my achamma and her gender

today when i was getting dressed my achamma (grandmother) exclaimed: “you look like a girl! why are you wearing women’s clothing?” and i said “so what?” and then she giggled and said that i looked nice. apparently earlier she was telling all of the other old relatives that she doesn’t care that i wear saris and have my nose pierced because she is happy that i am a “passionate artist.” she doesn’t get what i do so she often asks me to sing for her and i tell her “no i write poetry” and she says “same thing” (she’s right).

i am always moved by how my achamma finds ways to make such radical politics with such simple gestures. i often wonder who she would have become if she wasn’t forced to sacrifice person for woman. i often wonder how much happier my family would be if they stopped believing in gender.

the gender binary is so absurd it’s hilarious! finding meaning in our lives is so much more interesting. i wish we could just giggle at silly things like gender more & go on with our lives. my achamma doesn’t know words like “transgender” and “ally” but she giggles and it feels like we are both laughing at a patriarchal system which never made space for our pleasure and our rage and our meaning. we are laughing because we still find ways to survive despite it.

which goes to say i think that my achamma is a passionate artist — too — and that her smile is one of the most wonderful masterpieces i have ever witnessed in my life.

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Being, Not Doing

Last night was one of the most important nights of my life. Featuring at a show in India was never ever something I thought I would be able to do.

I wanted to make a status about diaspora and gender and complicity and healing and about how I never thought in my life that I would be able to share my work on race, familial violence, mental health, transmisogyny here. About how much work we still have left to do! But I just can't find the language to adequately capture what it meant to be able to perform "here." 

I've been sitting with this dilemma a lot these days: as a poet I'm tasked with the impossible mandate to make the intangible tangible and give language to feeling. As a trans femme I have spent my entire life watching my body being erased by the people around me so for so long. I learned from a young age to fight like hell to speak about our pain, our legacy, our resistance (because otherwise they pretend we do not exist). But last night I encountered a different kind of silence.

Ironically being a wordsmith has allowed me to appreciate silence more -- to see it is not the absence of language, but it's own form of knowing. We live in a world so obsessed with making things visible, known, explicit and I wonder what gets lost when the only ways we understand ourselves is through articulation and not just through being?

I am without words precisely because there are no words -- and will never be -- to capture the depth of gratitude I have for all of you who have supported me throughout my journeys. I want to say "thank you," but it's not enough. So many oppressed people across the world are fighting for the simple privilege of being. We have to do so much activism just to fight for people to be able to exist without violence -- such a simple goal and yet such a daunting project.

Last night I felt a type of closure that comes from being acknowledged simply for existing. Not just for doing, saying, critiquing, but being. I was reminded about why we do this, what kind of consciousness and world we are trying to create for everyone. Thank you for giving me the space to choose my own silence -- to blossom into it and to relish here in this space which -- albeit temporary -- makes me think that I can keep going.

We have to continue struggling toward a world where people can just be. Just exist. Just live. 

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Pronouns Are More Than Words

When trans people say “respect our pronouns” we are not just asking you to shift your language, we are asking you to shift an entire paradigm around sex, gender, and race. It’s not enough to change one word when we are asking for the end of an entire worldview.

What we are saying is not just “this word makes me feel good,” but rather I demand the right to narrate my body and my history on my own terms in a system that is predicated on categorizing, containing, and criminalizing me.

When we say “respect” what we mean is fight like hell for me. What we mean is we weren’t just assigned this gender at birth, we are non-consensually gendered every day and what are you going to do about that?

This is not an opportunity to be politically correct, this is an opportunity to stop being incorrect.

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10 Reminders on #SpiritDay

On this ‪#‎SpiritDay‬ let’s remember:

1) Homophobia and transphobia do not exist in isolation from racism and capitalism. Homophobia and transphobia are often responses to histories of and continued acts of colonial and economic violence. We will never end homophobia and transphobia unless we end capitalism and racism. It’s not enough to do LGBT sensitivity trainings, people need racial and economic justice.

2) ‘Homopohobia’ is often weaponized to further demonize Black, indigenous, and people of color. We will never end homophobic and transphobic violence unless we recognize that gender and sexual oppression is not unique to a particular culture, body, or region — it is pervasive and maps differently across all cultures and peoples. People of color are NOT more homophobic than white people.

3) Homophobia and transphobia are systems of oppression, not just attitudes and individual acts of violence. Our culture creates the idea of the ‘bully’ to recuse itself of its own complicity in structural violence. The truth is that ‘bullies’ are victims of the same systems of power. Bullies are often responding from very real trauma, loss, violence, and pain under violent regimes of power and state control. Hurt people hurt people.

4) The prison industrial complex feeds into these racist ideas. We are taught that if we punish and incarcerate “bullies” and “perpetrators” we will end violence. This couldn’t be more far from the truth. All this does is address the symptoms, and not the root causes. If we are really committed to ending a culture of hate we cannot respond to violence with more violence. We need to build a culture of empathy, healing, and transformative justice.

5) The rhetoric to “stop LGBT bullying” has and continues to contribute to the mass criminalization and incarceration of Black, indigenous, and people of color. Laws and policies may sound effective on the books, but they disproportionately are exercised on people of color. Zero tolerance policies around homophobia in schools have targeted black and brown youth and contributed to the high school to prison pipeline. Hate crimes legislation has further criminalized low income communities of color and funneled them into prisons.

6) Most LGBTQ youth are not white and are not wealthy. Their biggest bullies are not mean boys in school, rather they are our school’s administration. Their biggest threat is not men on the corner of the street, it is the police. The state continues to murder, profile, stop & frisk, rape, abuse, criminalize, deport, and lock up LGBTQ youth of color every day. (Rest in Power Jessie Hernandez!)

7) Our ‘bullies’ learn their strategies of control, intimidation, and violence from the state. The prison & legal system gives them a blueprint of what justice — I mean what murder, torture, and disposability — looks like.

8) When LGBTQ youth of color respond to defend themselves from violence they are often the ones who get blamed for inciting violence and are criminalized for their self-defense. Think of the case of CeCe McDonald, a Black trans woman who was physically attacked by racists on the street and was thrown into jail. CeCe has since been freed, but so many are still behind bars.

9) The only guaranteed housing the state offers to LGBTQ youth of color is the prison system.

10) LGBTQ youth do not need to be saved. They do not need our lip service, they need jobs, healthcare, stable housing, and respect to determine their own pathways to wellness and security.

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Don't Come Out if You Don't Want To

Coming out day symbolizes much that’s wrong with contemporary gay & trans politics. Certainly there is nothing wrong with individuals “coming out,” but when coming out becomes a mandate for everyone we must ask:

1. What does it mean to prioritize queer visibility in a political climate where visibility for most queer and trans people of color = surveillance, homelessness, violence, criminalization, and incarceration?

2. What does it mean to make the onus of liberation on the individual (you! come out!) versus the system (you! eradicate the closet!)?

3. What does it mean to compel people to come out when we do not have the infrastructure to support them (homeless shelters, radical foster care, finances, emotional support, jobs, etc.)?

4. What does it mean when the state uses our visibility to pinkwash itself and justify its war and imperialist policies?

5. What does it mean when not being ‘out’ is associated with being repressed/self-hating rather than being strategic and discerning?

6. What does it mean for coming out to be the only way many LGBT people get involved with movement struggle by proudly announcing themselves and then subsequently participating in economies, politics, and logics that further oppress the most vulnerable members of their communities?

I often means that when you say ‘gay rights’ what you mean is a politics engineered for cis white elites for whom it doesn’t only “get better” but it “gets bourgie!”

There is no one way to exist or look queer or trans. Many people negotiate identity and visibility within the context of extreme violence. We have to honor what people do to keep safe and not establish hierarchies that conflate authenticity with visibility.

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Why Do We Have to Gender Peeing & Pooping?

I was born and raised in a small town about an hour and a half outside of Houston. To put things in perspective: my town was the sort of place where we would talk about Houston as the “big city” — that place where all of the queers and misfits would go to after high school. Driving to Houston on the weekends was a vacation into a seemingly liberal oasis where people drank and fucked and sometimes even transgressed gender norms (God Forbid!)

So it’s not that I was surprised to see people casually and unabashedly holding signs that said, “No Men in Women’s Bathroom.” It’s not that I was surprised to hear people regarding my and so many of my friends’ identities as “costumes” that we put on to “invade” women’s spaces. I heard all of this (and more) growing up. They say that everything is bigger in Texas and I assure you: transphobia is no exception.

Often when we speak about violence we stop our conversations at the act of discrimination: the hate speech, the assault, the policy. But there’s a whole afterlife to violence: trauma stays with us long after the incident. The trans people in my life have all developed different strategies to cope with the trauma of a world so invested in telling us that it knows our bodies better than us. For me — I learned how to naturalize a lot of violence that happened to me growing up — to not question it and just take it. And that form of submission was its own form of resistance. How could violence hurt when I grew to become accustomed to it? How could words sting when I was as familiar with them as the sound of my own name?

When I heard about this loss in Houston I remembered some of the own flavors of loss in my own life – the parts of myself that I suppressed in order to get by.

The truth is: I didn’t use the bathroom once when I was in middle school and high school. I’m serious. I held it in every single day. I would get to school by 7:00am and leave by 6:00pm. I tried to drink as little as possible. I made constant mental calculations: only one more hour until your home, only twenty minutes, only…peace. What kind of fear is so foreboding that it’s stronger than a bodily need? What happens when your body becomes its own closet? I grew so accustomed to holding parts of myself back growing up – and this wasn’t an exception.

I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing and to some degree no one noticed. Back then I didn’t have language like “gender non-conforming” or “gender binary,” but I had that feeling of fear and anxiety in my chest at the very thought of entering the boy’s restroom.

Truth be told: I was terrified of restrooms not just because I was scared of “boys,” but because I was scared of “gender” to begin with.

When we speak about restrooms we talk as if gender ends on the sign outside the door. But I learned intimately how gender segregated restrooms are here to actually create gender itself. The boy’s restroom was where my classmates peered over one another’s urinals to look at each others dicks, was where they talked about the girls they wanted to fuck, was where they came to have private conversations, to fight, to tease, to compare. I didn’t go into the boy’s restroom because I hated being gendered. I wanted to pee without having to have my body surveilled, compared, categorized.

When trans people are invited to speak about our experiences of violence we often have to stop at the trauma of being misgendered, but are we willing to have a conversation about the violence of being gendered itself? It’s not just misgendering that’s the problem, it’s gendering.

What a strange world we live in where an entire campaign can be mobilized to prevent people from being human (read: digesting food) safely.
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End Transmisogyny

Being a femme gender non-conforming person on the internet is a daily struggle. On top of being almost consistently misgendered by (both cis and binary trans) people in person, I have thousands of people across the world calling me a “man,” a “tranny,” a “heshe,” and worse. Often people comment on my photos tagging their friends to laugh at how ridiculous, ugly, and strange I look. Every time I embark on a project that gets a lot of circulation I have to prepare myself for the onslaught of hate mail which inevitably includes violent threats, speculation on my genitalia, being insulted, being called an animal, and non-stop commentary on every aspect of my body.

And it’s even harder knowing that it’s never going to stop. Like so many other gender non-conforming people, I am not going to ever “pass” as a cisgender person. Violence and misgendering doesn’t just stop — it’s ongoing. Being femme and gender non-conforming means being made into a spectacle for other people — means not being able to control my own body and its representation. And it’s frightening because (like all of you!) I have a conflicted relationship with my body. I started to identify as “trans,” as a way to regain control of my identity but it has only opened me up to more scrutiny.

I am dreaming of a world where everyone — regardless of what they look like — can be respected for who they say they are. I am dreaming of a world where we stop policing one another into categories that actually don’t fit any of us, where we are open to being infinitely transformed by one another’s differences.

To the transmisogyny out there I just want to remind you:

1. The idea of universal womanhood is false. There is no one way to look like a woman. The idea of universal femininity is false. There is no one way to be femme. We all have our own unique ways of presenting our femininity and embodying our genders (and that’s beautiful!)

2. Femininity and womanhood do NOT belong to cis women. Trans women and gender non-conforming femmes are not “trying to become women,” we are women and femmes.

3. Trans women and gender non-conforming femmes do not have to look like cis women in order to be legitimate. We do not have to shave, we do not have to take hormones, we do not have to have surgery, we do not have to change our names, we do not have to wear makeup or dresses. We should not have to undergo the labor of proving what we already are nor should we have to look “beautiful” to be respected.

4. Stop telling trans women and gender non-conforming femmes that we are reifying patriarchal stereotypes of femininity. Do not strip us of our agency and punish us for the ways that we have made ourselves powerful and known in a world determined to erase us.

5. People do not have to identify as women in order to be feminine. People do not have to identify as women to experience sexism and (trans)misogyny. Detach your conception of femininity and womanhood from bodies.

6. Cis feminism is ultimately detrimental to cis women. We all have a stake in challenging the logics of the gender binary. Womanhood and femininity are so much more than what patriarchy has taught us.

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Grant Us Our Complicatedness

Like so many other gender non-conforming people I’ve grown accustomed to having to explain myself to others. My body has to come attached with a caption or else I am denied meaning. So many of us inhabit realities that are constantly regarded by both our cis and trans peers as too “complicated.” So many of us have to bear the burden of the theoretical, of being regarded as unpractical and idealistic. My interactions with media tend to be fraught and discouraging — from having to argue for the legitimacy of gender neutral pronouns, to defining “non-binary” — and even worse — “colonialism.” I’ve learned how to sort of tune out and resort to the political answering machine that I have pre-recorded in my head.

Recently I had the opportunity to work with a journalist who finally got it and I left our conversation in tears because for a moment — I think — I felt appreciated for my complicatedness.

I started think about what it would mean for us to acknowledge and appreciated our mutual complicatedness — to truly commit to the sticky and uncomfortable collage of history and feeling and body that constitute each and every one of our lives. The world I want is one in which we constantly transformed by one another’s complicatedness. The world I want is one in which we do not allow language to constrain all of our infinite possibilities. They tell us that our narratives have to be digestible but I wonder what parts of us are left after we have been consumed?

As gender non-conforming people we are rarely allowed to compose our own stories and feel our own feelings (let alone on our own terms). We have to continually make our stories and experiences referential — defining our narratives always in relation to the concepts people are more likely to understand and agree on like “woman” or “trans” or “minority.” So that every time I speak I am already mourning the things that I could not say. So that every time I am asked to “identify,” I am already compromising.

Today I began to think about what it would feel like not to have to be referential.

For the first time in an interview I was able to move beyond a word and actually speak about the “me,” that’s often buried beneath the layers of justification, theory, and history that I’m required to offer to even legitimize my existence. I also started to think about a world where gender non-conforming people are allowed to have our own stories and not have to define ourselves by *the* story that the media continually regurgitates: that our mere existence outside of the gender binary is either delusional or earth shattering (or both).

Because the truth is there is not one story for gender non-conforming people — there are hundreds of thousands. For so long we have had to cater and censor and edit our stories in order to be coherent to others. For so long we have had to filter our experiences with a language that was never meant for us. Our genders are stories that are constantly in flux — shifting, crescendoing, unraveling, screeching, pausing, rewinding.

You can’t stop the conversation about gender with a word. Knowing someone’s pronoun is not the same as knowing their story. Gender is not a destination but an invitation. It is an opening of a mouth. Let us continue speaking.

Grant us our complicatedness.

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Femininity Does Not Belong to Cis Women

Trans feminine people should be able to narrate our bodies on our own terms. If we say that we are women, then we are. If we say that we are femme, then we are. If we say that we have a pussy, a vagina, a clit, or anything else -- then we do. That's it.

So much of the way transmisogyny operates is about femininity and womanhood only being permissible for people who are assigned female at birth. Trans feminine people -- especially those of us who are visibly gender non-conforming -- are regarded and treated as both failed "men" and failed "women." Our femininity is imagined as perpetually abject: a failed gender project, a failed gender performance that will never quite live up to its "authentic" form. We are continually believed to be masquerading as cis women, appropriating or stealing from cis women, always desiring to become cis women.

Femininity does not belong to one body. In fact, much of what we regard as "femininity" was and continues to be meticulously created by trans feminine people and appropriated by cis women who erase us from feminism.

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On Lying: Street Harassment is Too High a Price For “Being Ourselves.”

 A few weeks ago I wrote about a debate I have with myself almost every day: what I want to wear, versus what I actually end up wearing. That conversation on street harassment and gender performance began on Facebook, but some of us — including Tyler Ford, Meredith Talusan and Aaryn Lang — decided to develop this discussion further on Medium. We want to talk openly about the internal dialogues we rehearse every time we leave the safety of our homes. So we’re launching a series called What I Wanted to Wear.

The story goes something like this:

Every morning when I wake up and look at my closet I ask myself, How much do I want to be street harassed today?

This means I usually gravitate away from the skirts and dresses and move begrudgingly toward the more conventionally “masculine” clothing. I consider for a moment how peculiar it feels that I have been made to find safety and security in masculinity — this thing that has been such a site of violence and anxiety in my past.

This weekend I did the same. I woke up. I looked in the closet and I saw this new dress I got on sale. But after I put it on I knew that I would have to pay for it, anyways.

At my performance downtown in the evening everyone told me that they loved this dress and remarked on how fabulous I looked. I did not mention the stares, the slurs, the panic, the terror. I smiled, said, “T H A N K Y O U.”

After the show I was walking home with one of my trans sisters and a man rolled down his window and screamed, “What the fuck are you faggots wearing!!”

There is something particularly unsettling about being harassed right outside of your home. Like that time on my way home, this man screamed, “You better take off that dress, or else!” and I walked faster and faster and didn’t look back while his girlfriend laughed at me. I will never forget her laugh. It left a stain on that dress, stubborn and permanent like wine.

I remember that for so many of us home is not that sacred place away from violence, it is actually that place constituted by violence. A type of violence that holds the paradox of being both perpetual and surprising. Keeps you on your toes.

That night I started thinking about how so many femmes I know are literally attacked for loving ourselves. How so many of us are harassed most on the days we think we look best. How dangerous and lethal self love can be.

I started thinking about how so many narratives in our culture are obsessed with “authenticity.” How we as trans people are celebrated because we have “embraced our truth.” And I think about what this does: how it standardizes visibility as authenticity, how it understands authenticity outside of violence, how it erases all of the calculations we must make to keep ourselves safe and whole.

Can we hold that on the days we are most authentic, that we are most ourselves, that we love ourselves the most — are the days that we are most terrified and afraid? Can we hold that not everyone can nor should afford to be “authentic,” because it means that they will be turned away from gender segregated bathrooms, shelters, parties, lovers. Can we challenge the hierarchy that’s drawn between those who are “out” and “authentic” and those who are not — as if these distinctions don’t have everything to do about race, class, security, home, terror, history. Can we be more critical of a culture that tells us that we are brave for being ourselves instead of dismantling the structures that made that so impossible to begin with?

I wonder whether we are ready to be more compassionate and appreciative for the ways that we have come to disguise ourselves. Can we find resistance in our duplicity and our disingenuousness? Can we remember the ways in which being inauthentic has kept us alive?

Today I woke up and looked at my closet and I remembered the street outside and that man and his girlfriend’s laughter so I put on a button down shirt and a beard and some pants and I have never felt more like a woman in my entire life.

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The Stonewall Movie, The Gay Movement, and Other Fairy Tales

There are some images that you never get out of your head. There are some moments that make everything explicit. This was both of them.

On June 26, 2015 the Supreme Court released a decision legalizing same-sex marriage across the country. The same day the Audre Lorde Project hosted its 11th annual “Trans Day of Action” — a protest that happens every year to honor the long history of resilience of trans and gender non-conforming people of color in New York City.

I was responsible for reaching out to media to cover the march.

That morning most of the media contacts didn’t show up. Instead, they all went to the Stonewall bar to cover the celebration for gay marriage. I wanted to tell them that some of the very people who started the Stonewall riots were marching with us. I wanted to tell them that many of these people still experience violence and homelessness today. But violence doesn’t sell like victory, does it?

I took this photo as our trans march passed by Stonewall.

The crowd gathered around the bar to celebrate marriage looked at us incredulously. Some of them heckled us: “Why can’t you just be happy?” We chanted about homelessness, about incarceration, about poverty, about occupation, about murder. “Why can’t you just be proud?”

I thought about who was behind the police barricade around Stonewall bar and who was marching on the streets with us. I thought about how much this says about the world. I thought about how Stonewall was a rebellion against police brutality. I thought about how the police are now invited to stand outside the bar. I thought about how much this says about the world. I thought about the word “community” and I thought about the word “barricade” and then I thought about them together and ended up thinking about the world.

Recently thousands of people across the world have called for a boycott of the new Stonewall movie because it fabricates a white cis gay male protagonist and erases the political contributions of the trans and gender non-conforming people who were there that night: Miss Major, Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, and more.

This movie is not an exception, it is the norm.

Erasure is not a moment, it’s a structure. It’s about who gets to tell the story about whom. It’s about the film Happy Birthday, Marsha!  which features trans women of color leads and is still fundraising to cover the costs. It’s about the very people who started Stonewall — people of color, sex workers, trans people, gender non-conforming people, women, queer people, homeless people, drug users — still fundraising to cover the costs.

Which goes to say: It’s not just that the movie Stonewall erases these people. It’s to say that the movie Stonewall is making what’s happening around us explicit. It’s to say the gay movement and gay history is institutionalized erasure. It’s to say gay victory, is already always whitewashed and ciswashed. It’s to say that the gay movement is one of the biggest fairy tales ever told: a series of lies — let’s call them “stories” — that spread across the world through a fabricated body of a white cisgender protagonist. It’s about the entire world knowing about “Stonewall,” but not knowing about TGI Justice Project (TGIJP), Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP), Streetwise & Safe, and all of the activists who still fight in the very legacy of anti-colonial trans resistance that Stonewall was a part of.

This is what happens when a movement becomes a metaphor.

The thing about fairy tales is that when they are told over and over again they become accepted as “truth” and as “history.” The thing about this movie is that when it will be shown over and over again it will make a nightmare seem like a wet dream: white police officers outside of Stonewall bar there to protect (white, cisgender) people from the very (Black, brown, trans) people who have and continue to put their bodies on the line for queer liberation.

There are some moments that make everything explicit. This is one of them.