I wish queer identity discussion made much more room for queer people who can’t and never could hide their identity. We don’t all have the option of passing as cishet until we choose to come out, and the erasure of that shows in construction of most queer discourse

This is also one of the problems with framing homophobia as “having a problem with who you sleep with.” I was in kindergarten being bashed for having a lisp and walking like a girl and the way I looked and moved. Had nothing to do with a behavior that I could have hidden

No one gave a shit whether I actually was attracted to guys or not. No one would have said “oh sorry I misunderstood your identity!” if I had tried to insist that I was really a cis boy. That’s just not how it works

I know because I tried to take this approach. I tried reasoning with people “hey you don’t know that I like boys or not, how can you say someone is gay based on anything else?”

The point is “gay” meant “effeminate” in practice and the attack on sexuality was a justification

Anti-queer violence has an entire dimension which is carried out on the battlefield of gendered signals, not all of which can be controlled by the person signaling them and most of which aren’t verbal

If we understand that bigotry occurs on an emotional level first, and response to nonverbal and usually instinctual cues, and is not primarily ideological, a lot makes more sense.

Transmisogynists don’t care why they hate me or what I really am

Cw slurs

TERFs and misogynist gaybros and hostile straight dudes and conservative Christian all share this in common: they may insist I’m a dude but they don’t really care. They see me as a he-she ultra-fag and have since I was 4.

Coming out was just a way of putting my own words to a thing I was already living. It was about ownership for me and not about exposing something that wasn’t already being signaled. I am not able to turn the signals off

And as a trans woman, your entire body is a map of signals. Some of us go through extensive surgery to try and alter the signals that get picked up from us. Transness is about the body and not just about declared identity or even behavior