QUEERING THE GAME OF LIFE

nueva-bordena:

(Cross post from a blog I did for a class on LGBTQ oppression)

I’ve been avoiding writing about Agnes Torres Sulca for almost a month now.  For those of you who don’t know, Agnes Torres was a Trans* activist in Puebla, Mexico who was found murdered on March 10.  Her Twitter account is active until the day of her disappearance, with a link to an interview she did being the final post.  Agnes was a psychologist, an activist, and an academic.  She was one of the most prominent advocates for Queer people in Mexico, and Mexican authorities went from writing off her death as a crime of passion to stating that the motive behind her murder was the theft of her car, not hatred, not transphobia.


[Agnes Torres Sulca, a brown Mexican Transwoman with curly dark brown hair]

I didn’t want to write about this because I didn’t want to add to the perception that Trans* people, especially Trans* women, are all victims.  I didn’t want to add to that narrative and that perspective, especially if other Trans* people are going to internalize it.  There’s a strong belief that to be Trans* is to be completely powerless, to be dependent on some cisperson for support through our lives, and that’s shown in just about every representation of a Trans* person that I can think of.  Every movie, almost every book, I think with the exception of Leslie Feinberg’s “Drag King Dreams”, has us crying to and leaning on some tolerant cisperson who sits by and listens.  

The fact is that Trans* people are being killed and no one seems to care.  We’re being killed directly, through knives and guns and fists, and we’re being killed indirectly, by being denied houses, medical care, and jobs.  And sadly, that’s never far from my mind.  The fact that almost half the names I read in online obituaries are Latin@ names, that half the bodies and faces shown during Trans* Day of Remembrance belong to someone who looks like me doesn’t help.  And their ages, nineteen, twenty-three, twenty-five, twenty-eight, only add to the weight in my chest.  It doesn’t look like people like me make it to thirty.

So here is the point at which, you, cispeople, are supposed to start doing something.  One of our assignments in Peers for Pride was to interview people on being what being a good ally means, and I received several responses that were simply “Being there for my friend to talk to”.  Let me make this abundantly clear: that is not being an ally, that merely is being a decent friend.  If you want to be an ally to Trans* people, if you consider yourself an ally to Trans* people you’re going to have to start doing more than the bare minimum, because for us it comes down to a matter of life and death.  You need to create spaces for us, to begin with.  You need to give us a part in communities and in families.  This is the first step.  Trans* people need places to organize and places to create.

Those of you who organize, on any level, need to realize that Trans* people are not some abstraction, not some target population for another group or social worker, we are part of your community!  We share your struggles against racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, and we need voices in those spaces and those movements.  And we need you to start using your voices to help us.  We are strong, we are capable, but we are few and we are scattered, we need as much help with our struggle as we can get.

And to Trans* people: we need to unite.  There is no other option.  We need to fight for and work for one another, we need to work on loving one another, because without that we are simply a group of people who share marginalizations and medical histories.  It is my sincere belief that Trans* people, all Trans* people, have a responsibility to create a Trans* community and to do everything they can to advance this community, because failure to do so will result in more deaths, more violence, and less hope.

And neither cispeople nor Trans*people should be allowed to forget those who have passed on.  They are more than faces to be gawked at during a memorial service, or names to be read in a litany at Day of Remembrance, they are a part of our family, they were sisters, brothers, siblings, lovers, and they deserve at the very least the justice that every human being deserves.  Never let us forget that, and never let us forget them.

[Black and white picture of Agnes Torres Sulca with her looking off-frame.  The slogan “Justice for Agnes Toress Sulca!” is printed on the side]

"Also, the white trans experience has trumped trans people of color’s experience. This is another factor that arrests development for some trans people of color. We go online and do research on transfolks and only get the white trans experience, which isn’t ours- so there’s no way that we could be trans, right? Also there are other issues in being out and trans which seems to be what white transmen push for. As they become visible as trans, there may be backlash…but they are still a white man with privilege. As soon as we transition to be black men, our lives get much more difficult- especially if we are trans organizers. There is a lot of pressure to stay “stealth” and invisible within communities of color, because who really wants the added marginalization and discrimination? It is hard enough to be a black man. Now you’ve got to worry about being accepted within your community, church, schools and jobs? Many say- No, thank you. And you know …some white transmen call us cowards for that. Cowards. Because they have no idea the experience of intersecting identities of being a person of color and queer among other identities."

The New Masculinity- Defining ourselves,semerging from our cocoons (via biyuti)

(via nueva-bordena)

I’m Done

nueva-bordena:

This seems more relevant now that this whole “cotton ceiling” thing has gone around.

I’m done identifying as “Trans*”.  I’m done trying to force my way into these movements and groups that are so overwhlemingly white.  I’ve already spent three years trying to, I don’t plan to spend the next ten or twenty doing the same.  I’m exhausted from fighting for acceptance outside of the trans* group, I don’t see any need to keep fighting within that group.  I don’t see why I should try to be included in a space that works so ardently to keep me and people like me out.  It’s a waste of my time, and I believe it will ultimately be hurtful to myself and others like me.

Don’t be surprised, the entire trans “consciousness” comes from a place of incredible whiteness.  Not only from its attempts for inclusion within the lesbian and gay movements, but within its discourse.  Kate Bornstein, Leslie Feinberg, Riki Wilchins, S. Bear Bergman, and Julia Serano are all white.  The people defining my identity and supposed community are all white, we share nothing in terms of culture or ideology.  In fact, the reason I celebrated finding Feinberg and Bornstein was because they were such a good alternative to the dominant, ALSO incredibly white, narrative when I was first coming to terms with my gender.  This is like rejoicing at finding a band-aid after being stabbed, because the dominant narrative had me questioning all the time what I was, whether I was trans enough, whether I was feminine enough to even be trans, all that bullshit.  I didn’t feel any kind of peace within myself until I read Gloria Anzaldua’s “Borderlands/La Frontera” at UTEP.  Until then, I had been combing through what Feinberg and Bornstein had written in hopes of making sense of my gender. 

And if I remember right, Jameson Green said that the term “transgender” was thought up by Virginia Prince, someone who didn’t believe people should have access to surgeries,  and who denied gay men and transwomen entry into the organizations she created. Why would I chose to use a label to describe myself that was created by someone who would hate means hate my use of it? Ignoring that history is one of the most problematic things I could do, and I’m not accommodating or excusing anyone by contributing to that. In fact, the only word I really identify with is “Mestiz@”, and within that I don’t need a signifier for my gender, the “@” does that for me. To me, that single letter, or symbol, I guess, shows how I am a combination of male of female, and how my understanding of “male” and “female” are based in Chicanism@.

Ademas, the people who I look up to as my TPOC ancestors didn’t identify as Trans*. Even Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson identified as drag queens and transvestites. Y Sylvia even said in an entrevista that she only identifies as herself. We, and I do mean ‘we’ because I’ve done this myself, ascribe transness to her postmortem because that’s the understanding of the space she occupied that we have today. Maybe she would have argued with that. So my history isn’t something I share with white trans people, and with that goes my last theoretical connection to white trans people. Because really, we have no more in common than I do with the average white cis person, except for some of our medical histories. I realize this means that I’ll have to create a community for myself, to find new ways of defining myself that don’t exist in white queerness, and I intend to. I will (re)create a space in Latinidad for myself and people like me. And I will never give up on that.

I’m going to continue my work.  I’m going to keep working for Trans* rights and TPOC.  I’m going to dedicate my life to doing everything I can to help those communities, because it’s the least they need.  It’s the least I can do.

So nothing’s different, really, except now everyone knows.  And everyone saw me call you out.

“Though February has passed, there is never a bad time to get reacquainted with African American history makers- the events that shaped our lives, our heroes and “sheroes.” Over the last few years we’ve been paying closer attention to the accomplishments of Black gay and lesbian people such as Bayard Rustin. But there is another group of African Americans who have shaped our people’s history: transgender people.

Transgender African Americans have been active contributors to history, even though they have often been overlooked. Their presence and contributions are not a recent development, but can be traced back through the centuries. ”