“Welcome to Womanhood”

Dear Cis Women,

When a trans woman is complaining about men, sexual harassment, misogyny, and/or sexism, NEVER reply with, “Welcome to Womanhood”.

First of all, we don’t need welcoming. We’ve always been here, and your entitlement to believe you have the authority to welcome us to womanhood in the first place is a sign that your cissexism is showing.

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“Welcome to Womanhood”
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Just Like You

Nearly five decades ago, the modern queer rights movement exploded from the grief and anger of the most marginalized members of our community: queer people of color, trans women, sex workers, and other people starved for justice took to the streets. Arrests were resisted, fires were lit, cops were assaulted, and our mothers refused to back down. The revolution had finally come and straights were going to have to put up with our shit for once.

People who weren’t there got inspired. They threw open their closets and forced the world to realize we were far more numerous than previously believed. Slowly it dawned on them that we were not some faceless and malicious boogie man, but their children and their neighbors and their co-workers. We weren’t scary, we were just like them!

As it turned out, only some of us weren’t scary.

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Just Like You

Trigger Warnings Are Not New

Previously published for Secular Shethinkers


Can we all just stop acting like trigger warnings are outrageously complicated?

I keep seeing scare-tactic articles from mainstream and feminist blogs trying to have a Very Serious Discussion about whether trigger warnings are warranted or have “gone too far”. And you know what? I’m not even going to dignify this “debate” by pointing out why trigger warnings are a reasonable accommodation for people who have survived traumatic events. There are already plenty of articles about that.

Instead, I want to talk about how trigger warnings have already existed long before the terminology, they just went unnoticed by people who didn’t need them.

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Trigger Warnings Are Not New