I went home to Florida last summer. I wasn't even super visibly trans. I just had long hair. But constantly hearing about the terrible things the government did to trans people got to my head. I looked around and saw people who voted for the governor who wanted to stop me from transitioning and remove my insurance coverage. Did they hate me? Fear me? Can they even tell I'm not just a gay man?. Do they care? This wasn't some acute panic attack; I lived my daily life as usual, with lingering discomfort. I took the trolley and stared at my shoelaces to try not to see if other people were looking at me. I drove around Miami with my friends and pretended not to notice their indifference. After four weeks of procrastinating, I ran out of Spironolactone (I was not taking Estrogen at the time). I had to pick it up soon. But Florida law allowed pharmacists to refuse to serve me if they thought giving me Spironolactone violated their religious beliefs. I was worried I might have to deal with the humiliation of a pharmacist looking at me and saying, "Wait, that's a girl's drug." So I put it off some more.
Burdened by the fear of others that cisnormative society instilled in me, I remembered when I first stopped denying my transness. I was 16 years old when I came out to my friends. I changed my name to Georgia and told them to keep it a secret. My high school assumed I was a gay man because of my ex-boyfriend. I let them. My friends would call me Georgia, and when anyone asked, I'd tell them it was a nickname. They believed it. Cisnormativity is a hell of a drug. One day, in between calculus problems, I impulsively ordered a disgusting bright yellow skirt. I hurried to take it from the mailbox before my mom got home and hid it inside my homecoming suit. That Friday, I wore it to a party with my closest friends, we took pictures, and I posted them to Instagram, changing my in-app name to Georgia.
I don't think any of my friends knew how much it mattered to me. I don't think I did. After all, that was just life as usual. But, the summer I turned 19, I deleted the post from my Instagram. I was too scared of my employers or family finding my account.
Reflecting on that summer, I realize that the main barrier between me and that pharmacy was the imaginary audience I drilled into my own psyche. I let a media machine convince me every citizen of Miami hates me. In reality, they were just living their daily lives, as I was, and had better things to do than stare at the weird boy with long hair. I'm realizing that the rise of transphobia is due to a similar issue. To borrow Drager's terms, right-leaning social media posts are spreading a cisgender tragedy, portraying transgender people as the oppressors of cisgender people (in sports or in schools). And, the few times they hear from a trans-accepting source, they hear transgender romances and tragedies, which wouldn't affect them because they don't see trans women as people. But, with transgender satire, there is the potential for change. When I came out to a somewhat-problematic friend, he began to question his preconceived notions of trans people, because our portrayal in the media dehumanizes us. But, the little things, like checking our calc homework and going to the movies, rehumanize us. In the online world, the closest we can get to befriending a transgender person is sharing the mundanities of our lives. "Today I spilled Mac and Cheese powder and messed up a good sweater." "Today a pen blew up in my face mid-interview." These posts wouldn't be viewed on a centralized media site because centralized media incentivizes confrontation and captivation. Thus, centralized social media platforms that overexpose transgender and cisgender romances and tragedies must go. Decentralizatizing social media to encourage people to bond over the mundanities of their lives would be its ideal future.