International Day Against Homophobia & Transphobia

Today is the International Day Against Homophobia & Transphobia, which was "launched with the idea of creating a worldwide community of activists and committed people, sharing the ideal of a world without homophobia nor transphobia in which everyone can freely live their sexual orientation and the gender identity they wish to live in."

Like many days which mark the advocacy for social justice (International Human Rights Day, Blog Against Sexism Day, Blog for Choice Day, Day of Silence...), I feel the best way I can honor this day is to reaffirm my commitment to being an ally and working my teaspoon to contribute whatever I can not just on this day, but on every day.

Support for sex, gender, and sexual orientation equality is and has always been central to my feminism. It's not just because lesbians, bisexual women, and trans women are my sisters, but because the rights of gay men, bisexual men, trans men, and cis, trans, and intersex androgynes to live a life on their own terms, too, to define themselves and express their sexualities and do with their bodies whatever they want, is inextricable from my ideal of a fluid sex, gender, and sexuality spectrum along which all people might exist free from harassment, marginalization, and violence.

It's because ladies wearing trousers in my country was once a scandal, and still is in other places in the world. (Not to knock ladies who don't want to wear trousers, but damn it if every lady shouldn't have the right.) How one dresses one's body, or wears one's hair, or decorates one's skin, is intimately related to issues of equality, to freedoms denied, to lives lost, because of deeply entrenched prejudices about nonconformity.

What do a trouser ban and a Ugandan law criminalizing homosexuality with a death sentence have in common? Well, sort of everything.

We all must have the freedom to be who we are—who were we born, who we choose to be—and the freedom to express ourselves and live our lives without the menace of prejudice. And not the kind of freedom in patriotic hymns written and sung by the privileged, not the faux freedom reflexively invoked in rightwing rhetoric, but a real freedom—the kind of freedom that allows every person to walk down the street with dignity and without fear, the freedom to live big and live whole.

Autonomy. Consent. Choice. My rights end where yours begin.

These are not mere words and phrases, but the governing concepts of how I approach the world. And the people in it. Because of that, I cannot understand a feminism in which "sharing the ideal of a world without homophobia nor transphobia in which everyone can freely live their sexual orientation and the gender identity they wish to live in" isn't a central tenet. And so I'm gonna keep working my teaspoon.


All in.