My name is difficult. All my life, it’s been mispronounced, misheard, misspelled. It’s such a common experience that I’m surprised and impressed when it’s represented correctly. When my name is used incorrectly, there’s a way in which I feel incorrect, like my presence is not fully accounted for.

We all have stories about our names and, whether they are difficult or common, our experiences with them help cultivate our identities. For people with names that do not subscribe to English language convention, like writer Durga Chew-Bose, the experience of feeling like an outsider due to the treatment of a name represents a belittling of an “essential sense of self.”

It was perhaps with this acknowledgment of the effect of a name that I found myself defending the correct spelling of bell hooks’ name, which I recently included in a profile I wrote about a comedian. The experience was strange — though I argued with editors about the basic fact of respect and the troubling imposition of capitalization and even sent them links to style guides and other publications that have all honored the correct spelling, they stubbornly believed that their conception of “reader clarity” and “stylistic consistency” superseded the proper presentation of a prominent philosopher’s name.

Eventually, dissent culminated to a point it should have never reached and the editors made the right decision to present hooks’ name accurately — but not without reprimanding and patronizing me for posting publicly about the plain fact of the error and the clear embarrassment I felt as the named author of a piece that meant a lot to me and included this egregious oversight.

We all have stories about our names.
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The misrepresentation of hooks’ name amounts to a misrepresentation of, and disrespect for, the educator as a person. That the decision to respect a person by invoking the correct spelling of their name turned into a heated debate perplexed me, though it really shouldn’t have, given that language has always been a site of domination. The experience was a clear embodiment of the exercise of white privilege at a basic systemic level, and it revolved around a writer and thinker whose work seeks to dismantle that very thing. The irony was transparent. (Not to mention the additional irony that lies in the fact that my profile was about the importance of language.)

No matter the reason for hooks’ decision to lowercase her name (according to her Berea College biography, she claims this spelling is meant to draw more attention to her work than who she is), featuring her name incorrectly amounts to a distortion of her identity.

And to distort an identity in the name of grammar is to distort an identity in the name of an imposed convention that has silenced cultures and communities for centuries.

Fundamentally, the power of names is intricately woven into the fabric of our individual and social identities. In many cultures, including the West, the act of naming exhibits dominion or power over something or someone. Examples abound in stories found in mythology, religion, folklore, film, and fiction.

In Greek mythology, invoking the name of the god of the underworld, Hades,summons the god. In the Bible’s Book of Genesis, God names light into being and Adam is tasked with naming the animals of the world in order to exercise man’s dominion. In the Gospel of John, we find the introductory verse naming the Word as God. In fact, A Russian dogmatic sect called the Name Worshippers (heresy according to the Russian Orthodox Church) claim to know that God exists because God can be named. And according to the Kabbalah, the name of every creation is its life-source.

Many stories in popular culture are also rife with powerful name themes. For example, in the Germanic fairy tale Rumpelstiltskin and the 1988 film Beetlejuice, plot is bound up in the way names break a spell or summon a presence. In the novel The Handmaid’s Tale and film Spirited Away, young women are enslaved, the domination inscribed in the act of naming.

One of the most culturally and historically relevant illustrations of how naming and language is bound up with power and the exercise of dominance is the practice of European colonizers attacking, defiling, and altering African names in order to suppress and erase African identity. For slaves, names encompassed their identities as individuals but also aided in the survival of a collective history. Despite this erasure, one of the ways in which enslaved and free Africans sought to preserve culture and identity was through naming. In “Naming and Linguistic Africanisms in African American Culture,” Lupenga Mphande writes that, “The movement for re-naming and self-identification among African Americans started at the very dawn of American history.”

The violence with which name, identity, and colonialism is embedded with slavery is exemplified in the novel and film, Roots, wherein the protagonist Kunta Kinte seeks to retain his birth name at the expense of extreme physical and psychological abuse. First shown on television in 1977, it had a significant impact upon naming in the African American community. As Richard Moore writes in The Name ‘Negro’ — Its Origin and Evil Use, “when all is said and done, slaves and dogs are named by their masters, free [people] name themselves.”

In fact, the history of the English language has always been tied to power and patriarchy. This is most keenly illustrated in the following etymologies, tracing female-centered words back to roots which define women by their relationship to men and how they are useful:

Female: Latin, femina, meaning fetus

Lady: Old English, hlaf dige, meaning loaf kneader

Girl: Old English, gyrlgyden, meaning virgin goddess

Woman: Old English, wifman, meaning female man

Male: Latin, mascul, meaning male

Boy: German, bube, meaning boy

Man; Old English, mannian, meaning man

Words are not merely names or parts of a sentence structure; they represent a dynamic of power relations. They do not exist in a vacuum; they are connected to our relationships. How we communicate language is a social process.

In Language and Power, linguist Norman Fairclough builds upon ideas of linguistic and ideological predecessors like Mikhail Bakhtin, Louis Althusser, and Michel Foucault to assert that language is the primary medium through which social control and power is produced, maintained, and changed, and advocates for “critical language awareness.”

Fairclough writes:

“‘Critical language awareness’ is a facilitator for ‘emancipatory discourse’ . . . which challenges, breaks through, and may ultimately transform the dominant orders of discourse, as a part of the struggle of oppressed social groupings against the dominant bloc.”

Ultimately, for Fairclough, awareness of language and how it contributes to the domination or subjugation of others is the first step toward emancipation. Though language is not the only site of social control and power, it is the most immediate medium at our disposal.

The English language’s implementation as a homogenizing force and its “correct” use is intricately bound up with notions of colonialism. As bell hooks herself writes:

“Standard English is not the speech of exile. It is the language of conquest and domination; in the United States, it is the mask which hides the loss of so many tongues, all those sounds of diverse, native communities we will never hear . . . in the incorrect usage of words, in the incorrect placement of words, was a spirit of rebellion that claimed language as a site of resistance . . . We seek to make a place for intimacy. Unable to find such a place in standard English, we create the ruptured, broken, unruly speech of the vernacular . . . There, in that location, we make English do what we want it to do. We take the oppressor’s language and turn it against itself. We make our words a counter-hegemonic speech, liberating ourselves in language.”

While the history of capitalization in English is obscure, the convention itself seems to be one with no clear function. During the late 17th and 18th centuries, it was customary to emphasize most English nouns with a capital letter. Personal names and proper names were indistinct from ordinary nouns, with the ultimate decision left up to the writer. It seems that typesetters and printers found the abundance of capitalization aesthetically and economically unnecessary, so, slowly over time, common nouns began to be written in lowercase while “important” nouns were italicized and certain proper nouns were capitalized.

Indeed, the arbitrariness of the convention only underscores the absurdity of imposing it onto a person’s name. Deborah Cameron, a feminist linguist and professor of Language and Communication at Oxford University, tells me, “Whoever says, ‘But the rule is, names get upper case initials’ hasn’t really thought it through: Names are a class of words whose ‘correct’ form is whatever the name’s owner says it is.”

Therefore, imposing capitalization onto bell hooks’ name, in a cruel irony, alters her identity as an African American woman and a scholar who seeks freedom through language and its resistance. Lisa Moore, professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at UT Austin, bluntly explains, “To misname [bell hooks] by changing the capitalization of her name is to put racist and patriarchal values above the thoughtful decision and strategy of one of our foremost philosophers.”

Imposing capitalization onto bell hooks’ name, in a cruel irony, alters her identity.
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Imposing a convention or prescriptive onto language disregards the fact of its inevitable evolution and represents an attempt to colonize it in some way. Of linguistic prescriptivism, Nicholas Subtirelu, assistant teaching professor in Applied Linguistics at Georgetown University, writes, “Within the field of linguistics (particularly sociolinguistics), prescriptivists are generally seen as looking for a rationalization for their own attitudes toward others, which might include racist or classist attitudes.” Subtirelu believes that “prescriptivism” is worth practicing, but that it should be motivated by political or moral concerns. “We should not be policing others’ language for deviance from arbitrary rules. We should be policing others’ language for the way it represents the world and others in it.” For this linguist, there is only one prescriptivist commandment: “Thou shalt not use language to harm.”

Which bring us to our current moment, one in which people are policing language for the ways in which it represents the world and the people in it, the ways in which it perpetuates or dismantles power which subjugates and dehumanizes. Some are asking for more responsible use of language while others are decrying “political correctness” gone rogue; some are irresponsibly over-policing, while others are irresponsibly sputtering; some even believe that First Amendment rights are being violated because real consequences are the result of careless and disrespectful language.

There is no “correct” language, only thoughtful and careful language. Language informed by its history. Compassionate language. Language which invites rather than excludes. Language which, most importantly, evolves. “Correct” implies there is only one way for language to be, that language is prescriptive. But language is malleable; it evolves because we are malleable and we evolve. Even the existence of the term “politically correct” and its pejorative use embody exactly the opposite of what thoughtful and generous language is about and what it seeks to accomplish.

At a time when a serious presidential candidate wields cowardly language so flippantly and disrespectfully without any regard for the people he is demeaning or emboldening, fighting my editors for spelling hooks’ name correctly felt all the more imperative. What kind of hope remains if we can’t even get the language right?

Sensitivity to language is responsibility to language, and respect for its power to call forth whatever is summoned by its use. The effects of language matter. We can start by speaking to each other by the names that we choose.

On January 10th, 2019 at 5:59pm, I received a text from home: “Where are you?”

“Just got on the bus.”

The moment I hit send, I felt karma lurking around the corner. I always believed that lying was an unforgivable sin. But, had my mother known I was with a boy in an empty parking lot, she would denounce me.

Adjusting the driver’s seat for the fifth time, Kevin asked, “So, were you serious about the whole kiss thing?”

Three nights ago, I’d texted Kevin that I wanted to kiss him—a meaningless kiss. We were close friends who had previously discussed our lack of feelings for each other, his failed relationships, and my childlike innocence. He responded with “lol,” unable to fathom that I, having never seen or done anything remotely sexual in my life, would’ve wanted a meaningless first kiss.

Had my mother known I was with a boy in an empty parking lot, she would denounce me.
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The trigger of my courageous inquiry was when talk about sex entered my Hindu-Canadian household for the first time, several months previously. In September 2018, India lifted the ban on homosexual acts, liberating many to legally explore their sexuality. Rainbow flags danced across our TV screen and Indians celebrated in the streets with loud music and faces full of happy tears. My mom came out of the kitchen at the sound of excitement.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“Other people can do what they want. It doesn’t affect us,” she replied, concluding the conversation.

I couldn’t argue with that. My family was convinced that somehow, someday I would confidently marry some Indian man and create a happy little Indian-Canadian family of my own. But this idea began to scare me. How would I know what satisfied me if I’d never experienced anything at all?

Needing to know the full story, I sat alone in my room, going through the news on the gay-sex legislation in India.

“What happens after decriminalization? What happens after marriage? How do we shift to culture, to acceptance as opposed to tolerance?” said Helen Kennedy, the executive director of Egale Canada in a CTV interview.

Acceptance isn’t possible if we’re constantly worrying about saving face—the concept of upholding a clean reputation by avoiding humiliation. To keep their children away from “unacceptable” sexual exploration, Indian parents change the channel on onscreen romance, take control of their children’s dating life regardless of age, and establish strict rules on going out with friends.

A phone conversation with a friend led to the topic of family and relationships.

“There is so much mistrust even when I wanted to go out to dinner with my girl friends. Didn’t hear the end of it for days,” said Hruti, whispering through the phone. “Sometimes it’s hard to leave the room, you know?”

How would I know what satisfied me if I’d never experienced anything at all?
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I recalled a few times where my mother suspected I had a boyfriend. She’d nearly cry, take my hand upon her head, and make me swear that I wasn’t seeing anyone. Hindus believe that lying under oath is deadly. When I’d confidently sworn to her that I was single, she’d sit in silence, waiting for some impending doom.

“So, how do you manage your friends-with-benefit situation?” I asked her.

“Well, during university I lived on campus, so it wasn’t a problem. Now I just make time after work. Luckily, I have my own car.”

She said lying was easy for her and recalled someone who’d said, “those with strict parents become the best liars.”

“But how do you deal with the guilt and the anxiety that comes with lying?” I asked, wondering if I was the only one who felt it.

“As long as I don’t get caught, I don’t care. It’s the only way to experience life.”

This was hard for me to digest. As a Hindu, we create our own set of beliefs, abiding to a core framework called “dharma” which in the simplest terms means to do the right thing. Personally, doing the “right thing” meant abiding by the values I learned growing up: respect, honesty, and having a positive mindset. This meant focusing on school and saving face, which in my case included not being seen with the opposite sex in public unless you were planning to marry them. “Don’t engage with boys and focus on school” was a famous motto in most Indian households—and my mom’s favorite saying.

After conversing with Hruti, I began to wonder how much a rule was able to stretch before it was considered broken. If I remained a virgin and didn’t date until I was permitted to, I believed that kissing in private couldn’t ruin my family’s reputation.

When I was with Kevin in the car that evening, I felt that was my one and only chance. With an untainted internet search history, a body less explored than the Mariana Trench, and a mind full of dramatic Bollywood dance sequences, I knew I had to start somewhere.

“Yes, I was serious about the kiss,” I said.

“So, do you want to?” he asked, shifting his eyes nervously.

“Sure.” I shrugged. After a few awkward seconds of listening to a Tim Horton’s ad play on the radio, I continued, “You’re going to have to start. I don’t know what to do.”

“Argh, I know. Don’t look away.”

We leaned in toward each other until our lips met. Then we made out for 40 minutes. Contrary to the romanticized descriptions of kisses in novels—of soft lips, gentle tongue, and an all around feel of magic and fireworks—his lips, tongue, and teeth only felt like lips, tongue, and teeth.

I began to wonder how much a rule was able to stretch before it was considered broken.
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My focus shifted from one sense to another. The glowing orange streetlight above. The cars passing by in the distance. The stick-shift forming a bruise on my left knee. Ed Sheeran’s voice ringing clear through the radio, “When your legs don’t work like they used to before...” The roughness of Kevin’s beard under my fingers. I kept imagining what would happen if the police caught us. Were we even allowed to be in the empty parking lot?

Eventually, we stopped. As I rolled back onto the passenger’s seat, I heard a crunching sound under my waist. I’d completely forgot that I’d taken off my glasses during the kiss. Though my frame broke in a way that my glasses still functioned, karma still managed to take $300 for the experience.

We didn’t talk about the kiss as he dropped me off a block away from my house. I wished him a good night and exited the car. The air was cold, and my lips were dry. I rubbed my face to even out my ruined makeup. I didn’t feel excitement, or regret, or disgust, or guilt, or contentment. My body and soul felt empty. I was on autopilot until I got into bed and dropped into sleep.

I kept quiet about my glasses for the night, planning to tell my parents I fell asleep with them on in the morning. I remembered Hruti saying it was easy for children of strict parents to lie, like a survival instinct. It would hurt even more if I found out I was lying to myself—that I knew exactly what I was and what I wanted.

What if it was because we didn’t love each other? But I found him exceptionally attractive. That should’ve been enough. Should I try kissing a girl? There were countless boys I pined over since I was four. Maybe I’ve been mistaking my feelings for good-looking girls as a form of appreciation rather than attraction. A group of guys in sixth grade called me a lesbian while snickering. But what if they had figured out something that I didn’t even know about myself?

I didn’t feel excitement, or regret, or disgust, or guilt, or contentment.
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I imagined all those Indians dancing on the streets, rainbows painted on their faces, knowing exactly who they were and what they fought for. Their fear of being disowned, of receiving death threats, and lying had a purpose. I wanted to know what it meant to feel contentment, disgust—anything besides empty. We Hindus are so caught up in the suppression of sexual discourse that finding where I belong would mean more lies, more sins.

Maybe this whole evening was karma’s well-written joke and nothingness was the ultimate punchline.

I feel my most queer in a skirt. Dresses feel like drag, like a performance I learned a long time ago, and am now reprising. Not quite a reenactment, but rather, a gender reckoning.

I do not remember the first time I was taught to demean the feminine. Maybe it was when my play was restricted by well-meaning adults telling me to keep my legs together—though they were the ones who put me in dresses. Maybe it was when I was a pre-teen and was told that girls should be good at school, but not too good, for fear of scaring off men. I began to see, as many see, the feminine as less important, frivolous, false, an act performed for the benefit of men.

But the feminine was also my community (which at the time was all cis, straight women). It was daiquiri mix in the fridge and all girl nacho nights with my friends and their moms and my single mom. We bonded over mandatory pedicures and Reese Witherspoon and Julia Roberts. We asked each other for makeup tips and knew that men were no good, but should be pursued nevertheless. It was Jude Law and Hugh Grant and finding the sensitive, but not too sensitive, men. It was not judging each other for crying at the end of sad movies, and giggling at other women’s bad haircuts. It was letting ourselves be joyous when the makeup bag came in pink, and promising to never “let ourselves go.” And it was the power of being vulnerable with one another when we found out my mother wasn’t going to live out the year. It was the way she held me and let me cry.

When I was young, I would watch my mother get ready in the mornings. She was a project manager at Ford, which, she was reminded daily, was a good job for a woman with only a high school diploma. It was my job to pick out the shoes she was going to wear for the day. I knew when she had meetings with the mostly male higher ups, because she would wear red, her power color. She rarely wore pants to work, preferring skirts and dresses. These were her armor.

There’s a certain type of femininity for the white, middle class below the Mason-Dixon. It’s blonde and perfect foundation and blush. It’s pretending to be upper class. It’s fake pearls and hot pink dresses. It’s monogrammed towels and a perfect wreath on the door, appropriate to the season. It’s also a passive femininity. It’s gossip and prayer groups and PTA meetings, but it definitely did not include the assertiveness needed to manage a team or go after that promotion. It was not the power femininity of the self-help books on my mother’s shelf: How to Succeed in Business without a Penis, and The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. When my mother called her makeup her “war paint,” I knew that on some level she was not joking or being metaphorical. She defied the femininity of her surroundings, and wore it into corporate battle, weaponized it. I remember her power. I remember her joy. I also remember her frustration.

To be a woman with ambition meant sacrificing the social training of woman. It was learning to look down on previous iterations of yourself. This was a lesson my mother never truly learned, or perhaps refused to, always keeping a small sense of play in her wardrobe. But when I moved in with my dad and crossed a class boundary, the pearls were replaced with leather bands, the pink with neutrals. A different kind of femininity was enforced here, in the upper middle class. This was a femininity that played a man’s game: its colors darker, its lines neater. This femininity was less social and more capitalistic. The bonding rituals stayed the same: The Notebook, blonde highlights, men. But the consequences for violating that femininity shifted. Where once I only had to fear the loss of community, I now had to fear the loss of status. Qualifications are irrelevant if you violate the social order. To be an outsider also meant being a failure. Success equaled wealth; there were no other barometers.

I began to see, as many see, the feminine as less important, frivolous, false, an act performed for the benefit of men.
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After my mother’s death and cut off from my main feminine role model, I also became cut off from the community of women she had introduced me to. Sure, by the age of thirteen, I had gleaned a little of how to perform woman. I knew how to put on a little makeup, and I knew what cut of pants was most flattering to my emerging pear shape, the same shape as my mother. I could quote Miss Congeniality and Legally Blonde, and I knew which Titans players had the best asses. But I had very little language for this new brand of femininity, and it was becoming and harder to allow myself to remain vulnerable and open to it. Grief has a way of making a person insular, of making emotion inaccessible to others. PTSD deepens the divide between you and others, and, the protection of others gone, you learn that it is necessary to protect yourself.

Women’s clothing exposes. At best it is supposed to empower. At worst, it objectifies. I could not afford to be an object. My senses on high alert, I already felt outside my skin, outside of time, moving back and forth between the past and present jarringly. I began having flashbacks of my mother’s last moments and trouble sleeping. It became important to fortify myself. Often, that meant layers. That meant stoicism. It was James Dean, who knows how to be sad, but artfully. It was John Wayne, un-phased by massacre. It was denim, no makeup. Bravado.

And those men, the stoics. They always got the girl. And that was something, I was just figuring out, I might want too. And if my femininity was not solely to be performed for men, then what was its purpose? I discarded it, figuring it could no longer serve me.

The dictionary defines femme as “a lesbian whose appearance and behavior are seen as traditionally feminine.” However, that’s what makes it subversive. To be “femme” is to capture femininity on your own terms, reclaiming it from the heterosexual gaze and performing it instead for a queer community. Moving to New York at age eighteen, my ideas of femme possibility expanded: no makeup, unshaven armpits, shaved heads, not just lesbians but queer and bisexual women, too. These women exuded the same type of strength my mother had, but without the fake pearls. And, somehow, they still displayed traits of what we traditionally assign as feminine. They could allow themselves to be vulnerable, to take care of others while also allowing themselves to be taken care of. They prioritized intuition, not necessarily over logic, but alongside it. There’s a generosity in femininity, and an honoring of the role emotions play in our lives. In the feminine, they can be embraced; in the (toxic) masculine, they are something to be done away with. There’s a practicality to this femininity in the way that I imagine it. The feminine rolls up her sleeves and gets shit done.

But there is also a danger to femininity. How many gendered insults can be thrown against us without a few sticking? How many times can I be called a cunt or a pussy or a bitch and still maintain that there is strength in my womanhood. How many times can I be harassed? Raped? Walking down the streets of New York after I was assaulted my freshman year of college, it was hard to differentiate between annoying catcalls and threatening men. In some ways, I imagined the feminine as a victim.

The stats vary, but something close to one in six women will be raped in her lifetime. Hate crimes against trans women are on the rise. Femme gay men are often the targeted victims of hate crimes for threatening the masculine’s sense of world order. So I told myself a story. Masculine does not get told to smile on the street. Masculine does not get catcalled. Masculine is not raped. I understood that to be masculine meant being safer walking home at night. And it was that safety that I craved. This is of course, not true. The masculine is also policed and is sometimes the victim of violence. I knew that the more masculine my appearance, the more likely I was to be identified as gay by passersby, which presented new dangers. But I also knew that it was my femme and feminine sisters who had been taught to walk with our car keys tucked between our knuckles.

To surrender to the feminine began to feel like surrendering to pain. It seemed easier, safer, to hold myself at some remove. Withholding brought stability. The masculine myth of self-sufficiency made it less painful to acknowledge a lack of familial connection. But, for me, this remove was not sustainable. Stoicism meant isolation. Masculinity made me feel shored up against something. But though it was scarier, femininity meant healing, meant community. My femme identity exists in direct opposition to toxic, cisgender masculinity that would have me fear for my life no matter how I expressed my gender. Femme identity is my letting the guard down.

To be “femme” is to capture femininity on your own terms, reclaiming it from the heterosexual gaze and performing it instead for a queer community.
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Over the last several years, as I have begun my slow, femme re-education, I have found a new type of community. It is a sisterhood of queer femme-ininity. It includes cis, femme, queer women, trans women, femme trans boys, gay men in nail polish, and lipstick with beards. What I have learned is that there is no one way to be femme. Some wear their fierceness on their sleeves like a weapon, and others hide it beneath pastels. I have found power in many different avenues of the feminine, reclaimed.

Sometimes, it can be easy to let myself regress into the trappings of Southern femininity, especially since I’ve moved back to Tennessee. And it can be especially easy when I am rewarded with the mixed privilege of passing as straight. My queerness is routinely erased in the workplace, and it can be difficult to decide to out yourself when Tennessee currently does not have laws on the books protecting queer people from discrimination. So passing can start to feel, not only like a social mandate, but also an economic one. In what class does my femininity sit? In which class do I wish to sit?

But that’s when I decide that it is time to play, just like my mother taught me. I sit in a chair with my legs spread, just like I was told not to. To be femme is not just to be feminine, but to allow myself to practice femininity in ways that empower me. Most days, I choose not to wear makeup, but I also choose to center the personal in my writing, and to ask for care when I need it. I let myself take care of others because I know my community needs to be strong for each other. I allow myself to be vulnerable because it grants me power to take what I want. I now find myself reenacting the rituals, but I choose to go in sans war paint.

“Why does it matter, saying ‘women’ instead of ‘people’ when we talk about abortion or contraception or pregnancy? It matters for the same reason we have the word ‘feminist’ at all — because it picks out the fact that women are treated as an inferior caste, whose bodies don’t fully belong to them.”

Rebecca Reilly-Cooper, according to her website, is a political philosopher in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick. She describes herself as “a once liberal, now increasingly radical, feminist.” She is authoring a book about sex, gender, and identity; recently gave a talk at a crowded pub entitled “Critically Examining the Doctrine of Gender Identity”; and has a sold-out speaking engagement on the same topic taking place this May. Reilly-Cooper opens this talk by stating, “I raise these questions, not out of prejudice or bigotry, but out of a sincere belief that this doctrine about the nature of gender is false and damaging to everybody.”

Like many other avowed feminists, Reilly-Cooper is bent on “proving” the absurdity of trans identity. More than that, she seeks to reveal how cis, white women like herself are actively harmed by policies and laws which aim to protect transgender individuals from discrimination and ensure their equal access to services.

Never mind that this view is completely ignorant of the facts. Never mind the damage this narrative does.

In 2014, Transgender Europe (TGEU) contributed to the OSCE Hate Crime Report, which stated that there were 69 recorded hate crimes and incidents from 10 different countries. According to a report by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and Trans People of Color Coalition (TPOCC), in 2015 “at least 21 transgender people have been victims of fatal violence in the United States, more killings of transgender people than any other year on record. More transgender people were killed in the first six months of [2015] than in all of 2014.”

This year, HRC released a report stating that there are 44 anti-transgender bills filed in 16 states so far, 23 of which target children. Currently, there are nine states with active bills that aim to prevent transgender individuals from using public restrooms that match their gender identity. It is difficult to pin down the exact numbers due to irregular reporting, inaccurate police reports, and an apathetic media, but as of the writing of this piece, there have been at least seven reported murders of trans individuals in the U.S. so far this year.

As these statistics show, trans individuals, especially trans women of color, are being targeted simply for existing and living their truths. Their suffering is real; the idea that cis women are being harmed by their identity is not.

Cis women aren’t being murdered because trans and gender non-conforming individuals exist and, in some locations, receive protection under the law. Cis women are not being denied entrance or access to restrooms, locker rooms, and changing rooms because trans and gender non-conforming people exist and need access to those same spaces for the same reason cis women need them. Cis women aren’t being thrown into the streets because trans and gender non-conforming people need shelters, too. Trans inclusion does not, has not, and will not result in the exclusion of cis women.

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People are in need, and an awfully vocal group of white cis women has decided that they come first — no matter what. Binary transgender, the lack of gender, the fluidity of gender, and the rejection of the binary has existed for centuries. Then Western culture manufactured and inculcated the gender binary. For example, the indigenous peoples of North America now use the term, Two Spirit, to identify individuals who “cross social gender roles, gender expression, and sexual orientation.” Mae Louise Campbell, an Ojibwa/Métis from Kississing Lake in northern Manitoba and the elder in residence at Red River College in Winnipeg, told CBC News that it was “an honor to have a child that was two-spirited to be born in the community. . . . Because they carry both [energies], many of them became leaders in the community, leaders in the elder capacity. People went to them because they were revered.”

As more people come out and express to the world their true selves, despite the psychological, emotional, and physical danger this openness invites, women like Reilly-Cooper believe it must be some kind of conspiracy to further oppress “real” women.

Why are the lived experiences of trans and gender non-conforming people not held as high as the opinions of cis women on trans people? Why do their feelings trump our actual lives?

Ophelia Benson is a feminist author, blogger, editor, and columnist at the Freethinker and Free Inquiry. In an interview with Vanessa Urquhart for Slate last summer, she said she considers herself to be an ally to the trans community. She later expanded on this by saying, “That means being aware of what it means to be trans, it means taking [trans people] at their word when they talk about their experience, and it means standing up for them if you hear someone attack them.” But Benson’s actions do not support these hollow sentiments. She regularly ridicules transgender individuals and promotes anti-trans voices.

My essay, published here last December — “Trans-Exclusionary Feminists Cannot Exclude My Humanity” — was reposted on her website for the purpose of derision. She concluded, “It’s as painful to read as tearing off a strip of skin would be.” She took a very real, very honest depiction of what gender dysphoria sometimes feels like, and mocked it.

In March, Benson caught wind of Katie Klabusich’s piece — “Inside The ‘Fetal Assault Law’ Sending Pregnant People To Prison” — and complained about Klabusich’s trans-inclusive language. Benson later wrote in a separate piece:

What such rhetoric fails to acknowledge is that the inclusion of another marginalized group does not make your marginalization any less important or real. Cisgender women are not the only people who can become pregnant, and acknowledging this indisputable fact doesn’t erase anyone; it includes those who were previously erased. Moreover, trans and gender non-conforming people, as well as cis women, are “treated as an inferior caste, whose bodies don’t fully belong to them.” Why play a game of oppression Olympics, rather than advocating for inclusivity?

Journalist Michelle Goldberg also repeatedly and voluntarily puts herself in the middle of trans debates. She’s given credence to damaging purity tests where trans people are measured by the extent of their surgeries, and pontificated over what makes a woman a woman. Then there’s bioethicist and author, Alice Dreger, who often positions herself as a trans ally, but who is quoted by the The Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate group, the Family Research Council (FRC), in the extremely transphobic and damaging report, “Understanding and Responding to the Transgender Movement.” According to writer, performer, and biologist, Julia Serano, “[Dreger] has a vendetta against transgender activism,” stating:

“She repeatedly positions herself as an ‘expert on’ or ‘friend of’ trans people, while at the same time completely ignoring or undermining the perspectives of the trans community at large. As someone who is both a scientist and knowledgeable about transgender people and issues, I feel compelled to set the record straight on these matters.”

Women like feminist writer and speaker, Germaine Greer, or poet, essayist and critic, Katha Pollitt, cry persecution the minute someone disagrees with their assessment of gender identity. Yet last I checked, they still write, speak, and get booked on television or published in prominent outlets. And their persistent views contribute to the needless death of so many trans individuals across the globe — suicide, neglect, and murder.

It is chilling to recognize that the two groups working most fiercely to strip gender-identity protection from the books, and to stop new legislation from passing, are conservative religious men — and progressive, feminist, cisgender women. These women are not literally pointing a weapon at transgender individuals, but they are plastering the airwaves with bigotry and transantagonism; they are contributing to their deaths, while crying, “I’m the real victim!”

This is where we go back to Rebecca Reilly-Cooper’s talk, where she is dismayed that she cannot experience gender identity in the way so many trans individuals do. “I don’t think I have this thing,” she states 29 minutes into her lecture. “I don’t have a deep, internal, personal sense of myself as a woman. I call myself a woman. It’s true. I think I’m a woman, but it’s not because in some sense, deep down, I feel like one. I call myself a woman because I am female. I have a body that has female sex characteristics. I have a uterus and ovaries; I have breasts and a vagina.” She goes on to say, “I am told that my biology and my physiology are irrelevant to the fact that I am a woman whether or not that I accept that. It’s an act of cisgender privilege, an act of oppression, for me to deny that I do.”

In a beautiful essay for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts entitled, “Fighting Against Ghosthood,” Gabrielle Bellot wrote, “But trans women remain marginal. To many people, we not only aren’t women; we are abominations, too, something that is wrong. Ugly, the thought of it, across many literatures, many minds.” Trans-exclusionary feminists often say trans women cannot know what it’s like to be a “real” woman. But here we have a cis woman complaining about the supposed “doctrine” of gender identity and how she can’t experience it or know what it feels like. Her entire talk is based around the premise that her inability to know what it feels like must mean it’s not real. If it’s not real for her, then it’s not real enough to be inscribed into laws and policies.

Rebecca Reilly-Cooper may not be holding the gun, but she is espousing ignorance and bigotry — it just looks nicer, sounds prettier. What struck me most while watching her lecture was how calm, friendly, and personable she was. How with such ease, one could spend an hour vilifying people like myself with a smile on her face.

Progressive, socially liberal women who increasingly and persistently attack, dehumanize, and slander trans and gender non-conforming people, are — in my eyes — more dangerous than religious zealots who do the same. The zealots’ views are harmful and put people in danger, there is no question there, but they can be spotted a mile away. They stand tall, proud, and anchored in their religious conviction; there is no deceit or mask. Their views are unabashedly conservative as they answer to a higher power.

These zealots don’t claim to be progressive; they are not fighting for progress and justice. They want to limit the rights and ignore the autonomy of large swaths of the population because of differences they refuse to accept. These women, on the other hand, claim progressive and feminist values. They fight for the autonomy and agency of individuals, and they vehemently oppose any and all restrictions placed upon women because of their gender. These so-called progressive feminists, who know precisely how reprehensible it is to vilify, attack, and discriminate against a person based on their gender, are doing exactly what has been done to them, all the while claiming to be the victim.

These women have a range of titles and backgrounds: journalist, author, activist, lecturer, scientist, feminist. They are all cisgender, and they all want to debate the identity of transgender people. If you’re like Reilly-Cooper, it’s because our myriad of identities are somehow harming her own. If you’re like Pollitt, it’s in the name of fairness. If you’re like Greer, it’s in the name of dismantling patriarchy. If you’re like Benson, it’s in the name of truth. If you’re like Dreger, it’s in the name of science. If you’re like Goldberg, it’s because all sides are valid in the name of true objectivity. In each case, the terms of the debate are not set by trans people, but by cisgender white women.

Reilly-Cooper concludes her talk by stating:

“If we take gender identity entirely subjectively, there becomes no way, either in principle or practice, to determine men from women. So, you could find yourself, say, in a room with all the people that are here today and be absolutely incapable of knowing who in this room is a man and who is a woman. There would be no way in determining it. . . . As soon as that happens men and women as a political class disappear; men and women can no longer exist if you define gender entirely subjectively.”

Her fearmongering about the elimination of cisgender men and cisgender women is identical to the fearmongering religious zealots use against gay marriage — if marriage isn’t confined to one man and one woman, then the word becomes irrelevant. Ryan T. Anderson, a research fellow at the conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation, wrote last summer after the Supreme Court’s Obergefell ruling:

“Redefining marriage to make it a genderless institution fundamentally changes marriage: It makes the relationship more about the desires of adults than about the needs — or rights — of children. It teaches the lie that mothers and fathers are interchangeable. Indeed, the judicial redefinition of marriage to exclude the marital norm of male-female sexual complementarity raises the question of what other marital norms may be excluded.”

In the Q&A after her lecture, Reilly-Cooper expressed how troubling she finds it that there are “very young, vulnerable, distressed people going online and find[ing] this [gender identity] doctrine.” You see, it’s about the children, the poor, vulnerable children. The same children Anderson is concerned about; the same children supporters of Prop 8 were concerned about. These tactics are the same: make the claim that inclusion and equality will somehow lead to the complete and utter breakdown of society. If the social norms we invented are changed in any way, society will suffer. And if that doesn’t convince you — think about the children.

Reilly-Cooper, and others like her, are worried that if you cannot determine a person’s gender by observation, then “men and women can no longer exist.” In case you didn’t know, you already can’t go into a room full of people and determine their gender by looking at them; this has always been true.

This is important, because what she did was erase my existence, and the existence of many others who are neither man nor woman. Her fear is our lived existence, yet our realities aren’t real enough for her to grasp.

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