people ought to know this is happening. one of the most vulnerable + subordinated groups in the country is being systematically targeted. every day there is a new assault on another fabric of our being.
let’s be clear: while this is about this administration’s blatant transphobia, the rhetoric + justification they are using for this is constantly deployed by mainstream society— including feminism + LGBT activism.
let’s break this down: they are saying that trans + gender non-conforming people are not protected by anti discrimination legislation because the protected class of “sex” does not include our “gender identity.” they argue that we are, fundamentally, our “biological sex” + that our “gender” is just an identity that we arbitrarily choose.
this gender/sex distinction where sex is seen as something “biological” + fixed + “gender” is seen as something cultural + chosen is transphobic. both sex + gender are cultural! being assigned male or female at birth doesn’t make you any more legitimate than someone else. calling something “biological” doesn’t make it any more real. it’s a rhetorical strategy used to depict us as inferior, one that that shirks accountability + covers the traces of its prejudice.
biological refers to life force, all living things are biological. trans women are not “biological male,” they are women + female, trans men are not “biologically female,” they are men + male, non-binary people are not male or female, we are non-binary! gender is not some exterior costume through which we hide our authentic sex.
when we say that we are men, are women, are neither — we mean this in a total + fundamental sense of our personhood.
of course we need to protest this + all of this administration’s blatant anti-trans measures, but we need to also resist the ideological structure that these arguments are based off of. this is something we all can + should do in our own lives. what this recent push shows is that the forces that be never real cared about discrimination, they care about ideology: biological essentialism.
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