Gender non-conforming people like us are frequently turned into memes as a means to ridicule us. But truly, the joke is on them.
We know who we are and that threatens those who only know themselves based on what they have been told. They manufacture their sense of self from whitewashing history, warping reality, deliberately denying complexity, sculpting truth as a monument to white male supremacy.
They argue that the mere acknowledgment of us is “political correctness.” But let’s reframe this conversation. BIPOC gender non-conforming people have always existed. Gender and racial diversity is natural. What is political is the narrowing of human existence, the clockwork orange of being inundated with the same images for hundreds of years.
We reveal their portraits as propaganda and in doing so, we suggest a world behind the camera. We are persecuted not because of our insufficiency, but because of our possibility, our promise of what lives (and does not lie) beyond their paradigmatic prison.
This photo was taken at Oxford University in 2017 as a reclamation of public space. We were there to support our friend @eddiendopu one of the first Black queer disabled South Africans to ever study there. They take our resistance art and recruit it into their insecurities about losing cultural hegemony. We are seen as combatants in our self-defense. We are seen as having access to some sort of mythological power, when in fact, we still struggle to exist in public.
This shows us that this was and is never about us. It is always about them. Their projections, their anxieties. They are not able to experience us, because they are courting the caricatures of us they sketch in their heads. They build walls around us because if they get too close they might not only see us, they might see themselves. They conjure fear and aspersion, commence panic, invent pseudoscience, disparage the dispossessed in order to establish a semblance of security, one that is so feeble it requires constant, frenetic fortification.
Yes. We will be in history textbooks. Not for Normandy. But for changing the world in our own time.
