I don't think I can quite express how heartbreaking it is to learn of Emi Koyama's passing, and to hear about it days later from seemingly the only person talking about it. Even her wikipedia hasn't been updated. Thank you endlessly, @elierlick for telling us all.
I quote and cite Koyama often, and her relationship with strife in the trans community made me hold onto her work all the more. Seeing the post, I really didn't want to believe it was true, and there is so little coverage for her. Where are the queer papers doing memorial pieces? Where are her murals? Why is her photo or at least name not all over my dash?
Her death makes me angry. It makes me sad. It makes me mourn for everyone whose lives were touched by her in-person work, as her writing deeply touched me.
Emi Koyama is the person who popularized the word transfeminism.
Every single person who calls themself a transfeminist owes Emi Koyama for that.
And it makes me ill that so many people who are the antithesis of what that word means, tries to claim it for ideologies that spit in the face of everything Emi Koyama is--now was.
Emi Koyama was a Japanese-American intersex trans woman who refused to abandon intersectional lenses to her feminism. She challenged white feminism, she challenged radfeminism, and she pushed us into a new era of trans and feminist thinking.
And she was demonized by reactionary members of the trans community for it. Her inclusivity was dangerous, her staunch opposition to racist feminism was dangerous, her refusal to be categorized by bigoted folks within our own borders was dangerous.
She stood with the members of our community that were discarded by attempts at appealing to white cis perisex folks. She stood with people across fictional binaries some trans people are bent on maintaining. She wanted a liberation movement for all trans people, and she fought like hell for it.
She wrote the transfeminist manifesto in 2000. She was harassed endlessly by people who tried to police trans identity in the 2010s in the same ways we are seeing today--those same sorts of people now adopting her term to call themselves. What a poisoned irony.
She was a fierce advocate of sex workers, was instrumental in fighting for the rights of intersex people--she and Betsy Driver founded Intersex Awareness Day--she was a major voice in challenging racism in queer spaces, she challenged fatphobic narratives in feminism, she was a major advocate for disability rights, she was a passionate defender of those who faced sexual violence and domestic abuse, and at the bottom of a long list of accolades, she helped me feel connected to other trans people.
I don't think I'll ever be able to fully express my gratitude and looking at the contact email for her website, I wish I had ever sent an email. I wish I could tell her what her work and advocacy has meant to me. And my heart hurts deeply at the effort to erase one of our best defenders. She should be a household name.
Per Chris Ash's words: "Those who know her name know what she brought to every movement she touched, and countless others have studied concepts or benefited from rights and narratives that she played an often-quiet role in shaping. Rarely have I known someone whose life and work have had this strong of an impact across so many movements, who was this brilliant and humble, or whose commitment to service was this strong."
May her memory be a blessing. May those who knew her connect stronger over losing her. May we all be as bold in the face of such separatism and be someone like Emi--who fought for us all.
