Sunshine Palace

hugs(?) stage (3/3)

There is a reason why legislation and social pushback is typically focused on preventing you from coming out, preventing you from transitioning from the start, or detransitioning and/or closeting you. That is state violence, but the state is hoping you will either do the dirty work yourself (suicide) or fall in line with the White Supremacist Patriarchal gender roles it expects of you (closeting/detransition). I know that is bad. It's abysmal. It's awful. We are not here to downplay the violence that happens broadly to queer people at the hands of the government.

However, under White Supremacy, as a white queer person, you can be "saved" from the "lifestyle choice" you have "made". We're in a country dominated by Christian savior complexes, conversion therapy is a regrowing industry, the laws targeting us are laws of restriction, laws of "prevention". White queer people are a "problem" to be "solved" by trying to "save" us from ourselves so we can reintegrate into broader white, Christian society alongside other white people. We need to be "corrected" and "saved" because our whiteness is still valuable to Christian, Patriarchal, White Supremacy.

White Supremacist state violence in the United States murders Black infants on the false allegation that their mothers are stealing diapers. White Supremacist state violence murders Black children for playing with toy airsoft guns. White Supremacist state violence murders Black women for experiencing a mental health crisis. White Supremacist state violence murders Black men on the unproven allegation that they used a counterfeit $20 bill. White Supremacist state violence murders Black people for simply existing in their homes. Kohen Wiley, Tamir Rice, Sonya Massey, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Roger Fortson. The list could go on because just existing while Black is dangerous under White Supremacy.

Your analysis of your own place in society as a queer person is incomplete without this analysis. It is not enough to say "well trans WoC have it harder than me but cishet people all have it easier" because that is incomplete and ignorant at best and flat out wrong and racist at worst. Why do trans WoC, particularly Black trans women struggle and experience so much violence in our country? Why does that violence happen? You can't just say "because they're transgender and they're women and they aren't white" and leave it at that. What are the institutions, the power structures, the long standing histories of violence and subjugation at play here? Why is it dangerous for someone to exist as a Black person, everything else aside, in the first place? Why and how does your whiteness protect you where their Blackness creates a target for them and how do the systems around you exploit that and target you differently on a material level?

some other mostly well-known texts by Black writers that may be useful here:

Audre Lorde’s “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House”

The Combahee River Collective Statement

less well-known but really useful: Angela Davis and Jane Elliott in conversation on race and privilege

and, how to use all this work: bell hooks’ “Theory as Liberatory Practice”

several of these authors were or are lesbians or queer and those who ever commented on trans experience were or are trans allies (to my knowledge), therefore specifically relevant to this post. :)

two extras:

this 1975 conversation between James Baldwin and Maya Angelou is much clipped and GIF’d (you’ll probably recognize the imagery if you’ve been on tumblr for any length of time) but I actually don’t know if I’ve ever seen a link to the full thing before - enjoy; it’s beautiful and worth watching

Tema Okun’s From White Racist to White Anti-Racist Ladder, a step-by-step resource designed for white allies who want to do what OP is telling them to do but need help figuring out how to manage their defensiveness/emotional reactions to trying to learn to become anti-racist and unlearning the structural racism in which they have been raised. these reactions are not something we have to be terribly ashamed of (in fact, shame can make us dig our heels into our racist behavior, so learning to forgive ourselves and behave differently is an important part of unlearning racism). feeling defensive is a totally normal part of unlearning racist patterns and white supremacy, just like it’s a normal part of unlearning any kind of privileged pattern we hold. what matters most is that we do our best to keep trying and not to push our emotional reactions onto the people around us and the people we love who are impacted and oppressed by white supremacy.