New article: Some thoughts on what cis people get wrong about Trans Day of Remembrance

The annual Trans Day of Remembrance is a chance to memorialize those lost and to stand up for those still living. (Illustration by Manasa Gudavalli)

Today, remember the trans people who are no longer with us. Then remember the ones who are.

Nov. 20 is Transgender Day of Remembrance, a day for honoring the trans people lost to a transphobic society. It’s a day that I, and many other trans people, have complicated feelings on. This year, I wanted to write about how TDOR should only be the beginning of one’s allyship, not itself a goal or marquee event. I felt like I had something to say about how the mainstream ally-industrial complex, so to speak, treats trans death and trans remembrance. The narratives presented by many allies tend to highlight the spectacle of trans death in a way that appears uncomfortably close to reveling in our suffering. There are people who are genuinely glad to see trans people die, which is its own thing, but I wanted to address the people who are suspiciously eager to center trans death as a form of “allyship.'“

With much gratitude to our opinion editor Kevin Kurian, managing editor Alexandra Chan, and multimedia editor Manasa Gudavalli for making it possible to publish this piece with a tight deadline, I’m proud of how it turned out. Read the full article here on nyunews.com.

With that said, I want to use this space to expand on some topics that I couldn’t address in the piece.

I do want to emphasize that pronouns aren’t everything. As Raquel Willis told me for the article, “they need to go beyond all of this pronoun talk and actually talk about the structural shifts that need to happen.” However, they play a big role in my own (relatively privileged) trans experience — my direct encounters with transphobia are largely in the realm of the microaggression.

This part didn’t end making it into the final article, but I kept finding myself thinking about that one professor who gendered me correctly. Not only did he listen and adjust when I introduced myself with my pronouns (I was using they/them at the time), he even spoke with me after class that day because of how much he wanted to get it right. He understood his limitations and was willing to work to make me feel safe and included. I wish any other professor had done half as much as he did.

“The person I do resent is the one who just flashes the excuse ‘sorry, this is hard for me’ and puts no effort into improving.”

I don’t hold any ill will toward anyone who struggles with pronouns — a singular they for a specific person in particular may not come naturally everyone, especially people like that professor who aren’t native English speakers. (His first language was French, which I imagine makes grammatical gender-neutrality a headache.) The person I do resent is the one who just flashes the excuse “sorry, this is hard for me” and puts no effort into improving. This sends the message that I’m an inconvenience to them, not worth the effort of accommodating.

In some ways, it’s worse to get misgendered unintentionally than intentionally — at least with the latter I am granted the validation of being seen as what I am, even if the person in question considers it invalid. When I am misgendered unintentionally, I am told that I did not even occur to that person.

I also wanted to talk about the role that trans rights play as a contemporary wedge issue in American politics, but that ended up being outside the scope of both this article and my own expertise. I do think it’s worth touching on some points here that were brought up by two brilliant trans friends of mine who heavily influenced the piece. Transgender issues in politics center around the control of bodies: how people can modify their own bodies, where they can use their bodies, how they can show their bodies. Every HRT restriction, every bathroom bill, every “trans women in women’s sports” hysteria comes down to control of transgender bodies.

“Transgender issues in politics center around the control of bodies.”

Control of bodies is also at the core of another wedge issue of today, abortion rights. Limitations on abortion, regardless of the pretext, are an effort to control women’s bodies.

(I understand that abortion restrictions affect more people than just [cis] women, but they are the intended targets of such legislation. I have yet to see a Republican legislator say that he believes pregnant people should not be able to get an abortion.)

It is a sort of authoritarianism to take away the control that people have over their own bodies. Furthermore, infringements on both abortion and trans rights are perpetrated in the service of the same (forgive me for using this term) cisheteropatriarchal vision, in which bodies that are seen as female are to be used for reproduction in the service of men. The owners of these bodies are barred from standing in the way of this end, and no bodies may be modified to distract from this purpose. A transmasculine person cannot be allowed to compromise their body’s reproductive purpose, and a transfeminine person cannot be allowed to encroach upon a reproductive standard of femininity.

“We are an inherent threat to the system of gender itself.”

This is not the only transgression that transgender people commit against the gender order — we are an inherent threat to the system of gender itself. A rigid conception of sex-based binary genders with associated duties is irreconcilable with the idea that one may modify their sex and inhabit gender in another way than the one they were assigned. This is to say nothing of the threat that the existence of nonbinary and intersex people poses to binary systems of gender (or really binary systems of anything). Trans people — thank God — are empowered to dismantle gender binaries and hierarchies.

As Umberto Eco famously put it, fascism casts its enemies as “at the same time too strong and too weak.” Now, transphobia is not inherently fascist, but it easily lends itself to fascism. A trans woman is dangerously strong, and the vulnerable fragile cis women must be protected from her vulgar perversion of womanhood. At the same time, she is laughably weak, a “sissy,” an easy object of ridicule and violence. A trans man, for his part, may be seen as weak — “not a real man,” himself seen as a vulnerable fragile cis woman putting on a costume of masculinity to overcome some supposed psychological confusion. Yet at the same time, he is dangerously strong as well — a threat to the concept of womanhood itself.

I do not mean to say that trans people cannot (or must) identify with, or simply be, a binary gender, nor do I mean to draft all trans people into a war on gender. I just think that we should not fear the power we have against rigid, hierarchical, harmful systems that too many people are accustomed to. This, however, makes us a high-priority threat to everyone who relies on these hierarchies for power or even just comfort, hence the high incidence of transphobic rhetoric and violence.

Despite all the cause for despair, I want to end on something Raquel said about the direction we want to focus on when discussing the tragedies that the trans community faces.

“Yes, there is tragedy, but there are plenty of people putting in the work every day to make things a bit less tragic,” she told me. “I think it is a disservice when we only get stories about losses within our community.”