted to women at all and I hate sexual and any kind of violence, as a constant victim of mostly verbal abuse from strangers, because of my facial anomaly and the “strangeness” from me.

So, we sat and talked. I talked about a general thing and her insecurity about me dropped away. She decided that it’s not a problem for her to sleep in one apartment with me and I think that my soft, feminine and comforting nature was the one who added to her decision.

There was one calm night where everyone slept in their beds, with no stupid tension between “sexes” and no violent desires bull shites.

I remember that situation, today when I am reading about the women's spaces, about how “man” is dangerous by presumption and other exaggerated stuff. Most cis men are dangerous even for their fellow cis men and every kind of woman. But that can’t be applied to every cis man, it’s absurd to be applied to trans women, as well. That girl, even without knowing that I am a trans person, felt comfortable and secure, just because she valued my social skills and my unannounced humanism and feminine approach to the world. She didn’t see me as a threat, back there, many women hadn’t seen me as a threat years later, many women don’t see me as one today! because I am not a threat and I am not erasing anything. Because I am way too open about myself and my identity than many oppressed-turned-oppressors anti-trans feminists will ever dare to be.

In the end — you decide what to believe and how to live. To believe in a general lies and live in constant fear, or to accept the simple truth that people are different and we can only judge if we really know someone for real, if someone’s doings are really evil, to the core. Sexism and misogyny are poison to women, to trans people, to children and to the men who are forced to drink and use these poison to oppress others and themselves. I am not the enemy, your enemy is already in your head, and next to you masked as an ally while whispering his conservative lies. You let him in there while chasing ghosts of non-existing ideologies.