SISTERHOOD, NOT CISTERHOOD
Real names tell you the story of things they belong to in my language, in the Old Entish as you might say. It is a lovely language, but it takes a very long time saying anything in it, because we do not say anything in it, unless it is worth taking a long time to say, and to listen to.
—Treebeard in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Two Towers
My best friend, Esther, decided to convert to Judaism a couple years ago. She’s a deeply curious person, talking circles around me in terms of discussing philosophy, logics, and rationality, and often refuses to accept “that’s how it is” as a suitable answer to any question. At times in our friendship, I found myself wishing she would turn it off for a moment, but any momentary annoyance is immediately brushed aside by her putting a concept in a way that finally makes sense to me. We spar in discussions, generally agreeing, and pushing each other to think better—in fact, it was largely thanks to ongoing conversations with her about the trans community that I recognized my own non-binary identity and developed the thought that drives large parts of this work. So her conversion to Judaism didn’t come as much of a surprise.
She, like me, was raised Christian but not as hardcore evangelical as me. She was a basic midwestern Methodist who found much of Christianity incoherent, particularly evangelical salvation narratives. For her, they seemed coercive and troubling. There’s an old story of a missionary arriving on an isolated island, and he tells the Indigenous people there about how all people are sinners, and therefore they need to repent. An Indigenous person looks at him quizzically and asks, “What happens to people who don’t know to repent?”
“Well, if a person is ignorant of the need to repent, then I suppose they don’t necessarily need to,” the missionary replies.
“Why did you tell me, then?” the Indigenous person replies incredulously. “You’ve condemned all of us to hell!”
My best friend was the first person to point out to me that a practice that requires a person to be convinced they are inherently bad and that your religion is the only way to fix it is a cruel practice and psychologically harmful. I’ve long left behind the individualistic conception of sin that dominates the evangelical church, but her pointing out just how cruel the project of evangelism is made me look back at my past in horror.
After her conversion to Judaism, she talked with me about what drew her to that particular faith. For one, they don’t proselytize. Indeed, Jewish people discourage converts, and converts are typically met with “You sure? You’re really, really sure? No, you aren’t. Really?” kind of back and forth. Not that Jewish people are disbelieving that someone would want to convert, but they know what a serious thing it is and want to ensure that a person is approaching becoming Jewish with a clear heart and with complete understanding of the task they are undertaking. The second motivation, for her, was that they believe deeply in asking questions. She’s the one who introduced me to the joke that one could have three Jews in a room and five opinions about the same topic. This encouragement of questions, of debate, and of challenging tradition while also honoring it appealed to her curious nature and desire to keep moving, keep digging. And, last, she liked that she didn’t necessarily have to believe in what atheists snarkily call a “skydaddy” to engage in all the debate and discussion and maintain faith. She found a home at the synagogue, and it has become a centering point for her life.
As a former evangelical, I’m constantly unpacking things I used to believe, and now with a Jewish best friend, I find myself going through ideas I used to hold about faith and rules and religion in general and realizing just how much of the Christianity I was taught is deeply antisemitic in its core. Many Christians believe in a supersessionist theory of their faith (also known as replacement theology): that Jesus’s coming supersedes Jewish teaching and makes it irrelevant. “Jesus was a Jew,” they’ll proclaim while also saying that he fulfilled the law and the prophets and made it so we don’t have to follow all the old rules anymore. This idea, however, places Jews as an enemy of the gospel, relics of a time gone by who simply don’t know any better.
I found this all out when I was talking with Esther about what evangelicalism calls “legalism.” There’s a concept in evangelical Christianity that people who continue to follow rules, who set up rituals for their faith, are not truly faithful and instead are relying on going through the motions to draw themselves closer to G-d. I threw the term out casually while we were out shopping one day, and she stopped dead and said, “You mean rules-following like keeping kosher and keeping Shabbat and following Torah?”
It was like a wave hit me. I realized in an instant that what I’d been trained to see as a harmless aspect of Christian theology, an internecine criticism of a certain kind of Christian, was actually a rejection of Judaism. It was, quite plainly, antisemitic. I stood there for a minute, thinking, and finally said, “I never thought about it that way. Holy shit, a lot of what I’ve been taught is just straight up antisemitic.” My brain raced through different evangelical things I’d believed and just accepted as fact and recognizing that a lot of them were actually built on rejecting Judaism. The idea of replacement theology, the idea that Christians didn’t need to “follow the old rules,” the idea of individual sin versus a corporate brokenness—all of it stemmed from a direct refutation of the Jewish way of thinking and the Jewish way of life.
I was gobsmacked. In the years since, Esther has become my sounding board for whether or not a Christian belief is antisemitic. Through her, I’ve befriended a number of other Jewish people, and while I don’t always get it right, I’ve been working hard to be an ally to the Jewish people, understanding, too, that they are not a monolith as a people but that I should largely trust when they say something is antisemitic, even if I don’t see it that way right away. I’ve learned to lower my defenses, to trust that they know what they’re saying and that our culture is structured such that it has become impossible to avoid symbols and ideas of antisemitism that are built deeply into our culture.
I previously wanted to make this chapter an angry polemic about refuting people who are bigoted against trans people, who argued that those of us in the community shouldn’t have the right to access the bathroom that matches our gender or remain safe in gendered spaces. I even wrote up a draft about how these bigots misuse studies and have poor, inconsistent internal logic.
Then I realized: I’m never going to convince the bigots. My own humanity isn’t something I should have to make an argument for. It’s nonsense to think, likewise, that I’m going to convince anyone who is hell-bent on being anti-trans to reconsider their position, whether I approached it kindly or angrily. If they were already reading this book with a mind toward “debunking” me, I wasn’t going to convince them in a chapter. No one could.
But what I can do is help you, the cisgender reader, to recognize some built-in deep-seated bigotry in our culture and work it out. Like my Jewish friends who kindly remind me of antisemitic stuff that’s buried deep into our cultural history, I want to sit here with you and help you to understand my story, my life, and my community. I’m not here to give you fuel to argue back against anti-trans bigotry—that’s about as useful as a Jewish person debating their own humanity with a neo-Nazi. What I am here to do is empower you to recognize bigotry and bias in yourself and learn new patterns of thinking in order to be better as people, as allies, and as cisgender persons.
First: Question Yourself
The first thing cisgender people tend to do when they encounter trans or non-binary people is try to work out how we could possibly arrive at our identities. The idea that “thinking about gender” is somehow confusing or strange is a very cis-centric way to look at the concept of gender identity. Many of us didn’t just wake up one day and consciously decide that we were trans or non-binary. Quite often, we knew something was “off” but didn’t have the language or concepts to explain it. I had to do so much reading before I came out about my identity—I wanted first and foremost to be an expert on myself and what my gender meant to me. Cis people in general haven’t had to do that kind of thinking. Many of them have not gone through a process of trying to find the right words and then eventually landing on “cis.” “Trans,” to many cis-identified people, has always been cast as the other, the abnormal, the different one.
I humbly request that cis people attempt to do the same work trans and non-binary people have done in thinking about themselves. Not just a feelings check but a real, deep inquiry. Take some time to write down what describes you, both gendered and ungendered. Then think about what you think describes a man, a woman, a non-binary person. Genuinely challenge yourself to think about where your identity fits in that realm. Ask yourself: Why do I believe I am a man? What makes me say I am a woman? Interrogate beyond the biology: Would I still feel like I am a woman if I lost my uterus? Would I still identify as a man if I got testicular cancer? What parts of myself do I see as vital to my gender? Question who you are, what made you cisgender, and attempt to put yourself, mentally, into a body that reads differently from your current one.
Before you start doing anything with trans people, you need to interrogate yourself about why you believe you’re the way you are. It’s like asking a gay person why they’re gay; it’s just as reasonable to ask a straight person why they’re straight. Trans people can’t be the only ones taking on the burden of introspection and thinking carefully about their own gender. Once you’ve done the work on yourself, you’ll probably understand a bit better what it’s like for transgender and non-binary people to be who they are. All of us think about our gender and have worked out arguments about who we are. You’re just catching up.
During the pandemic of 2020, I spent most of my time in my four-hundred-square-foot apartment. I joked early in April of 2020 that by the time this whole thing was over, I’d have redesigned my entire apartment. How little did I know at that time! By June, I’d ordered a cat scanner and set up my book library on LibraryThing, a library cataloging system for my collection of books. After several international moves and losing one or two boxes in storage, my library numbers about three hundred books, and they’re organized on my shelf by genre and then by author within that genre. But doing that work also meant that I had a few books that fit into multiple categories or didn’t quite fit in any of the existing categories. Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing is a historical record of the Troubles, but it’s also a true-crime mystery. So I clumsily stuck it in between John Douglas’s The Killer Across the Table and Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, while Simon Winchester’s Krakatoa sat farther down the shelf among my war nonfiction works.
Every so often, I’ll study my bookshelf, look at the titles, and move around the books depending on whether or not my thinking on its genre placement is different that day. I could just look up the Library of Congress placement, which would give me a call code and a category, but knowing the system as I do as a former library worker, I also know how the decisions about cross-genre books sometimes don’t make a lot of sense—somehow Foucault’s three-book series on sexuality ends up next to Chris Hayes’ Twilight of the Elites. Sometimes the labels imposed upon a thing don’t make a whole lot of sense for those familiar with the thing itself—example being that my first two books frequently appear in two different parts of the bookstore, depending on who is stocking them, despite them both being broadly under the genre of women’s studies. (It will be fun to see where this one ends up!)
So I’m not surprised that cis people who have never really had to deal with minority genders are confused by a seemingly infinite proliferation of gender identities and labels when it feels like there should be just a few that each person fits into. It felt like just a few years ago, this whole non-binary thing didn’t exist or wasn’t nearly as prominent. Surely we don’t need all these options? Surely there are just a few people that can fit into them?
Not really, no. Asking someone to fit themselves into a certain specific label that’s only kinda sort of right is like when a white person gives their Indian friend a nickname because “Karamavir” is just too complex for them to say all the time. It’s technically a thing that person will respond to, and it maybe sort of fits, but it will always not be quite right. That’s our gender labels. People will find what works to describe themselves. Understand that from the get-go, and any new label will strike you not as odd and confusing but as “oh, that’s a new one I’ve not heard of. Can you tell me more?” That’s it. That’s all it takes. Basic respect that means you want to understand, not judge.
Third: Don’t Make Us Manage Your Feelings
Back when I thought I was cisgender, I struggled with pronouns if someone announced a change and I’d been accustomed to using a specific one. After mixing it up for a while, I also realized that it was unhelpful for me to keep apologizing every time I did, typically because my apologies drew attention to the fact that I’d made an error. I was forcing trans people to bear my feelings about my mistakes, begging for forgiveness each time. But the reason it kept happening was because I simply wasn’t taking the time to practice with myself. Mentally, I still thought of the person as their assigned gender because I hadn’t mentally flipped over to their new name. And I was something of a jerk in not doing that.
We in the gender-expansive community don’t need to be your feelings manager or your pronoun police. When you misgender us, we can usually tell if you were doing it deliberately or as a mistake. All we ask in that moment is for you to correct yourself and move on. Don’t grovel or apologize or talk about how terrible you feel. Don’t make us manage your emotions about your inability to remember our pronouns. Correct yourself, move on, and then when you are not around us, practice. Go home and say to yourself, “This is my friend Dianna. They use ‘they/them’ pronouns. They take the bus. They shop at Target, and they like dark-roast coffee.” Practice saying normal sentences describing your friends with their new pronouns, and your brain will start moving them over into the new category.
Fourth: Don’t Be So Serious
One of my favorite Twitter accounts nowadays is the Gender of the Day. It’s a bot account that randomly tweets, “Today’s gender is . . .” followed by a random collection of things. “Today’s gender is a flamboyance of fearsome narwhals,” reads one. “Today’s gender is a shimmering caribou,” reads another.1 This delights me because it’s often absurd and serves to highlight—at least for me—the nonsense that is gendered experience. It’s a fun little laugh in the midst of a timeline that’s usually yelling about the latest political event or disaster. And the more I’ve talked with and become a part of the trans community, I’ve realized just how deeply important humor is to our existence.
For trans and non-binary people, just living through every day is sometimes a rough prospect. We face misgendering, potential violence, and fear in going out in the world as our authentic selves. So a lot of us have learned to make jokes about our lives to lighten ourselves up and laugh. Sometimes these jokes get very dark—gallows humor is part and parcel of the trans experience. Other times, these jokes are about cisgender people and “gender reveals.” Lots of times, the jokes are lampshading the concept of non-binary, pretending to be confused by our own genders (let’s face it, sometimes it is confusing!). If we tell these jokes around you, a cis person, that usually means we feel safe enough to joke around about our identities with you and that we know you’ll laugh along. Not every discussion about our gender has to be serious. Lighten up and laugh with us. It makes us feel safe, too, and lets us know that you get it.
Fifth: Ask Questions (Just Not Those)
When I came out as non-binary on social media in October 2020, many of my friends either congratulated me on getting to know myself better or asked a simple question: “What pronouns should we use for you?” I was elated and somewhat unprepared. I’d started using they/them professionally (this book was already in talks when I officially came out) but hadn’t really prepared anything for my coming out. I honestly didn’t think many people would care. But my cis friends immediately demonstrated that they wanted to make sure they respected my identity. It meant a lot that people both asked questions and weren’t afraid to do so.
One benefit that the increased visibility of trans people has had on our culture is that we now have an etiquette available to us for when a friend comes out. We know—from embarrassing incidents with Katie Couric and Laverne Cox—that asking about surgeries and genitals is a no-go. We know there’s no reason to ask for a person’s dead name. The AP has style guides for talking about us in professional journalism, for goodness’ sake. We’ve made it!
But sometimes cis people read this as “you can’t ask any questions.” Like any interpersonal relationship, that’s a pretty unreasonable standard. Coming out is a big change, and it’s natural to have questions. If you’re close enough to a person, you can usually feel out if a question is OK. One of my friends texted me to ask what his kids should call me as I’ve been acting as a proto-aunt to them for years. We talked it through and decided on Entle. My sister-in-law texted me about whether or not this new identity means I’m trans. I explained to her what I’ve explained throughout this book—that sometimes it means “transition”; sometimes it doesn’t. I don’t know that I want to take testosterone. I do know I might want top surgery at some point. Does that make me trans? I don’t know right now, and that’s OK.
Imagine it this way: if you had a friend who announced a pregnancy, you would allow them to set the boundaries about what is and isn’t appropriate to ask. Follow that same guide with your transgender and non-binary friends. You’re not going to ask your friend who just gave birth how their vagina is doing unless you’re really close. So don’t ask me about mine.
Christmas 2015 was spent abroad. I was living in Oxford at the time, and a local friend invited me and our New Zealander friend back to his parents’ house for Christmas, an invitation we delightedly accepted. He lived in a small suburb of London, a couple hours’ bus ride away. Nestled in a hillside, his small village had decorations and monuments to one of its more eccentric former residents, a man who collected a menagerie of exotic animals and would ride about town in a carriage drawn by a group of zebras.
We spent Christmas Eve in a local pub, playing cribbage (which I taught them to play) and having drinks together. The pub was crowded, with groups of people home for the holidays and out for a drink to escape home for a little bit and catch up with old friends. One particular set of people was causing a commotion in the pub—even for me, as the loud American in the group, this group’s loudness was distracting. Two English women were at the center of the noise, and they were visibly drunk. One of them fell in the middle of the pub, laughing, and the other tried and failed to help her up. We tried our British best to ignore them.
Later in the evening, my pint of Coca-Cola hit me, and I went to use the facilities. At the time, I looked much like I do now, just thinner. I sported short hair with part of it shaved in what’s commonly called an undercut. I wore a sweater and jeans. I pushed open the door to the women’s room only to be greeted by a sight that’s since been burned into my mind. One of the drunk women was sitting on the toilet, pants around her ankles, with the stall door wide open. Several friends were surrounding her, as though she were in labor. The woman on the toilet saw me, took in my short hair and boyish outfit, and started screaming. I couldn’t tell everything she said through the noise, but I caught “Get out of here!” I ducked into the other stall to the noise of her friends trying to assure her, “That’s a lady!”
I was visibly shaken up when I got back to the table. I was genuinely afraid—while I hadn’t yet begun identifying as non-binary, I’d gotten a taste here of what it’s like when someone perceives you correctly and hates what you are. My friends, who are heterosexual and cisgender, comforted me as best they could and understood that my evening had been completely altered by that one instance. They affirmed that the drunk lady was in the wrong, that this was not the norm, and that I was safe with them. Having my friends be understanding of my pain and allowing me to express my fear without minimizing or dismissing it was deeply important in that moment. Being friends with trans and gender-nonconforming people means understanding that they have different fears and anxieties and sometimes read situations as threatening where you may have trouble spotting the threat. Listen and trust that when your friends say they are not safe, they are not safe, and you have a duty of care to help them in whatever way is most needed.
—
This is, of course, not a definitive list, because the queer community is not a monolith. It is a general guide for how to be better people around us. My last bit of advice would be to make sure we don’t have to always fight our own battles. I have had friends tag me in when they’re dealing with a particularly persistent string of harassment or trolling over their identity, and I will hop in and draw fire away from them. This can be done in person or online. It takes a lot for us to simply survive through the day, and having someone who is willing to stand by our side and either help us fight our own battles or fight them for us is a big boon to getting through the day.
A story went around Twitter once from a guy who was sitting at a new bar in a neighborhood he’d just moved to. He was chatting with the bartender, when another patron came in and sat down. The bartender took one look and pointed to the door: “You. Get out. Now.” The guy got up and left without so much as asking for a drink.
“Why’d you do that?” the original patron asked. “Did he do something?”
The bartender motioned to his chest and said, “He had some Nazi symbols on his jacket, and with them, you gotta cut it off quick. If you’re nice and serve him, he’ll come back around next week and start becoming a regular. Pretty soon he starts bringing his Nazi friends with him. And by then, it’s too late. You’re now the Nazi bar, and you can’t kick them out because they’re shitty, and after all, you’ve been serving them this whole time, so why stop now that it’s a bigger group? You gotta head that whole thing off at the pass.”2
The thing about being an ally or just being a good person is that it’s easy to do when the person in question is right there. It’s easy to remember, “Oh, this person is X” when you’re staring them in the face and they can implement consequences right then and there. What’s harder is ensuring that you are remaining consistently allied even if that person is not there. Bigots tend to know enough not to show their bigotry toward the marginalized people in question—at least, most of the time. They have a sense of wanting to avoid public embarrassment or shame that can help keep their bigotry in check, at least around others.
But when bigots get in groups where they think everyone around them shares their own identities, they will become more open. They will test the waters with a sly joke to see if you pick up on the more abhorrent views suggested. They will sidle into the bar wearing a jacket with a flag of Rhodesia on it. They’ll venture to say a slur or an anti-trans comment to gauge your reaction. If you don’t react or if you react positively, you’re in. You’re now friends with a bigot. Congratulations, you suck.
Shut that shit down, even if it’s hard. Even if it’s “just the way that friend is.” You have to let people know that their bigotry won’t be tolerated around you. Give them social consequences for their actions. Stand up for us when we’re not in the room. This is what it takes to commit to your queer friends.
—
Back in 2016, I called my dad the night before the election. My mom, his wife of forty-two years, had passed just two years before, and I’d thrown myself into doing work I thought would make her proud. Despite being raised as a Republican, when I turned eighteen, I registered as an independent, and by my midtwenties was voting for progressives and Democrats up and down the ticket. Dad and I never really saw eye to eye politically, but my brother and I thought Trump would at least be a dividing line. In 2016, Trump was still largely unknown, and Democrat fears over his fascist tendencies—calling for the jailing of his opponent, veiled racism surrounding claims of voter fraud—were at that time largely cast as overblown. With an open spot on the Supreme Court, my dad knew Trump would put in a pro-life candidate, and that ultimately convinced him to cast his vote for Trump in an early vote the Sunday before the election. He told me he regretted it instantly.
Four years later, the stakes of the election that could result in another four years of Trump were stark. Hundreds of thousands had died from a pandemic his administration badly mishandled with little federal response that could’ve been used for supplies. The national deficit soared, and democratic norms had crumbled. We thought, for sure, Dad couldn’t possibly be considering voting for Trump a second time. When I told him I would probably need a break from time with him if he did indeed vote for Trump a second time, he handwaved away my concerns, calling them mere political disagreement. But I pressed further, telling him about how Trump had rolled back protections for people in my queer community, that I could be left for dead because a paramedic has a “personal belief” about queer people.3 I asked him, “Doesn’t that matter to you, that these policies could be used to put me and my community in danger?”
When he hesitated, my world fell apart. He heard the catch in my voice as I asked him, “Dad, what do you believe about gay people?” He deflected, saying that he’d always treated me with kindness and that he’d been perfectly friendly with my previous girlfriend. “But do you think I’m going to hell?” I asked, knowing the answer was one I wasn’t going to like.
“I’m not sure” came his halting response down the line. In that moment, I knew I could never be as close to my father as I had been. He had been hiding how he felt about me, covering it with kindness, believing that if he just showed me he loved me enough, it would make up for the fact that he was mourning the straight, cisgender daughter he wanted me to be. He would never show up to Pride with me. He would have “problems” attending a wedding, should I ever get married.
When I got off the phone, I called my brother, crying. I told him what Dad had said and that we wouldn’t be talking for however long it took. My brother said OK, said he loves me, and that I am absolutely OK just the way I am. And most importantly, he said he would do his best to work on Dad on my behalf. My brother is a chaplain with an MDiv from a well-respected seminary and went through his own journey of coming around to accept LGBT people. He made himself a safe person to cry to about what was happening with our father because he had taken the steps to affirm and understand me as I am, as a queer person, as a non-binary person, as his friend and sibling. And he promised to put in the work to make our family a safer place for me too.
This is what the stakes are. Your choices can make the world better for our community, or complacency can make it worse. We aren’t going anywhere, but sometimes we’re just tired of having to be our own advocates all the time. You must stand in for us when we cannot stand for ourselves, hold the line when we are failing, and be willing to take on just a small bit of the risk we take in living our authentic selves every day. Love only wins if we fight for it.