body hair + transmisogyny

4/29/19
trans feminine people should not have to remove our body hair in order to have our genders respected. trans feminine people should not have to remove our body hair in order to be safe. the thing about gender norms is that they are always aspirational. almost no one actually looks like normative men or women. but norms circulate at a symbolic level that doesn’t take our lived experiences into consideration. people of all genders have body hair. there are women with lots of it and men with none of it. we continually rehearse the idea that “women are less hairy,” despite all of the evidence against it. this is because norms do not care about evidence, about the lives we are living, the bodies we inhabit. norms exist to make us feel as if we are never enough. we naturalize our lack, become fluent in it like it’s a language we have always know. but we are not lacking, we just are. .

the gender binary is a particularly insidious norm: we exaggerate differences between men & women & ignore differences among them in order to fabricate the myth of binary gender/sexual difference. the stakes of this are particularly high for transfeminine people. our bodies are where they come to draw the lines of binary gender, we are collateral for this project. when i first started my transition people told me i shouldn’t even try because i was so hairy that no one would believe me. but here’s the thing: there *are* hairy women & feminine people. there always have been & there always will be. trans feminine people are held to an impossible standard to *prove* gender, meaning: we are often coerced into having to adopt the most normative (read: white) standards of beauty & gender in order to be believed for what we already are. in this way it feels impossible to own our own bodies when we know that our appearances will be scrutinized to confirm their norms. every day i remind myself that body hair has no gender. the gender binary — a social & political construction — dupes us into believing that it does. this harms everyone, but especially us. especially us 💔

art by @ximeco.art

race + policing body hair

4/28/19
policing of body hair has always been about race. the classification of body hair was foundational to defining race in the nineteenth century. in 1854 peter browne wrote Trichologia Mammalian in which he divided human species on the basis of hair. after Darwin (1859) race was often seen as an evolutionary continuum: racialized people were seen as closer to animals & white “civilized” people were seen as developing beyond us. body hair became seen as the lingering remains of animality/racial difference & removing body hair became a civilizational imperative. in 1876 the american dermatological association created a study on hypertrochosis — a medical condition to pathologize extensive body hair — & focused specifically on white women. white men became increasingly fixated on regulating white women’s physical appearances as a way to mediate anxieties about race. maintenance of white women’s proper physical appearance was about maintaining the “health” of the white race in the face of migration & racial unrest. magazines promoted models of hairless, white feminine beauty & campaigns talked about hair removal as “remedying evil” & removing racial markers. let me be clear about the implications of this: body hair is not “disgusting” because it’s “unhygienic,” but rather because it was & is still associated with racialized people. everyone should be able to do what they please with their body hair, but regarding those of us who don’t remove it as “unhygienic” is cultural racism. indeed, much of what has come to constitute “women’s beauty” & “women’s health” is actually about distancing from racial difference / gender non-conformity. yet another example of how gender is a racial construct & race is a gendered construct. for more info read “situated technology: meanings” by rebecca herzig.

art by @atsaidraws

listening to sadness

4/20/19
this past week i have been unyieldingly sad. the type of sadness that immobilizes: sore legs, sore heart, snoozed alarms, sleeping during the day, waking up in the night sad. sad like cancelled plans, or rather no plans, sad like not speaking much — instead sitting here still. still sad: like i can’t even get away from it, like it’s here to stay sad. .

& for the first time in a while i sat with my sadness & i listened & i learned that last week when i had to go to the emergency room to see my sick grandpa & there was another still moment before leaving the house — when i looked at the closet & had to choose between pants & skirt. pants = get there safely & swiftly to be there for him. skirt = maybe i won’t make it there. maybe i will: but in the bed beside him.
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i am hurt most when the violence i experience spills onto the people who i love. i want to hide it from them. keep them safe even though i am not. sad because i want to be strong but i can’t. sad because this shouldn’t be about me, this should be about him. sad because i can’t mute it sad, sad that it won’t go away.

i thought about dying on the way to someone i love maybe dying & i thought about impossible choices, how sometimes i feel selfish for being myself when i think about the costs for other people, i thought about all of the people who don’t have to think about these things & that made me even more sad: when the emergency room becomes the emergency world where do we go? when we love people so much we would die for them what do we do?

sad because i wore pants. sad because it was easier. sad because i cried every time i looked at him there. sad because the nurses called me his grandson. sad because i was grieving us both. sad because we are both still alive & i am still. so. sad. 📸 @christianhutterphoto

non-binary isn't new

4/19/19
There have been gender variant people for hundreds of years prior to the advent of western science. Requiring trans people to take hormones or have surgery to be “real,” is a form of cultural racism which invisibilizes thousands of diverse gender systems, transition rituals, & bodily practices from across the world. Let’s be clear: a racialized aesthetic of gender (read: white masculinity & white femininity) are being made to appear as natural & universal, when they are cultural & particular. White womanhood & white manhood are being generalized as “woman” & “man,” even though there have been & continue to be millions of people expressing out of these racial norms. “Gender non-conformity” only exists because you are evaluating (surveilling) our bodies with a white gender & sex binary. We aren’t “failing” to look like men/women/trans, we are existing outside of your particular white cultural definitions of masculinity & femininity. This is part of a historical project of disciplining racialized peoples into white gender binaries. Policing of gender non-conformity has & continues to be part of the colonial project of making gender & sex binary. They say that there are only two genders & sexes, but they don’t tell you about the work they do to kill, criminalize, disappear, and discredit everyone who exists outside the binary all the while delegitimizing our knowledge systems. Sex & gender are complicated & diffuse entities which vary among bodies and collapsing them into a bifurcated model of male/female is a recent cultural/racial project, not some fixed & ahistoric “biology.” This hierarchy we create of “scientific” or “medical knowledge” as an authoritative & dominant over all other ways of knowing & being is part of a long history of discrediting and erasing Black, indigenous, & PoC cosmologies. The “scientific knowledge” that gets used against us was produced by white people (often by forced experimentation on racialized people) as a means to justify their cultural worldview. Rather than accounting for this, trans politics has largely perpetuated it: establishing hierarchies of the real that reject gender non-conformity as failure. This must stop.

call me they

4/8/19
just a reminder that my pronouns are “they/them.” in a sentence that’s: “wow i like their boots!” or “they are on their way to the theater.” it’s hurtful when people come up to me & say they admire my work and then still refer to me as he/him “i was telling my friend is that him over there? and it is you.” like what??? it’s hurtful when i am invited for gigs & campaigns specifically for my visibility as a gender non-conforming person & am called he/him. it’s hurtful when i am literally being introduced to a full venue that i packed & am called he/him (lol what). these are the pitfalls of visibility: you want to look at us but you don’t want to regard our intelligence, difference, & personhood. hot take: if you actually believed us for who we say we are then remembering our pronouns once we tell them to you wouldn’t be this hard 👀 yes i know it’s difficult to shift habit & language but this is something TGNC people are doing as well! we were not magically bestowed with these knowledges & sensibilities, we are coming in to them through struggle, trying to excavate over time a more kind & gentle way to recognize & affirm ourselves & one another. heed our invitation to to this work & receive it as a blessing, not an inconvenience — one that allows you to journey beyond the tedium of the visual, the fatigue of the normative, and the brutality of the assumptive. we surpass all of this — we occupy more than physical space — we transcend convention & form — we birth language & ritual — we defy & in that refusal we create. let’s do better! love & need you. art by @cherry666soda

on hope

4/5/19
hope is something i rarely allowed myself to feel. amidst the constant & relentless assault on the people i am & the people i love, the routine & systematic policing of gender non-conforming life, the callous drone of misattribution & misrecognition - hope felt unrealistic, misguided, maybe even painful. hope meant going outside & saying today is going to be the day i won’t be harassed (& then it happening. again. & again. the disappointment its own wound). hope meant today is going to be the day that people will defend me (& then meant being left behind empathy’s embrace). but, when i meet you — my audiences, my potential friends — when i meet the students resisting the gender binary, the lovers cultivating compassion for themselves & everyone, the organizers ensuring that everyone is safe, the bipoc trying to remember another way to live, the heartbroken ready & willing to cry in public with me. when i meet you the people concerned with my safety & vitality beyond the stage i experience a kind of internal blooming as in “look outside it is cold but when i speak, here is spring.” in here there is a garden growing in the depths i thought there was no potential for life. which goes to say i am learning that it is both possible to be honest about the reality of pain & injustice while also feeling the reality of something else. these states of being are not mutually exclusive. i am clenching my heart with one hand & reaching out for yours with the other. i am hurting (& i am ready to heal). i am hurting (& i am ready to heal). love & need you! x

falling in love with everyone

3/27/19
why are we so mean to each other? why has politics become about how much we know & not how we treat each other? why do we mistake hurting other people as healing ourselves? why do we use big theory to disguise simple emotions? why has loving become synonymous with assimilating? what would it mean to sit with our sensitivity? to hold our tenderness? what would it mean to move from a place of need, rather than self-reliance? what would it mean to not just say “we need to talk about mental health,” but actually act on it? what would it mean to acknowledge that everyone is navigating trauma, loss, anxiety, & depression? so many of the people i am & so many of the people i love are struggling. i don’t want to bring them down further, make them feel like they aren’t enough. i want celebration, affirmation, care, delicacy, respect! it’s not just that i want gentleness, i need it. every day of my life i have people go out of their way to insult me, attack me, & degrade me. i know first hand what that does to your spirit & your body — something in you dies. there are multiple deaths in living. we are so callous with one another in our grieving of them. what would it mean to engage differently with one another? to say the world we want is not just in our minds, it is here right now in the way we relate to one another. this is why i practice affirmation — i heal from uplifting other people. i am enriched by your becoming. your spiritual glow up enlivens mine. increasingly i am drawn to the naive, the idealistic, the parts i have been told are “immature.” it is here in these places that i am finding the answers. what would it mean to recognize that we have the potential to love everyone in the world? what would it mean to recognize that everyone is capable of transformation? what would it mean to do something else from what we have been taught? do we dare? x

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being felt, not necessarily known

3/24/19
there are ways of existing in the world that are outside of & beyond “masculinity” & “femininity.” the gender binary collapses an infinity of modes of self-expression, styles, aesthetics, & ways of being into only two discrete categories. how would we feel if we were only offered two flavors, two colors, two emotions? who i am — let alone my gender — is in constant flux, shifting on where i am, who i am with, what i am doing, what i am feeling, what i am needing. i understand the desire to be known, i empathize with the desire to be recognized. but recognition at what costs? sometimes i worry coherence is another form of containment — that in our earnest attempts to transcend gender binaries, we put more of them into place. every time i say “i am” something gets lost there, like there are things crawling out of my mouth going to hide somewhere until i have the decency to bring them back. lately i have been searching for those things — finding them in the places i would least expect: missed connections, corner stores, the punch of a ginger shot. sometimes colors & poems & pictures & prints tell the story of my gender more than categories, words, identities, masculine, feminine. is it really a choice when we didn’t get to choose the options we are given in the first place? i want us to draw paintings on the multiple choice scantrons. i want us to build paper planes out of the forms they give us & send them back where they came from. i want us to ambition beyond being known... toward being felt. when people ask “what are you?” i want to dance or take them to meet my friends or invite them over for hot chocolate or some other way of illustrating that we are more than a word. how about how are you? how about what are you becoming? how about tell me about your pain & your power & your poetry? how about: how is language failing you? where do you go when it fails? take me there. take me there. take me there.

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in-between intimacy

3/23/19
the other day my friend asked me if she could meet me outside my hotel & travel to the airport early in the morning with me: “you give me life & love and if you're awake enough and feeling social, it would be nice to hang out & make your trip a bit of a celebration for you. with maybe coffee & croissants in the car?” at first i wanted to say no: it’s so early! it’s in the opposite direction! i don’t want to inconvenience you! but isn’t care about inconveniencing yourself for others? or rather: isn’t intimacy about relating to one another outside of an economy of inconvenience & obligation? there are things more important than convenience — rather, there are people who surpass it. so i said yes (sheepishly) & there she was waiting for me downstairs early in the morning with croissants, a smoothie, & a wry smile. have you ever had a conversation with someone at the back of a car? the landscape moving in the background. it’s one of my favorite things: that sleepy glow of the morning inscribed on our faces, the sun peeking through, the wind animating every hair, like the things that are dead, they are not dead, they are alive...here. everything in motion. the crumbs & tears left in the car: a monument to being alive, together. as if being together is the only way we are alive. so often we only show up for the event, the episode, the meal. but what about the in-betweens? i feel most lonely in the in-betweens: after a party, after a show, after an event. how do we come down from that? how do we return to the tedium of reality? when we grow up: who tucks us in? i spend a lot of time in airports. what i like about airports are the people saying goodbye & the people saying hello. sometimes i come early or stay late just to watch the ritual of it all. there’s something about it that makes me feel at home. which goes to say i want to be holding a sign for you on the other side: “welcome home.” i want to be there for the journey. i don’t just want to take you home, i want to be that home. i don’t just want to see you, i want to move beside you. being beside in the in-betweens feels like the love i need & am only now learning to accept.

rooting for you

3/21/2019
I just want to let you know that I am rooting for you. I want you to become your best self. I want to be your soccer mom cheering you on forever! I want a banner drop outside your window saying “THAT’S MY FRiEND!!!!” I am so committed to your healing! You mean so much to me! I am so grateful to have you here! You bring so much worth & dignity to my life simply for being! This world is so terrible and isolating and makes me so scared but I feel less alone knowing that you exist. Thank you for being honest, being present, being vulnerable, being messy. Thank you for needing & giving & needing & giving. I am constantly enriched by your presence, your artistry, your composite. I appreciate you so hard for trying and failing and trying again. Thank you for your paradoxes, your idiosyncrasies, your contradictions, your imperfection, your excess, your becoming. Thank you for your inconvenient & difficult parts, your stubborn parts, your celestial being! You give me hope & joy & tenderness and it means the world — no, it is the world. When you’re feeling like no one cares remember that you have a girlboy in your court who adores you & cares for you very much. Love & need you amsterdam, holland, world, universe.

queer interdependence

3/17/19

After my performance in Austin two trans femmes escorted me to my car & wouldn’t leave me alone on the street to make sure I was safe and followed up to make sure I got home okay. After my show in Toronto a group of folks walked with me and @artstarkiley to our next destination to make sure that we got there without being harassed. I was so touched & grateful, truly. I’m so used to having to safety plan by myself, and having other people care for me in this way moved me so much. This is what I want and need — queer interdependence. This idea that queer people have to be “strong” & “liberated” is a straight projection on us so they can be “lazy” and “complicit” in our struggle & not have to actually do anything to make our lives less awful. Transmisogyny means that queer & trans life only matters for its visuality, for its entertainment value, for its ability to overcome. We internalize this & treat each other as disposable. But we have to imagine and practice something else for each other: kindness, mutual aid, interdependence. So often when people ask me if I need anything I say no because I’ve become so accustomed to self-reliance & having to rough it out myself. But when people offer what they can provide — something tangible — it makes it so much easier for me to accept. I felt safe those two nights because of the love of queer strangers (potential friends). Safety is something I rarely feel and I do not take it lightly. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for protecting me, for caring about my life beyond the stage or the screen. Vulnerability comes from “vulna” which means wound. In other words: vulnerability is our willingness to be wounded. Are we willing to be wounded for each other? That’s what love means to me. Means I will inconvenience myself for you, I will put my body on the line, I will walk next to you, I will lose power by being with you...because there are things that are more important than power, aren’t there? This is the world I yearn for: one in which intimacy is desired more than power, one in which we are never lonely because there is always someone there. Always someone there.