Transgenderism and disability rights

Found via Trinity at The Strangest Alchemy, this post by Eli Clare, which is a transcript of Eli's keynote speech at the FORGE Forward Conference. Read it for the gorgeous poetry. Or the connections Eli's made between transgenderism and the disability rights movement.

Eli begins:

All my life as a genderqueer crip, I have puzzled my way through bodily difference, struggling with my own shame and love, other people’s pity and hatred. Yesterday I helped facilitate the Disability Gathering here at the conference. We spent the day, disabled people and our allies telling stories, laughing, crying, and sitting quiet. It reminded me of the incredible importance of community, how bodily difference means one thing in isolation and quite another when we come together, finding ourselves reflected in each other’s stories.

My first experience of queerness—of bodily difference—centered, not upon sexuality or gender, but upon disability. Early on I understood that my body was irrevocably different from my neighbors, classmates, playmates, siblings: shaky, off balance, speech hard to understand, a body that moved slow, wrists cocked at odd angles, muscles knotted with tremors. But really, I am telling a kind of lie, a half truth. Irrevocably different would have meant one thing. Bad, wrong, broken, in need of repair meant quite another. I heard these every day as my classmates called retard, monkey, defect, as nearly everyone I met gawked at me, as my parents grew impatient with my clumsiness. Irrevocably different would have been easy compared to this. I stored the taunting, gawking, isolation in my bones; they became the marrow, my first experience of bodily difference.

.... But really I want to delve beyond the rhetoric we often don’t pay attention to. Delve into the myriad of lived bodily differences here in this room tonight and think hard about three lessons I’ve learned from the disability rights movement. The first is about naming, the second, about coming out and disclosure, the third, about living in our familiar, ordinary bodies.

I could try and summarize what he talks about, or explain how brilliantly he manages to explain what has been a vague unarticulated barrier to my own fuller understanding of transgenderism, but I really need to think on it for awhile. I will say this much: the connections Eli makes between the lived bodily experiences of disability and transgenderism show implicitly why anti-trans hate is hating on us all.