Sorry for the delay, I want to come back to this and I am feeling myself becoming perfectionistic about my response (leading me to not respond at all), but in short I think you’re right. You have captured the essence of the problem, I think: I have had to justify my transition, and all that pressure has created a certain way of thinking about transition that then becomes normative and gets externalized or projected onto others.

There are only a few corrections I would make, e.g. I didn’t mean to imply the “I’m a fucking bad ass and can endure” mindset, but something adjacent to it, more that making sacrifices for the people in your life is a virtuous thing. It’s more about being pro-social than about being macho, if that makes sense. But I think that perspective of mine still misses the point you make, which is that it’s not the kind of moral sacrifice the Mennonite engages in, you are not doing it for your partner, but for yourself because you value your partner. This is just not the same.

Think of it this way - In trying to stess test my transition choices by finding fault this way binary trans people are doing what cis people did to them just in reverse - The requesting or coercing of trans people to defend their transition choices.

This was really helpful framing, thank you for your insights. I still haven’t reconciled my internal cognitive dissonance (i.e. a part of me still thinks there is a way to justify transition as being normative), but either way it is clear to me that this is complicated and the attempt to “help” can create a lot of harm.

I think this is related a bit to the egg prime directive and the culture formed around not telling someone they are actually a trans person in denial. On the one hand if a person is trans and in denial there is a lot of potential harm from that denial and there is a sense of urgency to helping the person past that denial so they can avoid the harm. On the other hand, no one can make those decisions or force that awareness on the person who may or may not actually be trans, even when it seems clear.

Being forced to justify not transitioning is a kind of gender policing, even if a kind of policing in the opposite direction as the dominant ideology (which tells you not to be trans and not to transition).

While there might be a need for some way to help people overcome the social situation preventing them from realizing they are trans and keeping them from transitioning, it’s clear to me those methods shouldn’t be coercive, like the way you mention feeling stress-tested about your decisions around transition.

I have a lot to think through, but I am genuinely challenged by your perspective and this has been so extremely valuable to me - I cannot thank you enough.