“I think that there’s this hierarchy that gets drawn between queer femininities or like, trans femininities as being somehow inferior or less legitimate than ‘womanhood,’ because we’re always seen as sort of ‘impostering’ to be women. I feel like the way I understand my gender is that I am both a man and a woman and neither a man nor a woman. I’m outside of these entire categories. I think they see me and they see me as a failure. The very core of misogyny against trans people, or transmisogyny, is that we’re always masquerading as something we’re not, that we always just put on this dress to trick someone, and so therefore we are always seen as worthy of our violence. That’s why people don’t stand up for us. It’s kind of like, ‘You chose to be that way, you have to take the brunt of it...’ The world I’m fighting for is where we stop making assumptions around everything, where we allow people to self-narrate their bodies. I think that’s a profoundly radical act, because we exist in a western colonial system that’s invested in creating norms about every single thing, rather than actually recognizing none of us fit into norms. My politics is: ‘I am me. I am Alok, and Alok exists outside of your colonial, white supremacist, heteronormative gender binary.’ I don’t have to be a woman or a man to be coherent, and I think that threatens so much of the fabric of this society. I wasn’t born in the wrong body, I was born in the wrong world. I see my hair as part of my femininity. If I have a beard and lipstick, that’s part of who I am. Why do we always put the onus on people to change their bodies and the onus on people to prove or authenticate themselves to other people, versus have society shift their norms? What I’m fighting for in a world is that we can just say, ‘You know what, my body is on my own terms.’ I think what’s also frustrating is that we ask trans people to have all the answers. How the hell am I supposed to have all the answers when I grew up in a world that erased my existence? I’m still figuring it out. But I have people in my life, I have lovers in my life, I have friends in my life who are willing to work through that with me, and that’s been the most liberating part about becoming politically active.”
— Alok Vaid-Menon