Everything’s Gonna Be Alright

postcard c1910

When I was in undergrad (it's been so long ago, now. I graduated in 2011.), I took a class called Psychology of Women. (I was a psych major.) My professor was the kind of feminist who believed in the mysticism of womanhood, the "innate magic" of being a woman, yonic mysteries, all that jazz. I was in the height of my nonbinary rebellion. I was riding high on the experience of having successfully socially transitioned to being called my preferred (gender neutral) name. (Still the name everyone knows me by, 16 years later.) In fact, some people were even using my preferred pronouns--xe/xem. (These days I'm honestly 100% that post that's like 'yeah sure those are my pronouns but i'm at work right now and don't have time to care that much.' Nice-to-have, not vital to my mental health.)

Anyway. For our final project, we had a choice: Do 3 hours of community volunteer work for a women's rights cause, or write a minimum-10-page paper on a women's rights issue. I think 99% of the class chose the volunteer work. I--as you can probably tell from this post if not my whole tumblr--could write a 10-page paper in my sleep, and had just spent the whole semester feeling like I was receiving mild electric shocks every time this woman came so close to "getting it" on gender equality and then veering off into Women Are Magic.

The works cited were four pages long, which, along with the 19 pages of actual paper, brought the final page count to 23. My thesis was simple, and conveyed in my title: Trans Rights Are Women's Rights.

For nineteen pages, I put forth the argument that any feminist movement that excluded transgender people could never achieve equality or genuine rights for women. I spent paragraphs citing famous feminists' work toward being sure women were seen as humans regardless of the state of their reproductive organs or whether those were ever used. Birth control, one of the great tools of women's liberation, was predicated on the idea that being a mother was not the be-all end-all of being a woman, and women should be able to choose. Women should have a voice in their medical care. Their goals for their bodies should be the primary consideration in any medical treatment, regardless of what their parents or husbands might say. These are pieces of progress feminists fought for. How, then, could you withdraw this progress because you didn't like the kind of woman someone else was or wasn't?

There is nothing, I argued, that you can deny to transgender people without also denying it to yourself. To deny the worth and equality of someone based on their gender identity or the shape or function of their body parts is to agree that a person's worth is not inherent, but based on how well they conform to their society's ideals, and a society that bases the worth of its members on conformity can never be a place where women are free.

I got an A on that paper. I felt confident that, as a culture, we were moving toward that bright horizon of true equality of genders.

And now, in the year of our work 2026, every goddamn day I have to listen to fucking adults with actual jobs who make decisions that actually affect other people spout shit that the villains in a 2005 kids movie on the Disney Channel or Nickelodeon would say to let you know without a doubt that they were the Bad Guys, right before the Independent Girl Main Character did some cool ass kickflips and saved the day while shaming them for being so narrow-minded.