(Featured image by: @Mypolyamlife)

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Recently, podcaster Drew Afualo got into some controversy when an old podcast clip about transgender women went viral. Their non-binary guest, ER, said the following:

ER: Truest Thought on this is that I think that trans women have a more beautiful understanding of what womanhood is.

Drew: I agree.

ER: I think that unfortunately, the programming for cis women is, is, it is, it, it’s kind of sad sometimes.

Drew: Yeah, it is. Yeah.

ER: and I, I’m like, actually, no, your womanhood is not your role. Your womanhood is not your status in society, and your womanhood is not your ability to be sexually assaulted. Yeah. And this trans, this trans debate that’s, like, centering all on, well, like, if a, quote-unquote, “man in a dress”…is in a bathroom … he will rape me. Mm I’m like, okay, well, the, then it sounds like the problem that we have- Is with cis men is that men are going to rape. . And women are fearing rape their whole lives.

Drew: Right.

ER: And when you talk to trans women about their womanhood, they talk about… It, like, almost gets me choked up. They talk about it in such this, like, beautiful, expansive way. Yeah. Of like, it’s, it’s this feeling I always had. Yeah. Yeah. You know? It’s this truth I’ve always known. It’s the most beautiful parts of me. Mm-hmm. It’s my softest self. And I don’t feel that from cis women right now because I think the propaganda is so strong.

ER: I agree.

It’s not surprising that cis women online are upset about this take. Honestly, I have a lot of thoughts about it, and I want to dig into them here.

Upon listening to this clip, my immediate thought was that, as a survivor, sexual violence is something I can’t entirely disconnect from my experience of womanhood. I transitioned quite young, and I remember a shift that happened in my life where suddenly I was receiving a certain amount of attention from men that I didn’t exactly understand. As a child, I started to develop breasts; for reasons I’m still not exactly sure. It was likely just your classic gynochomastia, but coupled with my generally feminine voice and way of carrying myself, it was not that uncommon for people to assume that I was a little girl. I remember when I would go to Hollywood by myself as a pre-teen, and I started to experience street harassment. Men would pull up alongside me as I walked down the street, asking where I was going and whether I needed a ride. My parents didn’t raise me like a little girl with any education about how this sort of attention from men wasn’t good. Unfortunately, several men would take advantage of that ignorance, and I spent my youth in a wave of hypersexuality where I was attempting to repeat some of the more coercive experiences I had with men in a way that felt empowering, instead of disempowering. Of course, ultimately all this meant was that more men had access to me when I was a minor, and it’s actually taken me a while to recognize and accept that I was trafficked as a child.

I guess for me, for quite some time, it was very hard for me to separate these experiences from my own conception of self because it often felt like my femininity was the reason I was being assaulted. It took me a while to accept that my first rapist, who drugged and raped me, was actually an adult who decided to prey on what was obviously a child. Beneath my hypersexuality was this confidence that, because of the shape of my body, the way I was dressed, and the way I carried myself, I was to blame for why I was assaulted multiple times. I’ve experienced sexual violence routinely for most of my life. As recently as a year and a half ago, my Uber driver sexually assaulted me, and to this day, I still have nerves around taking Ubers to and from the club because I still occasionally feel like the way my body is shaped is part of why I experience sexual violence. It’s an idea that is hard to get out of my mind because of trauma and how my assault seemed to line up with my overtly feminine expressions. It doesn’t help that oftentimes when I speak of my experiences with sexual violence, cis women often respond with “ welcome to womanhood,” as if I haven’t been a transgender woman for most of my life. The truth is, there have been so few phases of my life where sexual violence was not a constant threat and fear, and what I know is that no one particularly cares when a trans woman is assaulted. I’ve never reported, and likely never will.

I get where  Drew and ER are coming from. For cis women, being raised as girls means these experiences are baked in from the start. A lot of cis women end up believing their femininity is the reason they were assaulted, and that informs their often conflicted relationship with their femininity, and shapes how they move through the world. Some will even change everything about themselves, hoping it will keep them safe. Many women endure sexual violence in silence. In a culture where Epstein’s associates run the world and influence culture, it often feels as if sexual violence is an inevitable and central part of our culture that objectifies women and fights tooth and nail to limit their possibilities. I get the real sense in my life that sexual violence was weaponized against me; utilized to humble and immobilize me. The reality is, sexual violence shapes how you exist in the world, and it’s something women are forced to keep in the back of their minds all the time.

I think what ER was really trying to say is that a lot of trans women start out with a kind of hopeful, maybe even idealized, view of womanhood. When you’re reaching for femininity for the first time, it can feel new and exciting, and you haven’t yet had years of being told your body is the reason for the violence you face. Trans women often embrace things that cis women have learned to let go of just to avoid harassment. Remember when Dylan Mulvaney shared her ‘girlhood’ online? A lot of cis women saw that as making fun of femininity, even though that probably wasn’t the intention. I get why women who have lived through the rough parts of being a woman in a misogynistic world might feel like she glossed over all the hard stuff to celebrate the hot pink artifice of it all. For many women, the reality of having a uterus and living as a woman in this culture is complicated, and all of it- the good, the bad, and the ugly- shapes how they see themselves.

Another thing that comes to mind is how this idea of a trans woman having a positive relationship with womanhood usually comes from someone who’s still pretty new to living as a trans woman. I notice people talk about trans women like we only get a few years to live in our ‘truth’; and sometimes it feels like people don’t expect us to live this long. People often don’t understand that while dehumanization can of course come in a less than flattering form, deification- the elevation of a person to an almost fictional, god-like position- is also dehumanizing. We get reduced to symbols or hypotheticals, and the complexities of life get left out of the conversation. Deification is dehumanizing because it will always inevitably result in someone not living up to  the over-idealized standard they’re held to. When I saw that clip, I knew it would open the door for more attacks on trans women, all because of what two people who aren’t even trans women said about us. Sure, that first taste of femininity can feel inspiring, but over time, reality sets in and the story gets a lot more complicated.

I love being a transgender woman. If I could go back, I wouldn’t change much, except maybe how naive I was about the world when I first transitioned. I wish I’d understood sooner that the men who hurt me were always going to do that, no matter what I looked like or how I acted. I’d like to say I don’t still blame myself, or my body, or my femininity, but that wouldn’t be true. I know it’s not reasonable to live in constant fear, but trauma often gives you fears that feel irrational until they’re confirmed. When I was last assaulted, it shocked me because I felt as if the era of my life where assault happened to me had come to a close. I naively believed that my consciousness about sexual violence would in some way prevent it from happening to me, but it still did. I’ve never really had the luxury of not being afraid of sexual violence because it’s happened frequently enough to me for it to feel like a common part of life. Rape changes you, and I’m still learning how to live with that.

I think one of the most alienating realities of being a transgender woman is that, yes, we do actually experience many of the same things as cis women. Still, trans women are more likely to experience sexual violence than most survivors. It’s certainly not a competition, and at the end of the day, most of these things come back to misogyny and a rape culture that creates a circumstance where trans women, because of their dehumanization, become the perfect victims who, because of their circumstance, never report the violence that happens to them. Those who abuse trans women can count on transphobia to create a barrier of protection for them. Frequently, trans women are assaulted, and then criminalized once they report it. When I was raped for the first time, it was at the start of me being trafficked, and I remember feeling like no one would ever believe me, and that even though he’d done these things to me, I was still much safer with him. Of course, that’s how grooming works, but still. I haven’t reported it to this day, and likely never will. Those who harm trans women rely on that. When trans women are imprisoned with men, they often experience v-coding, where they are trafficked to violent inmates to absorb their violence, physically and sexually. Many trans women only end up in prison because they are forced to do survival sex work on the streets, all within a culture that is increasingly removing civil rights protections for them, where a genocide is indeed happening to them.

The situation for trans women is quite bleak, and it often feels reductive to fixate on the fluffier, more shallow aspects of how a trans woman is experiencing her life. We can celebrate trans women’s relationship with femininity without comparing it to a cis woman’s. I don’t know Drew or ER, but it seems like their relationships with trans women don’t go very deep. Maybe the trans women they know are still early in their journeys and need that kind of validation, so hearing ‘trans women have a more beautiful relationship with womanhood’ feels good to them. But to me, those kinds of statements just sound like empty flattery; they’re so over the top, it’s hard to take them seriously. Maybe Drew and ER really do find something refreshing in how some trans women see their femininity, since it’s not weighed down by all the baggage that comes with being a woman in this culture. Still, I think drawing a line between how trans and cis women understand womanhood just isn’t helpful.

It’s interessting that so many cis women have misinterpreted ER’s statements as “trans women are better women than cis women”; and, ironically, in response to that idea, they did indeed affirm that their relationship with their womanhood is related to their fear of sexual violence and the way their biological functions have traumatized them. So it’s less that ER was wrong; it’s that they dared to compare a cis woman’s experience to a trans woman’s. There’s a very meta layer of this conversation because on both ends, there’s this idea that a trans woman’s womanhood relies greatly on validation or affirmation from cis women, and those designated female at birth. The desire to over-compliment trans women and deify them is often paired with the subtext that trans women need the affirmation of others for their womanhood to be valid. There’s this sense that her womanhood is conditional, and every time a trans woman steps out of line, suddenly she/her becomes they/them, and it’s reinforced that she isn’t quite a woman after all. What I’ve had to recognize with time is that I could choose to disengage from feminism. I can deny the existence of misogyny, but whether I do that or not, I will still experience misogyny. To my point, sexual violence will still be something I have to fear because of the reality of the world I live in. I cannot separate myself from women and their experiences. I cannot pretend that misogynistic violence will never happen to me. It is, in fact, naive to believe otherwise.

The truth is, if you ask any woman about her experience of womanhood, you’ll get a different answer every time. Black women will have a different perspective than white women. Women from different religions will see their womanhood in their own way. You’ll meet both trans and cis women who have a bright, hopeful view of femininity, and you’ll meet trans women who can’t separate their experience of womanhood from sexual violence. For me, what matters most is recognizing and respecting all those different experiences, rather than using them to judge or rank one another. That only helps the people who want to keep us divided. The clip from that podcast is actually a year old, and it’s trending during a time when a lot of other negative stories about transgender women are trending. From where I’m sitting, there is a very clear and concerted effort to engender hatred towards transgender women specifically. The point is to dehumanize us to the point where, when violence does happen to us, no one will care.

While we debate who has a more beautiful understanding of womanhood, a trans woman named Autumn Hill is sitting in men’s prison for simply going to a protest opposing ICE. She’ll be in prison for 50 years, meaning she’s getting more time than the people who trafficked little girls for Epstein. It’s worth noting that the girls taken by ICE are mysteriously getting pregnant in ICE facilities around the country. A trans woman named Ava Cordero was one of the first people to call out Epstein for his trafficking of herself and other girls, but when she came out, all people could do was invalidate her womanhood. We are all suffering under patriarchy and misogyny is a weapon wielded against women whether they are transgender or not. Misogynists are the only ones who benefit from our division.

(The photo attached to this post was taken by @mypolyamlife)

So, I’m being accused of being a grifter, and I sorta found that funny, and I think this may be the perfect time to update y’all about some of my feelings about what I’m doing on social media.

Over the past few years, I’ve been shifting away from many of the topics I’ve historically discussed; mostly out of a desire to try new things. On TikTok right now, some people are barely older than my 20-year career of publishing informative content online, and they’ve begun calling me a grifter, essentially because I don’t align with them ideologically 100% of the time. What’s so laughable about that is that I’ve been in this very experimental space for the past few years with my content, and everything is telling me to withdraw from many of the topics that, in reality, do make me less successful as a content creator.

I think people don’t really register that I created a YouTube channel to seek community many years ago, when I was a lonely teenager. I found some of that community online, but offline, I mostly found men who were eager to exploit me as a transgender teenager. My experience with coercion and exploitation has given me a particular passion for feminism and women’s issues. It took me quite some time to register that the experience I was having was a reflection of the misogynistic culture where men exploit transphobia to get away with the sexual abuse of transgender women and girls. I felt very alone in my experiences as a survivor, so over the years, I’ve tried to pull myself through many of those feelings to have larger, more informative conversations about my experiences, which are often completely ignored. I have often felt like I was alone on an island advocating for myself, because in reality, the only person I’ve ever really had is myself.

Sometimes when I talk about this era of my life, it feels like I’m trying to ask my audience for pity, and to be frank, my upbringing makes this feel very distasteful to me. I don’t like pity; I really dislike people feeling sorry for me, and I am not great at asking for or receiving help. Similar to how it took me years to accept that I didn’t deserve to be drugged and raped by my first rapist, I struggle not to feel like many of the things that were, in fact, done to me were my fault. As a content creator, I’ve struggled with the idea that bias is something I have to face. I want to believe that people do not receive my content differently than they receive a white person’s content, but that’s something that I have not been able to be delusional about at a certain point.

Something I’ve noticed quite a bit is that many so-called progressives, and even some of the so-called leftists, really resent it when I speak freely and contradict their narratives. In recent discourse about dating preferences, I’ve acknowledged the reality for many women where they are often used to increase a man’s social capital. I spoke about how many men do use women as wombs and how that’s particularly a touchy subject right now during a time when conservatives are attempting to pass a total abortion ban. I think people who are familiar with my work would be relatively unsurprised by my position; I am an outspoken feminist and spent the 2010s being dogpiled for the content I created for EverydayFeminism.com. I was one of many feminist content creators who spoke openly about misogyny, and we were not well received. Most of my colleagues have left the internet, and those who are still online no longer publish feminist content. What I’ve learned as a content creator is that if you want to find a quick way to sabotage your content creator career, talk about feminism. Better yet, be openly transgender and speak about feminism.

There was a point in time when I could have disappeared even after establishing myself online as an openly trans feminist content creator. As I’ve spoken about many times, I was stealth in my 20s; hiding that I was transgender while living in a conservative community. I am an illustrator, animator, writer, and I have a performing arts background. My YouTube channel started as a sewing channel during the time in my life when I used to make almost all of my clothing. I can run several blogs on different subjects and be relatively successful at it, but I’m stubborn. To be frank, I have a very hard time moving on from subjects like misogyny and rape culture. As a survivor, I find so many of these conversations hard to disengage from because it does feel like we are never really heard in these conversations. As a black trans woman, I especially feel like there aren’t very many people who listen to people like me. Being stealth felt like cowardice; a new closet where I was isolated from the larger queer community. As I’ve moved to LA, begun organizing queer spaces and attending them myself, I’ve started engaging more deeply with the people who were touched by my work.

It’s slowly registering to me that people have a very high opinion of me, and that was quite hard to conceptualize with how isolated I’ve been through most of my career. Part of why I repeat that I’ve been publishing content for most of my life about these topics is because I often forget about that myself. I still feel very young. I still feel like some of my thoughts and ideas are forming. Still, in all reality, I’ve been publishing content long enough that there are people who were watching me in middle school (omg why weren’t your parents monitoring your internet?), who are not going to college for degrees that I partially inspired them to pursue. I’ve met quite a few people, not just in LA, but all around the country, who walk up to me, recognize me, and say that I’ve influenced them to do good work. From other content creators to activists, social workers, therapists, writers, and educators, I’ve literally met people whose work I’ve directly inspired. There are so many people whose content I see on TikTok who get excited when I follow them because my content partially inspired them. It’s actually a genuinely hard thing for me to conceptualize, but I’ve heard it enough times to realize that I’ve been quite influential.

I get caught up in loops because I am pretty passionate about the topics I discuss, which is partially why I was so insulted that a white content creator and their supporters have taken to describing me as a “grifter”. What’s interesting to me about this accusation is that I’ve often had grifters surround my content because they needed something to respond. My experience is that I get ire from both anti-feminists and people on the so-called left who are transmisogynistic and anti-black. No, I don’t think that correcting me when I’m wrong is racism. I draw a pretty distinct line between harassment and criticism, and, for clarity, I don’t feel harassed in this particular conversation. That said, I do feel disrespected. It’s one thing to disagree with me, but to insinuate that the last 20 years of my life, where I’ve been uploading this content online, holding largely the same positions, is quite annoying.

The subject of dating preferences is actually a great example of a subject where people have actively grifted from the content I’ve created. My position on dating preferences has always been an area where I tend to diverge from other people who, frankly, have fewer concerns in their own romantic lives when it comes to navigating around bigotry. Many years ago, I made one of my first videos about the subject, where I spoke about some of my earlier feelings about being rejected as a transgender woman. I spoke about how I was compelled to speak directly with those who rejected me about their bias and suggest that maybe they should indeed give me a chance, and how ultimately I shifted my opinion about that once I actually had experiences with those who aren’t attracted to me. I spoke about how those relationships were degrading and how ultimately. At the same time, I could grant that there is bigotry in a culture that excludes transgender women from people’s dating prospects; ultimately, it felt unhelpful to use dating preferences as a metric for allyship. I have often affirmed that I don’t exactly think accusations of phobia are useful. What was the response from anti-feminist grifters? To say that I wanted to bully men into sleeping with me. Back in the 2010s, it was incredibly common for larger content creators who had misogynistic audiences to make content misrepresenting the ideas of much smaller creators who were marginalized and were unlikely to be truly listened to. Many of my colleagues left the internet during this time. Misogynists hated that we were speaking about these topics, and this was the era when the far right was forming many of its foundations. Even in my own experience with these people, I saw how men and boys online joined in on misogynistic harassment campaigns where they would misrepresent what someone said so that they could get the best engagement. They’d copy each other; some content creators watched other content creators speaking about my content but never actually watched it for themselves to see that it was misrepresented. According to some of these people, I was essentially a black tranny who wanted to enslave white people and force heterosexual men to fuck me or suffer execution. I’m not even being dramatic when I say that’s how it was often presented. So I spent my 20s, as I was coming out of stealth, being massively harassed online for the subjects I still haven’t moved on from.

The interesting thing about my online presence is that, because I’ve been around for a very long time and was one of the first and only people discussing these topics, I have influenced much of the discourse we have online and much of the language people use about these subjects. I’ve uploaded educational content about race, gender, sexuality, and so much more. However, people rarely want to give me credit, and I saw a bit of that when people were recently reposting my quote without mentioning my name. It is very strange to be in the position I am, where so many people are familiar with my words and my ideas, yet they all act like acknowledging me would put a stain on their argument. Large content creators support me in whispers, and on more than one occasion, I’ve been told that if I withdrew from the subjects I discussed, I’d be more successful.

I am at an impasse right now. On one hand, I share what I do because of the life I’ve lived—a life where, yes, I have indeed had experiences that may contradict or complicate theory. I cannot pretend that life functions in the neat way we often conceptualize. I cannot pretend that some of my own experiences contradict common narratives. Though occasionally, I wonder how useful my voice is. As I said, I’m quite stubborn, and I speak about these subjects because I care deeply about them, but transparently, within this strange time we’re in, everything is telling me to move on. As I said, I have more I can do, and I have genuinely wondered what it would be like if I stopped focusing on the topics I have. The reality is, they sabotage my platform, and in a way, I’ve sorta said most of the things I want to say. Meeting people who’ve been following me for over a decade who have been inspired by the work I’ve done has also kinda given me the sense that I can, in a way, rest easy.

The grifter accusation insults me mostly because for the first 15 or so years of creating this content, I made very little money doing it. I often feel the pull to make content about more advertiser-friendly topics because I do have that in me. I’m feeling very creative and inspired right now, and I’ve partially wanted to shift back towards the original goal of my channel. What’s funny is I never really meant to go down this path. I went down this path. After all, I figured out that I developed good communication and public speaking skills because I’ve been making YouTube videos since I was a teenager. YouTube was one of many things I jumped into as a teenager to increase my confidence. Ironically, I did it back then explicitly because I didn’t have an audience and no one was watching… at least I thought. Even back when I was a teenager, my content performed well enough for my classmates to find it, which was mortifying. A decade later, it turns out I was an early adopter of a career many people are just now attempting to get into. I left the animation industry and stopped illustrating to pursue YouTube full-time, and since 2015, I’ve supported myself entirely on my YouTube and speaking income. I’m recognizing that I’m in a very good position right now, and I’m thankful for it.

So, while I know that I’ll never fully withdraw from these topics, I’m definitely curious what it would be like if I shifted toward more overtly creative endeavors. The reality is, discourse has robbed me of my time. I woke up one day, and I was 35, still having the same conversation I had when I went full-time as a content creator at 25. In many ways, I feel the message that I need to move on, so I’ll be focusing on that in the coming months. I will be thinking and moving with more strategy, and focusing on creating content that is not just monetizable, but easily shared across platforms. The reality is, for a while now, I’ve been off-script because I did need to learn that I don’t always need one. Some of you will remember my heavily scripted content, and I needed a phase where I was less scripted. But the reality is, i’ve been doing this long enough to know how to capitalize on my platform and while that hasn’t really been my focus in many of these unpopular conversations I’m passionate about, every year, I have to kick myself in the ass a bit about getting my platform together, and for a while now I’ve been speaking about placing a certain degree of distance between myself, my audience and my online persona. It feels like it’s just about that time…