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- Hell
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I'm really exhausted and thought it was the title as well. Edited.
Nerds, Catgirls, and Other Trans Potentialities - now revised!
- Thread starter Gargulec
- Start date
- Essay
Queshire
Wants a pink flamingo for their lawn.
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- They/Them
Mmm... for me it's like.... well you know that "Oo, a piece of candy," gag from family guy? Well, Oo, nerds, catgirls and talking about trans stuff? Why yes, I do like all three of these things. Don't mind if I do click on that.
As for the essay itself... well, it touches on some interesting points, but I think it misses its mark.
As for the essay itself... well, it touches on some interesting points, but I think it misses its mark.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I think that I'm maybe not the target audience of this essay? I've been through it a few times, and I still can't find something big to say.
Similarly to a few of the other people, the hook and twitter trans girls parts felt mean spirited and the latter rhymed enough with parts of myself to make it rankle while the former made me uncomfortable, but that doesn't really feel like something substantial to engage with the essay on.
It feels like the essay is an argument that the trans community shouldn't do respect politics, but the only context that it feels like that message fits is my interactions with the transmed community.
Similarly to a few of the other people, the hook and twitter trans girls parts felt mean spirited and the latter rhymed enough with parts of myself to make it rankle while the former made me uncomfortable, but that doesn't really feel like something substantial to engage with the essay on.
It feels like the essay is an argument that the trans community shouldn't do respect politics, but the only context that it feels like that message fits is my interactions with the transmed community.
Is that even a good convention to adopt for a forum? I imagine in academia and stuff it's probably just done so you do not waste hot takes on stuff that doesn't improve your metrics. Any smart response could be turned into another essay with a cool title, after all.
The forum equivalent of starting a new thread for each response honestly feels like some sort of unholy super-spaghetti posting
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I'll confess, the joke at the start hits home for me. When I first came out I had a certain degree of internalized anxiety around finding myself as trans on sv was some kind of indication of social contagion. Like, obviously there had to be something in the water, look how overrepresented we are?!? And, my self-concept went from a comfortably cis dude worrying if I could be trans because I didn't have dysphoria to a lifelong dysphoric wreck who kept findings clues hidden in the corners in every aspect of my life. I had a deep, ridiculous, internalized transphobia over the comparative representation on SV (look, I'm a quant scholar this is just how we think) that fell pretty hard into all those ROGD tropes. For me, at least, I stopped caring if that was true, I wouldn't be less trans if the lack of women in nerd spaces or a longing for community or whatever secretly transed, no I am less trans because HRT has done nothing for me even after a year and clearly never…. (Insert more medicalized dysphoria or whatever here to taste)
But, that kind of thing is why I think the joke really works and adds something vital to the essay, even though I deeply get why it's poking something that, for me, is a bit scabbed over but for others may not. After all, George is referenced to consider the potential of a transfemme Georgia existing, specifically constituted by that event. For all she is a ghost, she's a deeply resonant and real one and constructing her as brought about by comedic crossdressing in a very lightly abjectfied way is extremely helpful to the overall claim.
(garg's deliberate jumpiness and the way the essay changes course similarly strikes me as invoking a particularly structure of essay writing invoked deliberately in trans studies so as to create deliberately jarring transitions between tone and mood in a way that mirrors the trans experience. See: Susan Stryker's My Words to Victor Frankenstein for an elaboration on the practice. These are very purposive tools used, I think, well.)
Altogether then, I don't think running from our nastier thoughts is healthy or helpful at the end. If we want to embrace more diverse and radical potentials for trans life, I think that needs to entail a certain willingness to embrace and, at least as a community, even aspire to messiness and discomfort as people confront their own (self) loathings. It is, I think, deeply productive to examine this and to make sure people can, even while acknowledging that people don't always have to engage or read if the particular heartstrings tugged are not ones they find worth plucking to see why they resonate so.)
And I may be radically misfiring here, but, I'd wager any transfemme who is very on SV and it's satellite discords has at least a little cat in them. This is not written to or about aliens, nor is it being discussed as an essay about aliens, except as the shadow archetype is always faced as a stranged other.
But, that kind of thing is why I think the joke really works and adds something vital to the essay, even though I deeply get why it's poking something that, for me, is a bit scabbed over but for others may not. After all, George is referenced to consider the potential of a transfemme Georgia existing, specifically constituted by that event. For all she is a ghost, she's a deeply resonant and real one and constructing her as brought about by comedic crossdressing in a very lightly abjectfied way is extremely helpful to the overall claim.
(garg's deliberate jumpiness and the way the essay changes course similarly strikes me as invoking a particularly structure of essay writing invoked deliberately in trans studies so as to create deliberately jarring transitions between tone and mood in a way that mirrors the trans experience. See: Susan Stryker's My Words to Victor Frankenstein for an elaboration on the practice. These are very purposive tools used, I think, well.)
Altogether then, I don't think running from our nastier thoughts is healthy or helpful at the end. If we want to embrace more diverse and radical potentials for trans life, I think that needs to entail a certain willingness to embrace and, at least as a community, even aspire to messiness and discomfort as people confront their own (self) loathings. It is, I think, deeply productive to examine this and to make sure people can, even while acknowledging that people don't always have to engage or read if the particular heartstrings tugged are not ones they find worth plucking to see why they resonate so.)
And I may be radically misfiring here, but, I'd wager any transfemme who is very on SV and it's satellite discords has at least a little cat in them. This is not written to or about aliens, nor is it being discussed as an essay about aliens, except as the shadow archetype is always faced as a stranged other.
Queshire
Wants a pink flamingo for their lawn.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
It just feels somewhat incomplete.
It posits a connection between heavily skewed demographics and increased LGBTness, but doesn't offer anything about why that's the case. Should we expect that people are just THAT horny and be done with it? Perhaps it's the aroace in me, but that seems like too simple an explanation to me.
Similarly it offers feelings of failing to be a real man as a potential common ground between the nerdy trans people and the rest, but there's so much more that one could look at when it comes to connecting nerdom to trans potential that limiting the essay to that is a shame.
...
Plus there's the unfortunate implications resulting from those two things which has resulted in the reactions seen in this thread.
It posits a connection between heavily skewed demographics and increased LGBTness, but doesn't offer anything about why that's the case. Should we expect that people are just THAT horny and be done with it? Perhaps it's the aroace in me, but that seems like too simple an explanation to me.
Similarly it offers feelings of failing to be a real man as a potential common ground between the nerdy trans people and the rest, but there's so much more that one could look at when it comes to connecting nerdom to trans potential that limiting the essay to that is a shame.
...
Plus there's the unfortunate implications resulting from those two things which has resulted in the reactions seen in this thread.
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- Inside my own head
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- They/Them
Talk about the stereotype is one of the things I deleted from my previous post, but at least personally I feel what you mention here is a different stereotype from what the essay describes. The essay first mentions "bad taste in anime, porn and fashion, immature views on sex" and only after that the vague "bad trans takes". It feels quite like an inter-trans stereotype to me. While the stereotype I'm more familiar with, which what you describe here seems closer to (I'm gonna avoid calling those the same as well, though) is something where the "harassment and doxxing under the guise of/in the idea that it is woke" is always quite central, and while the stereotype is still queer, it's just general queer, not specifically trans catgirl. I'd say I instead generally just see it referred to as, well, idiot twitter teens. Sometimes as wokescolds, I suppose, when the people I'm watching are a bit spicier. They do share immaturity as a central 'sin', in a way, and it's possible they are related. Perhaps they are different facets of the same core stereotype coming about by experiencing it via different groups? I dunno. I am not a trans or a twitter expert.
The essay doesn't do that. It implies (or appears to imply, whatever) such as a hook, i.e. with the intent to shock you so you keep reading. The essay literally says that it did so and that it doesn't think such a connection exists.
Ben Who Devours
Hater Eternal
I've thought before that this might be because the furry fandom has its own negative stereotypes, and they don't overlap with the 'male chauvinist' take too well. After all, people have been obsessively hating on furries since before the word 'incel' ever got popular, and a lot of the stereotypes paint them as being very gay, openly sexual, fetishistic, etc. 'Pervs having loads of weird sex, often with other guys, and flaunting their fetishes at the world, ' doesn't really mesh well with 'bitter virgin loner straight dudes who hate women cause they can't get a date'. Not that these things are always totally coherent of course, but that'd be my take.
Mind, there was a bit of overlap between the stereotypes at one point. In the early MLP craze, a lot of brony hate was because they were seen as fellow travelers to furries rather than anything else.
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Gargulec
impact!
- Location
- a garden
I did not go into this particular side of the debate partially because there's been better coverage of it already, and partially because the "Stalinist catgirl out to cancel you on twitter" is such an attention-grabbing issue that to discuss it thoroughly would baloon this already overly long text to an untenable size.
SpiritFluid
Spooky, and Gay
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- The Sun from which The Shadows Cast
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- She/Her/They/Them
Me, transwoman, genderfluid: "Hm, I dislike this essay, it's opening gag bait hook feels disrespectful at best, and its end point feels hollow."
You: "Some guy has come in and is talking for other people"
Thank you, for tacitly looking at the post that talks about performative gender, of men doing dress up with a joke of how the same is true on this very website, and flat out saying I am one of them, because I spoke to my own experience and that of people in the very same fucking page.
Never thought I'd be misgendered, misrepresented, and told my existence doesn't matter, on SV and in an actual fucking LGBT thread, but thanks for proving me wrong, I guess?
Eukie
Powered by furious Canadian redheads
People are allowed to respond to other people without having to address you.
- Location
- Nova Scotia
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- She/Her
I would tentatively point out that the post you were responding to was addressing another user directly who does, in point of order, have he/him pronouns like... right there beneath his avatar. Assuming that this means you, specifically, instead of the user literally being quoted is a little much.
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I thought that the essay was fantastic and one of the few good pieces of writing I've seen on SV - I would also say that good writing should challenge you in some way and make you reflect on your own experiences. You can come away from reading with whatever opinion you want, from "this was great!" to "this is needlessly offensive!", but the presence of provocation is important
I'm disappointed but unsurprised to see the response to this essay so I wanted to chime in and say my piece to counterbalance things a bit
I'm disappointed but unsurprised to see the response to this essay so I wanted to chime in and say my piece to counterbalance things a bit
- Location
- Somewhere!
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- She/Her
There is a certain irony, in a thread about an essay about analyzing historical examples of the complication of gender and how identity is not necessarily legible to the audience, and how it is constructed from what we find around us, going "oh, but that person has he/him pronouns listed, why do they have an opinion on the subject at all?."
The first time I took the excuse of a school crossdressing day to wear a dress, (which is probably one of those modern parallels to the mentioned George's experience), I would have told anyone who asked that I was definitely a cis guy. I'm not sure that should be a bar for who's allowed to talk or think about this? Speculating about people's identity is one of the problems garg is talking about, I think!
The first time I took the excuse of a school crossdressing day to wear a dress, (which is probably one of those modern parallels to the mentioned George's experience), I would have told anyone who asked that I was definitely a cis guy. I'm not sure that should be a bar for who's allowed to talk or think about this? Speculating about people's identity is one of the problems garg is talking about, I think!
- Location
- Denmark
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- She/Her
Ignoring the rest of the post, because I don't want to dogpile you with something other people have already said, but this just factually is not what the essay says. That is not the essay's point, it is not its conclusions, it is not its substance, and I strongly encourage you to either read those parts again or stop suggesting the author is somehow calling every transwoman on the site men doing dress up as a joke.
- Location
- Inside my own head
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- They/Them
While I admittedly only skimmed for changed parts (I'd blame it on having a very bad day irl but that would be a lie, I'm just lazy), I like the new version much better. I can see the through-line and the point of the historical aside now. Though funnily enough I actually didn't understand the section where the essay asked me if I understood the connection now.
Sadly I don't have anything to add. I could talk about my own experience (more than I already have) but tbh it's not actually relevant.
Sadly I don't have anything to add. I could talk about my own experience (more than I already have
) but tbh it's not actually relevant.
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- She/Her
Garg is using that portion of the piece to lay out the stereotype regarding trans catgirls among many people, including people in the trans community. I think that's honestly rather clear, they talk about how this is "common knowledge" in certain parts of the internet, and then proceed to outlay what that "common knowledge" is. It pretty clearly conflicts with their own position, if you read the rest of the essay in context.
NonSequtur
a body
I'm going to set aside (some of) my stylistic and methodological misgivings and try to engage with this essay. Or, a part of it, because my brain only deals in mostly linear lines of argument. In particular I want to focus on the potentiality, and in particular the potentiality of online spaces.
1. II I Warned You About The Tractatus, Bro. I Told You Dawg.
It seems to me that one of the most obvious reasons for online spaces to have a greater (or greater visible, depending on your ontology) trans populations is that in some ways being trans is easier online. Not just in the sense that you can find an accepting community, though that's of course true for some people, or in the sense that you can find a disconnected community as opposed to having a difficult conversation with your parents and old friends and employer, though that is of course true too, and some people find it easier to reveal things to people whose regard doesn't cut quite as deeply. But also that the performance of whatever gender it is you desire is more easily accessed. Your body can be ignored. Your voice can be nonexistent. Your gender becomes a matter of what you type, what profile picture and name you choose, and maybe what personal information you enter into a box. In a pseudonymous space where the latter two are generally expected to be uncorrelated with your physical form - to the point that I genuinely double-take when I see a profile pic on SV or SB that looks like it could be a photo of the user, or a username which could be a user's name - you can abandon flesh, which is useful because while flesh can be changed and can be framed, it does take some effort.
An aside might be made noting that, at least from where I sit, femininity in particular takes more effort. At least in the North American Anglo context, more than the bare minimum of care for one's appearance - aside, perhaps, from the fit of a suit - is indexed to femininity in and of itself. Men don't need to care about body hair or make-up. Men, in general, seem less likely to be considered not men for failing to reach a bar of attractiveness. (There might be a suppressed expectation of violence but that's a whole other essay.) This goes double for those women who would not be granted the status of 'woman' prima facie and who might find fitting a certain mould of femininity difficult.
(of course, as my intellectual background would demand, i have to caveat that all of these observations are opinions - take this entire post as such, frankly. to be really rigorous i should be couching every statement made but i think this essay is going to run long as it is)
On the pseudonymous internet, those standards aren't applied. To an extent this makes things easier - if I wanted to experiment with living a trans life, all it would take in principle would be changing my pronouns and informing my dear, but also distant friends on and around this web forum. The potential for a trans life, at least in this sphere, is more immanent. To speak personally, I've made the choice to not do, largely because that potentiality feels less graspable in my body and the life which still requires my body. Though this decision is not purely an internally motivated one, I don't consider myself an egg, or a trans person in the closet, even though it's entirely possible and maybe even likely that in some other world - one with fantastical magic or technology, different notions of gender, or simply a minor change to my personal history - that I would not be as I am. I live in the world as I live in it, and I think counterfactuals can only inform how I think of myself so much before they become meaningless. In some other world I would be a woman, or a man, or something else, or a tremendously lethal robot. Maybe even a catgirl. It doesn't have to matter. (Maybe it didn't matter to George Dornin, either.)
Where was I? Oh, right, the internet. The potentiality of simply asking for different pronouns is open to me, but it's fair to wonder whether that sort of a trans life - because there are many - would actually satisfy me. Personally, I think effectively creating a closet for myself would force me to either destransition online or transition the rest of my life; I am not a person who embraces multiplicity. I'd blame the philosophy but I'm pretty sure that tendency is why I went into the field. But even just examining the online portion of my theoretical existence, I imagine my pronoun change would come with a profile picture change at the very least. This is because one thing I've long thought about gender troubles - not the Judith Butler work, but not not the Judith Butler work - is that to an extent what some people desire is exactly what other people despise. If a gender falls in the forest, does it make a sound? ...That doesn't really make any sense. What about 'if everyone's <gender> then nobody is'? Still no. Hmm. More analytically, the very standards which some people find restrictive and unnecessary are those with others find value and meaning in possessing and achieving. My hypothetical trans and online self wouldn't be satisfied with pronouns, with femininity as her goal; the urge to be a trans tradwife comes from somewhere. But while you can change your profile pic and your bio, you can't put on a gingham dress and become a homemaker on the internet if you are still unsatisfied with your online transfemininity.
Or can you?
(i really am a hypocrite about critical theory's rhetorical flourishes)
If you wanted to perform a heightened femininity online, how would you do it? What tools are available to you? If you don't want to just be feminine in the sense that people will correct others when they call you he, the medium shapes you again, because you only have so many tools. Here, I think, is part of where the dismissal of the online trans person as immature comes from. The 'mature' trans person might be willing to bring their fleshy body visibly into it, or share their stories of living fleshily as their preferred gender, to serve as the evidence of their gender - the 'immature' trans person is unwilling, and an extended unwillingness becomes taken to be incapacity and then failure. They are judged terminally online - terminal, of course, meaning 'unto the end'. Til death art thou cringe.
Of course, none of these inferential leaps is necessarily true. They might be unwilling because they are capable of living a trans life in the flesh, but (arguably wisely) keep it far away from their online activity, or they don't care to live (that specific) trans life in the flesh. They might be incapable in a way which has nothing to do with failure in a moral/developmental sense: a particularly hostile context or a body which will not cooperate in achieving the ideal of femininity (AFAB: first time?). Or they could, in principle want and be capable of all of that, and not manage it anyway, and then we dive into topics so thorny I'm not even going to touch them. They might not even want it, and then we hit even bigger, foundational questions of the fulfilled and mature life.
Ignoring those: regardless of reason, some trans people will be living trans lives entirely mediated by digital technologies and mostly absent their fleshy bodies, and for some of these trans people, the tactic is to... be a catgirl, or have a picrew avatar, or be really into the USSR. Or be overtly kinky on main - at least their main trans account, if that is a distinction they maintain. The last two are arguably the more powerful tools, because - for most people - being a catgirl isn't going to show in what you say about government policy, or your review of a movie you watched, or when you're idly chatting, save that your profile picture will be next to those activities. Politics, rhetorical tactics, worldview and interests, on the other hand, can be woven into nearly anything, which makes them a compelling thing to adopt, if that adoption makes one more broadly and consistently recognized as performing ones gender. (Am I arguing that some types of cancelling are an expression of online transfemininity? Hoo boy, I hope not, that seems fraught.) This isn't to say that the trans catgirl is insincere, or that anybody, adopting the markers of any group, is not being authentic - the extent that my gut agrees with that statement, I think, is more a measure of my anxiety. Some online trans women will adopt these markers out of 'inherent' affinity, to the extent that such exists. Others will adopt it and feel no less natural in doing so for a lack of 'inherent' connection. But there are also online trans women who lack that affinity, and either adopt the markers anyway because it is the most effective way of performing their gender in their online social context, or do not, and have their gender become less visible and recognized. Or even rejected. Being ace and uncomfortable with overt kink can make pursuing trans-femininity in some online spaces difficult, for example.
Of course this is contextual for any identity marker; even subject to the structural pressures of being purely online, someone exploring trans-femininity in an unironic christian minecraft server will likely land on a very different set of markers for their gender. The online trans catgirl, absent the fleshy markers of the 'mature' transwoman, reaches for what is in the environment, which might specifically be the environment of nerds. Anime, anime-influenced art/pornography, roleplay, custom avatars. Other parts of the identity might have been constructed through a dialectic - in opposition to the nearby markers of masculinity - or exist without much gendered association. Of course, I imagine some of it was historical coincidence, with someone or a group of someones with shared interests, habits and aesthetics simply happening to become a major node of influence as the archetype was constructed. Maybe in some nearby counterfactual universe the aesthetic for a certain brand of visible online trans-femininity is robot girls. Unfortunately I have to be consistent in saying that this doesn't have to matter.
In conclusion - because my training demands I have actual conclusions, yes this is a subtweet - the online catgirl is a particular expression of the struggle for a trans life that lacks, for whatever reason, the fleshy markers of a gender achieved and is reaching for the available tools to express it in their absence, and that absence is taken as a marker of trans immaturity or developmental failure which it can, but does not have to be. This is not unique to trans catgirls (or any other sort of online living which is in the same boat), because the absence of these markers of 'touching grass' seems broadly judged similarly, except in the sense that performing gender - which the trans individual in this case is trying to do - is particularly loaded with an expectation of touching grass, or touching something else that rhymes, and that trans individuals might actually be particularly likely to not share their grass-touching for reasons aside from what might be judged as moral failure.
Deeper connections between particular trans modes of living and the cultures from which they spawn and those in which they remain embedded - specifically between 'nerds', who are also judged for lacking some markers of successful performance of their gender, and 'online catgirls' - requires further study, preferably quantitative and comprehensive, no don't give me the grant funding I'm a philosopher, we're allergic to research. Give it to Gargulec under condition that whatever paper they write it needs at least five graphs and ten statistical analyses.
edit: it's worth being clear that trans catgirls are not the only way to try and achieve heightened femininity online (and isn't that applicable for most people trying for online masculinity, or online <other>, trans or otherwise) - i tried appropriately limiting my language but was poked in discord that i, of all people, managed to not caveat enough
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mothematics
How wide is the concept of "you"?
- Location
- the bottom of a coffee cup
- Pronouns
- She/Her
the fact your inability to read who I'm actually talking to has been backed up by three people is just sorta the icing on the cake of this post lmao
Zedalb
I just started a Patreon!
- Location
- Washington
I'm not qualified to speak on much of the content of the essay.
I do want to say, I would not trust that any "Personality type" found on twitter actually exists.
Twitter is routinely estimated to be 10% bots. (Currently it's a major contention in court if that number is higher or not)
Outside of bots it's common for people to have multiple accounts.
Within those other accounts there are trolls.
Many people have been caught (even at some high levels) using fake twitter accounts to generate outrage or to be an easy target for one thing or another.
Granted I don't want to say no one of any given nature exists online. Just that this is a particular group that serves right wing and conservatives very well to exist, and is incredibly easy to fake. (Not even getting into financial scams that exist on the internet from fake identities of any sort).
So maybe take large scale existence with a grain of salt.
I do want to say, I would not trust that any "Personality type" found on twitter actually exists.
Twitter is routinely estimated to be 10% bots. (Currently it's a major contention in court if that number is higher or not)
Outside of bots it's common for people to have multiple accounts.
Within those other accounts there are trolls.
Many people have been caught (even at some high levels) using fake twitter accounts to generate outrage or to be an easy target for one thing or another.
Granted I don't want to say no one of any given nature exists online. Just that this is a particular group that serves right wing and conservatives very well to exist, and is incredibly easy to fake. (Not even getting into financial scams that exist on the internet from fake identities of any sort).
So maybe take large scale existence with a grain of salt.
- Location
- Hell
- Pronouns
- She/Her
The more I post the more certain I'm incapable of figuring out what my thoughts are on this essay and actually putting them into a form that makes sense. It's so hard to seperate all the emotions and thoughts surrounding being trans from eachother, and it kind of all bleeds together. I keep rewriting my posts and I haven't been particularly happy with any of them. But, firstly, I know what the section is meant to do and what the conclusion of the essay is. That is not the problem. The problem is that it doesn't feel entirely genuine when it says they're actually totally valid. I think Shadell mentions that it was not written "to or about aliens," but like... that is exactly what it read like to me and other people. The fact that I know that's unintentional and that's probably not how Garg meant to come across on an intellectual level is what makes talking about it so hard.
- Location
- Somewhere!
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I feel like the intended audience of the essay is kind of particularly unclear, and that might be why the... thesis of it seems a little mixed up, too?
The ending talks about kind of... reclaiming these experiences, but I think that for the audience on SV, that's probably not the major issue? It's a call to action that might land better in a more serious academic context, talking to people who are less online and more respectable.
In that way it reminds me a lot of Andrea Long Chu's writing in general, which has a similar feeling of being boldy provocative about stuff that (to me, specifically, at least) is actually fairly mundane and taken for granted. On SV, is saying that we should be examining why trans fems tend to like anime and have unrealistic transition goals and maybe pursue very online kinds of feminity just preaching to the choir? That's a little how I interpret it, I guess.
The ending talks about kind of... reclaiming these experiences, but I think that for the audience on SV, that's probably not the major issue? It's a call to action that might land better in a more serious academic context, talking to people who are less online and more respectable.
In that way it reminds me a lot of Andrea Long Chu's writing in general, which has a similar feeling of being boldy provocative about stuff that (to me, specifically, at least) is actually fairly mundane and taken for granted. On SV, is saying that we should be examining why trans fems tend to like anime and have unrealistic transition goals and maybe pursue very online kinds of feminity just preaching to the choir? That's a little how I interpret it, I guess.
- Location
- Nova Scotia
- Pronouns
- She/Her
You will maybe just have to take my word for it that there are in fact extremely online trans catgirls on Twitter, and that it is not merely a right wing psyop that we're all falling for.
The larger stereotype that the essay alludes to is, in fact, a stereotype and few people meet it's description perfectly, but it's not based on nothing, and it's hard to be a trans woman online and not know at least one or two people who this broad archetype sort of fits.
So, maybe take your grain of salt with a grain of salt.