I spend a lot of time thinking about collective liberation, as I imagine many of us do as community advocates, organizers, and leaders here in Seattle. We talk about collective and Trans liberation all the time. It’s in our mission statements. It’s in our grant proposals. It’s in our speeches. It’s become one of the defining values of our movements.
But lately, I’ve found myself wondering if we’re all talking about the same thing. The more I reflect on it, the more I wonder if we’ve confused liberation with legitimacy.
Somewhere along the way, it feels like we stopped asking how to free ourselves from the constraints of patriarchal, colonial gender systems and started asking how to become more legible within them. Our vision of Trans liberation seems to have become less about expanding the possibilities of gender and more about proving we belong within categories that were never built for us in the first place.
These thoughts have been sitting with me for a long time. They come on the heels of years of reflection, conversations, and experiences, both outside of our community and within it.
A few years ago, my gender identity became source material for a staff meeting at a well-known local Trans organization — a meeting to discuss whether I deserved to receive an award from a different well-known local woman-/femme-centered organization that had already chosen to recognize my contributions to the community, despite knowing that I openly and proudly identify as a Trans Nonbinary femme. The question became whether my being Nonbinary somehow meant that I was taking an opportunity away from a Black Trans woman, or whether I belonged in a space recognizing women and femmes at all.
To be fair, what struck me most wasn’t that people had questions. It was that those questions were being answered without me. No one at that organization had ever sat down with me to ask how I understood my own gender. No one had asked how my West African identity, my cultural background as an indigenous African (Grebo Tribe), or my cultural understanding of gender informed the way I move through the world. No one had asked what being Nonbinary meant to me.
Instead, they did what so many of us in America have been conditioned to do, whether we’re cisgender or Transgender. They collectively assigned rigid rules to gender and then used those to determine who I am, who I’m not, where I belong, if I belong, and what I deserve. My identity wasn’t simply accepted as something for me to define and determine — even though we routinely argue that self-determination is fundamental to the dignity and autonomy of Trans and gender-diverse people. It became something other people felt entitled to discuss, analyze, and determine for me, and without me.
More recently, during a conflict with another Trans person in community, my gender identity again became a target. Rather than the disagreement remaining about issues of communication and the misalignment of working styles between us, my legitimacy as a Nonbinary Trans person was questioned out of anger. Whatever the motivation, the outcome was one I suspect was familiar to both of us, even if we didn’t both recognize it in the moment: gender policing became a tool of harm.
Identities
Neither of those situations made me question who I am. They did, however, make me question us collectively. How do communities built in response to exclusion begin reproducing exclusion themselves? How do people who know the pain and violence of having their identities questioned become comfortable doing so to others?
And perhaps most importantly: Is there only one way to be Trans?
I am Black. I am African. I am Trans. I am Nonbinary. I am (but haven’t always been) femme presenting.
None of those identities compete with one another. They inform one another. They shape how I move through the world and how the world moves around me. And so, I don’t experience those identities as contradictions.
But I’ve come to realize that many of the perspectives that have taken hold within our communities do.
Too often, I’ve watched people try to reconcile my existence by deciding which parts of me are more “real” than others. People rarely question whether I am Black. They may stereotype it, misunderstand it, or project onto it, but they rarely question whether it exists. My Africanness is acknowledged, though often misunderstood or questioned because Americans have a bit of history problem, and my name isn’t traditionally African (Mooney being a remnant of Americo-Liberian settlers and Irish indentured servant solidarity, i.e., freed African and Afro-Caribbeans who immigrated to Liberia in the 19th century).
But my Transness, and more specifically my Nonbinary identity, is frequently treated as though it requires additional explanation, additional evidence, or additional permission due to the way I express my gender at this moment.
That has led me to ponder a different question: Not simply whether there is only one way to be Trans but why so many of us have come to believe there should be?
Over the last few years, I’ve watched this conversation unfold everywhere: podcasts, Threads, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram lives, conference panels, and inside our own community spaces. The language changes, but the anxiety underneath it rarely does.
Who is really Trans? Is dysphoria required? Are Nonbinary people actually Trans? Should “Transgender” and “Transsexual” mean different things? Has the community become “too broad”?
Hell, even questions like, “Can you really call yourself a Trans woman if you have a beard?” despite the fact that many cis women also have facial hair (shout-out to our moms, aunties, and grandmas) or the persistent erasure of Trans men’s experiences and voices in our own communities.
At a time when our rights are under relentless attack, we’ve increasingly turned inward. Instead of asking how we can protect and support one another, we’ve begun debating who belongs.
Conversations in our community have increasingly shifted toward determining who is “really” Trans. Those often narrow the definition of transness by centering dysphoria, hormones, surgery, medical transition, and passing within a binary framework as the primary measures of legitimacy.
This is where transmedicalism enters the conversation.
At its core, transmedicalism reproduces the idea that there are fixed, legitimate ways of being a man or a woman and that our authenticity is measured by how closely we approximate those ideals. Within this perspective, Nonbinary identities are categorically invalid, as they exist outside of the binary but also a white Queer conspiracy to co-opt the lived experiences of binary Trans people, like gender pod people.
Transmedicalism does this while operating within a socially constructed, Western colonial framework of gender that many of us inherited without ever questioning where it came from.
To be clear, I am not arguing that identifying as Transsexual, pursuing medical transition, or distinguishing between different Trans experiences is inherently harmful. For many people, those distinctions are deeply meaningful and accurately describe their lived realities. The problem arises when one pathway to affirm Transness becomes the pathway, when one story becomes the standard by which every other is measured, and when identities that fall outside that narrative are treated as less authentic, less serious, or less deserving of validation.
To me, transmedicalism doesn’t seek to challenge or liberate us from the gender binary. It preserves the architecture of cis-normativity while changing who gets to occupy it. It functions as a tool of white supremacy and patriarchy. And you know what they say about “the master’s tools.”
I’m also arguing that making medical transition the primary measure of authentic transness limits the very freedom Trans liberation seeks to create. The harm doesn’t stop with those of us whose identities are questioned because we’re Nonbinary or don’t fit conventional gender expectations. Even people like me — someone who has had gender-affirming surgery and has been on and off hormones — can still find our legitimacy challenged when our pronouns, presentation, or understanding of gender fall outside someone else’s limited (or stunted, depending on who you ask) framework.
Nonbinary people are harmed when our existence is treated as an incomplete version of someone else’s transition. Trans people whose bodies, access to healthcare, disability, race, age, or gender expression don’t align with cis-normative expectations are harmed when they’re told they haven’t transitioned “enough” to be believed. Binary Trans people are harmed too.
Inherited ideas
But the damage doesn’t end there.
Because Transmedicalism doesn’t dismantle the binary that has been used to marginalize binary Trans people either; it reinforces it. It also asks them to seek legitimacy within the very framework that has insisted all along that they could never truly be the men or women they know themselves to be. It teaches us that safety comes through proximity to cis-normativity, instead of questioning why cis-normativity should be the measure of anyone’s humanity or authenticity in the first place.
It can even convince our community that another Trans person’s refusal to conform to cis-normativity somehow threatens our own legitimacy or safety, when our collective existence is what transphobes consider the actual threat, no matter what we look like or present as.
I don’t believe that’s because Trans people are uniquely exclusionary. I think it’s because all of us have inherited ideas about gender that were shaped by white supremacy, colonialism, patriarchy, and cis-normativity. Those systems have taught us that proximity to power offers protection, and that if we can become just legible enough, just respectable enough, just “normal” enough, we might be spared from violence.
But they also teach us something far more insidious: that when proximity isn’t possible, policing those with even less power can become another way to seek safety, belonging, or status. Oppressive systems have always relied on this dynamic. They encourage us to believe that drawing sharper lines between ourselves and those deemed “too much,” “too different,” or “too outside” somehow secures our own place within the hierarchy.
I’ve come to believe that’s part of what we’re witnessing within our own community. Rather than dismantling the logic of domination and extractive power over, we sometimes unknowingly reproduce it. We mistake gatekeeping for self-preservation. We confuse exclusion with protection. And in doing so, we begin seeking solidarity in ways that mirror the very systems we claim to resist, finding connection not through our shared humanity but through determining who belongs, who doesn’t, and who sits lower in the hierarchy than we do.
The uncomfortable truth is that hierarchy doesn’t disappear simply because a community is marginalized. It often reorganizes itself. Someone who sits near the bottom of one hierarchy may find themselves near the top of another, and the temptation to protect that position can be incredibly powerful.
As Black and Brown people, many of us already understand this dynamic in other parts of our lives. We recognize respectability politics and how white supremacy has encouraged us to police one another’s’ language, joy, creativity, beauty, culture, and authenticity in exchange for proximity to acceptance. Many of us understand how those systems ask us to become more acceptable to whiteness, rather than more ourselves.
Yet I don’t think we always recognize how those same forces shape the way we think about gender identity, even in Trans communities. We are not immune to internalized transphobia simply because we are Trans. We are not immune to colonial and patriarchal ideas about gender simply because we are not the gender we were assigned at birth. And the unpopular truth? Many of us project our internalized discomfort, pain, shame, trauma, hatred, hunger for hierarchy and power onto others in our own community.
Effects of history
But I don’t believe Transmedicalism emerged in a vacuum.
To understand why communities — built in response to exclusion — can begin reproducing exclusion themselves, we have to ask where our ideas about gender came from in the first place.
We cannot separate this conversation from colonialism.
European colonialism stole and occupied land and exported systems of law, religion, medicine, and gender across the globe. Many African, Asian, and Indigenous societies held understandings of gender that differed from the rigid binary imposed through colonial rule and forced religion. Those differences weren’t uniform, and they weren’t identical across cultures, but they do serve to remind us that today’s dominant, Western gender framework is not the only one that has ever existed. Maybe they also remind us that reliance on frameworks that remove us from our ancestral knowledge fortify the prison of self-policing that we’ve found ourselves in as a community.
One day colonialism showed up and demanded order.
Then it demanded classification. It demanded that bodies be sorted into categories that served power.
It imposed binary thinking as well. Either man or woman. Either civilized or savage. Either normal or abnormal. Either deserving or undeserving.
I cannot stress this enough: rigid categories have always served power. The more neatly people can be sorted into boxes, the easier it becomes to decide who belongs, who doesn’t, and who deserves access to rights, resources, and humanity.
Those same systems racialized Black bodies. Black women and femmes have long been masculinized. Black men have been hypermasculinized. Black bodies have been measured, classified, studied, pathologized, and denied the authority to define themselves.
That history matters, because contemporary debates about Nonbinary identities are also debates about whether we’re willing to loosen our grip on the binary logic that colonialism taught us to trust, even while fully recognizing that as Queer people, Trans and gender-diverse people, that we exist outside various normative boxes.
Femininity
And perhaps nowhere is that history more visible than in the policing of Black femininity. Long before Trans women became the political obsession of this moment, Black women had already been living under this microscope.
Michelle Obama. Serena Williams. Caster Semenya.
Three different women. Three different lives. The same question:
“Are you actually a woman? Does your womanhood count? Is your femininity valid?”
Black women and femmes have spent generations being told they are too loud, too muscular, too dark, too athletic, too strong, too masculine, too Black to embody the version of femininity white supremacy declared legitimate.
Black women and femmes have often been the canary in the coal mine for Transphobia. The mechanisms were already there. The targets expanded.
As a Black, African, Nonbinary person who, at this moment, is femme-presenting, there has never been a time when my existence wasn’t already in conflict with cis-normative expectations. Long before I had language to describe my gender, my body was already being interpreted by other people. Please know that the truth of my existence (and the truth of so many Black women and femmes) is there has never been a time when being called a “man” wasn’t weaponized against me. There has never been a time when the T-slur wasn’t used to try to humiliate or threaten me. There has never been a time when violence wasn’t justified through assumptions about my body. There has never been a time when my femininity wasn’t measured against standards rooted in white womanhood and found lacking because I am Black.
My existence has always been at odds with cisness, because racialized ideas about gender never had room for someone like me. That’s one of the reasons why I reject the idea that my Nonbinary identity and femme presentation somehow distances me from transness. I did not become marginalized when I found the word “Nonbinary.” I found language for a reality I had already been living socially, culturally, and historically. That history is one of the reasons I cannot separate my Blackness from my Transness.
Personal truth
And it is also why discovering I have an intersex variation complicated this conversation even further. Through medical care and long conversations with my mother about medical experiences I remembered but never fully understood, I learned that I have nonclassical congenital adrenal hyperplasia (NCCAH), an intersex variation. It answered questions I had carried for years.
But it also left me with a feeling that made me deeply uncomfortable. Part of me wondered whether people would finally believe me now. Whether this diagnosis would somehow make my gender make more sense to other people. Whether I would finally be “Trans enough.” And then I realized how violating and dehumanizing that thought really was, because it revealed that even I had begun to confuse medical legitimacy with personal truth.
Why should I have to disclose my medical history to be believed? Why should I feel pressure to open my medical records in order for people to respect my humanity? My diagnosis did not make me Nonbinary. It also did not create my identity.
And I want to be careful here, because being Intersex and Trans are not interchangeable experiences: Intersex people are not inherently Trans, and Trans people are not inherently Intersex. Some people are both; many are one or the other. Those are distinct experiences with distinct histories, communities, and forms of oppression.
My point isn’t that discovering I’m Intersex somehow explains or validates my transness. It’s that I immediately caught myself wondering whether other people would finally see my gender as more legitimate because there was now something medical they could point to. That realization stopped me in my tracks. Because it revealed just how deeply even I have internalized the belief that identity becomes more believable when it can be medically documented.
Gender identity
Gender is more complicated than that. Gender identity is, in many ways, invisible. It carries context, subtext, history, memory, culture, spirituality, relationships, embodiment, and countless experiences that no scan, blood test, chromosome analysis, or intake form could ever fully capture.
Most of us are also never fully privy to another person’s relationship with their own gender, because we haven’t lived their life. We inherit different histories, cultures, traumas, joys. We’ve developed different relationships to our bodies, different relationships to language, different relationships to ourselves. And y’all, that complexity isn’t a flaw in gender. It is the nature of being human.
Which is why I find it so unsettling that we’ve become comfortable flattening gender into medically or socially recognizable categories within a patriarchal framework that determines who is “really” Trans.
Medical systems have an important role in providing care, but we should never adapt systems we know to be deeply transphobic, racist, sexist, ableist, fatphobic, etc., as the ultimate arbiters of identity. That simply doesn’t make sense. If anything, our willingness to police one another exposes just how deeply we’ve internalized the belief that our bodies must either be medically validated or made legible within a Western, colonial, cis-normative framework before our identities are worthy of belief. That isn’t just a logic imposed on us by the society we live in but also one that can be leveraged against us by institutions, by the people around us, and at times, by one another.
But we are inherently worthy because we are human, and we exist.
Human experience
For me, Trans liberation and my transness has never been about becoming more palatable for cis people or even other Trans people to understand. It has never been about producing enough evidence to satisfy someone else’s imagination or rules. It has never been about becoming more acceptable. It has always been about refusing to shrink myself into someone else’s understanding of who I should be and challenging the very white supremacy and its connection to colonialism, patriarchy, and cis-normativity that taught us that no matter how authentically we live our truth, it will never be authentic enough for a system that was never designed to support or recognize our existence. No amount of social conditioning, trauma, respectability, passing, or conformity will ever change that about this system.
The truth is, for transphobes, there has never been a “right” way for us to exist. Their preferred version of our existence is one in which we don’t exist at all.
When I say I am Nonbinary, I am not taking anything away from a Trans woman or her experience. Nor am I co-opting her personal experience of transness or transsexuality. I am not diminishing the experience of a Trans man. I am not erasing anyone’s trauma, dysphoria, oppression, or joy. I am adding another human experience to the many Trans and gender-expansive experiences that already exist and have existed across cultures and throughout history. I am living the legacy of my ancestors and honoring my own history and spirituality by recognizing that my relationship to gender did not begin nor end with medical transition (even if it has included it), nor was it created by colonialism. It predates both, and my ancestors understood that long before Western medicine or colonial rule attempted to confine human experience into rigid categories.
I allow the joy and freedom of my ancestors to live in my fingertips, to sway my hips, and to greet me each morning with the reminder that who I am, how I feel, and the relationship I have with my gender and with life itself is fluid. It exists beyond the boxes that colonialism and white supremacy insist I fight to fit inside, all while reminding me that I could never truly belong there in the first place.
My existence is not subtraction. It is addition. Just as there is no one way to be Black, I refuse to believe there is only one way to be Trans.
Because liberation isn’t about making ourselves fit more neatly into inherited categories. It’s about asking whether those categories deserve the power we’ve given them in the first place.
So I return to the question that started all of this: Is there only one way to be Trans?
If our liberation depends on proving there is only one right way to be Trans, then I have to wonder whether what we’re pursuing is rooted in liberation at all.
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