“How did I feel about trans women in the 90s and 2000s” is really complicated by the way that trans identity was being gatekept on passing in those days

Like, part of that was va-va-voom presentation was kinda pressured against in favor of a more “achievable” edge-of-dowdy turtleneck sweater county librarian look, which was honestly not the sexy kind of librarian

Part of it is it makes the question “what would you think of someone who was fairly indistinguishable from cis (well back then, ‘normal’) girls, but just with the 'trans’ label affixed?”

Which was then more significant and weighted because the identifier of trans alone was more out there and loaded then, like the representations of “trans” at all in my lifetime up to the mid-late 2000s were

• Ace Ventura
• The Crying Game
• Silence of the Lambs
• That one episode of Veronica Mars
• That girl Begby hooks up with in a car outside a club in Trainspotting and is distressed to encounter a dick
• Boys Don’t Cry
• Twin Peaks (and the distinct category of “transvestite” was still more of a thing)
• This one grad student my friend knew in college who would inject hormones in front of people
• Like, I had English major friends who would regularly invoke Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble but it didn’t come up
• I do wonder if that was how we still had distinct “Women’s Studies” and “Queer Studies” departments before they merged into “Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies”

Maybe someone could’ve broken through, but if like I was filtering a dating search I would have left the “MTF” box unchecked