Someone brought up the archetypical "depraved trans girl" and I mentioned I could probably write an essay about it, they asked for a short version, I wrote it, but then decided I had more to say about it, so here's an extended take on it.

This is largely coming from my perspective as a freak myself. (the ethical kind, I like to believe) I am not ashamed of who I am, I have kinks, I have likes that some consider gross or otherwise abnormal. Your experience may differ. Maybe you're completely different, maybe you're exactly the same. This is just my feelings on the matter.

There's a certain kind of trans girl that spent her entire life repressing who she was, and hating herself for it. Denying herself everything and refusing to live for herself in any way. Trying her best to be a "good Christian boy" or something to that effect. Denial as a form of repentance, witholding one's desires in order to stay "pure."

She isn't the kind of trans girl who bloomed into a beautiful flower when she was first faced with the realization that she was trans. No. She hated herself for it and tried desperately to stuff it back inside and crush it. She represses it and cuts it away where she can. She tears it to bits and buries it. Maybe she didn't even truly accept it at first, but she felt *something* with regards to it, and she didn't like it or accept it. She forgets it, for a time.

Of course, that never lasts, and sooner or later you'll eat yourself, or your true self will come out. The relief is immense, once you do, and you start to learn to love yourself. But you've spent your whole life associating who you are with degeneracy, of the good and bad kind. (Read: feet and piss versus like, lolicon hentai, snuff and other things that are actually bad/harmful)

I grew up on the dark corners of the internet, chasing higher highs of gross, distubing shit, in an attempt to feel something. It grounded me. It made me feel alive again. It was awful, it was probably not good for me, but years of dissociation, depression, and the intense loneliness and emptiness was worse. It's a kind of mental self-harm. It's not healthy, but it feels better than doing nothing.

Also worth mentioning, I think is that early 2000s culture was very transphobic in the way that like, if you saw anything resembling a trans woman on screen, they were the butt of the joke, they were evil, or a corpse. I think that really fucks with you as a human being, the one-two punch of "There's something like me" followed immediately and inevitably by "That thing is shameful or evil". I think it's part of why I have a lot of attachments to really morbid media. I enjoy art that is violent, cruel, even, at times. I enjoy characters that are terrible people.

I think, taken to an extreme, this general mindset can make you okay with doing really awful things.

And now your lines are now crossed, and you associate vile things with the dopamine of being yourself, and some girls just never really learn to extricate that. You've spent your entire life repressing the things that made you. And now shame doesn't mean what it should for you. Shame was your fucking oppressor. Shame was a tool used to destroy you and stuff you in a box. So you think "To hell with it!" and you let shame have no power over you.

But there are things that shame and guilt should keep you from, that's the point. Be it self-destructive behavior or things that hurt others. But you have to redraw those lines yourself. And sometimes those girls don't bother. Because former shame and guilt are now bedfellows with dopamine, because of things you may not even have been able to control. And fixing this takes effort and time.

And when you're in your mid-late 20s, you feel you have no time. You are tired of waiting, trying to fix things, you want to live your life to the fullest and reclaim what was taken from you. You don't care, and now categorically, all that was taboo is now free game. Rubberbanding in the other direction from trying to be something you're not.

Society sees you as a freak anyways, why bother having moral fiber, in essence, I think, is what, consciously or unconsciously, goes through the minds of some of these girls. I mourn them, but I do not excuse them.