Truly I was overjoyed.
Last year, 2025, I suffered a whole bunch of stupid disappointments. My best friend was fucking up her life falling in love with a woman fifteen years her senior — a woman with a kid in the swinging scene. My best friend, let’s call her M, was married in 2022. I was best-woman witness something something at her wedding. Then her husband had become overprotective and slapped her around a few times and she fled to my place. Then bad things happened. My house was a shitshow. My life was a shitshow. My health was a shitshow, with me having serious aftereffects of Prednisone comedown after a chaotic Berlin Berghain-Wasteland-KitKat adventure. My finances were a shitshow. My emotional life was a shitshow. I was lonely as fuck. I was sexually frustrated as fuck. M had lived with me for a year and had transitioned with me, GRS and everything. I assumed we would pick that right up and I’d help her move along in life. I could be a springboard to a better future. I kept all options open in my mind — even reconciliation with her husband. Living with whatever swinger friend, discovering her lesbian side with some woman with a kid somewhere on the other side of the Netherlands… with all due respect I didn’t take it serious.
Four months later, she treated me like shit, I intensely resented her, a good friendship had catastrophically imploded and she moved back in with her husband. She couldn’t miss her creature comforts. She couldn’t sleep without him next to her. Full fridge, clean bed, bills paid. She realized there was absolutely no future where she managed things by herself. Or with me anywhere in the picture. I went no contact. She went no contact. We have not been on speaking terms.
Then Italy happened. Then my Mom happened. I realized that anytime my mom happened I had convulsive anxiety attacks and I started asking myself why. And I didn’t like the answers, and I realized the answers were killing me, possibly literally. Enter another three months of using Prednisone, stupidly, prescribed stupidly after me spending a night convulsing in extreme pain in OLVG Oost, and I was even more broken in November 2025. A project imploded on me. I lost my best friend. My housing situation and financial situation were even worse.
So when the opportunity arose to start a business, sort of, and move to a very special place in the Jordaan, I took that opportunity with both hands. People who see the above image, and I say it is a very stylized interpretation of the reality, will immediately recognize it. The process of moving there, the financials, paperwork etcetera, started in June 2025. I had a look at the place in August, and I wandered in and out of that bar regularly every now and then.
So facts — I am a post-operative trans woman of an advancing age. I am nominally bisexual, but my idealized exterior, if I had the absolute say in the matter, would be something like this:
So facts – I am a postoperative trans of an advancing age. I am nominally bisexual but my idealized exterior if I had the absolute say in the matter would be something like this: 
Let’s just say I have a lively imagination.
Facts remain: I am trans, life betrayed me and I look a lot less compelling. I have facial scarring because of child abuse and neglect. Some FFS didn’t pan out 100%. It’s clear I am trans, but I don’t pass 100%.
Plus I grew up in a dangerous youth. That’s why I will be forever overcompensating. I tend to be loud and present. I got ADHD coming out of my ears. I ain’t exactly subtle.
And for almost a year I knew I was going to be living where I now live. Almost a year of imagining what that would be like. One detail in particular delighted me. I was going to live literally within earshot of a famous lesbian bar. I liked that idea enormously. I looked forward to it. I visualized it in my head for months. I thought: okay, life has been a cheap and filthy little goblin, but at least this part is going to be fun.
I did not imagine instant friendship. I imagined a process of potential, maybe a volunteer gig, maybe starting doing some minor jobs. Maybe month later some supporting bar work. I didn’t have expectations beyond coming in, being treated with friendliness, respect, kindness, being part of ‘the’ community, respect for my long adventurous life, maybe even some courtesy for my art, my articles, my adventurous endeavours. I did not imagine I would be crowned Queen Sappho and handed the keys to the kingdom. I simply thought that as a bisexual trans woman, living almost comically close to a famous lesbian place, I might eventually become a familiar face there. I’d walk in with the dog, and after a month, feel welcome, warmth, safety, community, some degree of kinship. I’d get to know specific names and I’d have common grounds with a few. Maybe it would become one of those pleasant little anchors in life that make a neighborhood feel like yours.
What followed was a little more than a cold shower.
Now let me be careful here. Subjective experiences are difficult things. There is no meter for social hostility. I cannot know exactly what another person was thinking when she looked at me, looked away from me, or froze me out. Maybe somebody had had a terrible day. Maybe there had been an argument just before I entered. Maybe the room was hot and everybody was irritable. Maybe I misread a signal. Maybe I missed ten signals because I am ADHD as fuck and because I was not raised inside lesbian subculture and therefore do not automatically read all its codes, hierarchies, jokes, cues and microscopic rituals of belonging.
In crowd culture matters. I did not grow up in this world. I was not gently initiated into it. I was not assimilated into it over twenty years of shared references and old loyalties and exes and clique histories and silent rules. I came to it from outside. Which means there are things I will miss.
Some lesbian spaces appear to have solved trans inclusion politically without solving it socially. A trans woman may be defended in principle, admitted through the door, and still remain a perpetual outsider: tolerated, scrutinized, gatekept, never quite ‘one of the girls.’ No lesbian owes a trans woman desire, intimacy or friendship, and lesbian communities have legitimate interests in maintaining their own culture and boundaries. But when a space loudly proclaims solidarity while its everyday social reality leaves trans women feeling like guests rather than peers, there is a contradiction that cannot be wished away. Inclusion in the manifesto is not the same thing as belonging in the room. This goes completely ff the rails when for some reason or another hostility emerges and it’s never quite clear why. It can use somewords of support and solidarity – such as in the extreme case of certain famous authors – there’s a pervasive stance of deep hostility and support of hateful rhetoric.
But there is a catch, and it is an ugly one.
How exactly is an outsider supposed to stop being an outsider if there is no real route to belonging? If you do not know the codes because you were never included, and you are never included because you do not know the codes, then “you just don’t understand the culture” becomes a perfect circular machine. The door is technically open, but socially locked.
And what I found, more than once, was that I could be tolerated while I was effectively invisible. Quiet enough. Peripheral enough. Non-demanding enough. But the moment I was visible as a person — as in, a woman with opinions, a woman with a sexual history, a woman with confidence, a woman with some fucking ego, a woman not especially interested in apologizing for existing — the temperature changed.
That is the heart of it.
I am not claiming every woman in every lesbian space behaves this way. I am not claiming psychic access to anybody’s hidden motives. I am saying that I repeatedly encountered a very particular pattern: invisibility was survivable, but visibility was costly. The moment I was not merely present but socially present, the atmosphere shifted and the door slammed much harder.
That is why the phrase “allyship” has become difficult for me to hear without a bitter little laugh. Because what I experienced did not feel like equality. It felt like conditional admission. It felt like I could perhaps be accepted as long as I remained appropriately humble, appropriately grateful, appropriately unobtrusive, appropriately aware that I was entering somebody else’s house and ought not put my feet on the furniture.
Equality includes the right to be a pain in the ass.
Cis women in such spaces are allowed to be messy, vain, horny, arrogant, difficult, insecure, territorial, complicated, loud, politically annoying, self-absorbed, flirtatious, wounded, occasionally ridiculous. They get to be full citizens. They get to have edges. They get to be people.
But my growing suspicion — and I phrase it as a suspicion because I am trying to be honest — is that some trans women are welcome only for as long as they behave as though welcome itself were a favour. As though inclusion were a gift to be received with gratitude, rather than an ordinary expression of being treated as an equal adult woman.
If that suspicion is true, even partly, then the public performance of allyship begins to look less like solidarity and more like a fig leaf.
And this is where some people will get defensive and pretend I am making a much stupider argument than I am. So let me be explicit. I can live perfectly well with a woman not wanting me. Jesus Christ, I am in my sixties, not twelve. I might feel about as butthurt is being refused a social network account. I have survived not being wanted before. What is much harder to live with is the impression that some women resent me for wanting women like them at all.
That is a different thing.
Rejection is normal. Collective delegitimization is something else.
I have been around. In gay male spaces, for all their own hilarious pathologies, I was rarely made to feel this way. Men could reject me, yes. Men could ignore me, yes. Men could decline me, yes. But it generally felt individual. One man was interested, another was not. One thought I was an option, another didn’t. Fine. If men weren’t interested in getting to know me there was rarely a problem having conversation at the bar. The same appears to be categorically not the same in the afore alluded-to establishment. What I did not encounter nearly as much was the feeling that the room itself had formed a common front, or that my desirability or lack thereof had somehow become a referendum on whether I belonged there.
In some lesbian spaces, the injury has felt more collective than that. More atmospheric. More like a gatekeeping reflex switching on. More like one person’s disinterest or suspicion is somehow echoed and amplified until the unwelcome starts feeling less interpersonal than institutional. Less like chemistry, more like policy. I had attended some stupid lesbian event a bar called Sameplace (…an exceptionally grimy and sleazy sex dungeon…) a few years ago – I had the feeling it had almost come to blows. I said things to troll those present there, as a taunt, a provocation. That was unwise, but it triggered major escalation. I say something which is an self-evidently absurdity, and it’s immediate total war.
Did that ridiculous incident from years ago follow me here…? One would get paranoid.
Again: I cannot prove motive. I cannot prove coordination. I cannot prove what lived behind every look. But I do not need to pretend certainty about everything in order to be certain about some things. I know what repeated exclusion feels like. I know what it feels like when a place you spent a year imagining as potentially welcoming makes you feel instead conspicuously foreign.
And yes, that is painful in a very particular way, because I was not indifferent going in. I had genuinely looked forward to this. I had built a little fantasy around it. There was something almost funny and absurdly hopeful in the idea that after all the bullshit, all the illness, all the implosions, all the chaos, I would end up here, in this one little corner of Amsterdam, practically next door to a little queer institution, and maybe this one thing would click.
The absolute worst that could happen, happened. I was deemed unworthy.
That does not make me neutral. It does not make me serene. It does not make me generous.
It puts me on edge.
And what I have observed, not once but repeatedly, is that there appears to be a kind of trans woman some lesbian spaces know what to do with: careful, modest, socially fluent, non-threatening, perhaps grateful, perhaps eager not to offend. I do not say this with contempt. I say it because it appears to work.
I don’t grovel, for no one. Not for no man, not for no woman.
I have done things. I have stories. I have lived too much, broken too much, learned too much and embarrassed myself too much to convincingly play small. I do not enter a room asking permission to have a personality. I do not know how to be demure on command. And I increasingly suspect that this is exactly the sort of thing some spaces do not know how to metabolize in a trans woman.
That is not equality.
“That is tolerance on conditions. Behave, diminish yourself, don’t make trouble, and maybe you’ll be tolerated.”
Last but not least –
There is another thing I cannot entirely separate from this. The place I may or may not be alluding to is loud. Sometimes spectacularly loud. It is a socially loud, physically loud, occasionally obnoxious presence in a densely inhabited neighborhood, and not everybody living around it is delighted about that. That is simply reality. A place like this depends, whether it likes it or not, on goodwill if not tolerance. It needs people around it to think: yes, they are noisy, yes, they spill outside, yes, occasionally they are a pain in the ass, but they are our pain in the ass and this place matters.
Which makes the social hostility I experienced particularly baffling and counterproductive. Symbolic spaces need allies. Minorities need goodwill. You need people living nearby who actually like having you there.
July I was almost comically predisposed to be one of those people. I moved in delighted that this place existed practically outside my window. I wanted to like it. I wanted to defend it. I wanted to regard the noise as part of the charm.
And somehow, some people associated with the bar managed to alienate me. Hard. I wasn’t as much scorned or feel unwelcome – I was made to feel inappropriate.
That is just terrible PR.
Not because I am especially important. I may have a remarkably prominent ego but in the bigger picture I sadly matter almost nothing. Nonetheless if you can take someone who arrived positively disposed toward you, queer, trans, bisexual, living within earshot, who then is symbolically, actively pleased that you exist, and leave her feeling fundamentally wrong and treated as verminous, then perhaps the problem deserves more examination than another cheerful statement about inclusiveness.
If I were running that bar, I’d want to take a good look at how some of my staff interact with select people. It takes nothing more than one very cold, hard look to make somebody feel very small. A tiny little interaction across a bar can make a tall woman like me shrivel up like a raisin and sleep in the next day in a foul mood till one in the afternoon.
Maybe even shed a tear or two.
Sure, I have other things to attend to. I am a busy, busy woman. But now, every time I step outside my house, some of that resentment comes back.
That ain’t smart. You had somebody living almost next door who started out rooting for you. Why on earth would you turn me into somebody who now has to work at not feeling irritated every time I hear the crowd cheer at 1 AM on a Friday?
I am only human ok? EVEN if I once had a dick. I am SORRY, ok?