If your solution to some problem relies on “If everyone would just…” then you do not have a solution. Everyone is not going to just. At not time in the history of the universe has everyone just, and they’re not going to start now.
“I cannot tell you the complete, fundamental shift that I have felt in the year since having surgery. I knew that I wanted top surgery for a decade; it’s the longest I’ve ever thought about doing anything. The place where I went, I had that clinic’s website open on my laptop for five years. It was this impossible mountain: I want that, but I’m never gonna get it. No one’s gonna let me, blah, blah, blah. To have that be in the past now… I stand differently, I walk differently, I carry myself differently. It feels different in my body than it ever has. I have just never been happier. I’ve never been more centered. I’ve never felt more stable and present and alive. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done for myself. It’s taught me a lot. The recovery process taught me about rest, accepting help, and caring for my body as something connected to me rather than separate from me, that I’m in opposition to: This is mine and I want to take care of it. I feel good in it and good about it. Part of cis people’s fear around gender-affirming surgery is the fear of surgery at all — ‘Oh, my God, but that’s painful and scary!’ My reaction to that is, 'No, no, you misunderstood. It was painful before. Your worry has kicked in at the wrong time. The right time to be concerned was about the pain I was in before this. I’m great now.’ Everybody else’s concern for me has been on a delay. There’s no need to be concerned anymore. That’s so freeing.”
i think queer people should be more confusing actually. i think we should make everyone as confused as possible until they give up and realize that total understanding of other people isnt the gateway to respect and compassion
One of my favorite things about rewatching Cowboy Bebop is seeing all these one-line characters that you instantly know everything about from how they decorate their tiny box in space.
Again, that notion of family is so necessary or we are bone-lonely and suicidal if we’re that lonesome. And what helped, what always helped, was a word for family – tranny was one, and now we’re not allowed to say it. Another was, for a long time, transgender. But now – no, because there was a transgender tipping point, people in popular culture are examining the word transgender for those who made the tipping and those are binary-identified trans people. Trans men, trans women – there are men and there are women, great. But now that’s … they own the word transgender. What’s really great about this tipping point is that people acknowledge that it has nothing to do with genitalia or hormones … what genitals you have as a man or a woman, not important. What hormones you’re on as a man or woman, not important. It’s a matter of individual preference and ability to go forward in that. But what it’s done has taken another family word away from us – transgender. When we were starting to use it in the 1980s, well Virginia Prince coined the term. She was a cross dresser who wanted to live full time as a woman without hormones or surgery so she called herself transgender and we stole the word from her for which we never got forgiven – me and Jamison Green and Lou Sullivan and Les Feinberg. We started using transgender as anybody who fucks with gender – your family. So no matter the fights and the struggles, look – we’re all transgender together. Now that word has now shifted to a family term of trans and that still, to some degree, leaves out people who are non-binary or gender queer. Without invisibilizing those folks, I think trans … I say those folks, I mean me, trans includes, for the time being, non-binary and gender queer. So the degree we police our own language and say, “You get out of here, that’s my word,” we have to be careful that we’re not destroying family relationships, that we are chosen family. I would just caution going down that path and policing words like that.
