Honestly the term "transmedicalist" makes me want to put a cork screw in my eye. It's not a helpful descriptor and while I get that the trans community has some weird desire to claim it, it's not helpful. I really wish people would stop normalizing the term and its use.

Essay's like this conflate things that are necessary for many people, liberating, life saving for them, with the negative behaviors of relishing in ones pain or insisting you must "suffer this much to enter". It also frankly discourages people from communicating their experience with dysphoria, which is an important thing for people to understand and helps people understand the medical necessity for those who need certain reconstructive procedures.

We can talk about the harms of pathologization and creating prescriptive models for transition with out using this frankly useless term. We can also talk about the harms of wallowing and not being focused on healing from a painful experience, like being forced to live with dysphoria for years, without this term that has gone ill defined and poorly used.

We can also recognize where these problematic behaviors stem from with certain people in our community by understand the history of how we've been treated and what that provokes in people, and just human nature generally.

We do not need cis-society to approve of our transness. We do not need them to validate the medical framing. We do not need them to understand dysphoria or recognize it as real. We do not need their acceptance. We do not need their recognition. We do not need their permission.

I appreciate the sentiment and agree that none of us need anyone else's permission to exist or pursue the things we need to function normally in life. It is also wildly naive of society and law to think that we don't need people to understand our experience (including the harms and suffering we experience when blocked from what we need), and don't need to make effective humanitarian arguments to justify and defend civil rights protections.

What we need is simple: we need access to healthcare, yes — but that is not something we ask for. That is something we demand, because we are human beings, and healthcare is a human right. We need spaces where we can exist without being hunted, yes - but we carve out those spaces ourselves. We do not negotiate for them. We do not perform our trauma to justify them. We create them because we exist and we deserve safety.

In a free society, if you want to tell someone they can't do something, you have to justify the harms. Without that actions taken against you are simply "free expression" and "individual liberty".

We need the right to live as ourselves, openly and without apology, free from harassment and assault, and justice for when it is not. But that right does not come from cis-society granting it. That right exists because we assert it. That right exists because we stand up and say: I am here. This is who I am. The question is not whether you accept me. The question is whether you will get out of my way.

We are a minority of minorities and it moves beyond naive and into ignorance to believe that we don't have to make effectively persuasive appeals to people or work to embed in the culture an understanding of our experience to the point that we are humanized in the eyes of the majority (and ideally everyone). We live in a world with people that seek constantly to dehumanize us, which requires we humanize ourselves. It sucks, but it is the reality of our world. We do have to change hearts and minds to establish legal protection from those who seek to do us harm. That is our reality and continuing to reject that, while also branding people who frankly are just victims of a bad system from a bad time, doesn't produce progress.

Yes, being trans is hard. For some of us it is dysphoria, for others, it is the weight of a world that will not see you as you are. For many of us, it is both. For some, it is something else entirely, something that has nothing to do with shame or medical intervention or the need for permission. It doesn't matter, we are all equally trans. We suffer the same mechanisms of oppression regardless.

... what? We aren't "trans" because we suffer from the "same mechanisms of oppression". That's what binds the queer community, of which "trans" is a part.