Press Y to HONK

[Video transcript:

Impulse: No wax, just an axe! That's your slogan! You're welcome! Thank you! BUH-bye!

- everything really is about old friends

Having F on her birth certificate has not saved her. Systems can still demand further proof of "eligibility." People still refuse to believe her, insisting she is lying, that she is a trans woman, or that she is a man in disguise.

Legal designation does not protect assignment typical cis intersex women from misogyny, intersexism, or transphobic policing of their bodies. It does not prevent them from being publicly scrutinized, accused, and dehumanized when their bodies do not fit expectations.

So when people try to claim that cis intersex women are overwhelmingly supported in their womanhood, understand that this is false. They are asking you to ignore the reality of how quickly society turns on them the moment their bodies do not fit expectations.

Pretending otherwise is propaganda. People use the lives of people like Imane Khelif to push the idea that there is a clean class of people safely exempt from this kind of oppression, that cis intersex women are automatically protected from systemic transmisogyny because they are "really" female on paper.

Being accused of being a man, having your body publicly dissected, and being treated as fraudulent does not stop being that kind of violence just because someone decides you aren't the "right" kind of victim

The moment someone’s body is seen as suspicious, that supposed exemption disappears. They are still subjected to the same suspicion, humiliation, and violence. This reframing uses the same bioessentialist logic TERFS use to selectively define who is even allowed to "count" as a target of misogynistic violence in the first place

A Nervous Old Man (right) and his Emotional Support Violence Machine (Left)

In high school theatre, I was cast as whatever vaguely foreign side characters were in the script, because my theatre teacher said I was “ethically ambiguous”. But Ashkenazim are white.

At my first job, a coworker asked me what country I came from, and refused to believe my ancestors were Ukrainian. She thought I was Māori. But Ashkenazim are white.

A few months after 9/11, my mother was stranded at the airport for five hours. My father was supposed to pick her up, and Homeland Security at the arrivals gate thought he looked Arab enough to detain. But Ashkenazim are white.

One day a new tenant moved into the building. "Did you know," he said to me, troubled and scornful, "that the people across the hall from me are Jews? Polish Jews!" (Three months later we were North African Jews.) "The peace and quiet in this building are lost! You can't imagine how noisy these people are, how dirty and familiar. In the building where my sister lives, there is a Jewish family from Central Europe, and can you believe it. .. etc."

Suddenly, I was brought back to my senses, outside of this easy, apparently peaceful relationship which I had had with my neighbors. This man, with whom I was partially able to identify, brutally reminded me of the abject image he had of my people, an image which was an integral part of his universe, of this universe which I wanted to adopt. And now what was I to do? Was I to be silent or did I speak? Speak! A dignified protest. "Watch your step! I am a Jew myself, etc. . .." But then, once again, there I was out in the open, a Jewl A Tunisian Jew! The disguise was over and the assimilation stopped. Would it have been better for me to keep silent? To say nothing? No, because even if the disguise remained, the assimilation had still been arrested, identification suddenly became impossible. How could I continue to identify with people who despised and insulted me? Inside, at least, I again become distant, different, and separated as usual.

Of course I might have insisted, pursued identification at any price, but one can see the cost. In order to reach my destination I would have had to ratify this condemnation of my people and myself which the non-Jewish universe proposed. In order to assimilate, I would have had to assimilate not only the model, but also the accusations and the injustices. I would have had to swallow the poisoned fruit.