Trans Solidarity - Tumblr Posts
I think about this image a lot. This is an image from the Aurat March (Women's March) in Karachi, Pakistan, on International Women's Day 2018. The women in the picture are Pakistani trans women, aka khwaja siras or hijras; one is a friend of a close friend of mine.
In the eyes of the Pakistani government and anthropologists, they're a "third gender." They're denied access to many resources that are available to cis women. Trans women in Pakistan didn't decide to be third-gendered; cis people force it on them whether they like it or not.
Western anthropologists are keen on seeing non-Western trans women as culturally constructed third genders, "neither male nor female," and often contrast them (a "legitimate" third gender accepted in its culture) with Western trans women (horrific parodies of female stereotypes).
There's a lot of smoke and mirrors and jargon used to obscure the fact that while each culture's trans women are treated as a single culturally constructed identity separate from all other trans women, cis women are treated as a universal category that can just be called "women."
Even though Pakistani aurat and German Frauen and Guatemalan mujer will generally lead extraordinarily different lives due to the differences in culture, they are universally recognized as women.
The transmisogynist will say, "Yes, but we can't ignore the way gender is culturally constructed, and hijras aren't trans women, they're a third gender. Now let's worry less about trans people and more about the rights of women in Burkina Faso."
In other words, to the transmisogynist, all cis women are women, and all trans women are something else.
"But Kat, you're not Indian or Pakistani. You're not a hijra or khwaja sira, why is this so important to you?"
Have you ever heard of the Neapolitan third gender "femminiello"? It's the term my moniker "The Femme in Yellow" is derived from, and yes, I'm Neapolitan. Shut up.
I'm going to tell you a little bit about the femminielli, and I want you to see if any of this sounds familiar. Femminielli are a third gender in Neapolitan culture of people assigned male at birth who have a feminine gender expression.
They are lauded and respected in the local culture, considered to be good omens and bringers of good luck. At festivals you'd bring a femminiello with you to go gambling, and often they would be brought in to give blessings to newborns. Noticing anything familiar yet?
Oh and also they were largely relegated to begging and sex work and were not allowed to be educated and many were homeless and lived in the back alleys of Naples, but you know we don't really like to mention that part because it sounds a lot less romantic and mystical.
And if you're sitting there, asking yourself why a an accurate description of femminiello sounds almost note for note like the same way hijras get described and talked about, then you can start to understand why that picture at the start of this post has so much meaning for me.
And you can also start to understand why I get so frustrated when I see other queer people buy into this fool notion that for some reason the transes from different cultures must never mix.
That friend I mentioned earlier is a white American trans woman. She spent years living in India, and as I recal the story the family she was staying with saw her as a white, foreign hijra and she was asked to use her magic hijra powers to bless the house she was staying in.
So when it comes to various cultural trans identities there are two ways we can look at this. We can look at things from a standpoint of expressed identity, in which case we have to preferentially choose to translate one word for the local word, or to leave it untranslated.
If we translate it, people will say we're artificially imposing an outside category (so long as it's not cis people, that's fine). If we don't, what we're implying, is that this concept doesn't exist in the target language, which suggests that it's fundamentally a different thing
A concrete example is that Serena Nanda in her 1990 and 2000 books, bent over backwards to say that Hijras are categorically NOT trans women. Lots of them are!
And Don Kulick bent over backwards in his 1998 book to say that travesti are categorically NOT trans women, even though some of the ones he cited were then and are now trans women.
The other option, is to look at practice, and talk about a community of practice of people who are AMAB, who wear women's clothing, take women's names, fulfill women's social roles, use women's language and mannerisms, etc WITHIN THEIR OWN CULTURAL CONTEXT.
This community of practice, whatever we want to call it - trans woman, hijra, transfeminine, femminiello, fairy, queen, to name just a few - can then be seen to CLEARLY be trans-national and trans-cultural in a way that is not clearly evident in the other way of looking at things.
And this is important, in my mind, because it is this axis of similarity that is serving as the basis for a growing transnational transgender rights movement, particularly in South Asia. It's why you see pictures like this one taken at the 2018 Aurat March in Karachi, Pakistan.
And it also groups rather than splits, pointing out not only points of continuity in the practices of western trans women and fa'afafines, but also between trans women in South Asia outside the hijra community, and members of the hijra community both trans women and not.
To be blunt, I'm not all that interested in the word trans woman, or the word hijra. I'm not interested in the word femminiello or the word fa'afafine.
I'm interested in the fact that when I visit India, and I meet hijras (or trans women, self-expressed) and I say I'm a trans woman, we suddenly sit together, talk about life, they ask to see American hormones and compare them to Indian hormones.
There is a shared community of practice that creates a bond between us that cis people don't have. That's not to say that we all have the exact same internal sense of self, but for the most part, we belong to the same community of practice based on life histories and behavior.
I think that's something cis people have absolutely missed - largely in an effort to artificially isolate trans women. This practice of arguing about whether a particular "third gender" label = trans women or not, also tends to artificially homogenize trans women as a group.
You see this in Kulick and Nanda, where if you read them, you could be forgiven for thinking all American trans women are white, middle class, middle-aged, and college-educated, who all follow rigid codes of behavior and surgical schedules prescribed by male physicians.
There are trans women who think of themselves as separate from cis women, as literally another kind of thing, there are trans women who think of themselves as coterminous with cis women, there are trans women who think of themselves as anything under the sun you want to imagine.
The problem is that historically, cis people have gone to tremendous lengths to destroy points of continuity in the transgender community (see everything I've cited and more), and particularly this has been an exercise in transmisogyny of grotesque levels.
The question is do you want to talk about culturally different ways of being trans, or do you want to try to create as many neatly-boxed third genders as you can to prop up transphobic theoretical frameworks? To date, people have done the latter. I'm interested in the former.
I guess what I'm really trying to say with all of this is that we're all family y'all.
When I worked as a volunteer for a safe space and a trans support group at my university, I, a trans woman, faced a lot of alienation from especially the cis mainstays at the safe space, and it felt really shitty and I asked my transmasc co-runner of the support group if they’d experienced anything similar and they talked about something I still hold to me to this day, that they felt as if they were being treated as woman lite. Not only that, but that they were only accepted because people SAW them as woman lite.
I shared to them my experience of feeling like i’m being treated like a man and they said we should bring up this in the support group to see if other people felt like we did, and it was a fairly small group of of folks who came in regularly but they all pretty much respectively corroborated our experiences. There was even another autistic trans woman who said she felt alienated because of the queer people who haven’t dealt with their ableism and yeah looking back as I’m now diagnosed, I absolutely faced that too.
One of the transfems mentioned feeling jealous of the transmascs who got to be included in the socialization but couldn’t bring herself to still feel bitter after this conversation because she realized that most of the cis acceptance of transmasc folks was predicated on how easy it was for cis queers to ignore their identities. Not to mention how this space was almost entirely white and pretty fucking terrible at accepting even just poc into the space without being weird about it.
I still reference this to this day when I see trans infighting among transfems and transmascs, there’s so much more solidarity to be had than this, what’s mainly missing from our conversations is that we all want the same thing, and the people who are withholding that from us are not usually each other. Is it easier for transmascs folks to make cis friends? sure, but not because that’s the only version of trans that makes sense to them, but because it’s something they actively ignore for the sake of viewing them as AFAB+. The same thing happens to transfems where they’re alienated because cis folks trying to ignore their identities will only ever see them as weird men. The problem isn’t inside our community so much as it is with the cis queer community, but above that, their ignorance stems from the general acceptance of transphobia by society. We are not our enemy, and we shouldn’t be making cis queer people our enemy beyond making them acknowledge their transphobia and disposing of it. We don’t win by facing our hate to each other.
trans men aren't cis women, though. you get that, right? you get that trans men aren't cis women? and that doesn't change even if you think they are?
saw a post advertising a trans swim event that said "transmascs and adult non-binary people welcome to swim topless!" like ok.guess us trans women will continue covering up our shameful bodies then good to know
Trans people reblog to crack open a cold one with Dan Akroyd
Your identity and sexuality are up to you. You dont owe it to anyone to not be true to yourself just to make sense. You are not hurting anyone by explaining yourself in a way that feels right to you.
I support you, i think we should all stand with eachother and fight whats really a danger to the queer community which are the laws being passed and the rise of hatred.
You are loved and you are not alone. Be yourself, love yourself.
I'm fundraising on behalf of my partner, Luana, and I really hope the trans community around the world will be able to help our sister.
Luana is a young trans woman who is a brilliant artist, has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the lore of forgotten 2000's animated series, and makes me laugh until I cry. But she is living in a deeply unsafe and untenable situation.
Luana is autistic, and suffers from severe mental and physical health problems; as a result, she has never been able to work, and is unable to live independently. However, she has lived alone since the death of her mother four years ago in the council flat they once shared. Her mother was a hoarder and the flat was in an extreme state of neglect by the time she died; due to Luana's disabilities, it has only deteriorated in that time and is now in a state of the most serious squalor.
It's not a home that's safe for her to live in anymore, so I'm trying to organise an urgent and thorough clean, sanitising, and decluttering, as well as replacing rotten furniture and broken appliances. It will not be cheap, and neither of us have the ability to afford it, so we're turning to the community.
Please donate, or reblog if you're unable. Giving Luana a home she can be proud of will literally change her life and let her start to truly thrive for the first time.
We're already at over 10% of the total after just a few days! I'm very happy and feel confident we can hit this total! Please keep sharing and donate what you can 🩷
I'm fundraising on behalf of my partner, Luana, and I really hope the trans community around the world will be able to help our sister.
Luana is a young trans woman who is a brilliant artist, has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the lore of forgotten 2000's animated series, and makes me laugh until I cry. But she is living in a deeply unsafe and untenable situation.
Luana is autistic, and suffers from severe mental and physical health problems; as a result, she has never been able to work, and is unable to live independently. However, she has lived alone since the death of her mother four years ago in the council flat they once shared. Her mother was a hoarder and the flat was in an extreme state of neglect by the time she died; due to Luana's disabilities, it has only deteriorated in that time and is now in a state of the most serious squalor.
It's not a home that's safe for her to live in anymore, so I'm trying to organise an urgent and thorough clean, sanitising, and decluttering, as well as replacing rotten furniture and broken appliances. It will not be cheap, and neither of us have the ability to afford it, so we're turning to the community.
Please donate, or reblog if you're unable. Giving Luana a home she can be proud of will literally change her life and let her start to truly thrive for the first time.
We're over one-sixth of the way to the total and I couldn't be more pleased. But there's still a very long way to go and this is an urgent situation. I urge everyone to keep sharing this and to donate any small amount you can.
I'm fundraising on behalf of my partner, Luana, and I really hope the trans community around the world will be able to help our sister.
Luana is a young trans woman who is a brilliant artist, has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the lore of forgotten 2000's animated series, and makes me laugh until I cry. But she is living in a deeply unsafe and untenable situation.
Luana is autistic, and suffers from severe mental and physical health problems; as a result, she has never been able to work, and is unable to live independently. However, she has lived alone since the death of her mother four years ago in the council flat they once shared. Her mother was a hoarder and the flat was in an extreme state of neglect by the time she died; due to Luana's disabilities, it has only deteriorated in that time and is now in a state of the most serious squalor.
It's not a home that's safe for her to live in anymore, so I'm trying to organise an urgent and thorough clean, sanitising, and decluttering, as well as replacing rotten furniture and broken appliances. It will not be cheap, and neither of us have the ability to afford it, so we're turning to the community.
Please donate, or reblog if you're unable. Giving Luana a home she can be proud of will literally change her life and let her start to truly thrive for the first time.