#I am ALWAYS happy to have an excuse to rec Jamie Berrout

[specialagentartemis]

you bring up women and female too much... feeling pretty terfy tbh

This is so fucking funny. As bait it’s like you’re not even Trying

(for context: transphobes just found my post about why it’s important to not spread historical misinformation and they are mad about it. This is from a transphobic radfem angry that I said trans people exist and existed in the past too.)

Shockingly I bring up women and being female because I am a woman and I care about feminism and women’s rights. I firmly believe most people should! Being a woman kind of makes it pressing in a certain way though.

I went through the whole gender questioning and gender exploration thing, thinking about gender and womanhood and femaleness and what they mean and how I relate to it and don’t. I was a tomboyish girl who liked to read and climb trees and hated shaving my legs and participating in gym class and was resentful and resistant to Rules but also enthralled by history and particularly suffragists and women who Did Things. But also, for a while, as I started to increasingly reaize I was queerer than I supposed and felt alienated from other girls my age, I felt pretty disconnected from womanhood; I didn’t know what it meant to me. I’m aromantic asexual, and that self-knowledge was hard-won and required a lot of soul searching and fear for the future and trying really hard to be allo and crying alone at the dining hall. And the question of “what is my gender for, anyway?” felt pertinent in that regard. If it’s not there to structure romantic/sexual attraction and relationships, what is it there for? What does it do for me?

Reading feminist texts by cis feminists was important for thinking about political organizing and political necessities of combating sexism and misogyny in its many pervasive and awful forms, but it didn’t really make me feel any more of a personal sense of womanhood. Political coalition building is not necessarily the same as personal sense of self, nor should it be.

You know what made me feel more secure in my gender? In feeling like A Woman?

Reading the work of trans lesbians.

I mean it. Reading trans women lesbians writing sci-fi stories about apocalypses and AIs and identity, and realistic stories about longing and coercion and freedom and joy and fear and just being, is what made me go, oh, this is it. This is what it’s all about, this is what it means to be a woman. You get it. And you make me feel it in a way I haven’t in a long time.

(I’m also an anthropologist. Thinking about human societies and social constructs and performances of identity is my job.)

But if you want to read the work of the trans woman who really made me feel comfortable and seen and resonant in my womanhood for the first time in a long time, I highly HIGHLY recommend Jamie Berrout and particularly her Portland Diary: Short Stories 2016/2017. They have a spark of brilliance. This Pride month treat yourself to these stories. (This is a direct download because unfortunately Berrout scrubbed her entire internet presence, including any place to legitimately buy her work, but I paid a fair price for these before she did, and I think they deserve to be read.)

(I won’t currently link the other trans woman writer who helped my through my Gender Epiphany, because unlike Berrout who has gone off the grid, she has an internet presence and I don’t want her to get targeted by any transphobes camping my page waiting for my response to their brilliantly crafted bait.)

TERFs, and some overzealous tumblr/twitter users, want so badly to believe that feminism and trans rights are at odds, that if you believe in one you can’t believe in the other. That’s bullshit, of course. My feminism is fully bound up in trans rights; non-discrimination by sex and gender means non-discrimination by sex and gender. Bodily autonomy and authority on one’s identity are the rights of everyone. We need to end sexism and part of ending sexism is ending the belief in gender essentialism; we need to end transphobia and part of ending transphobia means ending the idea that women can only be One Thing and men can only be One Thing and there are unbreachable distances between them. I believe in gender equality and that means the equality of all genders. And from personal experience, I believe that trans women have a lot to say about feminism and what it feels like to be a woman.

Also I have a lot of trans and non-binary friends and I like them much better and trust them much more than I like or trust transphobes. So.

Women’s rights are human rights. Trans rights are human rights. Trans rights are women’s rights. All of these things are true, and inextricable.

#transphobia #trans rights #asks #anonymous #I am ALWAYS happy to have an excuse to rec Jamie Berrout