^ I don't agree (also watched)
Amin re-iterates some very valid points about how class and the effects of racialised class limit or expand the options that trans women have for transition, work, economic independence with a focus on US circa 60s+ - He is not saying a single new thing that Black working class women of trans history; Black transexual women; and Black transfemme women have not said as activists and academics.
He proposes the theory he's worked on for a bit that the options you have, rather than an internal specific personal orientation to your gender, direct how transexual women transex themselves and when in their lifecourse and the narratives they use to express this (again nothing new but an interesting minor new way to express this)
THEN he proposes that Black trans women are heterosexual and come out early to life an authentic transexual life through their orientation to desiring men
AND white trans women are not really trans for most of their lives because they are able to delay being transexual so they can keep economic advantage as white heterosexual cross dressers and have only very recently started to claim the idea that trans women are ever lesbians.
Amin refers to women he knows perfectly well are 'late' transitioning white women - transexual women. Actual women. And refers to them as heterosexual crossdressers as their primary selves - he uses intra trans women's oral histories, especially Black transexual women elders, selectively, to mobilise ideas about realness, passing, beauty etc.
It's a very weird take, very selective, like yknow Marsha P Johnson and Silvia Riviera would not count as authentic under this definition - neither had the ability to pass as cis, neither had Amin's lifecourse that he seems to assert is authentically Black , authentically feminine - to come out early and access (how?) the economic resource to live stealth, to have a interiority as 'simply a woman' - like this was not a unifying sense of self or material reality in this era or now.
How does it account for white women like April Lawton or Marilyn "Mardi" Pieronek - (one a rock gutarist, one a sex worker and drag performer) both who do fit Amin's lifecourse of run away, transition young, live stealth or primarily passing, as heterosexual women.
How does it account for white middle class - but - transexual same sex attracted, lesbian, transexual women like Charlotte Charlaque and Toni Ebel who were transexual and lovers in 1920s Berlin?
I don't think it is fair to say Amin can say whatever he likes because he's a Brown guy - there were no trans women on that panel - no Black women. He can be right about some things and way off the mark about others.