Feel a bit gutted because I just wrote a big massive rant and it didn't post (stupid ipad). I've been lurking on this thread for a while trying to condense my thoughts into something that adds to the discussion, as so many posters have articulated how I feel about things better than I could hope to. Here's my contribution..
One of my issues with all this cis bollox is that some trans people act as if hating their body and feeling it is a cage is a feeling that only they have experienced. I'm pretty sure most women have felt an extreme urge to drastically change their body on many occasions, if not constantly. After years of hating my physical body I have only in the last few years reached a point where I am proud of my body and even in awe of it, largely due to having gestated, birthed and breastfed a child. But prior to that I had such a bad relationship with my own body image, and I have often wanted to drastically change my body, I have often felt it was a prison.
I became aware that my body did not match up to the ideal at age 7 (I was short and muscular rather than long and willowy). I desperately wished to be someone else. Just because that wish wasn't centred around growing a dick or having a beard that doesn't make it any less real. I used to choose a girl to idolise, always a naturally skinny girl, and I would try to emulate her appearance and personality in order to feel I was more like her. Hitting puberty made it worse, suddenly gaining weight destroyed the little confidence I had and set off a period of starving, bingeing, and wearing huge amounts of makeup. I was so ashamed of my short, stocky legs that I used to carry my trumpet case everywhere around school right in front of them, so it knocked into my knees, in an attempt to hide them (I must have looked MENTAL). I binged and starved from age 14 to 17, when I simply stopped eating and existed on under 200 calories a day for about 6 months. Between the ages of 17 and 19 I rigidly controlled my own calorie intake and was only able to accept my own body when I was abusing and starving it. At university I fell into a cycle of starving, bingeing, ballooning in weight and then shrinking to nothing in a matter of months, all the while ashamed because my mental health issues were so visible. I researched leg-lengthening operations and liposuction. I considered taking speed as a weight-loss method. I was never even really fat, just chubby - my BMI has never been above 26. But my self-hatred and the feeling that my body was betraying me was always there. The wish to be someone else was always there.
My experience is not unique. Nearly all the girls I know from school experienced disordered eating at some point. I know women who say their lives only really began after breast augmentation. I recently met a lovely, vibrant, whippet-thin Chinese girl who still starves herself and feels fat; on her face the scars from rhinoplasty and eye-widening surgery are still visible. As women, we tattoo makeup onto our faces, get hair extensions, breast implants, breast reductions, facelifts, Botox, collagen injections. We rip hairs out of our legs, armpits and pubic areas at great expense and pain. We follow restrictive diets that harm our bodies and make our bodies feel weak and listless, and we hate ourselves for being mentally weak when we are not disciplined enough to suffer them. This is self-mutilation just like SRS is self-mutilation. Just because we are women already, it doesn't mean that we enjoy this shit, or that it doesn't profoundly harm both our bodies and our souls.
To be told that all of this is a privilege just adds insult to injury and demonstrates just how little many trans women appreciate what it really means to be born and socialised a woman. It isn't some pink glitter covered parade of lipstick, handbags and ugg boots. It's largely a painful slog through a lifetime of feeling not good enough, of being at odds with oneself, of struggling to gain self-acceptance. Not to mention the systemic oppression, the threat of violence, the sexual harassment and assault which one learns to see as normal because it happens so fucking often, the workplace discrimination, the no-win situation of being labelled either a slut or a prude. Don't even get me started on periods, the pain and shame they cause, the minefield of contraception, pills, coils, hormones, the virtual impossibility of getting even a decent man to wear a fucking condom, thrush, pregnancy, abortion, the expectation to shave your pubis, the expectation that you will not only give frequent blow jobs but enjoy them too. I could go on and on.
So when someone tells me to check my cis privilege, quite frankly they can just fucking fuck right off. None of this shit is a privilege. It is a fucking burden. And I'm not going to waste my time competing with these people over who has it harder. Having a tough life does not make you entitled to coerce other oppressed people into saying what you want them to say, or into redefining their own identities to make you feel better about yours.
And finally, people like Ego, who came on here into a discussion between women about women to swear at us, make it about them, and tell us all we're wrong, we don't know what we're talking about and that we've got no empathy - however much Ego may "feel like a woman", they are behaving like a typically socialised male, with all the entitlement and narcissism and bullying, coercive aggression that comes with being one.