queer and trans love

And this is my que to go to bed ~ 

Kelly and Spencer Naked and Kissing

Spencer is trans and Australian, Kelly is queer and Hatian-American, they met in San Francisco and fell in love and got married and here they are today in their living room.

[trigger warning: transphobia, transmisogyny, racism, misogynoir, abuse]

November 20th is Transgender Day of Remembrance. It was started in 1998 by Gwendolyn Ann Smith in remembrance of the murder of Rita Hester, a Black trans woman from Massachusetts. 15 years later, it is acknowledged annually regarding the deaths of trans people due to transphobia and transmisogyny at the hands of both citizens and the State. As Gwendolyn has written:

The Transgender Day of Remembrance is not an event for fundraisers and beer busts. It’s not an event we ‘celebrate.’ It is not a quick and easy one-day way for organizations to get credit for their support of the transgender community. It’s not something to trot out on the 20th of November and forget about. We should be working every day for all of us, living and dead.

This violence disproportionately impacts Black trans women and trans women of colour at higher rates than other people in the trans community and LGBTQ community. This year alone 21 year old Islan Nettles, 26 year old Eyricka Morgan and 32 year old Domonique Newburn were murdered. Both Islan (as Janet Mock so beautifully and painfully wrote about) and Eyricka Morgan were misgendered upon their deaths. Cece McDonald is still incarcerated (in a men’s prison) for defending herself against racist transmisogynistic violence. 

As Monica Roberts at TransGriot—a Black trans woman who is a trans activist and writer—so passionately notes in her her essay 238 Names:

We’re fed up with reading the names of so many young trans* women and sadly a few trans* men this year who will never get to experience another birthday.   Far too many of them who were killed this year were under the age of 35. We’re fed up with contemplating the disturbing fact some of the names we’ll be reading during these TDOR memorials hadn’t even made it to age 21 yet. We’re fed up in the African-American and Latin@ trans* communities of far too many of our people dying and our politicians, clergy and media pundits being cricket chirping silent about it. We’re fed up with legislative inaction on the human rights laws it’s painfully obvious trans* people need at the local, state and federal levels as a wide range of people from trans exclusionary radical feminists to right-wing politicians gleefully spread disinformation and lies to roll back or retard our progress. We’re fed up with our people dying and our people choosing suicide over life because you transphobic cisgender haters have made it so hostile and uncomfortable for them to live.

Below is some reading relevant to Transgender Day of Remembrance and the violence that trans women, especially Black trans women and other trans women of colour face. 

238 Names by Monica Roberts on TransGriot

Mourning Those Lost, Fighting for Our Lives: 2013 Transgender Day of Remembrance by Princess Harmony on The Feminist Wire

Black, LGBT, American: Laverne Cox (Threat or Threatened) by Laverne Cox on Advocate

Violence Against (Trans)Women Today by CeCe McDonald

Injustice At Every Turn: A Look At Black Respondents In The National Transgender Discrimination Survey [PDF] 

Transgender Advocacy Resources on Black Transwomen

Coming Out, Again And Again, In 27 Easy Steps by Rafe Posey

1. Pretend it’s okay that your birth certificate labels you as female. You know perfectly well you’re not.

2. In high school, fall for a girl whose photo you see in an old Life magazine. Carry the magazine from place to place, through six moves and three girls and a handful of boys and various missteps and seven years.

3. Get a job at a bookstore. Read OutWeek Magazine. Wear a pink triangle. Wear a red ribbon. Cry for lost friends.

4. Fall for a girl who works at the bookstore.

5. Discover that she’s the girl in the picture in that magazine. You’ve carried her from place to place, through six moves and three girls and various missteps and seven years, and now here she is, with creases ironed into her jeans.

6. Try. Maybe a mixtape will help. Keep trying.

7. Give up. Move away. There’s another girl. She’s smart and funny, and she likes you a lot. Fall for her and make a family.

8. Are you still pretending it’s okay that you’re not a regular boy? Yes? Fantastic.

9. Do not drown. Write. Ignore the Pacific Ocean when it tells you that drowning is better than writing, and much better than pretending. Refuse to drown.

10. Discover the internet. Discover Kate Bornstein. Discover that it’s not just you.

11. Cut your hair, but only a little.

12. Fall again for the girl in the picture in that magazine you’re still carrying, after seven more moves and one amazing partner and three splendid kids and all those years.

13. Stop pretending.

14. Blow up the world, clumsily. Break hearts, including your own.

15. Begin.

16. Drive from West Coast to East with a cat and too many books. Cut off all your hair. Buy a suit. Change everything except your last name.

17. Discover men who look like lions. Men sway-surfing on the subway. Gus Mattox. Jesse L. Martin. Poets. Artists. Heath Ledger. Johnny Damon. Men.

18. Stare. Endlessly shoot needles full of syrupy testosterone into your body, trying to shape yourself into something like those men.

19. Look away when friends, or people you hardly know, ask what kind of junk you have in your pants, and what you like to do with it. Your body is theirs. Or they think it is.

20. Stand in the vaulting, crowded loneliness of Penn Station, trying to understand which bathroom to use. Give up. Make a map of every Starbucks in Manhattan with a single-user bathroom. Stay safe.

21. Go to Chelsea to get coffee and write. There will be men there too.

22. Remember to breathe when cisgender friends who think they’re being supportive describe trans men as “female-bodied.” When cisgender gay men insist on gender as a construct but only want to sleep with “real” men. When friends and relatives ask why you bothered transitioning if you just want to sleep with men. When you go to Chelsea to get coffee and write.

23. Be vague. Use gender neutral pronouns when you talk about the girl from the magazine, now the woman with whom you’re sharing your life. People finally understand you’re not a girl. Now you have to convince them you’re not a straight man.

24. Don’t think about that man you know. Really. Please don’t think about him. He’s not your type. I promise.

25. Pretend you don’t care that the girl in the picture in that magazine that you’re looking at right now, after all these moves and so many missteps, and almost thirty years, isn’t a man. That she doesn’t want to be a man.

26. Replace “denial” with “abstention.”