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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.
Like if you remove our clothing, our makeup, and our pronouns, underneath the surface we are just men and women playing dress up.
Repression breeds insecurity breeds violence.
People judge gender non-conformity because they are insecure about their identities.
Power can be defined as the ability to make a particular perspective seem universal.
When it comes to gender non-conforming people, we are still at square one—still having to argue that we are real.
Just because an opinion is widely held does not make it right.
Gender is not what people look like to other people; it is what we know ourselves to be.
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. This science-opinion binary is oversimplified, especially when it comes to issues of gender and sexuality.
The idea that humans have a binary sex is a relatively recent phenomenon from the 1700s. Before then, it was a widely held belief by experts that humans were inherently both male and female. In the nineteenth century, scientists believed that binary sex was only possible in white people, who were seen as more “advanced” than other races.
