@oddtail I made quite similar experiences actually.

Most clueless cis people I met sure weren't very sensible about word choices and reading the room ("so i was wondering, ehh, are you a boy or a girl??"), but once you gave them an answer to whatever they were wondering, they just would shrug, accept it and move on with our activity at hand.

They'd then include me in gendered activities and spaces without any awkwardness or second thoughts at all, they'd be super relaxed about it, they'd clearly just take my gender as truth, and they'd get irate on my behalf if people misgendered or excluded me because they were genuinely baffled why people would mistreat me that way. It was as natural to them as anything else that I was a woman, it didn't even occur to them that it could be "wrong".

It took my middle-aged, cranky, Yugoslavian coworker who never heard of trans people exactly two days to completely understand my womanhood. When I eventually talked to her about the whole thing, she was surprised I brought it up, but said something that stuck to me ever since:

That she met a lot of unique and surprising people in her life, and that you learn things about the world and other people every day. And that it was just an interesting medical fun fact about me. And that's all. She said that to her, it was no different than when she met a black guy in our village and then found out he and his family are actually natively German. She compared me to her grandma, who apparently had a lot of facial hair, which ran in her family. It was just a fun fact about me that I'm trans, nothing more.

The validity of my womanhood was never in question to her, just whether I was a woman at all. That's the main thing really.

You really hit the nail on the head: transphobes really, really want to make us think that we're alone. That everyone naturally sees us as freaks by default, except those we have successfully 'convinced of our ideology'.

It's actually the same mechanic at play as with conspiracy types, crazy conservatives or elderly people refusing to go with the times.

They want to use "common sense" as a backup to try to convince you that their irrational fears are actually normal and how everyone else thinks. They're super afraid of having to change their world view, of being wrong about something. They want to make us feel like we have no support, not necessarily to hurt us directly, but because they themselves secretly feel ashamed and insecure about the world moving past them or judging them for something they don't understand. (Ideological transphobes who know what they're doing nonwithstanding, they're doing it on purpose).

That's also why allies can sometimes be insidiously worse than clueless folks. Allies might just as well have the same thought patterns as transphobes, but end the thought process on "...but it would be mean to misgender them, I should be nice and supportive."

They still fundamentally think we're freaks, they just think it's ethically good to be nice to freaks.

Before my coworker experience, I always felt that even if cis people accept us, they at best mentally create a third category: women, men and "trans". Or that they'd always see me as a guy who wants to be a woman and who they needed to be respectful of not to hurt their feelings. But that isn't the case. They just see me as a woman with a medical history.

Transphobes are the only ones questioning people's genders' validity. Normal people don't even have that thought process, because validity isn't an idea they associate with gender.

@lianna
Gender isn't real. And the more you force us to accept it, the less we'll give in (h/t @Gnomeshatecheese for that turn of phrase)
@oddtail @lxo

interesting thought that "gender isn't real". it seems to contradict scientific evidence about gendered brain development that suggests that it's as real as it gets. now, the opposite to acknowledging its measurable, objective reality would be taking it as an arbitrary choice, at which point ISTM you're the one trying to impose your unscientific, oversimplified, and self-inconsistent views onto others, no matter whom it hurts. you could do better

CC: @lianna@micro.webgarden.click @Gnomeshatecheese@spinster.xyz @oddtail@meow.social