The core assumption framing why we are here today is that trans women experience exclusion in broader queer women’s communities. Implicit here is a recognition that cis women in our communities have access to privilege, and that trans women are marginalized and often shut out.
Just as not all cis women have equal access to privilege, the experience of marginalization (and thus relative - though often conditional and tenuous - access to privilege) varies significantly from one queer trans woman to another.
I’ll delve into this in more detail in a moment. First however, and especially in consideration that this is a conference focused on sex, I want to suggest that the exclusion experienced by trans women in our communities is most profound when it comes to sex, dating, intimacy, and all the other various ways that we express our sexuality as queer women. I’m suggesting that trans women often encounter a “cotton ceiling”. The “cotton ceiling” works something like this: as trans women we have gradually been “allowed” to be enter queer women’s spaces and to varying degrees, our presence is made explicit and sometimes sought out; however, what has so often happens however is that we are exoticized and most often desexualized; queer cis women may be genuinely grateful for us being there; they may flirt with us and even make out; but so often there is resistance to actually considering us as people who they may wish to fuck, date, or be intimate with in one way or another.
In our community, we have a whole range of values - spoken and unspoken - that frame our individual desires, that determine what is constituted as “desirable”. For a long time, trans women have been far off the radar, and not by accident. In moving forward, and working towards FULL inclusion of trans women in our communities, we need to challenge standards of “desirability”, those that arise from within our queer community as well as those that trickle down from the broader world we live in. We will all have our personal preferences for what gets us off. In most cases though, I think that our spheres of desire are often much larger than we may think. However, if we reflexively shut the door to the possiblity of a trans partner, or a disabled partner, or a fat partner, as examples, we are not just recapitulating these messed up standards of “desirability” we may also be missing out on something amazing!
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Drew Deveaux | Jan 2012 | No More Apologies Keynote Address | Toronto, ON, Canada Part 3 of my Keynote Address from the No More Apologies. This is where I coined the term “cotton ceiling” as a way to consider the limitations of inclusion of trans women in the broader queer women’s community. (via drewdeveaux) |
