“Why didn’t the handmaids just use he/him?”

I’m pretty critical of the trans community because it’s my home and I love it. I don’t want us to have to live in a house with broken windows and leaky faucets just because we’re convinced that we can never have anything better. I want better for us. I want us to be safe and happy and I don’t want any of us to be shoved aside as if we don’t matter. Trans liberation should not only be available for white binary trans people who pass. We need more love for trans people of color outside of turning dead Black trans women into saints without ever listening to what they fought for. We need more love for trans people outside of the imperial core, especially those who don’t speak English or who struggle with it. We need more love for intersex people no matter how they identify. We need love for people who, seeking acceptance from a community who is meant to love and care for them, are told that their issues are “too complicated” or “derailing the conversation”. To the people on the fringes: I love you.

One thing that’s going to be controversial about me is that I will be referring to myself as female. I don’t believe that it’s useful to me to say I’ve changed my sex or that I’m not deeply affected by the patriarchal, sexist society we live in. I don’t believe this is “self misgendering” as I literally don’t believe that it’s possible to misgender yourself and I also don’t think sex and gender are the same thing. If you, the person reading this, do not identify this way that’s fine but please don’t try to change the way I speak about my body and my oppression because it makes you uncomfortable. I don’t believe that your identity has any impact on mine or my validity and I hope you will extend me the same courtesy.

I do also believe in *some* of the tenets of radical feminism. I mean this with as much emphasis as possible: some. I don’t believe in trans exclusion, I’m not a lesbian separatist, etc etc. What I do believe is that gender is a construct that has mostly been used to create a sexist hierarchical society (think gender roles and stereotypes). In my ideal post-patriarchal world, nobody would be trans in the way that no one would be cis, we would all just use whatever clothes and pronouns we wanted and there would be no hierarchy. I also believe that sex based oppression is real and I don’t think misogyny could exist without it. This does not mean I don’t believe in transmisogyny or that I think all misogyny is sex based.

Another important thing I believe is that we really *really* need to do more to center trans voices outside of the imperial core. White people in the trans community (including myself) also need to stop appropriating language used specifically about racial violence (eg “digital lynching” to refer to blogs getting banned) and language that is hyperbolic to the point of meaninglessness (calling bans on gender affirming care for children in the US “genocide”)