#trans visbility

wanted to doodle a lil something for trans visibility day 🏳️‍⚧️💕

whether you're in the closet or not, just being trans takes great strength and resilience. i am proud of everyone!!!! ❤️

Thank you for letting me know. I just checked it out and my heart is so full. It is exactly what needed to be said and what needed to be heard.

The fact that it came from Dan means so much to the community and the fandom. The following paragraph perfectly sums up the controversy and how we must deal with it -

It must not have been easy to make a statement like this one. But as our favorite headmaster said - "It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.

Thank you, Daniel for saying these very important words.

To my fellow witches and wizards, do not let this keep you away from the wizarding world. Magic blooms in all souls and magic works beyond gender and race and sexual orientation.

To quote JK Rowling herself - “Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.”

A thing happened this month that had me very exited for about 5 minutes and then upset for the next few days as shit came tumbling down. 

The interview

On the 5th of June, in an interview on national television, Mounir ‘Mo’ Samuel (already a well known face on Dutch television as a young Egyptian-Dutch political analyst) talked about being transgender in a way Dutch tv had not seen before. 

Presenter Eva Jinek opened the interview, introducing the heart breaking story of a woman who wants the world to know she’s a man, and Mounir immediately corrected her:

“I want to put something straight. I do not live my life as a man. I live my life as ‘Mounir’. That name makes my heart sing. It is the only name that makes my heart sing. Call me Mo. I’m human. I am a human with passion and drives, I am a human with very feminine sides that I am very proud of, but I also feel very inherently masculine. I wrote a blog and - ”

The reporter interrupted him: “I get it. It’s not one-sided. But would you say you are more masculine than feminine?”

Mounir went on, undetered: 

“I wrote a blog saying ‘Call me Mounir’. And everyone said ‘well now we get it, you are a man. We’ve put you in another box.’ And my whole problem was that constant labeling. I don’t fit in a box, I don’t fit in a label. I don’t fit in a cage of which I have to swallow the key. I want to be free and I want the space to figure out who I am. I know I feel good in a more masculine appearance, that’s closer to what I feel inside. But I won’t say ‘I am a man now and this is my new label’. What I want is to be liberated of those labels.”

The presenter then played a clip of Mo’s previous tv appearances, when he presented as a woman. She then went on: “You’ve been married to a man. Then you had a coming out as a lesbian..”

Mo: “As a gay woman, I said ‘queer’, and everyone turned that into ‘lesbian’. I figured, if that keeps the men away, alright.” 

Presenter:”Okay, but that wasn’t it. So is this your last step?”

Mo: “Life is a journey. If I’ve now reached the last step at 25 years old, I have a boring life ahead of me”. 

Presenter: “But it’s the last step defining your sex?”

Mo: “No, this is actually just the beginning. This is the first time I’ve given space to what I feel inside. I could be sitting here in two years with a beard or I could be sitting here -”

At that point he was interrupted as the other table guest said: “Oh, don’t do that. It won’t look good on you”. From that point the whole conversation got derailed as Mounir tried to explain to him that that was a very shitty thing to say to someone. 

The response

The interview had been rough on Mo and he wrote a blog post the next day about how poorly he’d been treated, how the audience had laughed at him and called names. Media the next day responded by calling Mo’s interview confusing and narcissistic whining. 

I expected a show of solidarity from the trans community. Sadly, that didn’t happen. Instead, the responses were:

- Debates on whether Mo was a good representative of the non-binary community, all assuming that he is non-binary even though he had never called himself that. Most of these debates ignored Mo’s request for male pronouns and referred to him with genderneutral pronouns. He might have asked for space to figure himself out, the transgender community had a third label ready to slap on and was determined to lock him in that box. 

- Accusations that it was foolish and selfish of Mo to appear on tv before he had figured himself out, thus not being able to give the balanced mature answer a more experienced transgender person might have given, and providing bad representation. 

There was no outrage about how Mo had been treated. There was no solidarity. There was no acknowledgement of Mo’s contribution to a more diverse trans visibility in the face of a hostile media or the importance of this moment. There was no call for transgender people to have the space to figure themselves out, to not define themselves, to not know where we will be in 2 years.