the loneliness of being yourself

they will tell you to be yourself & then they will punish you when you are. they will encourage you to pursue your dreams & then when you do they will call you selfish. they will create marketing campaigns, slogans, video reels that tell you to live your truth, but there will be no flowers when you do. there will be loneliness. there will be fear. there may even be violence. my entire life i was told to “express myself” & then when i did people couldn’t handle it. i was told that *coming out* would make me happy & then i got bashed & no one seemed to care. what i am getting at is that they are lying to us & what’s even more painful about it is they don’t even know that they are: when you repeat something over & over again you begin to think it’s real. what i have learned is they only want half truths — they only want you to live your best life (& still grovel to them), be yourself (but not too much!), shine bright (but tone it down!). they cannot handle real truth because real truth is a mirror & they cannot look at themselves (they prefer to look at you). there will be no camera crews or congratulations when you do that thing of excavating yourself from the graves we mistake as bodies, holding it out to the light. there will be no celebrations because chances are there will be no one else there. there is a direct correlation between giving birth to yourself & your relationships dying. the more you gain the more you lose. when you unearth her she will not be conventionally beautiful, she will not say the right things, but she will be dignified nonetheless. & it is that dignity — that ability to hold your head high say, “i am” & mean it, for once in your goddamn life mean something beyond what they told you to (be)lieve. in a world that tries its best to dispossess us of everything, there is something resistant about walking away with your dignity.

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ending the gender binary helps everyone

when i say i want to “end the gender binary,” i am not saying that i want everyone in the world to be nonbinary nor that being a woman or a man is a problem. what i want is for “man” and “woman” to be understood as only two of millions of potential ways of being. i want all gendered & agendered ways of being to have access to the same legitimacy, safety, compassion & beauty, i want the category “woman” to exist without an oppositional relationship to that of “man” (and vice verse), i want “man” to not be regarded as mutually exclusive with “woman,” i want “woman” & “man” to contain multitudes & not be homogenized & flattened. identifying as a man or a woman isn’t about “reinforcing the gender binary.” the way that we perpetuate the gender binary is more about the systems of value we uphold & how we treat each other than the particular words that we affix to our experiences. this is why i believe that all of us — regardless of how we identify & navigate the world — have a stake in ending the gender binary! it’s a system of power that values its reproduction over our realities, its supremacy over our stories, its universality over our uniqueness. i want a world where gender is respected as a story, not just a word. one where we understand that it means a fundamentally different thing for one person to be a woman than another, where we recognize that there is no one way to be a man. when nonbinary & gender non-conforming people challenge the gender binary it is not because we want to police or restrict others, rather it is because we want to create a world that values difference, complexity, and infinite transformation.

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sexual harassment against gender non-conforming people

been holding this in my body: feeling sore & tired and just need to get it out somewhere. the other day a cab driver interrogated me incessantly about my genitalia. “do you have a penis?” “do you have female hormones?” “who do you have sex with?” i was noticeably uncomfortable & kept trying to deflect, but he pushed & insisted to know what was between my legs. i was anxious because the car was moving, he had my address, i was the only one in the car. so i just sort of complied. i felt disembodied: thought of all the stories i know of what happens to trans girls & gnc femmes of color when men are too curious. thought about how powerful i feel on stage and how traumatized i feel in public. i eventually got home (safely), but was overwhelmed with deep sadness not necessarily at this individual man but the world that enabled him and this. i thought about the hundreds of times absolute strangers have interrogated me about my genitalia, my body, personal details of my life with this..look in their eye as if i am not a person right there in front of them. i thought about all of the comments & discussions random strangers online have about my genitalia & body. i thought about how this was and is never understood as a transgression of a boundary because as a gender non-confirming person i am already seen as transgressive & therefore incapable of having boundaries/privacy, my gender presentation is made into a spectacle for public consumption & therefore cannot belong to me. it brought up how dismayed i have been to witness conversations about harassment that once again erase trans & especially gender non-conforming people, even though we experience assault on the daily & are blamed for it because of our gender expression. i felt the fear, anxiety, and paranoia about going outside — knowing that this would happen again, that there would be no discourse to acknowledge that it happened. i thought about how in a moment of supposed “victory” and “progress” gender non-conforming people like me still can’t exist in public without constant fear and how so few people seem to care about this. care about us: we who are neither women nor men.

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sexism against trans femmes

the current moment only regards trans women & femmes insomuch as we LOOK, not SPEAK! cis women reproduce the very same tactics of sexism & misogny they experience from cis men, on us! we are reduced to aesthetic props, inspiration porn, metaphor & parable...exhibited as both the delight and the crisis, the problem and the solution of gender. when we do speak our minds we are punished for it: we are disappeared, disparaged, disinvited. we are dismissed as “emotional,” “selfish,” “bitchy,” “vain.” when we challenge the mainstream (cis, white, hetero) feminist imagination, we are ridiculed, demonized, reprimanded. “how dare you bite the hand that feeds?” the expectation is that we should be grateful for being noticed...as if that is all we are worth: tokenization, condescension, objectification. why do we keep calling cis people looking at trans women & femmes progress? why do we remain silent at the double standards and discrepancies between cis women & trans femmes? i want you to think about this — seriously — the entire “debate” (as if our lives are a matter of public opinion) around trans issues is fundamentally rooted in our appearance! how misogynist is that? how insidiously sexist is that? we have no range — intellectually, politically, economically — beyond our appearance! to make this more explicit: there are days that i do not want to wear makeup or a dress because i do not want to get chased down, spat on, assaulted. but i know if i don’t i won’t be taken seriously. so i do...and i am still not taken seriously. this is the double edged sword of trans femme life today: be visible and still be invisible.

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liberal transmisogyny

biology is not destiny, genitalia is not prophesy, & we are far more expansive than a body. 

part of the way liberal transmisogyny operates is the insistence on foregrounding and stabilizing our “biological sex,” even while acknowledging gender variance. 

examples of this include people telling me: “you look fabulous, man!” “you are such a well dressed gentleman!” “nice dress, sir!” by liberal transmisogyny what i mean is the acknowledgement of our femininity, but the subsequent devaluing of it as:

1) always less legitimate/real than cis womanhood
2) merely an aesthetic and not a fundamental dimension of our personhood
3) a transgression of gender that is necessarily distinct from “biological sex.” the idea becomes: “I accept that you are feminine, but you are just a feminine man!” Or “You are a gender non-conforming man!” in other words: gender can only be subverted insomuch as it re-inscribes binary/biological sex. 

this is why often compliments toward trans feminine people like me aren’t actually experienced as affirming...because they are still invested in the idea that we are “men” who just happen to be “feminine.” liberal transmisogyny has shifted its rhetoric but not its practice: boundaries of “womanhood” are policed in a way that continues to harm transfeminine people, especially those of us who are gender non-conforming. liberal transmisogyny creates a barren ideological landscape — one that cannot (or rather refuses to) accept that there are many, varied ways of existing in the world detached from a binary gender and binary sex (colonial lol) paradigm (erasing intersex people altogether). liberal transmisogyny might accept that “hypothetically” violence against trans women and femmes is happening, but it plays no part in it! this is enabled by understanding trans critique as simply one of not being included, not also one of being actively oppressed. but remember: the problem isn’t just anti-trans violence, it is cis supremacy. 

which goes to say: i am not a man. and it is so silly and ridiculous that we have to spend so much time convincing you what we are not.

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gender non-conformity is enough

In a world that requires everyone to 'pass' within two discrete categories of 'man' OR 'woman' what would it mean for gender non-conformity to be regarded as beautiful, desirable, legitimate, and worthy? 

What would it mean for gender non-conformity not to be dismissed as an interim, as an in-between, a phase, as an other, third, or pre-, but rather to be treated as already sufficient unto itself? 

What would it mean for gender non-conformity not to have to be oriented toward transition (always having to go somewhere else, become something else, move on) but already as a legitimate (non-)destination? 

What would it mean to experience gender non-conformity not as a failure, not as a success, but simply to experience it without a moral and competitive framework? 

What would it mean for gender non-conformity to not be a spectacle, a transgression, a subversion, a dilemma, a crisis...and instead for it to just be? 

We are so, so far from that reality but I refuse to lose my dream of what could be! I have been and will continue to be degraded, demonized, humiliated for navigating the world as I do (I know that). But what I also know is that constant harassment makes me feel like my body isn't mine, so sometimes all I feel that I have left are my dreams. 

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go and find it

the other day this kid kept following me around the street & asking their parent, is that a man or a girl?" & their parent told them to "keep quiet" & my heart broke for them, for me, for us. it's there lying somewhere on west 34th street. go and visit.

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i can love everyone

yesterday at my workshop a participant said after an exercise that they "remembered they could love anyone" and i wanted to cry because that was such a pithy way of articulating what i want to accomplish in my life. then i thought about this stranger who asked me for directions at the train station and i used the opportunity to strike up a conversation and they told me they loved reading novels and i asked if they ever thought about writing one and they said they had nothing to say and i was so hurt by a world that makes people feel like they having nothing to say. and i told that person that i wanted to read their stories, even if they were mundane or simple. i told them they had plenty to say. which was my way of telling this stranger, i think, that i love them. and they said "thank you" and -- for a moment -- i, too felt like i could love everyone.

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memorial for my grandmother

Champa Rani Vaid was a painter, a poet, & a feminist who also happened to be my grandmother. She died last weekend in the same hospital I was born in 26 years ago. She was surrounded by family & community singing her favorite songs. This scene: her, surrounded by a motley crew of adoration & sleep deprivation in small town college station -- was just one of many masterpieces in her life. 

She always possessed a distinctly femme power of willing things into being, creating everything out of nothing: a man into a husband, a country into a home, a word into a prophesy. It's a form of magic she channeled later in her life when she started writing poetry to say all of the things she was never allowed to. later when she started painting hundreds of paintings after her arthritis got so bad she couldn't leave the house. 

Convention would have me say that she "left behind" a husband, three daughters, four grandkids -- but it is still to be determined if "I" am still here by which I mean so much of who I am was constituted -- willed into being, if you will -- by her. I used to sit with her for hours & talk about history & politics & gender and we would struggle through it everyone used to say "she won't change" but I had to do it, had to keep going, just like she had to do it, had to impart her blessings & judgment & tradition. & I adored her most in that collision, that clash of ideology, because I now understand it to be the 'stuff' with which art is made, I mean memory, I mean love, I mean me. Later we would call each other say, "have you been writing?" by which we meant, "try better next time." On the other side, in the absence of her which still feels like presence, i find myself most grateful for the struggle, the stubbornness, the contradiction. Most blessed by the tension -- the collapsing of borders & cultures & genders, most grounded & resolute in the instability of it all. 

At her cremation ceremony i read her poem aloud in "men's" clothes & i heard her voice in mine & it was separate but still the same & there I stood on the other side surrounded by her art smiling through the tears because she found a way, once again, to do the impossible: to live after death.

 

Traveling While Brown & Trans

the acrobatics i am forced to undergo while traveling brown, gender non-conforming, and bearded are so exhausting & demoralizing. i am of course almost always *randomly* selected, i am of course almost always groped & violated. often i am forced to be pat down, instructed to lift up the soles of my feet, show every part of myself in front of crowds of other passengers. there's almost a sense of pleasure in the officers desire to humiliate me in public, to perform "security" & "safety" by dealing with the problem of the brown gender variant freak for a white & cis audience. my job requires me to travel a lot so most of the time i just numb myself to how much this hurts: how painful it is to smile constantly, to act excessively polite as i am actively being violated. how devastating it is to have to think about shaving & butching up every time i need to go somewhere -- all the strategies we do to correct & compensate for other people's racism & transmisogyny. i think that's why i need performance so bad. the stage is really the only place in the world i can talk about that pain, work through it publically, say "this hurts!" say: racial & gender profiling made me scared of my own body. one day i looked in the mirror and didn't see me, but saw what they told me i was. i am crying here on the stage because i am trying to remember who i am. i am trying to remember what it means to love a body, a people who i have been taught to fear.

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Writing to Live

navigating the world as a gender non-conforming transfeminine person of color teaches you that this world has been primed to hate you, be disgusted by you, & reject you. it is to experience the antithesis of desire. we have to carry the shame of our racial communities, the shame of cisgender gays, lesbians, & bisexuals, & the shame of binary trans people -- we become emblematic of both their failure & our own. hatred & distrust of us is a sacrosanct tradition: one enshrined & fortified at all levels. there are no safe spaces when we are harassed every day wherever we go. there are no safe spaces when we are not believed for the violence we experience &, indeed, are most often blamed for it. we are persecuted not only by cishet men, but also by cis queer people and cis women who are constantly scrutinizing us to confirm the preconceived colonial stereotypes they have about us (imposters, villains, parodies, freaks). in the very places we are told we can find refuge, we are misgendered, dismissed. when we speak about our pain and the violence that engenders it, we are told to "think positively" (not "i will fight for you") as if we can somehow self-love ourselves out of structural racism & transmisogyny alone. often the only way to keep going is to numb oneself, is to keep quiet, is to internalize. but when i sit down to write my poetry all of the wounds throb. i remember all of the places i have been groped. i remember all of the times i have feared for my life. i remember every time i have been most afraid of the people who are supposed to protect me. when trans people voice our concerns about being lumped into "LGBT," it is because we have been harassed by cisgender people, regardless of their sexual orientation. is because we know what we experience is unique & deserves its own language & attention. to exist in this body and in this world is to know a type of loneliness that comes from everyone staring at you, but never seeing you. people clapping for you, but never caring for you. is knowing that all of the worlds you create for yourself crumble when you walk outside or go online & are told to die. i write to remember why i chose to live. choose to live. 💔

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