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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.
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.
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?
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.
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 do not make art from following the rules. We make art precisely from imagining beyond them.
At its heart, discrimination against gender non-conforming people happens because of a system that rewards conformity and not creativity.
Repression breeds insecurity breeds violence.
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.
Power can be defined as the ability to make a particular perspective seem universal.
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.
It’s important to understand the difference between being “normal” and being “normative.” Being normal means that a numerically significant amount of something is found in a group. For example, if you select a random group
of students, chances are a large percentage will be wearing sneakers. This is normal. Being normative is about what gets elevated by society to a position of power. Normativity looks like a specific sneaker brand being upheld as the best. Normativity, then, is about value judgment and shouldn’t be used interchangeably with normal.
Pain does not have to be visible to be real, and violence does not have to be physical to be serious.
Tolerance is always about maintaining distance: “This is about something over there that doesn’t concern me.” 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.”
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. Individual men and women have valid experiences as men and women, but these cannot necessarily be generalized. 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
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Scientific knowledge is not fixed—it shifts as cultural prejudice is revealed and challenged. Oftentimes we associate “scientific knowledge” with knowledge itself, dismissing everything else as just opinion.
The fact that doctors still perform non-consensual and non-medically necessary surgeries on intersex people just because they are different shows how binary sex—like binary gender—is a political construction.
The world we want is one in which all people, regardless of their appearances, are treated with dignity and respect—one in which these factors do not have a bearing on safety, employment, and opportunity. We want a world that acknowledges and appreciates the complexity of everyone and everything—one in which transformation is celebrated and not repressed. We want a world where people have an underlying worth regardless of their gender.
