Trans Women Quotes

In trans women's eyes, I see a wisdom that can only come from having to fight for your right to be recognized as female, a raw strength that only comes fro unabashedly asserting your right to be feminine in an inhospitable world.

When the majority of jokes made at the expense of trans people center on "men wearing dresses" or "men who want their penises cut off" that is not transphobia - it is trans-misogyny. When the majority of violence and sexual assaults omitted against trans people is directed at trans women, that is not transphobia - it is trans-misogyny.

Being exceptional isn’t revolutionary, it’s lonely. It separates you from your community. Who are you, really, without community? I have been held up consistently as a token, as the “right” kind of trans woman (educated, able-bodied, attractive, articulate, heteronormative). It promotes the delusion that because I “made it,” that level of success is easily accessible to all young trans women. Let’s be clear: It is not.

Frankly, I'm not responsible for other people's perceptions and what they consider real or fake. We must abolish the entitlement that deludes us into believing that we have the right to make assumptions about people's identities and project those assumptions onto their genders and bodies.

The 7 Steps to Transformation: 1. Dream it. 2. Envision it. 3. Think it. 4. Grow it. 5. Become it. 6. Live it. 7. OWN it.

This pervasive idea that trans women deserve violence needs to be abolished. It’s a socially sanctioned practice of blaming the victim. We must begin blaming our culture, which stigmatizes, demeans, and strips trans women of their humanity.

[Trans women] have to fight to be included within the category “woman” in a way that is not dissimilar from the earlier struggles of Black women and women of color who were assigned the gender female at birth.

Little girls fear being a princess that was never rescued but little boys fear being a prince that was too late.

Yes.” Reese nods. “I mean, they go through everything I go through as a trans woman. Divorce is a transition story. Of course, not all divorced women go through it. I’m talking about the ones who felt their divorce as a fall, or as a total reframing of their lives. The ones who have seen how the narratives given to them since girlhood have failed them, and who know there is nothing to replace it all. But who still have to move forward without investing in new illusions or turning bitter—all with no plan to guide them. That’s as close to a trans woman as you can get. Divorced women are the only people who know anything like what I know. And, since I don’t really have trans elders, divorced women are the only ones I think have anything to teach me, or who I care to teach in return.

According to the media, trans women were subject to pain and punch lines. Instead of proclaiming that I was not a plot device to be laughed at, I spent my younger years internalizing and fighting those stereotypes.

We are much stronger and more powerful than we understand. We are fifteen thousand pounds of muscle and bone forged from rage and trauma.

The conspiracy of women. We are in it together, make no mistake.

What about trans women?" Zara asks, writing the question in her document. "How does that work?" "Of course I have written invocations for trans women," Emer says. "Demons do not care about bodies. They only care about souls.

If indeed all lives mattered, we would not need to emphatically proclaim that "Black Lives Matter." Or, as we discover on the BLM website: Black Women Matter, Black Girls Matter, Black Gay Lives Matter, Black Bi Lives Matter, Black Boys Matter, Black Queer Lives Matter, Black Men Matter, Black Lesbians Matter, Black Trans Lives Matter, Black Immigrants Matter, Black Incarcerated Lives Matter. Black Differently Abled Lives Matter. Yes, Black Lives Matter, Latino/Asian American/Native American/Muslim/Poor and Working-Class White Peoples Lives matter. There are many more specific instances we would have to nane before we can ethically and comfortably claim that All Lives Matter.

Trans women are juvenile elephants. We are much stronger and more powerful than we understand. We are fifteen thousand pounds of muscle and bone forged from rage and trauma, armed with ivory spears and faces unique in nature, living in grasslands where any of the ubiquitous humans may or may not be a poacher. With our strength, we can destroy each other with ease. But we are a lost generation. We have no elders, no stable groups, no one to teach us to countenance pain. No matriarchs to tell the young girls to knock it off or show off their own long lives lived happily and well.

A single man, he said he loved women but preferred engines.

My old man taught me to never trust anything that bleeds for three days and doesn't die.

I forget what it's like being around trans women," he admits. "That for once, I'm not the only one constantly analyzing the gender dynamics of every situation to play my role.

The alleged ‘science’ of autogynephilia is about making up categories to understand why J Michael Bailey wants to bone some trans women but not others. It’s about framing trans women as men in order to understand deviant male sexuality, without ever looking at female sexuality.

This placement of the authority to “stop violence” into the hands of the police produces a crisis of meaning. The police are often the source of violence, especially in the lives of women, people of color, trans women, sex workers, and the poor. And the police enforce the laws of the United States of America, which is one of the greatest sources of violence in the world.

Many people believe trans women choose to engage in the sex trade rather than get a real job. That belief is misguided because sex work is work, and it’s often the only work available to marginalized women. Though we act as individuals, we can’t remove ourselves from the framework of society. Systemic oppression creates circumstances that push many women to choose sex work as a means of survival, and I was one of those women, choosing survival.

Sentencing enhancements won't get police to investigate crimes they don't take seriously to begin with. They won't stop police from harassing trans women on the street because they assume all trans women are sex workers. They won't have any effect against police officers who believe they won't be held accountable. They won't sway the minds of jurors who think 'I killed her because she was trans' is an adequate excuse. Sentencing enhancements will allow them to dole out harsher punishments against the people they think are more deserving. And we already know that the legal system sees people of color, women, sex workers, immigrants, and the homeless as more deserving of punishment. (Tobi Hill-Meyer of COLAGE (Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere), "Disposable People," November 11, 2008, http://nodesignation.com)

My friend, still seemingly perplexed, asked me "So if it's not about genitals, what is it about trans women's bodies that you find so attractive?" I paused for a second to consider the question. Then I replied that it is almost always their eyes. When I look into them, I see both endless strength and inconsolable sadness. I see someone who has overcome humiliation and abuses that would flatten the average person. I see a woman who was made to feel shame for her desires and yet had the courage to pursue them anyway. I see a woman who was forced against her will into boyhood, who held on to a dream that everybody in her life desperately tried to beat out of her, who refused to listen to the endless stream of people who told her that who she was and what she wanted was impossible. When I look into a trans woman's eyes, I see a profound appreciation for how fucking empowering it can be to be female, an appreciation that seems lost on many cissexual women who sadly take their female identities and anatomies for granted, or who perpetually seek to cast themselves as victims rather than instigators. In trans women's eyes, I see a wisdom that can only come from having to fight for your right to be recognised as female, a raw strength that only comes from unabashedly asserting your right to be feminine in an inhospitable world. In a trans woman's eyes, I see someone who understands that, in a culture that's seemingly fuelled on male homophobic hysteria, choosing to be female and openly expressing one's femininity is not a sign of frivolousness, weakness or passivity, it is a fucking badge of courage. Everybody loves to say that drag queens are "fabulous", but nobody seems to get the fact that trans women are fucking badass!

look for the women in the room who have less space than you listen hear them and act on what they’re saying - amplify indigenous. trans. black. brown. women of color voices

Defining women as the people whose bodies developed along the female reproductive pathway is limiting only if you regard female embodiment as limiting.

And while it is okay to acknowledge that all kinds of women, whether white, Black, Indigenous, Latina, Asian, cis, gender nonconforming, trans, queer, bi, or straight might have different experiences, it's not cool to act as though transwomen are in some entirely separate category from the more general category of woman. That is something that feminism needs to be clear on - that it isn't feminism if all women's concerns, particularly the most marginalized women's concerns, aren't taken seriously.

People who are profiled by cops as sex workers include, in disproportionate numbers, trans women, women of color, and queer and gender nonconforming youth. This isn't about policing sex. It's about profiling and policing people whose sexuality and gender are considered suspect.

In a male-centered gender hierarchy, where it is assumed that men are better than women and that masculinity is superior to femininity, there is no greater perceived threat than the existence of trans women, who despite being born male and inheriting male privilege ‘choose’ to be female instead.

...there are lesbian sex parties that happen in the city and how they will often have No Bio-Cock Policies, meaning, No Trans Women. Or, optimistically, Trans Women: Keep Your Pants On. Meanwhile trans guys are welcome to brandish whatever cocks they want. Kind of frustrating, kind of problematic... The term bio-cock has become shorthand for the fact that trans women aren't sexually welcome in any communities anywhere.

Makeup can be used to express yourself as well. Those experiences should not be limited to women. Everyone should be free to be as colorful as they want to be.

The moms I knew when I was little didn't have to prove that it was okay to want a child. Sure, a lot of women I know wonder if they do want a child, but not why. It's assumed why. The question cis women get asked is: Why don't you want kids? And then they have to justify that. If I had been born cis, I would never even have had to answer these questions. I wouldn't have had to prove that I deserve my models of womanhood. But I'm not cis. I'm trans. And so until the day that I am a mother, I'm constantly going to have to prove that I deserve to be one. That it's not unnatural or twisted that I want a child's love. Why do I want to be a mother? After all those beautiful women I grew up with, the ones who chaperoned my classes on field trips, or made me lunch when I was at their house, or sewed costumes for all the little girls that I ice skated with — and you too, Katrina, for that matter — have to explain their feelings about motherhood, then, I'll explain mine. And do you know what I'll say? Ditto.

How could I explain that it was not all playacting? That I felt more of the male spirit within me than the female - a fierceness that whittled me down to a sharpened spear of ambition. And as a boy, I was applauded, not punished, for such raw energy. It was not beaten out of me for my own good, or worn away by women's chores.

Grief is an important part of the work. So many of the movements I’ve been a part of in my lifetime—the movements against wars in Afghanistan/Iraq and against Islamophobic racist violence here on Turtle Island, movements for sex work justice and for missing and murdered Indigenous women, movements led by and for trans women of color, movements for Black lives, movements by and for disabled folks and for survivors of abuse—involve a lot of grieving and remembering people we love who have been murdered, died, or been hurt/abused/gone through really horrible shit.

PinkNews coined the term "trans broken arm syndrome" to describe it: "Healthcare providers assume that all medical issues are a result of a person being trans. Everything—from mental health problems to, yes, broken arms.

What we are taught as a practice of beauty, of femininity, is also a practice of submission. A trans woman friend of mine recently explained to me how the technique for training your voice to sound more feminine has a lot to do “with speaking less or asking more questions or deferring to other people more.” We must not exhibit creases in our faces that indicate any critical emotion, because we should not express any critical emotion. Remember: women have been burned to death for as much.

We can change, evolve, and trans­form our own conditioning. We can choose to move like water rather than be molded like clay. Life spirals in and then spirals out on any given day. It does not have to be one way, one truth, one voice. Nor does love have to be all or nothing. Neither does power. What is positive and what is negative is not absolute.

Why does she deserve to be so angry? What has she truly lost? Quietly, to herself, she answers her own question: I have lost a child. The statement jolts her. She hears in her own voice a latch sliding into place. She says it again, phrased slightly differently, I have lost my child. Is it grief she feels? Is grief even a feeling to which she is entitled?

Women in long dresses, aloof and elegant, the mark of bonnet ribbons still on the soft of their necks.

If there's one thing I know about women, it's that they have vaginas.

It's actually a very old archetype that trans girl stories get put into: this sort of tragic, plucky-little-orphan character who is just supposed to suffer through everything and wait, and if you're good and brave and patient (and white and rich) enough, then you get the big reward...which is that you get to be just like everybody else who is white and rich and boring. And then you marry the prince or the football player and live boringly ever after.

Male prisons are represented as violent places. But we see, especially by looking at the predicament of trans women, that this violence is often encouraged by the institutions themselves.

Some days he wishes that he could simply empty the chambers of the men, fill the halls instead with women: the short sharp shock of three thousand two hundred mothers. The ones who picked through the supermarket debris for pieces of their dead husbands. The ones who still laundered their gone son's bed sheets by hand. The ones who kept an extra teacup at the end of the table, in case of miracles. The elegant ones, the angry ones, the clever ones, the ones in hairnets, the ones exhausted by all the dying. They carried their sorrow--not with photos under their arms, or with public wailing, or by beating their chests, but with a weariness around the eyes.

Society often blurs the lines between drag queens and trans women. This is highly problematic, because many people believe that, like drag queens, trans women go home, take off their wigs and chest plates, and walk around as men. Trans womanhood is not a performance or costume. As Wendi likes to joke, “A drag queen is part-time for showtime, and a trans woman is all the time!

Trans women in real life are different from trans women on television. For one thing, when you take away the mystification, misconceptions and mystery, they're at least as boring as everyone else.

Trans women of color end up primarily in male prisons—especially if they have not undergone gender reassignment surgery, and many of them don’t want to undergo that surgery. And sometimes even if they have undergone the surgery, they end up being placed in men’s prisons. After they are imprisoned they often receive more violent treatment by the guards than anyone else, and on top of that, they are marked by the institution as targets of male violence. This is so much the case that cops so easily joke about the sexual fate of trans women in the male prisons where they are usually sent.

The problem with mainstream feminism, again and again, is the frivolity of the issues it is concerned with: manspreading, “girl power” and female “empowerment,” articles with headlines like CAN YOU BE A FEMINIST AND WEAR MAKEUP? As they fight these lesser battles, white women ignore the ways that their Black and brown, disabled, and trans sisters are still shackled by multiple forms of oppression.

There is this dumb thing where trans women feel like we all have to prove that we’re totally trans as fuck and there’s no doubt in our minds that we’re Really, Truly Trans. It comes from the fact that you have to prove that you’re trans to psychologists and doctors: the burden is entirely on your own shoulders to prove that you’re Really Trans in order to get any treatment at all. Meaning hormones.

Yes, it is important for women to work together against gender oppression. But which women? Which forms of gender oppression? 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.

The Sex and the City Problem wasn't just Reese's problem, it was a problem for all women. But unlike millions of cis women before Reese, no generation of trans women had ever solved it. The problem could be described thusly: When a women begins to notice herself aging, the prospect of making some meaning out of her life grows more and more urgent. A need to save herself, or be saved, as the joys of beauty and youth repeat themselves to lesser and lesser effect.

I fear that, although white feminism is palatable to those in power, when it has won, things will look very much the same. Injustice will thrive, but there will be more women in charge of it. Feminism is not about equality, and certainly not about silently slipping into a world of work created by and for men. Feminism, at its best, is a movement that works to liberate all people who have been economically, socially and culturally marginalized by an ideological system that has been deigned for them to fail. That means disabled people, black people, trans people, women and non-binary people, LGB people and working-class people. The idea of campaigning for equality must be complicated if we are to untangle the situation we're in. Feminism will have won when we have ended poverty. It will have won when women are no longer expected to work two jobs (the care and emotional labour for their families as well as their day jobs) by default.

At some point, sisters began to talk about how unseen they have felt. How the media has focused on men, but it has been them - the sisters - who were there. They were there, in overwhelming numbers, just as they were during the civil rights movement. Women - all women, trans women - are roughly 80% of the people who were staring down the terror of Ferguson, saying “we are the caretakers of this community”. Is it women who are out there, often with their children, calling for an end to police violence, saying “we have a right to raise our children without fear”. But it is not women’s courage that is showcased in the media. One sister says “when the police move in we do not run, we stay. And for this, we deserve recognition”. Their words will live with us, will live in us, as Ferguson begins to unfold and as the national attention begins to really focus on what Alicia, Opal and I have started. The first time there’s coverage of Black Lives Matter in a way that is positive is on the Melissa Harris-Perry show. She does not invite us - it isn’t intentional, I’m certain of that. And about a year later she does, but in this early moment, and despite the overwhelming knowledge of the people on the ground who are talking about what Alicia, Opal and I have done, and despite of it being part of the historical record, that it is always women who do the work even as men get the praise. It takes a long time for us to occur to most reporters and the mainstream. Living in patriarchy means that the default inclination is to center men and their voices, not women and their work. The fact seems ever more exacerbated in our day and age, when presence on twitter, when the number of followers one has, can supplant the everyday and heralded work of those who, by virtue of that work, may not have time to tweet constantly or sharpen and hone their personal brand so that it is an easily sellable commodity. Like the women who organized, strategized, marched, cooked, typed up and did the work to ensure the civil rights movement; women whose names go unspoken, unknown, so too that this dynamic unfolds as the nation began to realize that we were a movement. Opal, Alicia and I never wanted or needed to be the center of anything. We were purposeful about decentralizing our role in the work, but neither did we want, nor deserved, to be erased.

What is the bedrock on which all of our diverse trans populations can build solidarity? The commitment to be the best fighters against each other's oppression. As our activist network grows into marches and rallies of hundreds of thousands, we will hammer out language that demonstrates the sum total of our movement as well as its component communities. Unity depends on respect for diversity, no matter what tools of language are ultimately used. This is a very early stage for trans peoples with such diverse histories and blends of cultures to form community. Perhaps we don't have to strive to be one community. In reality, there isn't one women's, or lesbian, gay, bi community. What is realistic is the goal to build a coalition between our many strong communities in order to form a movement capable of defending all our lives.

Feministing writer Jos Truitt puts it, “trans women are disrespected and treated terribly when they don’t pass, but if they do pass they’re called out for upholding the gender binary and cis standards of beauty. It is an impossible bind.”13

In my own experience, it is entirely possible for a person to know a woman is trans, insist they do not believe she is really a woman, and yet still treat her misogynistically. This may seem a paradox, - but, as Serano argues, it is because our popular culture and media has spent decades depicting trans women as extreme embodiments of very misogynistic tropes. First, we are represented as agents of vapid and regressive femininity - vain, obsessed with how we look, stupid, weak, childish, and entitled. We are simultaneously hypersexualized: either as grotesque sexual deviants, particularly if we are unconventionally feminine (or lesbians); or, as yielding, sexually passive and deceptive if we are more feminine in appearance and/or if we date men.

Often, women's symptoms are brushed off as the result of depression, anxiety, or the all-purpose favorite: stress. Sometimes, they are attributed to women's normal physiological states and cycles: to menstrual cramps, menopause, or even being a new mom. Sometimes, other aspects of their identity seem to take center stage: fat women report that any ailment is blamed on their weight; trans women find that all their symptoms are attributed to hormone therapy; black women are stereotyped as addicts looking for prescription drugs, their reports of pain doubted entirely. Whatever the particular attribution, there is often the same current of distrust: the sense that women are not very accurate judges of when something is really, truly wrong in their bodies.

The assumption that femininity is always structured by and performed for a male gaze fails to take seriously queer feminine desire. The radical feminist critiques of femininity also disregarded the fact that not all who are (seen as) feminine are women. Crucially, what is viewed as appropriately feminine is not only defined in relation to maleness or masculinity, but through numerous intersections of power including race, sexuality, ability, and social class. In other words, white, heterosexual, binary gender-conforming, able-bodied, and upper- or middle-class femininity is privileged in relation to other varieties. Any social system may contain multiple femininities that differ in status, and which relate to each other as well as to masculinity. As highlighted by “effeminate” gay men, trans women, femmes, drag queens, and “bad girls,” it is possible to be perceived as excessively, insufficiently, or wrongly feminine without for that sake being seen as masculine. Finally, the view of femininity as a restrictive yet disposable mask presupposes that emancipation entails departure into neutral (or masculine) modes of being. This is a tenuous assumption, as the construction of selfhood is entangled with gender, and conceptions of androgyny and gender neutrality similarly hinge on culturally specific ideas of masculinity and femininity.

When disclosure occurs for a trans woman, whether by choice or by another person, she is often accused of deception because, as the widely accepted misconception goes, trans women are not 'real' women (meaning cis women); therefore, the behavior (whether rejection, verbal abuse, or sever violence) is warranted. The violence that trans women face at the hands of heterosexual cis men can go unchecked and uncharted because society blames trans women for the brutality they face. Similar to arguments around rape, the argument goes that 'she brought it upon herself.

The women of colour on that show made it clear to Dolezal that trans-racialism was not acceptable because a person who had grown up white could not understand what a person who had grown up black could feel like. They could not have had the same experiences.7 This was the point that the second-wave feminists were making at the same time about the transsexuals. But an argument that had worked with race had not worked for women.

While some male "admirers" of trans women tend to fetishize us for our femininity or our imagined sexual submissiveness, I find trans women hot because we are anything but docile or demure. In order to survive as a trans woman, you must be, by definition, impervious, unflinching, and tenacious. In a culture in which femaleness and femininity are on the receiving end of a seemingly endless smear campaign, there is no act more brave - especially for someone assigned a male sex at birth - than embracing one's femme self. And unlike those male tranny-chasers who say that they like "T-girls" because we are supposedly "the best of both worlds", I am attracted to trans women because we are all woman! My femaleness is so intense that it has overpowered the trillions of lameass Y chromosomes that sheepishly hide inside the cells of my body. And my femininity is so relentless that it has survived over thirty years of male socialisation and twenty years of testosterone poisoning. Some kinky-identified thrill-seekers may envision trans women as androgyne fuck fantasies, but that's only because they are too self-absorbed to appreciate how completely fucking female we are.

They [heterosexual cis women] are accepted in the straight mainstream way more readily than I [trans woman] will ever be. But they are marginalized in their day-to-day lives because they are feminine. To argue that they are reinforcing the binary, or the patriarchy or the hegemonic gender system, because they are conventional feminine (as opposed to subversively feminine) essentially implies that they are enabling their own oppression. This is just another variation of the claim that rapists make when they insinuate that the woman in question was 'asking for it' because of what she was wearing or how she behaved.

Once I was asked by a seatmate on a trans-Pacific flight, a man who took the liberty of glancing repeatedly at the correspondence in my lap, what instruction he should give his fifteen-year-old daughter, who wanted to be a writer. I didn't know how to answer him, but before I could think I heard myself saying, 'Tell your daughter three things.' "Tell her to read, I said. Tell her to read whatever interests her, and protect her if someone declares what she's reading to be trash. No one can fathom what happens between a human being and written language. She may be paying attention to things in the world beyond anyone else's comprehension, things that feed her curiosity, her singular heart and mind. Tell her to read classics like The Odyssey. They've been around a long time because the patterns in them have proved endlessly useful, and, to borrow Evan Connell's observation, with a good book you never touch bottom. But warn your daughter that ideas of heroism, of love, of human duty and devotion that women have been writing about for centuries will not be available to her in this form. To find these voices she will have to search. When, on her own, she begins to ask, make her a present of George Eliot, or the travel writing of Alexandra David-Neel, or To the Lighthouse. "Second, I said, tell your daughter that she can learn a great deal about writing by reading and by studying books about grammar and the organization of ideas, but that if she wishes to write well she will have to become someone. She will have to discover her beliefs, and then speak to us from within those beliefs. If her prose doesn't come out of her belief, whatever that proves to be, she will only be passing on information, of which we are in no great need. So help her discover what she means. "Finally, I said, tell your daughter to get out of town, and help her do that. I don't necessarily mean to travel to Kazakhstan, or wherever, but to learn another language, to live with people other than her own, to separate herself from the familiar. Then, when she returns, she will be better able to understand why she loves the familiar, and will give us a fresh sense of how fortunate we are to share these things. "Read. Find out what you truly are. Get away from the familiar. Every writer, I told him, will offer you thoughts about writing that are different, but these three I trust.

I don't want to be a phenomenon...... I want to be a quite normal and ordinary woman.

But the world is full of trans girls and women whose lives have been cut short.

this is the conversation I’ve been having since the 2016 election ended and liberals and progressives have been scrambling to figure out what went wrong. What was missing from the left’s message that left so many people unenthusiastic about supporting a Democratic candidate, especially against Donald Trump? So far, a large group of people (mostly white men paid to pontificate on politics and current events) seem to have landed on this: we, the broad and varied group of Democrats, Socialists, and Independents known as ‘the left,’ focused on ‘identity politics’ too much. We focused on the needs of black people, trans people, women, Latinx people. All this specialized focus divided people and left out working-class white men. That is the argument, anyways.

The process of trying to assimilate into an existing category in many ways runs counter to efforts to produce radical or revolutionary results. And it shows us that we not only should not try to assimilate trans women into a category that remains the same, but that the category itself has to change so it does not simply reflect normative ideas of who counts as women and who doesn’t.

One consequence of opening women's spaces to males is to recast two common male sex crimes as rights. Exhibitionism - non-consensually displaying one's genitals - is so common that many women will tell you that the first time they saw a penis was when a stranger flashed them. Voyeurism - non-consensually viewing someone in a state of undress - is known to be a precursor to contact sex crimes. Entering a changing room constitutes consent to see and be seen by the other occupants while undressed. Women grant that consent on the basis that those occupants will be female; gender self-identification removes that basis while denying that it does so. It therefore turns facilities intended for women into places where males can commit exhibitionism and voyeurism with impunity.

bugs me are the trans troublemakers, you should have seen the stick I got when I announced my festival was for women-born-women as opposed to women-born-men, I was accused of being transphobic, which I’m not, I’m absolutely not, I have trans friends, but there is a difference, a man raised as a man might not feel like one but he’s been treated as one by the world, so how can he be exactly the same as us?

In the same way that we need to look out for women in ethical non-monogamy, we also need to look out for queer folks, trans people, people with disabilities, the young, the old, the poor, and people of color.

People also often face prejudice as a result of other characteristics, such as age, class and religious belief. The principle of intersectionality is actually pretty simple: if all these different kinds of prejudice stem from the same root, then it is arbitrary and ineffective to attempt to eradicate one of them without acknowledging its intersection with others and trying to work together to tackle all forms of inequality. Or, from a feminist perspective, if we are to tackle the fact that women have been historically oppressed because of characteristics that are seen to be ‘different’ from the male norm, how can we protest such treatment while simultaneously excluding from our own movement the needs and agendas of those with other stigmatized characteristics? (This is particularly true in the case of our trans sisters, who some feminists believe should be excluded from some areas of the movement by virtue of not fulfilling required ‘characteristics’ of womanhood – a deep irony for a group fighting for equality regardless of sex.) And on

The trans issue is repeatedly used as a pretext to stop discussing sex and power. Suddenly, it is 'sensitive' to speak about men and women. But is it a new thing, or is it the same old misogynist sentiment returning in a new guise.

Bell now wishes she had come across radical-feminist ideas earlier – ‘that stereotypes don’t mean anything, that it doesn’t matter if you’re masculine, that it’s your biology that makes you a woman, and there are other women like you’. The

Stereotypes are the most reductive kind of story: They reduce others to single, crude images. In the United States, the stereotypes are persistent: black as criminal, brown as illegal, indigenous as savage, Muslims and Sikhs as terrorists, Jews as controlling, Hindus as primitive, Asians of all kinds as perpetually foreign, queer and trans people as sinful, disabled people as pitiable, and women and girls as property. Such stereotypes are in the air, on television and film, in the news, permeating our communities, and ordering our institutions. We breathe them in, whether or now we consciously endorse them. Even if we are part of a marginalized community, we internalize these stereotypes about others an ourselves.

At the first trans health conference I ever attended, a parent asked about long-term health risks for people taking hormones. The doctor gave a full assessment of issues that trans men face; many of them mimic the risks that would be inherited from father to son if they'd been born male, now that testosterone is a factor. "What about trans women?" another parent asked. The doctor took a deep breath. "Those outcomes are murkier. Because trans women are so discriminated against, they're at far greater risk for issues like alcoholism, poverty, homelessness, and lack of access to good healthcare. All of these issues impact their overall health so much that it's hard to gather data on what their health outcomes would be if these issues weren't present." This was stunning-a group of people is treated so badly by our culture that we can't clearly study their health. The burden of this abuse is that substantial and pervasive. Your generation will be healthier. The signs are already there.

What I know about transgender women comes from the media—from seeing and hearing Caitlyn Jenner and Laverne Cox and Chelsea Manning and Janet Mock. I haven’t really thought about what it means to be trans…because I have had the luxury of not having to think about it.

And so, I’m also afraid of women. I’m afraid of women who’ve either emboldened or defended the men who have harmed me, or have watched in silence. I’m afraid of women who adopt masculine traits and then feel compelled to dominate or silence me at dinner parties. I’m afraid of women who see me as a predator and whose comfort I consequently put before my own by using male locker rooms. I’m afraid of women who have internalized their experiences of misogyny so deeply that they make me their punching bag. I’m afraid of the women who, like men, reject my pronouns and refuse to see my femininity, or who comment on or criticize my appearance, down to my chipped nail polish, to reiterate that I am not one of them. I’m afraid of women who, when I share my experiences of being trans, try to console me by announcing “welcome to being a woman,” refusing to recognize the ways in which our experiences fundamentally differ. But I’m especially afraid of women because my history has taught me that I can’t fully rely upon other women for sisterhood, or allyship, or protection from men.

Since nobody really wants to be a trans woman, i.e. nobody wakes up and goes whoa, maybe my life would be better if I transitioned, alienating most of my friends and my family, I wonder what’ll happen at work, I’d love to spend all my money on hormones and surgeries, buying a new wardrobe that I don’t even understand right now, probably become unlovable and then ending my short life in a bloody murder. In fact, if there’s one thing a lifetime of Stockholm syndrome with hegemony gives you, it’s a thorough understanding of cultural tropes about trans women.

most people don’t know what Pride is about. The anguish, and the hurt, and the reason why Pride started in the first place—it was an anti-cop event. Look, yes—I know there are trans police officers. You have Black people who are police officers, and women police officers. All that’s cute, but guess what: It’s blue first, your other allegiances second. Once you get on that blue, child, it goes straight through to your brain, dyes your brain blue, and you’re no longer whoever the fuck you were before. So no, they don’t need to be there. That’s where their loyalty lies. So stay the fuck away from me.

If you have social and financial capital, you can buy your way out of problems – if a facility you use jeopardises your safety or privacy, you will simply switch. It is poorer and older women who are stuck with the consequences of self-ID in women’s prisons, shelters and refuges, hospital wards and care homes.

Throughout this book I will refer to both sex and gender. By 'sex', I mean the biological characteristics that determine whether an individual is male or female , XX and XY. By 'gender', I mean the social meanings we impose upon those biological facts. The way women are treated because they are perceived to be female. One is man-made, but both are real and both have significant consequences for women as they navigate this world constructed on male data. But although I talk about both sex and gender throughout, I use 'Gender Data Gap' as an overarching term. Because sex is not the reason women are excluded from data - gender is

Often overlooked are the ways prison culture systematically maintains and nurtures rape culture, targeting women and men made to be women. Again, members of LGBT and trans communities suffer especially egregiously in prison,[111] since they directly challenge the heteronormativity maintained by hegemonic masculinism.

Divide and conquer is best accomplished through silencing, through calling into question those who speak out. There is so much of this attached to the trans movement. Even just wondering about a profound concept such as transgender is labeled “transphobic”. What I think has happened is that people are now phobic about their own gut responses to life. We are being systematically separated from our own intuition. This is fatal for a civilization, I think. Not that our intuition always tells the truth with a capital T, but it is a critical piece of who we are. Without it, we remain profoundly directionless, and more susceptible to coercion of all types. What

Amy remembered how one of them patiently explained that the term "autogynephilia" only works if you don't think trans women are women. If you do, then you immediately see that the majority of women, cis or trans, are all autogynephiles, and that most men would be autoandrophiles – it's not something special about trans women. Of course women are turned on by being women and men turned on by being men! Watch any porn and the sexuality of everyone in it is actually about their own auto-andro/gyne-philia. Listen to them talk. It's about validating their own gender. [...] And alone on their laptops somewhere: the viewers, turned on to identify with people identifying with their gender.

The male space is constructed as homogenous, monolithic, exclusionary and violent. The women's space is for the leftovers - women, trans people, non-binary people - and is required to be inclusive yet not in need of protection. This model also neatly summarises gender identity theory: the male name, male sport, male spaces, all are retained intact while female spaces are opened up.

Even though I was born in America, and my ancestors built its infrastructure for free, I’m not a part of the “Our” when they sing, “Our flag was still there!” I feel like the “Our” doesn’t include blacks, most women, gays, trans, and poor people of all colors. And, sadly, our nation reminds us every day. Some may reject the anthem because Francis Scott Key sang for freedom while enslaving blacks. His hatred even bled into the lyrics of the elongated version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” you won’t hear at a sporting event. The third stanza reads: No refuge could save the hireling and slave/From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave That line was basically a shot at slaves who agreed to fight with the British during the War of 1812 in exchange for their freedom.

We live in a culture that teaches us that "men" are the sexual aggressors and pursuers. We also live in a world where most women, trans, and non-binary folks have had negative experiences with men who are hitting on them. These factors tend to lead to some big gender differences for those exploring non-monogamy. Cisgender men often struggle when they first enter the world of non-monogamy. Within consensual non-monogamy (CNM) communities, most folks who sleep with cis men choose their partners based on referrals and endorsements. As in the world of business, it truly is who you know. Cis men who have been in the communities longer have dated and interacted with more people, and, therefore, have more word of mouth. It is an unfortunate reality that many, especially cisgender women, will not date men they don't already know about through their friends and communities. So, if you're a cis man exploring CNM, expect that it may take a while before you start seeing the kind of attention that others get. Focus on being kind, respectful, and honest. Respect the needs and boundaries of everyone with whom you interact. Spend lots of time getting to know other people simply as people - especially of your preferred gender to date - and form genuine friendships and connections with them free from any pressure to become sexual.

Donne loved the trans- prefix: it's scattered everywhere across his writing—'transpose', 'translate', 'transport', 'transubstantiate'. In this Latin preposition—'across, to the other side of, over, beyond'—he saw both the chaos and potential of us. We are, he believed, creatures born transformable. He knew of transformation into misery: 'But O, self-traitor, I do bring/The spider love, which transubstantiates all/And can convert manna to gall'— but also the transformation achieved by beautiful women: 'Us she informed, but transubstantiates you'. And then there was the transformation of himself: from failure and penury, to recognition within his lifetime as one of the finest minds of his age; one whose work, if allowed under your skin, can offer joy so violent it kicks the metal out of your knees, and sorrow large enough to eat you. Because amid all Donne's reinventions, there was a constant running through his life and work: he remained steadfast in his belief that we, humans, are at once a catastrophe and a miracle.

In the modern era, teachers and scholarship have traditionally laid strenuous emphasis on the fact that Briseis, the woman taken from Achilles in Book One, was his géras, his war prize, the implication being that her loss for Achilles meant only loss of honor, an emphasis that may be a legacy of the homoerotic culture in which the classics and the Iliad were so strenuously taught—namely, the British public-school system: handsome and glamorous Achilles didn’t really like women, he was only upset because he’d lost his prize! Homer’s Achilles, however, above all else, is spectacularly adept at articulating his own feelings, and in the Embassy he says, “‘Are the sons of Atreus alone among mortal men the ones / who love their wives? Since any who is a good man, and careful, / loves her who is his own and cares for her, even as I now / loved this one from my heart, though it was my spear that won her’ ” (9.340ff.). The Iliad ’s depiction of both Achilles and Patroklos is nonchalantly heterosexual. At the conclusion of the Embassy, when Agamemnon’s ambassadors have departed, “Achilles slept in the inward corner of the strong-built shelter, / and a woman lay beside him, one he had taken from Lesbos, / Phorbas’ daughter, Diomede of the fair colouring. / In the other corner Patroklos went to bed; with him also / was a girl, Iphis the fair-girdled, whom brilliant Achilles / gave him, when he took sheer Skyros” (9.663ff.). The nature of the relationship between Achilles and Patroklos played an unlikely role in a lawsuit of the mid-fourth century B.C., brought by the orator Aeschines against one Timarchus, a prominent politician in Athens who had charged him with treason. Hoping to discredit Timarchus prior to the treason trial, Aeschines attacked Timarchus’ morality, charging him with pederasty. Since the same charge could have been brought against Aeschines, the orator takes pains to differentiate between his impulses and those of the plaintiff: “The distinction which I draw is this—to be in love with those who are beautiful and chaste is the experience of a kind-hearted and generous soul”; Aeschines, Contra Timarchus 137, in C. D. Adams, trans., The Speeches of Aeschines (Cambridge, MA, 1958), 111. For proof of such love, Aeschines cited the relationship between Achilles and Patroklos; his citation is of great interest for representing the longest extant quotation of Homer by an ancient author. 32

The Gender Sonnet Woman means not weakling, but wonder. Woman means not obstinate, but original. Woman means not man-slave, but mother. Woman means not amorous, but amiable. Woman means not neurotic, but nimble. Man mustn't mean medieval, but moral. Man mustn't mean abusive, but affable. Man mustn't mean nefarious, but noble. Trans doesn't mean titillating, but tenacious. Trans doesn't mean riff-raff, but radiant. It doesn't mean abhorrent, but affectionate. It ain't nasty and sick, but nerved and sentient. Gender has no role in society except in bed. Person is known by character, not dongs 'n peaches.

What same-sex marriage, women's franchise and the end of segregation all have in common is that they extend the rights of a privileged group to everyone. And when people hear the phrase 'trans rights', they assume something similar is being demanded - that trans people be enabled to live without discrimination, harassment and violence, and to express themselves as they wish. Such goals are worthy ones, but they are not what mainstream transactivism is about. What campaigners mean by 'trans rights' is gender self-identification: that trans people be treated in every circumstance as members of the sex they identify with, rather than the sex they actually are. This is not a human right at all. It is a demand that everyone else lose their rights to single-sex spaces, services and activities. And in its requirement that everyone else accept trans peoples' subjective beliefs as objective reality, it is akin to a new state religion, complete with blasphemy laws. All this explains the speed. When you want new laws, you can focus on lobbying, rather than the painstaking business of building broad-based coalitions. And when those laws will take away other people's rights, it is not only unnecessary to build public awareness - it is imperative to keep the public in the dark.

Ames, having explained the condition of juvenile elephants, drew this metaphor: Trans women are juvenile elephants. We are much stronger and more powerful than we understand. We are fifteen thousand pounds of muscle and bone forged from rage and trauma, armed with ivory spears and faces unique in nature, living in grasslands where any of the ubiquitous humans may or may not be a poacher. With our strength, we can destroy each other with ease. But we are a lost generation. We have no elders, no stable groups, no one to teach us to countenance pain. No matriarchs to tell the young girls to knock it off or show off their own long lives lived happily and well. Those older generations of trans women died of HIV, poverty, suicide, repression, or disappeared to pathologized medicalization and stealth lives - and that's if they were lucky enough to be white. They left behind only scattered exhausted voices to tell the angry lost young when and how the pain might end - to tell us what will be lost when we lash out with our considerable strength, or use the fragile shards of what remain of our social networks to ostracize, punish, and retaliate against those who behave in a traumatized manner. "And so we become what we have seen. How could we know not to? Have you seen many orphaned juvenile elephants behaving otherwise?

David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow, respectively the Chair of the Board and Executive Director of Just Detention International (JDI), one of the most intrepid organizers against prison rape and for implementation of PREA, cites analyses in 2011 Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) reports, showing that there are over 216,600 cases of sexual abuse in prisons in a single year. They continue, “that’s almost 600 people a day—25 an hour.”[113] The most vulnerable among all groups are trans persons, the increasing number of mentally ill that have been taken in by the prisons, and also women. Nearly half of these violations, according to still more recent BJS studies, are committed by prison staff, the very ones, observes JDI pointedly, whose job it is to ensure their safety from such violation.

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.

Terms such as "man bun," "man purse," "guyliner," "meggings," and the new "romp-him" (romper) have entered the American lexicon. These terms refer to new fashion trends involving men wearing garments or using grooming regiments once thought of as exclusive to women. The term metrosexual comes to mind. While they may be amusing to read, and certainly to say out loud, they are dangerous roadblocks preventing the collapse of the binary. That notion might also make you laugh. Think about it. What purpose do these unnecessary labels serve, other than to single out that these stylistic choices go against the grain? Eyeliner is applied to people's eyelids. Leggings are worn by people who have legs. The gendered associations exist solely as social constructs. Men used to wear leggings all the time in the middle ages. Probably would have shopped at Sephora too, if there had been one at the faire.

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.

Continued scholarly research reveals just how many women, queer or nonbinary individuals, and people of color perceive very real barriers to their participation in wilderness activities. Recent survey participants list a variety of reasons for these barriers, including outdoor recreation’s continued emphasis on physical strength and technical expertise, sexist and exclusionary programming, and a fear for one’s personal safety while in the wilderness. A recent study of advertisements in outdoor magazines found that while women were present in 46 percent of ads, the majority of them appeared in passive roles, such as sitting around a fire with friends or holding outdoor gear rather than using it. Only the smallest percentage of these women were depicted alone and actively engaged in any kind of athletic pursuit while in the wilderness. Of all the women in the ads, a full 91 percent were white. No known trans or nonbinary models were used.

One cannot be lazy. How do we do that? How do we win men to fight for women’s liberation? How do we win whites to struggle against racism and for the emancipation of people of color? It’s the same thinking, right? Well, it is. We have to extricate ourselves from narrow identitarian thinking if we want to encourage progressive people to embrace these struggles as their own. With respect to feminist struggles, men will have to do a lot of the important work. I often like to talk about feminism not as something that adheres to bodies, not as something grounded in gendered bodies, but as an approach—as a way of conceptualizing, as a methodology, as a guide to strategies for struggle. That means that feminism doesn’t belong to anyone in particular. Feminism is not a unitary phenomenon, so that increasingly there are men who are involved in feminist studies, for example. As a professor I see increasing numbers of men majoring in feminist studies, which is a good thing. In the abolitionist movement I see particularly young men who have a very rich feminist perspective, and so how does one guarantee that that will happen? It will not happen without work. Both men and women—and trans persons—have to do that work, but I don’t think it’s a question of women inviting men to struggle. I think it’s about a certain kind of consciousness that has to be encouraged so that progressive men are aware that they have a certain responsibility to bring in more men. Men can often talk to men in a different way. It’s important for those who we might want to bring into the struggle to look at models. What does it mean to model feminism as a man?

The intellectual justification for transphobia on the left is usually framed as concern about a mythological 'trans ideology', which is individualist, bourgeois and unconcerned with class struggle. As we've seen, however, the majority of trans people are working class, and the oppression of trans people is specifically rooted in capitalism. In short, capitalism across the world still relies heavily on the idea of different categories of men's work and women's work, in which "women's work" (such as housework, child-rearing, and emotional labour) is either poorly paid or not paid at all. In order for this categorization to function, it needs to rest on a clear idea of how to divide men and women. Capitalism also requires a certain level of unemployment to function. If there were enough work to go round, no worker would worry about losing their job, and all workers could demand higher wages and better conditions. The ever-present spectre of unemployment, on the other hand, enables employers to dictate conditions. Equally, in terms of severe crisis this 'reserve army' of unemployed people can be called into employment as and when the economy requires it. This system of deliberate unemployment needs ways to mark who will work and who will be left unemployed. In our society this is principally achieved through race, class, gender, and disability. Social exclusion and revulsion at the existence of trans people usefully provides another class of people more likely to be left in the ranks of the unemployed (even more so if they are trans and poor, black, or disabled - which is why unemployment is highest among these trans people).

In the abolitionist movement I see particularly young men who have a very rich feminist perspective, and so how does one guarantee that that will happen? It will not happen without work. Both men and women—and trans persons—have to do that work, but I don’t think it’s a question of women inviting men to struggle. I think it’s about a certain kind of consciousness that has to be encouraged so that progressive men are aware that they have a certain responsibility to bring in more men. Men can often talk to men in a different way. It’s important for those who we might want to bring into the struggle to look at models. What does it mean to model feminism as a man? I tour the campuses regularly, and I was speaking at the University of Southern Illinois during a Black History Month celebration and I came into contact with this group of young men who are members of a group they call “Alternative Masculinities” and I was totally impressed by them. They work with the women’s center. They have been trained in how to do rape crisis calls. They were really seriously engaging in all of that kind of activism that you assume that only women do. And then I remembered that many years ago in the 1970s there were a couple of men’s formations like Men against Rape, Black Men against Rape, Against Domestic Violence, and I remember thinking then that it’s just a matter of time before this gets taken up by men all over. But it never really happened. So I was reminded by these young men in “Alternative Masculinities” that after all of these decades they should today represent a far more popular trend. But this is the kind of thing that needs to be happening.

US trans activist Sam Dylan Finch lists 300+ "Unearned advantages" that cis people benefit from. These include being spared questions on how one has intercourse, being able to move freely around without being stared at, receiving competent healthcare, not being discriminated in the workplace, not being bombarded with articles about how many people of their gender are murdered, being allowed to wear clothes and uniforms which align with ones' gender, not being sexually objectified and potential partners knowing what their genitals look like and what to call them. Sound familiar? Finch has just described what most women go through on a daily basis. Receiving poorer healthcare due to ones' sex, being groped, subjected to sexual violence and inappropriate, probing questions, reading articles about how women are killed by their partners because they are women - this is unfortunately well known territory for us women. The text thus turns the very harassment and injustices the women's movement fought against into undeserved privileges. We should feel pleased that we are allowed to dress in alignment with our gender, despite us having done nothing to deserve it. We should be thankful that we are permitted to wear high heals and veils, since these 'align' with our gender. If we follow this analysis to its logical conclusion, even a girl who is genitally mutilated at nine and married off at twelve is a cis person and thereby privileged - her sexual partners know what they are to call her genitalia: CUNT! Similarly, a homosexual man in Saudi Arabia or Uganda would, according to this interpretation, be considered the 'normal, natural and healthy' - and privileged.

A future where disability justice won looks like queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, folks of colour, and women, girls, and nonbinary humans are living in a world where disability is the norm, and where access is no longer a question but a fait accompli. Gone are the days where our disabled bodies and minds are compared to the able-bodied and able-minded. We’ve flipped the script. We still like our non-queer, non–people of colour, non-disabled friends and we’ll have them at our fully accessible dance parties (which include comfy chairs and couches for our aches and pains, subwoofers that make you feel the vibrations, active listeners, and personal support workers, so we can fully enjoy our time out, and plenty of room as well as fully accessible bathrooms for wheelchair-users to dance, dance, and dance as well as pee with ease, and no stairs in sight and clear paths to sway or rest as we please). Because, please, did you really think this could go on, this able-bodied and -minded domination? It’s not that we’ve flipped the script to exert power and replicate oppressions on our able-bodied and able-minded friends, they just over time learned to not take up so much space and not be offended or feel left out if we don’t organize with them in mind. Actually, in our accessible/disabled future, binaries are broken. We fully live on and in the spectrum of possibilities of non-stigmatized minds and bodies. In this spectrum, we are fully connected to one another, which means that decolonization has happened and is still happening and that patriarchy has been toppled and much more. This interconnectedness that we now live daily means that sometimes our able-bodied and able-minded friends are learning every day, including from their mistakes, and are understanding in how many ways our differences and disabilities manifest. This also means that we have collectively built this future and thus have learned and understood differences and disabilities, and all of us are still doing that important work even when it is hard because this future world is ours! -KARINE MYRGIANIE JEAN-FRANÇOIS AND NELLY BASSILY, DAWN (DISABLED WOMEN’S NETWORK) CANADA