That Transphobic Sign At The Women’s March Highlights White Feminism’s Racism

Vancouver, Canada is the fourth most densely-populated city in North America, third-largest metropolitan city in Canada, an ethnically and linguistically diverse city, and now home to that fucked up transphobic sign we all saw online yesterday. You know, the one that that one old white bitch was holding at the women’s march on Saturday, January 20.

How could this misogynistic bullshit happen, at a women’s march no less, in this the year of our lord two thousand and eighteen?

Because white people, that’s how!

I’m going to get back to the transphobic element of the sign further down in this piece and zero in on a more insidious form of oppression called white supremacy. You see, white supremacy is the vehicle driving the entire world straight into a wall. Colonization, the favorite tool and weapon of the white terrorists I like to just call “white people,” is what separates us into these constricting dualistic boxes of seemingly opposing forces (white vs. black; man vs. woman, etc.) in order to wage control over the rest of us and make money off our lives.

It was white people who created “whiteness” back in the 1700s after they ran out of Irish INDENTURED SERVANTS (NOT slaves by any stretch of the word) and had to bring African people to work their newly stolen Native American’s land creating their opposite, “blackness.” The African slaves and the Irish had this pesky tendency to band together in order to upturn their oppressorsyou know because they were human beings, not cattle. The colonizers then told the Irish that if they turned in or killed runaway African Slaves, they’d get land, money and the greatest prize of all: the privilege to call themselves white , because the Irish weren’t considered white up until that point and nobody wanted to be black even then. (Let’s also not forget my people, the Indians, the autochthons of this “Western” Hemisphere.)

It was white people who told the ORIGINAL INHABITANTS OF THIS LAND that their ways were wrong, that they were savages in need of salvation, that there are only two genders, and that there was only one god. Two spirit people such as myself have been known to my people and respected on this land since before white Europeans even heard of soap and water. Societal constructs of male and female were never meant to be as rigid as the European mind would have us all believe. We all exist on a spectrum of varying degrees of intersexuality. Binary logic has been at the controls for some time and it’s cramping my style, I’m sure I’m not alone. Nobody is fully one thing or the other.

Science has said it time and time again that sex isn’t this static, tangible thing. We know gender is a construct at this point, I’m sure, but did you know sex is also a social construct?

There are five criteria that determine a person’s sex. They are, in no particular order:

1. Genitals ( vagina, penis, etc.)
2. Gonads (testes, ovaries, etc.)
3. Chromosomes (xx ; x ; xxy ; xy ; xyy, xyyy , etc.)
4. Hormones (testosterone, estrogen, neautrois)
5. Secondary sexual characteristics (facial and body hair, breasts, etc.)

Of the five, secondary sexual characteristics is the only thing you can see of a person not covered by clothes or their own flesh. So why is it that only bottom surgery is covered by my insurance?

Patriarchy, the other favorite weapon-tool of white supremacy, decides what a woman isnot that bigot’s sign, I can tell you that much. And she, unfortunately, is both a pawn of white male oppression and a beneficiary.

What this white racist transphobic bigot did, in holding up this sign is only secondary to the theater of chaos we have all grown to love. It was sensationalism, pure and simple, and whoever took that bitch’s picture knew full well the ramifications of broadcasting her hatred for men or masculine identified people.

Is that really being a woman, though, acting just like men and spewing such disgusting prejudice so blatantly? Perhaps the point of the women’s march is to draw attention to just how oppressive women actually are, especially white cisgender women to transgender women, especially of color, and to show that the future isn’t female, it’s nonbinary and brown.

What happened at the (white) women’s march was more ally theater more gaslighting more just trauma for people of color especially indigenous transgender women like myself. You want to know what I think of this sign and the person holding it? I think you’re an asshole for asking a transgender woman not even a day after she shared a triggering experience what happened to her yesterday, what she thinks about the fact that y’all won’t get a clue and go back to Europe.

Image via Facebook