I've been there. I've been the person someone like DJ looks at and thinks just those thoughts above.

It hurts. Tremendously, achingly, viscerally, it hurts. And yes, we can tell, every single time. If you think we can't, you've never been a marginalized person, never been someone whose safety, whose very life, depends on being able to read just those kinds of reaction.

We can see it in your faces, your eyes, your body language, the talking out the side of your mouth, the little nods of direction given to a friend, the ways you pointedly don't look at us, the laugh when you think we've turned away, we see it all. We have to.

It hurts. Physically. A pain in the gut, an ache, "Will I ever be able to just walk down the street and not worry about this crap?"

This is the kind of thing that forces us into excessive displays of genderedness, because we have to reassert that aspect of ourselves if we want to be taken for who we are. It's why one of my friends never wears pants, even in some of the worst cold here in Canada*, because she doesn't want to have to suffer yet more pain of this kind. It creates its own problem, in the sense that "passing" becomes a survival skill, rather than a choice.

I'm not ever going somewhere that I know this walking collection of used bog-roll [DJ] will be. Between his rapeyness and his enthusiastic defence of rapeyness and his gross transphobia and general misogynist assholeishness...he can practice his oral autopodiatry somewhere I'm not.

* She lives in northern Alberta.