get free or die tryin'.

neeshy:

tikipon:

First, I want to explain that there are a lot of things wrong with this statement. It implies that there is only one way to treat a girl across every culture, it implies that there is some kind of universal treatment girls across every culture get, and that is definitely wrong.

Second, this primarily works in a US context, but other western countries might find something similar. If you do, great, if not, you can ignore this post since it might not/does not apply.

Third, because of the pervasiveness of whiteness in the US, I am forced to use white context for this because that’s the context that many of us use whether we notice it or not. That said, I am all for breaking out of that context when it becomes possible to.

Fourth, there will be comments that appear cissexist. They are. They come from the cissexist view of other people that got projected and reflected. Do not take them as something I believe, but something that was projected and caused a problem for a child.

They stopped treating me like a girl when I was 14. To have it happen at 14, I found out later, was actually lucky for me, many people in my situation, that is, being Black and female-assigned-at-birth, had it snatched away much earlier, and some Black girls never got it at all.

I began to notice it when I was 14, which was also, curiously enough, when I left largely Black schools and entered a primarily white school.

What I understood as “girlness” back then was:

• being a princess
• being treated with extra care
• being delicate
• being cared for
• sometimes having to save the world

I was a tomboy, but that didn’t seem to have much of an effect, I was still a princess and people still tried to keep me safe from ~evil~, whatever that was.

That’s not to say I wasn’t bullied or tortured. I was, for being dark-skinned, for being a little slow in the “womanly development” department, all sorts of things, but I still heard often “you do NOT put your hands on these girls” from numerous older men, Black, white and otherwise, who had a vested interest in keeping me safe.

Then I went to high school.

In high school, Black people made up maybe 5% of my school population. It was a “good school”, by which they meant “a school that smart people went to”, so I was getting ahead by going to it.

That protection stopped.

I should mention that there was a much lower chance that I’d be smacked since most of the time, people were interested in getting 100s on everything than trying to have fights.

But ALL protection stopped.

Every form of care.

Everything that I had known a girl to be was replaced with…something I didn’t quite understand.

Which I found really weird since ALL of my friends were girls!

But from the way they treated me, I soon found that they were absolutely more girl than I was. How that worked, I wasn’t sure…

But I played sports. That took away some of my girl. I was muscular and slender and not particularly hippy or breasty. That took away a lot of girl, even though the other girls were skinny and not really ample in either area either.

When I tried to be a princess, it “didn’t suit me”. When I tried to be frilly and fancy, that “didn’t suit me either”.

Why? I don’t know.

Boys treated me like I was one of them, and soon after the girls treated me like I was a boy too…a boy they didn’t really like.

It didn’t help when I found out I liked girls very much, in THAT way.

That removed all the girl I was supposed to have left, and I was shuffled off to the only thing I could be: A boy.

I mean, I wasn’t actually a boy. Not a boy enough for the straight friends I had. But boy enough that any protection afforded girls was taken away. I became some in-between, degenderized freak, receiving neither the benefits of girldom or boydom.

The more I tried to keep a grasp on my girldom, the more I was reminded that it didn’t belong to me. But when I tried to grasp boydom…things were easier. People were friendlier. Girls started to like me and flirt with me and find me attractive.

No one wanted or tolerated girl me. Boy me wasn’t really loved, but people could be around him and interact with him and wanted his protection. And for that, they would stay with him.

Girl me had nothing.

Boy me had everything.

So to survive, I became a boy.

Not all the time. Just when he was necessary to keep the peace.

But every emergence of the girl led to pain, and the boy had to be out all the time to keep me sane.

It took me years to figure out why the other girls were just girls, and I had to be some weird mangled boy-without-a-penis-so-not-really-a-boy thing that had no place in the world.

I was dark.

I was Black.

You don’t get to be Black and a girl. You are either/or. You DON’T have a choice unless you want to be trashed for it.

At the time, I couldn’t take being harangued over it and I created something that was allowed to exist. The masculine Black nearly-man that everyone expected me to be, that people had crushes on and thought was so sexy in his desire to protect and quick anger.

It devoured my sense of self. It still has hold over my sense of self.

The boy is still here and he never left and he never will, because this is still a land where you cannot be Black and a woman. He constantly strives to “properly” exist in a world that is telling him he is good. But the girl that I used to be is still underneath, begging for attention, begging to be loved for who she is.

Miki still exists, that’s the name of this blog.

Because I still exist underneath here, under everything that tried to get rid of me.

Some people will try to take this as some kind of reason why FAAB trans people should be invalidated, because “trauma” caused this sort of thing. Think about that for a moment. Even if it were trauma…would that matter? I am still a boy and a girl and no matter what caused that, they are still here and inside me and will CONTINUE to be inside me as long as I live. What does it matter to you how it got there? How does that affect your life? It doesn’t, and this is one story, my story, and only applies to me.

This is how Black cis girls, Black FAAB people are treated. They are stripped of girldom but many can never achieve boydom. You think there are no protections, no benefits to being a girl? If you’re a girl who isn’t Black, there absolutely are, and I can tell you that as someone on the outside looking in. Those things you don’t think you have, we’re out here begging for. Dying for. Changing our entire lives in hopes of just being able to exist.

Remember this when you’re leaving Black people out of your gender discussions, your women discussions. Remember this when you’re calling that Black girl a beast, remember this when you’re saying that someone isn’t “trans” enough for whatever reason. Remember this when you make egregious and ridiculous claims of “FAAB people have male privilege”. Ha. In our fucking dreams. You’ve left us no place to exist. There are so many discussions I see here about how “genderfluid” and “genderqueer” is a privileged position to be in, but that’s not true for us. There are no benefits to this. We’re already in a spot where we receive no gender at all; how much lower than that could we get anyway?

That’s all. Inb4 people use this post for some fuckery.

I want to add further commentary and feels onto this but I can’t right now so

Yeah, read, and heed the warnings at the beginning and don’t take it and twist it into bullshit I don’t have the patience.

(via karnythia)