I'm getting really fucking tired of being introduced to my own politics through the fact that I'm trans. Every time I write about women, somebody finds a way to shrink the work back down to "trans issues." I write about pornography misogyny, desire, marriage, political organization, the family, women's labor, feminist history, and the structure of male supremacy. Somehow I'm still filed under trans activist.
And you might ask “what is Tara whining about now” “why is this such an issue for you” Because a transsexual woman is only permitted to become an intellectual representative of the category stamped onto her forehead. A cis woman can spend her entire writing career writing about women on her self help article about and become a feminist theorist. I do the same thing and I become a "trans voice." Fuck that. I am a feminist. And since my notes app rants turned mini essay series has a Star Wars theme I’ll continue it with this; Grant me the fucking rank. The Rank of Feminist writer.
I don't mean feminist in the increasingly useless and meaningless sense where the word means that I support women doing whatever they personally want. I don't believe liberation is produced by accumulating enough individually empowering choices until patriarchy gets bored and we can flash every male to empower ourselves.
I believe women constitute a political class under male supremacy. I believe our desires are formed inside material conditions that existed before we did. I believe heterosexuality has a history. Femininity has a history and Sex has a history. The fact that something feels personal doesn't remove it from the politics that caused it to form.
And yes, this includes trans women. It obviously fucking includes us. My transsexuality didn't remove me from the political condition of womanhood. It gave me another route into it. I've spent my entire time as a theorist watching femininity get enforced, purchased, rewarded, mocked, fetishized, and punished. I've watched women learn what kinds of bodies make them legible and what happens when our bodies refuse the assignment. You cannot tell me that experience somehow disqualifies me from speaking about women.
Yet there's this bizarre expectation that I should stay inside my little designated intellectual enclosure. Tara can talk about hormones. Tara can talk about passing. Tara can talk about transmisogyny. Maybe Tara can talk about lesbianism if everybody is feeling generous. Then I start talking about pornography or marriage or racialized femininity and suddenly people behave like “what is this abuser bodied moid speaking about”
When I write about Black women, I am writing about women. When I write about transsexual women, I am writing about women. When I write about lesbians, I am writing about women. When I write about heterosexual women trapped inside arrangements that feminism has spent fifty years trying to understand, I am still writing about women.
There's a political sleight of hand in calling every trans woman who develops a body of feminist thought a "trans activist." Our theory becomes "lived experience." Our arguments become ✨Valid✨.
Meanwhile some cis woman can discover Andrea Dworkin at twenty-seven, write twelve hundred words about heterosexuality, and suddenly she is conducting feminist analysis from the mountaintop. Please be serious.
I've spent an enormous portion of my adult life thinking about women's liberation, sometimes obsessively, probably to an unhealthy degree. I have read the arguments. I have fought about them. I have changed my mind about them. I have watched feminist politics fail in real time and tried to understand why.
I didn't build Bundle of Styx as a social platform or name from which I write feminist theory because I wanted a nicer seat at the diversity table. I want women free. By any means necessary. That means I care about the conditions under which women live. It means I care about male violence and economic dependence. It means I care about the sexual expectations women inherit before we're old enough to understand what sex even is. It means I care about racial hierarchy inside womanhood. It means I care about the industries that make money teaching women to hate their bodies, and I care about the fact that individual women still have to survive inside the world those industries helped build.
Feminism has to be capable of holding all of that at once without turning every political question into a fucking affirmation exercise.
That's why I get irritated when people describe my politics as fundamentally concerned with "trans rights." Obviously I support trans liberation. I'm a transsexual woman. I'd have to be spectacularly stupid not to notice what's happening to us.
I do not want a feminism where trans women are graciously invited into the existing order of womanhood as long as we promise not to touch anything. I want to argue about why women desire what we desire. I want to argue about sex and labor and race and the family and beauty and violence. I want to argue about what liberation would actually require. And occasionally I'd like to do this without somebody introducing me like I'm the fucking assistant secretary for transgender (heshe) affairs.
I am a woman writing about women. I am a feminist writer. You can disagree with my feminism. Please do. God knows everybody else does. You can call me vulgar. You can call me wrong. You can call me a radical feminist or a materialist feminist maybe even a trans-inclusive radical feminist, an irritating lesbian with internet access. Several of these would at least demonstrate that you have read the work.
But stop reducing the work to my transition. I didn't transition so that every idea I ever had could become a subsection of transgender discourse. I transitioned because I am a woman. And I write because I want female liberation .
So please, for the love of god, stop calling me a trans activist.
Grant me the rank of feminist.