“M*N IN A DRESS”
Some Agitational Thoughts On Transphobia

Strong Content Warning for details, analysis of and replies to extreme transphobia

Preface

I do not believe that at least half of all cisgender people will ever willfully understand the very basic distinction between so-called Sex and so-called Gender. The sad majority of them worship off-hand ‘truisms’. If it weren’t so insultingly superfluous to say it, I would hammer it out right here in this paragraph. But I am not your professor nor your parent. You must give a shit about understanding things in order to not be considered a waste of breath, to not be my enemy. My point here is that there is so much dialog, scientific research and history on the subject, and only a sliver of you — cis people — have taken it in and changed your perspectives. Pathetic. You haven’t been making the lives of anti-trans politicians the literal worst hell ever, and have therefore been failing us. You haven’t been uplifting the stories of trans kids, trans adults, the horror of dysphoria and its source, and have therefore been failing us. You haven’t been defacing and destroying hate churches and hate preachers’ homes, and have therefore been failing us. You haven’t been stealing hormones and nice expensive things and giving it to trans people, and therefore you have been failing us. You haven’t been disrupting all facets of normalcy on our behalf because of your love for us, and have therefore been failing us.

I don’t want this piece to just be a lecture to cis people generally, because I love those cisgender individuals who have shaken off the yolk of gender stupidity and made strides to not simply pretend to respect us, but who have actually considered themselves the way I have and come away with their own conclusion, genuinely respecting without fully understanding my own. Those exact cis people will gladly be at my side in the war against the gendered nightmare, and they will revel in the destruction with me. The rest of you have so very much work to do.

Just to be clear, nothing in particular has befallen me. (I’m certain that hate-readers are just so heartbroken). Yet a friend of mine spoke of her encounter with an angry, possibly intoxicated, forty to fifty year old man near the block of her apartment building who cried out the titular phrase, to which she deployed her pepper spray when he began to advance. Thankfully, she successfully fled. ( I have been given consent to mention this via private message.)

She is ... to put it lightly ... very lucky. I found it prudent to write this piece for Any Trans/Queer Zines that seek raw perspectives on the drive behind anti-trans hate. I was brought to write this not because I’m a triggered snowflake, but because I’m tired of people being stupid and saying stupid shit and not getting along. I’m sick of the people saying that they don’t want anything shoved down their throats going on to shove shit down the throats of those they deem intolerable for simply breathing.

It’s only difficult because cis people make it difficult. We actually make it very straightforward: a new name, a shiny new set of pronouns — Done. That’s all you have to fucking go along with in order to simply be a worthwhile person for a trans person to be around. Perhaps also drop certain terms meant to be affectionate for a different gender from your lexicon of usable phrases in reference to the trans person in question. This is almost always treated like some terrible, impossible loathsome undertaking for those not blessed with family and friends who don’t Demand that you be someone you’re not.

This piece is going to be incredibly triggering, and I implore readers to not distress yourselves by reading this more than you need to. I consider this a cathartic work of passion to affirm ourselves from a place of basic human analysis; alongside the unsavory, I made sure to follow up with encouragement. With recognition of those who understand that all of us are precisely who we feel that we are. I wrote this piece as a combination of my own observations and direct statements to those who could be reading who harbor sincere Hate and Disgust for the likes of me. When I begin certain statements such as “You don’t know my medical situation”, know that — if you aren’t a hateful bastard — I’m only speaking to that bastard for the sake of clarity.

I know it’s hard. Especially now. We’re all feeling the weight of the madness, the hate, the willful distrust of everything we say, the disregard for reason. I need trans readers to know that I will fight for us every day I am alive, that this piece is a catalyst for what our overturning of gender itself is to be.

Victory and Long Life to all Gender Non-Conforming People!

For Struggling Gender Non-Conforming Individuals

This is the phone number for Trans Lifeline +1-877-565-8860 (translifeline.org) which will connect you with someone who is investing their time into helping a member of their community get to a better situation. Please don’t be afraid to reach out if things aren’t OK, just try to be mindful of any information you share and with what intention.

Some Agitational Thoughts On Transphobia

Humankind is going through a very, very difficult growing pain with all the worst variables to incite frustrated rage within the poor and working class. Nothing is affordable. Our governments and private entities have proven themselves to be a hideous tangle of ineffective, negligent and malicious on every front. The climate is in utter chaos, extreme weather patterns are leaving people everywhere unsafe thanks to the very worst of industrial civilization dragging us further and further towards the end of the cliff. Naive citizens are crowding behind totalitarian ideals and politicians to assumedly put the people they don’t like “Back in their place” in order to secure their shitty Thanksgiving dinners and pure white aryan families frolicking through wheat fields, or whatever the fuck it is to be “white”.

Everything fucking sucks. Everyone is fucking stupid, cruel, toothless and blind. Every waking set of hours is a session of unadulterated torment of the living spirit, and we let it become this terrible over a span of lifetimes.

What pockets of community manage to exist share information about surviving the hellscape, being prepared, being aware. Some people are questioning who they are, trying to realize those contents into a concise form in order to be happy in themselves during these last days of this and all species.

At the center of it all, trans people are under attack from all angles. On the streets, in the legislatures, in the churches and other religious communities, in the media, in the schools, in families with trans children, etc.

In the midst of our incremental collective decay, we’re having great internal revelations about the true form of our living essences. This means the felt certainty of one’s own content of character, which transcends colonial enlightenment era conceptions of reality that do not in fact represent what actually happens inside a person’s own self-constitution.

In the throes of that, we’re finding love (again), we’re getting sober, we’re learning to defend ourselves from those who hate us, we’re educating ourselves on our history and struggle. We’re generally trying to engage in our second chance at life. We’re trying to exist authentically—and that fact does truly trigger cisgender society to the point of candid nastiness and homicidal rage.

I wish I could know precisely what it is that makes them act so weird or so aggressive. I wish I could approach the matter with a scalpel and disable it all. But sadly, we only have a combination of the obvious and some of the more academic to assist in our understanding.

We know for a fact that gender variance has existed longer than cultural gender distinctions have; to be gendered by an external entity is younger than to have an unmitigated pallet of expressive shapes and tones to play freely with without negative consequence. We know that a good number of cultures across the world have a three or more legal gender system, e.g., the Hijra of India, to name but one. There is no basis to be alarmed by any of this other than one being an ignorant bigot, crying and stomping like a toddler over the real complexities of lived reality. And truth be told, the crux of this essay is to encourage everyone, not just trans people but everyone who knows and loves them, to approach transphobes as grown toddlers spoiled by the insulting easy-mode notion of binary gender which leaves so much of life out of the equation. It’s a sad and oppressive oversimplification of life that needs to be insulted out of existence, which is completely possible.

People who are only morons at heart like to feel like they hold the magic key to unlocking the structure of trans individuals’ sense of truth: just state absurdities in a dickhead tone, or a self-made bro philosopher cadence in order to conjure a lame sense of “Ha, sure, you’re a ‘Woman’, lol.” Matt Walsh, or as we rightly call him MAP (“Minor-Attracted Person”) Walsh and his “What Is A Woman?” escapade have given those who hate or hide their fetish for trans people a four-word phrase that they can pull out of their ass and feel smug and “Inquisitive”.

“What!? I’m just asking a question!” What is a woman? Any individual who affirms femininity and womanhood in herself. “NO. NO NOT GOOD ENOUGH. YOU HAVE TO [Essentialist Horseshit] TO BE A WOMAN.”

Well, I’m sorry (not) but that’s not how this actually works. It’s only constructed to be how it works in the sense of cis-het nuclear family procreation, which the vast majority of humanity deviates from. It’s not how it works in the far greater sense of “Who am I?” The existential cannot be rightly determined by a purely material examination. There are contents to living beings that cannot be put into words, but rather expressed and lived out by their honest temperaments.

If, for some reason, that’s too difficult for you to handle in your adulthood, you perhaps shouldn’t be alive, to be frank.

Trans existence is met in one of three ways: (1) hostility, (2) fetishization, (3) nominal tolerance. The two seem fairly straightforward, whereas the third can mislead some into the company of a quiet predator. I don’t want this to suggest that every trans girl who is attracted to a cis man needs to be paranoid of his intentions, but I do mean to implore being incredibly careful of men as a trans person. The same is to be said for cis women who profess to be supportive of trans womanhood while using said “support” as manipulative leverage over someone’s life. “I’m the only one who’s going to be supportive of you, so you’d better just learn to deal with me.”

We don’t want hostility, nor fetishization, nor mere tolerance. We don’t even want the inflated liberal phrase acceptance. We want an entirely revised conception of personhood, of what determines who is what. We want the notion of “Cis” and “Trans” to be made obsolete. ”I am what I am, because I say I am. I say this because I have felt a great deal of conflict in myself, and after a time I have reached a conclusion on what can most aptly be used to describe my nature, which only I can truly know.” Let this be the only law of what someone can be. Let it serve to destroy the efforts of those who would impose titles, names, pronouns, roles and castes on others. We want our very existences to be testaments of reconsideration for the very simplistic systems of classifying the components of one’s nature. It shouldn’t have to be only the lives of trans people to evoke this — all life should evoke a reconsideration of the general way things are.

All things should be reconsidered for whether or not they are serving the happiness and fulfillment of living beings. I find a great, disappointing lacking in this world. One that needs correcting now.

We know that hostile reactions to trans existence are fear responses caused by some people’s own insecurity, confusion and instilled sense of abomination with gender possibilities, not any kind of deep instinctual reactions aimed at “protecting children”, a common belief of grown adults who worship middle school biology and push hateful legislation around the world. These reactions, which brush aside all content of humanity, all sense of any given stranger being deserving of basic compassion, all common standards of respecting a fellow human being, are part of a settler colonial passion to occupy a position of normalcy below the top of everything in white patriarchal capitalist state society: to be “A Normal Person” who isn’t any kind of “weird”, just some “normal” penis or vagina-haver being Normal, adhering to the gender role society demands, going to work and generally not being any kind of remarkable. This is the mentality that drives at least our common, everyday transphobia, acting more or less as an irritated pipeline for more extreme aggression and physical violence. It needs combating on its own level, just like fascist organizing against queer rights and expression on its own level.

Cis people who have children are a special kind of stupid and entitled. They would pass by a trans person at a restaurant or other public setting with their stupid crotch fruit, sometimes saying something to the trans person or giving them a hateful look for daring to show their disgusting tranny self out in public where children could be. How am I supposed to explain whatever you are to my children!?”

Cis parents absolutely love to interject their children into any situation that can boost their social capital in the eyes of baby-shitting culture. The sentimental fetishization of having children and being equipped to reproduce your species is a part of the capitalist project to have infinite bodies to do the work machines are yet to be stationed to do. The primordial instinct to breed is a vestigial function of keeping the tribe alive which has been usurped to reproduce the economy. Every individual at this time in 2024 contemplating creating a baby is being controlled by that mechanism. Every effort at destroying pregnant peoples’ bodily autonomy to terminate a pregnancy is an effort to ensnare and monetize life itself; to punish unwed sexual intercourse and move further to eliminate healthcare for trans people. We need to focus on the health and strength of ourselves and of our Earth before we can even contemplate having anymore children. It is selfish to “want a baby” when that child will grow up into a hell you refused to stop. It is stupid to be oblivious to this urgency, thinking that you can just go about your stupid middle class life and keep fucking everything up with your consumption and productivity. Fuck you all to hell.

The extended list of morons includes those who can’t see trans people as anything more than something inherently lewd. It conflates trans existence with particular paraphilias, a terrible and highly incorrect comparison that falls to pieces the moment someone actually listens to a trans person’s story and perspective. A good deal of us are asexual for a variety of reasons, and over half of us have been the victims of abuse as children which for the vast majority cements their staunch opposition to every and all predatory accusations of our community. Anyone who has actually spoken to a trans person knows that we are out to be our gender, not to entice or convert. That accusation speaks more about you than it does us.

I do in fact love it when a so-called “man” is made uncomfortable (or perhaps comforted in a way he is afraid of) by my clearly trans presence because it demonstrates that we all have capacity for any expression of self that we consider “gendered”, and that the social taboos of our turbulent, waning zeitgeist are becoming so frustrated that they are soon to come undone, rendered unsustainable. You will never convince me that when it isn’t just hate for the unfamiliar, it’s not personal unhappiness. Just fucking be who you are! Don’t repress things, because then you produce so much pressure and frustration to where you do stupid shit like scream at random people for trying to be comfortable in their skin. Then you end up just embarrassing yourself.

Does it really bother me, being told that my decided womanhood is nothing more than one immutable biological configuration cloaked in another intricately crafted tapestry of cultural devices called “being a girl”? Does somebody stating this opinion of my own character make its foundations collapse?

No it fucking doesn’t! As much as transphobes really, really want to hurt my feelings by regurgitating shit I hear everyday, I still go home to the girl who loves me and live my life in splendor for who I am now. Believe it or not, when you call me something I’m not, I still get to enjoy my life uninterrupted. I still inject my hormones weekly, I still wear my pretty dresses and other outfits, I still engage in this passion of mine without a second thought of catering to any gender conventions that don’t satisfy me. You screaming at someone that they’re a “man in a dress” is only announcing some need of yours to assert your hate, because admitting your deep fascination is too telling.

Firstly, however one conceives of gender/sex/personality/selfhood, I am not a masculine person. I never have been. Now, I don’t necessarily “pass” in the perfect sense of “perfect womanhood” — which does not exist — and yet one of the Last Things a person thinks when they glance at me is “that’s a dude”. I have always at minimum been androgynous, and only by happenstance have had to go about life trying to be “a boy”, mostly failing — consciously so in private — the entire time. There is a stutter in gendered reality with me, my personal content, my presence in a room or, as the kids say, liminal space. Of course, one of two conclusions is typically reached by so-called “normies” — not always in my favor, but I’m often surprised — and yet there always has to be that particular stutter in the cis-tem they reproduce.

“You possess a penis and yet you have the shape of what I consider to be a woman’s body which confuses my own penis quite considerably, and because of this confusion, I must come to the conclusion that you are not entirely up to my standards of what a woman is” is not a valid refutation of the fact that I meet far more criteria for womanhood than I do manhood. Your obsession with what resides a few inches below my waist is not a problem to me. That’s something for you and a therapist to work out. The very fact of your confusion represents a potentiality of recognition of my womanhood, but an almost moralistic jerk away from even treating me like a human being. Pathetic. Weak.

How the fuck are you to know anything of the sort about me by glancing at me? My shoulders? Big fucking whoop — I live in the so-called American South. You know how many cisgender women come into places with shoulders bigger than mine and breasts less than a quarter the size of mine? Fuck off.

Secondly, you don’t know my medical situation. You don’t know that I’ve always had breasts. You don’t know whether my genitalia can be soundly classified as Female or Male or something “deformed”. You don’t know any physiological specifics that can inform anything of me — let alone a shitty value judgment of my femininity.

Thirdly, you most definitely would not be confused about any of your feelings if you truly had your duped sense of what womanhood you find attractive memorized like the back of your hand. The configuration I have within my undergarments does not change the femininity that I fit so well. That is decided by my longstanding inclination to ensure my own expression. That very phenomenon sexually startles you, and you must reply with violence to secure your alleged cisgender male heterosexuality. Get help.

Fourthly, I don’t actually give a fuck about being a “Valid Woman” to those who are too stupid to accept the complexity of reality. If you are seriously whining and crying — telling me I’m not who I say I am after knowing of me for all of five minutes — you don’t deserve to be loved by anyone, and you don’t deserve to be acknowledged by a single person. I know that some cis women have this strange sense of being offended “As A Woman” at my existence, but you can equally go fuck yourselves. A real woman knows the extent of living and having lived each of the binary paths. I spit on cis womanhood, and I spit on all womanhoods that demand exclusively vaginas. They are failures to the female spirit; they are lies of a woman’s essence. They are male fantasies of “women.”

I ADORE being a self-made biological woman. “Biological”, as silly and duped as that pathetic distinction is, because my blood tests indicate that I have well past the estrogen of a pregnant woman. I LOVE that I intervened in my hormones — deciding at the age of twenty-one that trying to be a “man” was exhausting as FUCK — and made myself the pretty little fairy I always felt I was, shaping my body to my and my lover’s liking.

I truly understand that there are two factions of people who hate gender variance. One is the faction of sincere gender binary enforcement, and the other is the faction of angry fascination up to and including outright violence of envy. Gender validity only really plays out among those who are informed, empathetic or at least oblivious. It is a sad statement to have to make, but not purely hopeless. Where one can persuade someone with the right sequence of words into seeing the living reality of what gender is, there are opportunities for individuals in localities to actually foster healthy relationships with trans people. People are shitty, but they will also surprise you.

On Turtle Island in the so-called United States, where it is applicable in certain states, every willing and ready trans person should be versed in the carrying, handling and ownership of firearms. Hands down, no questions about it. Knives can be a substitute if firearms are out of the question. If a group of queer/trans friends can tolerate at least one friend carrying a weapon, that at least doubles the chances of being able to survive what environments they go through. We have Got to begin being thankful for queer individuals who carry weapons and respect their decision as a choice of continuing to live, by all means at hand.

My femininity is a weapon, not an invitation. You cat call me, you say some shit, I’m showing you my piece. And then, you’re going to close your mouth like a good little boy, and pretend you never saw me.

So, if we can simply refuse to be disheartened by the hateful words of stupid people with cackles and acts of self-defense where justifiable or escapable, why do we need to combat transphobia in substantive written avenues at all? Because people are going to learn to respect us and our struggles. People are going to begin standing up for us. More and more people do everyday. I hear stories of parents and family members of trans children learning from actually listening to that child’s ongoing experiences and completely revising their outlook. As time goes on, so will the anti-trans violence, the legislation, the criminalizing of trans people simply existing in public. But so too will the coming out stories, the tales of rediscovering life and its joy, the updates on a trans woman’s self-defense training.

It is crucial to the dignity of trans people that we confront absurd, angry and possibly jealous accusations with reason, with concise replies employing our lived realities — and then with whatever physical response required. Let us not neglect to hammer it home into the heads of everyone on the fence about trans healthcare bans currently targeting trans youth that this is a strategy to outlaw trans existence and declare a permanent state of war on all gender variance. At the rate we’re going as of writing, we will be arming and going to war for the authentic freedom to realize ourselves and be seen as a whole person.

We require nerve. We require a calm, collected and effective demeanor. We require affinity groups and skill shares. We require networks of highly secure, highly motivated and highly resilient individuals, and we require a restless spirit of permanent agitation.

Most of all, we require trans joy. We require works of art that celebrate our deviation from the miserable Normal. We require written works that say it all plainly. We require literature that guides people through their struggles and into the light they need. We require groups and communities that genuinely support their collaborators. We require love, kindness and creativity to flourish. This is growing each and every day.

I’m not special because I’m trans. You’re not special because you’re a hateful loser who worships easy truisms without having felt and lived what any of this means.

Grow up. Get with it. For your own sake.

You make us the enemy. You undo your bullshit. Or we undo you.

Death To cis-ciety.

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