a l'allure garconniere

People who aren’t trans women using the word “tranny.” (Trans women who use the word tranny: I’m not mad at you, but I’m not happy at you, either.) I have had this conversation so many times that I have died and now I’m writing this from Tranny Appropriation Conversation Hell.

I’m not alone. IT IS OLD. Read one of the zines I’ve written on the subject; read one of a billion articles trans women have written about it. I am tired of educating people on this, especially because it tends to lead to people going “oh yeah definitely” and then continuing to go to Traniwreck, and buy videos from Trannywood. Not convinced? Okay, let’s do a quick guided meditation:

You’re standing in a beautiful green field in England or maybe Ireland. It’s cool and a little bit humid and early in the evening; the blue sky is just starting to darken; white cirrus clouds stripe the sky, growing orange near the horizon. All around you are your friends: genderqueer folks, lesbians, female-to-femme identified womyn, queers, maybe even a couple trans women. You know, everybody cool. Also, nearby are boring people, television personalities, magazines, and the entirety of popular culture. It’s feels pretty good where you are.

You think you spot one of your exes across the field and wave with wistful affection, realizing that you’re over hir enough to feel that affection again. You take two giant steps back and find that there’s a rustic wall in front of you, all cool stones, a little moss, which you hadn’t been able to see because it was too close to your nose. It’s beautiful and serene. Now, your field of vision backs even further away and rises into the air; you see that on the other side of the wall there are more fields, a river, and a lot of trans women who don’t have access to community, respect, people to date, people to fuck, performance venues, or queer collective housing.

Your field of vision backs up further as you move into the sky, and you see that the beautiful stone wall is part of an enormous series of curving walls, laid out in a configuration that becomes clearer the further you move into the sky. In cursive, the walls spell out the words YOUR FUCKING SENSE OF ENTITLEMENT.