You cannot lie that one of the biggest forms of privilege has always been about looks and how one is perceived by the masses. For the lack of a better term, as a teenager, I started telling everyone in my circles I was a trans woman. For around two years, most of my friends at the time started walking on eggs whenever they talked to me about trans issues, LGBTQ matters, and some other social-justice kind of shit I wasn't interested at the time. I remember I was basically the first person around my own mediums to spread that term, so much that half of the people I was talking to also began their own experiences with gender. And here's where things get heated a little bit. Hear me out.
I was the only person in my classroom who's taken MAC Makeup Classes when it was a thing in Sao Paulo, and also the only person (out of the 50 people I knew at the time) who didn't really have any strong male or female characteristics, either because of my facial structure or the clothes that made me a little more comfortable to wear everytime I went out. So, no matter if I told people my name was "Joe" or "Jane", they wouldn't know my biological sex if I didn't tell them from the start. And I can assure you that one of the best things I've learned with it, is that you can get a lot of people to either pay you for stuff or treat you like some sort of king who knows how to do everything.
Because of how I was treated, I had a couple colleagues who were biological males fully transitioning to female. One of those colleagues, let's call him Matt. Matt studied in one of the most expensive and most privileged colleges in Sao Paulo near Av. Paulista, his father made his living by being a good musician and multi artist, and his mom I believe that owned some shared and was the vice president of a private council/building in the city. So you could imagine Matt wouldn't ever consider losing any of his privileges. I mean, he was a high grade student and had most of the influential people around him. If you really believe it like I did, dude, im sorry to inform, but he threw it all out.
At the time we were friends, Matt would always ask me how people loved me this much, and I never knew how to fully explain it without having to tell him that my girl friends loved to use me as some sort of frankenstein experience, always dressing me up, doing my makeup on Hermés brushes and Chanel mirror, so I just told him, as a joke, that I could give props to being a girl. Again, for the lack of a better and acknowledgeable term. So I believe it kind of messed him up for a bit. Either confusing him or worse.
Out of nowhere, he started forcing his friends to treat him like he was some sort of goddess on earth, started complaining how nobody around him was using "she/her" pronouns and how everyone in his school hated trans girls. All that while having a moustache, a deeper voice than me and a posture that could easily be compared to how a reddit teenager behaves in real life. It felt like I was watching a comedy skit whenever I opened facebook and saw him post a bunch of pictures of anime girls holding the trans flag like he didn't look exactly like my uncle if he was on crack. I couldn't believe my eyes but it was kind of watching Chris Chan descent into madness. With the main difference being that one was often horny when he talked about being a girl and how he'd wear his moms clothes, and the other one spent an awful lot of time drawing Sonichus, or whatever Chris called it.
After a month or two, I started to get online attacks on both my instagram and youtube pages. Friends said they didn't know where it was coming from, I didn't care much and kept on going with my life. But then, some of my colleagues who were also friends with Matt, started to block me and also ignore me at the streets and parks we used to visit. Didn't take me long to discover Matt was fabricating lies about me supposedly being basic and bragging about HRT (wich I've never taken) and also how white girls were inherently evil for excluding girls with curly hair (??????) because my straight hair gave him dysphoria.
One of the things that made me cut Matt and his friends from my social circles was that on March 8th, international woman's day, he posted himself wearing what I believe to be his mom's dress at school, in his classroom doing makeup and the caption read "Imagine dressing yourself as a woman and being treated as such, I don't know how it is." Then below the pictures, he started complaining about how no one at his school treated him as a woman and how much he wanted to kill himself because of it. I read all of his rants and all I could think of was how I couldn't believe how delusional he was about thinking of how being a woman equals to be treated better by everyone around you. He then proceeded to spend weeks of his life sharing a lot of posts about social justice (things he opposed before transitioning) and the life of trans people who don't have access to medicare. Wich was pretty much a lie because he used to have an expensive medicare plan under one of the most expensive hospitals in Brazil. Yet not only he pretended to be poor and hostilized, but also dropped out of his school to be a couch surfer, cut out contact with his parents to live with crackheads and other kinds of drug addicts, and also spend his last 10K dollars on weed and music software. Wich ended up being stolen by his druggie friends.
Matt's story teaches us that, even though you believe that something you feel might be true, the lack of good and precise external influences might lead you to destruction. I've always had the best kinds of people around me and I'm safe to say that looking like a woman or being white didn't play any sort of part on it. But rather the respect and self-recognition. Being a man or a woman will only limit the way you can achieve success. Carrying more labels than reasons to be respected is the same thing as telling people you're made of a shell. There's nothing full on you, nothing deep, nothing innovative.
Matt didn't know I never thought about sexual relationships or priviledges, all he could do was like, project his deep and obscure insecurities on me because he used to be a loner (and a pro wanker at a point where he smelled like semen sometimes) and was often told he should get girls. He saw on me an opportunity to socially rise, thinking I ate pussy every weekend. But in reality, I rather saw my own existence as just a normal person from the neighbourhood. I loved to have fun, wether it was a makeup night, a day with the girls, or just a week reading old subversive literature and old comic books I bought from the store next block. Gender has never played a huge part in my life because it never made sense I had to have muscles for women to talk to me or a hourglass body shape to have the boys looking my direction. I can do all of those things while wearing the largest clothes you can think of.
It doesn't matter if I'm dressed like Effy Stonem or Jack Donoghue. People still love me a lot lol!!
In the end of the day, insecure people will blame their own problems and failures on you because they're too dumb to think they can fail. They're too proud to go correct their own mistakes in life. So they're going to try to cut your head off and claim to be a hero. Or shoot you in the neck.