Womanhood is not assigned. It is lived, sacred, and sovereign.
A statement co-written by the Transfuturist Collective and the Ad’iyah Collective. With immense gratitude to Sol Elias and Sabreen.
What we are witnessing across the so-called United States and the United Kingdom is not a new wave of transmisogyny — it is the ongoing, global enforcement of colonial gender regimes.
In the U.S., the current federal administration has made its stance clear: trans people should not exist anywhere. In an official statement for National Child Abuse Prevention Month, it named “gender ideology” as one of the most “prevalent forms of child abuse.” This is genocidal rhetoric. In the U.K., the highest court has ruled that “woman” can only legally mean someone assigned female at birth — erasing the lives and realities of trans women and reaffirming the state’s authority over our bodies.
These attacks are not coincidental. Trans people — and especially trans women and trans feminine people broadly — have always been among the first targets of fascist, colonial violence. These are the logics that justify the sterilization of intersex children, that criminalize bodily autonomy, that disappear us into prisons, detention centers, and extermination camps. We reject the weaponization of biology to define, constrain, or delegitimize trans existence. The use of biology as a colonial tool — to police bodies, erase cultures, and uphold imperial power — has always been about control, not truth.
Our lives and genders are not deviations from nature — they are part of it. Trans people have always existed, across histories, cultures, and cosmologies. Science, when unmanipulated by colonial agendas, affirms this truth. It is not biology that erases us, but the junk science used to uphold imperial norms. Our bodies — whether we take hormones, undergo surgeries, or not — are not problems to solve. They are sacred expressions of autonomy. For those of us who are Muslim, we affirm this clearly: trans people have a God-ordained right to life, to dignity, and to self-determination.
As the Ad'iyah Collective, we affirm: womanhood is not a legal category. It is not a medical condition. It is not assigned. It is lived.
Womanhood is forged in struggle, in care, in bloodlines and kinship. It is expansive, sacred, and sovereign.
Our feminism is decolonial. It is rooted in the long fight for reproductive justice — the right to live and raise our families in safety, to decide if and how we birth, to determine the course of our lives free from state control. These are not rights the state can grant us - or weaponize biology to deny us. These are ancestral imperatives.
We honor our trans mothers, sisters, aunties, daughters, and elders – those here with us, and those whose names have been taken by violence, neglect, and state abandonment. We do not and will never recognize the authority of any government, court, or institution to determine our legitimacy. They do not know us — and they cannot name us. To our people: now is the time to move beyond words. Recommit to material solidarity with all trans people — not just in principle, but in practice. That means money. That means protection. That means showing up when it’s hard, not just when it’s visible. That means redistributing resources — not out of charity, but out of duty.
Our futures are already being built — right now — by trans hands. We encourage the Ad’iyah community to support the work of the following organizations:
The Transfuturist Collective (U.S.)
Trans Kids Deserve Better (U.K.)
KHJN Trans Health Advocacy (Kentucky, U.S.)
Mermaids (U.K.)
Mariposas Sin Fronteras (Arizona, U.S.)
FiveForFive (U.K.)
Southern Fried Queer Pride (Georgia, U.S.)
Dua for trans Women’s Safety & Protection
Ya Allah,
Protector of the oppressed,
Bear witness to our truth.
Bless the hands of our trans mothers,
the strength of our sisters,
the wisdom of our aunties,
the fire of our daughters,
and the spirits of our beloved dead.
Make their bodies safe,
their names honored,
their lives long.
Break every chain of empire,
Erase every law that seeks to disappear them.
Ameen.
