[flamesabers]

HN-I think you bring up an intriguing point about other trans women leaving BN. I can't speak for them, but I saw in my own posting history, I have gone for extended periods of time with little to no posting. I didn't post at all for about 11 months of 2025, and only a few posts for 2024. 2025 was a very bad year for me, hence why I didn't contribute during that time. 2024 was much better for the most part, but I was also very busy with working on the legal aspect of my transition.

Another possible factor to this lack of posting was my doubts concerning my relevancy here. My days of self-experimenting with PM are done with. My HRT dosages has been mostly consistent for a while now. And since I'm transitioning, I obviously have very different HRT (or otherwise) goals then the male staying male users who utilize HRT. At no point though when I first thought about posting again in December 2025, did I worry about BN not being a safe space for me. 

Shirazmn's story of meeting a trans person for the 1st time reminds me of when I came out to a friend as being trans. She was totally clueless about trans people, what it meant for me being a trans woman, or even why it's becoming more common for people to state their pronouns during their introductions. I didn't lash out at her in anger, call her a bigot or transphobe. Instead, I recognized I was likely the 1st (openly) trans person she talked to, so of course she might be very unfamiliar with the appropriate language to use. Given enough time, she made a lot of progress in this regard.

I also had the unfortunate circumstance of being hurt by real-life transphobes. When people (in real life) tell me I'm delusional, evil, going against God's will, etc., there's probably no (foreseeable) hope of anyone changing their mind. Their opinion(s) on trans people are already set-in-stone and it's probably not worth my while to argue with them.

Given time (and tone of language), I think it's very straightforward to distinguish between those who have (good faith) questions and/or unfamiliar with trans-friendly language and those who are unapologetic transphobes. Hypothetically, if a newcomer asked me why I'm posting on this forum (my BN gender marker is set to female, as is all of my legal documents), I'm not going to lash out and immediately write off this person as a transphobe. If on the other hand, someone kept calling me a "man who's only pretending to be a woman", that's a transphobe who already hardened their mind against contradicting information.