I was at Trans Pride Bristol last weekend and it was good for the soul. One of the things that struck me was the willingness of speakers and organisers alike to call out the genocide in Palestine as an issue of interlinked liberation along with transness, queerness, disability, etc. As a mark of solidarity in a public forum, it was very good to see.
We need to understand our struggles as inseparable. The same ideologies which underpin transphobia also underpin white supermacy, misogyny, ableism, and the other oppression which seek to divide people along invented demographic lines. Two corollaries flow from this: it is possible to be multiply marginalised, at the famous ‘intersection’ of discriminations; but equally, it is possible to occupy a space in the kyriarchy where one is privileged in some ways and oppressed in others.
White trans and nonbinary people can sometimes be oblivious to this. A good example struck me today when a friend online pointed out the racism visible in a trans public figure’s history of comments. She was immediately deluged in replies from fellow white people who felt that addressing the public figure’s racism was sowing division within the trans community and preventing us from showing a united front.
At a time when the trans and nonbinary community is besieged from all sides, it is definitely vital that we are able to face the world as a strong ensemble voice – but that voice cannot be one which excuses racism or excludes our comrades of colour. The trans and nonbinary community know what it is like to be excluded and marginalised from mainstream society, and I think sometimes the more relatively privileged of us believe that because of this, we are exempt from being able to marginalise others. That is simply not true. In activist and academic spaces, white voices still ring out louder than the voices of Black and Brown people, Asian and Latino and Indigenous people. White people are still given more credence for our statements and more grace for our mistakes. White people are allowed to be learning and to behave problematically; people of colour are expected to arrive fully formed and unimpeachable, or they are excoriated. It is an unfair double standard which threatens to divide potential communities even further.
The trans and nonbinary community cannot continue to prioritise the feelings of white people over the safety of people of colour. Since the beginning of the era of colonialism, white people have imposed gender roles and strict hierarchical binaries on communities of the Global Majority, contributing to the marginalisation, criminalisation, and erasure of queer and gender-diverse people around the world. Colonialism is seen as a universal bad among progressive-thinking people in the current day and age, but we do not seem to see the ways in which our own behaviours replicate colonial logics. In the West, by which I mean majority-white countries like Europe and the Anglosphere, we are born and raised in a white supremacist society. We are taught tropes, norms, and ways of thinking which range from benignly to perniciously racist. Rejecting this is a lifelong effort. Our other marginalisations do not exclude us from the work of rejecting whiteness and its trappings.
The neocolonial mindset prevails when white people are the ones chosen to speak, and the ones who are most listened to. It prevails when the opinions of white people are privileged over the lived experience of people of colour. It prevails when we look away from helping those in need in places like Palestine, or from talking about them in ‘polite company’ with our friends or at work. It prevails when evidence of racism is brushed under the rug for the sake of a false united community front. It prevails, in short, when we act like – just because we are trans and nonbinary – we are somehow immune to the conditioning of white supremacy.
It is natural to feel reflexively annoyed when this is pointed out. None of us like to think of ourselves as racist. We are told that Good White People are not racist, after all, and who doesn’t want to think of themselves as Good? That comfort needs to be disturbed. White people are insulated from the realities of racism.
White supremacy is a practice of exclusion. It works in blatant ways and small ones. It hides in plain sight. No-one is immune. Our societies have done their work on us well. It is a life’s work to inculcate discomfort in oneself, as a white person, with the way things are set up for us. It is a life’s work to cede the space we are given by virtue of growing up white in this world. Our academic and activist spaces are all the poorer for the epistemic injustice that has been done to scholars of colour and of the Global Majority – the deliberate exclusion and diminishing of the knowledges and work produced by these scholars. Can you imagine the pluriversal world of knowledge creation and activist communities there could be if globally diverse strands of knowledge creation were respected equally with the white academy and white activist traditions? Can you imagine how many brilliant minds have been lost to racism, exclusion, and even genocide, in the recent past? How many people have turned away from contributing to their communities because of thinly-veiled hostility and ignorance?
Choosing to excuse racism is choosing the comfort of cooperation with white supremacist social norms over the wellbeing of our comrades. Don’t let that be you. I am working on not letting it be me.
Sandra Duffy 