ABSTRACT
The chapter shows how trans identities are differently positioned within feminist organizing across the global North and global south. It highlights how bio-essentialist anti-trans frameworks cross national and cultural borders. Drawing from the wisdom of Audre Lorde’s erotics offers a starting place for considering transgender and transmasculine identities as practices of decolonization. Lorde’s understanding of the erotic is not to be confused with the merely sexual, which she claims to be diametrically opposed to the erotic. Dissenting from feminism’s normalizing practices in Chiapas has meant embodying sovereign erotic power and allowing a sense of true accountability to self and others to become our inner guide. The term “sovereign erotic” comes from Quo-Li Driskill’s revolutionary work on first Nations two-spirit and decolonizing identities that also borrows from Lorde.
