The future is gender expansive

It’s June, the air is thick from the wildfires up north. As we celebrate Pride, I can’t help but feel a similar toxic air all around us. Already, 2023 has broken records for anti-trans legislation. I am a trans woman in America, and it’s getting harder and harder to breathe.

Binary or not, my gender is pretty simple: I am a woman. Though, as my friend says, I am “she/her in a they/them kinda way.” For those of us who do use gender-expansive language, however, it is a particular kind of rebellion. And — for many in our community — it is sacred.

“Black, brown, and Indigenous people across the diaspora already encompass [gender expansiveness],” said Asa Hendrix. “To not have the reverence for that is deeply insulting.”

Hendrix, a Black artist and parent from West Philadelphia, uses he and they pronouns. As someone who was raised and socialized as a Black woman, this experience still informs “how I’m able to perform gender ... how I’m able to speak to gender, and also how I’m able to affirm it.”

This affirmation, they say, is heavily linked to Black femme bodies. Gender expansiveness does not exist without them.

“‘I’m Every Woman’ is a song that’s often used in white queer spaces,” said Hendrix, “as an affirmation of gender. And then I think about how that was literally a Black woman, singing a song about all of the ways in which she is able to show up in the world.”

White queer people are “using the words and the examples of Black women and of Black femmes to affirm an experience that you’re saying is all your own, that you’re saying you’ve created all by yourself,” he adds.

“It feels like gentrification of gender,” said Tee Mohammed, another resident of West Philly. Mohammed is Black and agender and uses she, he, and they pronouns. Their presentation is androgynous, but at work as an educator, they often get lumped in with the girls.

“I refuse to name myself within this gender system because this gender system is white supremacist,” he tells me. “Therefore, no, I’m not going to play.”

Passed down through generations, the history of gender expansiveness has deep roots in nonwhite cultures, specifically in a pre-colonized world. Therefore, to commune with it is to recognize a painful but resilient past for so many people of color.

“You are summoning upon a history,” said Hendrix. “[Black people] had it before, and y’all didn’t have it. And then you took it.”

The more I learn about our history, the more I see gender expansiveness as the work of giving back what has been stolen. It is a spiritual commitment to the deconstruction of the violent world around us. It is a daily practice of undoing. It is personal, and — as I am reminded every time I read about more anti-trans legislation and policies in Florida, Texas, and Bucks County — it is also political.

In their 2022 book Black Trans Feminism, the scholar Marquis Bey writes, “We are not playing the game anymore, not altering the rules — we are leaving the field, throwing away our equipment, depriving funding from restoration efforts, and joyfully watching the stadium crumble not because we smashed it to bits but simply because we left and refused to come back.”

You don’t need to be trans to understand how a gender-expansive future works. Regardless of your race, class, sexuality, or gender — the work of undoing is open to all. However, said Hendrix, “You have to step to it with some reverence.”

“It’s like when you step up to a goddess, you’ve got to bring an offering,” he said. “You can’t just come to the altar empty-handed.”

Ultimately for Mohammed, they feel their gender isn’t the most important thing about their identity. “I am such a good friend. I’m such a good person,” she said. “I like myself. I think I have other things to give to this world than how close of a boy or girl I am on whatever day, you know?”

“It’s important now to do that work,” she adds, but “there’s so much more that we could be worrying about.”

This June, I am reminded of whose ancestors we are calling upon as we fight for a more inclusive future. Every day, they remind us we are worthy, we are loved, and we are enough. We ask, “Though we know you are too great and too many to name, what shall we call you?”

”Call us Love,” they respond. “And may we be like cool water to this burning land.”

Daisy Love James is a white trans writer, producer, and journalist who has produced more than a dozen stories for WHYY and produced the film “We Are Still Here.”