Quick 🧵 When I came out as trans my freelance career died.
I'd always struggled (poverty/subtler pre-coming out transmisogyny), but places that had taken my work for years suddenly said they didn't need anything on "trans issues" (I'm an experienced journalist who's written extensively on history)
When someone talks about whether you can separate someone from their work, I know the someone they’re talking about is a white man.
Marginalized creators (including young women who are that man’s victims) are never allowed to have their work considered apart from their marginalization.
When that wasn't the response, word got back to me that I was now considered "too controversial." Not anything specific I'd said (my views hadn't, at that time, shifted much) just...my existence. None of these publications were (publicly, at least) conservative.
I'd like to say things have improved but while there's been a smattering of places that have taken my work since it's still pretty desperate. Even among those who occasionally hire trans writers both my name and multiple other aspects of my self and work made me too...other, easily disposable.
So yes, no matter how extensive our experience, our work is never going to be separate from our marginalizations. This applies from the bigger names down to working poor writers like me (though it hits even harder here)...
A few months ago I finished a novella-sized history of medieval peasant revolts that's one of the few general audience works to seriously delve into their organizing/tactics.
Around the same time I learned that someone in the field had referred to me as "David, you know, the woman one."
I am very proud of being trans. I don't want editors or anyone else to ignore that. The fact a major part of my career collapsed due to bigotry and nearly put me on the street - and that my work's still referred to in terms of me being Other is some goddamn bullshit. And it's very, very common.
Final, insidious part is that years after I came out, when I'd scrabbled together some freelance work again I faced another serious setback... for working with survivors to call out a serial rapist who was influential in activism circles.
Abuse culture and marginalization are heavily intertwined.
