The Price Is Us

The Cruelest Arithmetic

The world is not our only oppressor.

Watch what happens when oppression does its work long enough, effectively enough: you begin doing it to yourself. Not because you're weak, but because you've learned the lesson too well. You absorb the cisheteronormative logic so completely it starts speaking with your voice, wearing your face, calling itself common sense. You become a collaborator in your own erasure. An accomplice to the oppressor, a gatekeeper to the oppressed. And you call it "binary assimilation" or more blandly, "blending in."

They believe it matters to be cis. And somewhere along the way, so gradually you didn't notice the shift, you started believing it too. Maybe you started with the dream that you would be as normal a man or woman as any other cis person! Regardless of where you started, you have ended up where they treat transness as shameful, as deficit, as pathology. And you, scrutinizing your reflection with the precision of a hostile examiner, measuring angles and distances and ratios, cataloging features and failures, you treat it the same way. You've internalized the audit. The judge and the judged share the same body now.

This is the cruelest arithmetic: when there's no evidence around you, no message or example that another way of being is legitimate, you mistake their cis standards as the only standards. Everything reflected back is measured against what you are not, and how you're not. The images of trans life you do see are mocked, pitied, pathologized, and held up as cautionary tales - these aren't invitations to solidarity. They're warnings. They teach you, without anyone saying it directly, that safety requires distance from those images. That normal is not being trans.

So you scrub yourself clean of everything that might mark you. You don't let your voice rise. You don't move your hands when you talk. You learn to avoid the center of attention so as to avoid any scrutiny that comes from it. You learn to hate your reflection before anyone else gets the chance, as if pre-emptive shame could purchase safety, as if self-surveillance could buy passage into a world that never intended to include you. You become...what, exactly? Not yourself. An empty parody. An individual conformist, someone who erased their own difference in pursuit of a belonging that keeps receding.

No cis person has ever scrutinized their body with the precision you've been trained to apply to yours. No one handed their gender unquestioned has measured their shoulders, jaw, and hips against standards upon which hang their destiny, dignity, and safety. You perform this examination daily, even hourly, and call it normal. Normal for whom?

And then comes the harder work: breaking out of that mold, to shuck the world's expectations that become your cage, the place society insists you belong, and where you must remain. Trying to become yourself when yourself is precisely what you were taught to cloister, bury, and erase. Hard for anyone. Brutal when you're born knowing that you are something the world insists isn't true. But this isn't some peripheral belief you can quietly hold while living otherwise. This is the core of your experience. The truest thing you know, and the one thing you've been told you can not ever be. Two sides of yourself that remain insurmountable and forbidden, that which they see, and that which you are.

To become yourself requires divorcing yourself from the standards that society used to mark you wrong before you had language and understanding for who and what you were. Not wrong in a way that could be corrected, adjusted, and made acceptable, but in the way that your existence is irreconcilably so.

But here is the crueler arithmetic, the one no one warns you about: sometimes it works.

Sometimes the distancing, the surveillance, the erasure - it purchases what it promised. The career materializes. The family forms. The acceptance, or something close enough to call by that name, arrives. You blend in. You pass. You are treated as what you always knew yourself to be, and the world moves around you without friction.

And in that success, a trap closes.

Because now you have evidence. Evidence that the standards were correct. Evidence that the scrutiny was warranted. Evidence that the distance you created between yourself and those trans people - the loud ones, the visible ones, the ones who couldn't or wouldn't do what you did. That distance was not survival strategy but wisdom. Not adaptive response but moral clarity.

You succeeded. Which means the system works. Which means anyone who fails must have failed themselves.

This is the transformation: from survivor to gatekeeper. From someone who internalized the audit to someone who administers it. The judge and the judged shared your body once; now the judge has won, and turns outward, measuring others against standards you met at such cost you cannot now admit the cost was unnecessary.

The sunk cost is not just psychological. It is identity itself. You spent decades learning to scrutinize, to distance, to perform. To say now that this performance was imposed rather than earned, survival rather than virtue, adaptation rather than truth - this would unravel everything. It would mean the surveillance was trauma, not diligence. The erasure was loss, not refinement. The distance was not wisdom but wound.

So you double down. You provide the testimony the system needs: See, it can be done. I did it. The ones who can't or won't do it are the problem. The ones who go too far.

You become proof that exceptions are possible, and in becoming proof of the exception, you legitimize the rule. Your existence, your success, your platform, your reasonable measured voice agreeing with people who would exclude everyone like you except you - this is the function you now serve. Not as counterweight to the system but as evidence that it is fair. That it can accommodate the deserving. That the undeserving deserve what they get.

You are no longer merely complicit in your own erasure. You are now useful to the erasure of others. The collaboration has become a career.

And the hardest truth, the one that might crack the whole edifice if you let yourself see it: the acceptance was never for you. It was for the performance. For the distance. For your willingness to say, in rooms full of people who would never extend to others what they extend to you: I agree. They went too far. They ruined it. I'm not like them.

The belonging doesn't recede because you keep paying the price.

And the price is us.