When i first read that passage, i seriously wondered if somebody had reformatted a Halimede tweet. I don't want to dunk on Serrano too much here, i've taken a lot of good input out of her works, but this is one of her takes that has aged poorly. Like, seriously, i am so fed up with that view of being trans. The one that always, always without fail, centers suffering and pain and misery, that can only frame our joy and our thriving in contrast to the damage that has been inflicted on us, the one that can never let the past rest.
I am not like this. And it's beginning to become a problem.
You see, i like being in community with other trans people. I'm at home there, i've made friends there, found lovers there. It's where i belong. As long as i stay within my own bubble. As soon as i step out of it, i immediately get bombarded with unsolicited trauma dumps, dysphoriaposts out of a 4chan hellhole and a trainload full of internalized transphobia. Everything is a trigger for me. I cannot safely navigate most trans spaces anymore because the people there just drag me down. I logged in yesterday after a long hiatus and looked into the trans megathread and the first thing i had to do was block a user for her unspoilered loathing of the trans existence. I don't know how to handle this anymore. I used to be the kind of woman who writes big effortposts about self acceptance and how to figure yourself out and how to begin navigating systems of medical gatekeeping, but the further i go along in my own transition, the further i am removed from making these early experiences myself, the less i have it in me to unpack all that needs to be unpacked when baby trans yell their pain into the void.
And that's eating at me. It makes me feel guilt, it makes me feel like a failure to my community. My second puberty feels as if i get to sit at the table with the pretty, cool and popular girls, giving fashion advice to the prom queen while i'm leaving the most vulnerable trans people out in the rain, the ones that would need my experience and my encouragement the most. But when i try to be there for them, i harm myself. I can't say it otherwise, it is burning me out to expose myself to that kind of pain. It feels as if i'm walking backwards into a darkness i have escaped from. How do i deal with this? Do i retreat to my wonderland of privileged, happy women and girlthings or is there a way to move beyond the triggers and face the misery of others without becoming miserable myself? Because that's what i would need if i wanted to keep helping my siblings.
I'm sure there's a proper term for this but the analyses you're responding to are very common in NPR liberal storytelling. It's what they think of as prestigious. A lot of focus on describing trauma, of injecting drama where it may not exist or just overemphasizing dramatic aspects of an experience. And when I say drama I mean actual drama, as in what will read as entertaining for a very particular kind of emotional impact.
In a way that style is describing a truth. There are people to whom it applies at least some of the time. But in a more accurate way, it serves to obscure reality, as you mention. Most trans people are people like anyone else, dealing with the shit thrown at them in the same ways. Major stressors are things like rent and work and relationships. But in an attempt to evoke empathy, writers of "the trans experience" often focus on only the transness and usually the challenges specific to trans people, because the first perceived barrier to rejecting transphobia is dehumanization. If you can empathize with someone, you can see them as human and not a label or abstraction. But the double-edged sword is that it will end up creating a new stereotype that can and will be repurposed by reactionaries, internalized by trans people, etc etc.
Maybe one takeaway should be that more trans spaces are needed, reflecting the fact that trans people are not monolithic. There's nothing wrong with some trans people wanting a place to talk about their trauma or to try to share and process a crisis. There's also nothing wrong with you wanting to do your thing that is different from that. Y'all should both have space and flattening both into just being "trans" and therefore needing to be the same exact threads is the error.