Blackness Is Not The Barometer For Your Struggle

Photo by Zachary Kadolph on Unsplash

Today, someone asked me in a comment to my Sinners essay if I thought it was valid how TERFS equate transwomen with being Blackface for women. At the time that it was asked, I couldn’t come up with the response. I felt fully captured what I thought and felt. But what I have come up with hours later and is fully supported by countless discourse in society is that everyone uses Blackness as the barometer for their struggle. Everyone associates Black people as the ones who have intimate knowledge of struggle and resistance. They use us as icons and inspirations. Mascots and mantras. Our blood, sweat, tears, and intellectual, social, and spiritual capital. What they get fucked up is thinking that their struggle ever measures up to ours. It does not and it never will. No one has ever caught it as bad as Black people. No one experiences the levels of ongoing struggles and oppression the way Black people have experienced it. Which means that people will have to find ways to name their struggles for themselves. Which means that their protests can not be rooted in their aversion to being treated like Black people. Which is the dirty little secret of this whole thing.

It is expected that Black people should struggle. It is expected that we should be oppressed. It is not news if the cops kill us. No one else cares when the Karen or the Chad does Karen or Chad things against us. No one else would care if it was decided tomorrow that every Black person was to be rounded up tomorrow. They not only accept it, they expect it.

As a Black transwoman, I resent the ways that specific Black American historical and contemporary atrocities are brought up when discussing any other groups. I resent this even when white and other race trans people attempt to use those atrocities and realities when discussing their plights because they are 10,000% not equivalent at all. Feel how you want to feel. On the connected flip side of that and related to the original query, it is again dead wrong to equate trans women as being Blackface for women. I am not going to get too deep into history because of a few things. Number one, this history is known. People know about how racism and oppression have and continue to affect Black people. Two, the burden placed on Black people by whites and others to explain our struggles that they created, perpetuated, and benefit from is insulting to the highest orders of things.

Blackface was and is an entertainment mockery practice where white people originally donned on Black makeup and attempted to mock Black people through skits that portrayed us in the worst ways imaginable. Later on, or even during this time, actual Black actors would be made to perform Blackface skits for the laughter and entertainment of white people. Meanwhile, in the background of all of this, America was still being America and lynching Black bodies for fun. Every Halloween , white people still don Black paint and makeup on their faces for shits and giggles.

What I am going to say is likely going to make many trans and that so-called liberal crowd hate me even more, but I am going to say it. The trans struggle will not and does not measure up to the Black experience. I am saying this as a very Black and very trans person. This is not about oppression olympics. It is just pure facts. To that point specifically, if you happen to be white and trans , you automatically occupy a higher social status than anyone else who isn’t white. It is your whiteness that protects you and benefits you even amidst the ways that you do experience struggles.

This brings me to my next point and one that I have been sitting with for a minute. There is no true way to address blanket LGBTQ issues in general without addressing race in the same breath. For transwomen in particular, one of the only unifiers we have across the entire community is that we were assigned male at birth. Outside of that , our connections and experiences differ dramatically when we add in our race and our class levels. As a Black transwoman, I have more in common with other Black people of different genders and sexualities than I do with other raced trans women. If you are a white transwoman, a Hispanic, or Asian transwoman , you will also have more in common with people of your respective backgrounds.

Trans people face relentless calls to explain ourselves. I feel like that is what so much of the advocacy and experience calls for. It tells us to tell the world who we are. They say that you’re a fake woman, you’re a man. You spend so much time disputing that and saying that you aren’t. You say that you’re real. They ask you ad nauseam to explain why you think you’re real. You spend your wheels explaining sex, gender and attempting to debunk their biology arguments. Here’s the thing, they don’t care. What they care about is preserving that which they have always believed and likely always will, which is that if you are born with a penis, you are a man. If you are born with a vagina, you are a woman.

Trans women existing has not made cis women irrelevant. Trans women have not become the leaders and innovators of womanhood. Transwomen existing has not painted broad strokes about women as a whole. There are no current transgender related tropes that have been placed on cis women as a whole. A transwoman walking in the streets is not a mockery for cis women walking on the streets. This makes the whole Blackface equivalence absolutely wrong and insulting.

I am Black and a transwoman. I have those concurrent existences every single day of my life. It is my Blackness that impacts me the most and at the same time it is my transness that comes in as well with my experiences in the world. I have an identity that is maligned and disrespected at all times in so many ways. I have an identity that has so many aspects of erasure built in to it from both sides. I am waving my flag and pumping my fist for my Black people while experiencing the transphobia that is present in my community. At the same time, my only use for the greater trans community is as a built in line that exploits my specific Black transness with the violence and oppression I face for being Black and trans at the same time. Other races of trans people do not face the same levels of social antagonism and adverse statistics as Black trans people experience it . It is expected that a couple of dozen Black trans people usually Black women will be killed violently every single year. The tiers of intersectionality are real .

Stop using Black struggles and Black specific discrimination to address your non-black struggles and specific discrimination. It is not the same.

Stop using the violence and dehumanization experienced by Black people to relate to anything you go through in the attempts to enforce discrimination . In that example, a white woman attempting to say transwomen are the equivalent of Blackface for women. Please be serious.

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