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Trans people may choose not to consume transphobic media; we have no choice about living in a world shaped by this misinformation.
We push for the inclusion of these words into our common lexicon because, without them, it is so much easier to pretend that we’re too impossible to exist.
You have to run the gauntlet to prove your worth. If you don’t want it enough to expose yourself to violence, ridicule, the loss of employment, the loss of a home, then you don’t want it enough to be sure.
We hold off our transitions until it is transition or die. We are encouraged to do so. And some of us die. Many of us who live have tried to.
Social dysphoria: the collision between who we are, how we should be, how we need to express ourselves and live our lives, and the gendered straitjackets others would force us into. It is the misery, the wrongness, of being forced to live a lie. The pain of being called fakes for our authenticity. It is being turned invisible, which serves a dual role: not only is our disquieting presence removed, but the pain we experience as a result can be safely ignored.
Trying to deny us the right to exist as we know we are is to deny us the right to exist.
Proprioception broadly translates to the sense we have of the body as a physical entity: its position in space, a sensory map, its relationship to itself. It is what allows us to move without watching that movement, to truly inhabit our own physicality in a physical world. It’s crucial to our spatial awareness.
Sex is not just what is seen by an outside observer—it’s how the body knows itself.
IT IS NOT only that mental health care can be cut off for being trans, but that transition-related care can be cut off for being mentally ill.
The hardest part, though, the part that will be so familiar to other trans people, was the fact that it wasn’t just my peers who rejected and judged me—it was some adults also.
I had ambitions, I had things that I loved but, against that constant pain, it was often hard to hold on to something as nebulous as a hope that it would get better, or a daydream about my future career. Sometimes, I couldn’t imagine how things could be different, and sometimes I felt as though I didn’t deserve to live.
Attraction to a trans person is more usually seen as a joke and a failure. If we match normative standards of what it is to be beautiful then we’re deceptive; if we don’t we’re pathetic. All that we are, all that we could bring to a relationship, is swept away in that judgment: unworthy, repugnant, fake.
It’s the message I received from men and women, gay and straight, who have admitted their attraction and followed it with “you confuse me”—not that these people are confused, but that I am responsible for their confusion.
Listening taught me that the labels that confined me could liberate others.
It may be surprising, then, to learn that trans people are far more likely to be bisexual, gay or lesbian than cis people are.
I need feminism. I need it not because I am a woman but because, no matter what lens the world uses to view me through, I am subject to gender-based abuses, founded on the idea that there is one, hierarchical, coercive gender system.
Life is seldom perfect, and everyone knows the sometime necessity of a compromise. But if we accept the necessity—the desirability—of offering up the lives of others to improve our own, then we have already lost.
Something is happening—something powerful and exhilarating and frequently terrifying—but it is an edge state: I couldn’t tell you upon which side we will fall. Trying to balance on that edge is dangerous, exhausting, a constant wash of adrenaline.
Nearly every gain I could quote for you has its flipside. That backlash is not distributed equally, and those who already suffer the most are inevitably those who are made to suffer more.
Health care, education, the prison system, the justice system, borders and immigration, cultural mores: in every part of society trans people are suffering, and they are suffering in multiple ways. How can we claim to be a community and then insist that it is necessary to leave any one of us behind?
