When I was growing up in the 90s, in the days before search engines and everyone being online all the time, I saw plenty of trans women, just as sob stories directed at cis people on daytime television, freakshows directed at cis people on daytime television, the punchlines to hateful and violent jokes broadcast at all hours, and as a species of sexual fetish available to the consumers of niche websites and periodicals. The horizons of the possible to me looked like that: you could be someone else's tragedy or someone else's fantasy. The possibility of living a normal and dignified life seemed marginal. There were resources for trans people but they were aimed at adults. There were groups, online and off, aimed at adults. There were definitely trans people living normal-ish lives like mine, but they weren't people I was supposed to know or see. Society insisted they were dangerous to me.
I want to finish this with a joke, like "Good thing our benevolent corporate overlords have decided we had it too good for too long and brought back the fetish/corpse dichotomy", but it's not even just them. Trans people, trans women especially, and our silly little culture and our silly little jokes and our silly little attempts to find and know each other make cis people who, in their view, have to endure them - those things make them seethe. It is an upset to this social situation, this social situation they consider the natural order, which they grew up with and internalized as much as we did, that we have the audacity to see ourselves in things besides jerkoff mags and human corpses. I suggest they die mad about it, and I suggest everyone who shares their frustration die mad about it
