Kashmira Qeel

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

But brushing your teeth for 30 seconds is better than not brushing them at all when that 2 minutes seems exhausting.  Doing ten minutes of yoga is better than 10 minutes of sitting when 30 minutes of cardio sounds impossible.  Changing my clothes is good when a whole shower is impossible.  Standing on the porch for a few minutes is worth it after being in the house for three straight days because I don’t have the energy to go anywhere.

We live under a system of kyriarchy. The term was coined by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza in her 1992 book “But She Said: Feminist Practices of Biblical Interpretaion” to describe what we today might call the intersectional, interconnected systems of domination and submission which oppress us all. These systems oppress us in some ways and privilege us in others, but under the domination of these systems we cannot truly be free to be ourselves. The transphobic notions of "male socialization" and "female socialization" are really a system of patriarchal and class domination through which our society forces us to look through the world. Kyriarchy itself is a complex system of domination that exists to uphold the status quo, and those on the bottom of the pyramid are subject to the full force of kyriarchal oppression - today, those forces are arrayed against trans and BIPOC people most strongly. The structure of this oppression reinforces itself through internalized oppression and externalized structures, such as capitalism, racism, compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory cisgenderism and cissexualism.

Now Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza is a religious and biblical feminist, and thus, most of her writing is about the Roman Catholic Church and interpreting the bible in a feminist lens - she believes that the original disciples and the early church actually treated women and men as equals. Her coining of the term kyriarchy was originally intended as a way to discuss how the world's current understanding of Christianity is incomplete, and that we should be interpreting the Catholic Bible with feminist theory as a liberatory text, allowing women the freedom to be equals to men. The concept of kyriarchy, however, is relevant throughout history to our present day.

Doing more research into this topic for this essay, it turns out that the concept was popularized by John Money and Anke Ernhardt in his 1976 book “Man & Woman, Boy & Girl” which immediately points to the whole concept of “gendered socialization” being wrong. John Money used, as a case study for this book, the case of David Reimer and one other child, where he reported that they had essentially successfully transitioned these two infants. David Reimer, of course, was not successfully transitioned - he realized that he was a man, transitioned back, and lived his life as a man until his death by suicide from years of trauma. John Money used this theory of “gendered socialization” to argue that intersex people should have their genitals “normalized” as infants and have them grow up as either a boy or a girl, rather than let them choose as they grew up.

Money also popularized ideas around “gendered socialization” pertaining to sexual orientation, an idea which we’ve discarded entirely, and the current definition of sex that TERFs love to parade around, the “males produce small gametes, females produce large gametes” shit.

It's like, either you're a feminine cis man who is still cis, like a femboy, or cross-dresser, or you're a binary transgender woman 'gender conformist' who has an absolutely uncomplicated relationship to her gender. There's no in-between, and any sign that a transgender woman might have a more complicated relationship to her gender is grounds to exile her to the former category of femboy or cross-dresser.

Being nonbinary is only socially permissible in transgender spaces when you're transmasculine, because transfemininity is subjected to such intense scrutiny that that anything short of swearing an oath of undying loyalty to Artemis that you will forever and exclusively be a woman is grounds to treat you as a male cross-dresser.

You can see this in a lot "androgynous" fashion styles as well, especially in what bodies get to be counted as androgynous. Typically, the bodies are white, thin, and (stereotypically) feminine, save for the absence of boobs, while the clothing is (stereotypically) masculine. The fact that this is an idealization of transmasculinity is not an accident, and it makes transfeminine nonbinary people hoping to be socially read as such extremely difficult.

The only alternative for them is the 'man in dresses' stereotype, which not only reduces them to the status of a cross-dresser, but which is constantly fetishized and repackaged as "gender fuckery" by TME people who think it's exotic. And I know some transfem nonbinary people get a lot out of this, I know a few of them, but for the vast majority of us, it's a complete misrepresentation of how we actually want to present.

These fashion and body standards are not the cause of this pattern so much as the shared effect of the pervasive transmisogyny directed against transfemininity which constructed transfemininity and nonbinary identity as anathema to begin with.

This anathema is typically employed against transfeminists as well. I am nonbinary, and yet I could not tell you the massive stream of people accusing me of being a binary trans woman who denies the existence of nonbinary people and who do not believe me when I try to explain otherwise.

When people say transfeminism is "exorsexist", what they mean is that they can't understand transfeminine people as nonbinary, that they refuse to recognize our identities, or to understand our experiences.