this trans awareness week let’s shift the focus from just empowering trans people to disempowering cis supremacy + gender normativity.

the reason our lives are so precarious is not because we are wrong, it’s because cis people believe that they are right. there are no such thing as trans + non-binary issues, there are just issues that cis + gender conforming people have with us. if they were secure in their identities they would not need to target us — we would just be regarded as another way to live, not a threat or crisis.

it is the cis community that is in a state of crisis. the ways the tend to identify their manhood + womanhood require enclosure + hierarchy, not porousness + interdependence. they have to be exclusionary, defined by what they are not. have to police the Other in themselves + around them regardless of the fact that there is as much variance (race, ability, size, etc.) among the category “woman” than there is between “women” + “man.”

being a man or woman is fine + dandy, but there is nothing particularly organic or natural about it. there shouldn’t have to be - we can exist without hierarchy. we shouldn’t have to be born this way to be real or worthy, we can choose + make our selves + that is legitimate.

non-binary people are not botched derivatives of cis people, we are not failed cis people. cisness is not the prototype, it is not the origin — it is normative, a particular experience made universal as a project of dominance.

the reason that they target us so ferociously is because they are so insecure in their self-conception they need to prove that they are the only. if they exclude + eliminate us then they can maintain the myth that there are only two genders/sexes, maintain a world where we have to conform in order to be worthy. they can naturalize their power as just “reality,” not the result of particular choices.

we do not come to this earth as men or women, we become + are molded into man + woman. we insist + demand the right to self authorship for everyone, an affirmation of extraordinary difference, the proliferation of possibility, most of all: a world in which creativity is celebrated more than conformity.

support the author