When WAVAW was established in 1982, our founding purpose was to address the devastating gap in support services for survivors of sexualized violence. One woman operating a Crisis Line in her basement wanted to ensure that survivors could access emotional support and information while navigating healing and systems. After more than 30 years of serving self-identified cis and trans women, we could no longer ignore the need for WAVAW to fill another, long-standing gap in our services: the need for support services to extend to survivors of all marginalized genders, including trans and gender diverse survivors who were denied access to support services and pushed to the margins of feminist spaces and communities. 

 In 2018, we expanded our service delivery mandate beyond cis and trans women to be inclusive of all trans, nonbinary, Two-Spirit and gender diverse survivors. But, we quickly discovered that  expanding our services required more than simply changing our mandate and developing new programming – It meant examining our identity within a sector largely composed of ‘women’s spaces’. We started to describe our gender scope as, “people of marginalized genders”. The purpose of our new language is to name the way that rape culture punishes and polices both cis women and gender diverse people –  not always in the same ways, but always in ways which increase our likelihood of experiencing sexualized violence. Using the language of “marginalized genders” to include “trans and cis women, as well as Two Spirit, Trans, and nonbinary people” is our way of resisting the attempt at an exhaustive list of all genders we serve, recognizing that language is constantly evolving, and we don’t want to leave anyone out simply because we haven’t learned the right words yet. 

Over the past four years, we have continued our work with gender diverse communities, providing support to other organizations on inclusive practices, and sharing tangible tools for making change. During this time we’ve refined our thinking about “people of marginalized genders” and what it means to re-align feminism and gender diverse community. 

We have learned that it is not enough to simply include gender diverse people in services originally designed by and for cis women. Women of colour, such as Kimberle Crenshaw, have taught us that equity work requires us to re-center those we want to better serve, and to re-think how our services can meet their needs.

Including gender diverse people in our work does not mean we have checked a box and no longer need to talk about gender. A gender-neutral lens lacks the analysis of gender and rape culture, and ignores the reality that gender diverse people especially trans women of colour, experience exponentially higher rates of sexualized violence than cis men or cis women. To re-center gender diverse survivors in our work, we must expand on our feminist praxis, and expose/lay bare the connections between gender and violence. Equity for gender diverse people means talking about gender more, not less.

Language is powerful. But developing new language as an approach to equity has its strengths and limitations. This is what we have learned that by using language like “people of marginalized genders”:

• We can draw on the strength of naming commonalities, but we cannot conflate people’s experiences and ignore differences
• We invite gender diverse people and cis women to the table and recognize that their experiences of sexualized violence and gender oppression are very different
• We must be cautious of defaulting to cissexism and heterosexism when we share space between gender diverse people and cis women
• We must be explicitly informed by transmisogyny and transphobia when we talk about violence, or else we run the risk of implicitly centering only the experiences of cis women
• We cannot ignore the different experiences of privileges and oppressions within gender diverse communities, and the power dynamics these create within community
• We must explicitly center the experiences of trans women of colour and avoid defaulting to the experiences of white trans masculine people within gender diverse communities

Feminism has tried to build safety by creating gendered spaces, but by creating “women’s only spaces” we ignore the harm done to people of marginalized genders because power exists in all spaces. Gendered spaces are not free from racism, white supremacy, and colonization. We have learned that no gender mandate can do the work to create safety by itself; we must create safety intentionally, explicitly, and continuously. Safety is not created by assuming a single shared experience and ignoring the multitude of ways people navigate the world differently. Safety is created by action.

“People of marginalized genders” is a call to action! Gender diverse people have always been an integral part of feminism. However, the feminist movement has frequently harmed gender diverse people both by explicit exclusion and hate, and by passively dismissing their needs and contributions in favor of centering cis women. We hope that this language can help re-align feminism with gender diverse people, and start to provide a path forward which is reflective of the feminist intent to dismantle patriarchy to the benefit of everyone impacted by it. 

For cis people, this means showing up as allies to end transmisogyny and transphobia everywhere, especially within feminism. It also means understanding the specific ways that transmisogyny and transphobia can manifest as sexualized violence, which are often different than the experiences of cis women. For gender diverse people, we hope it means seeing our reality better reflected in feminist services. 

Finally, we want to humbly offer “people of marginalized genders” as a contribution to the movement and our work towards trans inclusive feminism. We hope that our community and allies will use it, refine it, and improve on it as we learn together. Gender diverse and cis feminists all have a stake in dismantling patriarchy and gender oppression, and we hope that language which speaks to this common goal is a step into solidarity.