Thread by @ButNotTheCity

Gender identity is complicated and honestly if it wasn’t for the fact that my womanhood was constantly called into question, I’d probably have openly expressed my ambiguous identification to non-binariness much earlier.

The truth is that I aggressively do not care what my gender identity is, have no idea what it really means to feel like a certain gender, and only claim words to the extent that it makes people act towards me in the ways I desire.

You’re allowed not to know your gender. I’m allowed not to know my gender. The requirement that we label ourselves to be granted recognition is liberal hogwash that cares about choices in the abstract rather than in substance.

Labels matter because they allow us to speak about our oppression, to craft new discourses about ourselves, to form communities of resistance, and to attend to the materiality of subjugation and marginalisation.

Materiality is what matters, not labels, and we should keep that in mind lest we forget that labels are meant to be labels to a material reality.

My ambiguous relationship to gender, this queerness that refuses unambiguous, fixed labelling should not be the risk that it is

I should not have to fear that I will be excluded from women’s spaces for identifying as non-binary or having a complex relationship to my gender. Certainly not while AFABs are allowed to identify as non-binary or have complex relationship to their gender while being included...

The disparity of treatment just betrays the cisnormativity of those spaces. The details of my identification do not change my material conditions, and I’m situated in much the same way as a non-binary transfeminine person as I used to be as a trans woman.

(Which is not to say that as a group non-binary transfeminine persons have the same experiences as trans women, but only that I inhabited my life in nearly identical ways in both identificatory periods.)

Safe spaces and segregated spaces exist in response to material conditions. This is an important thing to keep in mind as the notion of identity becomes more and more prominent in social discourse, transforming itself and erasing its justificative relationship to materiality.

If our feminism isn’t informed by materiality, it becomes an empty feminism. This is an important teaching of Black feminists. I am reminded of how Kimberlé Crenshaw paid careful attention to the lived experience of Black women.

Despite being labelled as identity politics by class reductionists, centrists, and conservatives, her work deeply attends to the material conditions of Black women’s lives. Therein lies the strength of intersectionality. This is what we must strive for.