As artists and organizers we are not interested in “trans equality” or “trans rights,” we are invested in trans liberation. Trans equality requires trans and gender nonconforming people to incorporate ourselves into racist, cisgender heteronormative systems. Trans rights require trans people to ask permission from cisgender society for dignity and safety that we are already entitled to – we understand our politics to be less about empowering trans people and more about dismantling a society that makes our wellbeing so impossible. Trans rights means gaining access to an oppressive system. Trans justice on the other hand is about centering the leadership of trans and gender nonconforming people of color and demanding that society as a whole shift its paradigms, politics, and ideas about gender and sexuality. Trans liberation is about creating our own reality on our own terms.

We understand that the gender binary is the root cause of our oppression as trans and gender nonconforming people. The gender binary is a system of thinking and policing that maintains that there are only two genders (“male” and “female”), and they are fundamentally oppositional. “Masculinity” and “femininity,” then have to exist as polar opposites and cannot co-exist in tandem. Those of us who transgress the binary are policed back into it at every level: by our families, by state-sanctioned identity documents, by police, by prisons, by violence.

The current gender binary was created as a system of social control, white supremacy, and colonialism. Enforcing white gender norms on Indigenous communities, and portraying Black, Indigenous, and/or people of color as “backward” with regard to gender norms, sexuality and family is central to maintaining exploitation and control. Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color are already gender nonconforming in a system where gender was created for and produced through whiteness and its constructed either/or binaries. Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color are already seen as parodies of white masculinity and white femininity regardless of gender— we are never permitted the status afforded to “real” white gender. Dismantling the gender binary, then, is fundamental to our aspirations of decolonization and racial justice. Gender self-determination is a fundamental to dismantling colonialism and white supremacy.