Our Visibility is Somehow a Threat to Power
or: on Trans Day of Visibility
It’s Trans Day of Visibility and, as always, I wish I didn’t have to care about being trans.
You there, hypothetical cis reader, tired of hearing about trans shit in the news all the time?
So am I, so are we.
It’s Trans Day of Visibility but it’s also Trans Day of Have To Go To Work Anyway, or Trans Day of Who The Fuck is Hiring, or Trans Day of How Are We Going to Support All These Queers Who Are Internally Displaced Refugees Here in the States.
I used to wear a pin that I made that said “I probably don’t want to talk to you about gender” because gender is so desperately low on my list of priorities in my own head. I refer to myself with the pronouns “I/me/my” and the only gendered word I feel strongly about, personally, is that I am Rintrah’s mom. And he doesn’t care about gender, and he pisses with all four of his paws on the ground.
I rarely write about trans issues, and it’s not because I’m self-hating, it’s because gender sort of bores me. The only reason I care about it is because society cares just so deeply about it. I promise you, my thoughts about decolonization and the eradication of the state and capitalism present a lot more of a challenge to the status quo than the fact that I wear dresses sometimes even though I don’t “pass.”
At least, that’s how it works in my head. But somehow, my very existence, and the existence of like half the people I know, is some fundamental, existential threat to society. Our fashion sense is bad but surely it’s not that bad.
The thing is, on an individual level, no one else gives a shit that I’m trans either.
One time, in rural West Virginia, I told the septic cleaner I was a trans woman while we were chatting while he was cleaning decades of accumulated shit from the chamber under my house.
“Oh, so like, when you go out you’re a chick?”
“Sure,” I said, because I’ve never particularly felt like quibbling on details.
He thought about it for awhile. He was curious, more than anything. Statistically, based on the county we lived in, he either voted for Trump or didn’t vote.
“What about women’s sports?” he asked. “What do people in the trans community think about that issue?” Again, he was curious.
“It’s sort of a wedge issue, something minor that they can use to get everyone mad at us.”
“That makes sense,” he said.
Later, after I settled the bill and was walking away from his truck, he called me back over. He had one final set of questions for me.
“Wait, so your chick [I had told him I was seeing somebody], she knows that you’re a chick?”
“Yup.”
“So you’re like, lesbians?”
“Yup.”
“Cool, my cousin is a lesbian.”
And he drove off.
Some people might care, but most people don’t. It’s structures that care, that want to make everyone else care.
Gender (the social construct, not just biological sex) seems to be as old as human society, but every society seems to have treated it at least somewhat differently. And importantly, most societies, historically, have offered room for variance within whatever gender structure they used. “Men” who lived as women, “women” who lived as men, or people living in understood third, fourth, or fifth gender roles.
Crucially, most societies in history didn’t have the social construct we call the state, and as far as I can tell, most societies depended more on what we might call “guidelines” than “laws.”
I think this gets at the fundamental threat we pose to fascism, and to authoritarian structures more broadly. Authoritarianism relies on classification and stratification, on strict social order. Yet here I am, not only telling everyone in the world that I’m a girl, but having everyone either believe me or politely accept that I see the world differently than they do.
Because at the end of it all, most people understand that we all see the world differently. Most people fundamentally understand multiculturalism, that our ways of doing things are not the only ways of doing things.
My great aunt, the Catholic nun, kept a Muslim prayer rug in her cell in the convent. I asked her about it, and she told me it was to remind her that everyone looks for God in their own ways. She committed her life to a specific institution and its theology and its way of doing things, but she understood flexibility. We all do.
That’s the understanding that fascists are here to destroy. The authoritarian urge sees only a single way of doing things.
It seems silly, in my own head, to make a big deal out of transness. To reiterate, my transness isn’t not even a big deal to me, and I’ve been out for coming on a decade. It seems absurd to imagine that we’re a threat to power.
But we are.
Our silly queer lives and our silly queer drama and our endless arguing about terminology, it’s fundamentally incompatible with authoritarianism because it’s fundamentally a declaration that we either defy classification entirely (my preference) or we at least get to dictate that classification amongst ourselves. The state wants to be the one who decides which of us are valid. It doesn’t want to let us hash that out ourselves in mean-spirited Instagram reels.
It’s trans day of visibility, and I think I’m not visibly trans but most of my friends laugh when I say that. I can drive a big truck and wear Carhartt all I want, but I guess the classification for me is “long-haired butch” and it’s visible to anyone with quarter-functional gaydar.
(I suppose the backpatch of Willem Arondeus with the quote “let it be known that homosexuals are not cowards” doesn’t help).
Maybe I should start caring about transness, maybe that’s the lesson here for me. The fascist state keeps telling me that my gender presents it with an existential threat, and maybe I should listen.
I could have sworn it was my desire to reorganize society from the bottom up instead of the top down, but maybe all that talk about “who really has the power when there are bottoms and tops” is queer as hell anyway.
Either way, happy Trans Day of Visibility. Take care of each other and stop arguing about bullshit. The state wants us dead, and I want us alive. Nothing is sweeter than aging. So let’s all do that, together. Let’s become elders before we become ancestors.
General News
In movement news, the anti-ICE activist Trenten Barker received an 18 month sentence for “arson” (he tossed a flare at some debris piled up in front of a metal fence outside an ICE facility during a protest). He’s raising money for legal fees and to help his family while he’s inside.
Idris Robinson, a Texas philosophy professor, was fired because of a talk he gave at the North Carolina Anarchist Book Fair about Palestine. I’m going to order his book.
Anarchist trans prisoner Marius Mason is going to be released to a halfway house on May 4th after something like 17 years behind bars for his role in the Earth Liberation Front. I promise you if there are humans two hundred years from now, the Earth Liberation Front will be written about as some of the only people from the early 2000s who actually tried to do something.
Rintrah looks like a very sweet pupper. 11/10 would pet and give treats.
I heard from a very trustworthy source (the grandmother maple tree at Wolf Creek faerie sanctuary) that queerness is meant to be a threat, and I should quit my fussing about acceptance and normalcy when it comes to the state. I'll never stop demanding safety and space to exist though.