Talia Bhatt

“An oft-overlooked factor in the appeal of hate movements is that they feel good. The politics of male grievance has wide appeal to men who, faced with an increasingly hostile world that is unashamedly denying them the economic security their fathers enjoyed, turn to misogyny as an outlet. Sublimating impotence, despair, and rage into organized hate, directed at a target you can actually hurt, who is actually within reach—unlike the faraway, untouchable concept of ‘the ruling class’—provides an immediate psychic relief that “class-consciousness” simply cannot rival.”
― Talia Bhatt, Trans/Rad/Fem

“To the Western academic, the subjectivity and activism of transfeminized Third-Worlders is a distant concern next to their rhetorical utility as a ‘venerated’, vaunted “Third-Sex”, casting “primitive yet Enlightened” non-Western cultures as curious gender-practitioners from whom the West has so much to learn. All the while, the ways in which Third-Sexed populations like hijra identify with womanhood and organize for legal recognition as women are utterly elided; as Serano grimly notes of Nanda’s Gender Diversity in Whipping Girl, the “gender-diversity” of the Orientalized non-Western culture is a sacred cow for many academics who concern themselves with queerness and (supposedly) feminism, a crucial cudgel with which to beat and berate the “medicalized”, “Western” transsexual. Transition healthcare that is socio-economically out of reach for many Third World trans women is derided as “imperialism” while the transmisogynistic model of “Third-Sexing”, first imposed by our own cultures and then legitimized by Western academics, is simply considered scholarship. Many Westerners, it seems, would happily let my sisters languish without means or care just to reinforce their own worldviews.”
― Talia Bhatt, Trans/Rad/Fem