To be is to become. Change is the only constant in life, in love, in the evolution of humanity and all species. It is inevitable. Fighting against change is counterproductive; molding or shaping change is only logical. To explore, to endeavor to find humanity’s pontentialities is the objective of humans — finding limits and constructed barriers of the species and pushing past them, both as individuals and a collective. To break free. Of course, not without consideration for lesser conscious and capable species, but as a role explicitly with that in mind. As Uncle Ben told Peter, “With great power comes great responsibility.” And we bear a responsibility to our planet and the ecosystems here to maintain their considerations.
Humanity is one species. Gender, race, sexuality are all constructed. The human need for control spawned a need to categorize, taxonomize, and characterize things, creatures, humans. This leads to unlearning and breaking away, with new constructs to rebuke and liberate one’s self from societal norms. In other words, change occurs, and the change that exists as an inevitability can be shaped.
To be is to become. Being cisgendered is not objectively wrong in itself or a wrong way to be. However, cisgender as the norm or default to be is. Ethical consensual monogamy as a choice is not inherently oppressive, but it being a default makes it so. As with being heterosexual, but when these things are our norms, our de facto states of being, they leave no room to become. When it’s default or normal, it operates through the lens of compulsion, mandate, hierarchy, repression, and stagnation to change and becoming. Conservatism as such is the pure definition of resistance to change and as such is antithetical to being because to be is to become, to transgress, to change.
So, to be and to become takes smashing paradigms and societal constructs of control, ideas of normalcy, regarding things objectively, and recognizing the change or fluidity of all things. This leads me to one of the main points of this essay, “everyone is gay,” as Kurt Cobain says. And no one is, as no one is not. Everyone is sexual, and no one is. Everyone is trans, and no one is. Humanity exists in potentialities, as everything changes, as I’ve stated so. In endless potentialities, endless possibilities, so it’s a possibility any given human is asexual, trans, nonbinary, straight, gay, monogamous, and also possibly not.
If it’s a possibility looked at through a lens of freedom, autonomy and choice, change, fluidity, objectivity, and openness and love, this is a very rational statement. If looked at through the lens of the oppressors, constructed systems of control, obstinance to change, fear of it, a force that which is not to be feared, well then, what I said sounds abhorrent. The oppressor fears the queer community because it fears change, it fears these carefully created constructs put in place to control the population will crumble and expose the state for the small, feeble, petulant child it is (no offense to children, you are better than them).
This leads to my second and biggest point. We must abandon ALL constructs and systems of control. Gender, sexuality, race, government. All of it. Even our constructed places we’ve created to break from any given norm poses a threat, the ability to isolate and oppress. It causes gatekeeping and harm to the very folks we seek to liberate with our ideas. Aces break from sexuality to be and assert their right to and existence, yet because purity, whiteness, and heteronormativity is to be aspired to, it can isolate those who DO engage in sex, or are disabled as they seek to not be diagnosed. The queer community as a whole can keep out aces who are cisgendered. The trans community has its own expectations, as does race. Consensual non monags can have an air of superiority.
The point is, in trying to liberate, we assimilate, we break away our being, then try to get it close to the standard normal. As close as possible. Though we always end up confused when our lives are not radically different, just because we have representation and visiblity.
But we’d need no visibility if we weren’t shrouded in this blanket of a white supremacist, capitalist, neo-Christian colonial state. The very concept of normalcy bleeds into an everyday, even as we break away! Then you have a normal gay or normal poly person, a normal Asian, a gold star lesbian, a normal Black person, etc. In this race to be recognized, to be, we stuff ourselves into a box and stifle our ability to become. We also stifle other’s ability to be and become. Whiteness and purity are already out of reach for most of us, but to find a community of folks we identify with and STILL not be enough is devastating. There does not need to be a normal, and we must remember that.
Which leads me to, whiteness is a disease. It is. Whiteness, white supremacy, capital governments, normalcy, purity, etc. Whiteness, the social construct created by white people, is the problem. But further than that, constructs at ALL are problematic. Even the most well meaning, inclusive construct is not favorable to us. Everything is fluid, nothing is permanent, everything is made to change. We progress or transgress. To take a bit from Trans Femme Futures, “we are who we are, and we’re nothing that we’re not becoming together.” Together, we’ll find it, but we must first smash all of it.
If whiteness is the disease, normalcy, status quo, standards, PURITY, then the only cure is not to just run counter to, but to undo, a normal. My lover once said [while quoting a zine], “dressing in bloc and destroying everything is the queerest thing you can do.” I find that true. Smash all constructs. Abolish gender, sexuality, race, borders, hierarchy, and all! Embrace anarchy.
Everything and everyone is becoming. Nothing that is just IS, it’s also NOT. And thus nothing can be identified, but what it’s just not or is perceived as being now, because to be is to become. I assert that in this sense, the natural way of things, of humans, is trans. Someone once said that God gave humans part in creation, how we turn grapes into wine, wheat into bread, grains into alcohol, and so on. So why would, if you subscribe to the idea of a deity, it NOT allow for humans to create, even within themselves?
To a more logical, demystified outlook, the natural state of things never just is social order. Humans, plants, and animals are all in a state of flux, of becoming, that’s simple evolution. And as with evolution, a base was randomly provided, and life changed it, became. We see this state, and it relates to social order as things are NOW. They have not always been. A couple hundred years ago, Blacks were seen as 3/4 of a human. Before that, the world was flat and the center of the universe. Monarchs ruled because they said a deity blessed them to. Today is far from that, in a sense.
Things never were just “is,” states change and exist in flux, change is the only constant. And if Murray Bookchin is to be believed, as history can seemingly show, change has always been in a direction of freedom. Evolution has constantly tried to free humans. There have been forces and authors against such change, of course, but the heading is freedom and liberation from. Freedom from. I believe freedom from ALL constructs.
So just as the world once was a way, or governments structured one way, then changed, I argue the state of “is” is insufficient for any rational, autonomous human to just say it “IS” and accept that. So with regards to humans, a child with a penis or vagina — some anatomical part that has been used to define the whole of a human’s existence, attaching to it baggage, stigmas, and societal and personal gendered roles, without choice — does not constitute the child being male forever, nor female. If to be is to become, the part is irrelevant, but if you MUST attach meaning to it, it ONLY means as much as the human it’s attached to ascribes meaning to it. The appendage does not obligate the child to only dress one way, or only bear children, etc.
The natural order of things is change, flux, evolving, and becoming. To stagnate a human from the womb and prescribe damn near its whole life in mere seconds is asinine. It’s antithetical to progress, evolution, and it’s just as fascist republicans say, “NOT natural.” It’s in fact, so far from natural and godly, republicans should flog themselves and repent.
Being trans is the natural state of being, as you are becoming, masc or female, androgynous, outlaw. You may perhaps identify how you appear to society, but in doing away with prescribed genders at birth, we do away with it all, rules and dress too, so then perhaps there’s no need for an identifier. I assert again, everyone is trans, everyone is gay, AND everyone is not, we are beings, being and becoming.
We’re put in a box, pegged at birth, as Freddie Mercury once said, “I’ve got to break free!” We must break free from the chains of all constructs! And there’s only one form of pegging I like, and that too is a choice and consent, not ascribed at birth.
[Click the audio to hear Malik read the following.]
Queer folk are a very real existential threat to the status quo. The trans agenda is real. The worlds we make, are making, are meant to usurp the violence we face now. Not all queers have radical politics, but queer politics are always radical.
During the AIDS epidemic, a whole community of folks were left to fend for themselves, forced to support and survive, relying only on one another. Even before that, trans care relying on each other, being excluded, invisibilized in a movement for homosexual visibility. And decades later, in 2025, as Trump’s MAGA hat America tried to invisibilize a community and deny medicalized care, trans folks are left, still surviving and thriving together, making and building worlds rooted in communalism and mutual aid, and care we can materialize, devoid at the state. But this type of operation outside of the state just will not do.
It’s one thing to seek assimilation against the state’s gatekeeping of normal and hierarchy because at least those things are recognized as inherent, but should we not just envision the world outside of the state, but make it exist inside of that world we build, together, caring for one another? Should this world reject social standards and norms within the state and reject the desire to assimilate, and rather destroy and usurp social structures, well, that world might just look attractive to more and more people who now see that there’s an alternative to the current order of things.
The nuclear family is out. The family bond is stickers[?], and water doesn’t hold, we see and feel the love of people we aren’t related to, but who mother us, who care for us as we are. They see us. We dispel the notion of playing into a gendered, hierarchical, capitalist hellscape, and rather live outside of it. These simple ideas, expressed in trans femme care in the queer community, where we are questioning the very foundations upon which capitalism was built in there and thrive, are dangerous to the fascist regime that wants assimilation as it’s touted as what is to be aspired to be to.
Queerness, transness, is arguably the most dangerous politics, and at the same time, the most hopeful for our future. A future based in rooted in trans care and ethics, in queer politics is the best way, to me. We can go about world making without repeating the sentences of those that came before us,. We must reject all social hierarchical systems, and we need to the experience and know how to care for one another physical, mental, and emotional capacities laterally with openness.
No other ethics, I believe has crossed all systems of control, race, sex, gender, relationships, family structure, capital, and all of the facets of oppression, the intersectionality of queerness and the experience in care laterally, oppositional to the government, is what I believe can save us and take us into this new world. We must destroy this one, but I believe the only ones who can get us through the transition to the next, is trans femme ethics, with queer politics.
Yes, the trans agenda is real, and it is the threat. I also argue, it’s the salvation too.