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We Are More Than Noise

‘Burn the Binary 2’ explains the need for trans epistemology

10 min readJul 21, 2025

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illustration of a person’s face with a colorful pattern overlaid
Detail from the book cover of Burn the Binary (Bookshop)

In 2017,

published her first Burn the Binary!. It came out the month I left my job at an investment company in Boston. I wasn’t reading a lot of trans books then, wasn’t aware of this one, and, as I was selling my condo and moving to Bogotá, Colombia, I wouldn’t have had time to read it anyway.

I do retain an impression of what 2017 felt like politically for trans people, since that was the last year I (as a trans person) lived in the US. Thus, I have my own personal understanding of what Wilchins refers to when she says that everything’s “exploded” with “the white evangelical Christian right” pursuing its “stalled 70-year anti-gay culture war” by targeting trans people.

What they want is “white ethnic procreation.” They’re crusading for it via “a cross between January 6th’s bare-chested, horn-helmeted, flag-wearing QAnon Shaman and Justice Amy Coney Barrett.” TERFism wants something more specific: to regulate white femininity. Anyway, trans rights and abortion rights are “the very tip of the spear that will decide what country we will have” for at least a generation.

Florida “has used a political backdoor to cut off access to hormones for the entire state,” affecting some 95,000 trans adults, “so the hormones I’ve…

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Tucker Lieberman
Tucker Lieberman

Written by Tucker Lieberman

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