I really hate how transgender experiences are
individualized
whenever they’re made visible. We’re always represented through portraits and biographies, dozens and dozens of them, but all individual. Everytime someone wants to do something for transgender people you can be damn sure they’re going to do more portraits.
The goal is always to ‘humanize’ us, but I’m very sceptical about that. Again and again we see that people are perfectly capable of appreciating an individual member of a minority while continuing to support the systematic violence against that minority. Individual humanizing just doesn’t translate to structural improvement or real change.
And then there’s the claim that portraits provide ‘rolemodels’. But how depressing is it that whenevery you see your rolemodels they are always alone? We’re not presented as part of a community, a group of friends, a family. It’s just us. That doesn’t feel good.
In fact, it’s isolating.
And then there’s the claim that these portraits and biographies show our struggles. They really don’t. What they do is individualize our struggles, turn them into just our personal experiences and obscure the scale and connectedness of all the violence against us. The truth is that we share this struggle with millions of others. Our struggles are a collective struggle. Our enemy isn’t the person that misgendered us, it’s the whole system of transphobia and the other systems of oppression that work in concert with it.
Show me that system in all its darkness. Show me our collective resistance. Show me the struggle that brings us together.
Show me our community.
Reveal the beauty of our solidarity, the rage just behind our collective grief, the worlds we can build when we rise up. Inspire us. Or better yet, ditch the cissaviour complex, drop your pen and your camera and actually join our fight.
QueerAnarchism 