Hey everyone, look who found a perfect top to match her Butterfly Queen polish! 

Standing up to Negative Facebook Comments

I wanted to do a quick post to share something I added as a comment on Facebook. This was something I posted in defense of a young transgender woman who contacted me through a friend. She was looking for advice on how to start HRT. Not long after she was already coming out as trans on Facebook. She was met with mostly happy and loving messages. However, coming from a religious family, she was also hit with the “I don’t agree with your decision, but I love you and will pray for your soul” type of messages. 

Most of my life was influenced by a very conservative town, university, and certain family members. Due to thoughts and shame I adopted, I was unable to tell the world that I was transgender. I quietly suffered for decades, then came to know exactly how it feels to have people react this way once I was finally able to be truthful with the world. 

I decided to speak up for Dani, who had already sort of decided to just watch the fireworks develop on her post. Many were defending her already, some with lots of anger. The thread was spiraling.

I am sharing this here because, after being up for over a week now, it seems to have killed the negative comments on her post and the discussion is no longer spiraling.

I hope this helps other people who need to try to let a family member know what damage they are potentially doing..

———————————– Facebook Excerpt ————————————

To those that are saying they “don’t agree with Dani’s decision.” I don’t want to beat you up. I don’t know you, and in some of the comments I can sense how much you do actually care for Dani. I just want you to realize and hopefully pause for a moment. Comments like this from a loved one can hurt so much more than you may realize. Admitting you are transgender is not something you are choosing, it is part of the core of who you are as a person. Calling it a decision and saying you don’t agree with it is basically heard by a transgender person as this.. “I don’t agree with who you are as a person and I want you to be who I want you to be.” When admitting you are transgender, you are revealing something that is kept hidden not because it is sinful, but because society does not understand and therefore attacks it. It is kept hidden out of intense fear and wrongly, often because of this fear, the transgender person feels shame for who they are. Transgender people are often confused with fetishists (many times intentionally so by those who exploit them or make them scapegoats for political gain). Unfortunately, these attitudes are being spread more and more as the media has a war over the topic. Transgender people are not the same as heterosexual cross-dressers. Heterosexual cross-dressers (in the past called transvestites) take part in that practice for some sort of pleasure, but then happily go back to their everyday lives (these people would never even consider undergoing hormone therapy or gender confirmation surgery). Transgender people simply are people whose gender does not match their biological sex. This causes them daily pain and suffering by trying to wear a mask to live up to the imposed expectations of their family, friends, and society at large. This is why some transgender people suffer from depression and other mental illnesses. It is not because they are inherently mentally ill to begin with, it is because over time.. society, loved ones, and ‘well meaning’ people cause them to develop mental illness through daily intense stress and anxiety. This is all transgender 101, but it is purposely overlooked by those that spread hate and lump us in with fetishists. Dani is not sinning, Dani is being honest. Dani is telling the truth about how SHE was knit together in the womb. She was given body parts that do not match her innate gender. Science has proven that an innate sense of gender exists and that trying to re-write that does not work. For someone that likely believes in a soul, do you think maybe souls have a gender? You can look up how a late onset introduction of elevated testosterone in the womb can potentially cause everything from intersex babies to a transgender condition. There is so much more to the development process to us as humans that we are still studying and have yet to discover. Pray for Dani sure, but don’t pray for her to stop ‘sinning,’ because as already stated, she is not sinning in regards to this. Instead, pray for her health and her strength as she faces off against ignorance. It may be painful for you to imagine, but the truth is Dani was a little girl being told by everyone she had to be a boy her whole life. Take any other girl from your family, look at her and think what it would be like if you were to try to impose your will on her and MAKE her be a boy. How would that affect her? How would that make her feel about you? That perspective is important to have. Do not cause harm. Love and pray for Dani, but do so in a way that recognizes she is NOT sinning against God. Not in this anyway!

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Anyway, there it is. If you need to use some of the text in this post to defend yourself or someone else then I give you permission to use it. Also, I hope this does not come across as negative to cross-dressers. I was trying to point out the difference because of what some of the previous comments were saying. It was clear some of these people did not even understand what Dani was announcing. They were picturing her as someone that did this for sexual pleasure (to be clear, I am not judging anyone for that!) and I hope we can all agree there are many points at which one can fall on a whole spectrum between being trans and being a heterosexual cross-dresser. Dani was announcing she is trans and there were people immediately creating confusion as to what that meant so I included an explanation that I hope was something those people could wrap their heads around.

Love you all,

-Ariana