Accept Us When We Are Not Fabulous

Do you accept trans women & femmes when we are not fabulous? when we are not dressed impeccably? when we are not wearing dresses or skirts or makeup? when we are not wearing anything at all? do you look at our nudity and see masculinity? when we say "i am not a man," that means this body is not a man's body, this hair is not a man's hair, these genitals are not a man's genitals, these hands are not a man's hands.

or is your acceptance of us dependent on how much we inspire you? is your inclusion of us contingent on how much we look like you?

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Trans People Are Not Discourse

I will never get over the reduction of trans people to topics, ideas, metaphors, scapegoats, topics, beliefs, controversies, moral panics, props, symbols, etc. We are people with diverse and vast experiences. We are complex. We have emotions and lives and dreams and desires. Resist the temptation and indeed the incentive to reduce us to discourse.

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You Can't Divide Billions Into Two

I believe dividing the billions of people in the world with all of their histories, traditions, cultures, and ways of being into one of two categories: "male or female" is tragic, dystopic, and reductive.

I believe there are as many genders and sexualities as there are people in this world. I do not believe that queer, trans, and gender non-conforming people are minorities -- I believe that we have become minoritized (and there is a difference).

Could it be that we have been made to fear the very ideas, the very people, that most have the potential to set us free?

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Friendship Is About Being Unreasonable

i had this moment last night when i was having dinner with a new friend and we were talking about anxiety. and we kept on finding ourselves saying that it was "unreasonable" that we were so anxious about "things beyond our control." but nonetheless we stayed steadfast and we listened to one another be unreasonable. and later that night i started to think about friendship and for me how friendship is about a commitment to being positively unreasonable with one another. what i mean is we live in a world that constantly shames us for the ways we have come to survive, for our coping strategies, for the ways we have been bruised. we live in a world that makes us fixate on small things because we know they are actually about big things. and there is something joyous and full of relief in being able to sit with someone and just bear witness say: "what you are experiencing is real and valid and i do not care if it is reasonable or not." i wonder if the anxiety is compounded by the fact that we have been made to feel like it's unreasonable. i wonder what it would look like if we threw out reason all to begin with and found another way to relate to each other. i'm trying to do that in my life -- to stop trying to find reasons, linearity, point A point B, simple origin stories. i'm increasingly realizing that none of us have simple stories. we are as complex as all of the things that have been done to us. we are as complex as all of the things that have been done to us.

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The Inevitability of Cyber Harrasment for GNC People

another day, another instance of my photo and representation being used without my consent for memes to ridicule me & gender non-conforming people and advance horribly racist messages. 

just a reminder that these days participating on the internet as an openly gender non-conforming trans femme person means knowing that inevitably your likeness is going to be used for foolishness like this -- means constantly being reminded that you lack the basic power of ownership of your own body. 

seriously folks this is what trans femmes are fighting for: the basic ownership of our bodies from your fantasies, nightmares, and projections. how are we even supposed to talk about the issues we face when you don't even permit us that? 

please hug and fight for all the trans femmes of color in your life....you never know what their inboxes look like, you never know the ways in which they experience violence at the most intimate and pervasive levels. 

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Call Me They

hello @ world just a gentle reminder that i use gender neutral pronouns no matter what i look like (even if you think i "look like a man" cause of racism & transmisogyny lol). 

just a reminder that gender is who we are not what we look like. 

just a reminder that we were born & indoctrinated in societies who recruited us into gender binary ways of doing and thinking cause of capitalism, colonialism, and other rly mean stuff and part of the way we challenge that is by checking in with people about how they want to be addressed. 

just a reminder that 'they' can be used a singular pronoun, but also btw i like it as a plural pronoun because it reminds me (and maybe you!) that i am part of something bigger than myself -- a long legacy of people living and dreaming outside of gender. 

just a reminder that i don't think gender neutral pronouns are *who i am* they are just what i use to show *who i am not* because ideally i'd like to live in a world where gender wasn't relevant to your perception of my being at all, lol. 

ok anyways ttyl have a good day cool thanks x

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Stop Saying "Brothers and Sisters"

with the trump administration's withdrawal of federal protections for trans students and the swift and widespread #ProtectTransKids response many non-trans people have expressed their solidarity with their "transgender brothers and sisters."

this is a well intentioned gesture of inclusivity that relies on the continued exclusion of nonbinary and gender variant people.

transgender people are not just "men" or "women," "ladies" or "gentleman," "brothers," or "sisters." many of us live and navigate the world outside of the gender binary.

this is not an isolated instance: "LGBT" inclusivity often relies on and further perpetuates the denial of nonbinary and gender variant people. this is not just about semantics, it's about real experiences of violence. it is important to name, recognize, and strategize around the fact that it is often nonbinary and gender variant people who experience the brunt of anti-trans discriminatory policies (often because we may be the most visible).

the question remains: will solidarity with trans people move beyond facile expressions of support toward serious engagement with actual trans politics and experiences?

it is time to fight with transgender "people" not just transgender "brothers and sisters."

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Never Ending Grief

how do you cope with a grief that has no beginning or ending? how do you cope with structural sorrow? how do you process a permanent pain? we need forms of healing that address trauma not just as a moment, but as a condition of being itself.

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support trans intelligence

what is becoming increasingly apparent to me is that trans women & femmes of color are only invited in the room to share about our "journeys" and not about our ideas and politics. 

part of transmisogyny is the reduction of trans life to *experience* and not *intelligence.* 

the idea here is that trans women & femmes lack the capacity to comment on larger structures and can only speak about ourselves. 

what this does is make transfemininity something assumed to be shameful ("tell me more about how you came to accept yourself!" read: why would anyone want to be like you). what this does is make this thing 'gender' and especially this thing 'gender non-conformity' only the domain of trans femmes -- a logic which hurts us because we become minoritized even though others also have genders and femininities. 

trans life reduced to journey and experience provides fodder for cis people to theorize us and to politicize our experiences of violence and abstract them to effect the whole "LGBT community." this is about stabilizing cis supremacy: trans people are always objects for inquiry, for inspiration, for intrigue to be equally dissected and admired and demonized by cis people. 

i know intimately that if i were to speak about things beyond my body -- climate change, history, pop culture -- it will always be collapsed to metaphor or expression of my personal identity/journey. i know that i am forcibly denied abstraction because my gender makes me always treated as literal. 

what would it mean to commit to trans intelligence? to have trans femmes speaking and writing and dreaming on a host of topics with credibility and acknowledged rigor? 

it would require the explicit naming of transmisogyny -- how trans women & femmes are reduced to aesthetic objects for cis fantasy and consumption. it would require the collective responsibility of non-trans femme LGBT people to aggressively and consistently center trans femme intelligence at all levels, not just the *trans* ones. it would require us all challenging the misogyny and racism embedded in separating "experience" from "knowledge" itself.

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#protecttransyouth

sending my love & rage to all of the protesters speaking out against trump's anti-trans tomfoolery. 

i have been getting a lot of messages from trans youth about how to keep going when there is so much state-sanctioned violence against us and how i push through. 

the truth is it was & continues to be devastating to be trans femme. whatever pride i have in myself is constantly challenged by routine harassment. 

i grew up in a small conservative town in texas where i didn't use the restroom once in middle school or high school because i was afraid of entering the men's room. i didn't yet know what i was, but i knew what i was not: one of them. 

to cope i become very disembodied & didn't let people touch me. most of all i recall an overwhelming sense of isolation & hopelessness. my body and mental health suffered tremendously because of it. 

these days i still get harassed in bathrooms every week -- & have to plan my days thinking about where and how i can change & pee safely. 

what i mean to say is that for many trans youth -- especially transfeminine people of color -- it doesn't get better. there is no magical end to the bullying, no safe space to pee let alone BE. 

but what i can say is that i have seen now how trans activists have & continue to resist for hundreds of years. & there is comfort in being connected to that struggle -- knowing that you are part of something greater than yourself. 

so i can't offer false promises, but what i can offer is my raised middle finger, my heart, my determination to fight as hard as i can for you and for us. 

you are part of an ancestral legacy of healers and warriors and dreamers have been punished for embodying the kind of world that is so urgent that people are afraid of their own desire for it. the person that you are and the work that you are doing is not just valid, it is important & powerful. i am so sorry that they are so jealous of your brilliance, your honesty, your courage. know that there are many people in the world who do not know you, but love you nonetheless, regardless of what you look like & what you have to do to survive.

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challenge transmisogyny in the art world

what i need you to understand is the only place for transfeminine people in the art world is the stage because transmisogyny teaches you that our genders are themselves only performative and because of that the only artistry we are capable of is our appearance.

what i need you to understand is that transfeminine people are constantly made aware of the fact that we are the only one in the room, in the gallery, in the curation. we are made aware of this fact by constantly being misgendered even if our work is being used in the service of branding as "progressive" or "inclusive." 

what i need you to understand is that it is a very different project to advocate for more cis women artists than it is to advocate against (trans)misogyny. the thing is when we say we want "more women artists" without saying "we want to challenge the very conditions that made it so impossible for women's artistry to be recognized" what you get is a feeble and symbolic gesture of progress, not a substantive shift in paradigm. 

what i want you to understand is that transfeminine people are some of the most brilliant creatives I have ever met in my life it's just that you don't know of them yet not because they aren't making work, but because you don't regard it as real work -- and at a more fundamental level you don't regard them/us as real people.

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