Just want to comment on the “trap is ok/not ok debate.”

It’s totally cool if you or your partner(s) identity as a trap. As an older trans girl, being a trap was a badge of honor. It meant not only do you pass, but you’re fucking hot. Almost like a trap/not trap distinction of attractiveness (which is also horribly misogynistic and demeaning), but it was a qualifier.

So I get it, part of me likes the idea of being called that - in a private, contextual sense. But the problem is the word and the connotation it has in the general zeitgeist, which implies that a trans person (typically a trans woman) “tricks” a man into having sex with her, and then deserves whatever happens to her, regardless of how dehumanizing it may be.

It is the horrible, completely unjustifiable rationale behind the Panic Defense, and that’s why it is a term that needs to be buried. Continued use of it is an unconscious signal that trans women are perpetrating some kind of deception just by existing in a man’s field of vision (if, of course, she comes close enough to cis white heteronormtive standards of beauty).

Be woke. Don’t say trap (except in the bedroom. And then smack my ass a little 😋).