r.i.p. tyler

in 2013 my friend malcolm asked a room full of people what healing felt like and none of us could answer. malcolm said that so many of us are fluent in our hurt, but not our joy. how are we supposed to fight for something when we don’t even know what it feels like? malcolm is one of those friends whose questions linger like lint in your pockets: light, gentle, persistent. ***

recently i got the news that my childhood friend tyler passed away. tyler was everything i am not: white, conservative, straight, christian. in other words, “the man.” before both of us had the language to articulate difference we were best of buds on the same soccer team for years. eventually we grew apart which is a nice texan way of saying our friendship was not able to withstand the invisible hands that pushed us to different lunch tables, classes, lives.

i ended up back home a couple of months before tyler died. i was in town to perform for the first time and was overwhelmed. i don’t remember much about that night but what i do remember is tyler posting on the event: “everyone should come support alok because a lot of their poems are about this place!” what i do know is that i had never talked to tyler about my gender before. what i do remember is how he sat at the back and smiled throughout. what i do know is that every system in this country was set up to ensure that he did not come to my show. what i do know is that he did.

i was deeply affected by tyler’s passing. i hadn’t talked with him for almost a decade, but i was still overwhelmed with grief. then i remembered malcolm’s question and that silent room: what does joy feel like? and i was filled with an incredible lightness, a collapse of time, a profound sense of resolution. joy comes from that which made tyler show up that night – that completely illogical and inexplicable drive outside of language. thank you tyler for reminding me what i am fighting for: a belief in the infinite transformation of everyone and everything. i never got a chance to tell you but you mattered a great deal to me and that night in our home town you gave permission for some deep part of me be free. i hope you are now, too. 

TransFeminism Helps Everyone

I am feeling disheartened by this increasingly popularized narrative of feminism progressing to "include" trans women (and sometimes nonbinary people). What this framing does is disregard all of the political work that transfeminine people have already always been engaged in outside of what cis feminism regards as legitimate. There is this thing that happens where the contributions of transfeminine people are always seen as just for "trans people" and not for "everyone." Transmisogyny teaches us that femininity is a selfish and individualistic endeavor, not a collective emancipatory project for liberation. Transfeminine people thriving and resisting in a world that continues to dismiss and demonize our femininity is feminist work that has reverberations for all people (and especially cisgender women). The political work of transfeminine people has and continues to create space, safety, and celebration for people of all genders. Transfeminine people should not have to narrate our experiences and our identities into cis feminist frameworks in order to be believed. Transfeminine people should not have to make our traditions of activism and our practices of survival/resistance fit neatly into cis feminist frameworks in order to be regarded (let alone respected).

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Push Harder! Beyond Nonbinary Inclusion

There are people in the world who are neither men nor women! It’s not just that they don’t “identify” as men nor women, they are just simply not men nor women. They are not wrong; the gender binary is wrong. This is not some young people on the internet theory, this is not some trendy politics, this is about real peoples lives and experiences with violence.

It’s not an accident that nonbinary people have been so thoroughly erased from the collective imagination, from political and social movements, from the historical archive. It’s not an an accident that frameworks like “sexual orientation” are always anchored to the gender binary. It’s not an accident that nonbinary people experience tremendous forms of interpersonal and state violence. It’s not an accident that people only understand “patriarchy” as being enacted by (cisgender) “men” against (cisgender) “women.”

This situation is the result of a series of calculated equations, decisions, and histories. Including “nonbinary” in a mission statement isn’t enough. Understanding that nonbinary people exist isn’t enough. Exceptionalizing us and regarding us as anomalies isn’t enough. Push further.

How did all of the complexity in the world, all of its difference, all of its context become reduced to two categories only? How did we come to think it was okay to link and define our sexual orientations to binary gender (let alone mobilize entire movements around them)? How did trans politics come to be about trans people “gaining rights” and not everyone divesting from gender to begin with? How are we upholding institutions, rituals, cultures, politics, and ideas that further entrench the gender binary and facilitate violence against nonbinary people? How did gender become so essential that it has become required for humanity?

These questions are not rhetorical. They have answers. And nonbinary people have been on the frontlines of providing them.


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Short Dress

Last week I wore a short dress for the first time in public. I want to tell you that I felt powerful. I want to tell you that I felt sexy. I want to tell you a story about reclamation, about confidence, about triumph. But the truth is I felt terrified. But the truth is I felt exposed. But the truth is I felt ugly. I was hyper-aware of my broad shoulders, my hairy thighs and armpits, my chest hair billowing out. The dissonance between my bold lip and my beard.

Which goes to say I hate the way we talk about gender dysphoria as if it's my fault that these clothes weren't made for bodies like mine, as if it's my fault that the more visibly gender non-conforming I look the more they will stare at me, as if it's my fault that they wiped us from your history books and TV channels. As if it's about me being insecure, me not loving myself enough. Me being wrong. Me being wrong. Me being wrong.

Every story about feminine people begins with the premise that we were wrong. It's not my fault that I grew up in a world that scripted my disappearance so well that I do it to myself.

When I started my transition it felt like something I had already been doing my entire life: erasing myself in order to fit in. At what point does femininity become synonymous with apology?

Which goes to say I hate the way we expect trans women and trans feminine people to be heroines, to be brave, unapologetic and perseverant. As if we only exist to inspire you. As if its our own responsibility to undo hundreds of year of racist (trans)misogyny. As if its our responsibility to liberate everyone else from gender binaries. As if of our safety is not on the line every time we do something so simple as reclaim the femininity that was stolen from us. As if this is our fault (and not yours).

I have learned many things from wearing dresses and beards and the survival strategies that go with them. One of the most important lessons I have learned is how deeply and religiously our world hates femininity. And often trans women and trans feminine people have to bear the burden of that hatred. How not only do we have to get dressed in the morning we have to wear all of your insecurity, all of your projections, all of your anxiety, all of your loss from the feminine part of yourself that you had to destroy in order to get by.

So I got up on that stage and performed anyways. And I didn't do it because I felt powerful or victorious or strong. I did it because I recognized that the reason I feel uncomfortable in my body is not my fault. I did it because the reason you feel uncomfortable with my body is not my fault. I did it because I am not triumphant -- I am tired.

I am tired.

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Gay Progress = Trans Backlash

I’m feeling concerned about the way that people are speaking about the flurry of anti-trans legislation popping up all over the country. There seems to be a sense of surprise like, “How did this happen?” “How did things get so bad?” As usual, “conservatives” are being demonized: the prototypical white straight southern racist becomes the straw man for all of the virulent transphobia and backwardness more generally. As always the liberal establishment is quick to produce a foreign enemy responsible for all of the hatred rather than taking responsibility for driving an agenda that not only disenfranchised trans people, but made us even more susceptible to violence.

Certainly there are many factors driving these policies (the rise of right wing nationalism being one of them), but what gets lost here is the complicity of cisgender lesbian, gay, and bisexual people and their political organizations and allies.

Never forget: there is no gay victory without trans backlash. The history of the gay movement is a history not just of trans exclusion, but of forging the very ideas, conditions, rhetorics, and politics that contribute to trans violence. This movement made a series of strategic choices that contributed to increasing the vulnerability of so many trans people (and especially gender non-conforming people.) “Gender identity” was defined (medically, legally, socially, politically) as separate from “sexual orientation,” because “love” is more palatable than gender non-conformity.

Trans people as a group, as a symbol, as a rhetoric — were construed as a threatening and abhorrent character foil (read: failure) for acceptable and friendly cisgender gay people (read: success). We cannot understand the ongoing criminalization of gender non-conformity without understanding that‪#‎LoveWins‬ precisely because ‪#‎GenderDoesn‬‘t.

This is the time and place “somewhere over the rainbow.” This is where frameworks of “equality,” commitments to “love,” and pleas of “we’re just like you,” reveal themselves to be morally bankrupt. This is the moment where those of us who have never had the privilege to escape the condemnation of our difference are left behind.

So the solution is not just about educating conservatives about trans people, it’s also about challenging progressive liberalism for its inability (and in fact refusal) to seriously account for the historical & continued demonization of gender non-conformity (especially against transfeminine people).

Let’s be clear: that if these policies were targeting cisgender gay, lesbian, and bisexual people there would be a very different sense of urgency.


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Trans Visibility Isn't Trans Justice

On this day of trans visibility so many of us are left uneasy and conflicted. Yes, of course, visibility has been helpful and transformative. But visibility is not the same thing as justice. What has become increasingly evident is that the system is, in fact, much more willing to give trans people visibility than it is to give us compensation, resources, safety.

Here are some quick feelings about visibility on this day so enamored with it:

1) “Trans” “Visibility” is an oxymoron. Trans is who we are, not what we we look like. We shouldn’t have to look like anything in particular in order to be believed for who we are. Visibility often is a form of (nonconsensual) labor that we have to in order to make our experiences coherent to others.

2) Trans Visibility is a cis framework. Who are we becoming visible for? Why do we have to become visible in order to be taken seriously? Non-trans people will congratulate themselves for our visibility but will not mention how they are the ones were responsible for erasing us in the first place. The trans movement isn’t about trans people moving forward, it’s about cis people catching up with us.

3) Invisibility is not the problem, transmisogyny is the problem. Trans people are harassed precisely because we ARE visible. Mandating visibility increases violence against the most vulnerable among us. The same system that will require trans people to be visible will not give institutional support to us when we are harassed precisely because we are visible.

4) Visibility often means incorporation. Often the only way we are respected as “legitimately” trans is if we appeal to dominant norms of beauty, gender, race, and establishment politics. Trans people should not have to be patriotic, change what we wear, undergo medical or legal transition, really should not have to do anything in order to be respected. We were and already are enough.

5) Visibility is easy. Organizing is hard. Sharing photos of trans people and calling us “resilient” and “beautiful” does little to address the persecution so many of us face. We cannot love ourselves out of structural oppression alone. How come media visibility of trans people has not resulted in the funding and support of our organizations, campaigns, and struggles?

Let’s push harder and demand more.

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Gay Assimilation Fuels Trans Persecution

This narrative that there is so much “internal division” and “conflict” between gay people and trans people within the “LGBT community” is a red herring. It’s intentionally misleading. What it does is blame and demonize trans people (and especially transfeminine people) for being oppressed. Trans people are reduced to our anger and stripped of our politics and experiences of harm. Our rage has a history! What this narrative does is erase a long and documented history of cisgender gays, lesbians, and bisexuals pursuing political agendas that threw trans and gender non-conforming people under the bus.

Our conversations should not be about “removing the T from LGBT,” but rather about what accountability looks like for cisgender gay, bisexual, and lesbian people who stole a powerful movement for racial, economic, and gender justice and made it about love, whiteness, and the acquisition and preservation of private property.

Never forget: Trans people ARE ALSO gay, bisexual, lesbian, and queer! I repeat: trans people ARE ALSO gay, bisexual, lesbian, and queer. This separation of “trans issues” from “gay issues,” this differentiation of “gender minority issues,” from “sexual minority issues,” is only possible because of the rejection of gender non-conformity within the “gay movement” itself.

The distinction of “gay” from “trans,” and “sexuality” from “gender identity” was a conscious strategy to make the (cisgender) gay movement palatable to straight cis white middle class society. “Love” became the organizing frame instead of “difference,” because gay INC knew a politics of love would be much more palatable than a politics of gender non-conformity. This is why millions of dollars were poured into campaigns for marriage and NOT campaigns to decriminalize sex work, campaigns to end police criminalization and brutality, campaigns for housing and economic justice.

In order for cisgender gay, lesbian, and bisexual people to achieve “equality,” they had to distinguish themselves from us and reject their own gender non-conformity. Equality (read: assimilation) requires both a celebration of heteronormative white culture AND a thorough and systematic dismissal of gender non-conformity.

So the problem is not “internal conflict,” as if we just “can’t get along.” The problem is that the precarity of trans and gender non-conforming people today is precisely because of the actions and decisions of cisgender gay, lesbian, and bisexual people.

Intimate and familial violence is often the most harmful. The pain stings twice: not only being erased & rejected, but also being told that the people doing it are “your community.”

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Fight For Our Artistry

New York Fashion Week & Halloween are some of the only times I feel comfortable walking around as myself in the city. In both occasions there's a sense of social permission for gender transgression -- people think I'm wearing some "costume" and let me go about my day. On the whole people are so much nicer to me: a man even went out of his way to come up to me and tell me that he thought my dress was beautiful

I realized later that this is the first time a stranger had said something nice to me when wearing a dress in public. I am used to people going out of there way to make me feel like trash. I couldn't tell if I was more affected by his words or my surprise. .

I yearn for a world not just where gender non-conforming people can be safe, but also one where every day we encourage and celebrate transgression, creativity, and experimentation.

People always ask me why they should care about trans issues if we are "such a small percentage of the population?" This is about gender, but it's also about something else. It's about the potential for people to be themselves in a culture that makes that so utterly impossible. It's about developing an alternative relationship to difference, it's about unlearning all the ways we have been taught to fear and dismiss the unfamiliar

I also think there's something there about appreciation of artistry -- of all of our potential to birth new worlds out of our bodies and our words. Because I think we live in a world that is terrified of possibility because it so desperately relies on the status quo to keep people down

So to that man on the street, and to you on your screen, here is to fighting for all of our artistry. To supporting one another in making meaning and truth and possibility EVERY DAY out of all of the monotony and bleakness around us.

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Issues Facing Nonbinary & Gender Non-Conforming People of Color

Last weekend I facilitated a caucus with my friend Joshua Allen for non-binary and gender non-conforming (people who do not identify as a man or woman or people who transgress what society regards as a man or a woman) people of color. Because GNC and non-binary people of color are so often forgotten by feminist, queer, trans, and anti-racist movements I wanted to share a couple of the points that came up from discussion.

1) Representation of gender non-conforming and non-binary people is limited and misleading. Even though people of color are more likely to identify as non-binary, the only people who are recognized as such tend to be white, masculine, and/or thin people. Due to patriarchy and transmisogyny non-binary femmes are continually erased.

2) Choosing to identify as non-binary or gender non-conforming had as much to do with our race as our gender. Many people spoke about how the gender binary was forcibly imposed on Black people, indigenous people, and other people of color through various processes of colonialism. Some felt like they could never fit in “man” or “woman” because these categories were never meant for them.

3) People talked about the trauma from being erased from one’s own peoples’ histories and communities. Part of what colonization did was made it so that there often no words in our languages and tongues to explain who we are. Often times our communities read our genders as “white,” or “academic,” even though there have always been people and experiences outside of the gender binary.

4) Many people expressed never being believed because they weren’t “trans enough.” People struggled with consistent feelings of imposter syndrome as if their experiences didn’t qualify them to claim the identity “transgender” (even though trans is supposed to be an umbrella term for everyone who identifies outside of the binary). Even though people experienced transphobic and transmisogynist violence daily, people felt pressured to modify their bodies and/or pursue medical transition in order to have other binary trans people recognize them.

5) Almost every single non-binary or gender non-conforming person of color we knew struggled with depression and suicidality. Almost everyone struggled with loneliness and isolation because so few people believe us (let alone understand us). Yet, there continues to be little to no mental and health care services that are equipped to handle our problems because we continually have to argue for the legitimacy of our experiences.

6) The crux of the violence is not just misgendering, it’s gendering to begin with.

7) Gender non-conforming and non-binary femmes often feel terrified to leave the house because they experience such intense harassment and violence. This doesn’t necessarily look like, “Hey sexy,” but rather, “What the hell is that?” People are discouraged that the trans movement hasn’t yet challenged the idea that we should have to be gender conforming in order to be safe.

8) Non binary and gender non-conforming people are experiencing extreme physical, intimate, and emotional violence, poverty, police brutality, homelessness, and other serious issues. Yet they are denied support or resources because they are not cis women or trans women.

9) In particular, Black and Indigenous femme non-binary and gender non-conforming people are experiencing lethal state violence and murder and continue to be misgendered in their deaths. There has been no conversation about all of the non-binary and gender non-conforming people who have been misgendered as trans women in their deaths even if they did not identify as such. People were concerned with who is left to grieve & resist the criminalization, violence, deportation, and murder of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous non-binary and gender non-conforming people when people do not even understand their identities.

10) How are people supposed to organize when people still consistently deny that there are more than two genders & police us into the binary?

Why is Everyone So Afraid of Men in Dresses?

A confession. Every time I have a photo shoot, interview, or performance — I shave. I shave because later when I look at photos of me wearing a beard and lipstick or beard and dress I feel like I look disgusting. I shave because I know that people won’t believe that I’m trans if I don’t.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be hairy and to be trans. How the days when I do not shave are actually the days that I experience the most harassment. Shaving is about the distance between, “You look like garbage,” and “Hey baby.” I’ve been thinking about how almost all of our models of transfemininity are hairless — how when I post photos of myself online people tell me that if I want to be recognized as “real woman,” I should AT LEAST shave, otherwise I look like a “beast,” or “a monster.” Sometimes when I look at photos of myself I see a monster.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about monsters. How the monster in the closet of so many of our feminist, queer, and trans politics continues to be the figure of the “man in a dress.” I am not, in fact, a man in a dress. I am non-binary person which means I do not identify as a man nor a woman. But “man in a dress,” seems to be the only way that this particular culture recognizes me. So as someone who is so often read and treated as such I’ve developed a particular sense of empathy and awareness about how revolted our world is by the idea of gender non-conformity.

What is absent from so many discussions of body hair between cis women is why so many of them are offended from being read as “men in dresses,” aka gender non-conforming people like me. What is absent from so many discussions of “passing,” in trans communities is why should we have to be gender conforming in order to be regarded as beautiful (let alone safe?). And certainly not everyone should have to be gender non-conforming, but I wonder who is left to rage, to fight, to love, to find beauty in us when everyone is trying to run away from us.

Why do we think men in dresses are ugly? Why do we think gender non-conformity is suspicious, dirty, uncouth, unprofessional, tacky, wrong? Why do people spit at me, laugh at me, throw things at me, or shove me when I wear a beard and dress?

My experience and so many of the experiences of gender non-conforming people are a testament to the world that it’s not just femininity that’s being policed, it’s the gender binary. Gender binarism teaches us that “masculinity” and “femininity,” must always exist in opposition. So when we see people that have what society regards as “masculine” and “feminine,” coexist in tandem we are motivated to disgust, rage, and sometimes even violence. Sometimes I can’t tell if I’ve been harassed because of my perceived femininity, my perceived masculinity, both, or neither.

I earnestly wish we can imagine and build friendships and ideas and movements that challenge the deep and ingrained aversion to gender non-conformity we have been taught. But sometimes that project feels too daunting and naive. So this year I’m going to make a small commitment to not always shaving my beard. To looking at my photos and not seeing ugly or beauty, or masculinity or femininity, but just seeing me.

What a simple gesture, what an impossible task.


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Celebrate Gender Non-Conformity

We need to challenge the deliberate erasure of gender non-conforming people  — people who visibly defy gender norms, binaries, and roles — from our social movements. Stigmatization of gender non-conformity isn’t new, it’s an intentional strategy of respectability and assimilation that is as old as feminist, queer, and trans movements themselves.

Historically gender non-conforming people have been cast aside by feminist movements who rely on the incorrect premise that you have to be a (cisgender) woman to experience patriarchal violence. Gender non-conforming people have been silenced by racial justice movements who view us as “contaminated by the influence of white culture” or failures of the type of patriarchal manhood and womanhood required to be a part of the struggle. Gender non-conforming people were thrown under the bus by a gay movement which chose to pursue a politics of love and assimilation versus one of gender and difference. (Love won because gender didn’t.) What’s becomingly increasingly evident is that gender non-conforming people are being forsaken by a trans movement which increasingly relies on gender binarism and palatability and proximity to cisgender and white ideas of beauty.

What’s becoming evident is that gender non-conforming people are becoming symbolic failures for the very movements that claim to fight for justice for all. Often the victories of feminist, gay, and trans movements have less to do with how much they have challenged gender binarism and more to do with how they have become incorporated by it.

Rather than rallying around difference we continually find ourselves in the same trap of fighting that we are “just like” the very people who oppress us. This logic has a disproportionately negative impact on visibly gender non-conforming people who often may not look like the norm. Not only do we have to navigate a world that thoroughly denies our existence we also have to carry the burden of all shame of the people around us who project their own feelings  of insecurity and inadequacy on us.

We didn’t cross the gender binary, the gender binary crossed us.

It means a very different thing to fight for gender self-determination — a world where people can express their genders without fear of persecution and violence — than to simply fight for transgender rights. The problem isn’t just about misgendering, it’s about gendering to begin with. We are fighting for a world where all people are able to self-determine who they are without fear of state, communal, and interpersonal violence.

Never forget:

1. People do not have to identify as transgender to experience transphobia.

2. People do not have to identify within the gender binary of male or female to experience transphobia.

3. People should not have to “pass” as cisgender in order to ensure their safety. We should not have to be palatable to be safe. We should not have to appeal to racist and ableist ideas of beauty to be safe.

4. Patriarchy is the institutionalized regulation and policing of the gender binary. Those of us who visibly defy cis, white, and able-bodied ideas of what a “man” (and especially) what a “woman” should look like often experience the brunt of the violence.

5. Gender non-conforming people are regarded and treated accordingly as “failed” men and/or women and because we live in a world where participation in gender binaries and norms is a requirement for humanity.

5. The project of gender self-determination is a political conviction that holds everyone and does not draw hierarchies of authenticity of who is “trans/queer/radical enough.” It’s about imagining and creating a world where people are given back the power to self narrate their own bodies, identities, and experiences. It’s about remembering that there is enough room for all of us — that we do not need to invalidate one another’s realities in order to realize our own.
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