on gender inclusive language

5/16/19
Inclusion rhetoric often ends up re-inscribing the norm, rather than challenging it. For example: When we say gender non-conforming & non-binary people need to be “included” in feminism what ends up happening is that the core paradigms which created the exclusion in the first place are left un-checked and the same paradigm is just expanded to incorporate a few different bodies. It’s not enough to include us, you have to shift your analysis to challenge the gender & sex binary. So often non-binary and GNC people are accused of being “politically correct” when we ask for recognition, but actually we are just being correct (period.) The reality is that people who are not women get abortions. People who are not women experience gender based violence. This is our lived experience, not some postmodern conspiracy. We are not asking for language that respects this as a matter of principle, but as a matter of profound truth. When you just speak about gender justice as just “women’s rights” you are not addressing all the people going through the very issues you profess to care about. Calling for language that reflects reality isn’t about erasing women — it’s about making the work more precise & effective for everyone. Feminism benefits from a recognition that the non-consensual gendering of everything — including pregnancy — is a root cause of so many feminist issues. Fighting patriarchy with the gender binary is like fighting fire with fire. It doesn’t work and it just makes the problem even more dire. Listen to intersex, non-binary, and gender non-conforming perspectives not just to learn about “our” issues, but your own! All people deserve bodily autonomy, including the right to name their own identities, bodies, and experiences. There is a double standard operating that needs to be named: when people with power call for recognition it’s not seen as political correctness, it’s seen as a logical demand. When those of us without power call for it, it’s seen as us being overly-sensitive & distracting from the greater cause. This is misogyny.

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photograph from @hiwildflower campaign

re-imagining body hair

4/30/19
the stories they tell about us, they are not our stories. oppression is about the organizing of stories: the narratives we are exposed to & the narratives that are deliberately & furtively concealed. there is nothing common about “common sense.” “common sense” is the consolidation of the feelings of powerful people made universal (& feelings are everything but democratic). reality then, is a political project. if you look behind the screen there is a protest happening (come & join). look harder & the protest is a dance party. harder & it’s us: we the people on the other side of shame. the screen is the shame. shame: the original instagram filter? narratives have always been material — as in, the words & images we make always have bodily consequences. when did we first learn that body hair was wrong, dirty, unhygienic? when we were primed to think that women & feminine people could not have beards? what images, what words, what stories facilitated this? this is why we need artists: to make different stories & images — to inundate us with different possibilities, flood us with them, until we realize we are not drowning we are — in fact — breathing for the first time. the stories they tell are about restricting our infinity. i want us to cherish our infinity. art is about world making. we are living simultaneously in different worlds, aren’t we? they see dirty, i see magnificence. my body hair is cursive written across my body: a love letter to you & me. it is my infinity: my renewable resource: a constant presence that keeps coming back when everything else, it leaves me. my arm hair is a built in blanket, my beard is a natural contour, my chest hair is a crop top. my body is so fabulous it accessorizes itself. my body is so beautiful that beauty, it spills out of me. it cannot be contained by this skin. for so long i was made to believe that i had no power. but then i thought about whose language i was speaking. i started to write poetry — another way of saying, i started to speak my own language — & then i looked at myself & i no longer saw dissonance, i saw something else. i saw this. do you witness what i do?

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art by @zhkdesigns

body hair + transmisogyny

4/29/19
trans feminine people should not have to remove our body hair in order to have our genders respected. trans feminine people should not have to remove our body hair in order to be safe. the thing about gender norms is that they are always aspirational. almost no one actually looks like normative men or women. but norms circulate at a symbolic level that doesn’t take our lived experiences into consideration. people of all genders have body hair. there are women with lots of it and men with none of it. we continually rehearse the idea that “women are less hairy,” despite all of the evidence against it. this is because norms do not care about evidence, about the lives we are living, the bodies we inhabit. norms exist to make us feel as if we are never enough. we naturalize our lack, become fluent in it like it’s a language we have always know. but we are not lacking, we just are. .

the gender binary is a particularly insidious norm: we exaggerate differences between men & women & ignore differences among them in order to fabricate the myth of binary gender/sexual difference. the stakes of this are particularly high for transfeminine people. our bodies are where they come to draw the lines of binary gender, we are collateral for this project. when i first started my transition people told me i shouldn’t even try because i was so hairy that no one would believe me. but here’s the thing: there *are* hairy women & feminine people. there always have been & there always will be. trans feminine people are held to an impossible standard to *prove* gender, meaning: we are often coerced into having to adopt the most normative (read: white) standards of beauty & gender in order to be believed for what we already are. in this way it feels impossible to own our own bodies when we know that our appearances will be scrutinized to confirm their norms. every day i remind myself that body hair has no gender. the gender binary — a social & political construction — dupes us into believing that it does. this harms everyone, but especially us. especially us 💔

art by @ximeco.art

race + policing body hair

4/28/19
policing of body hair has always been about race. the classification of body hair was foundational to defining race in the nineteenth century. in 1854 peter browne wrote Trichologia Mammalian in which he divided human species on the basis of hair. after Darwin (1859) race was often seen as an evolutionary continuum: racialized people were seen as closer to animals & white “civilized” people were seen as developing beyond us. body hair became seen as the lingering remains of animality/racial difference & removing body hair became a civilizational imperative. in 1876 the american dermatological association created a study on hypertrochosis — a medical condition to pathologize extensive body hair — & focused specifically on white women. white men became increasingly fixated on regulating white women’s physical appearances as a way to mediate anxieties about race. maintenance of white women’s proper physical appearance was about maintaining the “health” of the white race in the face of migration & racial unrest. magazines promoted models of hairless, white feminine beauty & campaigns talked about hair removal as “remedying evil” & removing racial markers. let me be clear about the implications of this: body hair is not “disgusting” because it’s “unhygienic,” but rather because it was & is still associated with racialized people. everyone should be able to do what they please with their body hair, but regarding those of us who don’t remove it as “unhygienic” is cultural racism. indeed, much of what has come to constitute “women’s beauty” & “women’s health” is actually about distancing from racial difference / gender non-conformity. yet another example of how gender is a racial construct & race is a gendered construct. for more info read “situated technology: meanings” by rebecca herzig.

art by @atsaidraws

story of contradiction

4/22/19

this is the story of contradiction. i know that change is necessary, but i fear it nonetheless. sometimes i am afraid of making new friends because i think about them dying one day. sometimes i am afraid of saying goodbye on the phone because i am terrified it might be the last time. so i just hang up. so i just disappear. sometimes i leave so i don’t have to get hurt. or rather: sometimes i hurt myself first so other people can’t hurt me. i think about hospital beds, funerals, grief. is loving worth the grief? i am afraid of falling in love because i am afraid of the loneliness on the other side — how alone becomes freshly lonely in the aftermath of it all, the way a crumpled sheet takes a new character when you are gone. i fear the things i know — or rather, i fear the things that i expect. i am expectantly shocked. i pretend things will last forever (even though i know they will fall apart). i pretend that we will live forever (even though i know we will die). i pretend that my body & my mind are distinct (even though i know they are not). i know that knowledge is failing me, but i keep trying to know. for so much of my life i thought the goal was about fighting, but now i think it’s more about feeling. maybe feeling is fighting? pain feels closer to truth than anything i have ever known. or rather: feeling feels closer to truth than anything i have ever known. i know that the people i am & the people i love are dying. but i also feel like we are living while dying. watch me live while dying. watch us live while dying. what do you feel knowing that we are dying? i want to run outside & ask everyone what their plan is for the end of the world but instead i am writing you this letter. here to say i know, and that’s precisely the problem. i know, it hurts. or rather knowing hurts. knowing hurts. 📸@christianhutterphoto

listening to sadness

4/20/19
this past week i have been unyieldingly sad. the type of sadness that immobilizes: sore legs, sore heart, snoozed alarms, sleeping during the day, waking up in the night sad. sad like cancelled plans, or rather no plans, sad like not speaking much — instead sitting here still. still sad: like i can’t even get away from it, like it’s here to stay sad. .

& for the first time in a while i sat with my sadness & i listened & i learned that last week when i had to go to the emergency room to see my sick grandpa & there was another still moment before leaving the house — when i looked at the closet & had to choose between pants & skirt. pants = get there safely & swiftly to be there for him. skirt = maybe i won’t make it there. maybe i will: but in the bed beside him.
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i am hurt most when the violence i experience spills onto the people who i love. i want to hide it from them. keep them safe even though i am not. sad because i want to be strong but i can’t. sad because this shouldn’t be about me, this should be about him. sad because i can’t mute it sad, sad that it won’t go away.

i thought about dying on the way to someone i love maybe dying & i thought about impossible choices, how sometimes i feel selfish for being myself when i think about the costs for other people, i thought about all of the people who don’t have to think about these things & that made me even more sad: when the emergency room becomes the emergency world where do we go? when we love people so much we would die for them what do we do?

sad because i wore pants. sad because it was easier. sad because i cried every time i looked at him there. sad because the nurses called me his grandson. sad because i was grieving us both. sad because we are both still alive & i am still. so. sad. 📸 @christianhutterphoto

non-binary isn't new

4/19/19
There have been gender variant people for hundreds of years prior to the advent of western science. Requiring trans people to take hormones or have surgery to be “real,” is a form of cultural racism which invisibilizes thousands of diverse gender systems, transition rituals, & bodily practices from across the world. Let’s be clear: a racialized aesthetic of gender (read: white masculinity & white femininity) are being made to appear as natural & universal, when they are cultural & particular. White womanhood & white manhood are being generalized as “woman” & “man,” even though there have been & continue to be millions of people expressing out of these racial norms. “Gender non-conformity” only exists because you are evaluating (surveilling) our bodies with a white gender & sex binary. We aren’t “failing” to look like men/women/trans, we are existing outside of your particular white cultural definitions of masculinity & femininity. This is part of a historical project of disciplining racialized peoples into white gender binaries. Policing of gender non-conformity has & continues to be part of the colonial project of making gender & sex binary. They say that there are only two genders & sexes, but they don’t tell you about the work they do to kill, criminalize, disappear, and discredit everyone who exists outside the binary all the while delegitimizing our knowledge systems. Sex & gender are complicated & diffuse entities which vary among bodies and collapsing them into a bifurcated model of male/female is a recent cultural/racial project, not some fixed & ahistoric “biology.” This hierarchy we create of “scientific” or “medical knowledge” as an authoritative & dominant over all other ways of knowing & being is part of a long history of discrediting and erasing Black, indigenous, & PoC cosmologies. The “scientific knowledge” that gets used against us was produced by white people (often by forced experimentation on racialized people) as a means to justify their cultural worldview. Rather than accounting for this, trans politics has largely perpetuated it: establishing hierarchies of the real that reject gender non-conformity as failure. This must stop.

call me they

4/8/19
just a reminder that my pronouns are “they/them.” in a sentence that’s: “wow i like their boots!” or “they are on their way to the theater.” it’s hurtful when people come up to me & say they admire my work and then still refer to me as he/him “i was telling my friend is that him over there? and it is you.” like what??? it’s hurtful when i am invited for gigs & campaigns specifically for my visibility as a gender non-conforming person & am called he/him. it’s hurtful when i am literally being introduced to a full venue that i packed & am called he/him (lol what). these are the pitfalls of visibility: you want to look at us but you don’t want to regard our intelligence, difference, & personhood. hot take: if you actually believed us for who we say we are then remembering our pronouns once we tell them to you wouldn’t be this hard 👀 yes i know it’s difficult to shift habit & language but this is something TGNC people are doing as well! we were not magically bestowed with these knowledges & sensibilities, we are coming in to them through struggle, trying to excavate over time a more kind & gentle way to recognize & affirm ourselves & one another. heed our invitation to to this work & receive it as a blessing, not an inconvenience — one that allows you to journey beyond the tedium of the visual, the fatigue of the normative, and the brutality of the assumptive. we surpass all of this — we occupy more than physical space — we transcend convention & form — we birth language & ritual — we defy & in that refusal we create. let’s do better! love & need you. art by @cherry666soda

on hope

4/5/19
hope is something i rarely allowed myself to feel. amidst the constant & relentless assault on the people i am & the people i love, the routine & systematic policing of gender non-conforming life, the callous drone of misattribution & misrecognition - hope felt unrealistic, misguided, maybe even painful. hope meant going outside & saying today is going to be the day i won’t be harassed (& then it happening. again. & again. the disappointment its own wound). hope meant today is going to be the day that people will defend me (& then meant being left behind empathy’s embrace). but, when i meet you — my audiences, my potential friends — when i meet the students resisting the gender binary, the lovers cultivating compassion for themselves & everyone, the organizers ensuring that everyone is safe, the bipoc trying to remember another way to live, the heartbroken ready & willing to cry in public with me. when i meet you the people concerned with my safety & vitality beyond the stage i experience a kind of internal blooming as in “look outside it is cold but when i speak, here is spring.” in here there is a garden growing in the depths i thought there was no potential for life. which goes to say i am learning that it is both possible to be honest about the reality of pain & injustice while also feeling the reality of something else. these states of being are not mutually exclusive. i am clenching my heart with one hand & reaching out for yours with the other. i am hurting (& i am ready to heal). i am hurting (& i am ready to heal). love & need you! x

falling in love with everyone

3/27/19
why are we so mean to each other? why has politics become about how much we know & not how we treat each other? why do we mistake hurting other people as healing ourselves? why do we use big theory to disguise simple emotions? why has loving become synonymous with assimilating? what would it mean to sit with our sensitivity? to hold our tenderness? what would it mean to move from a place of need, rather than self-reliance? what would it mean to not just say “we need to talk about mental health,” but actually act on it? what would it mean to acknowledge that everyone is navigating trauma, loss, anxiety, & depression? so many of the people i am & so many of the people i love are struggling. i don’t want to bring them down further, make them feel like they aren’t enough. i want celebration, affirmation, care, delicacy, respect! it’s not just that i want gentleness, i need it. every day of my life i have people go out of their way to insult me, attack me, & degrade me. i know first hand what that does to your spirit & your body — something in you dies. there are multiple deaths in living. we are so callous with one another in our grieving of them. what would it mean to engage differently with one another? to say the world we want is not just in our minds, it is here right now in the way we relate to one another. this is why i practice affirmation — i heal from uplifting other people. i am enriched by your becoming. your spiritual glow up enlivens mine. increasingly i am drawn to the naive, the idealistic, the parts i have been told are “immature.” it is here in these places that i am finding the answers. what would it mean to recognize that we have the potential to love everyone in the world? what would it mean to recognize that everyone is capable of transformation? what would it mean to do something else from what we have been taught? do we dare? x

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being felt, not necessarily known

3/24/19
there are ways of existing in the world that are outside of & beyond “masculinity” & “femininity.” the gender binary collapses an infinity of modes of self-expression, styles, aesthetics, & ways of being into only two discrete categories. how would we feel if we were only offered two flavors, two colors, two emotions? who i am — let alone my gender — is in constant flux, shifting on where i am, who i am with, what i am doing, what i am feeling, what i am needing. i understand the desire to be known, i empathize with the desire to be recognized. but recognition at what costs? sometimes i worry coherence is another form of containment — that in our earnest attempts to transcend gender binaries, we put more of them into place. every time i say “i am” something gets lost there, like there are things crawling out of my mouth going to hide somewhere until i have the decency to bring them back. lately i have been searching for those things — finding them in the places i would least expect: missed connections, corner stores, the punch of a ginger shot. sometimes colors & poems & pictures & prints tell the story of my gender more than categories, words, identities, masculine, feminine. is it really a choice when we didn’t get to choose the options we are given in the first place? i want us to draw paintings on the multiple choice scantrons. i want us to build paper planes out of the forms they give us & send them back where they came from. i want us to ambition beyond being known... toward being felt. when people ask “what are you?” i want to dance or take them to meet my friends or invite them over for hot chocolate or some other way of illustrating that we are more than a word. how about how are you? how about what are you becoming? how about tell me about your pain & your power & your poetry? how about: how is language failing you? where do you go when it fails? take me there. take me there. take me there.

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