Equality includes the right to be a pain in the ass

(rewritten for reasons of insecurity on 24 august)

Last year, 2025, I suffered a whole bunch of stupid disappointments.

My best friend (Let’s call her M.) was fucking up her life falling in love with a woman fifteen years her senior — a single Mom from Friesland with a kid from the swinging scene. She and her husband met in Fata Morgana. Yanno, the place where I’ll also get completely ignored. She used to call me her best friend for years, with considerable insistence. She fled from Prague because her dad put her in a psychiatriarch hospital because she was trans, and slit her wrists after the family dog died, and her junky trans ex ran off to germany. Or whatever. So a mutual aquaintance – some chaser from Slowenia asked me as a favor – please can you help her?

I said FUCK NO, she’s 19. You want people to think I am pedo? I already have a shit reputation like everywhere. The guy begged me. “she is going to die if you don’t help her”. He showed me the scars on her arms. I let her call me. She was a little mouse. She showed me her dildo & buttplug collection. At that time I was in the process of moving to Amsterdam with a Four-Way housing trade and it the world was on fire and it was Corona. She begged me.

I said yes, come on over.

I moved to Amsterdam Noord 2 May 2020. She arrived with a suitcase May 18. I picked her up from Schiphol and fed her Ben & Jerries. A year later we moved to de Pijp and we went fucking NUTS. Drugs, insane parties, private parties. I took a 20 year old kid to Wasteland and fetish paries and gangbangs and she sure loved that. I gave her LSD and molly and we watched Kill Bill. We played Cyberpunk and Eve. And then late 2021 she had qualified for full gender transition and she had surgeries with Kanhai.

She was born again. Little mouse became a swan.

Then in 2022 she married herthen husband whom we met at a Gangbang at club Monique in Wieringerwerf. I thought he was a small nerdy guy, but he turned out to be a very honorable, hardworking and dedicated guy. Let’s also call him M. Let’s call them M&M. They moved fast. They married in 2022 and I was witness to the ceremony. In 2021 I had visited Prague and the Prague family in Cestajovice had profusely offered me gratitude “for saving their daughters life”, anbd they were goddamn serious about it. Turns out the last year before M left to Amsterdam had been a living nightmare and her hospitalization in a mental hospitalization hadn’t come sort of as a surprise. Pup had been sort of a restless kid.

Anyways I rustled up a Nurse from the VUMC, whom I was fucking at the time, a Viking type 195cm blonde lesbian Goddess – because hey I can’t appear at a wedding without eye candy next to me right, and we had a great time. Husband M. had burned through 10K to organize a spectacular wedding, BUT had wed a transgirl half his age and the rather conservative family had not really approved. His sister had repeatedly asked

“are you gay now?”

A few years later, Big M proved overprotective and Little M was still a chaotic handful with major mental issues. That clearly didn’t come as a surprise. We have lived together for a year and I knew living together with M. was not like “easy”. She had autism, ADHD and a severe emotional affective disorder, for rather obvious reasons. In the meantime right after our visit, old dad in Prague had …. well, let’s remain discrete…. our visit had unraveled a whole bunchg of shit. M was looking forward to a million euro+ inheritance.

You heard me right. Dad had decided to take a very short ride in the car, after Mom had filed for divorce. They were rich folks, and dad was some kind of famous Gynaecologist.

Anyways back to 2024-2025. M was in love with some single welfare mommie from Friesland, who lived off alimony, with a 13 year old daughter and M had delusions and thought she could walk out on big M, and move in with that 35 year old woman and build a life. Top be honest I did not actually take this as the most serious plan but hey live and let live right?

She left Big M, because Big M was surveiling her, and had on several occasions slapped her around pretty hard. Pretty big age difference.

Timing was real bad.

Late 2024 I had spend a month in Berlin. I happen to the severe version of Cluster headaches. The chronic type. So I had done what I did twice before – take prednisone. I had however -again- severly underestimated the winnowing down as well as the after-effects of Cluster Headaches. I was financially in the negative. I came back from Berlin with cheyletiellosis, and my Prednisone made me especially vulnerable and the whole house, couch and bed was riddled with these horrible little things. They itch. They were all in my hair. So I threw away my mattress and bedding just before M fled to my house, right when I had money flow issues, right when she had major money flow issues, right when I was super unstable with Prednisone withdrawal, right when I was flowing in and out of cluster attacks and was using a LOT of imigran injections. I had used a LOT of drugs in Berlin. I went to Berghain anbd KitKat and a of of clubs and I was strung out and exhausted.

I was sort of optimistic though. I was looking at the 2 years between May 2020 and Early 2022 where me and M were inseperable… but she was 3 years older and bvy now she was studying product design in Rotterdam and she was incredibly motvated and serious. Plus she was doing amazingly at an internship at vanMokum. So when she arrived from the rather well-padded luxury at Big M’s apartment, into the relatively speaking DUMP at my place she freaked out, and how I unstable I was at the time didn’t help.

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.

To be honest, she kinda fucked up. I can honestly said that under the circumstances I tried my best, but she made it clear she couldn’t stand me. She treated me like shit.

I suddenly broke down and started crying. I literally collapsed, walked out with my dog and was bawling my eyes out on the street, looking at options and I realized I was looking at options for her for emergency housing.

I assumed that after Big M has slapped her, and from the stories, ‘pretty hard’ there was no reconciliation. In fact they had already gone full divorce papers. I stayed in touch with him. But then she started doing insane shit. She ordered something like 300 euro worth of drugs, and that included GHB. And for me GHB is a hard no.

So I said, what the fuck are you doing. And at the same time I was trying to get her mom to get her her inheritance – but her mom was FURIOUS that she had walked out on what mom in Prague assumed was the idyllic marriage. I couldn’t keep my mouth shut and I told mom in Prague about the Drugs.

There as considerable drama.

That’s where I lost M. It was over. My friendship died there and then. I had destroyed aboiut 75% of her contingency planning by aborting her financial freedoms. If I had kept my mouth shut she would have had 10-20 K on her bank account. I told Mom M had started buying well, drugs. And actively dating some welfare mom with a kid.

You know that scene in The Big Short where Mark Baum says “Boom”? It was kinda like that.

So I ended up crying, and figring out emergency shelter for M. M in the meantime was talking to Big M whether or not coming back to him might a good idea. So early June 2025 Big M came to pick up little M. I congratulated them with their reunion and wished them well.

Apparently they needed a narrative and the narrative was to blame me. I don’t blame them. It’s a good and functional narrative. You can pin everything that happened on me, I caused it, I manipulated things for my benefit, whatever. Little M can bow her head and absolve her guilt and point at Bad Bad Khannea. The price was that little M was no longer allowed to ever interact with me, since clearly I was a bad influence. That allowed Big M to remove a potential escape route for little M in the future, by making little M swear allegiance, he gains control, can rewrite the narrative. And by then I was seriously fed up with her and I saw no reasin to argue. She fucked me over with my dog. Then my mom did some … unforgivable drama and said some unforgivable things to me and I realized I couldn’t take it anymore.

Then Italy 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 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 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.

Do I actually look like ths IRL? No. Let’s just say I have a lively imagination.
The dog is very real though.

(Short intermezzo music)

Fact remain I am trans and I am not getting any younger. I had a spectacular ten years. I did things most people scarcely dare dream about, and I did them brazenly and shamelessly. I did orgies in Wasteland. I did Gangbangs. I did an orgy in Berghain.

But it was ending in 2019. I pushed it for a few more years but I was forcing it in 2024. It was already over by then but I squeezed the last juice out. But 2025? Nothing. The magic’s gone. Let;s just say, I am not a fucking boomer but not by a big margin. And I do have a bit of luggage. I got some mean 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%. I gained a few kilo’s during Corona. 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.

But on a regular basis I do get lucky.

So June 2025 I get another housing trade and this one is a doozy. I get to move from de Pijp to de Jordaan.

And so 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.

……The Lesbian Bar

Everyone knows what I am talking about. Everyone who knows me knows who I am and what I am. Talk to people who know me from the 1980s and 1990s and everyone will say in unison – dyke. The Inner Khannea is bisexual, but leans Dyke.

That is an absurd statement. In my inner mental universe this feels like “stolen valour“. It is a claim I do not deserve to make, or so I feel. I feel – I can only be a lesbian if an actual lesbian accepts me as such. And if that never happens I am essentially bullshitting myself and I am just some weirdo who is cosplaying and engaging in some complex delusion.

But hold on, isn’t that what being a trans is then too? Well yeah essentially yeah. Take for instance the movie the Danish Girl. That movie was set in the 1920s and postulates a concept that was completely not universal – a former male that with utter insistence claimed status of female gender. In 1920 this claim was universally rejected as madness. It took more than 50 years for this claim to become even remotely more than a private observation and evolve to a consensual group assessment, acceptance and respected view. Up the 1980s Amsterdam police still arrested “crossdressing perverts” and dropped them off at psychiatric clinics. Talk about a vote of no-confidence.

But, the afore aluded to ‘lesbian bar’ proudly insists on inclusiveness.

They have banners screaming that they are inclusive. I felt positively encouraged, elated, welcomed. I thought – hey I mad not get dragged into the toilet first night and get my muff voraciously munched, but I might be welcomed as part of a community.

Win for Team Khannea.

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.

….when THEY 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. (qt5mj5n4nt.pdf )

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.

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 actually liking 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 welcomed 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 did in fact attend some stupid ‘lesbian’ sex event at a bar called Sameplace (…an exceptionally grimy and sleazy sex dungeon…) a few years ago – I had the feeling it had almost came to blows. I said things to troll those present there, as a taunt, a provocation. That was unwise, but it triggered major escalation. The whole ambiance was… off. It was weird.

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. Outsider.

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.  (And certainly not for some nonbinary)…

I have done amazing things. I have amazing 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?


………………………………………………………..

“Khannea did you say you were fucking a VUMC nurse valkyri half your age in 2022? what the fuck you whining about?“

“shhhh that one didn’t count. I used magic. Magic spells is cheating.”

“…Then why don’t your use Magic all the time???“

“.. you clearly don’t understand how magic works. Sex or Love or Intimacy or Friendship or Money arranged with Magic is faerie dust.. isn’t real. Fugazzi. “