If you are a White trans person with any interest in racial politics and racial solidarity, you have to put your allyship, solidarity, and support behind the entire Black trans community. Not just one portion of it.

You do also have to be vocal about Black trans men and Black nonbinary people along side Black trans women AND you cannot only bring up Black trans women when it is convenient for you to remember someone's getting punched harder than you. Because Black trans men and Black nonbinary people ARE ALSO GETTING PUNCHED HARDER THAN YOU BECAUSE THEY ARE BLACK.

"You're adopted" jokes are harmful. Insisting adoption is always a good thing/nice and rosy is harmful. Using words like "fake" and "real" family is harmful. We are people with complex lives and most, if not all of us, develop some kind of trauma due to being adopted (whether it worked out for us or not).

An intersectional lense is meant to be a tool to discuss the lives of marginalized people complexly and discuss the ways multiple systemic power structures that impact, oppress, and marginalize us simultaneously — not do math to figure out who is the most oppressed.

Kimberlé Crenshaw has talked extensively about how she dislikes the way intersectionality is misused to just add up different marginalizations and say "this demographic is the most oppressed group to exist". That is not the purpose of intersectionality in an academic context, nor is it the purpose of intersectionality in an applied context. It's a tool for analysis. A tool for understanding. A tool for giving language and voice to complex systemic issues while treating marginalized people like their entire selves.

It's not a tool to go "this demographic has it the worst ever" online to attempt to shut down other marginalized people.

Like, it is undeniable that there is a gendered element to racism when an adult Black man is called "boy" in order to dehumanize him. It is undeniable that there is a gendered element racism when a Black boy, a child, is adultified and referred to as a "man" in order to view him more easily as a threat. It is undeniable that gender and personhood are inherently tied together here.

I know I use these specific examples fairly regularly and don't often drift father in a more simple text post like this, but it is because they feel like such obvious, base level, critical race theory 101/gender studies 101/sociology 101 understandings of race and gender that it absolutely baffles me that there are people who claim to be intersectional and yet refuse to acknowledge them adequately — even when they are confronted with these extremely explicit and direct examples of the racialized nature gender.

It's really interesting the way this gender realism is manifesting though, because it's trying really hard to manifest through social sciences this time as opposed to the medical sciences of yesteryear. Like, not to be all "back in my day", but back in my day when I was a deeply insecure and uncertain trans teenager facing the first Trump admin, the way we tried to argue that trans men are just like any other man and trans women were just like any other woman was with brain scans, studies on the success rates of medical transitional care, and DSM definitions of gender dysphoria.

Of course we read studies wrong. Of course many brain sex studies have since been debunked because their sample sizes were small and skewed and it has since come out that the human brain is not all that sexually dimorphic in general. Of course we only focused on the transition success rates of binary gender conforming trans people, nonbinary people didn't matter. Of course we loved the DSM, we didn't care about the potential threats of medicalization like eugenics as long as it gave us our HRT. Of course we went out of our way to bully and name call and harass other trans people who disagreed with us, none of us wanted those nondysphoric theyfab transtrender tucutes to steal our precious precious undefined ~medical resources~ from us, the real transsexual victims of society.

Now I'm seeing a bunch of insecure and uncertain trans people facing the second Trump admin arguing that trans men are men just like any other man and trans women are women just like any other woman - actually - are the most women to ever women ever - with passing privilege discourse, studies on income rates in the trans community, and sociological / political concepts like intersectionality and materialism.

And it's just kind of like. Of course you're reading studies wrong. Of course passing privilege discourse is old and has been hashed and rehashed 80 different ways to Sunday over the last several decades and it's been bullshit every single time. Of course many surveys on income only reach certain demographics of trans people with higher income stability, who have more time to fill a nonessential survey, who aren't worried about sharing their information, who feel safe outing themselves even privately, who have other potential privileges like whiteness that also plays a huge part in their income, etc. Of course concepts like intersectionality and materialism are being misunderstood by people who have only just been introduced to those concepts in the last 3 or less years, have only engaged with those concepts online, and haven't actually read a book on the subjects once. Of course people are going out of their way to bully and name call and harass other trans people who disagree with them, they don't want those nonpassing lying transandro bro theyfab birthday boys to steal their precious precious undefined ~feminist resources~ from them, the real transsexual victims of society.

It's fascinating watching the same regurgitated talking points that came alongside this discourse resurface too, like "If someone calls it ~queer art~ it's probably bad and transphobic" (typically in reference to RHPS and other adjacent media) and "Queer is a slur" and really anything that deeply hates a more unified idea of queer identity in general. It's all shit that I used to parrot back in the day with a fresh coat of new gender realist paint. People who want to convince you you're just like a cis person are going to do whatever they can to cut you off from and target you against any sense of queer cultural identity. It's built on the false logic that if you find yourself aligning with queer culture, queer identity, then the cishets aren't going to accept you as normal, as one of them, as safe. Because obviously the path to safety as a trans person is trying to break our backs proving to cis people that we're just like them and we deserve safety because we're just like them, and not with our own broader queer community who has been fighting for unconditional acceptance for us all for decades.

It's the same shit. It's bullshit. It was bullshit when we did it 10 years ago and it's still bullshit now. Appealing to cis authority won't get you anywhere good as a trans person. I know because I tried and I ended up isolated and bitter and I actively hurt every trans person that stayed in my life during that time.

And it's just like. no actually. It's not even necessarily specifically about manhood. I could say the exact same thing for many feminist frameworks lack of attention to nonbinary people, especially multi-marginalized nonbinary people. Especially nonbinary people who actively reject any sort of binary or trinary of gender, or who outright reject gender all together. I could say the same for intersex people as well frankly. I could say the same for any demographic of people whose experiences with marginalization are shaped by patriarchal standards.

The issue is the fact that your framework for understanding a marginalized, gendered + sexed demographic of people and their gendered + sexed liberation from a gendered + sexed systemic power doesn't account for the experiences and liberation of other marginalized, gendered + sexed people under the same gendered + sexed systemic power.