Hard disagree, I do not want to potentially accidentally hit the dress even a little bit, not to mention how annoying holding up a petticoat or long dress is, sitting is better for both

The feminine urge to kiss a woman with a cut and bleeding lip

vs

The feminine urge to bite my lip until it bleeds to tease vampiregf into kissing me

Sorry, having actually had someone repeatedly insist I’d be a trans woman prior to my egg cracking, and having experienced the way I was pushed into further denial for months by it, I thoroughly disagree with everyone else in this thread. It’s telling that the majority of people I’ve ever seen who actually had someone directly tell them they were trans has had similar experiences to myself (like this recent example on Tumblr. Honestly this example is even worse insofar as people kept insisting on it despite her and her friends repeatedly asking them to stop).

Sure, parts of these feelings often stem from internalised transphobia, from the worries that come in with thinking you can’t actually change your gender and the denials that come through that. But it’s not internalised transphobia to just have a negative reaction to someone trying to insist on your gender identity regardless of yourself. Can you seriously not recognise how insisting a gender upon someone else feels? Especially when the person isn’t ready to think about it themselves? There’s far more going on in that interaction. If the egg is still in a precontemplation stage, that is to say not even questioning and unable to recognise their dysphoria as dysphoria, it’s just going to backfire insofar as they aren’t psychologically ready to actually grapple with it yet. This isn’t just a trans thing, it happens for plenty of other psychological phenomenon too, so saying it’s just internalised transphobia is reductive. In practice, someone in that state will push back against the attempt, they’ll usually instead go further into denial and distress like I did, and probably feel less comfortable sharing the egg feelings in the future, which in turn makes it take even longer for them to recognise it and receive support when they are ready for it. Even once they do recognise it, the feelings of doubt that get instilled in you from having been told directly that you are trans isn’t going to just go away right then. “What if I just think I’m trans because x insisted on it so much?” Plus, quite frankly, again pulling from my own experience, it also just feels like the other person is trying to strip your agency from you, to insist that what you think you are is profoundly wrong and that it is obvious to others. I know that’s not the intent, but that’s how it feels for the egg in question, how I felt when it happened. I’ve seen this repeatedly and I feel like everyone insisting that the egg prime directive is just transphobic is, frankly, not thinking about the implications on what will happen to the egg after the attempted breaking. This isn’t even getting into eggs in actively dangerous situations wherein cracking before they’re ready will make them go further into suicidal ideation among other things.

This doesn’t mean you can’t do anything to help eggs recognise their transness. Remember, the specific wording of the directive is not that you can’t help people recognise that they are trans. It is very specifically to not tell people directly that they are or are not trans. Pulling from the Gender Dysphoria Bible’s site statement on it (IE the site that popularised it in the first place):

"My good friend Lily coined the phrase “Egg Prime Directive” to describe the fact that trans people have an unspoken agreement not to tell people who are questioning their gender whether or not they are trans.

When someone is just told they are trans, that opens ground for denial; it activates defense mechanisms built by internalized transphobia, and it has a high probability of pushing them further into the closet, if not making them outright transphobic. Even when it doesn’t, it leaves ground for their own subconscious to reject their dysphoria, claiming that they were just manipulated or deceived. The much more effective strategy is to talk about your own experiences with dysphoria so that they see the common grounds and come to their own conclusion about their gender. The code doesn’t forbid helping them to explore their gender; it forbids assigning a gender to them. Or, to put it more succinctly, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself." (Emphasis mine)

It is fine to help people with exploring their genders, and I actively support doing so and have done it before. But there’s a huge difference between giving people support and the space to contemplate themselves, and outright telling them ‘you are trans.’ This distinction gets constantly lost on both sides of this debate and it feels like I’m going fucking crazy for noticing it. For cis shits (and trans pick mes) they usually insist that any statement or relationthat implies potential transness is itself breaking the directive. Regarding this, I do agree there ought to be some pushback. Tommasi’s example earlier is an example of a certain level of hypocrisy, wherein people are fine with saying that it’s okay to be cis but not fine with saying it’s okay to be trans. (though notably, the example is leaving the option open rather than insisting that is who the person is, so it’s not entirely the same as what the directive is meant to forbid. I maintain that saying “it’s okay to be trans” to someone actively questioning is not the same thing as saying “you are/may be/are not trans” and is fine, insofar as it’s opening the option but is not prescribing it to them.)

But the flipside, to insist upon breaking every single egg you see because it will “push against the transphobia and cisnormativity of the directive” (as quite a few trans people are currently wont to do) is ludicrous and will result in pushing people back into the closet more often than not. The way to help people crack their eggs is actively creating a space and listening instead of trying to crack it for them, no matter how frustrating it can get to listen to them sometimes. But this requires far more effort and, importantly, isn’t really something you can do with strangers (unless they seek out trans spaces first). It’s something you do to help people you have actual connections with and can understand. It’s to insist that the decision is up to them, and that it’s okay to not be sure just yet. Because the only person that can decide if they’re actually trans is them.