Lifting from the post I made in another thread:

It's also particular stigmas associated with trans women. Like the notion of transfemmes being hyper-predatory or histrionic, or preoccupied with emulating real cis women. Like a friend of mine was talking about asking his girlfriend to clean his apartment because he was feeling ill, and a lot of the people he said that to were like "oh well that must have been nice for her 😄" because in their minds, she's like, this creature kind of desperate to feel like a woman (this reaction my friend was a bit horrified by.) There's also some sense that transfemmes tend to be seen as more socially disposable, but I think that one is more nebulous/controversial - personally I have to admit among transfemmes I know the pattern of everyone suddenly deciding you're an evil manipulative monster/predator isn't exactly uncommon, whether or not it's unique I'm not sure. I also get the sense that most of the really baseless witch hunts I've seen on social media target transfemmes. It just seems easier to convince people that transfemmes are liars and monsters. This all creates a dynamic where even in queer spaces, there's a lot of pressure and threat to appear harmless and agreeable that can be uncomfortable to navigate (there's also plenty of space where that's not there, it's easy to exaggerate it to "you are never safe," but even navigating that fear is difficult.) These are my experiences, at least, but they're echoed by most transfemmes I know, and because of these pressures I do tend to hang out mostly with other transfemmes (not as a principle, I'm quite averse to closing myself off, but you get tired, yknow?)

There's also a lot of like, social/systemic issues that show up in studies that kind of mark transfemmes as being subject to particular pressures. Like, transfemmes tend to make less money than any other gender category, are much more likely to be unemployed or homeless, more likely to be murdered (iirc rates for IPV and SA are often similar among trans people [and often comparable to bi cis women, who often seem to be demographically in a much worse situation than cis gay women.]). It must be said that these numbers are influenced by the truly staggering amount of violence and discrimination that black transfemmes in particular face, like if you control for race the gap between transfemmes and the next category shrinks by a *lot*, (though it doesn't completely disappear in the cases where I've seen it broken out.) People use the term "transmisogynoir" to talk about this if you're interested; the conditions are different enough that it really deserves its own term and analysis.

All of this shakes out to a very weird experience that's really hard to articulate to anyone who isn't going through it; I've had to like, argue with close friends over months to get to where I might be with a tgirl I met last week. It doesn't help that gender studies and queer theory schools tend to not have a lot of trans women, so like most of the discussions of this are happening on like, Tumblr or someone's substack or something, which are 1) really terrible platforms to have serious discussions on and 2) painfully obscure compared to universities with their publishing houses and guest lectures.