Carnation Insant Butch ☕

I do appreciate the sentiment but maybe I should rephrase:

can we hurry up and make it normalized to have boobs out in public so that even if it’s legal in your state you don’t risk get arrested anyway and you need to hire an attorney to point out that you were’t breaking any laws.

can we hurry up and make it normalized to have your boobs out in public so it’s weird that it’s legal in some places and not others.

Commissions open!

but, if this is you, please hear me: this feeling is internalized transphobia. it's understandable, but you need to work through it. you are trans.

there are not "levels" to being trans.

there are material circumstances that can impact how transphobia impacts you. the more things you choose to do with your life that are prohibited according to assignment, the more you will experience transphobia, because transphobia is assignment enforcement. so yes, trans people who encounter these structural modes of enforcement are experiencing transphobia that those who are not encountering these structures are not.

(for example, I have not changed my name or gender marker legally. this means I have not experienced the specific mechanism of assignment enforcement that exists to restrict legal sexgender re-categorization. I have changed my sexed traits medically (hormones and surgery) so I have experienced the specific mechanism of assignment enforcement that exists to restrict bodily autonomy over sexed characteristics. these are structures, right?)

but we are all trans. avoiding these structures to avoid dealing with the transphobia inherent to navigating them is also experiencing the impact of this enforcement. whether you decide to go up against any specific enforcement structures or not, you are still trans. you are still experiencing living in a world that enforces assignment and punishes people for disobedience to it. you are still being impacted by this restriction on your autonomy, whether you openly fight any particular aspect of this restriction or not.

at a time when people are constantly promoting the idea that

nonbinary people "don't transition,"

nonbinary can mean being "detrans" or cisgender,

nonbinary people are "neither trans or cis" or "less trans" than other trans people,

nonbinary people are always assigned female at birth and transfems can't be nonbinary

we need to all understand this is an effort to insist that:

nonbinary people are somehow inherently, categorically different from other trans people,

that we do not have shared material interests or life experiences navigating the same structures of assignment enforcement, and

that TME nonbinary people should not work together with transfeminized people--nonbinary or not--for shared liberation.

this is some divide-and-conquer shit. we cannot allow this idea to flourish. it is dangerous.

i feel it makes me an arbitrator of knowledge and experience that i do not have and will detract from speaking on

here is what I think: no trans person is an arbiter. every trans person can only speak to their own life experience and accumulated knowledge.

some trans people spend a lot of time and effort collecting information about many trans people’s experiences (through talking to a lot of people, doing surveys and studies, etc). some trans people spend a lot of time and effort applying and modifying theoretical frameworks about oppression to form coherent analysis around trends in experience. these people can speak to the knowledge and understandings that they have about transness broadly, and can cite their sources and explain their influences that led them to these conclusions.

any legitimacy someone holds when talking about transness is not an innate quality derived from their identity; it is an earned, living, relational trust.

you can speak on your own experiences and whatever knowledge and understanding you have gained from engagement with these things. same as any trans person.

you might not know a lot yet, so you might not have much knowledge to offer in these situations besides anecdotes from your own life right now. that’s fine and is the case for many trans people.

in my opinion, as long as you are humble and honest about the limits of your own knowledge about transness when you speak on it, then you are responsibly wielding that label and not detracting from anyone else's experiences.

also there are trans people who are irresponsible with this all the time & claim anecdotes from their own life is in-and-of-itself proof of some universal truth about what it means to be trans. they're still trans. trans people grift and let themselves be tokenized sometimes. transness does not imply knowledge, authority, or investment in trans liberation in and of itself.

trans people are just people. there is no test. saying you're trans is just an honest report that you are not living your life within relational/medical/legal bounds of the sexgender assigned to you.

I think it's wonderful that you feel responsibility to treat discussion about being trans with gravity. it is genuinely a very good thing to move with respect for how these discussions impact other people's lives.

you do not need to deny yourself language to maintain this respect. in fact, your ability to advocate for trans people more broadly may strengthen when you claim your stake in the struggle directly.