I Want to Live Out Of Tune

Photo by Sophia Emmerich

Earlier today in the back of the car I started to tear up because the driver was singing along to Lady Gaga’s song “Shallow” so out of tune, but with so much gusto it didn’t matter. Or rather: it was the only thing that mattered. It moved me so much. how someone can feel something and write it down and someone else all the way across the world can say, “hey I felt that too.”

How can we be strangers when we feel the same pain?

My sister gave birth to my first nibbling and I held that precious baby in my arms and I cried because I was once that and we all were and someone heeded our cry and sang to us, out of tune and we looked back with so much wonder, like the world continually stretched beyond our wildest imagination. Because it did (and it still does.) So I remember that all the scary men on the street and the comment sections, they were once babies too. And i wonder what made them lose their wonder.

I’m an artist which means I want to do my part to make the world wonderful again. I want to live out of tune. I want to say and be and do the “wrong” things because they are wonderful. I want to live in many places in many genders in many feelings because they are all so wonderful. I want to say I am both the happiest and the saddest I have ever been. Sometimes I love so hard it hurts and sometimes it hurts so hard to continue to love.

It hurts that we call each other strangers even though we feel the same pain. It hurts that lovers can become strangers (even though we feel the same pain). It hurts when the audiences say to me “as a white / cis person I resonate with your work” as if we are only supposed to have affinity with the people who look like us, not the people who feel like us.

I make art for everyone. because everyone is hurting. Because someone sang to me and i learned that the heart is the most honest instrument because it is always out of tune.

Saying "I Love You" Back (RIP Urvashi)

Today was my aunt’s funeral. She told us she didn’t want a conventional ceremony, she wanted a political riot. So we started out chanting “Fuck Cancer!” and the rest was herstory.

I was one of the first to speak. And I didn’t really do much of that. Mostly I sobbed. I wanted to howl. Every word felt crass in comparison. Like subterfuge. Words felt cruel, just another failed cancer treatment. No sentence is a spell. Nothing can bring her back.

My aunt told us that Urvashi was the first one in our Indian family to say “I love you.” It’s not that we don’t love each other, it’s that we show it with action, and squirm at the word. Urvashi had learned how to claim it from her queer community. My late grandmother told my aunt that she only felt comfortable saying it back because of Urvashi’s persistence.

It’s a lesson I’m learning again & again. Queer people teach the world what love is. We fight for love because we know what it feels like to lose it. How tragic, those who shun us. Because they shun love.

I grew up in a family where we tried our best to protect each other from our pain. And we called that love. We spent so much time worried about how each other would react to our feelings that we forgot to feel them: our feelings.

Queer people taught me how to feel in public. How to weep, and shout, and shriek with joy. And today I think I brought that back home. Gave permission for us all to feel in front of one another. Flagrantly, without decorum. Runny noised and feral.

Everything feels blurry in my life right now. I keep missing trains and getting off at the wrong stop. I leave the house and feel like I forgot something: my keys, an umbrella. But then I remember that it’s just her. That I am missing her in every street corner and email notification. I spend hours scrolling through texts and photos and videos and each one feels haunted and conspicuously time stamped. Like if only I had known. Would I have texted her that I loved her? Would I have said it back?

This is the year I learn how to say “I love you” back. For Urvashi, for me, and for us.

Thank you for your support my beautiful community. I love and need you very much.

We Are All Playing Dress Up

I took these selfies on the same day. They are of the same person with the same name and identity. Why does our society regard and treat them so differently? How do we create a world where this aesthetic difference is unremarkable? Just another human doing what humans do: changing.

There is no before and after. There is no in or out of drag. The photo on the left is not my *feminine* side, the photo on the right is not my *masculine* side, both of them are me. All of this is me. I exist outside the gender binary. Before 19th century gender norms there was my spirit. And after them - my spirit. My personhood is not about what I look like, it’s about who I am.

I am playing dress up in both looks. Because I am a soul. Invisible and irreducible to a body. The rest is just adornment. A tshirt, a wig…both elaborate forms of decoration.

I feel so much sadness for the ways that we structure and constrict reality into binaries: man and woman, cis and trans, authentic and artificial, true and false…

Nothing is simple, flat, or one dimensional. Let alone a whole ass human. I wonder if the reason we stay attached to a singular self, is because we worry that we won’t be understood if we declare our multitudes? That we will be abandoned if we assert our fluidity?

We must move past the desire for comprehension. The very systems that assign coherence are the ones that are holding us back. We may never be understood by other people, but that’s not as important as being embraced by ourselves.

I do not request nor require your acceptance. What I ask for is your curiosity. Why do you wear what you wear? Why don’t you wear other things? What made you feel like you could only be one thing? Are there forms of love and expansion you haven’t allowed yourself to experience yet? Why?

The movement to #degenderfashion isn’t just for trans and non-binary people. It’s for everyone to wear whatever they want and determine what that means for them. We aren’t just resisting gender norms, we are uplifting humanity as multifaceted and complex — a constellation of stories. We are reclaiming humanity from gender norms.

Gender Non-Conformity Belongs Everywhere

I love this photo of @badbunnypr for @jacquemus . It’s so beautiful when people express themselves creatively and play with gender norms. It’s also so wonderful to see so many people celebrate this artistry. Let us use this moment to keep dreaming more expansively.

In the early 20th century heterosexual male “female impersonators” like Julian Eltinge were huge stars (in 1912 he had a theater named after him in NYC). At the same time droves flocked to watch his performances, so many queer/trans people were arrested by cross-dressing laws for doing the same thing outside the theater on the streets. Performers like Eltinge were featured in magazine editorials while queer/trans people were photographed in prison and medical clinics: our portraits published in newspapers to teach people how to spot “cross-dressing criminals.”

In present day we see the recreation of this dynamic with the rise of celebrity “gender fluid fashion” alongside the uptick of anti-trans legislation.

Why are people comfortable with gender transgression on stages, red carpets, runways, and photo shoots….but not the street? This story is not just about identity, but also geography and temporality.

This is how the gender binary works. It doesn’t seek to eliminate gender non-conformity, but rather only make it permissible in certain places and times that are cordoned off from respectable society.

Gender non-conformity is permissible insomuch as it’s positioned as a spectacle. Only acceptable when it’s temporary. It must happen on the periphery, never in the public. The idea is after this display the individual will return to “normal” (which is coded as hetero/cis/binary).

When we frame campaigns featuring cis men as the pinnacle of “gender fluid fashion” who and what do we lose? To truly #degenderfashion we must extend this same energy to trans/queer people who do this every day, everywhere amidst astronomical violence and with little to no acknowledgment. We must challenge what we regard as normal and ordinary and who we believe belongs there. We must create a society that embraces gender non-conformity anytime and anywhere from anyone.

Always Becoming

#10YearChallenge Winter 2012 VS NOW! #DeGenderFashion

The photos on the left were taken when I was a junior in college. I had a fashion blog & would ask my friends to take photos of my looks on the way to class. I’d name each one after books or ideas I was reading like “CRUEL OPTIMISM” or “REJECT THE GENDER DICHOTOMY” (I’ve been on this kick for a while !!)

Style was one of my first forms of creative self-expression, a practice of self-fashioning into the person I wanted to be. When I was leaving Texas for first year of college my mom & I got into a huge fight. “You can’t wear clothes like that, no one will take you seriously!”

18 year old me shouting “I don’t care,” was a form of care for 30 year old me. I didn’t know where I was going, but I knew where I didn’t want to be anymore: fear.

When I look at these photos together I don’t see a “before” or “after,” I see a continuum. I see myself laying the groundwork for myself — experimenting with freedom, making the perennial choice to choose love over fear.

This is why I like New Years so much: it’s a moment of reckoning where we can reflect on all the ways we have shifted, the ways we are always becoming. Nothing is fixed. Transformation is one of the only constants. Like the seasons, and the years, we change.

I have lived so many lives in this one. I went from hating myself to accepting myself, hop-scotched across LGBTQA until I landed here: me.

How did I get here? All the people taking these photos. The people who believed in me before I could believe in myself. All the people who came to my coffee shop poetry readings and said, “Keep it up.”

It devastates me how we make one another one-dimensional: reduce people to something they once were. I believe in complexity, redemption, renewal. I believe in the infinite capacity for transformation. I believe we can and have become things we could have never imagined. I believe that’s what it means to be alive: to stretch beyond the parameters of language, categories, binaries.

Happy New Year! Signed sincerely me: a person who believes in your healing journey so much. Love & need you!

The Cruelty of a Compliment

The Cruelty of a Compliment

The other day a white woman came up to us with a bouquet of what I’m sure she thought were affirmations. She thanked @eddiendopu for going outside. She called me beautiful and insisted on taking a photo of me to show someone in her life how accepting she was. She didn’t even ask for my name.

How do we hold compliments that land like slurs? Hugs so tight they suffocate? There’s this mistaken notion that compliments are always positive. But how much cruelty has been cudgeled in the name of care?

Various histories / presents have made it so that people aren’t used to seeing people like us (let alone together). This makes people uncomfortable. Sometimes people seek to overcome this discomfort by showering us with praise. But the compliments are less about us and more about reinforcing their self-concept as progressive and not like “other people.”

Ableism / transmisogyny render us living metaphors. Infantilize us. Reduce us to props to mine for inspiration. Cast us as entertainment in someone else’s story, denied our own. These remarks re-inscribe boundaries of who belongs and who is made a perpetual visitor. We are only there to be gawked at, not to lead.

Compliments rooted in dehumanization are not compliments. In these scenarios consider: Is this about their life or my feelings? Is this about affirming or denying their dignity?

Here is a photo of us laughing. Populate your imagination with it. Yes, there is so much tragedy, but alongside it — so much resplendence. Thank goodness we have each other. I wouldn’t be able to see myself as a human if it weren’t for people like Eddie who reminded me that I was one.

Combat Disinformation: Fact Check Transmisogyny

I need your help. Right wing and trans exclusionary media spread lies about trans and non-binary people to delegitimize our existence and justify harassment against us. This slander continues uninterrupted because it’s profitable. Since the majority of news shared on social media is anti-trans and factually incorrect I want to get something straight.

These forces have misattributed a 2016 Facebook status about girlhood to me that I did not write. These words, ideas, and life experience are not mine. This status – an analysis of a film I haven’t seen -- was written by a former colleague who was born female. The author states this in the text (“I have been a cute little girl”). This has been glossed over and erased in order to demonize and discredit me.

I have never been a girl. Anyone familiar with my life knows I am a non-binary transfeminine person who grew up a boy. For over fifteen years, I have written, spoken, and published a book about this experience.

This is how confirmation bias works: because people believe that transfeminine BIPOC are monsters, they ignore overwhelming evidence otherwise to re-enforce their views. The trope of transfeminine BIPOC as dangerous and predatory (especially to women and children) is part of a longstanding project to dehumanize us. This myth is used to deny our rights. The actual data shows that transfeminine BIPOC are the most likely to face discrimination and violence. We are not the threat, racism and transmisogyny are.

Society prioritizes other people’s words and projections over my life. This persistent malignment takes a dire toll on my body and spirit. Please correct the record and combat disinformation. Condemn scapegoating and exclusion. Resist the rising wave of anti-trans legislation. Protect transfeminine BIPOC lives. Affirm our dignity in a world that uses us as cheap shots for views, clicks, and political and financial gain.

Love and need you,
ALOK

Discourse is Not A Hug

Before I had the language to diagnose the ills of world — I felt ugly. Bone deep, derelict, irredeemable ugly. Sure there were spectacular moments like my classmates calling me dirty because of the color of my skin. The tongue is the best tattoo gun, ask the word ‘faggot’ on the back of my neck.

But it wasn’t just about these moments, it was about how they landed in my body. Made colonies in my consciousness. Took hold — harvested a whole new crop of shame. My own thoughts became more cruel than anything they could ever say. Their shame becomes our self. Eventually we don’t know who we are outside of it.

(This is a lesson that before we have language, we have feeling. This is a lesson that after feelings, we have language. We need both, I think. Which is why I’m here now.)

For years I sought solace in words. Analyzed, deconstructed, prescribed, pontificated. I became so good at speaking the wound, describing it. Became so good at saying “this is what’s wrong,” I forgot somewhere along the way to ask, “what do I need?” Discourse is not a hug. Analysis is not a home.

I thought that legal recognition would heal my childhood pain. Or fame. Or work. But what I was looking for — all along — was a good friend. Someone to sing “you’re beautiful,” like a prayer so many times until I believed it. Someone to show me that is possible, this — being free. Someone to blaze with an incandescence more scintillating than the sun. So bright I just couldn’t look away. And I didn’t.

What I’m saying is that love is both a scalpel and a stitch. What I’m saying is being understood isn’t enough. We all deserve to be loved.

Thank you my gorgeous friends for helping me find my own beauty. I thought it was lost forever, but here it was, all along.

The Table Was My First Stage

Growing up my mom used to insist that we all come together at the table for dinner. She would play her favorite jazz and for at least thirty minutes every evening we would suspend time to the sweet serenades of Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday. There are so many albums I know by taste.

I inherited my mom’s love of hosting. I love bringing my friends together for a meal. Small talk is an oxymoron. Let’s talk big, language is too beautiful to confine to pleasantry. Be rogue. We, like the sauce on our dresses, spill. We overflow, can’t / won’t fit into categories, let alone words. What’s your gender? A conversation that never ends. Where are you from? The dinner table.

Ambiance never felt like an apt enough word to describe it. It’s not just the things around us — it’s about how those things elicit something inside of us. Like stage lightning, the candles bring us into being. I think people look the most ravishing in that glow. The cinema of friends becoming strangers, secrets singing like the crickets outside. Here: night is our friend. Darkness is our home.

The table was my first stage. It’s where I learned the anatomy of an argument. Studied wit like a graduate student (so I could keep up). Learned how to tell jokes, and be the butt of them. The table is where I started to speak myself into existence. Had my first audience. Over time. And with the right people. “This is what I believe” becomes “this is who I am.”

I want to take you out to dinner & let you figure it out. Listen to all the things you aren’t supposed to say. Ask the wrong questions. Fumble through it: the discourtesy of being different people with different scars. Identity is an invitation to a table somewhere — find it. Who are you outside of what you’ve been told?

My favorite part of my birthday last month was the meals together. We seasoned that shit with our tears, peppered it with expletives. There is a Yelp review somewhere out there talking about noise we take full responsibility for. I found myself listening, just watching thinking — damn. How lucky I am to have found family in my friends.

Even In My Loneliness (I am not alone

When I die I want the photo they use for my memorial to be a portrait of me with my friends. My friends loved me before I could love myself. Taught me how to exist in this world unapologetically as a brown transfeminine person. Who I am is an amalgam of their care, critique, conversations. Meaning — I would not be here without them today. My friends are the greatest romances of my life.

And friendship, like all the most precious and sacred things in the world, so often gets disappeared from the narrative. We hear so many love stories about romantic partners, but what about the friends who helped process the breakup? When I read a great author I want to know who they hung out with when they had writers block. Or a philosopher — who they called when their heart was broken? There have been times in my life where I have felt like giving up, and it’s my friends who remind me why I keep going. I am because we are.

For my 30th birthday I hired a wedding photographer to shoot film portraits of me and my friends. I wanted to leave evidence: we were here in a world that said we shouldn’t be. We were glamorous and contradictory, naive and brilliant at the same time. We weren’t meant to find each other, but we did. Which means impossible is merely a suggestion. And that friendship is the miracle.

The photographer asked my friends to tell me what they wished for me in my new decade. These people know my doubts, my apprehensions, and inconsistencies. And they said the things I needed to hear. Gave me permission to grow. So many words — one big, big feeling. I am not alone. Even in my loneliness, I am not alone.

The Dehumanization of NonBinary Life

The gender binary is a publicist who never stops working. It would have you believe that gender non-conformity poses a bigger threat than actual emergencies like climate change. That nonbinary people have access to massive power, even though the majority of us can’t go outside without being attacked. That it’s our fault for being attacked.

That this is about our bodies, not their bigotry. Our presentations, not their policies. That our attackers are just “ignorant,” not “intentional.” That we are new, even though we have always been here.

There is a staggering disconnect between how we are represented and the reality of our lives. This is calculated. They manufacture tropes about us to sanction our disappearance.

Mainstream discourse would have you believe that we are hyper-sensitive “snowflakes” who want attention. The enormity of our struggle is reduced to a single-issue: pronouns. The diversity of our community is collapsed to whiteness. The severity and ubiquity of harassment we experience is completely ignored. The goal has always been our elimination.

They won’t tell you about the colonists who attempted genocide on gender variant communities across the world. About the cross-dressing laws that threw us in prison for existing in public. About the doctors who tortured us to “fix” us into the fabricated gender binary. Incarcerated us in psych wards claiming that we were “delusional” for saying we were neither man nor woman.

Isn’t it ironic that they accuse us of making up our identities when they have had slurs for us for hundreds of years? This has never been about language, it’s always been about who gets to exist. Nonbinary people are only allowed to be spoken, not speak. We are objectified, reduced to metaphor, debate, thing. They make us things, so that you forget to grieve our lives. In order to maintain the colonial fairytale that there are only two genders, non-binary people cannot exist.

And yet, here I am. And yet, here we are. Everyday miracles. In our survival is a viable alternative to a world structured by coercion and conformity. Another way to love, another way to live. Nonbinary life is sacred. Fight for it.