From the attempted colonial genocide against gender variant people, to the advent of eugenics to pathologize us, to the promulgation of cross-dressing laws and so-called “ugly” laws, to the criminalization of our communities (walking while trans), the archipelago of anti-trans laws has been constructed to eliminate trans and gender non-conforming people from the public in order to naturalize the fiction of the gender binary. This recent escalation gives license to the powers that be to exercise the hostility they have long harbored for us. Blood is the most permanent ink.
They fixate on our appearances to distract from material systems of inequality. They instigate cultural panics to villainize vulnerable minorities and recuse themselves of responsibility. Suddenly the public becomes more concerned with our Adam’s apples, than the fact that they live in food deserts. We are scapegoated as a diversionary tactic to siphon off attention away from the ongoing dismemberment of public infrastructure, to divert rage from impending economic and political collapse.
History teaches us that this discrimination is often advanced during times of transformation to undermine solidarity - a divide and conquer strategy that keeps us policing one another, rather than building coalition.
Trans and gender non-conforming people have been blowing this whistle since the beginning. Like fire fighters we have been trekking through the various smokescreens (“biology,” “freedom,” “feminism”) that they have procured to camouflage their insidious prejudice. This is not about safety, it’s about control. This is not about freedom, it’s about privilege. This is not about feminism, it’s about fascism.
What remains to be determined is not TGNC resistance. For hundreds of years we have found ways to manifest & femifest despite their machinations. What remains to be seen is whether others will come to know/feel how gender normativity restricts their own horizons, offers a hackneyed mode of existence - one that requires rote uniformity, callous monotony, spiritual necrosis.
We seek the proliferation of possibility that blooms when people can self-fashion their own ways of living, loving, and looking.