To My Fellow White Others.

• Author: Strangio, Chase
• Position: A transgender white woman talks about her experiences

One day, while waiting for a friend at Penn Station in New York City, I was approached by an older man. I was leaning against the wall outside of TGI Fridays when he grabbed my crotch and asked, "How much?"

The fact of my gender transgression signaled to this person that I was waiting to engage in an exchange of sex for goods. That, in turn, suggested to him that my body was available to him to touch without my consent.

The exchange was upsetting and yet, I was not surprised. It was not the first time I had been assumed to be a sex worker while out in public, nor was it even close to the first time I had been touched without consent. Each intrusion has had its own permanence. Sometimes they coordinate to diminish my sense of self, other times they fade into the distance and I reclaim the movement of my body in the world.

My trans body, by existing as it does, destabilizes conventional assumptions about binary sexual difference. The illegibility of a body with a petite frame, pubescent facial hair, flat chest, tight pants, and higher pitched voice invites stares. I become something to be figured out and then, once people's gazes are fixed, to be sexualized, controlled, surveilled, consumed, dominated.

I am The Other in a society that needs binaries, that deploys notions of gender difference to sustain patriarchal norms. I am transgender and transgressive, and I am part of a community that is dying because of our threat to the "order of things" as they are. I have experienced deep anguish, discrimination, trauma, discomfort, and violence connected to this transgression of convention. I have watched my friends and community members die by suicide, preventable illness, and violence because transgression is punished with corrective assaults on the opportunities we need to survive.

To be trans in 2019 is to wonder whether the government will announce on any given day its intention to excise you from federal law; to endure the consistent and tired suggestion that your existence is up for debate; to experience internal and external alienation from your physical body; and, at the same time to thrive in ways unimagined ten years ago because of the relentless fight of our transcestors, mostly of color, who died so many of us could live.

None of these various struggles as I experience them, however, change the fact that I am white and trans. And the attacks on my body--individual and systemic--have not taken and could not take away the many ways that I...