“Nobody believes you”
It happened on a Saturday, I think. I went to the library because, well, sometimes I like libraries. I don’t go often, because I don’t enjoy being stared at and whispered about, but every so often the urge strikes me and I can’t really resist it. Anyway, as I was leaving, and walking out the lobby, this woman (who I recognized as one of the library workers) turned to face me as I was walking out, looked me right in the face, and said: “Nobody believes you.”
Now, I had never exchanged one word with this woman in my life. I didn’t know her at all. And she sure as hell didn’t know me. Yet so disturbed was she by my feminine presentation, so certain that what I was doing was fundamentally wrong, that she decided to say these words to a complete stranger.
I simply walked on out. I don’t feel an obligation to try to converse with rude people. But I was terribly shaken for the rest of the day. And I still am. Her voice was the voice of society’s refusal to allow me to exist. It sounded so very much like the voice in my head, the voice that makes it so difficult for me to keep going: What in the world makes you think you can ever be a woman? Why are you even trying? Nobody believes you.
I know, of course, that the statement is objectively false. Lots of people believe me; lots of people accept me. But when my identity can be so simply, cavalierly dismissed in three words and the entire weight of cissupremacist society is behind those words, it’s hard not to feel that they are, in the end, true. That it’s hopeless, and I’m wasting my time, because nobody believes what I say about myself. That I might as well end my life, because there’s just no point in continuing.
Every so often, a cis person will ask me how they can help trans folks. There are a lot of answers to that question, but the single most important thing you can do is: Believe us. And don’t just tell us you do, either; show it. Call us what we need to be called; treat us as members of our genders; acknowledge our genders in all conversations with or about us. Don’t erase us; don’t avoid including us just because it’s simpler for you not to.
Please: Believe us. Accept us. Prove that woman wrong.
