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I am going to talk to you today about how Black trans lives matter and how race and gender have historically and currently intersected to shape the lives of Black trans people // @DrDLStewart
“My body defies the restrictions of a society consumed by boxes and binaries and ‘are you a boy or a girl?’ Independent of such conventions, my body clings instead to the long ago lore that understood its magic: I contain multitudes.” // @DrDLStewart
To say that #BlackTransLivesMatter is a claim to sovereignty. As much as #BlackGirlMagic and #TransIsBrilliant, #BlackTransLivesMatter is also a chorus of resistance. // @DrDLStewart
Black trans* lives have always mattered. They’ve always been seen and unseen. Unseen by the anti-Blackness or queer and trans movements. Unseen by the transphobia and transantagonism of Black movements // @DrDLStewart
Speaking to the power that our legal system gives those who should be believed about one’s gender and those who cannot be trusted to understand their own genders // @DrDLStewart
Black bodies and our genders have been caught in the white imagination. Imagined as a thing, made to become that thing, and so bred like horses, milked like sows. Gender did not matter so long as body parts could be turned into profit // @DrDLStewart
“The Black body was made not-white and, therefore, not worthy of gender.” // @DrDLStewart
Blackness is transgeressive. And once set free from social acceptability, Blackness challenges the limitations of what gender can be. // @DrDLStewart
Sissified and bulldaggered, we are all made up. // @DrDLStewart
Because when manhood is located between one’s legs, and defined in opposition to womanhood, what’s between one’s legs cannot be seen as having anything in common with womanhood. // @DrDLStewart
What will happen as I move from the social threat of angry Black womanhood to the physical threat of looming Black manhood? When and how soon after I am no longer misgendered woman will the cops be called to contain and erase my presence? // @DrDLStewart
What does it mean to become a brute? To turn my body into another kind of threat? // @DrDLStewart
We are not looking for saviors; we have each other. // @DrDLStewart
Let us work together to make #BlackTransLivesMatter. If you believe your liberation is bound up with mine, then I invite you to make #BlackTransLivesMatter your personal ethic by being transformative loudly and mindfully. // @DrDLStewart
You can do that by 1) transforming your thinking about Blackness and gender, 2) be loud by taking the risk to confront false assumptions and others’ fears and biases, and 3)be mindful and pay attention to what Black trans people say about our own lives // @DrDLStewart
Getting someone’s pronouns right and being transformative loudly and mindfully matters. Because Black trans lives matter. my life matters. My body is a sovereign country and my first site of resistance // @DrDLStewart @TEDxCSU
