We met years ago on a jobsite. Both ironworkers, both lesbian, both masc, and I her apprentice. We gradually became friends, running into each other occasionally on jobsites, seeing each other at union functions, and eventually running tables at queer and trans career fairs, first one that a friend organized, then one of my own. I trusted her then, and still do now. She's the kind of woman who listens in that deeper sense, doesn't shy away from heavy topics, but also knows how to celebrate wins. She's one of my best friends.

She came out to celebrate my birthday months back at our city's local lesbian bar. It was my first time there in a dress and full face instead of my standard button up or utilitarian drip, and I was nervous as hell until she showed up. The girl brought me flowers, a gift card, and the best vibes, covering my drinks and dancing with me til I forgot my inhibitions and relaxed. We were taking a break from dancing outside and catching up when she asked me how my dating life was going.

I stumbled through a diatribe of petty woes. First starting with my nerves about being femme at the bar, and how there was an almost possessive bent to other women's interest that I was unaccustomed to in my usual masculine wear. The rest had been standard masc lesbian blues: feeling used after hookups with women who had no interest in giving back, the pain of finding out women were cheating on another with me once or twice, and some gripes about women consistently touching my body in ways that left me feeling disembodied. She listened and held space for me with genuine empathy and understanding in spite of not having lived some of those experiences.

However when I told her most of these encounters, whether they ended in disappointment or not, started with a woman approaching me, asking my name, complimenting me, and sometimes even buying me a drink, her face immediately lit up.

"Wow, you've got it made though! I'm so glad women are appreciating you like they should!"

It was at this point that I asked her how her dating world was, and she smiled wide and opened up about the woman she'd been seeing recently, and how the relationship felt healing in a way she hadn't anticipated.

"Oh man, before we got together I think I had forgotten what it felt like to be a woman. I mean every girl I've dated always treats me like a man. I buy the gifts, I plan surprises, I validate her beauty, I make sure to show up to events with her looking handsome, I pay for dates, but they'd never reciprocate, and more, sometimes their demands would just escalate and escalate, it was exhausting. This girl though, she reminds me how beautiful I am, she buys me little things to remind me I matter, the way she talks to me and dotes on me is hitting me in a place I'd forgotten was there. I feel like I'm being courted for the first time in over a decade."

I immediately felt both so happy for her and angry on her behalf and embarrassed by the trivial problems I'd been relating to her moments earlier. As a trans woman who is lesbian, I understand the experience of my bar being through the floor. I've slept with a lot of terf lesbians, with a lot of ignorant lesbians, and also with a lot of women who were toxic, and yet I clung to out of my own low sense of self worth as a trans woman.

However, to be withheld from affection, from minimal appreciation, and from even the barest acknowledgement of one's womanhood is beyond the pale to me. I'd heard horror stories from black femmes before about being pressured to take on a masculine role by white girlfriends, and am appalled by that treatment. The way this treatment is amplified into a complete denial of womanhood for black and masculine sapphics is shocking, disgusting, and something we all need to bear in mind, especially in these next four years.

Womanhood comes with a degree of oppression and dehumanization that is appalling. It is amplified by being gender non-conforming moreso. It is amplified by being lesbian or queer moreso as well. It is amplified by being trans moreso as well. Above all of these things, it will always be amplified the most by blackness, brownness, and indigeneity, and that is not up for debate.

In my experience of being a woman who is very visibly trans, 4/5 times when a woman on the street gives me a genuine smile, stops to compliment me, or asks me about my fashion, they have been black, brown, or indigenous. 2/3 times I have been approached by a woman at my lesbian bar and offered a compliment, a dance, or a drink, that woman has been black, brown, or indigenous. Hell, even leaving womanhood and queerness aside for a moment, almost all the men who taught me my trade as a union ironworker, who made efforts to pronoun me correctly, and who tried to forge friendships with me when I was an unknown apprentice were black, hispanic, and indigenous men.

I want to reiterate for everyone who's not keeping up, that the safety and care I have received from black, brown, and indigenous straight men, straight women, and queer women was at a risk to them. Even as a trans woman, my whiteness will always extend to me more privilege than most of them, more power to abuse a dynamic, and more potential for misunderstanding on my end. Yet, knowing this these folks made efforts to uplift me because they all understand surviving genocide, institutional oppression, and the experience of having a body our society considers suspect and criminal in ways that are very similar to my white trans experience, but cut infinitely deeper.

I want to remind all of us, terrified as we are for what comes in the next four years, that women of color both without and within our communities are at the deepest risk they have ever been, and must be prioritized in our spaces, in our organizing efforts, and of course in our partnerships and friendships. I myself am about to reach out to my friend and wish her a happy MLK day and check in on her feelings. I invite all my white sapphic peers to do the same for all the women of color in your life, be they friend, family, partner, or spouse. My trans womanhood has been enclosed in safety and support by my black, brown, and indigenous siblings for years now, and I have a duty and a yearning to return the favor.