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Our existence is made into a matter of opinion, as if our genders are debatable and not just who we are.
Regardless of whether these pieces of legislation pass, the fact that they are even being considered suggests just how disposable we are considered to be.
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. Gender non-conformity is seen as something immature, something we have to grow out of to become adults.
This is what happens when fear becomes stronger than need: The body becomes its own closet.
There’s magic in being seen by people who understand—it gives you permission to keep going. Self-expression sometimes requires other people. Becoming ourselves is a collective journey.
True acceptance doesn’t look like having to change who you are in order to be embraced. Conditional acceptance is not freedom—we shouldn’t have to erase our differences in order to be respected.
Jealousy, even when disguised with big language, is still jealousy—an emotion that makes both you and me small.
itself; anyone who expresses another perspective is punished. Arguments against gender non-conforming people are about maintaining power and control. Most can be grouped into four categories: dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope.
Imagine everyone you encounter all day long telling you that you are not real and that there is something fundamentally wrong with you. Being constantly invalidated takes a toll: 40 percent of trans and gender non-conforming people have attempted suicide. Emotional and physical violence are not in competition with each other. It is possible to acknowledge one without invalidating the other.
Acceptance, on the other hand, is about integrating difference into your own life: “This is about something that I’m a part of, and I need to learn more to better help.”
is to get rid of gender normativity, not everyone’s gender. While gendered language might be helpful to describe individual experiences, gender-neutral language helps us be more inclusive when talking about groups. Individual men and women have valid experiences as men and women, but these cannot necessarily be generalized.
People in power make hierarchies and stereotypes seem natural in order to make inequality seem inevitable and permanent.
While we are beginning to recognize a plurality of ways to be a man or a woman, we still have such limited understandings of what it means to be transgender. This is because transgender narratives are often determined by the medical establishment, rather than our own experiences.
Man and woman don’t lose their meaning when we recognize the diversity and difference within them; rather, they invite us to be more specific.
This is how power works: It makes the actual people experiencing violence seem like a threat. Moving from a place of fear leads us to make harmful assumptions about one another. In our fear, we treat other people’s identities as if they are something that they are doing to us and not something that just exists.
We spend so much time trying to make other people comfortable that oftentimes we don’t even know what makes us happy.
