Thanks for a thought-provoking article. Positive models and narratives are always welcome, hence the adoption of "pride" as the banner for LGBTQ2+ empowerment. Pride is a pretty good antonym for "shame", the banner that had been thrust upon us.
If I may be presumptuous enough to find a point of intersection between my experience as a gay man and the trans experience: I've said elsewhere that I think trans awareness and acceptance by the greater community is roughly where gay awareness was at around 1970. This was well after our PM Pierre Trudeau had decriminalized "homosexuality," saying, "the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation."
Problem: Legislation, however necessary to ensure justice, is always a front-runner. Public opinion lags behind. Way behind.
What was called back then "Gay Liberation" pushed us into the spotlight, and the awareness it created was not positive. In fact, given the entrenched attitudes of the time, it was threatening. I felt like an exotic specimen of small game who'd been chased out of the woods and had a bull's eye painted on my back.
In other words, it was a strange, new experience to be visible, and this visibility was not balanced by an awareness that LGBTQ2+ people were fully-fledged citizens deserving of the same rights as everyone else.
Why had I been "invisible"? Because I had that choice, and the pervasive hatred that was all around me - whether schoolyard taunts, whispered conversations of adults, or obnoxious stereotypes of gay men in the media which encouraged people to laugh at us, despise us, generally treat us as failed men - made choosing invisibility a no-brainer.
There's a tiresome thread in American philosophy that comes as a free gift along with the "pursuit of happiness" bit. This is the "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" "if you fail, you've only yourself to blame" and "my thoughts create my reality." This is patent bullshit. If my thoughts created my reality, I'd be crashed on a Greek island on every flight I ever took.
When did "victim" become a dirty word? To be constantly assailed with insults, questions about your validity as a human, and threats of, leading to actual commission of, violence, is victimizing. Someone who is victimized is not solely "a victim" but they are in that instance. Why have we started to despise the fact that they are victimized, and laid it at their feet to be "positive", as though new age affirmations will help you when your assailant comes for you some night on the street? Don't let transphobes off the hook.
So while I applaud your desire to focus on the positive, negative experiences must be daily occurrences for trans folx, at least if the discourse on social media around trans rights is any indication. It matters little if these are perpetrated by well-meaning allies or queer-hating transphobes. And it's not the duty of trans people to educate, it's the duty of the community to educate itself and not be douches.
Finally, I would ask you to think again before using terms such as "trans activist establishment" which implies an oppressive, almost authoritarian leadership, and implies that "activist" is a pejorative. Anyone who works for justice deserves our admiration and support, particularly when the issue involved is subject to such irrational and emotional responses. There IS queerphobia everywhere... at least, if my experience is in any way comparable, it sure as hell felt that way most of the time.
