I've Succumbed

"The average life span of a transgendered person is twenty-three years. The statistic is shocking, until it begins to make sense. Gender non-conformists face routine exclusion and violence. Transgendered people are disproportionately poor, homeless, and incarcerated. Many of the systems and facilities intended to help low-income people are sex-segregated and thereby alienate those who don’t comply with state-imposed categories. A trans woman may not be able to secure a bed in a homeless shelter, for example. Spade writes that just as the feminist movement tended to “focus on gender-universalized white women’s experience as ‘women’s experience,’” the lesbian- and gay-rights movement has focused primarily on a white, middle-class politic, centered on marriage and mainstream social mores."

Dean Spade is the first openly trans law professor. Meaghan Winter interviews him for Granta.

FUCKING READ THIS SHIT. NEXT TIME ANYONE THINKS IT’S OKAY TO RAG ON TRANS* PEOPLE (BECAUSE LOLOL THEIR EXISTENCE IS JUST SO FUNNY, ISN’T IT FUNNY THAT SOME PEOPLE AREN’T EXACTLY LIKE ME), I AM GOING TO PRINT THIS QUOTE OUT AND STAPLE IT TO THE ASSHOLE’S FOREHEAD. Fucking read this shit and think hard, think as hard as you can, about how tragic this is. Your tittering and joking and mocking and bullying — which is, painfully obviously, motivated by an indoctrinated discomfort that you are too ignorant or complacent to question the morality of — is what facilitates violence against the trans* community. No, you don’t have to personally pull the trigger, or raise your fist, or deny care and shelter.

All you have to do is systematically dehumanize. All you have to do is deny the weight of your words and the pedestal of your privilege, ignore the suffering that you can conveniently shrug off after an insensitive SNL skit or forum post because what does it matter to me if these people are dying?

(via gadgetry)

If you are not foaming-at-the-mouth angry right now, read that first sentence again (unless you’d like to protect your blood pressure, in which case have a soothing non-invasive hug from me right now).

(via mumblingsage)

(via formerlyreavers)

21st Oct 2011✧16:044,322 notes