in the group of “men” there will always be women. in the group of “women” there will always be men. no matter how you define these groups there will always be people on the “opposite” side. frankly this should be a basic tenet of transfeminism because its vital for all trans people- not just multigender people. its vital that any resource catering to men or to women understands that they will also, inevitably, have someone of the “other” gender who needs their services. its vital that any discussion of gendered experiences understands that no experience is incapable of being had by the “other” gender. tbh if including trans people in your feminism doesn’t shake up your entire understanding of gender you aren’t doing it right
I wanna be real clear that this post is about binary monogender trans people, too.
In any population where there’s a lot of cis girls, there’s inevitably going to be a trans guy. Maybe he’s in the closet, maybe he doesn’t realize it yet, maybe he’s out but still has his old friend group or his old hobbies, but he’s there. Same with trans women & cis boys.
Trans people are inevitable. You can never know for absolute sure if that group of men has no past, current or future women in it. You have no idea if one of the women seeking your help is a past, current or future man. And trying to enforce this artificial binary will only cause harm.
THIS
I knew of a woman who came out in her 90s, a handful of days before she died of kidney failure, and spent her four day girlhood picking out a green dress to be buried in - a dress that she’d wanted since she was 40… At which point, as she said, she’d already KNOWN she was a woman and before that a girl, for 30-odd years, and then she held the idea of this green dress in her head for fifty years, before finally telling her daughter. I never had the privilege of meeting her, I knew of her because a friend of mine was the mortician who prepared her, and her daughter told the story to her, and she told me. And I’ll carry her name as well.
All the way through her life, there was a woman in the various factories and rowing clubs and masonic meetings and nightclub audiences, that nobody but her knew. And there will be millions more like her right now, that we should be mindful of.