#FacebookBan I was banned for calling our racism... WUT?!

This just one more part of the trans experience... Care taker of parent or parents. Trans folks inhabit so many roles in their lives. Allies, friends, loved ones - Let’s show some love, gofund.me/e767171e #GoFundMe

The idea that trans women need to pressure anyone into sex is so laughably absurd. The desire for trans bodies is insatiable. The problem is that it’s not public. It’s on porn and escort sites, the DM’s of every trans woman, in low whispers in bars and on public transportation.

To be a trans woman is having to constantly navigate the simultaneity of strangers’ desire for us AND the shame interlaced with that desire. Their desire requires secrecy, darkness, denial, lies, and all too often, violence, to hide from the shame.

That shame has a clear and simple source: the ignorance and judgment of others that to be with a trans woman is somehow a challenge, a threat, to their identity. At least with straight men, whose masculinity is so incredibly fragile and requires constant vigilance.

But lesbians? I’ve met countless cis lesbians who are interested in trans women. Not *all* trans women, of course, but even one is enough to prove it’s possible. I don’t know any who thought it somehow changed or invalidated their identity.

My wife is a “gold star” lesbian. She came out young and has never been with a man. She asked me out, she proposed, and she has no doubts about her lesbianism. In my experience, butch lesbians tend to be drawn to the femininity of trans women. It’s a good pairing.

If there’s an issue here at all, it’s linguistic and ideological, not a real life one. As a response to the history of really narrow and heteronormative gatekeeping, we settled on the idea that your gender is whatever you say it is.

But it then raises the specter of someone who identifies, and is recognized as, a cis man one moment suddenly declaring they’re a woman and expecting the world to immediately see and treat them as one. It’s a troubling thought experiment, but it doesn’t happen like that.

For most of us transition is a long process that steadily reconfigures all our social relationships. After a certain point many trans women are indiscernible from cis women, and therefore an object of desire for straight men and lesbian women.

And frankly, at every stage in that process trans people are attractive to someone, for a multiplicity of reasons, because desire is complex and messy and comes before the neat little intellectual and linguistic structures we build to stabilize identity and community.

Whether it’s novelty or simply the fact that generally trans people are relatively self-aware, bold, resilient, and just kinda awesome, others have been attracted to us, no matter whether we’re read as cis or trans. It’s just a fact. We don’t have to pressure anyone.

Which is all to say don’t fall for stupid op-ed’s written with little to no basis in lived experience and by people who want to erase trans people from public life. If you don’t want us, we don’t want you either. All we ask is that you leave us and our partners the fuck alone.

p.s. Let’s not forget the gay trans men or all the T4T variations out there! We’re really living our best lives.

It’s almost like there’s an intense, sustained, and coordinated campaign to legislate and shame trans people out of existence by making medical care, bathrooms, sports, employment, dating, and love inaccessible, (or least feel so). All to defend what is supposedly “natural”.

Just posted a photo instagram.com/p/Ca4TxAbL5YF/…