My stance on “Is [identity] a valid member of the [group] community” has been and continues to be that if you are actually in that community and acting in solidarity with your fellow members of that community then it is fundamentally obvious that you are in that community. Whereas if you act against the community and do not participate in the community and do not spend time in that community then you are not in it. Membership is not taxonomical in nature but participatory in nature. Membership is a performative act in the Butlerian sense. Something you do.
Caitlyn Jenner and Blair White are not valid members of the transgender community even though they may be women of some sort of transsexual experience. They spend their time acting against the best interest of trans people as a class. They cozy up to our enemies and make arguments against our liberation. They do not hang out with us or come to our potlucks and parades. We do not know them as we do other famous trans women like TSMadison, Kat Blaque, or Chelsea Manning.
Meanwhile we have plenty of famous non-binary people who are not medically transitioning but who clearly act in solidarity with transsexuals and other transgender people. Who are clearly in our community spaces and who know us and care about us. Judith Butler, Janelle Monae, Mae Martin (apparently Mae Martin is on T), Maia Kobabe (apparently got top surgery), insert some other third example who is non-binary but not currently medically transitioning. My point is you don't need to medically transition to be in the community. Moving on.
Why is Miley Cyrus’s supposed nonbinary identity invalid but not Janelle Monae? When was the last time Miley Cyrus spoke to queer or trans issues. What has she done in solidarity with us. Who knows her. Have you seen her at pride? Does she do anything to compromise her positionality as a cisgender woman? Will the Florida DMV charge her with fraud?
It is not that I seek to gatekeep for the sake of some sanctity of valid identity labels or respectable taxonomy. There are plenty of people who do not meaningfully change their presentation past their pronouns but who I absolutely would count as legitimate members of our community because they are in the transgender community as in they are literally in the community. They are our friends. We know them. They act in solidarity with other trans people and act for the benefit of all of us. Their experiences may differ from my experiences as a transsexual but I will act in solidarity with them as they act in solidarity with me and for that I would consider their standing as a member of the transgender community legitimate. I am not expecting them to prove their worthiness through activism brownie points but when they find themselves in a position to act for trans people as a whole or against us, whose side do they take? Do they take the position of a transgender person and fight with the rest of us as one of us, or do they retreat into the safety of a cisgender position, accepting “misgendering” to protect their own best interest as an individual at the cost of the safety and inclusion of the transgender community as a whole.
I will not validate the nonbinaryness of Cathy Brennan or Rose McGowan who seem to arbitrarily identify as women or not at various times but consistently identify as "female" when behaving in actively hostile ways to our community. My issue I take with "theyfabs" or "agab-first nonbinary people" (e.g. identifying as "AFAB nonbinary" as opposed to "Nonbinary" with birth assignment as a tangential detail that arises when relevant but not an identity placed first above all else) is not that they are taxonomically invalid but specifically when someone seems to not identify as cisgender only when criticized for their cisgender postionality relative to the trans people they are harming, but is otherwise happy to identify with their birth assignment or accept gendering aligned with their birth assignment any time it is beneficial to them to do so, that is when I am inclined to say "If you are happy with your birth assignment, then you can keep it." If you see all the trans people on one side of a room and this person on the other side, acting or voting against our interests, then that is when I would say that that person is not a legitimate transgender person which is to say they are not a part of our community. Often they will accept labels like "nonbinary" but would never identify as "transsexual." They will claim a sort of outsideness of the cisgender category when it suits them, but would never present in a manner that risks being seen as a tranny, dyke, or faggot.
It is not about being the recipient of a privilege by way of a flowchart derived by the interiority of their feelings about the words "man" or "woman," but about where they sit in a structure and how comfortably they sit there and what it says about what team they are on when they decide to kick the ladder out from under them.
If they are so outside of our community that they do not recognize and are not familiar with the huge intersection of Disability and transness, or how the intersection with race becomes a social determinant of health, then they clearly are not members of our community. For every transgender person knows somebody who is disabled, who is high-risk of COVID complications, who has been unhoused, who is severed from their birth family, who has been sexually assaulted. I am skeptical whether Miley Cyrus has heard of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome or knows about the prevalence of chronic pain in our community.
And I am angry about this because recently a local she/they semi-cisgender woman stood up in front of a room of masked and grieving transgender people of all kinds, who were nearly-unanimous in our demand for keeping COVID precautions which would keep a vital community space safe for us, and not only stood against us but was the lead advocate against our inclusion, and this person is such a prevalent local figure that they are doing this same thing in every local space they are in. If you are going to systematically exclude my community from the spaces you have power over then I will rhetorically exclude you from my community. That /they in your email signature does not change that you took a cisgender position to exclude 95% of the transgender people in your community space. So I will not cede our words to you when that is how you act. She will surely not see this post and I doubt we will ever be in a room together again. She ignored my email correspondences to her where I gave her good faith and expressed my grief and heartbreak at her actions. So ultimately this is just me venting in a way that my brain works which is through political analysis and discourse. To look at her position in this moment to take back something that had been shared with her, which is to say, her legitimacy in my eyes. I see you and I name you Cisgender Able-Bodied White Woman. J'accuse. You are disinvited from the potluck.
This is how I approach the question of every person who questions the validity of their queerness or transness. I do not care who or if you fuck or how you feel about it. When the faggots are under attack, will you be standing with us? I do not care about the interiority of your feelings about gendered language as it applies to you. When they call us groomers and freaks and seek to push us out of public life, are you fighting by our side? That is what I care about.
Renamed this to make it more clear what my point is. I am trying to decenter how someone identifies and instead say I care about their political position in our society.
In this weird fucked up system that has evolved from attempts to preserve a colonial caste system called race and the artificial gender binary it forcibly imposed on top of the natural variations of our species, I care not about how you feel about yourself or your individual interior feelings, but rather, are you being pushed to the margins with us and fighting with us to push ourselves back into public life? Or are you at the center, activly pushing us out of public life and into the margins. If you’re the latter, then I’m not inviting you to the party we’re having over here at the margins. And my choice to invalidate your identity is an intentional hostile act that I am taking in retaliation for your hostile acts against our community whose endonym you seem entitled to claim when convenient while still ultimately holding a position in the political system as a cisgender white person, the highest rung in the caste system, and utilizing that position to perpetuate our systemic oppression—something that exists on a structural level, not as merely an emergence of natural individual bias.
Ultimately I don’t care about your identity if your position in the structure is as one of our oppressors. The difference between a TERF that says “don’t call me cis, I’m a Real Woman” and a liberal who says “don’t call me cis, I’m a female non-binary person who uses she/her pronouns and isn’t transphobic I just hate every transsexual I’ve ever met” is the aesthetics, not the political position.
