I know that on the internet transfemmes tend to get accused of “separatist ideology” the most for speaking about our issues, but I do think it’s hilarious (evil) how the more marginalized you are the harder it becomes to actually be separationist or isolationist because of the exact systemic discrimination that creates those desires.
Like ok, you’re transfemme. You have hella bad experiences with non-transfemmes doing transmisogyny to you so you end up interacting almost exclusively with other transfemmes.
But you’re also Black, and you hope that also being marginalized will help cut out the antiblackness and transmisogynoir from non-Black transfemmes, but it turns out they still gonna do that shit to you, so you retreat to just other Black transfemmes.
And then you get hit with long covid or literally any other disability, can’t work anymore because of it and become reliant on mutual aid to survive. Surely, you think, the double whammy of being Black and transfemme means they’ll understand ableism too. Maybe mask so you can be with them safely without getting even more disabled.
And then they don’t, so you try to find other disabled Black transfemmes, a sliver of a sliver of a sliver, but they’re all ALSO broke and isolated and surviving on mutual aid and luck and they tell you your options are to accept everything being done to you so that you have a chance of surviving via mutual aid and community resources, or simply give up.
So you go back to the larger community to have a chance of surviving, because the average lifespan for Black transfemmes is mid-30s and you’d like to beat the average at least, and you prepare to suffer again, to survive.
Last year, two of the best known/loved cis Black women who were disability advocates on Twitter died due to lack of mutual aid. One couldn’t raise funds for her chemo, the other couldn’t raise funds for a rideshare to the hospital the day she died and knew that an ambulance would ruin her financially.
I look at them, two well known and loved disabled Black women who put so much effort into helping their community only to die due to lack of help, and then I look at the other disabled Black trans folks I know surviving off of mutual aid and I wonder how much longer it’ll be until it’s them, because they damn sure don’t got the same amount of people that even know who they are.
(If you BIPOC/trans/disabled and trying to cf, I’ll reblog it if you message it to me or put it as a reblog on this. I’ll also try to go through and reblog everything on here every so often)
blakekathryn
stormborns
vaporwave
titsay
kaledo-art
