First of all: I am sorry that you have encountered that! The level of gatekeeping in the trans community is incredibly disheartening and often times has been a turn off for me and fellow trans people as well. You’re right, none of those do lessen who you are or your queerness at all. You, like all of us, have every right to our identity!

Anyone in the community is free, and should!, express themselves how they want to. The weight of this piece fell heavy on the editor to rework before throwing the writer to the lions for sure, but I do think comments challenging them, and the entire community, on how we conflate and intersect queerness solely to identity is something worth noting, as it alleviates the heavy burden of focusing on internalized homo/transphobia. It’s a current phenomenon especially in the digital age that is interesting to peruse discourse on and this piece really was a catalyst in opening the conversation open more. I didn’t view writing this as a “woe is me” or a “oppression olympics” ordeal since we’re all a marginalized community, we all face oppression, but more to reframe the lens on pushing us at every level to realize our own privilege as that is what inter-sectionalism is. At the beginning of my coming out experience, I sought external validation as a means of offloading the heaviness of focusing inward: what is queerness to me outside the lens of cis-het men. After years unlearning my existence through the male gaze, I was finally able to shed compulsive heteronormativity. I do think that is 100% something valid to highlight in the narrators piece, as wlw relationships should not exist for the male lens, for sure.