Evan Urquhart

So, what I'm hearing is that this topic makes a lot of people nervous, and I should tread carefully. Challenge accepted, and away we go. 1/https://twitter.com/e_urq/status/1372198406450507778 …

In every community there are ways of thinking and speaking that come into and fall out of fashion, with new ideas complicated and sometimes supplanting older ones, only to be themselves supplanted.

In the trans community at the moment, a current way of thinking and speaking about ourselves focuses on continuity (ex: I was always a boy). 3/

An older way of speaking invoked a single dramatic, but permanent, shift (Female to Male). And a candidate for upcoming disruption/replacement would be a focus on fluidity (evolving gender identity, all places along the journey respected). 4/

tangent: Notice how I don't have a single concise phrase to invoke that last example? That's one way we know it's an upcoming/challenging narrative, but not a currently dominant one. 5/

None of these narratives are "wrong" in the sense that every one resonates with some people. None of them are "right" in the sense that they don't resonate with everyone. 6/

As a stigmatized minority, we can't expect any of these to be invincible. Remember, transphobes hate us for who we are, not for how we talk about it. (It doesn't mean the process of addressing probs in old language is bad, just don't expect it to have an endpoint.) 7/

So, when I say that the narrative that resonates most with my experience is that of having a medical condition, I'm not saying it's a narrative without problems, I'm not saying I'm some 'true trans', and I'm not attempting to diminish the experiences of others. 8/