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.)
