Trans Ally Quotes

Like racism and all forms of prejudice, bigotry against transgendered people is a deadly carcinogen. We are pitted against each other in order to keep us from seeing each other as allies. Genuine bonds of solidarity can be forged between people who respect each other's differences and are willing to fight their enemy together. We are the class that does the work of the world, and can revolutionize it. We can win true liberation.

When out in public, and are uncertain of a person's gender… stop worrying about it. It doesn't matter. They are a person.

cheers to the bisexuals the lesbians, gays, and queers cheers if you liked to be called all three cheers to the trans folks to marsha p. johnson and sylvia rivera thank you for letting me be here cheers to the two-spirit to the nonbinary the questioning the not sure yet cheers to the allies cheers to everyone who did work so i could fully be me sexual experiences don’t have to define your sexuality

We’re at this really unique time, I think, in trans representation in popular culture where homelessness, depression, mental health issues, instability-in-general are still so very real and need to be talked about, but we’re aware that they’ve dominated “trans” stories for years and years. And we’re now finally at a place where we’re seeing some really positive representations of trans folks in pop culture, and there’s this new pressure -- at least, I feel it, within trans and trans-ally communities -- to only focus on the positive. Because we’re trying, in some sense, to overcompensate for the years and years of too much negativity. As a writer, you might feel a pressure to push the negative stuff away. But there are consequences for that too. Anyone who’s working with trans characters right now is going to have to reconcile that tension.

For revolutionaries, theory that is not a guide to action is a worthless intellectual exercise. Our analysis has to be as taut as a diving board that enables us to springboard into the fray, to be able to recognize allies and enemies, and put an end to economic inequality and social injustice altogether.

That night I looked Stephanie [Burt] up online and started reading more about her work...I kept encountering a striking factoid...: she’s often cited as the most influential poetry critic of her generation. And she’s openly trans. This is not the world I was taught I would grow into when I was a young trans child -- the one where transgender people are heard, are brilliant, are influential, are even the best. At anything. Being trans, I’d learned subliminally, was supposed to keep you from being that -- even if you loved your trans self, and even if some other trans people and a few allies did too, the world at large would keep your potential tamped down." - from "Surface Difficulty: An Adventure in Reading Trans Poetry," Original Plumbing Magazine 2014

Adults, whether anti-trans hate groups, trans exclusionary feminists, conservative activists, parents, so-called interested observers, or even allies and advocates, tarry within the dangerously limiting circumstances of a system that continues to assay the value of trans children’s being in terms not of their humanity and personhood but via questions absurd in their abstraction for how they ask us instead to wonder if trans children “prove something” about the biological basis of sex and gender or how identity politics have so injured a cis, white, heteronormative imaginary that cannot fathom the obvious fragility of its claims to universalism in the face of a defiant no.

OBAMA’S FRUSTRATION WITH HIS critics boiled over during a lengthy trip to Asia in the spring of 2014. In the region, the trip was seen as another carefully designed U.S. effort to counter China. We’d go to Japan, to bring them into the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)—weaving together twelve Asia Pacific economies into one framework of trade rules, environmental protections, and labor rights. We’d go to South Korea and discuss ways to increase pressure on North Korea. We’d go to Malaysia, something of a swing state in Southeast Asia, which we were bringing closer through TPP. And we’d end in the Philippines, a U.S. ally that was mired in territorial disputes with China over maritime boundaries in the South China Sea.

Wealthy queers support initiatives that lock up and murder poor queers, trans* people, and sex workers. Women in positions of power continue to defend and sometimes initiate the vicious assault on abortion and reproductive rights, and then off-load reproductive labor onto the shoulders of care workers, who are predominantly women of color whose employment is often directly tied to their citizenship status. The politics of "leaning in" for a small layer of wealthy women has dovetailed with budget cuts and health care rollbacks that have left poor women at the mercy of misogynist, increasingly lethal anti-reproductive-rights legislation, and left poor, queer and trans* people without access to necessary medical resources like hormones or AIDS medication. Original pamphlet: Who is Oakland. April 2012. Quoted in: Dangerous Allies. Taking Sides.

Echoing right-wing racist rhetoric, liberal organizations routinely smear "illegitimate," nonpacifist resistance as senseless and the work of irrational "thugs." And yet it is precisely marginalized groups utilizing these tactics--poor women of color defending their right to land and housing; trans* street workers and indigenous peoples fighting back against murder and violence; black and brown struggles against white supremacist violence--that have waged the most powerful and successful uprisings in US history. It is extremely advantageous to the powers that be for these groups to be deterred from the risks of militant self-defense, resistance, or attack. We refuse a politics that infantilizes nonwhite and/or nonmale groups, and believes that the are incapable of fighting for their own liberation, as the old saying goes, by any means necessary. Original pamphlet: Who is Oakland. April 2012. Quoted in: Dangerous Allies. Taking Sides.

In the future, white supremacy will no longer need white people,” the artist Lorraine O’Grady said in 2018, a prognosis that seemed, at least on the surface, to counter what James Baldwin said fifty years ago, which is that “the white man’s sun has set.” Which is it then? What prediction will hold? As an Asian American, I felt emboldened by Baldwin but haunted and implicated by O’Grady. I heard the ring of truth in her comment, which gave me added urgency to finish this book. Whiteness has already recruited us to become their junior partners in genocidal wars; conscripted us to be antiblack and colorist; to work for, and even head, corporations that scythe off immigrant jobs like heads of wheat. Conscription is every day and unconscious. It is the default way of life among those of us who live in relative comfort, unless we make an effort to choose otherwise. Unless we are read as Muslim or trans, Asian Americans are fortunate not to live under hard surveillance, but we live under a softer panopticon, so subtle that it’s internalized, in that we monitor ourselves, which characterizes our conditional existence. Even if we’ve been here for four generations, our status here remains conditional; belonging is always promised and just out of reach so that we behave, whether it’s the insatiable acquisition of material belongings or belonging as a peace of mind where we are absorbed into mainstream society. If the Asian American consciousness must be emancipated, we must free ourselves of our conditional existence. But what does that mean? Does that mean making ourselves suffer to keep the struggle alive? Does it mean simply being awake to our suffering? I can only answer that through the actions of others. As of now, I’m writing when history is being devoured by our digital archives so we never have to remember. The administration has plans to reopen a Japanese internment camp in Oklahoma to fill up with Latin American children. A small band of Japanese internment camp survivors protest this reopening every day. I used to idly wonder whatever happened to all the internment camp survivors. Why did they disappear? Why didn’t they ever speak out? At the demonstration, protester Tom Ikeda said, “We need to be the allies for vulnerable communities today that Japanese Americans didn’t have in 1942.” We were always here.

Black-Trans-Asian-First Peoples-Nonbinary-Otherkin-Latinx-Fatx-Allies Lives Matter.” BTAFPNOLFA Lives Matter

I am Trans. This is MY struggle and MY fight. You can be an ally, a friend, a lover, or simply leave me alone. I have enough pain, doubt, and crisis to fill a warehouse. So please, just let me be on my own battlefield in peace.

While many feminists - especially those who came of age in the 1980s and '90s - recognize that trans women can be allies in the fight to eliminate gender stereotypes, others, particularly those who embrace gender essentialism, believe that trans women foster sexism by mimicking patriarchal attitudes about femininity, or that we objectify women by trying to possess female bodies of our own. Many of these latter ideas stem from Janice Raymond's 1979 book 'The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-male', which is perhaps the most infamous feminist writing on transsexuals. Like the media makers discussed earlier, Raymond assumes that trans women transition in order to achieve stereotypical femininity, which she believes is an artificial by-product of a patriarchal society. Raymond does acknowledge, reluctantly, the existence of trans women who are not stereotypically feminine, but she reserves her most venomous remarks for those she calls 'transsexually constructed lesbian-feminists', describing how they use 'deception' in order to 'penetrate' women's spaces and minds. She writes, 'Although the transsexually constructed lesbian-feminist does not exhibit a feminine identity and role, he [sic] does exhibit stereotypical masculine behavior.' This puts trans women in a double bind, where if they act feminine they are perceived as being a parody, but if they act masculine it is seen as a sign of their 'true' male identity. This damned-if-they-do, damned-if-they-don't tactic is reminiscent of the pop cultural deceptive/pathetic archetypes.

For trans* people, the designation of heterosexual or homosexual is based upon gender identity. So a trans* woman who is attracted to men would be considered heterosexual, while a trans* woman who is attracted to women would be considered homosexual or lesbian. A trans* woman attracted to both sexes would be bisexual. Likewise, a trans* man who is attracted to women would be heterosexual, a trans* man attracted to men would be homosexual or gay, and one who is attracted to both would be bisexual.

Sex workers and their allies are dismissed as the ‘pimp lobby’. Trans people and their allies become the ‘trans cabal’, or in an incredibly offensive formulation, the ‘trans Taliban’…. And any challenge to reactionary feminist views is repackaged, via these conspiracy theories, as evidence that they are indeed right. Terms such as ‘trans Taliban’ echo other reactionary monikers, such as the racist ‘woke Stasi’ and misogynist ‘feminazi’, which are common on the far right. They also tap the contemporary appetite for conspiracy that has supported recent rightward shifts. Reactionary feminists may well be the InfoWars of the movement.

When, in Being and Time,Heidegger insists that death is the onlyevent which cannot be taken over by another subject for me—an-other cannot die for me, in my place—the obvious counterexampleis Christ himself: did he not, in the extreme gesture of interpassiv-ity, take over for us the ultimate passive experience of dying? Christdies so that we are given a chance to live forever....The problemhere is not only that, obviously, we don’tlive forever (the answer tothis is that it is the Holy Spirit, the community of believers, whichlives forever), but the subjective status of Christ: when he was dyingon the Cross, did he know about his Resurrection-to-come? If he didthen it was all a game, the supreme divine comedy, since Christ knewhis suffering was just a spectacle with a guaranteed good outcome—in short, Christ was faking despair in his “Father, why hast thou for-saken me?” If he didn’t, then in what precise sense was Christ (also)divine? Did God the Father limit the scope of knowledge of Christ’smind to that of a common human consciousness, so that Christ ac-tually thought he was dying abandoned by his father? Was Christ, ineffect, occupying the position of the son in the wonderful joke aboutthe rabbi who turns in despair to God, asking Him what he shoulddo with his bad son, who has deeply disappointed him; God calmlyanswers: “Do the same as I did: write a new testament!”What is crucial here is the radical ambiguity of the term “the faithof Jesus Christ,” which can be read as subjective or objectivegenitive: it can be either “the faith ofChrist” or “the faith / of us, be-lievers / inChrist.” Either we are redeemed because of Christ’s purefaith, or we are redeemed by our faith in Christ, if and insofar as webelieve in him. Perhaps there is a way to read the two meanings to-gether: what we are called to believe in is not Christ’s divinity as suchbut, rather, his faith, his sinless purity. What Christianity proposes isthe figure of Christ as our subject supposed to believe:in our ordinary lives,we never truly believe, but we can at least have the consolation thatthere is One who truly believes (the function of what Lacan, in hisseminar Encore,called y’a de l’un).The final twist here, however, is thaton the Cross, Christ himself has to suspend his belief momentarily.So maybe, at a deeper level, Christ is, rather, our (believers’) subject supposed NOTto believe: it is not our belief we transpose onto others, but,rather, our disbelief itself. Instead of doubting, mocking, and ques-tioning things while believing through the Other, we can also trans-pose onto the Other the nagging doubt, thus regaining the abilityto believe. (And is there not, in exactly the same way, also the func-tion of the subject supposed not to know? Ta ke little children who are sup-posed not to know the “facts of life,” and whose blessed ignorancewe, knowing adults, are supposed to protect by shielding them frombrutal reality; or the wife who is supposed not to know about herhusband’s secret affair, and willingly plays this role even if she re-ally knows all about it, like the young wife in The Age of Innocence;or, inacademia, the role we assume when we ask someone: “OK, I’ll pre-tend I don’t know anything about this topic—try to explain it to mefrom scratch!”) And, perhaps, the true communion with Christ, thetrue imitatio Christi,is to participate in Christ’s doubt and disbelief.There are two main interpretations of how Christ’s death dealswith sin: sacrificial and participatory.4In the first one, we humansare guilty of sin, the consequence of which is death; however, Godpresented Christ, the sinless one, as a sacrifice to die in our place—through the shedding of his blood, we may be forgiven and freedfrom condemnation. In the second one, human beings lived “inAdam,” in the sphere of sinful humanity, under the reign of sin anddeath. Christ became a human being, sharing the fate of those “inAdam” to the end (dying on the Cross), but...

Every savage can dance,' declared Jane Austen's Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. His antagonist's riposte now seems odd—'I doubt not that you are an adept in the science yourself, Mr Darcy.' 'Science' is among the most slippery words in the English language, because although it has been in use for hundreds of years, its meanings constantly shift and are impossible to pin down. That plural (meanings) was deliberate. In the early nineteenth century, when Austen casually mentioned the science of dancing, other writers were still using 'science' for the mediaeval subjects of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Long afterwards, 'science' could still mean any scholarly discipline, because the modern distinction between the Arts and Sciences had not yet solidified. The Victorian art critic John Ruskin listed five subjects he thought worthwhile studying at university—the Sciences of Morals, History, Grammar, Music, and Painting—none of which feature on modern scientific syllabuses. All of them, Ruskin declared, were more intellectually demanding than chemistry, electricity, or geology. However skilfully Mr Darcy performed his science of dancing, Austen could never have called him a scientist. That word, now so common, was not even invented until twenty years later, in 1833, when the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) was holding its third annual meeting. As the conference delegates joked about needing an umbrella term to cover their diverse interests, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge rejected 'philosopher', and William Whewell—one of Babbage's allies, a Cambridge mathematical astronomer—suggested 'scientist' instead. The new word was very slow to catch on. Many Victorians insisted on keeping older expressions, such as 'man of science', or 'naturalist', or 'experimental philosopher'. Even men now seen as the nineteenth century's most eminent scientists—Darwin, Faraday, Lord Kelvin—refused to use the new term for describing themselves. Why, they demanded, should anyone bother to invent such an ugly word when perfectly adequate expressions already existed? Mistakenly, critics accused 'scientist' of being an American import, a trans-Atlantic neologism—one eminent geologist declared it was better to die 'than bestialize our tongue by such barbarisms'. The debate was still raging sixty years after Whewell first introduced the idea, and it was only in the early twentieth century that 'scientist' was fully accepted.

To attack a system that has evolved to contain social movements through elite representation, we believe in the absolute necessity of autonomous organizing. By "autonomous," we mean the formation of independent groups of people who face specific forms of exploitation and oppression, including but not to limited to nonwhite people, women, indigenous people, nonwhite and white queers, people with disabilities, trans* and gender-nonconforming people, and the poor. Creating a variety of spaces as free from anti blackness, racism, sexism, and sexual violence as possible are the minimal conditions needed for political projects to survive over time. We also believe in the political value of organizing across social divisions with the understanding that any identity category is already a "coalition" of different groups with often radically different political interests depending on the issues being addressed. We hope for the emergence of widespread autonomous organizing. Original pamphlet: Who is Oakland. April 2012. Quoted in: Dangerous Allies. Taking Sides.

Why is it that when people who use a word like ‘tranny’ to describe transgender people, are told, by a transgender person, that the word is derogatory and offensive towards transgender people, they rally and insist that it isn't? To deny this in the face of someone who is on the receiving end of this abuse – and who has just informed you that it is offensive – only adds to and compounds the abuse. To claim that a transgender person is ‘over reacting’ when insulting terms are used against trans people, and that a cisgender person is easily capable of understanding life from a transgender perspective... While making facetious statements like ‘just because you're confused about your gender...’ only adds injury to the insult. You clearly do NOT understand, and you've just proved it. To crown it all, saying in your defense that you're ‘not transphobic’ because you watch ‘tranny porn’ does NOT make you a cis-ally to transgender people!

After all, cis women can and do oppress trans women, white women have the institutional and social power to oppress women of color, able-bodied women can oppress people with disabilities, and so on. Oppression of women isn’t just an external force; it happens between groups of women as well. While the oppressed can and do fight oppression, what happens when the people who are supposed to be your allies on one axis are your oppressors on another?

It’s great to have allies, but it’s also great for the impacted group to be the speakers for that movement. I don’t just mean trans people of color, but trans people in general. We sometimes think that because I’m oppressed in one way, then I understand every form of oppression. But how can I understand your struggle as a gay white man, when I’m not? And what makes you think you can understand my struggle as a trans black man, if you’re not?