This Trans Femme Has Never Felt Part of The Sisterhood

This image was originally posted to Flickr by elements_of_this_world at https://flickr.com/photos/135717563@N05/32056333643 and modified to include a trans flag gradient.

I remember one of the first times I went into a female bathroom. It was in a library, and an older woman came in with a walker. She looked me up and down and then loudly asked if this was the women’s bathroom. I don’t know if she was being cruel or simply oblivious, but it made me feel like shit.

Since then, I have never felt comfortable in women’s spaces. Even as my hair and boobs grew out and people started referring to me as ma’am and miss, there was always a hesitancy I had: Am I femme enough?

Do I deserve to be here?

I see so many people calling me and my fellow trans peers sisters, but sometimes it’s hard to believe that these words are anything more than talk.

Can trans people be part of the sisterhood?

One of the stereotypes I grew up on is the idea of the “sisterhood.” I would see this camaraderie among some, though certainly not all, women in movies (and in real life, as I grew up with sisters). Women would go into the bathroom together to gossip and provide aid when men were unnecessarily cruel. They would counsel each other through the misogyny of modern society. There was a sense of care I witnessed, always from afar. As proclaimed by the Emerge Woman Magazine:

“Sisterhood refers to the bond created between women who share a deep sense of empathy, understanding and support for one another. It goes beyond biological or familial ties and encompasses a long-lasting, unconditional friendship characterized by mutual respect, trust, and loyalty. Sisterhood promotes unity among women encouraging them to uplift each other towards greatness.”

A naive part of me expected to be included in this bond once my transition became more “passable” (i.e., when I was more readily read as a femme), but I have never felt it. There is a chill in the air I feel around women: a nervousness that one false move or word will lead to my discrediting, to being gendered a man or even an “It”.

And part of that anxiety is mine — something I must continue to work through.

However, it’s also how this alleged sisterhood sometimes operates that makes me uncomfortable, particularly from the actions I see from my fellow white women. When I go into the women’s bathroom now, as I have done for years, I see a lot of cruelty in those conversations by the mirror: a camaraderie often built around tearing each other down.

The other day, I was at the gym, terrified that I was showing too much stubble and that my T-shirt was unwomanly, only to hear two femmes gossiping about the women around them. They said something to the effect that wearing tight clothing was unsightly. That one woman was not wearing a bra for the benefit of the men around her. I wondered, briefly, if they were talking about me. I had forgotten to wear a bra that day. I had decided to go to the gym anyway, telling myself that no one would care — that I was engaging in a nasty case of the spotlight effect.

But clearly, people notice when such deviations happen.

People comment on my appearance all the time. They point to me during dinners and afternoon walks. They whisper about me from across the room, wondering which box I fall into, which myth I satisfy. They tell me which bathroom to use and sometimes even disagree with themselves over it. And many of my worst critics are women.

I am not the only one who feels the sting of such comments. Many trans people describe the sense of urgency they have when it comes to learning how to maintain their appearance. As the trans video essayist Natalie Wynn remarked in her video Opulence: “…that pain basically spurred me to work on my glow-up like it was the cure for cancer, like my life depended on it, which is how it felt.”

To become a white trans sister, I often feel like this is the only option: to forgo my complaints and wants and cling to the white supremacist standard of beauty. To work on that glow-up, the hair, the voice, the body — to be the same.

That doesn’t feel like sisterhood as much as it does a type of death.

This marginalization is common

It would be a mistake, however, to attribute this sense of marginalization to just white trans women — by no means is it only our problem. All women at the margins feel it.

The Black feminist scholar bell hooks wrote an entire book on how white women marginalized Black women in “feminist” spaces. Her book title was itself a reference to a famous speech by Sojourner Truth, talking in part about how Black women were being excluded from the conversation of womanhood and feminism (see Ain’t I a Woman?). As she said in that speech in 1851:

“That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man — when I could get it — and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?”

It was a stunning condemnation of the racism in then-contemporary spaces that we remember to this day because it still resonates. Writing about the racist sexism she felt during second-wave feminism in her book, bell hooks noted that this sense of exclusion from white feminist women was often done under the banner of unity (i.e., what we could call sisterhood). White women feminists would attempt to talk about the problems of all women and inevitably exclude Black women in the process. As hooks writes:

“In most of their writing, the white American woman’s experience is made synonymous with the American woman’s experience. While it is in no way racist for any author to write a book exclusively about white women, it is fundamentally racist for books to be published that focus solely on the American white woman’s experience in which that experience is assumed to be the American woman’s experience.”

As we can see, women on the margins have been talking for a long time about the line where sisterhood begins and ends and how often some of the worst gatekeeping has come from their fellow “sisters” — a trend that is still very much alive in the present. In the words of Amber Wardell, Ph.D. in her 2024 essay Is “Sisterhood” What We Need?:

“…American women of all identities have been raised under white supremacy and patriarchy. Many of us have not done the necessary work to deconstruct these indoctrinated ideas. As a result, even exclusively female spaces cannot be entirely safe, especially for women with multiple interlocking marginalized identities. Indeed, women’s spaces are often replete with various -phobias and -isms that continue to make non-white, trans, queer, disabled, neurodiverse, or economically disadvantaged women feel unwelcome and misunderstood.”

It is hard to believe that such a sisterhood includes all women when often many “women” spaces exclude human differences in the name of “unity”.

An unsisterly conclusion

I don’t think the sisterhood has ever truly existed. The limiting nature of the sisterhood is not something uniquely part of my transgender experience but innate to patriarchy itself. The unity of sisterhood is not so much about liberation as it seems to be about conformity: about silencing those you disagree with and calling it peace.

Amber Wardell, Ph.D., mentions in her essay that true solidarity comes not in sisterhood but in coalitions, where different groups come together to achieve common goals.

“Coalition in the intersectional feminist movement focuses on the attainment of common objectives that center the needs of women with multiple marginalized identities, who are resisting oppression on multiple fronts. Understanding that women’s liberation is inextricably linked to racial, social, and class equality, coalitions forsake the futile pursuit of sisterhood and focus instead on dismantling all systems of oppression that affect women.”

These coalitions are fragile moments on the periphery where we are brave enough (and often maligned enough) to say yes, all women, all femmes belong here. We will not judge trans women, Black women, poor women, disabled women, fat women, immigrant women, and the many other multitudes of women that exist because we recognize that the only way forward is together.

It is the privileged — the rich, the white, the non-disabled, the cisgendered, the straight, etc.— who need to hold their judgment and ask if they would rather have their sisterhood or their coalition.

For they cannot have both.