Yasmine Tadross

I don't know what to write about most days Because every day it feels harder and harder to grasp for air my soul slowly draining as I encounter a sea of whiteness when I leave my doorstep Most days I don't know what type of person I should occupy Every time I see a group of more than 4 people, I have the urgency to leave I don't enjoy company anymore I don't want to leave my house Within Predominantly White Institutions, There is a need for marginalized people to pit against each other in order to claim a seat at the table I always never understood that because that is just capitalism For me, I occupy multiple realms, I am Afro Egyptian Alternative Trans Woman Hairy Femmine human person daughter sister Low-income first generation, I am me I am defined by my lineage, not by labels I will never compete with you because the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house My foremothers are Audre Lorde and Marsha P Johnson Blood-derived from t

These days, I wake up in the morning and all I know is a deep anger for the world  and my surroundings filled with fair trade coffee and loving the idea of girls like me but discarding me when I am fully visible  My rage is never valued  As an Afro- Egyptian, black, hairy, trans woman  I often think that all I am to be is angry  I keep thinking that the world will fail me So I figured that I might beat them to the punch  I will just reject every human who encounters me  Drag them before they even say anything The only way that love can come about is if we validate our own rage When we fucking scream before we reach a state of compassion My rage will not be silenced Neither the rage of intersectionally marginalized people because silence never protects us I have lost most of my hope for this country But I love this country enough, though it does not love me back I love it enough to critique the living shit out so I can help change it

In moments when the printer get jammed with paper I bang my head against the wall to numb the pain The thoughts of certain people help me carry on through the day To you, Your blue eyes, thick black frame glasses, and brown hair Sitting across from you on Saturday mornings drinking allowed me to be calm when we say goodbye I always seem to extend the hug longer and hold onto you because I am afraid what it would be like when you're gone I know we can never be more than friends but, I think I like being friends I know that whatever will happen, you will be with me I just hope you feel the same about me To my mothers, sisters, and siblings on the East Coast, Thank you for being one of the few women to truly embrace me From the baggage to the light blue lipstick Dunkin Donut coffee runs That brings joy to time that was an uphill battle Fantasizing about what tiny house we should buy and where in Colorado should we put You all have shown me what unconditional love l

Welcome to my self-destruction, Where my brother tells me that he cares, but uses me for his own gain he benefits from my own failures so he can access my parent's love, when he sees my successes he discredits them by finding the slightest imperfections and capitalizing the flaws for his profits Welcome to my self-destruction, Where friends neglect me in the name of progress They care when it suits them, not when urgent I wear my heart on my sleeve I bear my brown hairy womanhood to them but seem to focus on the blue lipstick that I put on Very few actually look at me, I mean look at me Not just the blue and purple dresses, brown hair wigs, and lipstick but the bags under my eyes, the mornings where I can barely get out of bed, the times which I look in the mirror and not even recognize what I am or hating myself so much to the point I start to hate others At least with my brother, he is open about what he does Dear world, You have all failed me and I have f

Why do we deny ourselves pain? Rage is a figment of our imagination The idea of taking an old brown wooden chair and bash it towards our oppressors' backs seems like a dream in which one day, I can take a deep breath without my arms and my legs twitching the idea that the people who have called me a faggot, sand nigger, disgusting, and terrorist the people who have told my mom to neglect her Arabic tongue and have tried to put her in her place To lay down on the cold, blue, concrete floor drenched in their blood But Rage is something only few can access Mom and I are nothing, but similar in other facets We both have been told to keep our chins up, back straight, and always smile even when your body is too numb to have the lips stretched out into a smile We both don't have a choice At times the only times I get to see the real her is when she calls her mother in Egypt She misses her Spiced Fava Beans, her homemade bread, her willingness to love everyone That is t

I am just a fetish, When a white boy tried to play with my trauma in order to have sex with me He told me that I was beautiful for my light brown skin as he never wanted to give me pleasure  because like capitalism, he commodified my brown body for an orgasm and left me vulnerable on the white, cracked sidewalk    I am just a fetish, when straight cisgender white and women of color only care about my lipstick How I look on stage, but not when I talk they wonder how I look, but not how I am going to get home tonight  When I tell them that people say I am ugly, disgusting, and a fa***t they just say that I am beautiful and move on to the next thing as if I am worthy of my own violence I am just a fetish, When people compare my womanhood to Caitlyn Jenner  Even though she is like the countless other white women  who told my mother to only speak English I am just a fetish, When I am up on stage  Heart on my sleeve tears coming down my eyes  A

I feel like you all don't actually see me I live in a stream of double consciousness in which I take charge on one end but I become obedient when I am with you all I am full of rage, impatient, and invisible The latter occurs even when I am fully myself I understand that emotion is not actually expressed within our dynamic We swipe everything under the rug and hope that it will cover the baggage and the trauma When the pile gets to full, we just find a bigger rug to hold everything in Sorrow is a western thing Because westerners have extracted our resources I am raised in a Coptic Christian Egyptian Household, Where I am told to embrace being male, heterosexual, whitewashed and having my face stuffed with food Go to church every Sunday and talk to a priest who has hypnotized my parents to thinking that they are the reason I am an Afro- Egyptian Brown Queer Hairy Transgender woman I don't want to go to church to disappoint you, but because I am traumatized by the d

To all the straight cis guys who liked me, congratulations, you are not actually straight!!! There is a possibility that you may have an interest in women who don't have vaginas Gold Star for you! But here is a catch, I was chatting with this guy 25 young, brown, perfectly trimmed beard and eyebrows; works at a tech firm and lives in Brooklyn sounds a little like gentrification right? But I like the hipster type, the thick frame glasses, and your fair trade coffee, it just turns me on but we were talking and he discusses how rim jobs and body embracing turns him on he asked me if I could send him photos of me more dressed up because the more feminine I am, the better he wanted my midnight blue lipstick kisses all over him I thought well, I could avoid the kissing part and just write "I am not a fetish all over your forehead" Honey, note this, these clothes and makeup is just a facade When I take them all off and you see the disconnected hairy brown body,

When my body is reduced to body parts, When gender is to the surface, People go straight to you body part, because that is the only thing that is validating, As I came out of the whom, I was birth-assigned male only to come to terms with the fact that I am a woman, The discrimination is prevalent, But the one thing that gets to me Is when a mother covers the eyes of your young daughter in order to protect her from me When I go to the bathroom, woman's eyes turns into shock horror because I somehow invaded their space you see, once your body is marked at birth, one can't get outside of it Each day it gets harder to fight because I don't know a day where I am truly whole This brown skin and this aching disconnected self I will fight for myself and for my Queer and trans siblings of color In my own way because rallies are too numbing for me We will strut one step at a time and let DT45 know that we are still here Your group of people can not

I live in a world where the representation is greater than the reality, My body is limited to my lipstick and a pill that one injects every day When neither is on me my body can't obtain the experience My identity goes beyond a pussy hat I have African Roots with the Arabic tongue I hear the drums rain And my grandmother's spicy foul medemas is in my blood With our daily bread When one can't find community, They spend money that they don't have because the only thing capitalism is good for is feeding off the lonely I was born in a post 9/11 nonnormative female body Where my lifespan does not go beyond the age of 24 Our image is only seen as five slashes and a gunshot to the head and bliss is just an illusion My liberation does involve going to a big city Where white gay men think your obsessed with RuPaul's Drag Race and your identity revolves around spending money on Maybelline cosmetics When one can't find community, You just grab the bits

You look in the mirror, One is not lovable That notion is only catered to some people  and lives are put at stake just to claim that label As I see the reflection, Brown skin, Slightly wide-eyed and the matte Blue lipstick The more I put on, the more I seem white   No one can pin point what you are Because the brown skin does not correlate with the aesthetic  As I move through the world like tetras, bending every facet of myself to fit in The ones who accept me see me as desirable only when I look like everyone on RuPaul’s Drag Race Dear Straight people, That is not how trans people look like  People like me struggle to get out of bed, if people like me to have one So buckle up on this cluster fuck ride that is myself Through the hyper femininity and the barebones To embracing my Nubian ancestors  as we set conquest on reclaiming our brownness  as Colonization took it away from us