Transgender Day Of Remembrance 2021 – Freedom News2021/11/20 shared with thanks
(To Kell & Back: despatches from the front line)
“you don’t have to live next to me
Just give me my equality”
Nina Simone, Mississippi Goddamn
It is not the responsibility of trans people to thank you for showing up and being an ally. It is not our task to reward you for using the correct pronouns no matter how unusual they are (zie, hir, per, iel, ix) nor for calling us by own chosen names. It is no more our job to request you stand up for us when we are not in the room than it is the job of Black peoples of African origin to praise white people for “freeing” the peoples we and our forebears enslaved.
It is no more our job to be grateful for your recognition than Black indigenous australians should be grateful to white so-called australia for recognising that the indigenous peoples of so-called australia have first title and that terra nullius was a lie. Not raping women, not making women scared, not hitting women are not achievements AMAB people need to be praised for, and not putting trans women in ‘male’ prisons should be just as much an obvious choice.
The past two months have been very stressful for trans & nonbinary people. Across the political spectrum from anarchist elders to liberal-left newspapers, public broadcasters to international media companies, a panoply of charities, NGOs, governments (and their official oppositions) have been putting into the public domain vast quantities of traumatizing bigoted hate. To have the uk prime minister openly praising a lesbian gay & nominally bisexual charity, that seeks to eradicate trans people, is galling if not just terrifying. To see the BBC broadcast programmes and articles that attack the leading LGBT rights charity for daring to include trans ‘rights’ in its existing campaigns. And to have this attack approved of by the minister for Women and Equalities. To sit in disbelief that an employment tribunal has ruled that it is a ‘protected belief’ to question the gender of your colleagues at work. And of course Keira Bell.
The Free 