There's this expectation that medical transition is the only legitimate form of transition. Now, I do plan to medically transition as a part of my journey but access to healthcare is a privilege in America. It shouldn't be but it is.

I didn’t have immediate access to medical transition and there’s lots of trans people being policed in states where that's illegal in, or they're low income, and they don't have access to medical transition.

In terms of athletics, there's this very deeply racist and classist element where the NCAA and Olympic regulations require medical transition.

That's just a deeply transphobic and reductionist approach to take. A lot of trans athletes are being denied these places that they've earned because they lack ‘enough medical transition’ or because they're not ‘visibly trans’ or because they're not ‘trans enough’ for cis people in these positions of power to deem them trans.

It’s like this sports organizations want to play God, and you see that in a lot of spaces. It really just comes down to misogyny such as reproductive rights and policing of women and gender nonconforming folks' bodies.

In all these spaces, it is all about power that informs our collective consciousness around the way we understand transness because most people who would even consider themselves liberal still have a very binary and trans medicalist perspective of who gets respect in the trans community.

These perspectives inform our policies and inform how we treat each other. It becomes the root of transphobia and it's painful.

[As told to @Ragi Gupta — to be continued tomorrow]