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When trans women are mocked and made into jokes in the media, I get very upset, and I am often told “Kay, you can’t go through life getting offended every time someone makes a joke.” And I sputter and object but they don’t hear me. So I want to be clear for once, about why the jokes make me angry.

I learned to hate myself for being transgender before I knew I was transgender. I laughed at the jokes in stand up comedy routines, and prime time sitcoms, and animated comedy shows, and in the movies, and in books, and in games, laughing at trans women for existing, about “men in dresses”, about people who “got their dicks chopped off”, and I learned to think that was worthy of ridicule.

And then a day came when I felt a pang of envy at what my female classmates were wearing and I repressed it, and felt guilty, and a day where I felt incomplete because I had no breasts and I repressed it and I felt disgusting And a day when I realized the only images of romance that made me feel anything showed two women together and I repressed it and I felt like a monster And a day when I realized I felt sick when I looked at myself in the mirror after every shower before work and couldn’t bear to look at my own face, and I hated myself. And then there came a day when I hated myself so much, and I thought I could never understand why, and so I just wanted it all to end. And it was just a miracle that I swerved my car back into my lane in time.

And all of it started with a joke that I heard on TV, and then kept hearing from all the voices from the ether, over and over and over, worming an idea into my mind before I was old enough to realize I was absorbing it, the idea that a man in a dress is funny, and that changing your body parts makes you a freak, and that women who have penises instead of vaginas are liars and hurt men. And they’re still making these jokes. And somewhere out there right now, just like all those years ago, there is a little girl in a t-shirt and cargo shorts with buzzed off hair watching the TV, hearing that joke and absorbing it without knowing it, who will someday have to pry herself apart to tear it out of her head, just like I did.

That is, if she doesn’t kill herself first.

[queerfeelingsdisplayedhere]

D.va 🌸✨

IG: lovesoapie

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I put underwear on everyday. It never "fits" I often don't think twice about it, but today I can't stop

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being a lesbian can really fuck with your connection to womanhood, even as a cis woman. i can only imagine how much more difficult it is for butch and nb/trans lesbians, but conventional womanhood relies so much on attraction to men that i think its really easy to feel excluded from that, regardless of whether you are a binary woman or not.

so heres a shout out to all the lesbians who have a hard time feeling like women, even when they want to, whether you are butch or femme, cis or trans or nonbinary, gender nonconforming or anything else. your womanhood does not need to be defined by the heteropatriarchy. your womanhood is a unique expression of your experiences and your life, and even though cishet women will try to exclude you from their world, you do not have to listen to them.

you belong in womens spaces, your womanhood is real, and you are wonderful 💖❤

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Plans for the [September 14, 1989] Wall Street demonstration against the price of [important early AIDS drug] AZT were advancing, and were not undermined by the pending release of ddI, a direct competitor. On the contrary, it was more important to the activists to keep pressure on [AZT’s manufacturer] Burroughs Wellcome so that Bristol-Myers would not feel encouraged to price its own drug out of reach. Activists formed into affinity groups and made independent plans for actions within the demonstration. Peter Staley and [ACT UP affinity group] the Power Tools wanted to make a spectacular impact on Burroughs Wellcome. The idea to infiltrate the New York Stock Exchange was Staley’s, and once details were worked out it included a plan for a small group in “executive drag” to enter the Exchange on the corner of Wall Street and Broadway and chain themselves inside. In the weeks leading up to the event, Staley scouted the building with two other men, both of them HIV negative—Charlie Franchino, a chiropractor, and Robert Hilferty, a writer and filmmaker. They posed as tourists with a video camera. Back home they studied Hilferty’s footage. Each of the traders they encountered wore a pocket badge, which the guard at the door scrutinized only glancingly. Hilferty zoomed in on several badges. They were plastic-coated white tags, about three-by-five inches, and contained the name of the firm along with a series of large, bold numbers. Franchino knew a place that would copy them exactly. They decided to masquerade as traders from Bear Stearns, because that firm seemed to have the greatest representation on the floor. […] On the morning of the Wall Street demonstration, the guards were jittery. Leaflets and news accounts predicted the noontime arrival of a thousand ACT UP protesters. Staley and his affinity group members slipped inside the Exchange with the morning crowds. The opening bell was set to sound at 9:30 am. At 9:20, five of them climbed to the balcony, locked a chain to the balustrade, and handcuffed themselves to the chain: Staley, McGrath, and Arsenault from the Power Tools, and filmmakers Scott Robbe and Gregg Bordowitz. No one had yet noticed them up there. When Staley saw the electronic clock read 9:29:45, he signaled to the others to unfurl their banner. It said, “Sell Wellcome,” using the Wall Street shorthand. Then they pulled portable marine foghorns from their pockets and pointed them in the air. For Staley this action had deep personal meaning—payback after having endured the homophobia of the trading desk for so many years. He gave the signal. The noise was deafening. At the same time, they pulled big stacks of fake money from their pockets—in homage to Abbie Hoffman, who had protested the Vietnam War inside this building years earlier—and threw them into the air. The slogan printed on the bills bypassed diplomacy: “We die while you make money. Fuck your profiteering.” Once the traders realized what was happening and why, they exploded in outrage. They surged angrily toward the balcony’s staircase. Pens and other projectiles sailed through the air accompanied by cries of “mace the faggots” and worse. In the confusion, nobody realized the opening bell had sounded, and trading was delayed by many minutes, the first time in the 197-year history of the Exchange. Down below, the two remaining protesters—Hilferty and Richard Elovich, a former IV-drug user—snapped a few photographs and hastily retreated toward the door, sprinting the last several yards after someone bellowed, “Who the fuck are you!” and twisted-faced traders lit out after them. When they were blocks away, the photographers passed their film to designated runners who headed straight for the AP offices to have the images developed and copied for the wire. Police took their time extracting the five from their chains. They dragged them out of the Exchange and into the thunderous applause of fellow activists. As Staley stepped onto the running board of the police department van, he allowed his eyes to turn toward the windows of the old J. P. Morgan trading floor. He pictured his former colleagues pressed against the glass, and smiled. When lunchtime came, nearly 1,500 other ACT UP protesters descended on Wall Street, likewise armed with air horns and placards and banners decrying the cost of AZT. Their angry voices echoed through the narrow canyons into repetitive, blurred cries: “How many more must die? How many more must die?” That same day, ACT UP chapters staged satellite demonstrations in London, where Burroughs Wellcome’s parent company was based, and in San Francisco, where the company’s major U.S. warehouse was located. Papers throughout the world carried news of their feat, following The Wall Street Journal, which played the story above the fold. Only the Times, continuing its aggressive stance against covering gay news, let the historic event go unmentioned in the morning papers. The following Monday, admitting to being pinioned by protesters, Burroughs Wellcome slashed the price of AZT for a second time, finally reaching the price range demanded by ACT UP. It took another seven months for the criminal trespass case to come to a head. A judge, ruling that the defendants had acted “in the interests of justice,” dismissed all charges.

David France, How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS (2016), Pt. 3, Ch. 6. (via enoughtohold)

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I would appreciate it if I didn't get dysphoric and horny at the same time. Like I get that one probably causes the other but it's such a weird feeling, go awayyy

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The Topeka Daily Capital, Kansas, August 2, 1905

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it’s hard for me to express how heartbreaking it is to see gay people, especially–but not exclusively–gay women, buying into this idea that the closet is an idyllic place to grow up as a trans woman. that we’re socialized–without complications-in the way that men are socialized, that we reap every benefit cisgender boys, teenagers, or men reap because of their gender?

like. gay women, do you remember growing up being told you were meant to find a husband, carry the children you have with him, support them and him first, maybe to the point of effacing yourself? and gay men, do you remember growing up being told you were meant to find a wife, get a good job, father children, and carry on the family name and everything that goes with it?

do you remember realizing that you could never be this? and that, at the end of the day, the thought of being it repulsed you? that you were fundamentally different–flawed, even–fundamentally wrong and that everything you needed in your life was immoral and unnatural, or at least a disappointment? do you remember that choice you made? between rejecting everything you’d been told was in your future trying to make something of that pain–and sacrificing a fundamental part of yourself trying to be something you weren’t?

do you think straight people go through that? do you think that, being told all the same things, they know what it’s like to feel that panic and alienation?

i don’t understand why they can’t see that our closets are like this too. that we didn’t grow up internalizing everything society prescribes for a man or woman–that we grew up full of dread, and horror, and constant questioning of what was wrong with us and how we could possibly exist in the world. that, even if we tried to fulfill those prescriptions, we did so at the cost of our bodies and personhoods. that, as women, we were reckoning with the confines and disenfranchisement of womanhood on top of this.

that denial of empathy and willful blindness is so painful, especially coming from people who share so much of our childhood traumas. like, that people are so inclined to see us as Other that they’ll look straight past their own experiences is so impossibly heartbreaking and demoralizing.

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I think Goresby inherited my depression.

Poor Baby.

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I know it’s because of internalized transmisogyny and I know it’s bullshit but I can’t shake the feeling that sexual advances/flirting from me is seen as creepy/predatory because of the whole predatory trans woman thing (esp @ wmn). I know it’s wrong and I can rationalize it away but like in the moment my brain goes ‘are you being that creepy guy?’, and that fucks me up

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I'm scared of being codependent, but it feels so good. I'm scared of addiction because it destroys people. I'm scared of relapse, not because I think it would be bad but because my surgeon and endo would. I think it would be good, really good: that scares me. Why do I feel disgusting about what I laud others for? I haven't slept in a while, I feel odd

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Have you ever wanted something so bad, but it would stand between you and what you want most (bottom surgery) like I don't know what to do but I just want to hurt myself, so much (esp cuz. Idk if I'll ever get surgery) but it could stop me getting that, fuck

Bestfriends.

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I desperately need to [self harm] but I can't because it might set my transition back. I can't deal with this feeling I just need so much to [self harm] [body part]. It's never gotten this bad cuz I used to just do it: nothing to lose. I feel like my mood is fucking with my relationship but all I can think of is [self harm] that's all my mind is rn.

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When people mention the way I talk

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Trans people who dont want hrt are still trans.