When I read the part about cis women being lucky for having to put in no effort to look femme I felt a bit defensive about it though because of my own struggle with appearing femme enough even though I was born with the femme hormones.

Yeah these were honestly the parts that really rubbed me the wrong way. There’s a really brutal intersection between transphobia and misogyny that has put me through a ton of hurt over the last years and that all of my transfem friends suffer under to some degree, i’m not denying that the standards society puts on women bear down on transfeminine people extra hard, but you can’t tackle the internalized part of that without plain old feminism that includes solidarity with cis women. And when there’s a take that just puts all trans women in one box and all cis women in another where they have it easier than us, that heavily implies both a cissexist deficit narrative about transfems where we are universally painted as inferior to cis women looks wise and all cis women are considered to be the “fair sex” by default, and a strong dismissal of how patriarchal reality affects and harms all women. That was the point were it really showed that these are 4chan ideas - the trans subset of a cult of terminally online misogyny ultras will never come up with a non-reactionary take on femininity, and that obviously includes trans femininity. I’m not even getting into how fucking heteronormative and exorsexist all of this is as well.

I must stress that i do not intend any of this this as a callout of anybody, not only because these takes came from more than one user, but because i’ve spent way too much time on 4chan as an egg, fortunately before gamergate happened and before they talked much about trans stuff. But even back then, when i tried to talk sense into the incels on /r9k/ at a time when they didn’t yet refer to themselves as incels, but as “foreveralone” or “permavirgin”, i saw how deeply that hellsite can get their hooks into people and how hard it can be to let go of the ideas they infect people with. I’m not putting blame on anybody for struggling with these ideas. But trans liberation isn’t possible when we do not fight this kind of ideology. You can’t be a happy transfem when you aren’t a feminist, and you can’t overcome dysphoria when you do not put physically transitioning alongside a social and psychological transition. And as a community, we have to be mindful that certain transphobic ideas will eat at others and that we need a space where you don’t get hit over the head with them.