Narrating queer audiobooks is how Natalie came out to herself !?? 😭😭😭😭😭 And then she wrote this for US!??

The problem with this emphasis on testimony is not just that it demands trans people cede our right to privacy, exposing our vulnerabilities in order to prove that we deserve basic human rights: it’s that it creates an expectation of testimony.

Related to this testimony problem, I feel like sometimes trans people are pushed to compromise their safety in order to further trans visibility and trans rights. This is a very complex topic: we want trans voices to be heard, but we also want trans people to be safe. How do you reconcile those two things within a transphobic society?

Just to give an example of what I mean, when I was in uni we had a teacher that was very progressive and often engaged us in discourse about gender inequality. During my bachelor's I had been out as trans, but for my master's I changed uni and went back into the closet. TLDR: Being out of the closet meant that I became "the trans friend"; my gender identity became my only defining quality, which, as a non-binary person, was exactly what I did not want. So, I kept my chosen gender-neutral name and went back into the closet.

During a lecture, the progressive teacher asked everyone to share their pronouns. Suddenly, I had to very quickly make a decision. Should I misgender myself —a very painful experience— and stay in the closet, where I felt safe? Or should I be honest about my preferred pronouns, thus outing myself, which I knew would then lead to me having to share my whole "gender story" and answer a bunch of questions about being non-binary?

I just couldn't bring myself to give the wrong pronouns, so I said "they/them" and then felt forced to answer all of classmates' questions —who I didn't even know very well, as it was the start of the first semester— after class.

It sucks that trans people are put into this kind of situations constantly. But also, I don't know what my teacher should have done. Not ask about pronouns, and just wait for people to voluntarily disclose them? Skip the whole conversation instead of trying to bring awareness to the importance of respecting people's pronouns? It's a complex situation.

And we're off to the races, folks 🏇🏽💨

To deny the reality of any genders beyond male and female is also to deny the reality of many genders that white people in Western Europe and the USA aren't socialised to recognize . . . White non-binary people often seize upon the existence of these genders to prove the validity of our own: tokenising, instrumentalising, and romanticising them, often without really taking the time to understand them on their own terms. This is a problem: when white people use the genders of people of colour in this way, it recapitulates a colonialist dynamic of exploitation. The desire to name and categorise people according to Western metrics reflects and re-enacts a similar colonialist impulse.

I'm so glad that this author brings this up in the introduction. It's important to remember that there are genders that exist outside of the Western world's daily lexicon and that we should not be co-opting terms nor trying to force these genders into boxes that they previously never existed in.

Are any of you on the Finch App? If so, do you wanna share your friend code so that our finches can be friends?

Gosh, Michelle Zauner's voice is stunning!