Tyler Robertson

Did Trump just make me trans?

Tuesday, October 29, 2024

I don't have a full thought here, and I'm not sure how I feel about the partial thought I do have, so I'm gonna ask for some patience while I work through it in real time.

I am a non-binary person who was assigned male at birth. I use they/them pronouns, my gender is "oh, no thank you", and I present as pretty agender but still leaning masc mostly because I'm tall and wide. I have been described as "what if a boy could be a lesbian." These descriptors help me make sense of who I am, and I'm happier now than I ever was when I tried to be a man. As someone who always felt like something was off, but never had the right words before, coming out felt like putting on clothes that finally fit just right, fresh out of the dryer.

Despite being firmly queer and nonno-bononno, I don't really consider myself transgender. My trans friends and heroes have gone through very different experiences from me, and forged paths that I don't necessarily want to emulate (though as a side note I did agree with a genderfluid friend recently that we as humans should just make all our sexy bits modular and that would make everyone's lives easier). My gender experience is related to theirs, and my ability to express myself is shaped by the examples they set, but I usually feel we're more like cousins than siblings, if we're trying to classify things in that way. It's nuanced, but I think that nuance is very important for talking about each person's unique gender experience and journey.

However.

Earlier this week I was listening to Pod Save America, and they mentioned an ad put out by the Trump team, which was trying to villainize Harris's position on trans healthcare, particularly for incarcerated citizens and aliens. I won't link to the ad here, you can go find it yourself, but it ends with this: "Kamala is for they/them. Donald Trump is for you."

They/them versus you.

Explicitly pitting the ad's target demographic — American voters — against non-binary people, by showing them clips about transgender healthcare.

I am realizing (maybe too late but I hope not) that it is not up to me to determine whether I am trans. When a political power wants to demonize a minority and you are at all different from what they say is "the norm", they will lump you into whatever group helps their case. My attempt to respect trans people by not comparing myself to them does not matter to the Republican party. It probably doesn't matter to the Democrats either but at least they aren't actively trying to kill us. "Eh, close enough," they'll say, scooching us all into the same corner, under the sign which reads "gender?".

What I'm getting at is that for all intents and purposes, when it comes to political action and working to make the Project of Life easier for my community, maybe I am trans? We can figure out specifics later — this is not a distinction I'm trying to make for myself, but rather a re-framing or re-focusing on the fights I need to be fighting as an individual. When we say shit like "nobody is free unless we're all free", this is kinda what we mean: we're all the same people, especially to the powers that be, who don't actually care about your nuanced view of gender expression. Maybe we all just need to fight the big fight, so we can still have space for that nuance in the future.

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