Published by Medium

A touching (and personally resonant) little story from Tattie, a dearly valued member of my Fediverse parasocial circle:

Even before marriage, I had always had an aversion to buying “stuff”. I always tried to get by with the bare minimum, the cheapest things, the most practical. I never felt I deserved good things, and often I didn't have a good sense of what it was I wanted, exactly.

Speaking to other transfems, it seems it's quite a common experience. Before we start to grow into our true selves, we tend to live small lives, unassuming ones. Self-sacrificing lives. If we can do without, we do without.

I remember in university feeling too guilty to buy name-brand chocolate biscuits, going for the store-brand ones instead. A matter of perhaps twenty pence, but twenty pence which I thought didn’t deserve to be spent on me. I remember living in the cheapest clothes I could find, and wearing them until they were full of holes. Cycling everywhere because getting a bus would be too bougie, apparently.

It wasn’t about needing to save money. It was about self-denial. Self-denial had become a virtue in my mind— I justified it with half-understood stoic philosophy and Buddhism, but even without that philosophical framework I would be doing it.

Why?

Because I had been told I had to live in self-denial. To pretend to all the world that I was a boy, to tamp my feminine nature right down so that nobody would notice, nobody would suspect. And if this was good and right, well, self-denial must in general be good. Otherwise what was I doing this all for?

The ‘Tragedy of Commons’ thesis, and the ways in which it is accepted as ‘common sense’, has been wildly successful at obscuring what we are actually experiencing: a Tragedy of the Non-Commons. Non-common governance and inequalities are at the heart of the climate and ecological crises.