Stop Scapegoating Gender Non-Conforming People

Today on #NonBinaryPeoplesDay I wanted to be vulnerable with you all. My entire life I’ve been harassed by the cis/hetero world. But if I’m being honest there’s no pain quite like experiencing vitriol from your own. These are a few of the countless messages I receive all the time from other queer and trans people. I know that this is about internalized homophobia/transphobia, but that doesn’t make it any less devastating and painful. These really hurt :(

There is an ongoing project of scapegoating gender non-conforming people instead of targeting the gender binary system. In the early 20th century masculine gay men started to use the word “queer” as a way to distance themselves from effeminate fairies, who they blamed for homophobia because they wouldn’t comply with gender norms. After Stonewall in the 1970s, gay men distanced themselves from drag queens who they dismissed as “screaming queens” who were “too visible” and holding the movement back with their “flamboyance.” A couple decades later the gay movement threw trans people under the bus, only seeking employment protections on the basis of sexual orientation because it felt like trans rights rocked the boat too much. Now here we are in the 21st century where non-binary people continue to be sacrificed by the trans movement in its pursuit of acceptance.

“Accept us because we’re like you and not like them!” I’m valid because “at least I’m not that!” What becomes evident is that people aren’t fighting for freedom, they’re fighting for privilege: the ability to take what has been done to them and do it to others.

Non-binary people aren’t the problem. The gender binary is the problem. This was not about what we look like, this is about what they feel like. Queer/trans people should be able to look like whatever we want without being discriminated against. We shouldn’t have to adhere to gender binary norms to be real, let alone safe. Our acceptance shouldn’t have to be conditional on disappearing our difference.

An earnest plea: Please challenge transphobia, even when it comes from trans people. Protect gender non-conforming people. Interrupt the cycle of violence. Create a more kind and just world.

The Camera Cannot Walk Us Home

After filming on set the other day I was walking back to the car when a group of guys started making jokes about me. “Is that your wife?” Hhahahaha.”

Encounters like this happen to me constantly. They become less specific, more atmospheric. Part of the scenery of every street, every city, every identity I live.

Gender non-conformity is never allowed to be, it must always be doing. I was not allowed to be just another human walking down the street. My appearance becomes an agenda becomes an attack. (This is how they justify their aggression to us as self-defense.)

The presumption is that because I have transgressed society’s gender norms, no other boundaries apply to me. I am not a person who is capable of hearing them, or being hurt, I am a thing. I am denied my own existence, I belong irrevocably to theirs. (How desperately I hunger to be permitted into the land of “is,” not banished to the realm of “does.”)

In their imagination: my mini skirt is seen as something that solicits, not something that simply is. They are threatened because even though I am saying nothing I am apparently saying that I am a subject worthy of desire. This contradicts their grammar: to them I am object, worthy of disgust. In order to re-consolidate their worldview they must disparage me. They are not just laughing at me, they are laughing for themselves. To convince themselves that they are men. (It strikes me then that the goal is less my empowerment, more the demolition of their imagination). I need something more ambitious than representation. You see photos of people like me, but do you ever think to ask what our lives are like outside the camera? The camera exposes, it does not defend. The camera cannot walk us home. It feels like increasingly gender non-conforming life is being defined by the camera. The lens becomes the only place I’m allowed to be. I want GNC people to be able to be everywhere.

How ironic that I’m using a camera now to insist on my humanity. Sometimes it seems like the only technologies we have access to are the ones that seek to…I’m sorry. I forgot what I was going to say. (I guess, just look at me instead.)

Day Dreaming Yourself Into Existence

Whenever I feel impossible, I reconnect with my trancestors. This is a photo taken in 1940 of someone arrested in New York City for cross-dressing. As they step out of the police van they strike a pose for the camera, smiling. 



What did it mean to smile in the face of criminalization? To pose during attempted disappearance? There is a remarkable presence and self-knowledge here. There is an embrace of self-worth and beauty. A recognition that power comes from within. Everything else is secondary darling!



There is no legitimacy to a law that is anti-fabulous. Despite being arrested dozens of times simply for existing in public, my trancestors continued to go outside. The newspapers would often report the names and identities of people arrested for “female impersonation.” But my trancestors continued to go outside. 



Many people couldn’t take the scrutiny, the loss of power. But some did. Because they weren’t waiting for freedom, they were living it. They understood they were already free. The way that they lived their lives. Adorned their bodies. Carried themselves. Made freedom real for everyone else. 



Cartoonist Lynda Barry once said: “We don’t create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay.” My transcestors made every moment on Earth aesthetically striking. Such that they found gold in it, being alive. 



There is a continual misreading of camp and drag as superficial. But I can think of nothing more potent than a smile that helps you survive. Finding levity in gravity. A sliver of delight amidst despair. Day dreaming yourself into existence.

Photo Credit: “The Gay Deceiver,” by photographer Arthur Fellig (known as Weegee)

Queerness is Why I Live

cw: suicide

This is a photo of me at 7. I used to have trouble sleeping, overwhelmed by existential questions. One night, I told my mom that I couldn’t stop thinking about how my life would be different if I was born someone else. Another: “Mom, I’m queer.” I learned the word from British lit, a hangover from my dad’s colonial Malaysian education. I always knew I was different. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew I had to hide it. A hunch that if I didn’t, I would die. But when you bury life it always finds a way out. Ask the poets who resurrect dead things: like hope.

Living felt like playing a video game. I became a character in someone else’s story. I peeled myself from my body so I didn’t have to feel the pain. But, my voice. My gestures. My body hair. I spilled out of the effigy they made of me.

41% is a comment I often receive. This is in reference to how 41% of trans people have attempted suicide. They do this to say that we die because we have a disorder (not because we are demonized).

What had to be severed to produce this self? I mourn for us and them. I refuse that distinction. I live in the invisible world where people exist, not this one where they pretend. This global callous, that is not life. I know life, because I almost lost it.


I started writing poetry after my first suicide attempt as a teenager. I shared my poems because I wanted to know if someone else out there felt what I did. I learned that my lonely was our lonely. I discovered an underworld that lives beneath the things we say but do not feel. They hunt us because we feel and what is more dangerous than that in a world that anesthetizes our souls into thinking they are merely bodies? We were taught to view each other as sculptures. We spend so much time in fear that we forget how to live. But every stone still has a spirit. I swear it.

I would rather be a soul than a body. I would rather be fluid than frozen. This is why I share when I am hurting. Because I am alive. And it is terrifying and brilliant. It is the most profound argument for love I have ever known.

How ironic that they think my queerness is what made me want to die. When it is the very thing that reminds me why I live.

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My Beauty, it Blooms

At 8 years old I developed an acute case of trichotillomania: a compulsive urge to pull out my body hair. I would sit in class plucking out each individual arm hair like it was my job. One time my teacher noticed and asked me to stop. How curious it was that she asked me to cease, not the kids in my class who told me I looked like a monkey.

A few years later I began to use my sister’s razors and shave off all of my body hair: my body became one prolonged razor burn.

A few years after that my classmates started to call me a “terrorist” because I was brown and had facial hair. I begged my father every day to let me shave my face. On my 13th birthday he gifted me a razor. That first shave — there were no visible cuts (but that doesn’t mean they weren’t still there).

I looked in the mirror and I remember thinking: I look beautiful (by which I meant — I look more white). A few years later I learned about a movement called “Beards for Peace,” to protest the war. I did not shave for a year — my beard, it was the run-on sentence that taught me poetry — finding beauty outside standard grammar, creating my own definition.

A decade later when I started my gender transition, so many people told me that I would be more “believable” if I “just shaved.” I had spent so many years coming into myself and yet here I was, once again, being told that I was the problem.

I remembered my sister and mom being told that they were “mannish” for having arm hair and a slight mustache. I remembered all of the brown women I knew who were made to feel like they were never feminine enough. I resolved then and there not to remove my body hair because I believed in the femininity of my hairy brown foremothers.

Why should we have to look like what white men have told white women to be in order to be regarded as feminine? I would rather be my own kind of beautiful.

Their beauty is a razor. It disappears. My beauty, it blooms.

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I'm Fighting for Beauty

Every lesson I learned from society taught that gender non-conformity is a failure. This message gets reinforced through the relentless drone of harassment, the complete strangers who pick apart my body. “It would be easier if you tone it down.” Gender non-conforming people are framed as the problem. Not: gender norms. The onus is on us to modify what we look like to make other people more comfortable. Never them to stop attacking us.

This year I haven’t been going outside. Usually, I’m on high alert. People point and stare, take photos of me, laugh, scream expletives, throw trash. They do everything in their power to disappear me (so they don’t have to confront themselves).

I’ve been thinking: why continue when it takes such a toll? I live with chronic pain. Which, in some narrations of the body is hardly a life at all.

It’s not a rational thing – this - living in a form where, foreseeably for the rest of my life I will be misunderstood and maligned. But this is about something more honest than comprehension. I’ll never be able to describe it to you, all I can do is show you. When I laugh, I feel it. Not the simulated laugh of a TV show audience, my laugh. When I cry, I feel it. Like every tear is its own private baptism.

The other day @lavernecox said that being visibly trans in public is beautiful. I felt so moved because she was speaking to another kind of beauty. One that they thought was impossible, but here we are, doing it. Living. Here. In their impossible.

Beauty is less about what we look like, more about what we feel. When I go outside as my truest self I feel, transcendent. Rooted on the earth. When I don’t, I feel like I’m wearing a costume. Someone else’s idea of who I should be.

I’m fighting for beauty. I’m fighting for the joy that comes from encountering beauty in myself and in the world. I’m fighting for everyone to be able to exist in their divine, self-authored form. Gender diversity is necessary. Not just for humanity, but for ecology. The only constant in the world is change and oh my god, how beautiful that is. Watch the seasons, watch the rivers, watch the trees, watch me.

physiognomy

In the early 19th century, the Victorians believed in physiognomy: the practice of assessing a person’s character from their outer appearance (especially the face). Scientists believed that human beings were puzzles that could be deciphered: a nose like this, meant that. A smile like that, meant this. That you could pinpoint the criminals, the mischievous, the poor simply by looking at their face. People would carry pocket-size guidebooks with illustrations helping them identify who they could trust. Physiognomy was irresistible. It gave license for people to both judge and surveil one another. And even better: it sanctioned this in the name of science.

Physiognomy has since been disproven as a pseudoscience. But I think we are still haunted by its legacy. There’s this enduring commitment to the idea that our exterior appearance signifies a less visible interior. That the visual realm presents the most reliable data. Truth, even.

What is social media but a 21st century book of physiognomy?

Yesterday I filmed my first video project under quarantine. I woke up earlier than I usually do and I looked in the mirror and encountered my face for the first time in a long time. I thought about what other people would think of it: my face. I have grown accustomed to a newfound obliviousness to my body. It’s not that my face has been absent, it’s that it hasn’t been present.

And for a moment, there in front of myself in front of you, I mourned what would be lost. How many words I will utter! say! scream! and how few of them will go anywhere because of what I look like. How what I look like is the least interesting thing about me, but the most noticeable. I felt the inchoate, amorphous grief of having to be seen - and in that — having to be disappeared. A vanishing act before your eyes.

I guess I felt a tinge of sadness — subtle, like a wheatgrass shot — of having to face the fact that I had a face.

Then I took a selfie. Wrote this caption like a cigarette pack disclaimer: “what you see, is not what you get / what you get, is not what you see.” Walked back to my mother, the camera. Said:

“Hello.” or “Hello?”
(I’m not quite sure.)

the quiet gravity of love

Today is a very special day. It’s my bestie @travisalabanza birthday Here is a lil #tbt of us doing a show together back in summer 2017! (We missed you there, come next time?)

One of the paradoxes I hold to be true is that we only become ourselves only through other people. Meaning: we spend our lives waiting to be witnessed by the right people. And in that encounter we uncover who we are in the most fundamental sense. You know it when you feel it: that first hangout that lasts for hours but feels like a blink. The conversation becomes an inauguration. You become someone else.

To say that Travis has changed my life is an insult to language. It would be more accurate to say: they made me remember that I was alive. Or rather — they made life worth living again.

Because they see me. Even at my worst. Through all my denial, naïveté, evasion strategies. Through my melodrama, chronic pain, idiosyncrasies. Even in gym shorts and a t-shirt. Even when I can’t see myself. They see me. And as most things that matter do: it both thrills and terrifies me. The spiritual nudity of being recognized. no — of being.

I think it was Bourdeiu who once wrote: “being is...being perceived” (I think he was right.)

The irony of being a poet is that pretty soon you learn silence is the most potent verse. There is a moment at the end of every call. A moment when one of us flies away to another country. Where the particles that compose me reassemble themselves into something else.

the quiet gravity of love,
how it shapes us.

Happy Birthday, Travis

#DeGenderFashion: Harry Styles on the Cover of VOGUE

Harry Styles is the first non-woman to appear solo on the cover of American Vogue...let alone wearing a dress! In one of the pics he is outfitted by gender fluid designer @harris_reed !

A lot of people have been asking me what I think about it and I’ll say this: I am holding simultaneity and choosing abundance over scarcity. Am I happy to see Harry be celebrated for openly flouting gendered fashion norms? Yes. Do trans femmes of color receive praise for doing the same thing every day? No. Do I think this is a sign of progress of society’s evolution away from binary gender? Yes. Do I think that white men should be upheld as the face of gender-neutral fashion? No.

It’s a curious thing this: holding space for joy, while also insisting on a more expansive form of freedom.

We can both acknowledge this unprecedented moment while also remembering that it could only happen because of the resistance of trans femmes of color. We who for decades were imprisoned by cross-dressing legislation. Make no mistake: trans femmes of color started this and continue to face the backlash from it. Our aesthetics make it to the mainstream, but not our bodies. We are still dismissed as “too much” and “too queer” because we aren’t palatable enough to whiteness and heteronormativity.

Is that Harry’s fault? No. It’s the fault of systems of transmisogyny and racism. I want a world where everyone — regardless of their gender — can wear whatever they want. He is exercising that and giving permission for other people to do the same and that makes me so happy!! I can both celebrate that and be cautious about the politics of representation.

I truly hope that more trans femmes of color will be given roses, covers, recognition. I hope that people will remember that what is manifest in a magazine does not necessarily materialize on a moving train: when it’s you against transphobia with no one to defend you. I hope I can work with Harry and all people of all genders to #degenderfashion and create a world beyond the gender binary. 

Wildfires: Trauma, Narrative, Transphobia

I read an article about how some Oregonians wouldn’t evacuate during the wildfires. They were afraid that “leftist looters” would come and steal their property.

What a tragic illustration of both the power of trauma and narrative. Trauma teaches us to fear what could be and prevents us from responding to what is. We remain distracted in the face of actual destruction. Trauma keeps us stuck in the past or the future, making it impossible to experience the present.

Stories become a fireproof home in a cruel world. The most valuable property we own is our story. Some of us would rather die than lose it. Because when we lose it we have to encounter the vulnerability of being alive.

A story is many things, but it is not a life raft. Nor a mask. What was being asked of those townspeople was not only the evacuation of their houses, but their stories. What is being asked of all of us now is to abandon the flimsy fantasy of certainty. Living is tumultuous. We can’t control it. But we can control our response to it.

When I learned that JK Rowling is publishing a transphobic novel about a man who dresses up as a woman to cause harm, I found myself thinking about wildfires. As patriarchy ravages the world we are looking for someone to blame. We cannot bear to look beside us, so instead we look at our screens. And we take that pain and dole it out haphazardly to trans people / migrants…it almost doesn’t matter who, as long as we don’t have to see it here, among the people who said they loved us. (The most lethal story is a love story.)

I know that JK is hurting. I know that transphobia is unprocessed grief and repressed desire. I also know that injury has always been the justification for supremacy. I know that if we do not transform pain, we transmit it.

As a brown transfeminine person I’m not allowed to name my own pain. I am just a metaphorical device for other’s pain. It feels like drowning in an ocean of text written in a language I will never understand. But I don’t need to. Because I am here. Present in this body and in this burning world. And I can feel it.

Are you willing to suspend your story? Not just so that I can live. But so that you can, too?

Image by Matt Bernstein

Sexism in the Double Standards: Justice for Caster Semenya

Caster Semenya deserves justice. Everyone policed by sexist-racist fictions of what “men” and “woman” should be deserves justice.

There is a chasm between “should” and “are” maintained by the willful refusal to push past ideology to address reality. Black women are competent and talented and this system will do everything it can to undermine and belittle their achievements. What’s unfair is not Caster’s abilities, but the sex binary that disproportionately targets her.

These cultural categories of “male” and “female” are defined by white supremacy. So often when society uses the terms “man and woman” they are actually referring to “white man and white woman.” This association of womanhood with weakness and manhood with strength was solidified as part of the racist arithmetic of empire building. Indigenous women and Black women in particular were denied recognition of their womanhood and femininity by European scientists on account of their leadership and strength. These categories were never innocent, and they are certainly not natural. They were created by race scientists in the 19th century specifically to advance white male supremacy and to demonize Black, Indigenous, and racialized peoples.

The disparate treatment of Caster and Michael is not a coincidence, it is a calculation. It is a product of the racial eugenics Euro-America still masquerades as “science.”

Racism/sexism/transphobia lives in the double standards. Constantly interrogate: would this person be treated this way / would I feel this way about this person if they were white / male / cis / gender conforming?