This is the top 1 worst thing someone ever said to me.
The story behind the being held back thing is just that I always wanted to be a mechanic but I can't because my country doesn't hire female mechanics. They are very rare and might not exist at all. So I didn't risk going to trade school to be one when it's very uncertain that I'll ever have a job at all
I don't know about the place you live in, for all I know you could be a Pakistani woman not even allowed to touch a car, but depending on the cost you could easily do it more as a hobby than anything, and then if you get hired it was a nice plus on top of just learning to fix cars. It'd make for a nice precedent for people to point at and say "she could do it so I can do it also", too. And if you don't get a job, you still learnt a good skill to have. In the end, the one stopping you from doing it is yourself.
I've been doing something similar, albeit my circumstances are specific. It's fun when people tell me "once you get into the industry" thinking I'm going to get a job at what I'm doing (which I might, too, since I find it fun, but it's not what I've usually worked as).
Next time type that out into a Word document and sit on it a few days.
I find using pen and paper for these emotional screeds more relaxing, but yes, it's good advice. You can write stuff without publishing it on Internet.
This is also why I’m pretty forgiving of people in this space, because I think you have to be a little crazy already to care about this topic as much as we do, and then you have all of society telling you that This Is Good Actually and you’re a monster if you think otherwise. It’s genuinely maddening to see institutions failing everyone this badly and it makes you question everything you think is true. On the bright side, it seems to be on its way out.
I find this shit downright fascinating. These people absolutely don't exist where I'm from. Just the other day I saw a tranny on the train and it was a first for me, pooners are directly non-existent (I do know of both kinds of funny people that are home-grown here through their Internet presence, but I've never seen a pooner and I've never talked to a tranny).
There's some laws protecting them and there was a lot of noblesse oblige involved in the passing of that, but in real life they are conspicuous in their absence. I see a ton of posts around here about seeing them in the wild or having family that trooned and I'm fascinated by it, it's more or less an academical interest ("Internet anthropology", maybe?).
I did find out some acquaintances trooned out much after cutting contact (one was a US immigrant, the other moved to another country and trooned there), which when finding out was a novelty to me, and the transsexual community here still screeches sometimes, and loudly, but other than that they are ridiculously rare outside of their little niche, and I live in a big progressive city.
It's not even the "tomboys," though, if that category exists in IRL children.
What we're looking at is awkward squidgy girl with long hair who never wears it any way but straight down and is currently really into the English monarchy but only as far as the War of the Roses and whose heraldry phase is starting to include vexillology genocide.
From what I've seen around it's always girls who are very into girly stuff. It's pretty much a stereotype at this point, they're almost never interested in being a car mechanic or emulator programmer, so I'd wager tomboys are less prominent nowadays due to less emphasis being there on the "do whatever you actually like" message and not the hypothetical tomboy-to-pooner pipeline.
There is a concession to be made, though, on the fact that many (some?) of them do seem to go to the gym and put on muscle even if just to pass better. But then they go and make crochet amigurumis.