reading the intro to decolonizing trans/gender 101 this morning by b. binaohan and one thing that has been particularly insightful for me is their description of the closet as a place only white people get to inhabit - not only because it is premised on having access to a private sphere (whose origin lies in the private property relationship of colonialism & capitalism, a type of ownership only white people have historically had access to), but also that the body itself can be private, a site of individual expression that you both 1) have control over and 2) a desire to assert a liberated, enclosed, individual agency separate from the social fabric of your life (a privilege that, again, only white people have full access to).

I think this diagnosis is very helpful in revealing that a lot of white discourse about transgender identity is, if not outright biologically-, then bodily-essentialist - that gender is expressed and mediated through the individual, that the decision "to come out as trans" is a decision that an individual makes, that being transgender is a wholly private revelation disconnected from the history of gender as a social system of control, that being trans is really not a social relationship to gender, that if you don't "come out of the closet" you are not "doing gender." it reinforces cisgenderism as a natural default, something you don't do but rather simply are, in contrast to transgenderism, a type of gender expression you can only do, and only do alone by emerging from a private realm into a public one. this is in contrast to, as binoahan puts it, "being a non-white person in this world, is to immediately be rendered available for public consumption."

This is not to say that white trans people (or any trans person who engages in the practice of "coming out") are making up the social exclusion, harassment, and violence they face by publicly transitioning or announcing their transhood, but that this imagined white universal trajectory of transhood is one of individual self-actualization, a breaking away from the world to be your own individuated self - to be liberated from the world around you, to forsake an original set of (insufficient, backwards, hostile) communities for a liberated, individuated queer one. This is, again, the product of a white imaginary and a trajectory of identity only white trans people have access to. Again returning to binaohan, "because my experiences in either the trans or queer community have made it very clear that the 'community' is hostile to my existence. and so the request to sacrifice my current communities, the communities to which I properly belong, just to fulfill some (imaginary) obligation to a community that regularly lets me know how much i don't belong, seems ludicrous. but it is not just that: it creates a situation whereby not only is the white trans/gender narrative normalized but your value/goodness as a human being becomes dependent for how well you are able to locate yourself within that narrative."