Online Harrassment of GNC/Transfeminine People

I have been really heartened by increased attention and consideration to the difficulties of navigating the internet as a woman. But -- as always -- these discussions of "gender and social media" tend to only focus on the experiences of binary and cisgender women. There is a particular type of cruelty directed to gender non-conforming / transfeminine people that is not challenged (let alone acknowledged). This is because centering this type of violence would require us to challenge gender binary thinking itself -- not just "men."

Existing visibly on the internet as a gender non-conforming/transfeminine person is to have to constantly normalize and become accustomed to routine hostility-- is to always be assumed as fabulous and triumphant -- to never be allowed to hurt because you only exist as an aesthetic object to inspire others (not keep yourself alive).

Central to the world I want to create for myself and the people I love is a deep and earnest commitment to interdependence -- naming when we need help (and being celebrated and affirmed for it!) The truth is I need help! When gender non-conforming/transfeminine people do something as simple as make an argument for our own dignity...we are demonized and ridiculed. I need everyone to publicly challenge transmisogyny and to support the transfeminine people in your life constantly, not just when we experience physical violence.

Harassment against trans people online extends beyond being called the wrong gender pronoun. Here is some everyday acts of transmisogynist harassment I experience online. Please try your best to counter these as you see them happen.

1) People tagging their friends and saying, "Is this you?" or "Doesn't this look just like _____" followed by tear tear emojis. Usually cisgender (brown) men are tagged. 

The idea here is that I am a "failed" man and that my femininity is a joke that is more embarrassing than anything. Here my personhood is reduced to a prop to bolster masculinity. I become a symbol of every (brown) man's worst nightmare, rather than a person with feelings.

2) People sharing photos of me saying things like "ME," or "SAME."

This is part of a culture that reduces transfeminine people to aesthetics for other peoples' empowerment and never our own. The same people who identify with us online will never defend us offline. We only matter insomuch as we can become instrumentalized for empowerment and triumph of others, and never our own. 

3) People tagging their friends and saying, "Omg this is your bf or gf right?" Then entire chat threads will ensue about how disgusting I am and how I remind people of their ugly exes. 

What this does is shame people who do desire us (and there are many). Our appearance not only becomes a source of embarrassment for ourselves, but for everyone associated with us. We become the ultimate fear: dating a "tranny." 

That's a lot of projection, anxiety, and insecurity mapped on us that we didn't consent to! Oh wait, gender non-conforming/transfeminine people aren't allowed to consent because our image and bodies belong to the nightmares and fantasies of everyone else.

3) Cisgender women and "feminists" telling me that I am a man "invading women's spaces" with my "male privilege." I am dismissed as a "fraud," an "impostor," and a "threat."

In a transmisogynist and gender binarist world only cisgender women are allowed to own femininity. The rest of us are dismissed not only in our genders, but in our ability to be understood as victims of gender based violence. Even though transfeminine people experience some of the most brutal and intense forms of misogyny, we are regarded as villains and never victims. The irony is that in their efforts to combat patriarchy these women actually rely on it by conflating "woman" with "vagina" and by delegitimizing femininity as superficial and excessive.

4) People of all genders telling me that I am ugly, gross, that I look like trash, and that I deserve to die.

The idea here is that A) My worth should be linked to my physical appearance and B) The only way to be beautiful is to look like a cisgender man or a cisgender woman. 

In a transmisogynist and binary world we are taught that in order to be beautiful we have to be binary. In fact an entire system of sexuality ("gay," "lesbian," "straight,") rely on and strengthen a binary system. Desire is only available to those of us who uphold binary standards.

5) Being called a "degenerate," a "retard," a "freak," a "monster," and other ableist terms that basically position transfemininity as a sort of weakness and/or illness. 

The idea here is that the only way to be *healthy* is to be a masculine gender non-conforming man and that because I did not "develop" into one there must be something wrong with me. What is lost here is what is horribly wrong about a society that standardizes one way to look and one way to be healthy -- and a society that conflates "weakness" with "illness" to begin with anyways!

6) Rape threats, death threats, threats of physical violence and assault. These are often delivered just by the sight of my image. 

The idea here is that gender non-conforming/transfeminine people are victim-blamed just for being visibly trans. Our visible difference is seen as justification for violence. This violence is meant to police and intimidate us back into gender conformity and uphold the myth of two genders.

7) People (often cisgender women) commenting on every detail on my body, surveilling me to tell me what I should do if I want to look like a "real woman." This often involves detailed conversations about my genitalia and speculations on my medical/surgical history. Example: "If you want to look like a real woman then shave your legs!" 

The gender binary teaches people that femininity is attached to womanhood and that anyone who looks "feminine" is a woman or is aspiring to be one. Actually, femininity is totally separate from womanhood and people of all genders can be femme. There is no one way to look or act femme, it's all about celebrating how people embody it. Also -- part of the way transmisogyny works is a foregrounding of others' fantasies over our realities. The question of our genitalia becomes continually elevated because people are sexualizing and objectifying us, not granting our full subjectivity.

8) General laughter. People tagging their friends to all have a joke about how ridiculous I look. "Look at this tranny..." 

Transmisogyny would have you believe that we are the only ones performing our genders and not that cisgender people are constantly performing theirs. Part of the performance of cisgender identity involves a thorough mockery of transfeminine people. "I am a man" "I am a woman" "Because I am not that!"

9) Cisplaining. None stop cisplaining. Telling me that my ideas about gender and my identity are wrong, telling me that I am wrong about the reasons why I experience gender, teaching me that there are actually only two genders, etc. 

The idea here is that cisgender and binary people know what's best for us better than we do. Part of transmisogyny is infantalization: we are regarded as underdeveloped men or women or both! Because we are infantalized we are not able to make decisions for ourselves by ourselves.

10) Outright denying, dismissing, and delegitimizing my experiences of violence. Example: "Surely you don't experience this much harassment, you must be making it up!" "That can't have happen, no way!" "No one would have let that happen, this is a joke!" 

What is important to understand is that gender non-conforming/transfeminine people experience harassment in public every single day of our lives from people of all genders. Often no one defends us and we are blamed for it. What is more unbelievable than the routine harassment we experience is how "gender" has become synonymous with "cis women" and how transfeminine people's experiences with (street) harassment have been systematically erased. Comments like this are part of a culture of cisgender people refusing responsibility for the violence they uphold against us.

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Shift Your Paradigm: Nonbinary People Aren't Too Complicated

often cisgender people and binary gender people dismiss nonbinary and gender variant people for being "too complicated." we are told that people are just "ignorant" and that if we keep advocating for ourselves to spread awareness then we will have justice.

yes it is absolutely important to meet people where they are at. yes a lot of the particular language that has come to be associated with gender variant experiences (especially in the west) is new and can be difficult to digest. yes divesting from gender binarist thinking takes time and is a struggle (for all of us!), but i worry if we continue to accept that it is nonbinary people who are "complicated" and that it is cisgender and binary people who are motivated by "ignorance," then we will do little to actually have meaningful justice (let alone safety) for nonbinary people.

nonbinary people aren't complicated, the structural conditions of misogyny and colonialism that have so thoroughly ritualized our invisibility are complicated. nonbinary people aren't complicated, the mechanisms and institutions of gender binarism are because they work in deeply insidious and deeply entrenched ways at every level -- intellectually, socially, culturally, economically, politically -- to perpetuate and normalize the myth of two genders. nonbinary people become seen as complicated because we make explicit how complex the systems around us are.

also the ongoing erasure and brutality against nonbinary and gender variant people isn't the result of ignorance. gender binarism has and continues to be a conscious strategy to discredit, criminalize, and annihilate ways of being and living that are outside of the western gender binary. part of the way this project works is by keeping individual people ignorant of its own strategies, histories, and devices. so then we should understand this not as *ignorance,* but as a particular type of enlightenment/consciousness that has been imposed as part of a bigger project.

the problem is that nonbinary and gender variant people continue to spread awareness to no effect because people are only seeing our knowledge as information, not as an alternative paradigm.

granting full dignity to nonbinary people requires a transformation of how you understand race, gender history, progress, and more -- not just an awareness of the words we now call ourselves.

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"Transphobia" Doesn't Capture the Violence of Gender Binarism

there is a particular type of vitriol and aggression directed against nonbinary and gender variant people that is continuing to escalate and can't adequately be captured by words like 'transphobia.' now, more than ever, it is crucial to explicitly name 'gender binarism' and unpack how it operates to specifically and disproportionately harm people who are gender non-conforming.

the narrative among conservatives becomes that we are "gender snowflakes" who think we are exceptional and/or special because we are doing ridiculous things like identifying our own genders. we become markers of the degeneracy of "men," "america," and "politics" more generally. we are attacked as a way to punish and police us back into conformity. those who harass us are elevated to the status of heroes and are venerated for taking on the necessary struggle against "political correctness."

the narrative among liberals becomes that we are vain and obsessed with semantics and insubstantial issues like pronouns and bathrooms. we become understood as symbolic of the degeneracy of progressive politics: "what happened to focusing on the real issues?" we are shamed for focusing on ourselves rather than fighting for the bigger picture (as if the gender binary is not a crucial structure to upholding everything wrong about the now).

what both of these narratives do is create a mirage where gender variant and nonbinary people are regarded as *privileged* and cisgender and gender binary people are regarded as *victims.*

this invisibilizes the very real and grave violence that nonbinary and gender variant people do experience (especially those of us who are transfeminine/people of color). this not only sanctions, but glorifies the people who attack us both on the right and the left.

myself and many of the people i love are harassed regularly not just for being trans, but for being gender non-conforming. many of us live our lives in constant fear -- so much so that we cannot and do not present ourselves as we are. it is difficult and upsetting to see gender once again dismissed as inconsequential. this is just another incarnation of an age old problem where gender violence is disregarded as a distraction and not actually a directive to do better.

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you want us to be visible, but you do not protect us when we are

"wish they had finished you off" "degenerate" "you have a mental disorder" "go die" "you are a man with a hairy chest in a dress, reconsider your life choices" i woke up today to an onslaught of racist & transmisogynist comments on my photos the day after the premiere of #TheTransList. & i knew this would happen but it still hurts. here's the thing: visibility for gender non-conforming people often does more for cis people than it does for us. you get to be inspired, educated, challenged, compelled, aroused -- we get to expose ourselves to more harassment and violence. gender non-conforming people -- and especially those who are Black and PoC -- experience the brunt of the backlash for gay & binary trans "progress." we are often the most visible, therefore the most identifiable, therefore most targetable. our genders get taken from *us* and made into a symbol of everything wrong with *insert group* : we are reduced to caricatures of the 'politically correct' establishment, failures & embarassments for our races/communities, failed men, failures of identity politics & more. i have been really encouraged to see people acknowledge the risks that trans women (& especially those of color) take for acknowledging their transness in public when they could just "pass" (whatever that means). but i have not seen this same respect extended to nonbinary & gender non-conforming trans femmes. this is because we are expected to be visible because if we are not we are just regarded and dismissed as men. we are denied a self if we aren't visible because our entire self is predicated on being seen by others rather than belonging to ourselves. our job is to be visible & instrumentalized for everyone else but ourselves -- it is an expectation, no a mandate. our visibility is needed as a character foil for what heterosexuality is not (abnormal), what cis gayness is not (no femmes! no sissies!), what cis womanhood is not (read: hairy, bulky, 'mannish'), what trans womanhood is not ("complicated," "man in a dress," "pre-op"). you want us to be visible, but you do not protect us when we are.

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"There Are Only Two Genders:" Or, the Joke is On You

“The dating app Tinder announced a new feature this week which gives users 37 different gender identity options,” co-host and cast member, Colin Jost said. “It’s called ‘Why Democrats lost the election’.”

After the election Saturday Night Live made a joke at the expense of nonbinary and gender variant people. I find myself returning to this joke not because it's *offensive,* but because it's just...bad. I'm all for political comedy and performance, but this is not it.

After the election there's been a re-submergence of conversation on the "failure of political correctness." Nonbinary and gender variant people are seen as emblematic of this: "Can you believe people are concerned with pronouns when there are so many OTHER issues in the world?" (as if nonbinary and gender variant people aren't leading multiple other struggles for social justice). We -- a group with literally no formal recognition and substantial political power -- are scapegoated as young idealistic "millennials," who are responsible for the failures of the progressive establishment (as if people living beyond and outside the western gender binary have not been around for hundreds of years).

There's been a lot of important conversation about how vile the rhetoric of the alt-right is. But what is often missing is the points of connection and solidarity between conservatives and liberals. Key to this allegiance is a shared conviction that "THERE ARE ONLY TWO GENDERS" (a mantra for the alt-right). Key to this allegiance is a dismissal of nonbinary and gender variant people as overwhelmed by feelings and lacking real and substantial politics.

The lines between 'feelings' and 'politics,' are almost always drawn by racism and misogyny.

The real project of identity politics at work here is a global project of reducing the complexity, social and cultural difference, and ancestral traditions of billions of people across the world into one of two genders: "male or female."

They tell us that nonbinary people are "obsessed" with gender but please tell me: Who required gender markers on identity documents? Who constructed their entire sexual identity and orientation on the basis of gender? Who divided basic and universal services and institutions into two lines? Who made something as simple as peeing have to do with gender? Who funded and fabricated hundreds of years of pseudo-science to perpetuate the myth that there are only two genders and sexes?

"Cisgender" and "Binary" were not terms that were created organically, they were terms that were created in response to an intense project of mobilizing (white, cis, gender binary) identity. Why are these entrenched political ideas not elevated to the status of "identity politics?" Why are they not dismissed as "feelings?"

It would be more useful -- and, indeed, more correct -- to understand this moment as the emotional assertion of cisgender and gender binary identity both among conservatives and progressives.

The real joke is that even though nonbinary and gender variant people are fighting -- in fact -- for everyone to be entitled to their self-identification, to be granted their complexity, to be the author of their own body and narrative -- we are seen as the problem and not the solution.

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the trans list premiere

since getting physically attacked last month i have been feeling exhausted. gender non-conformity - especially for transfeminine people of color like me - means constant harassment, surveillance, violence, fear. there is no *before* and *after,* we do not transition into safety, we do not pass into white cisgender norms and binaries. bullying doesn't stop when we grow up. precarity doesn't stop. we are constantly the most visible & constantly made to feel the most abject. we carry the shame & negation of cis people & increasingly binary trans people. & with tonight being the premiere of #TheTransList on @hbo i am full of conflicted feelings because on my way to seeing the film back in june i was pushed & shoved & people took photos of me & laughed. but people at the screening kept telling me "congratulations," & i felt that dangerous thing we do femmes where we take appearance as actuality & visibility as victory & we do not ask to see the scars & we do not offer help. during the panel discussion after i told the audience that cis people are comfortable putting gender non-conforming people on screens & runways & stages, but the minute we come off them we are in danger. i told them cis people looking at trans people is not progress, it is the status quo. i asked them to not just watch us be "resilient," but to fight for us so we don't have to be. after people came up to me & still called me "articulate" and "resilient" so it hurt because i am often looked at & rarely listened to, just like it hurt waiting 45 minutes to catch a cab after because no one would stop for me. it hurt because you want GNC people to be visible but you do not want to ensure that we are safe when we are. it hurts because you expect us to fabulous away the pain, to selfie our way into confidence, to muster the courage to overcome instead of divesting in the ideologies and institutions that make our existence so impossible. so i offer the film tonight not in triumph, but in exhaustion. i use the stage (& now the screen) to demand that you let us live beyond it. yes this film is exciting but my favorite people in the world know how to turn a good party into an even better protest x

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sometimes the most important work is the invisible work

While thinking more about what it means to uplift trans & nonbinary people who are unable to be visible (because of Trump & the racist transmisogyny that pre-dated and enabled him), I've been thinking about how this moment requires a re-calibration of what we think of as visibility and silence more generally. In moments of tragedy and crisis there is a collective impetus to "show up" which often gets conflated with "being visible." These *visible* (often social media shareable) displays of solidarity and political action are urgent and tremendously important but work that gets invisibilized (often due to ableism, racism, and misogyny) is just as essential. The work of bearing witness, helping people process grief and despair, thinking and art making, community building, cooking and healing...acts of softness, emotionality, and care can be just as militant, political, and real. Almost every (trans) femme in my life feels like they aren't doing *enough,* and certainly there is so much to do -- or rather undo -- but part of that doing is about re-considering and uplifting the private, the intimate, the invisible. Pushing back against the dismissal of art, of trauma, of care, of imagination. Recognizing that our tactics have to be as expansive and varied as we are -- encountering one another in our entirety, not just our oppressed identities, not just our political utility, not just our ability to critique and/or inspire. It's about rooting ourselves in empathy and interdependence and remembering that we fundamentally need each other -- desperately and completely. And it is from that recognition and our commitment to one another in all of paradox and complicatedness that we can draw strength. Because sometimes strength comes from quiet gestures, being held by the intangible, being seen in your invisibility.

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Being Bashed in Melbourne

content warning: transmisogyny, violence

the story goes something like this: it is on the days that i feel most myself that i am most punished for it. it is the days that i feel most beautiful that i am most terrified. it is the days that i have the words that i am not permitted to have a body. the difference between a “body and a “idea,” is the difference between who is chasing and who is being chased.

i stay up until 5:30am finishing my talk. it’s an old habit that i haven’t been able to shake off: putting things last minute, only being able to create in the stillness of the night. but there are few things more luxurious than that sleep-deprived brilliance: creating something with my own hands that i can’t even recognize with my own eyes — writing myself into existence. at 8:30am i wake up to the modern rooster call of my phone alarm. i slip into my outfit quickly. the trick is to figure out your outfit the night before so that pre-caffeinated you doesn’t have to decide. i put on my makeup. i am out of the house and at the venue by 9:30am. 

i ask someone to take this photo of me before my talk. i am tired, but i am feeling powerful. confident, sexy even. i want to remember this moment: that time i pulled off that semi-all nighter and still felt this great. at 10:30am i begin speaking. i start by saying that i am often scared, lonely, and hurt. because this interaction — me on stage and you in the audience — feels comforting and familiar, but also temporary and hard. when this is over i have to return to a world that has no frame of reference for what i am. i talk about how gender non-conforming transfeminine people are only permitted to exist on a screen, in a photograph, on a stage — something staged, never real. how people still understand us as parodies and costumes that only exist to entertain, to fascinate, to inspire. i talk about the irony of only being able to be considered real in a performance context — about the dissonance that happens when i walk off a stage and onto the street.

it is 3:00pm and i am tired and full: both of good food and even better conversation. i decide that i want to go home and take a nap. it is the middle of the day and i am not alone so i do not think twice about getting on that packed tram. i do not think twice about my heels or my makeup or my body because in that moment there were no heels no makeup there was just me: tired, but complete.

the tram turns suddenly and i accidentally fall down on the lap of a white man sitting next to me. i apologize profusely and then sheepishly walk to the center of the tram. i am embarrassed: my flushed cheeks match my lipstick. 

at 3:05pm i see that man approaching me. i think nothing of it. then, he punches me in the face. 

i do not have time to feel the pain. he is screaming at me. he says "you didn’t even say sorry.” he keeps screaming “you didn’t even say sorry.” and in that moment i know he wanted me to apologize not for falling on him, but on him falling for me. for me being femme in public (and him liking it). for me accidentally touching him (and him accidentally liking it). 

i want to cry. i want to say: i have written the same poem my entire life, it begins with “body” and ends with “i’m sorry.” i want to run away — both from this moment and how powerless i feel. my heart starts beating fast. i find it difficult to breathe. i am about to have a panic attack. i think about all of the videos i’ve seen of transfeminine people getting harassed and no one coming to our defense. i think about everyone who has ever harassed me. i can’t tell if i am more afraid of this man or of the world who nurtured him. i can’t tell the difference between him and everyone else in my life who wanted to love me but ended up hurting me instead.

a person on the tram screamed, “hey you can’t do that — he just fell! he apologized!” i wince at them calling me “he” but i am grateful. so grateful. in that moment i want to write hundreds of love poems for that person. i want to hug them and say, “i have been waiting for you for my entire life.” and then that man screamed, “if you don’t shut up i will hit him harder.” “i will hit him harder”

and i am back to being nothing. back to being all word, and no body. back to being that thing that belongs on a stage and not a tram. and that man looked at me in the eyes like he wanted to destroy me — or rather, that man looked at me in the eyes like he had already destroyed something inside himself and was coming for me next— screamed “i am okay with gay people, but you are too much!” he screamed: “i am okay with gay people but you are too much!” and then he got off on the next stop. i do not say anything. i am still, quiet. i want to be invisible. i want to disappear.

at 3:30pm i get off the tram and my friend asks me if i’m okay and i say, “i am fine. i am used to this.” and what scares me most perhaps more than that man on the tram was how utterly unfazed i was by his violence. how i could continue on with my day. how normal it felt to go from being assaulted in public to preparing for my next show: slip into the next outfit, put on your makeup, repeat. how so many of the femmes in my life have been forced to live their lives like this, “it could have been worse.” (call it, tradition)

at 7:30pm over dinner my first response is to intellectualize trauma: thank you stranger on the tram for making explicit how the gay movement has only become successful by distancing itself from gender non-conformity. but what i am learning is that it is easier for me to theorize than it is to heal. i am learning the difference between verbalizing and internalizing: one stops at the mouth, the other begins in your gut. all i am is scared, lonely, and hurt. all i am is scared, lonely and hurt. and isn’t that enough?

it is 8am a few days later when i first cry. i am talking to my mother on the phone. she says she has been trying to reach me for hours. i feel the desperation in her voice. and i am reminded that even if i can’t yet love myself, that i do love her. and that her voice is one of the only places in the world i feel safe anymore. and i start crying in that airport terminal where everyone thinks i am a man because i am wearing pants and a shirt because i am scared, lonely and hurt. and i promise her that i will be more careful. i do not know what this means. it was daylight. it was in public. i was with a friend. what else could i have done? but i am good at words. it’s what i do. so i say, “i will be more careful” like i mean it. like my best performance yet. and we both try our best to believe me. 

that night i go on the stage at 8pm. i am wearing a dress. i say, “the only place i feel powerful is on the stage, do you understand?” after the show a young person approaches me and my body tenses up. these days when strangers approach me i am often afraid that they will assault me. they ask, “how are you getting home tonight? do you need a ride?” 

i hug them. say, 
“thank you.”

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Gender Euphoria

I was going to wait to post this photo until I could accompany it with a poem about the street harassment I experienced in this outfit. But then I started thinking about why I needed to define the narrative of this outfit -- of myself -- by other people's hatred. Which goes to say, recently I've been thinking about how all of the narratives out there about trans people, and especially transfeminine people, are defined by the violence we experience. 

What gets lost here is the joy of being trans. 

I've been thinking a lot about joy recently. What makes me wake up and look like this when I know that people will try their best to bring me down? What makes me keep going even though I don't see an expiration date for being harassed, disregarded, shoved, insulted, laughed at? 

And what I started to realize is that the delight I experience when I look at myself and who I am femmifesting is unparalleled, ancestral, soul-affirming. The joy of not having to define and live my life by imposed standards and borders. The joy of being able to constantly change, adapt, re-invent, shift, transform. 

And that got me thinking: Could it be that the reason we experience so much oppression is because of their repression? Could it be that the reason we are harassed is because others too recognize our joy? Could it be that they cannot take us because they have become accustomed to their own misery?

I want so badly for the world to feel entitled to its joy, to its pleasure, to its delight. I want so badly for people to give themselves permission to try, transgress, transcend. I want so badly to be able to walk down the street without having the joy punished out of me. I want so badly to share this with you. This (un)becoming. This invitation. This joy.

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Transition is Constant

Narratives of "transition" always feel hard for me. It's not as if I was once one gender and have now become another. It's not as if my identity, my personhood has ever been defined solely by gender. Rather, it's that I (and by the way I think you, too) am in a constant state of transformation and gender is just part of that. The constellation of ideas and people and aesthetics and places I have encountered in my life have fundamentally changed "me."

I struggle with how (Western) society is obsessed with the idea of having one self/identity. I struggle with how the only way we talk about gender is as an identity. I think gender just like our "selves" is relational. I think we have been and will become many selves for many different people. So pursuits like "authenticity" aren't about striving for some far away truth, but rather an acknowledgement (perhaps a submission) to the constant ebb and flow of change. We are all just sort of orbiting around and responding to a whole host of emotions and ideas and experiences and sometimes that involves is changing how we look, how we describe ourselves, the words and images we use to give meaning to our interior life.

Which goes to say here is a ‪#‎tbt‬ photo of me four years ago when I wore different things and said different words and used different language to describe my body. I don't experience this person as masculine or as a boy or as wrong I experience this person as a product of his/her/their time and place. And that's okay.

So here is to not being confined to the dilemma of the "now," here is to a sincere commitment to relationality, here is to a world that remembers how to believe in one another's infinite capacity to transform. We are far too tremendous to be reduced to the prophecy of perpetual sameness.
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why i take selfies

i took this selfie before leaving the house today. this is before a man right outside my door looked at me and said "what the fuck is that!?" his friends began to follow and record me until i couldn't take it so i got into a taxi. in the car i looked at this selfie of me & i remember how powerful i felt when i took it. i remember how fun it was to get ready. i remember the delight of seeing my chest hair and my lipstick and my floral all together. most of all i remember feeling safe, feeling at peace. i have been thinking a lot recently about what selfies mean to me and why i am so moved by them. today i remembered in the car that what selfies allow me to do is to remember who i am, what i am fighting for, and what the world i want to create looks like. a selfie is an earnest invitation into the world i am making for myself. "WTF?" is the number one reaction i get leaving my house. and i feel like i finally am coming up with an answer. what you see is someone just trying to figure it out. someone desperately trying to remember what it means to prioritize my joy over your fear. what you see is someone trying my best to find meaning in a world that continues to think it knows what's best for me. what you see is someone is equally confident and equally scared, is someone is someone who needs your help to get free. 

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