Gwen the Trans BalrogThis wasn't actually a fairytale. And that's not how it happened.
No, what happened was that Michael had no idea what he was experiencing. Fairytale characters aren't allowed to be gay, but if they had been he might have assumed that he was. But as it was, Prince Gideon went bachelor to his grave several years later after catching a particular virulent form of contagious gout.
And Michael soldiered on, living the lie, until his parents died, leaving him the farm, which he tended, becoming old and bitter and withdrawn. No one said "gay" about him but everyone in the village was thinking it really hard. And when Michael died, the crown confiscated his land in probate and that was that.
That's depressing, right?
I said it wasn't a fairytale, and it wasn't. It was a parable. That sense of injustice and depression you're feeling right now is the lesson.
You might say, "Oh, things like that don't happen," if you're particularly slow on the uptake, but more likely you either got here two steps ahead of me or you're thinking, "Well that was a bit on the nose, wasn't it trans girl?" I never claimed it was a subtle parable.
Michael is every single trans person, only instead of his parents, it's society. If you feel any sort of human empathy at all, if you were rooting for Prince Gideon to find his Dahlia and a happy ending, you need to realize that trans people are currently living in a situation where the actual ending I gave, the non-fairytale ending of bitterness and confusion, is actually a far happier ending than the one which a lot of trans folks face. Michael lived out his life, sad though it was. A lot of trans people don't get to do that because they're murdered or driven to suicide. Or substance abuse. Or mental breakdown. Or any one of a myriad of other things which society would rather trans people do than simply blossom.
So here's your call to action. If you're cis and you felt something reading this, good. All that any of us want to do is be able to live our lives the best we can, and trans people, myself included, don't want you to do anything different for us. Just let us live.
But we're past the point where that's enough. You've got to actively facilitate us living. You've got to push back against the forces, both malevolent but also seemingly benign, that want to keep us from living as ourselves. Please.
There are no magical fairies coming to save us. This isn't that sort of story. Please do what you can.
4/4
timberwraith
GreenSkyOverMe (Monika)
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the