Catch Up Part II

Last nights post was written while I was angry, hurt and feeling very alone.
This is the less angry more sober follow up.

[please note, I am speaking specifically to my personal experience as a binary identified trans woman.  i am writing this piece in the their person as a tool for distancing myself slightly from the emotional content of this topic.  I'm not trying to speak to all trans, or even all trans feminine experience, but I rust that my feelings on this topic will be at least somewhat familiar t many trans people]

Being trans means feeling out of place a lot of the time.
The absence of shared formative years with the genders we identify with often leaves us feeling like perpetual outsiders and makes it hard to feel authentic in our interactions with cis gendered people.
The thing is though, it's often far less true that we fear.
The myth of a shared girlhood of, is just that.
Every time i get the courage to talk to cis women regarding their experiences as girls and young women, I'm constantly surprised (I don't know why at this point) to learn that they too have often felt like fakes and frauds in the presence of peers who seemed to have the whole girl thing down pat.
We've all sat awkwardly to the side at one point or another while  the more confidant amongst us stole center stage and then used that platform to make the geeks, nerds and the congenitally shy feel even more awkward.
The only real difference is that for cis women, feeling of inadequacy when it come to "being a girl" aren't routinely used to deny them their identity and sense of self.

I've written before about feeling like a failure as a parent, and especially as a mother. I was genuinely surprised to discover, in conversations I had with other women that this was an incredibly common feeling, especially in the poly community where being a mom, yet not being the birth mother is a more common situation.  Even those mothers who did have their own pregnancies reported feeling like a sham and a faker in the face of all the things society tells us a mother should do, feel and be.

I can't help wondering if those people who would deny trans women their identities on the premise of "lacking a shared experience of girl hood" are not, in fact, the same women who felt most ostracized during their own formative years.
If gender is nothing more than socialization, then all those girls who were so "good at it" can have their femininity dismissed as a by product of patriarchy.  In the denial of an internal sense of gender identity, womanhood then becomes biological essentialism and their own insecurities over feelings of failure to live up to societies gender roles can be wiped away with righteous anger.
We weren't ostracized, we were fighting fighting gender constructs the whole time.
Ironically, when it comes to shared experience they probably have more in common, in many cases, with those trans women who's identities they would deny.

In the end I do believe (obviously) in an internal sense of gender.  I also believe that most of the experiences that we deem masculine or feminine are no more than socialization, and if we could all get over our fear that we're not doing t right, if we started to talk more and share our experiences more, we'd find that man, woman, non-binary, cis or trans.  We have far more in common with one another than we have holding us forever apart.