This essay is reprinted from Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Donald Trump's America and was written in response to the Women's March following Trump's election. However, the dynamics it describes continues to compromise the feminist movement, whether implicitly or explicitly, on the first anniversary of the Women's March, during a weekend when hundreds of thousands have once again gathered across the U.S. and abroad to protest Trump. — MT

I wanted to be sad, but I was too angry. Over the weeks after Donald Trump’s election, that anger steadily shifted toward alienation as I watched cisgender women across America find comfort in each other as they planned the Women’s March in Washington, an event that over time grew to emphasize emotional relief over radical action. Being an immigrant trans woman of color, I’m used to adapting to the mood of the majority. But from both collective and personal experience, I’d learned that comfort and despair are emotions that must be deferred out of necessity in times of grave crisis, and to be wary of protests that don’t engage in confrontation, because people in power have no motive to change their ways unless they feel threatened. While I’ve taken to writing in part because there are so few trans women of color like me who have overcome the systemic discrimination that pervades our lives, and recognize the need to amplify the voices of my trans siblings, I am keenly aware that it has been through directly confronting injustice that my communities have survived and persisted.

Trans women and gender-nonconforming femmes have always been marginalized at best if not outright excluded from the American feminist movement. Even among cisgender women who don’t believe that someone needs to be born with a vagina to be a woman, we continue to be seen not as potential leaders with unique knowledge, but either as victims or as tokens to include, as long as our opinions don’t stray too far from the majority. Cisgender women who lead other women boldly are lauded; transgender women are accused of behaving like men, and those of us who are feminine but don’t consider ourselves women are commonly excluded altogether. These exclusions are particularly glaring in light of Trump, as trans women and femmes who have a long collective and individual history of battling for our rights are relegated to the margins of discussions about how feminists should fight this unjust administration.

Ironically, trans women’s position among feminists is analogous to Hillary Clinton’s position among the American electorate, even other white, cisgender women like her. In both cases, it’s not simply the assumption that women are inferior that’s to blame, but more precisely a gender essentialism that dictates how men and women are supposed to be have to be deemed good and respectable. Clinton’s loss, despite the fact that she was exceedingly better qualified than Trump, mirrors the way trans women and femmes are marginalized in post-Trump feminism, despite our significantly greater experience of fighting oppression, compared to the vast majority of white cisgender women.

In Clinton’s case, the proof of this gender essentialism is that despite all the feminist movement has achieved, 53 percent of white women voted for a blatant misogynist in Trump, who repeatedly expressed disregard for women’s bodies and hostility toward our minds. They did so because they agreed — at least implicitly — with Trump’s assessment of Clinton in the third presidential debate as a “nasty woman.”

According to gender norms that Trump espouses, a woman is "nasty" simply for disagreeing with him, much less occupying the ultimate position of power as U.S. president. Despite decades of progress by the feminist movement to expand the reach of women’s rights and abilities, there is still a deeply ingrained belief that a woman shouldn’t be too loud, too smart, or too ambitious. This is why a large proportion of women persisted in seeing Clinton as ruthless and untrustworthy while granting Trump every excuse for behavior that was far more objectionable.