"My Sylveon stole my fuckign gender "

I think I’ve seen more Black transfemme memorial tribute art than I’ve seen art depicting Black transfemme characters. Like yes representation is the bare fucking minimum but. do you have any idea how little Black transfemme art I see that isnt the “five o’clock shadow” type or Marsha or because yet another one of us got killed and it’s in tribute?

There’s an omnipresence of white trans folks in popular trans art because whiteness is the currency of attention online and everyone else gotta pay the BIPOC Attention Tax, and even if you specifically look for it, often algorithms and censors that target all transfemmes but disproportionately affect transfemmes of color will make it hell to find unless you know EXACTLY what/how to find it.

Part of why I share my modeling photos, or even my selfies like I do, is bc so many people like me never get to see others that look like us even within our own marginalities. That it doesn’t stop at being white, or petite, or abled, or cis. That there are other people even more like us within our marginalities, that we aren’t fucking alone in a society that uplifts the same types of people to the “top” even within a marginalized group.

The police ruled it a suicide. The family and local community demanded an investigation. The police refused to change their ruling.

Juliana Nzita, A 16 year old Black girl, was just found hanging from a tree on church grounds in Charlotte, NC. Police have ruled it a suicide, despite hanging ourselves from trees being like the one communally agreed way Black folks ain’t killing ourselves.

Every time I go on Twitter or Facebook I learn about another recent lynching or missing Black person going mostly unreported. Half the reason I keep an active account on either of those sites is because they’re the only place I can find out about the violence happening to Black and Trans people reasonably quickly.

Non-Black and/or non-US based people often wonder why so many left-leaning Black folks in the US try to operate alternate justice systems within smaller community such as restorative justice, transformative justice, etc. when “all over the world, activists and their ancestors have fought for access to legal systems like this” and this is why.

Our legal system is explicitly designed to kill and enslave Black people. Our legal system from the cops to the lawyers and courts (one of the few times we got justice) to the prisons is legalized slavery where prisons are privatized and corporations are encouraged to maximize their profit by incentivizing every part of this system to hold as many people as possible.

Black folks can be proven innocent after years of time in prison or on death row and still killed by the state or dying in prison because the goal was never justice, it was to keep culling and controlling the Black population.

And outside of the system, we are lynched, raped, abused, trafficked, and robbed by those involved in our legal system, lives often irreparably destroyed, entire lives disappeared with no justice because that is the point, not a flaw. It’s almost always those in the legal system or their families and friends doing this, so that it can be ruled a suicide or a runaway or intracommunity issues and swept away.

The Greeks had this word, right, we have no idea where it came from, it just kinda popped up out of nowhere, and it could mean either apples, cheeks, or boobs. Problem is it looked and sounded *exactly* like another, unrelated word which could mean sheep, goat, or any animal in general really, which must have got confusing if you were a farmer talking about your livestock, but anyway…

Then the Romans, having stolen practically everything else from the Greeks, thought they’d nick this word too, because Latin isn’t confusing enough without throwing in a bunch of loan words. And they adopted it to mean a pumpkin.

Then the English came along and were all like “when in Rome”, and stole it, where it became our word ‘melon’. Which has now come back to mean boobs.