nonbinary is the present

Nonbinary people are not just the *future* we are the present! Relegating us to the future erases how we are here NOW living & creating. It absolves people of their complicity in our active erasure. We are not theoretical or metaphorical, we are real! With little to no institutional support we design our own fashion & make our own media & write our own scripts because the beauty & entertainment industry remain wedded to the #fakenews that there are only two genders & sexes. What (little) progress trans representation has made has been by appealing to the gender binary & actively suppressing gender non-conformity. All the while our aesthetics are mined for the mainstream while our bodies continue to be maligned. We are not the problem — a society which disappears & demonizes gender non-conformity is! When will you see images of us beyond your news feeds? When will you see us beyond your jokes & memes & projections? When will you recognize our beauty, our history, and our worth? We have been here. Now it’s time for you to catch up darling.

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affirmations for trans & nonbinary people

there is no such thing as “fake trans” or not being trans “enough.”

gender is not necessarily what we look like, it is so much more expansive than our appearance. there are infinite ways to be & your narrative and body belong to you. harassment, discrimination, and violence are very real so no one has the right to judge you for the decisions you make regarding visibility & safety.

you do not have to take hormones, have surgery, change your name in order for your identity to be legitimate. you do not always have to have known, you do not have to dress a certain way, you do not have to wear makeup (or not wear makeup).

there is no one way to transition, there is just your way!

clothing, shoes, accessories, makeup, hair, pronouns, names should mean what you want them to mean, not what other people say. you are allowed to be confused, you don’t always have to have known. you can change your mind, your identity, your pronouns any time you feel like it.

i love & admire how complex you are & how you contain multitudes. you do not have to downplay your masculinity for your femininity to be legitimate; you do not have to compromise your femininity for your masculinity to be legitimate.

you are not a fad, trend, or aesthetic. there have always been people like us. you are not an imposter, joke, or prop. you are not a delusion, burden, or mistake. you are not a problem — the gender binary is. you are not a joke — gender norms are. you deserve people in your life who experience you for you & respect you for your entirety.

you are the way you are & that’s enough! 

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fight for the excess

what i need you to understand is that violence against gender non-conforming people works precisely by saying “this is not about gender, this is about your choice to look like a fool.”

our genders are already always understood as superficial, excessive & illegitimate. we are already rendered as props, caricatures, mistakes. we are presented as character foils for *real* womanhood/manhood & *real* transness. they are authentic because they are not us.

the narrative becomes that we “choose” to be this way whereas others just “are.” not only do we “choose,” but we “enjoy.” we ask for it, we want it. why else would we look so “ridiculous?” “i’m ok with women but this is...too much.” we are always positioned as the problem & never their transmisogyny.

how impossible it is for them to realize that maybe we are “this” for OURSELVES. how impossible it is for them to realize that maybe their own genders aren’t as natural as they think?

i wonder often what it would feel like to have the privilege of essence? to not have to argue for my existence? i wonder what it would mean to be believed for the constant harassment i endure & not ridiculed when i name it? i wonder what a feminism that actually cared about we — the abject, the failed, the undesirable — would look like?

i believe that people should be able to look like whatever they want without sacrificing their body autonomy. i believe that how we dress & adorn ourselves does not give permission to others abuse us. i believe that we should be able to be as queer, as gender non-conforming, as flamboyant, as effeminate as we want without fearing for our safety. i believe that we shouldn’t have to be normal, respectable, or conventional in order to be worthy of protection & respect.

i believe in fighting for the excess, the absurd, the peculiar, the “ugly,” the “too much” because i believe that these norms are the joke not me. i believe that our freedom should not be contingent on conformity. we are complex, weird, celestial. we are evolving, becoming, manifesting. we do not fail, we transcend! why do you fear your transcendence?

why have we been taught to fear the very things that have the potential to set us free?

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how to heal when hunted?

every time i pick myself up i am shoved down again. how can you heal when you are hunted?

there is a direct correlation between loving myself & being hated for it.

they tell us to practice self-love but they do not defend us when we are punished for it.

i have been trying my best to eliminate the distance between the world i want (need) & the world that masquerades as normal. trying my best to create my own intimate revolution in my self & with my friends, to value the degraded & demeaned — vulnerability, interdependence, imperfection — to demand reciprocity & intimacy & complexity. to delight, no relish, in our contradiction & superfluousness & our often fraught & relentless attempting.

but to do this work of becoming, to have the audacity to say “my body belongs to me” in a world that believes my body belongs to the gender binary...often feels impossible.

it feels impossible when the feminists sound like the misogynists sound like the doctors sound like the politicians sound like the police sound like the parents sound like the voice inside our head: reducing us to our genitalia, making us the problem not them.

feels impossible when beauty becomes a prerequisite for empathy so that we must turn our screams into song to be noticed, let alone believed.

feels impossible when we are pushed & spat on & told to die simply for going outside & saying “i am here.”

so when i am feeling impossible i take a moment to breathe & push myself to be a little more audacious. there is a direct correlation between their attempts to malign me & my commitment to materializing what i know to be true & dear & just. i

find worth & dignity in that which they dismiss as ugly, i find magic in that which they dismiss as messy, i celebrate gender non-conformity in myself & others, i dream & i dream & i dream of a day when we are no longer bodies but stories & ideas & poems.

i swallow all of the insecurity deployed as hatred & i spit out love letters to everyone & everything, say, “i do not know you, but i love you. because i am you.” i am you.

Impossibility of Gender Non-Conforming Life

i’m going to try to express something deeply painful for the first time so please be patient with me. as a brown gender non-conforming transfeminine person, every day when i wake up i have to decide between two unbearable options

1) wear what i want...& inevitably experience relentless harassment & potentially lethal violence at the hands of strangers in public with no support from others or
2) wear clothing associated with masculinity (pants, button down shirts, etc)...and inevitably experience extreme dysphoria & anxiety from being misgendered.

often people tell me that i should just “butch up” in order to experience less violence. this suggests a fundamental dismissal of the severity of gender dysphoria & mental health more broadly. violence isn’t just physical, it’s so much more than that.

i am so saddened by the constant belittling of mental health as always already “less than,” so frustrated by how much language i have to articulate the physical violence that happens to me but not the psychological. due to being constantly misgendered i experience severe anxiety & chronic pain. my body locks up, i feel unable to engage, disassociated. i can’t sleep. i spiral & spiral & spiral and want to disappear.

this is not because i have a *disorder,* this is not because of *my* shortcoming its because of THEIR transphobia, their willful ignorance, their bigotry. so every day we have to confront the reality that there are no safer options for us. and the gravity of that — knowing that there is no escape, no safety that is not temporary, no guaranteed stability...that permeates into every realm of our lives & holds us back from so much.

i want to do so many things but i can’t. i want to be so many things but i can’t. the rhetoric of choice gets flung at us: “well if you choose to look that way you have to accept the consequences”

...but do we have choice? we don’t change our appearances & we get misgendered & we do & we still get misgendered. we don’t change our appearances & we experience incredible pain & we do and we still experience pain. this is the impossibility of gender non-conforming life — that the things that give us life have the potential to give us death.

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Missing Grandma

i woke up today beneath one of my grandmothers paintings. in the corner lies her signature: Champa Vaid. i find it difficult to write about her now because i have to use the past tense. which is another way of saying: language mourns insufficiently. how callous it is to make something past with no ceremony? when she was (...) alive she used to make me turn her paintings around over & over again, ask: “which way do you think it should go?” “you know best grandma.” and that she did. she would decide and then etch her signature in the corner “so you know which way direction to put it.” 2017 was the year i remembered how to believe in magic. grandma died (...) & over night i saw her signature written on my chest. maybe so i knew which direction to go. maybe so i knew where i came from. i used to call her mostly inbetween things: meetings, classes, shows, destinations. she always answered. & i imagined her sitting in her bed & she imagined me going somewhere & we would talk about ‘nothing’ but it felt like ‘everything’ & it just got me there, where i was going. i rarely said goodbye, it was mostly “i have reached.” with her gone i feel lost. disoriented even. i r.i.p. at my chest, tear pieces out, look for the compass, the signature, the magic but all there is me. do her paintings miss her like i do? does art grieve more adequately than language? i think they do. i think it does. i think i make art to be remembered, like she did. maybe that’s the only thing women can do: write signatures like spells say, “i was here.” no: “i am here.”

Saying Bye to Achamma

for my past few days in Kerala i had stomach bug & in some perverse way i found myself enjoying the sickness because it meant being doted on by achamma. she spent hours on the phone calling every relative keeping them abreast of my bowel movements. she made me porridge & steamed banana, checking on me constantly throughout the day & the night. she told everyone how sad she was that i was sick. on my final night she offered to sleep on the ground next to my bed in case i needed anything. i am constantly thinking about the things i have lost to oceans & this is one of them: the ability to love like that, as if the boundaries between ‘her’ & ‘me’ are non-existent, as if me being sick was her being sick, the porousness, the refusal of individuality. at the same time, the failure of language to express what i felt — to say i am alive because of you. after leaving achamma I thought about the last time i said goodbye to my other grandmother. she died 6 months later. how i recorded a short video from afar for her on her death bed — me fumbling through another goodbye, a bunch of words to say: “I will remember.” why do we say bye instead of i will remember? when my sister left for college i cried every night for a month. at her graduation party i made a slideshow with a poem & cried so hard i had to leave the venue. how do we go on knowing it will never be the same? how do we say goodbye to the people we love? how come it’s goodbyes that let us know just how much we love them? i keep thinking about all of things i wanted to say/could have said/couldn’t say to achamma, to nani, to the people i love or rather, the people who keep me alive. so i write poems & letters & notes from afar miss everyone & everything, regret the limitations of a tongue, the vulgarity of a hand waving goodbye.
 

ode to the small town gay bar

after my 18th birthday i convinced a friend to drive me down to halo. i grew up in a small town in texas which is a polite way of saying i survived (we love euphemisms down here) which is another way of suggesting that almost a decade later i find it difficult to swallow when people say ‘happy birthday.’ it feels like a stale piece of cake in the fridge: beautiful until you bite. like im living on stolen time. 

halo was a gay bar downtown: a folklore passed down from high school seniors, a place of whispers, nudges, innuendos. i couldn’t believe it until i went. nothing like that could exist ‘here,’ & by here i mean the town i learned magic tricks: how to disappear myself, how to make them think i was still there. & by there i meant the baptist church around every corner, the persistent drone of ‘faggot’ ‘pussy’ ‘sissy’ flung at me like a morning prayer. a baptism in their spit. in god’s name, a-man!

i have never understood why they call it “coming out,” as if removing their arms from my neck is about my emergence & not their erasure. but at 18 i clung onto words like ‘gay’ to hold up a white flag among the wreckage. “i surrender.” less about the accuracy, more about indicating a sign of life. 

& i found myself at halo week after week too shy to ask anyone to dance (still am), that 18 year old messy girl on the stage getting her life (in more ways than one) until close, that flaming queen from texas, setting the stage on fire. it was me & “britney bitch!” & the goths & punks & rebel middle school teacher & old cowboy from 3 hours away, & that lady i recognized from the grocery store - it was “us,” one of the first times in my life i remember experiencing “us.” halo was that place where ‘we’ the discarded things, the children they did not talk about, the misfits, the queers, where we came to dance — or rather, live. 

here i am almost a decade later with a new gender & an old shirt. & so much of who i have become is from this bar & this town: learning to love difference in myself & others despite everything we were taught, saying “hello” like our lives depended on it, needing each other because we had nothing else.

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the loneliness of being yourself

they will tell you to be yourself & then they will punish you when you are. they will encourage you to pursue your dreams & then when you do they will call you selfish. they will create marketing campaigns, slogans, video reels that tell you to live your truth, but there will be no flowers when you do. there will be loneliness. there will be fear. there may even be violence. my entire life i was told to “express myself” & then when i did people couldn’t handle it. i was told that *coming out* would make me happy & then i got bashed & no one seemed to care. what i am getting at is that they are lying to us & what’s even more painful about it is they don’t even know that they are: when you repeat something over & over again you begin to think it’s real. what i have learned is they only want half truths — they only want you to live your best life (& still grovel to them), be yourself (but not too much!), shine bright (but tone it down!). they cannot handle real truth because real truth is a mirror & they cannot look at themselves (they prefer to look at you). there will be no camera crews or congratulations when you do that thing of excavating yourself from the graves we mistake as bodies, holding it out to the light. there will be no celebrations because chances are there will be no one else there. there is a direct correlation between giving birth to yourself & your relationships dying. the more you gain the more you lose. when you unearth her she will not be conventionally beautiful, she will not say the right things, but she will be dignified nonetheless. & it is that dignity — that ability to hold your head high say, “i am” & mean it, for once in your goddamn life mean something beyond what they told you to (be)lieve. in a world that tries its best to dispossess us of everything, there is something resistant about walking away with your dignity.

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ending the gender binary helps everyone

when i say i want to “end the gender binary,” i am not saying that i want everyone in the world to be nonbinary nor that being a woman or a man is a problem. what i want is for “man” and “woman” to be understood as only two of millions of potential ways of being. i want all gendered & agendered ways of being to have access to the same legitimacy, safety, compassion & beauty, i want the category “woman” to exist without an oppositional relationship to that of “man” (and vice verse), i want “man” to not be regarded as mutually exclusive with “woman,” i want “woman” & “man” to contain multitudes & not be homogenized & flattened. identifying as a man or a woman isn’t about “reinforcing the gender binary.” the way that we perpetuate the gender binary is more about the systems of value we uphold & how we treat each other than the particular words that we affix to our experiences. this is why i believe that all of us — regardless of how we identify & navigate the world — have a stake in ending the gender binary! it’s a system of power that values its reproduction over our realities, its supremacy over our stories, its universality over our uniqueness. i want a world where gender is respected as a story, not just a word. one where we understand that it means a fundamentally different thing for one person to be a woman than another, where we recognize that there is no one way to be a man. when nonbinary & gender non-conforming people challenge the gender binary it is not because we want to police or restrict others, rather it is because we want to create a world that values difference, complexity, and infinite transformation.

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sexual harassment against gender non-conforming people

been holding this in my body: feeling sore & tired and just need to get it out somewhere. the other day a cab driver interrogated me incessantly about my genitalia. “do you have a penis?” “do you have female hormones?” “who do you have sex with?” i was noticeably uncomfortable & kept trying to deflect, but he pushed & insisted to know what was between my legs. i was anxious because the car was moving, he had my address, i was the only one in the car. so i just sort of complied. i felt disembodied: thought of all the stories i know of what happens to trans girls & gnc femmes of color when men are too curious. thought about how powerful i feel on stage and how traumatized i feel in public. i eventually got home (safely), but was overwhelmed with deep sadness not necessarily at this individual man but the world that enabled him and this. i thought about the hundreds of times absolute strangers have interrogated me about my genitalia, my body, personal details of my life with this..look in their eye as if i am not a person right there in front of them. i thought about all of the comments & discussions random strangers online have about my genitalia & body. i thought about how this was and is never understood as a transgression of a boundary because as a gender non-confirming person i am already seen as transgressive & therefore incapable of having boundaries/privacy, my gender presentation is made into a spectacle for public consumption & therefore cannot belong to me. it brought up how dismayed i have been to witness conversations about harassment that once again erase trans & especially gender non-conforming people, even though we experience assault on the daily & are blamed for it because of our gender expression. i felt the fear, anxiety, and paranoia about going outside — knowing that this would happen again, that there would be no discourse to acknowledge that it happened. i thought about how in a moment of supposed “victory” and “progress” gender non-conforming people like me still can’t exist in public without constant fear and how so few people seem to care about this. care about us: we who are neither women nor men.

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