how trans women talk. We talk good. We say the best words. It's incredible!

can trans women lactate? im a visual learner btw

Hershey's Chocolates featured a trans woman in a recent ad campaign raising awareness for Women's History Month, and the usual suspects are having a meltdown.

The specific responses aren't worth looking at; they're predictably vile. It really does underscore how pants-on-head stupid this manufactured culture war is. It'd be more funny if trans lives weren't on the line.

The stories of trans women should be heard alongside the voices of cis women, because the core of their struggles against patriarchy are really the same. The current structure of the world views men as being more responsible, more logical, stronger, and more worthy of visibility, success, and control than women.

Women are seen as small, fragile, vulnerable, in need of protection. We are carried by the vagaries of our emotions, ill-equipped to handle logic and reason, divinely designed to stay at home and serve as a birthing vessel. We don't act upon the world. The world acts on us. We receive. This power imbalance is seen as "natural", even "divinely inspired."

We are, in short, less than men. It is better to be a man than it is to be a woman. Being gay, or effeminate in any way, or to suffer some cataclysm of emasculation is to fall from the God-sculpted pedestal that men should occupy by default. It is one of the greatest terrors these men possess, to be a receiver. Emasculation is a stripping of the title of Homo sapiens. They would no longer be "wise". They would become an animal.

The idea that any man would voluntarily fall from perfection shocks them to their core. The idea that any woman could rise up to be their equal is a stench in their nostrils they wish to evict. They want the line between Man and Animal to be solid, unwavering. Their grip on power depends on it. They can't let the livestock run the ranch.

Right now, to them, it feels like the livestock is winning. The ranchers refuse to see that gender and sex aren't the same thing, or that what makes people happy is simply having the opportunity to be themselves in a panoply of ways that are as numerous as the human population of Earth. Labels can be blurry, even ephemeral. The Cambrianesque explosion of various pride flags and identities is proof of all this. People are complex, and we are capable of filling many roles, of bending or breaking concepts of gender, or rejecting gender altogether.

And for women, we can see ourselves as we choose, whether that be aggressive or submissive, progressive or conservative, or any number of "-ives" we care to name. We can be the traditional wife, or we can run entire nations. We can eschew motherhood, or embrace it. We can build architecture, or wrestle with heady mathematics. We can come from all walks of life, rich or poor. And yes, we can even start life assigned male at birth. It doesn't change the fact that the overarching system of patriarchy doesn't believe we should have a choice in any of this.

So here's to all the fairer animals out there in the world: may we succeed in capturing the ranch. :)