Like, transphobes literally think I'm a degenerate who shouldn't exist and isn't a real woman. Idk, it just kinda irks me to feel like a struggle over assuring that the community is respecting/accepting of me as a person and woman, somehow deserves to be on the same level of what someone eats.
Like, I'm all for veganism, and I hope when I'm in a more stable place I can transition to that. I'm all for stopping animal cruelty and exploitation, on a moral basis and environmental one. But like, it just feels weird to have my immediate experience of fighting for my right to be safe and treated as the gender I am, and the constant bigotry/violence that is enacted against other trans people like me reduced to "just another struggle" alongside something that feels less pressing, like the ethics of killing animals. Idk, maybe I'm just brainwashed by our culture of animal exploitation, but I just felt like I needed to express this uneasiness, because, to me, I feel kinda bad having the fight for my rights and my trans comrades rights being reduced like this.
I think you helped put into words what I have had trouble figuring out myself.
I don't like veganism in a way that is beyond the usual "lol look at these weirdos eating strange food because they care about animals so much" that is a common trained response to vegans in our society.
The time and effort it takes someone eating a normal western diet to switch to a vegan one is so much better spent on so many other things that it's a waste of time if you aren't bothered by the suffering of animals everytime you eat. This is more because switching to a vegan diet is extremely difficult than it is because animals don't matter.
Asking someone to try and be vegan or even just vegetarian isn't a small thing to ask for, it's quite big. I've recently held someone's hand through recovery from alcoholism and gotten a homeless women off the street, and doing that took half as much effort as trying to become vegan was. Neither of those things were easy. Asking me to go through the effort of a drastic diet change like that when there are so many much more important things to care about is offensive to me.
How could you even compare the value of things like that? I know vegans aren't (in general) directly trying to compare things like that, but whenever seriously evaluating the things they want me to, that is the comparison that gets made.