Thread by @jemmaisOKeh

why do articles like this keep throwing black TW under the bus?

centering cis ppl's abject definition of trans as the audience for validating your transness IS a reification of the authority of cisness, which by definition constructs the gender binary

wearyourvoicemag.com/gendering-unge…

"So many ppl have internalized the idea that transness is defined first, always, and only by accumulated death."

specify that this is cis ppl & stop acting like black trans women are lording our deaths over you as a neoliberal social identity category & not a material reality

"ppl grow comfortable w being transphobic towards nonbinary ppl because the violence transgressed against our bodies has not yet been directly translated to death"

how do u know murdered black TW aren't non-binary? this is a weird speaking for the subaltern assumption to make

"Gender is violent and it is violence." This is actually a TERF line btw

I've a HUGE problem w this take it's so Western & white, language is gender like what do u mean by gender? do u mean the law, gendered violence, prisons, or the HIERARCHY that enacts (coercive) gendering?

this kind of thinking actually reifies the violent abstraction of the social that produces "gender" it's "legitimation by reversal" it's NOT the decontructive take ppl think it is

it also violently overlooks histories of sociality constructed against & under the brush of gender

it's a weird Western liberal Englightenment take that assumes simply cuz we have "better" language now, we are more free (sounds like Rousseau)

what abt the black trans women, hair faeries, queens who didn't have your language, were they imaginative in their freedom dreaming?

"We can simply make the commitment to understanding transness as expansive, gender as violent"

again this is ahistorical & just so un-attuned to the way especially black & indigenous ppl have constructed alter/counter social worlds that r gendered (incl as trans) AFTER THE FACT

if gender is the law (and it is, why are y'all simply arguing) for more laws, "better" laws & (implicitly) harsher penalties and therefore more reductive practices of humanity?

like "trans" has already been indoctrinated into the neoliberal order of state/market violence incl.

PRIDE flags, medicine, militarism, so what world are you actually arguing for, what world do you want & need?

i think the latter is something ppl need to actually think abt instead of cloaking their needs in low-hanging transmisogyny & un-FLESHED out abstractions