Trans People Need to ‘Exist on Our Own Terms’
Jessie Gender talks to us about acknowledging our stories, setting the terms, and framing our success
A moment of reflection and reassurance.
This video has been up for two days and has already been viewed nearly 50,000 times.
Trans people are constantly dehumanized through simplified binary narratives…Trans issues and people constantly get reduced to memes and culture war conflicts — whether you’re ‘for us’ or ‘against us’. [We] rarely get to succeed, exist, or discuss our struggles on our own terms.
Instead, stories that talk about us emphasize either our vilification or our fight against adversity (especially the adversity that doesn’t implicate the larger hegemonic culture but individuals like Musk, Rowling, or Trump)…We trans people rarely get to exist on our own terms beyond stories of how we’re villains or oppressed.
But true success and recognition should come from a genuine acknowledgment of our contributions and identities (of which there are many).
The bigots get to define the terms of engagement on how trans people are viewed, and how we talk about us, or how we even educate about trans people — even when we’re platformed by people who think these bigots are entirely in the wrong! The very fact that the issue of our existence and how we live and how we think about trans people is up for debate — on their terms that they set! — is the entire issue. And the problem is that we constantly fight under the terms set by systems that were never built to enable us.
— Jessie Gender, “YouTube Is Destroying Its Creators,” October 11, 2024
(8:34–9:50)
The full video is 1 hour 41 minutes.
Thank you to everyone who resists and recreates the terms of engagement.
