Trans Women of Color Solidarity Network

TWOC Solidarity Network upholds the self determination of Two-Spirit, Trans Women and Femmes of color and creates opportunities to exercise community care.

[Trans Women of Color Solidarity Network @TWOCSolidarity]

Twitterland, support Two-Spirit, Trans Women and Femmes of Color in WA. Your generous contributions mean we have funds to pass through to them to help meet basic needs such as rent, food, clothes, etc. More info here: https://t.co/QTfZhO2uuy

[Trans Women of Color Solidarity Network @TWOCSolidarity]

Just posted a photo https://t.co/VzCDQgTtSN

[Trans Women of Color Solidarity Network @TWOCSolidarity]

@womanistbae I wish I would have seen this then. Wanna be flewed out this year ?

[Trans Women of Color Solidarity Network @TWOCSolidarity]

@0rf Wondering if every mistake you’ve made is on Twitter and if the idea here is that folks should be perfect and never grow to be better people? Cuz from where I’m sitting Dave Chappelle isn’t apologetic nor has he learned anything.His special wasn’t 8 or 9 years ago.

[Trans Women of Color Solidarity Network @TWOCSolidarity]

@AshleeMPreston Nobody is born with all the answers & without mistakes. Fact is you’ve grown. You’ve done better. You’ve learned from those mistakes. That’s what makes you different from Mr.Chapelle. Accountability is admitting fault & then doing better. Something these folks know nothing about.

[Trans Women of Color Solidarity Network @TWOCSolidarity]

@StopTweetingMia @SmartAssJen This part.

[Jen Richards @SmartAssJen]

It’s almost like there’s an intense, sustained, and coordinated campaign to legislate and shame trans people out of existence by making medical care, bathrooms, sports, employment, dating, and love inaccessible, (or least feel so). All to defend what is supposedly “natural”.

[Jen Richards @SmartAssJen]

p.s. Let’s not forget the gay trans men or all the T4T variations out there! We’re really living our best lives.

[Jen Richards @SmartAssJen]

Which is all to say don’t fall for stupid op-ed’s written with little to no basis in lived experience and by people who want to erase trans people from public life. If you don’t want us, we don’t want you either. All we ask is that you leave us and our partners the fuck alone.

[Jen Richards @SmartAssJen]

Whether it’s novelty or simply the fact that generally trans people are relatively self-aware, bold, resilient, and just kinda awesome, others have been attracted to us, no matter whether we’re read as cis or trans. It’s just a fact. We don’t have to pressure anyone.

[Jen Richards @SmartAssJen]

And frankly, at every stage in that process trans people are attractive to someone, for a multiplicity of reasons, because desire is complex and messy and comes before the neat little intellectual and linguistic structures we build to stabilize identity and community.

[Jen Richards @SmartAssJen]

For most of us transition is a long process that steadily reconfigures all our social relationships. After a certain point many trans women are indiscernible from cis women, and therefore an object of desire for straight men and lesbian women.

[Jen Richards @SmartAssJen]

But it then raises the specter of someone who identifies, and is recognized as, a cis man one moment suddenly declaring they’re a woman and expecting the world to immediately see and treat them as one. It’s a troubling thought experiment, but it doesn’t happen like that.

[Jen Richards @SmartAssJen]

If there’s an issue here at all, it’s linguistic and ideological, not a real life one. As a response to the history of really narrow and heteronormative gatekeeping, we settled on the idea that your gender is whatever you say it is.

[Jen Richards @SmartAssJen]

My wife is a “gold star” lesbian. She came out young and has never been with a man. She asked me out, she proposed, and she has no doubts about her lesbianism. In my experience, butch lesbians tend to be drawn to the femininity of trans women. It’s a good pairing.

[Jen Richards @SmartAssJen]

But lesbians? I’ve met countless cis lesbians who are interested in trans women. Not *all* trans women, of course, but even one is enough to prove it’s possible. I don’t know any who thought it somehow changed or invalidated their identity.

[Jen Richards @SmartAssJen]

That shame has a clear and simple source: the ignorance and judgment of others that to be with a trans woman is somehow a challenge, a threat, to their identity. At least with straight men, whose masculinity is so incredibly fragile and requires constant vigilance.

[Jen Richards @SmartAssJen]

To be a trans woman is having to constantly navigate the simultaneity of strangers’ desire for us AND the shame interlaced with that desire. Their desire requires secrecy, darkness, denial, lies, and all too often, violence, to hide from the shame.

[Jen Richards @SmartAssJen]

The idea that trans women need to pressure anyone into sex is so laughably absurd. The desire for trans bodies is insatiable. The problem is that it’s not public. It’s on porn and escort sites, the DM’s of every trans woman, in low whispers in bars and on public transportation.

[Trans Women of Color Solidarity Network @TWOCSolidarity]

@RainofTerra @netflix “Offense” cheapens the very real FEAR many trans folks experience as a result of people internalizing and believing these “jokes” I’m sure the guy who got in my face daring me to do something thought he was REAL funny. But fear for our lives, and/or wanting to exist isnt funny.