How do I not be like this?

Post date: 2020-12-03 09:49:32

(Content warning transphobia) I'm worried I'm turning into a TERF. No queer-friendly therapists or community available to me. Who can I talk to or how can I train my feelings to match my values.

My intense feeling of grief, disappointment and stress at Elliot Page's coming out as trans is very at odd with my intellectual cheer on his behalf at finding his authentic self. I'd actually been vaguely concerned for Page's well-being based on interviews the past few years so hopefully this will bring him peace and joy. But, as a small-b butch woman in her forties I'm feeling a loss. I get that this isn't my loss to feel, that Page wasn't what I (and he) thought, but the feeling that I am being edged into a narrower and narrower space between binary expressions where I'm the one who's wrong (again) persists. I hate feeling this way, and I have that this feeling is so close to the way transphobic women talk, reason and agitate. I absolutely keep these shitty thoughts to myself and argue against them where I see them dogwhistled by others and love my trans homies, we are all one family.

I've been having complicated feels for a while about (forgive me) "butch erasure". The thought that the ways I expressed my gender as a kid would, today, if my parents had loving, open intentions, probably been interpreted as gender questioning. Intellectually I realize that of course that it's more a struggle to get validated as trans than to accidentally transition. A coworker was telling me her kid may be trans as they hade anything to do with being a girl. I wanted to ask if their kid has any women who look and act like me in her life, her mom is about my polar opposite.
Equally I've been having weird and shitty reactions and thoughts about "women in X" where X is a male dominated field or hobby. There is a growing number of women in these fields which is great. There's also a disproportionate number of trans women, which is also great and arguably an even harder row to hoe, but I can't seem to be as excited or identify as easily. It's gotten that when I hear a woman has done something in a field like that I find myself googling to see if she is trans. I worry that this is some displaced obsessive disruptive thoughts, and while that is something I could possibly talk to a mental health person about I don't have any access to someone who would take that seriously I think, because of their own generalized transphobia.

Any frameworks for dealing with these thoughts or how I can work through them without encumbering trans people more? Is there an aspect of queer theory that handles this? I am fearful of the internet as I am afraid of and disgusted by those who would tolerate these thoughts and "get their claws " in me.
At the same time as I feel these are bad questions and I don't want to put them on the internet, I don't know where else to ask. Mods if this just feels like a transphobic screed I understand if you need to not post it.

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