The Difference Between Trans Rights and Ending the Gender Binary

We are not just fighting for “trans rights,” we are fighting to end the gender binary.

This is not about individuals, it’s about ideologies. There are cis people who are against the gender binary and trans people who perpetuate it. “Trans rights” is about a minoritized population. Challenging the gender binary is about everyone. Trans rights is about supporting trans people, terminating the gender binary is about ending gender norms.

The gender binary is the root cause of gender-based violence. No matter how much you decorate it, it is a fundamentally violent system that cannot be redeemed. There is no feminist gender binary. Binary thinking requires hierarchy and stereotype over reality.

It’s concerning how the narrative becomes that we, the hyper-emotional non-binary “social justice warriors” are taking away all of the fun. This is the same response that cis women received from men in advocating for suffrage: people struggling for the recognition of their humanity are dismissed as selfish saboteurs because they’re inconvenient to the status quo.

We fear the loss of the gender binary because we don’t know who we are outside of it. The ways that we have been taught to parent, build family, structure our lives and communities are called into question. But that interrogation, it’s the beauty of being alive. We are dynamic, constantly self-healing. We are predisposed to transformation. Why would we want to remain stagnant when we could be soaring?

Trauma clouds us from seeing the difference between fearing “what might occur” (projection) fearing what actually is (reality). A world with no gender norms might seem scary, but look at the world we are in right now. The gender system isn’t working.

How exciting it is to create new ceremonies, new language, new ways of being. How splendid it is to actually experience people for who they are, not what they should be.

Abolition of the gender binary isn’t destruction. What is destruction is the forests in California that are burning because of a gender reveal. Get your priorities queer. 

art by @gs.crafty

Imaginal Cells

Navigating mental health during quarantine has been difficult. I have never felt more isolated. I have never felt more conviction. As with most immense and transformative events — there is no evidence of this quiet revolution. There is just me documenting a moment, futile like trying to keep water in the cusp of my hands. There is a crack in every surface. A tear in every fabric. I am residing there: in the broken parts that are actually, upon arrival, more honest than anything.

The avoidance strategies and defense mechanisms I refined for years have dried up. In this stillness I have to confront so much of what’s been dormant. No, what was buried alive. What was buried so that I could stay alive.

Narrativity is how I learned to establish some semblance of security despite all of the precarity around me. The stories I told about the world became my world. I became a story teller because that’s where I could be in control. Growing up it was: “I am going to work so hard so that I can get out of here.” And then I got out, but then another there become another here became another there became another here. And i kept running to the noise to drown my intuition. And I worked so hard, my body it broke.

So much of what I want and what I am feels impossible. But what is impossible is only what cannot be imagined. And what is imagined is only determined by the stories that are being told.

I think this is my way of saying — I am trying to learn that what I feel isn’t necessarily what is. I am suspending one story for another. I am learning how caterpillars must digest themselves in order to transform. In their remains there are imaginal cells, discs which activate only in this self-destruction. They hold the blueprint for every part of their new body.

I am learning that sometimes transformation requires self-annihilation. I am choosing dissolution over disassociation. I am becoming undone so that I can be remade again. It hurts.

I Am Here, Waiting to Heal Together

Every time I receive hateful reactions to my appearance I remember how grateful I am that I have access to friends who helped me transform my pain and resentment into poetry and resplendence.

I used to be so self-hating: my internalized homophobia/transphobia/misogyny/racism made me feel like I had to disappear myself in order to be worthy, made me distance myself from everything different, lash out at any perceived threat to my normalcy. It was a hollow life — one where I sought the myth of sameness as if it would keep me safe. But it didn’t. Nothing I could do was ever enough. I was always wanting, aspirational, remiss.

It was only through the care and compassion of my friends that I began to embrace self-acceptance. And through self-acceptance I began to accept that everyone is different from one another and that’s totally rad, not a threat to my identity. The more I work on my self-healing, the more love I have for everyone and everything!! It’s overflowing out of me! I have so much hope, so much faith, I am overwhelmed by the beauty around me. I am so thrilled to be alive! Not just to exist: but to be alive.

I believe now in the potential for transformation, our continual becoming, because I have experienced it firsthand.

To my haters: I love and need you! I am fighting for you, too! I am sorry that you have been misled to target me and not address the crises you’re going through. I am sorry that you can’t see me outside of your anxieties and insecurities. When we take off those projections the world is so much more vibrant and three dimensional, I promise. I know that you’ve probably been so hard on yourself and been made to feel like you weren’t enough, but you are. and have always been. I believe you are worth more than conditional acceptance! You don’t have to be strong here. You don’t have to play pretend here. You are special and worthy of community who loves you for you, not your disappearing act!

I want to be in the audience at the open mic and hear about who broke your heart! I will be there in the front row cheering you on as we figure out who we are outside of what we have been told. I am here waiting to heal together.

The Idiosyncrasy of Grief

Yesterday would have been grandpa’s birthday. He passed in February. Here we are from last year. On the one hand I feel so validated that I took so many videos of him towards the end. On the other I feel so distrustful of my mind, guilty even, how much I forget, how pathetic it is that I require visual prompts. That specific memories become muffled over time, like a bad internet connection.

Photos both leave evidence and eviscerate it. Each one is both a portal and a trap door. I worry about the moments I didn’t capture. I worry about my reliance on these imperfect tools. I worry about my reliance on perfect grief. I worry about making a complex person a constellation of memories, what about the everyday modes of relating?

I miss that quiet, I covet it. My grief is idiosyncratic. One moment i am obnoxiously self-assured, whimsical in my musings about how people don’t end they become something else. The next I feel this all-consuming panic about the loss of that kind of security, that kind of love. How am I supposed to navigate this thing without him? How without him becomes synonymous with alone.

All of this strikes me as the crisis of translation: how do we convert reality into representation? How do we communicate the extent of our love and our grief? What becomes of us without bodies? I suppose “can’t” and “I don’t know” and “maybe” are candles at the altar of grief.

I get that it’s about surrender that it’s a lifelong process, these are the things i know. But selfishly I want to hold onto the mourning because then part of him is still here. These are things I feel. What I can tell you for sure is I read a Baldwin quote today that made me weep because it reminded me of him: “A real writer is always shifting and changing and searching. The world has many labels for him, of which the most treacherous is the label of success. But the man behind the label knows defeat far more intimately than he knows triumph. He can never be absolutely certain that he has achieved his intention.”

I suppose then for both of us — writers — the move is simultaneously cultivating intention and surpassing certainty. It feels impossible, but then again, so was he.

Why They Turn Us Into Memes

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.

We Proliferate Possibility: The Legacy of Trans Resistance

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.

International Non-Binary Awareness Day

Today is international non-binary awareness day! Despite recent gains in visibility, our community continues to be misunderstood, scapegoated, and dismissed. We are accused of “making up” our identities when in fact the gender binary — the political division and regulation of billions of people into two, opposite genders — is a recent Western historical invention. We did not cross the gender binary, the binary crossed us.

Living a visibly gender non-conforming life is one of the most difficult things I have ever endured. I am constantly at risk. There are few places where I can look like myself without fear. I am made into a repository for everyone else’s projections. I am so exhausted, in so much pain.

But it has also been one of the most meaningful experiences of my life. I am part of a vibrant legacy of people who have persisted despite attempted erasure for hundreds of years, I have found beauty in so many places where I was taught shame, my friendships are deep and vulnerable, I know firmly and irrevocably who I am.

Gender and sexual diversity are fundamental parts of humanity. We are not the problem, the gender binary is the problem. It’s not enough to support non-binary people, all of us need to work together toward ending the gender binary.

Because of the ongoing project of disappearing being outside the ambit of western gender binary, information about non-binary people is sparse, absented from school curricula and mainstream media.

That’s why i wrote an accessible book for all ages called #BeyondTheGenderBinary ! I have been moved by how non-binary people have championed this book, but it’s also so important that cisgender people learn this information and join us in creating a world that values people beyond gender norms. 

You can order a copy here.

Fight Against Patriarchy, Not For Cis Privilege

It’s not a contradiction that cis women claim to know trans people better than we know ourselves (as they critique cis men for doing the same to the them). It’s not ironic that cis women legislate around trans bodies (as they condemn cis men for doing the same to them). It’s not a discrepancy that cis women deploy the rhetoric of biology to justify discrimination against trans people (as they denounce cis men for using it to discredit them).

It’s just two sides of the same coin. Trans exclusionary feminism is patriarchy. So many women are fighting for cis privilege, not against patriarchy. There’s a difference.

This is not about a few bad apples. This is about a system of patriarchy which rewards people for upholding heteronormativity, sustaining the gender binary, and distancing from gender non-conformity.

Womanhood is far more expansive than reproductive function. There are plenty of men and non-binary people who can give birth and plenty of women who cannot.

But this has never been about facts or even cognition. This has always been about a deep, ingrained hatred and distrust of us. In order for patriarchy to work we must be demeaned and disappeared.

It makes me so sad. So scared. So, so tired.

Trans Exclusionary Feminists Masquerade Racism as Feminism

In response to JK Rowling’s recent bout of transmisogyny some are saying that she should have “read the room” and realized that this moment of global uprising against anti-Black racism is not the time. Actually — she did. This is her response: white backlash. Policing and fortifying gender/sex boundaries has always been a tactic of white supremacy.

Racist eugenicists in the West long believed that Black people, Indigenous people and people of color were “less developed” than white people. They used evidence of queer and gender non-conforming expression to characterize racialized people as “backwards,” and needing “uplift.”

To differentiate themselves from BIPOC, they argued that only white people could achieve a binary distinction of sexes. Racialized people — especially Black people — were seen as inherently “hermaphroditic” and gender nonconforming, stuck in a primitive past.

The sex binary was seen as a civilizational achievement of white people, one that no other race could reach. This is why when BIPOC trans people sought support in early medical clinics for gender transition they were turned away. Their gender dysphoria was seen as a marker of their “degeneracy” that couldn’t be “fixed.”

In this way, the category of woman has always been racialized. In order to maintain the guise that white people were more human than BIPOC, white men tasked white women with maintaining the boundaries of sex difference (having to look as different from them as possible to create the illusion of the binary). Genitals became conflated with sexed identity. The vagina was politicized as a link between the individual body and the white race. The purpose of sexuality became less about pleasure and more about population. Womanhood became defined by the vagina because it was white women’s job to reproduce the race.

With her remarks, Rowling is continuing a centuries long project of white supremacy. Her notions of sex/gender descend from patriarchal, racist eugenics. Ironically, she accuses us of masquerading as something we are not, but what she and so many like her, are actually doing is masquerading racism as feminism.

For further reading to learn more about these histories read:
White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States by Dr. Louise Michele Newman (Oxford University Press 1998)
The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century by Dr. Kyla Schuller (Duke University Press, 2018)
Histories of the Transgender Child by Dr. Julian Gill-Peterson (University of Minnesota Press, 2018)

art by @liberaljane

Cisness is Political, Not Biological: JK Rowling and Conditional Womanhood

Written in Response to Article “J.K. Rowling Goes Full TERF in New Series of Transphobic Tweets”

The impulse to make this about JK Rowling’s exceptional transphobia is misdirected. Her words are representative of the everyday, mundane transmisogyny of cis feminism.

Let’s be honest: JK is articulating what many cis women truly believe: that while destabilizing gender is acceptable, complicating the consecrated category of sex is going “too far.” That cis womanhood is ultimately more real, more natural, more organic than trans life. JK speaks what so many cis women think of us: “I accept you…BUT.” There’s always a caveat. A condition. Cis womanhood gets to dictate the terms of our correct and appropriate embodiment and identification.

Imagine the double standard. What would cis women say if cis men extended this kind of paternalism to them? Said: your womanhood is illegitimate because it doesn’t fit our idea of what you should be. In fact, historically this was the case. Men told women they would become “unsexed” and “mannish,” if they got the right to vote. Men would argue that “biologically” and “anatomically” women were just meant for motherhood, not political life. Women called this what it was: sexism.

Well, this is sexism.

After centuries of cis women protesting cis men’s restrictive definitions of womanhood and women’s capacities, cis women turn around and do the same intellectual work on us. In the same way that cis men claim to know cis women better than they know themselves, cis women claim they know us better than we do. We are “biological males,” not because we are, but because they say that’s what we are. There’s a difference.

In this moment where we’re critiquing non-experts posturing themselves as epidemiologists in response to COVID-19, can we extend that energy to critiquing how every day cis people posture themselves as biologists? There is no biological basis in the sex binary. There is no biological basis in defining gender and sex by genitalia.

This is nothing new: white supremacy has long manipulated the rhetoric of biology (which let’s be clear, is not actual biology) as a means to justify discrimination and inequality. In this eugenic era: when you claim difference as “biological,” it’s a speech act. You’re able to naturalize it, gloss over how difference becomes produced as an effect of specific, cultural, political, and historical choices. It is much easier to declare that something just “is,” without interrogating how something actually came to be.

This is not actually about us. This is about what we as trans people elicit in JK Rowling. Our existence requires cis people to reflect on their own self-understanding and identity. We call into question the rigidity of gender-sex norms and are a testament to the possibility of self-declaration in a world that ritualizes its opposite.

 Yes -- that is difficult and confrontational. But that is precisely what’s required for trans justice.
The stakes of trans justice aren’t simply about “granting us our rights.” This is about recalibrating society’s ideas of gender as well as “biological sex,” a framework that was specifically created by white male scientists in the 19th century to naturalize sexism. This is inevitably going to require a deep reconsideration of the grammar through which all of us have come to know ourselves.

Cisness is not about biology, it’s about politics. Cisness is a political structure that deploys the rhetoric of biology in order to collapse the profound complexity and sexual diversity of humans. The very substance, the marrow, of cis gender is transmisogyny. In order for cisness to work, trans and non-binary people have to be delegitimized and disappeared. Cis people are inaugurated as modern and *real* precisely through their disavowal of us. They know themselves by saying, “I am not that!”

That’s what JK Rowling is doing. Performing cisness. Or rather: coming out as cis. Over and over again.

sexism works

Sexism works. They comment on our appearances as a strategy to distract from and discredit our ideas. There is a delight in demeaning us, putting us back in our place on the shelf. We are not allowed to have ideas, because we just exist only as bodies. Our worth is incumbent on whether men desire us or can use us. It’s not even “his word against ours,” because we are denied access to the word. We are not allowed to speak, just be spoken to. Not allowed to think, just be thought. Not allowed to look, just be looked at.

Sexism means they think they know us better than we know ourselves. Means: I have spent a decade researching the topics I write on, I have lectured and performed at hundreds of universities all over the world, but they will always listen to cis &/ gender conforming people because of what I look like. Even supporters of transfeminine people so often fixate on our image, completely disregarding our intellect.

I am so much more than my body. I wrote #BeyondTheGenderBinary because I wanted my ideas to exist in the world outside of me. But promoting this work has felt so painful because I am reminded that people don’t want to regard my writing — they just care about my body. Use it as a character foil, a poster child, a museum object, a freak show, interchangeably here to inspire or insult (depending on who’s watching).

There is a direct correlation between how much we speak out and how much abuse we receive to shut us up. There have been so many times I have just wanted to give up. but I refuse to back down. I am part of something greater than myself. My community is under attack. Unlike me, so many of us have no support systems to endure this daily aggression.