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This is how it has always worked: 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 issue is not that we are failing to be men or women. It’s that the criteria used to evaluate us to begin with is the problem.
They tell us to “be ourselves,” but if you listen closely, there’s more to that sentence: “. . . until you make them uncomfortable.” Be yourself until you make them uncomfortable.
I have learned that the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.
The thing about being visibly gender non-conforming is that we are rarely, if ever, defended by other people in public. Everyone thinks that since we “made a choice” to “look like that,” we are bringing it upon ourselves. The only reason people can fathom why we would look this way is because we want to draw attention to ourselves. They can’t even consider that maybe we look like this for ourselves, and not for other people. We are reduced to a spectacle. And when you are a spectacle, the harassment you experience becomes part of the show.
How do you express pain when you can’t even locate the wound?
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.
How are you supposed to be believed about the harm that you experience when people don’t even believe that you exist?
I couldn’t understand why something that gave me so much joy could be met with so much judgment.
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.
Most of this advice was offered with genuine concern. I suppose some people wanted to protect me from bullying and didn’t realize that they were bullying me in the process.
The thing about shame is that it eats at you until it fully consumes you. Then you cannot tell the difference between their shame and your own— between a body and an apology. It’s not just that you internalize the shame; rather, it becomes you.
I didn’t go to the restroom in middle school and high school because I was so afraid. As soon as I got home, I would rush to the toilet. This is what happens when fear becomes stronger than need: The body becomes its own closet.
Puppppppy
That’s the thing about being an LGBTQIA+ kid—you often don’t have the luxury to come into yourself on your own terms because other people have made up their minds for you.
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.
We are both too much and never enough. We are always made out to be the problem. But maybe we aren’t the problem; maybe the whole gender system is. Whose definitions are we prioritizing, anyway?
Yassss
At its heart, discrimination against gender non-conforming people happens because of a system that rewards conformity and not creativity. Rather than celebrating people who express themselves on their own terms, we repress them.
Why couldn’t I just say who I was without the caveat? Why did there have to be that tension? I needed to put other people down in order to bring myself up. To make myself real, I had to invalidate other people; to make myself right, I had to say other people were wrong. This was my internalized self-hatred on display.
This is how shame works: It recruits you into doing its work for you. It’s a chain reaction. Our parents shamed us because their parents shamed them because theirs shamed them, and so on. A cycle of violence.
What we look like isn’t gross; what is truly disgusting is how we shame one another for our physical appearances.
Amen
Power can be defined as the ability to make a particular perspective seem universal. Control is how power maintains itself; anyone who expresses another perspective is punished.
Most can be grouped into four categories: dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope. These are strategies that people use to make the gender binary seem like a given, not a decision.
Omg i love this
“It’s common sense that everyone is a man or a woman.” 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. These perspectives are told so often that we begin to see them as universal truths.
The selective outcry over new words to describe gender and sexuality—amidst the thousands of words that are added to the dictionary every year—is about prejudice, not principle. If these people are so averse to change, why aren’t they outlawing the use of bingeable or taking more public stances on the use of the Oxford comma?
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.
The goal of gender-neutral language 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.
Using gender-neutral language isn’t about being politically correct, it’s just about being correct.
“We all have an innate tendency for the gender binary because this is how humans reproduce.” First off, this claim has long been used as a tool of discrimination. People in power make hierarchies and stereotypes seem natural in order to make inequality seem inevitable and permanent.
Trans people are diverse and complex. Our experiences of our genders and bodies do not need to be universal to be valid. Being real is not a scarce resource, and it is possible to hold a diversity of experiences without creating hierarchies.
“If we allow people to self-determine their genders, then anyone can say that they are a man or a woman!” What’s behind this fear is an assumption that there is one stable and shared experience of manhood or womanhood and that if we move beyond this one definition, man and woman will stop having meaning. But the fact of the matter is that there are many experiences of manhood and womanhood. No individual woman experiences all the issues that every woman can go through.
“If we provide protections and accommodations on the basis of gender identity, then women will be harmed.” The 2015 US Transgender Survey found that about one in ten trans and gender non-conforming people were physically attacked in the past year, and nearly half are survivors of sexual violence. The numbers are likely higher because of underreporting. Trans and gender non-conforming people are actually more likely to be assaulted while using public accommodations, not the other way around.
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.
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.
