Dealing With Targeted Harassment Of Trans Women Online

Dealing With Targeted Harassment Of Trans Women Online

I decided to take myself out of a discussion in a tweet thread from one of my friends. She's in the entertainment industry, but I won't get into it specifically. What I saw there was targeted harassment, but I didn't realize what I was jumping into when I got in there.

My friend is a trans woman, and she's been dealing with targeted harassment since she took a stance against somebody who was using trans women as a punching bag for his jokes. That's an unpopular opinion for some, and that's when she started getting attacked. People were going into her pictures and tweeting about her.

The danger of what can happen in situations like this is they start doing information searches on an individual, doxing them and then who knows what can happen. There are cisgender women who will never give an inch to a trans woman. They refer to us in male pronouns and in very negative terms. We in the trans community have a term for them and their exclusionary ways, but I won't use it here.

I didn't think it was a big deal that my friend stepped in front of the mirror in the ladies room to take a picture of herself after doing her makeup. Cisgender women do this and so do trans women. You're staring at yourself in the mirror, and that's where you pull your camera out. So basically, she's a trans woman doing what cisgender women do and nothing more.

What these women do is pick on something and then attack. A trans woman with a phone in the ladies room becomes a threat to them. I'm well aware of the reaction of some cisgender women, and that's why I always try to be respectful around them. When I bring my phone into the ladies room, it's usually in my pocket. I might pull it out and look at texts or whatever in one of the stalls, but so do cisgender women.

You see, right here these exclusionary women would target me because I dared bring a phone into the stall and read texts and use Twitter. How dare I do something that they do. To them it would be quite logical to attack me for doing something that they do. Of course, I know me being in there at all is problematic because they think I'm being predatory for some reason. Like the trans woman who started this thread, I take my picture in the mirror sometimes. The reality is I'm doing something that cisgender women do.

I've struggled to feel good about the way I look, and it's been hard for me to want to take a picture of myself. As I've come out as trans, I find that I can now do that. Out of every four or five pictures, I find one that I like. When I do my makeup, I take pictures to find one I like. It's just me in the picture, and I share it on social media sometimes. It's sort of a progress report about how I'm looking, and a friend or two might comment. That's all I'm doing. That's all my trans woman friend was doing.

Because she is being targeted and harassed, these cisgender women decided to attack her for daring to take a picture of herself in front of a mirror in the ladies room. What they're trying to equate her doing is walking around and pulling out her camera, taking pictures of cisgender women in stalls or in compromising positions. This is not what she was doing, but that's what's going on in the minds of these exclusionary women when they launch this sort of attack.

I jumped into that thread and was being empathetic with my friend. I said that I had done the same thing, which I have done and will continue to do. In no way do I take my camera phone and point it at anybody. I'm pointing it at myself, and usually there's nobody else around me. In fact, when you look at my friend's photo, there was nobody around her either. They are making a big deal about nothing, simply to say that trans women are invalid.

I engaged a few of them, because all of them had hateful comments to say. They were designed to hurt me, damage my self-esteem and make me give up on myself. This is the danger of the hate that exclusionary women spew towards trans women. They do damage to us, and they don't care.

They think there's never been a trans woman in the ladies room, but it's happened for years and they didn't know about it. They're never going to stop trans women from existing, and the joke of the matter is they've probably had conversations with trans women and not even realized it. This is because trans women are women.

I disengaged from this thread after a day and deleted my posts. I put some people on block that were a part of the thread, because I don't want them searching me out and attacking me. I'd rather not have to defend myself in this situation, but if somebody comes to attack me, I'll have to. Sometimes, you have to pick your battles. It's okay to be trans in the ladies room. There are some who would say it's not. There's a lot of hatred being spewed towards us, and this is just one area in which it happens.

They still want to say that you're being trans to harass women in the bathroom. The reality is a man wanting to do anything to a woman will just follow her into the bathroom and do whatever he was going to do. He won't go through the trouble of dressing up as pretty and feminine as he can, and these dishonest cisgender women know that quite well. My comments in this thread were only going to be read by hateful cisgender women who want to attack me, and I saw no good coming of that towards me.

Therefore, I deleted those comments and decided to write an article here. I just wanted to make a point that we exist, but we don't exist to harass cis women. We exist because that's a reality, whether they like it or not.

We're only going to the bathroom because we need to use it, and many trans women are interested in men. Even if there are trans women who are interested in cisgender women and other trans women, there are also lesbians who go into ladies rooms. That does not mean that they're looking to get into anybody's space and harass them. We just want to do our business and leave, and that's what we do.

Just in case there are some people who wonder, I'll end this with a very important statement. You're not wrong for being trans. That's how God made you. Also, for the people in the back in the exclusionary camp who don't understand, trans women are women, and we're going to stand our ground for the right to exist.