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It is an article of clothing! It’s like saying, “Hey, everyone, look! It’s . . . a lamppost!”
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.
To speak about the violence would mean acknowledging that I was different from the people around me, which would result in more violence.
I couldn’t talk to my parents about it because I felt like they would stop loving me if they knew that I was different.
And this . . . this is a good thing! Being self-reflective and open to transformation is something we should celebrate, not fear.
The gender binary is more concerned with gender norms than it is with us.
At its heart, discrimination against gender non-conforming people happens because of a system that rewards conformity and not creativity.
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.
We accept the fact that this is the way things are and have always been. For large periods of history, it was “common sense” that Black people and people of color were inferior and that this supposed inferiority justified discrimination, genocide, and slavery. Just because an opinion is widely held does not make it right.
They say that gender non-conforming people, in particular, are caught up on some new fad: that we are inventing language, identities, pronouns, and genders. But language and grammar have always been developed to meet the needs of society. Consider
It’s not that gender non-conforming people aren’t normal, it’s that we aren’t considered normative.
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.
There are many women with body hair and facial hair and many men without it. Not all women are able to bear children and not all men are physically strong. There are many men with curves and many women without them. Differences and the variation within categories are glossed over to exaggerate differences between sexes.
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.
Gender is a story, not just a word. There are as many ways to be a woman as there are women. There are as
many ways to be a man as there are men. There are as many ways to be nonbinary as there are nonbinary people.
