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The best way to eliminate a group is to demonize them, such that their disappearance is seen as an act of justice, not discrimination.
The days that I feel most beautiful are the days that I am most afraid.
I do not have the luxury of being. I am only seen as doing. As if my gender is something that is being done to them and not something that belongs to me.
I learned about gender through shame. In so many ways, they became inseparable for me. As I grew older, people told me to stop being so feminine and grow up.
There’s magic in being seen by people who understand—it gives you permission to keep going.
At its heart, discrimination against gender non-conforming people happens because of a system that rewards conformity and not creativity.
People judge gender non-conformity because they are insecure about their identities.
At the time, I thought conforming would make me happier, but instead it just made me more lonely.
Common sense is what happens when a particular point of view is regarded as the status quo because it’s held by the people in power, not necessarily because it is right.
For large periods of history, it was “common sense” that Black people and people of color were inferior
Normativity looks like a specific sneaker brand being upheld as the best.
Gender non-conforming people are not opportunisitic; we are oppressed.
40 percent of trans and gender non-conforming people have attempted suicide.
tolerance is not the same thing as acceptance.
As of 2016, there are 1.4 million openly transgender people in the United States, and that’s hardly insignificant.
Gender is not what people look like to other people; it is what we know ourselves to be. No one else should be able to tell you who you are; that’s for you to decide.
For example, when we say that women give birth, we neglect that some women are not capable of giving birth while some trans men and nonbinary people are. The gender-neutral alternative “people who give birth” holds all of these realities just like the gender-neutral “siblings” includes brothers, sisters, and nonbinary siblings.
people use the word biological to position trans and gender non-conforming people as artificial and everyone else as natural.
In 2018, in response to pervasive anti-trans legislation, over 2,500 distinguished scientists released a statement noting that the idea of the gender binary has no biological basis.
Biology and culture are yet another false binary. Nothing exists in a cultural vacuum. Sex is not only biological, it is also cultural.
Often critics of gender non-conforming people are more concerned with the conception of life than they are with the care and social structures needed to sustain it.
doing the very things that they are doing to us. They say that we are erasing them as they actively erase the long history of cultures outside the Western gender binary. They say that we are making things up as they invent hundreds of new laws to legislate us out of existence. They say that we are pretending as they recite the scripts about gender they have been taught. They say that we are attacking them as hate crimes against trans and gender non-conforming people increase.
man and woman are two of many—stars in a constellation that do not compete but amplify one another’s shine.
Gender is a story, not just a word.
