i/we want to be unrepentantly trans in my arguments. must i be clear? i/we am not writing for cis audiences to simply ‘get it’. i/we am not writing so that trans communities all of a sudden become legible or heard. they are legible. they speak. there is voice there. there is already sound and fury. i/we don’t want to ‘be in conversation’ with some scholars whom some cis woman suggested ‘established this line of inquiry’. bullshit. that is academic politics. bad epistemic practice. i/we want to be fiercely and intellectually situated within these communities who have more willingly accepted me/us than any other ‘queer’ communities, than my/our families.
i/we want to be unrepentantly cross in my tone, in my/our speech, in my/our underlying pluralism–because no one else will sit down long enough to unmoor themselves from experiences that define them ever so neatly, ever so powerfully, to their limitations.
i/we need a voice that is no longer stitched together by others’ theories of what i/we am feeling. what i/we am feeling, what life is giving, what life is growing, what life as process is doing, is what i/we am being and becoming. do not tell me to dumb down that which is the very grammar of my/our existence. i/we will not. i/we will stare you in the eye and ask you, with the same level of (dis)respect you offered me/us, to learn without hand-holding.
i/we need a voice forged of fire and ice. one that burns both from the underside of the pit and overside of the tallest pyramid. i/we need a voice that links these experiences with those whose voices are stamped out. i/we need a voice that will penetrate, cut, dismantle, and destroy the fabric of this social stuff that suffocates me/us and others. where i/we cannot find myself/ourselves, there will be light that pours in, air that rushes in to fill the vacuum.
i/we need voice no one can turn off or mute. a voice that will link all others together but still so very much their own. a voice more sonic, more powerful, more than the accumulated bullshit of racism, of sexism, of misogyny, of transphobia, of homophobia, of all that makes mere static, mere noise, from the worlds i/we inhabit. mere noise. noise. no.
The Trans Ordinary 
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