gayconflictavoider:

gayconflictavoider:

gayconflictavoider:

I’m just now reading the section in fucking trans women on touch and got its so real. Since transitioning the amount of hugs I get from people has dropped to almost none. I’ll be in groups of people where everyone hugging goodbye and see people hesitating over whether to hug me and then choose not to. Its frustrating. Platonic touch is good, and the amount of it I have is so much less. 

Its not just frustrating from like a real need for contact with other people as like a physiological thing, but also like what it says about my body.

like this section is just ouch and so real: “"I notice when my touch or my compliments give you that deer in the headlights look, or how you don’t know how to respond. I notice when it takes you longer to hug me. I feel it when we share a bed as friends but your body is rigid. I don’t say anything but I notice. “

like its that knowledge that my body even in the mundane moments that mark friendship, is still just a little too horrific for others

I’ll add that its not just abjection I think. We are hypersexualized. Even our friends I think still suspect that theres some sort of kink or fetish or something behind the ways we modify our bodies and social lives. I think that has to do with the aversion to touch as well, as if physical contact with our bodies could only be a sexual act. And thats just not the case and people who realize that are my favorite. Like my friend kissed me on the cheek last night when she left and literally I don’t know anyone besides her who could bring themselves to express platonic affection with me like that, because of the idea that there must be something more to contact with a trans woman’s body.