1/ On this New Year’s Day I just wanna pay tribute to one of the OG detrans women who has been at this for more than 15 years: Redressalert. I’ve seen a lot of tweets about how 2019 was the year that detrans community got rolling, but that’s not true!
2/ Quick herstory lesson: three of the very first detrans bloggers were Redressalert, Crashchaoscats, & Twentythreetimes. Redress & Crash were who my gf and I reached when in gender crisis in 2015. Redress organized a detrans workshop at the last Michfest.
3/ 23 ran a private, secure forum for detrans women. It was the first support group of its kind. Redress edited & put out the very first publication of detrans voices - Blood & Visions. These women’s work gave us the foundations & roots of many of the terms we have today.
4/ My gf and I crashed into the scene in 2015 and started making private Facebook groups for peer support, starting w/one for ex-“radical queers” (the term at the time for deep trans/queer activism) & then along with other women making groups for detrans/re-id’d women.
5/ Carey Callahan was tirelessly, brilliantly blogging the whole time. I met her at a women’s event with a detrans group for the first time, had no idea who she was, & stayed up all night reading her blog. It was an intense time. Everything was changing.
6/ Some of us talked to journalists like @kittypurrzog, @jessesingal, & others. Guideonragingstars did a survey of detrans women & published her findings to extreme harassment. God, there’s so much more! And all these little sentences can’t contain what it was like to witness.
7/ or the parts I didn’t witness, to hear about. It is amazing that so many women are on youtube now, vlogging, podcasts, etc. But I remember how we got to the spotlight! I know the women who worked for years to get us there, whether or not they choose to be filmed.
8/ I can’t wait for the 5th annual Blood & Visions meetup this year. I have made & lost so many friends in this community. I’ve watched us hurt & heal each other, & done hurting & healing myself. We are not alone, & our numbers are growing & growing.
9/ But I think back in wonder & intense appreciation to when it was 1 woman, 2 women, 3 women, 4 women, standing alone against a medical establishment & thriving subculture that told them they didn’t exist, & tried every tactic in the book to silence them.
10/ Just because the herstory is hidden doesn’t mean it’s not there. Many of these women did things this way - w/o a face, w/a pseudonym bc they were intensely private people, but also being a lone target facing the wrath of trans activism is a different dynamic than we have now.
11/ I know I left a lot of stuff out! Like, a ton. But that’s a super basic timeline of the last decade in detrans organizing. It wasn’t just 2019 or youtube or Reddit or Facebook or the couple of big features you saw in the papers. We’ve been here fighting for each other. 💞
