**CAVEAT: IF YOU DISAGREE WITH THE FOLLOWING, FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT’S HOLY, PLEASE DO NOT ENGAGE WITH ME ON THE TOPIC. Maybe you think I’m being far-fetched, that I’m making false equivalences. Too bad.  Suck it up, and move on, because I do not debate subjects that involve my friends being negated from existence if your side “wins.” Trans rights are human rights, full stop. Thank you.**

Everything Solnit writes makes me think. Even when I agree with her completely, her words add new levels of understanding. Her recent repost of her 2020 Guardian article lead me to rattle off the following:

Accents of pronunciation suggest that what many of us take as physically innate is often very malleable. No one is born with an accent. We are merely born with the capacity to make sounds, and we train our bodies (mouths, lungs, vocal cords) to produce the sounds that endear us to our environment. Children mimic their adults’ speech patterns, whatever those happen to be.  Adults pick up local accents without any intention to do so.  It’s what we do, and we’re built to do it with whatever speech patterns exist in our environment.

And we change our accents. Maybe not to the point of indistinguishability, but we alter our speech all the time. If you think you would never change the way you speak, and certainly never to “impress someone,” tell me right now you use the same language at the bar with your best friends that you use with your grandmother. Very few of us can say yes. Just like you don’t scream “FUCK” in church (if this is the sort of thing you do happen to scream in your church, lemme know, I have questions) you maybe don’t drop as many ‘aitches’ or slur your vowels when you’re sitting in front of a university admissions panel.

Our voices are part of our bodies. They don’t come from our brains alone, but from an interaction between our brains and bodies.  Our vocal chords, which we can reshape at will. Reshape your body at will.

What’s my point?

That we change our bodies.

All the time.

On purpose.

Things about ourselves which seem physically unchanging, aren’t, and we change them on purpose.

Our performance of gender can be one of those things. 

And clinging to the illusion of gender essentialism is a waste of everyone’s time.