In regards to the Grapevine mess:
As a Black Trans woman, the demographic of people that have the most shared oppression with me is Cis Black Women. There is a particularly pointed pressure to defend and be in alliance with them. Not out of obligation, but from loyalty rooted in integrity, understanding, and familial history. Cis Black Women have saved/enriched/guided my life many times…particularly uneducated/queer/hood/country/sexually free ones. They have been comrades in battle intellectually and physically from academia to street brawls.

They have been an integral part of my survival.

But now that I have said all that

Let keep it real

They have also been an integral part of my harm.

No, Black Cis Women don’t owe BlackTrans Women shit…EXCEPT to stop their contribution to our oppression. If you are sitting around our bullies/abusers/oppressors and joining in the transphobic rhetoric…translation: sitting around black cis men calling us men and invalidating our womanhood. If you are telling some one we are trans while we are minding our own business on a train, at the grocery store, in class, wherever and that starts a public ridicule of us. You are causing us harm and solidifying the causes of our deaths. You cosigning the dehumanization. No, you are not the murder, but you are part of the push that make them think that its ok to harm us.

If you are upholding patriarchal rules of masculinity…. i.e. saying stuff like “a real man doesn’t date a trans woman because a real man knows they aren’t really women” then you are adding to our harm. If you are upholding that womanhood is based on reproduction…you are narrowing womanhood down to body parts and placing exclusive value in what those body parts can do. Isn’t that what men do to you? Didn’t men delegate your value to the heirs you could produce for them? Doesn’t that make women who have infertility issues feel less than a woman too? That is causing all of us to harm and not pulling the powerful towards thinking of women outside of being objects here to give them orgasm and babies.

I feel like we live in a both/and world

where I can call our police brutality against black men while calling out Black men for killing cis and trans women ..and expect them to work to change both

I can see and acknowledge that yt women are oppressed by patriarchy but I also call out how Karens weaponize their whiteness…. and expect them to fight to stop both from continuing.

I can acknowledge the homophobia that gay men come up against while at the same time call out the misogyny that they uphold…and I expect them to simultaneously dismantle the norms that allow for both to be valid critiques.

So although we are going through our various layers of oppression. I’m not expecting cis Black women to be mules and dismantle all of the systems for us…. BUT I am expecting them to be comrades in that struggle. This is a cis dominant world, so ignore accountability is adding to the oppression from a place of complacency and privilege. I’m expecting you to see my humanity and work to not add to the trans demise.