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My Biggest Takeaways from Unit 3 and From the Class as a Whole

I think one of my biggest takeaways from the Trans Activism & Mutual Aid Unit of how powerful it is when people help their own communities. Mutual Aid doesn’t excuse the inaction of the government or society but it can create meaningful change. This unit also showed the residency of the trans community as a whole. Despite the hardship and adversity that they have faced and in many ways still face, they are still a strong and proud community. The trans community even goes out of it’s way to help LGB people even though the favor is not always returned. I think it is important for LGB people to know about figures such as Sylvia Rivera and the work she did to help the Gay Liberation Movement.

I think this class as a whole really challenged me in a lot of ways. When we discussed how the idea that sex is binary is a concept that was forced onto society by colonist ideals, it really blew my mind. Although I knew that gender  existed outside the binary before this class, I hadn’t thought that it could apply to sex. The Malatino reading that this idea comes from was also quite a challenging academic read. It might be one of the hardest texts I have ever read during my time in undergrad. I appreciate that Dr. G was able to share the reading with us and help us dissect it. I believe that I will take the things that I have learned in this class with me into the rest of my life.

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This activity allowed me to show the harsh realities of being trans in prison alongside how trans people help each other in the prison system. I think it’s important to acknowledge the brutal treatment and experiences trans people face in prison. They are often assigned to a prison that doesn’t match their gender identity, have their access to hormones stripped away, and face constant threats of violence and sexual assault. It’s also important to acknowledge how resilient trans people are. For example, the founder of Black and Pink, Dominique Morgan, has had her own experiences in prison but still finds the strength to help her trans community. After living through that experience herself she overcomes the trauma and pain it has caused her to improve the realities of other trans folk.

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My drawing was particularly inspired by the Nonprofit hopes to build 20 'tiny homes' for Black transgender women NBC News Report (https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/nonprofit-hopes-build-20-tiny-homes-black-transgender-women-n1233500). An important part of this article is that this is a trans-led organization. A big part of this unit is trans mutual aid in which trans people band together to help one another when the government and other social services aren’t. I think this article shows how trans people have come together to tackle some of the problems they are facing. It is also important to note that this initiative is particularly targeted at black trans women who are even more likely to experience homelessness.

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Lucy, 👻 ANTIFA terrorist, 🏳️‍🌈 Queer Lesbian 🎃 on Twitter

“Easy to decide who to elect to your state legislature when one of the two candidates doesn't believe you exist (because I am trans). But my ballot disagrees, fortunately. #votingwhiletrans”

My biggest takeaway from the conversation on trans voting is how significantly at risk trans people’s right to vote is. Due to voter ID laws in many states, a trans person could be barred from voting if their photo, name, or gender marker doesn’t match. I think it is impossible to expect every trans person to have updated ID due to barriers such as having to out oneself or pay a significant fees. This election it seems particularly important for poll workers to be on the look out for those who are trying to block the trans vote. It is important for cis poll workers and voters to fight for trans people’s right to vote. 

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I’ve never done an erasure poem (let alone actual poetry) so I found this quite difficult. However, I think this medium helps illustrate the key points of the critical trans resistance section of Dean Spades’s What’s Wrong with Trans Rights. I don’t know if the way I did this was able to come across in a poetic way though. I think it reads as more of a Spade Manifesto for Critical Trans Resistance. 

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Biggest Takeaway of Trans History Unit

I think the reading that impacted me the most during the Trans History Unit was Malatino’s “Situating Bio-Logic, Refiguring Sex Intersexuality and Coloniality”. I think the takeaways from this reading will stick with me the longest. The notion that sex is binary was something that I had believed for a long time and it was shocking to learn that this binary was also socially constructed. Colonists and western society created the sex binary to police behavior and sex characteristics that they considered abnormal, unnatural, and deviant. These colonists gave themselves the power to decide what should be considered normal since they believed they had a higher intellectual capacity than those different from them. I had known for a while that the gender binary was socially constructed but I hadn’t thought to apply that to sex. Society constantly emphasizes that sex is fixed and easily defined. This reading pushed me to consider what other characteristics society has tried to restrict and carefully define.

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I thought this was an important aspect of Peter Cava’s trans activism list that reminds me of the idea that everyone is straight until they come out. I think the world would be a lot more inclusive if we didn’t make default assumptions about people. I also tried to do some research into the best way to ask what someone’s pronouns are. I found that it was important not to refer to pronouns as preferred since that implies that it could be a choice whether you use them or not. I think if we asked for pronouns every time we met someone knew it would keep us from making assumptions about someone’s gender identity. 

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Trump Presses Limits on Transgender Rights Over Supreme Court Ruling

The Trump administration is pressing forward with policies limiting transgender rights. Many rules that have been in development for years have now either been finalized or have gone into effect.

This article discusses the trump administration’s policy of forcing trans men into women’s homeless shelters and trans women into men’s homeless shelters. Although the administration claims to be protecting cis women with this ruling but the Cava article show that this is at the expense of trans people. Cava states that trans people have accessed homeless shelters they often face harassment and physical/sexual assault. As in the public restroom section of the Cava article, men who do assault women are responsible for their own actions.The actions of a few should not be the justification for the exclusion and harm of many trans people.

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From @beelovespossums on Instagram

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I tried my best to be as thorough as possible with this timeline. I also added in a few extra important figures from the time such as Dorchen Richter and Christine Jorgensen. It saddens me that a lot of these Trans-Related Medical Interventions were discovered at the expense of BIPOC, queer, poor, and intersex people. It’s truly unfortunate that it took the suffering and torture of these people to start to address trans issues in the medical field.

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Carlett Angialee Brown was a shake dancer and U.S. veteran who wished to become a woman during the 1950s. Most of what is known about her life comes from arrest records and a few magazine articles. She hoped to get sex reassignment surgery in order to marry her lover Eugene Martin. However she was unable to get this surgery in the U.S. so she sought to give up her U.S. citizenship to move to Germany. In Germany she would be able to have her surgery and be with her partner who was a U.S. Soldier stationed there. Her plans were interrupted when the U.S. Government barred her from leaving due to unpaid taxes. It is still not certain whether she was able to leave the U.S., get her surgery, and be reunited with her lover.

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Here is my info doodle of Susannah Temko’s TED Talk, “A Different Kind of Superpower: What It Means to Be Intersex”. This is a personal account of some of the atrocities committed against intersex people that Malantino shared in their essay. It shows the colonial ideas of the sex binary are still heavily enforced in today’s world. The video details how these views that were established centuries ago are still hurting people today. If sex could be thought of in a more broad way it would allow for much more inclusion in society.

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Here’s my imagining of a gender cosmology. I decided to go with the cosmo theme for my drawing and put gender identities among the stars in a galaxy. I think this is better than the idea of a gender spectrum because all the identities are equally weighted. There are no hard lines like male or female at one end of a spectrum. 

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Trans 101 Unit Reflection

One of my biggest takeaways from the Trans 101 Unit is that there is no limit to the spectrum of gender. There were several gender identities from Reif Hill and Mays’s “The Gender Book” and from our explorations during class that I hadn’t heard of before. However it’s important to note that just because some of these terms aren’t widely known they are just as valid. Also the drawings we did in class really helped me apply the concepts from class to my own life. Another of my takeaways is how the concepts of privilege apply to my own life. I acknowledge the specific aspects of my identity that afford me privilege and now I can be more aware of this while out in the world. Finally, I learned how to avoid getting of the hook when being called out. It’s important to stay on the hook otherwise it’s impossible to be part of the solution to many of society’s shortcomings.

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I chose this blog prompt so that I could relate the concepts of difference, privilege, and marginality to myself. This exercise was helpful for me because it showed me what areas of life I have privilege in and which ones I do not. I have never looked at all these aspects of my identity at once before. I think this will help me keep in mind what characteristics are providing me unearned entitlements and conferred dominance.

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One of the things I learned from this video was the use of the word sibster for non-binary siblings. I think this is a really cute way to refer to a non-binary sibling that avoids gendered terms such as brother/sister. I also think this video shows a good open dialogue between the two siblings. You can see that Georgia is trying to understand Hope better while also educating her youtube audience.

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Didn’t get much time to color it but this is my illustration of sex, gender, gender identity, and gender expression. I tried my best to show the relationship between them.