Reflections on Pre-Party Pride
Thursday, June 25th, 2009As we move from the arts and film portion (my preferred one) of this year’s Pride festivities to the final drunk and debauched weekend, I feel compelled to comment on some of what I’ve witnessed and experienced.
To kick things off, I attended Fresh Meat, an annual queer/trans performance (mostly dance) that I’d been wanting to go to for years, but never actually did. I think it was hard for me to accept or even believe that in the last five or so years, I went from being a tomboy who obsessed over the sports pages and watched SportsCenter religiously to being an artsy boy who uses the sports pages for kindling and would rather watch gender-variant folks doing modern dance or clog around the stage than even discuss who was in the NBA finals.
I particularly liked Sean Dorsey Dance’s Uncovered: The Diary Project (the full-length version is even better), themed around the diaries of transsexual gay man and pioneer, Lou Sullivan, and a performance piece by D’Lo, who blew me away with hir ability to perform a variety of genders, unraveling the complexities within each, and rocked my heart with the love that s/he expressed for hir bois, reminding me how my expanding network of trans-masculine people is my own source of personal strength.
Perhaps what moved me most about this night was the realization of how many of us there are out there, enough not just for one trans dance troupe, but for every variety of performance and dance — tap, modern, hip-hop, rock, folk — and that we exist across and through every culture, ethnicity, and race. There was a moment when I was sitting there in the audience and I thought, “This explosion of creativity, of self-expression, a sense of openness, support and community, this best represents the world that I want to live in.”
The next day, I watched Boy I Am, a documentary, and the best trans film I’ve ever seen, that played in Frameline two years ago and has nothing to do with this year’s events, except that I watched it in the middle of them. Between this and Fresh Meat, I heard and saw people binding (with ace bandages, layered sports bras, and tanktop binders like the ones I used to wear from Underworks) for the first time since my own surgery, and had what I felt like was a post-traumatic stress response.
I remember a few years ago when a good friend of mine told me he found binding “comfortable,” and how shocked I was, having just started to experience the excessive sweating, chafing, and constriction of crushing my breasts against my chest. I didn’t argue with him, nor did I argue with my father who referred to my behavior as self-injurious. It was destructive, but it was also palliative. Binding was a survival technique, not that I could’ve said that at the time — to acknowledge my struggle, the physical agony that somehow alleviated the mental and emotional agony, was impossible.
I was just developing a transgender identity back then, one that wasn’t predicated on a desire to become a man, the sense that I was a man, or any desire to take on perceived male social or sex roles, but rather an increasing awareness of the deep discomfort with the gendered parts of my body in a way that seemed so different from standard body image issues surrounding things like weight. I struggled with my desire for top surgery as a cosmetic modification and was fearful that speaking about it like that would do a disservice to trans people fighting desperately for health insurance to cover what is most often construed by the industry as “elective” surgery. For awhile, I convinced myself it was elective, at least for me, because to feel like I didn’t have a choice, that I couldn’t fight it, that I would have to accept the phenomenal challenge of being transgender was too hard.
I’ve changed. We all do. But it is still my fear, especially in discussing/writing about transgender subjects, that I will regret my words, take a stance that is not politically forward thinking to the cause of greater acceptance, understanding, and visibility. At least 70% of my trans friends cannot afford the $8,000 for top surgery and may never be able to on their own. They are not working towards a trans identity like I was; they have one. And as I continue to step up to the challenge of embracing myself as transgender, it is remarkable how I am still one of the privileged, the lucky ones, to be white and raised upper middle class, is to be instilled with the foundation and expectation that I always get what I want, even if it’s something socially deviant like having my breasts cut off.
I have sat with one of my old binders by my side (I gave the rest away to friends) as a writing prod, but it did nothing compared to the trigger of seeing other human beings wearing them, the ache in my heart for the pain I couldn’t let myself feel, and the empathy for those who don’t know what it is like to take a deep breath, who must convince themselves that suffocation is comfortable.
The best film I saw in this year’s film festival was “Diagnosing Difference,” a one-hour documentary analyzing, deconstructing and ripping apart the DSM-IV criteria for Gender Identity Disorder. I *had* to procure a letter diagnosing me with this something that is significantly easier to do these days, and although I’ve read extensively on the hoops that those before me had to jump through, hearing someone like Shawna Virago describe going to a gender dysphoria clinic and having to reiterate the standard narrative or the “transgender myth” still moved me.
I’m still trying to understand on how pathology has affected me (my solution was to handle it with humor), how it affects social (non)-acceptance of trans folk, and working to see more clearly how services can be accessed if a medical as opposed to psychological diagnosis is rendered, or if there’s a better solution, something I feel like this movie talked around. But maybe I’m dense. Or looking for simple answers to something that is still being problematized.
There were two thoughts that are not particularly profound, but that resonated with me in that lightbulb kind of way. One was the focus on the word “stereotypical” and how the diagnostic criteria considers it a disease to oppose gender stereotypes. Wow. Need I say more. I believe it was Dylan Scholinski, author of Last Time I Wore a Dress, institutionalized in part for gender identity disorder (an archaic form of treatment reminiscent of electroshock therapy for homosexuals pre-1973) who spoke eloquently (and I’m paraphrasing) about how much sense it makes to question our genders, explore ourselves, build consciousness around who we are, that to miss out on that journey in life is abnormal. It is that sentiment that makes me feel the gift of being transgender for the ways in which it grounds me and connects me to others who care about self-awarenss.
Susan Stryker, my favorite queer “celebrity” (activist/historian/filmmaker/writer/theorist/insightful and brilliant mind) said the simplest and for me, the most mindblowing thing: that because of including GLB and T together, people outside the queer community tend to think of transgender as a sexual orientation. Oh fuck, I thought, if we’re still doing remedial education, which of course we are, the complexity with which I want to discuss my ideas and experience is not only going to get lost on people, but could be catastrophically misleading. For example, living for so many years as a dyke allowed me to see my masculine reflection in my more feminine partners and allowed me to take refuge in a community that embraced masculinity. And where I am now, I see my desire to embrace masculinity as almost a posturing for my unrecognized maleness that is now full of feminine (or rather effeminate) traits. But it’s a bad idea to say something like that to someone like my brother who associates my “gender thing” with my “gay thing” and doesn’t understand that sexual orientation, sex and gender are all different and that masculinity does NOT necessarily correlate with being male.
Finally, I attended the annual Transforming Community event last night in which a handful of diverse queer/transgender people read or spoke about their experiences, followed by a Q&A, more like a conversation, with the audience. Afterwards, my companion said she heard and felt a great deal of pain in the room. On some level, I felt the same way, but of course sexual abuse, violence, discrimination, and improsonment are painful, and for a moment I had some concern that I was dangerously inured to what almost seems standard for gender-variant people. I wanted to go deeper into what was so upsetting and it came in a moment when I could see the trauma in the face of Felicia Elizondo, a community elder who for the sake of this post can be best described as a person who has worked and fought to make my existence possible, and her resistence to the word queer. Of all the horrors she experienced in her life, the one that was most moving to me was seeing her struggle to try to embrace the only word I can find that encompasses me, a word we’ve supposedly “reclaimed. But for the first time ever, watching this transgender activist and leader try to heal from the damage that this word cause, I felt I didn’t have the right to throw it around, to take it as mine.
In the end, I think what I found most painful was what was beneath the surface — that despite our likeness, we are still so different and that the inspiration of our uniqueness is also tinged with loneliness, something that seems dispiriting in a battle whose key feature, for the rest of my lifetime I imagine at least, will be us against the world, not us against us. As with most things honest and compassionate, there was little that was truly divisive during this event, and the conversation, in both intent and practice, increased my awarenss of others and my confidence that in our ability to listen and care, we are building a greater unification. The pervasive sentiment of the evening that rose above the aggrieved voices was that we are each entitled and deserve our own experience and identity and that nobody else’s experience invalidates or erases our own.
A few things I expect to think more about are the “good human being” model of educating society vs. the raising hell model of forced change, and Yosenio V. Lewis’ comment, “There is no art without activism and no activism without art,” and the role I, as a writer, a queer and trans person, and a burgeoning activist can and will play in continuing this conversation.
The most meaningful question I was ever asked and reminded of by teachers repeatedly in graduate school for creative writing was, “Where do you want to enter the dialogue?” It had never occured to me to frame a book in that way, as another voice in one long conversation. This is very hard to do. It requires a person to understand both the historical and contemporary discussion, and there is a great deal of listening needed in order to gather the courage to speak, or for me, anyways. I hope that what I write (and will be published in my memoir as the case now seems to be) contributes and pushes forward the conversations of my community, as well as educates and of course entertains, just like the events of this past week did.
So now it’s time for the party portion of Pride… After all that we’ve been through, I think we deserve the celebration.
