I know about homophobia in the music industry - not just in hip-hop. Obviously, we're dealing with homophobia in hip-hop; we're dealing with homophobia in the black community.
Women who love women are Lesbians. Men, because they can only think of women in sexual terms, define Lesbian as sex between women.
When you hear anyone policing the bodies of trans women, misgendering and othering us, and violently exiling us from spaces, you should not dismiss it as a trans issue that trans women should speak out against. You should be engaged in the dialogue, discourse, and activism that challenges the very fibers of your movement.
There are cis women who are being attacked and called men because they are wearing makeup and because they are too tall, and they might have an Adam's apple. Once cis women start to realize it's not just harmful to trans women, then we'll start to come together more and attack this together. It sucks, but we're all under the patriarchy.
When folks say 'identity politics' don't matter, it simply reinforces the norm of a white, middle-class, cis narrative and further marginalizes the rest of us who don't share that identity.
Homophobia is just that: a phobia.
I think we won't be able to understand the operations of trans-phobia, homophobia, if we don't understand how certain kinds of links are forged between gender and sexuality in the minds of those who want masculinity to be absolutely separate from femininity and heterosexuality to be absolutely separate from homosexuality.
'Pretty' is most often synonymous with being thin, white, able-bodied, and cis, and the closer you are to those ideals, the more often you will be labeled pretty - and benefit from that prettiness.
I feel like one thing that messed me up was living in a homophobic and transphobic society, and just being the object of mockery and disgust in your average sitcom or movie or person at school.
I never felt welcome in the heteronormative groups.
The entertainment industry is a microcosm of the real world. To be 'othered' within the industry is a reflection of where we have been cast in the outside world, existing in the margins of society for decades witnessing cisgendered, heterosexual whiteness as the clearly defined default to which we must cater.
We have to look at queerness as a means towards challenging normativity.
Let's face it: your average straight, cis-gender teenage boy isn't going to pursue a relationship with a trans-girl.
We are all inundated with images that present a limited scope of what is considered beautiful. For American women, the closer she is to whiteness/paleness, cisness, thinness, and femininity, the more she is considered beautiful.
So much of male heterosexual comedy can be steeped in a gay panic. A lot of juvenile comedy is predicated on that.
Trans women are conditioned to accept that society sees us as overly sexualized objects - even more so than how society already sexualizes cis women. It's almost as if they don't see us as fully developed human beings.
But I don't believe anyone begins a homosexual.
Like many teens, I struggled with my body and looks, but my despair was amplified by the expectations of cisnormativity and the gender binary as well as the impossibly high beauty standards that I, and my female peers, measured myself against.
Of course it is very limiting to be labeled a lesbian or queer writer. We live in a homophobic culture, and even people who aren't hateful per se assume they won't get anything from a queer book.
I just didn't like the word 'gay.' I still don't like it. It's a dumb way of describing sexuality. I like 'queer' or other words, but 'gay' is a word that had a completely different-meaning word and has been reappropriated. I just don't like it.
I think artists are scared to have same-gendered pronouns in their writing, and I don't think it's because they're scared to be out, because gay artists are visible, but they don't want to alienate an audience.
Homophobia, transphobia, and sexism, they're all rooted in the same prejudice: the belief that one perception at birth - the sex we are assigned - should dictate who we are, who we love, how we act, and what we do.
I can say with confidence that my trans/transfeminine identity emerges as the most heavily problematized aspect of my lived experience. My transness is not a problem on its own but problematized by a society that reviles it, hates it, fails to understand it - or does not wish to.
I've had friends of mine say, like, they're tired of 'gayface,' and I was like, 'What's gayface?' They were like, 'It's the gay version of blackface: like, come in and be more effeminate.'
You wish that everyone knew what cisgender meant. Everyone has access to Google. You can find out what's appropriate to ask a trans person.
