To My Trans Friends, Associates, And Strangers:

To my trans friends, associates, and strangers:

Ever seen those posts online telling you that you're beautiful, and handsome, and awesome, and that not passing doesn't make you less human, less your gender? I've made a couple myself because it's true, but do you know why it's true?

For a while it flew over my head, but the reason is probably something many have not yet fully considered: that cisgender women, and men struggle to pass too.

In this world of idolized muscled and square-shouldered hunks, and hour-glass thin beauties, where do most cisgender men and women fall naturally? Outside of idolization. They too worry about their figure, their weight, their height, if they're too masculine, too feminine, or not enough. They too feel their nose is to big or too wide, jaw to wide or narrow, hips too wide or narrow, lips too big or thin, too much hair or not enough. When they look at those idolized metrics of beauty and masculinity, they too feel the pressure to reach for an extremely high bar, and they too feel the shame, depression, and distress when they can't reach it. When they don't pass for market defined pretty, beautiful, handsome, or hot.

We're not that different. We share the same problems. We are human.

So it is okay not to pass, it's okay to feel like you miss the mark. It is okay to fall short, because cis people aren't hitting that incredibly high bar half the time anyways either.

Beauty is an industry that preys on vanity, and sets goals deliberately to make you feel lesser to sell you products to 'get you there'. Make-up, protien-shakes, suppliment pills, face-creams, gimmicky exercise tools, etc. It is designed to make you feel ugly so it can sell you fake, marketable, packageable beauty. It lessens the value of your being purposefully to sell you product to feel what it defines as "normal". It should not define what makes a human being a man or a woman. The fact that it does and tries to, is a problem both Cisgender and Transgender people face equally.