my journal

May 18th 2024

i am still fucking livid.

i can feel my brain actively rewiring itself to try and make sure i forget the events of today as efficiently as possible, so i'm just going to try to record what i remember.

i work one of the busiest and most demanding positions in my store, so i don't always have time to notice what my coworkers are doing. today didn't seem like it was anything out of the ordinary, just was pissing me off they were talking about that debunked "the brain isn't fully formed until age 25" study like it was gospel (that wasn't the conclusion of that study at all, but that's an aside...) i was pretty busy so i didn't get a chance to see at first what was making them even talk about that in the first place, which was some paper the shift manager was holding.

when i asked what it was, the manager said here, look at this, some lady out in the dining room gave this to me. i wish i was even slightly prepared for it being
a sheet of fucking TERF bullshit scaremongering about "biological males" trying to sneak into women's areas and how parental rights about medical procedures are being eroded, and more fucking scaremongering about gender-affirming surgery.

i felt my blood run cold as i read it in full. seriously? i was fucking incredulous. my coworkers were still talking about it around me, but stopped when i began fucking ripping the paper into pieces.

oh! [DEADNAME] is ripping it up!! i'm not out at work, so getting deadnamed and misgendered is a constant for me. i try to compartmentalize it as my "work name" and "work pronouns" but seeing this fucking bullshit trying to radicalize my coworkers into hate and bigotry against people like me was just too fucking much. i crumpled up the pieces, threw them in the trash and stated loudly and very clearly i will NOT tolerate that fucking transphobic bullshit in my store.

i guess the rest of them figured that was that and went back to what they were doing, but i was shaking all over and continued to for like half an hour. i was unspeakably angry. it's been a while since anything tripped my fight or flight mechanism so strongly, and it took me the rest of my shift to even begin to feel like a person again instead of a seething ball of rage.
i don't think my coworkers thought anything of it, at least that they just started talking about other things after that. part of me dreads even considering that any of them thought about it seriously, not knowing what that really was, not seeing the dogwhistles and just thinking it sounded so. well-meaning and concerned. if i hadn't spent the rest of my shift trying to surpress my emotional reaction so i could make it through my shift without screaming i would've tried to talk to them about it, but honestly most of them don't fucking listen to me anyway, so i doubt it really matters i wasn't able to. they haven't about anything else i've tried to talk to them about, so i've just given up with most of them.

i'm so tired of this shit, man.

i'm so tired of being the bogeyman in the transphobes' closets when all i want to do is exist as myself and feel even vaguely comfortable in my own skin. the rest of my life already feels like it's burned to ashes around me, i really didn't need this on top of everything else. none of us do. we're all just out here trying to live in a world that would rather we be dead than happy. it's so fucking hard to stand any of this anymore.