Trans people of color are underrepresented and outnumbered. When we stand up and make ourselves visible, we put ourselves at risk of disproportionate scrutiny and harassment, not just from transphobes and bad actors, but also from those within our own community.
When we want to make ourselves heard, we're told that now is not the time. We're told it's stirring up drama, in-fighting, and bad optics. Even how, and when, we express our grievances is policed.
When we use provocation, it's inflammatory and lacks nuance. When we use satire, it's offensive and unproductive. When we share our personal experiences, it's the oppression olympics. When we share statistics, it's sowing division. When we clarify ourselves, it's back-pedaling. When we defend ourselves, it's doubling down. When we criticize too harshly, we're asked to placate. When we don't criticize hard enough, we're ignored outright. When it's said by a large platform, it's engagement baiting and fed posting. When it's said by a small platform, it's buried and forgotten. When it's said by a SWer, it invites shame and disparagement. And when we're lucky enough to survive beyond all of the compounding systemic barriers placed upon us (before, during, and after transition), we're seen as the example and not the exception. It's suffocating, disillusioning, and isolating.
Even within a community that claims to include and support us, we have no voice.
Acknowledging the intersectionality of trans people of color, especially those who are black and indigenous, is not something new within progressive spaces. And it does not take anything away from the very real experiences of white trans individuals. But it also does not absolve them from, or grant them immunity to, the same racial prejudices and biases held (subconsciously or otherwise) if they were cis.
Having a marginalized gender identity does not come with the awareness of marginalized racial identities. White hegemony and oppression do not disappear when recontextualized within a transgender space, just like they don't within queer spaces more broadly. It still exists including through unexamined racial privilege and how that shapes behaviors and attitudes, and how trans white voices dominate discourse and dictate the overarching priorities of the trans community while excluding, dismissing, sidelining, and being blind to, trans bipoc perspectives.
And that was made very clear from the responses throughout this entire discourse, including the same familiar displays of white fragility and conservative talking points used when confronting racial inequality more generally. To me, and all the other trans bipoc, who read every defensive reaction, deflection, straw man, dismissal, bad faith interpretation, condescending interjection, anecdotal fallacy, pedantic argument, disparaging comment, accusation, and personal attack. Every "well actually", "not all white people", "all lives matter", and "we have bigger problems". Only for those same people to inevitably virtue-signal about how their peers need to do better when one of them is outed for racism (if at all).
The irony and hypocrisy has not been lost on us.
This isn't a call to action for the greater society to solve all the issues that every trans person experiences, nor is it the business of anyone outside of the trans community. It's a conversation for the trans community specifically and a direct call to action for white individuals (across all gender identities) within the trans community to take a moment of self-reflection and to have a willingness to listen with an intention to learn.
Why should those in power care about the struggles of trans people as a whole when they themselves are not directly impacted and have larger problems to address? How can trans bipoc be expected to wait until the broader trans issues have been solved to finally have a voice? Especially when our own white trans peers disparage and deprioritize our grievances in much the same way? Why is the consideration of trans bipoc experiences sidelined as a secondary goal to the broader effort of transgender liberation instead of being seen as an integral and interwoven part of it?
In the US, the women's suffrage movement failed to maintain intersectionality and abandoned racial equality in order to secure the white vote first. There's no need for straw man arguments when an actual equivalent example already exists.
Acknowledging and platforming the most vulnerable within an already marginalized group is not a means of division, but rather an explicit act of solidarity. It's not just about not oppressing those among us with less privilege, but uplifting them with the privileges we do have so we are all empowered to fight together. None of us will be heard until we are all heard. And none of us will be free until we are all free.
The trans rally sign that read "white trans people are oppressors too" wasn't even mine (mine said "trans joy"… lol…), but I understood the subtext (and context) enough to take it in good faith, and to advocate for the very real sentiment behind it. Is the semantics and optics around how we define and confront racial prejudices and systems of oppression within our own community really that much more important than the act of actually addressing it?
Let's not wait until another white trans person gets outed for racism, or for another trans person of color to get dogpiled by their white peers into silence, to have this conversation again.
Trans lives matters include trans bipoc lives.
Trans bipoc rights are also trans rights.
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