So recently I signed up to join some free voice training courses. It’s high demand, but I manage to get in, and I was incredibly thankful for that fact.

From the get go, it was emphasised to us time and time over the importance of having our cameras on to assist the instructor, and to make everybody feel that they were in a safe and welcoming environment seeing that we’re all making ourselves vulnerable, and people requiring that assurance that there isn’t some undercover transphobe in the call using this as a means to discover and out people in the community that are trans.

So I think to myself, okay, makes sense. Normally I’m not the type to turn my camera on in a situation like this, but there’s a lot of emphasis on the importance of this, so I’ll step out of my comfort zone if it makes everyone else feel comfortable.

So what happens when I join the voice training session with my camera on?

Every other camera amongst maybe twenty participants aside from the instructor’s is turned off, with nobody else in the call even doing so much as saying a word.

I ended up leaving because I was so uncomfortable. I feel like the script was flipped on me and that a bunch of people that are supposed to be mutually supportive just collectively decided that something labelled as being so important wasn’t important at all, and violated my trust in being vulnerable to them.

I asked to withdraw because I’m not doing things this way if I can’t trust that other people are going to follow the basic rules set out by the organisation. I asked if they had in-person sessions to replace this with, and for whatever reason they don’t??? Like what’s the big deal, if we’re doing this as a group, I should be able to see the faces of everyone else in the group so I can feel safe, and not a word was spoken to our group about the very basic rule being violated by pretty much everyone.

Either enforce the rule you claim is so important, or don’t have the rule at all. Don’t leave me singled out and vulnerable after I did so because of the rule.

It just feels so invalidating.