The Othering
Note: This was started in february, well before the recording of Long Live Lacroix. I still firmly believe the written aspect of this has value, and decided to proceed forward with finishing this work.
The best place to start is with the truth, I suppose.
Hi folks, I’m trans. As to what flavor or label of trans, I’m unsure. But I’ve known nearly my entire life. I’ve lied to and denied myself that fact for as long. Though I’ve slowly begun to open up about that over the last year I’ve never come out publicly and stated it. Patrons first heard about it months ago on my series The Workshop, where speaking it aloud felt safe. There were fewer people there and they were folks I by and large trusted immensely.
This is my first time talking about who I am in full outside of my circle.
I think I was scared of doing that for a long time. But I’m getting too old, tired and angry to give a shit anymore. I’m trans. I’ve known my entire life. Though I may not have dared to type that word or talk about it until now, I’ve been open about it in my own way for seven years.
I did so with a face you all know and love. Someone many of you have written in and expressed immense admiration for. Someone that I’ve said on several occasions had the fates been kinder to me, you’d be addressing as Jen rather than Jack.
Jen, for lack of a better way to put it, is just me in a wig with a chest plate. Her words, ideas, thoughts and dialogue have always been my own behind a thin veneer of vocal effects. Jen wasn’t my first experience revealing this side to myself either-as I was a woman to an entirely different circle of people called Jacklin for nearly five years in my early twenties.
Surprise, or not, depending on who you are and your capacity to read intent.
I’m Trans.
And I’m tired of fighting you all about it.
I write today not only in hopes to firmly establish my identity outloud, but to also proclaim that the community at large (specifically its online component) has done a shit job at acknowledging people like me. We’re the lost folk of queerdom, and there’s not a single day that goes by that I feel safe either out in the world or with my own kind. Our experiences are outliers to the gender binary, something many of my siblings adhere to despite openly protesting it. While I am by no means unique in my perspective, I find the voices of my kin stifled every time we try to say something. Moreso if they’re minorities.
Queerdom and being queer isn’t a radical idea or position to take. There’s no “right” way to queer or trans, but the beauty of the spectrum is held in check by the dead weight of deeply rooted gender binary concepts, misogyny/misandry and racism. The online queer community has been placed in high chaos, violent times with unprecedented access to resources which allow us to draw attention to the suffering of our siblings.
Instead, they’ve used it to align themselves with the boots of fascist policies which are quickly running through the respective houses of government in the US and becoming law. The serpent inevitably eats its own tail, et al. Instead of using widely available technology to enable the greatest mutual aid network our species could conceive, I see it squandered by and large on intra community squabbles which invariably boil down to gossip and overblown popularity contests. Specifically at fault are the white queer americans, who have used their positions to preach to the rest of us about how we should be.
Which, before I go any further, I’d like to say the following to these types: There is no amount of gladhanding or appeals to law enforcement, government officials or religious leaders that will keep you out of the mass grave we’re on track to be buried within. The killing and curling of our kin is already happening. You directly aided that by thinking being “one of the good ones” would save you. You ignored the teachings of those that sacrificed themselves so that you could draw breath right now. Because of your efforts, here we are again with people denying Stonewall was a riot. With cops at Pride. With puritanical ideas running rampant once more, infecting the youth and the old with fascist, genocidal ideals.
And so the serpent eats it’s tail once more. But I digress.
I feel neither masculine nor femme, but another option entirely. This is popularly referred to as “non-binary”, but adhering to labels at all limits the beauty, depth and nuance I and others like me have come to find with our existence. Instead, we get wrote off in a thousand different ways under a thousand different names, which ultimately do nothing save fracturing the community and our identity further. The most damning thing is that this is often done without our consent, by people who think they understand us.
I’ve been called a “demi-man” simply because I’ve a five o’clock shadow one day. A “queen” simply because I took photos in a skirt. Despite going from “they-them” to “any pronouns” in a desperate attempt to assert myself, I still get called a man by my own community-often by well meaning queers as afraid of asking me to explain as they are of upsetting the Straights. It’s a means of silencing discussion and the human experience ingrained in us from birth by a culture that swallows propaganda daily.
I and others like me are out, but we’re not free. We’re seen but we’re not heard. The only time people do listen is when we yell, and then they give us as much space as their sensibilities as allies and siblings will allow. Because they seriously, genuinely thought slapping an enby flag on our forehead solved our problems instead of creating another form of pseudo-nationalist rhetoric.
The only time I felt liberation from the expectations of labels was within the trans community. It has faults of it’s own, bad actors and no shortage of those that want us dead. Speaking comparatively in my personal experience however, it by far aligns closer with my concept of identity than others. I feel more at home in the arms of my brothers, sisters and others than I ever did attempting to placate the rhetoric of the rest of the community.
A non-zero portion of the rest of you would be happy if we all just shut the fuck up though. The shackles of binary ideals muzzle what you know to be the truth-that we’re all queer uniquely, and I dare say “trans” by concept of stepping away from those binary norms.
It scares you. A lot. Because it upsets the comfort and protections you’ve secured by appealing to the same powers that want us dead.
Which is why it’s fine to have sacrificial lambs.
The Binary: An Anti-Humanist, Species Destroying Concept
Nothing is inherently gendered.
Absolutely nothing.
“Gender” as a concept is so inherently nebulous, so vague and general in so much that it’s applied to overlapping experiences and marketing. In of itself however, it is simply a word with no basis in physical reality. The concept of what’s a “man” and “woman” is ultimately a dialectic concept, conveyed through the equally nebulous concept of intention. Gender, in theory, should be “whatever the fuck I individually make it to be”.
Yet right now, there’s laws being pushed through congress and the senate that allow for the active genociding of anyone challenging the idea. As of this writing, there was a trans girl who was stabbed to death in the UK for expressing her identity.She won’t be the last of us killed just this month, nor is she alone in being a minor murdered for this. There’s thousands of years of historical precedence justifying our existence, yet that’s ignored so we can die by the hundreds every year at the alter of American conservatism and evangelical values.
For something that ultimately doesn’t exist. For a concept that should be treated with the same derision people have for organized religion or the idea of incorruptible governments.
Queers treat the gender binary as a yardstick with which to measure their human value. We talk of “passing” and “boy/girl moding” as beasts we have to satiate simply to piss where we want. Should any of our siblings not adhere to these ideals and concepts, we feast upon their being like a multi-course dinner. First comes the polite suggestions, the ribbing. The advice never requested about fashion, hair removal and more. When those fail we exile them, ostracize them. For desert, we use them and their existence as a boogeyman style warning to others.
“Hey, you don’t want to be like them right?”
The fact of the matter is, this is an abused, marginalized group perpetuating the abuse that was given to them in a desperate bid to hold power totally unavailable by any other means. We’re politically under-represented, out gunned and out matched by our oppressors everywhere else. So of course a section of us will use the same tactics to beat down anyone that doesn’t conform to some contextually sensitive, puritanical idea of what a “good queer” looks like.
The truth of such movements however is that they ultimately serve white supremacist, cis-het christian ideals. You can see the proof of this via the “LGB remove the T” movement, which recently has opted to remove/invalidate bisexual people as well. They’re perfectly fine with allowing members of the same struggle to die so long as their white, cis-het approved comfort is perpetuated. You’d think any level of awareness of our history whatsoever would show them what a dangerously deadly idea this is.
Yet, their goals aren’t simply exclusion/exile from the community-but rather to alter it’s trajectory as legitimate and established. Doing so allows them to control the narrative of the struggle, and therefore it’s history both backwards and forwards. Just like the very people that were content to send us to death camps during the 1940s. I’ve often called such people “casually evil”, and I can think of no better term to illustrate the mindset of white queer americans towards the struggles of anyone who isn’t them. The total disregard for inequality, human life and the voices of others is committed with the same casual disdain they give receiving a work email. BIPOC people and gender fuckers are a nuisance to their existence, as we’re a threat to the power grip of white american politics.
Adherence to the gender binary will be the death of all of us. Assuming that our identity is solely tied into how well we pantomime, how well we fit our clothes, how well we can shuck and jive will be death of us. Adherence to an outdated, static ideals that we fail to realize are a kinetic concept and always have been will be the death of us.
It behooves me to mention very specifically that the “LGB without the T” movement was started by two people that aren’t even queer. Bev Jackson and Kate Harris of the LGB alliance, aside from their hate/fear mongering rhetoric, ultimately seek to “redefine homosexuality” and thus retroactively invalidate all historical precedence for what is ultimately elimination of queer voices from public spaces and history. They boldly claim that queer children don’t exist among other things.
Hey, Bev and Kate-I was in the closet from the time I was ten. Literally nobody knew anything about my sexual identity or preferences until I was twenty-five. I masked a majority of my life if for no other reason than the threats to my young life were incredibly real. I know for a fact based on empirical evidence and conversations with others in this community I’m not the only one by a wide margin. We see what you’re doing and we’re wise to it. That’s why we fight you so hard, you daft, absolutely hideously evil cunts. Denying the existence of a marginalized group does not make us magically go away. There’s no amount of hand-wringing, whataboutisms and denial that can snap an entire group of people out of reality no matter how much you direly pray for our deaths.
Charity status doesn’t mean you’re not a hate group.
One legacy will significantly outlive the other.
Besides, don’t you have a court date to prepare for?
Wad Of Flesh, Slab Of Iron
I’m trans.
I have zero intention of getting on hormones.
I don’t care if I pass. The very concept of needing to do so makes me laugh.
I am stuck in a body I didn’t ask for in an existence I didn’t consent to on a planet that wants me dead.
I’m trans, and given the above, I will work with what I have.
I will take this heap of flesh covered in coarse body hair, this booming bass voice and I will pound away until it’s hard as iron. Until my shirt stretches across the flat-breasts that Gendered Society calls “pecs”, until I cry out in pain on the weight bench and beg god to kill me.
Then I’ll do another set. And another.
If I will be considered undesirable by the straights and othered by my own siblings, then I will lead by example. I will mold my body and torture my flesh into an ideal I can feel comfortable in, damned the consequences and pain it inflicts upon me.
Because nothing can hurt me more than you already have. Nothing can kill me in any meaningful way more than being given a smirk by people I thought were my found family, followed by the off-handed remark of “are you sureeeee you’re trans?”
Nothing I do to myself and my body will hurt anywhere near as much as the things you people have done to me, to people like me and to our BIPOC siblings.
I will do all of this because long after your ideals of what a queer should be have been defeated, be it by your own in-group fighting or the reality of existence, after you’re dead and quiet at last, I’ll still be here. Right alongside all the other “ne’er do wells” like me. It’s gonna be a hard road for all of us, and I’ve got to be strong enough to carry it with them. I’ve got to be strong enough to keep fighting all the others that tell us we shouldn’t exist, too.
I’m trans. I’m not unique in how I trans. There’s a lot of people like me.
There’s always been trans folks like me.
There will always be trans folks like me.
And some distant day, maybe in a world that looks like ours (or perhaps will be kinder), I hope to sit down in my old age with my siblings. I hope we can laugh and smile and the pain of the here and now is distant.
But until then.
I will lift.
I will fight.
I will grow stronger than you ever could have imagined I and others like me could be.
Because we’re trans, and we are powerful.
As for what to call me:
I’ve long since given up the struggle of being recognized.
Call me anything, I don’t care anymore.
But acknowledge me. Realize I exist.
Realized we exist.
-j