7
This chapter recognizes the significant political and cultural contributions made by trans people to the growth and diversification of the LGBTQ community and to providing all of us new and challenging ways of thinking about gender and identity. We begin with some historical overview of the emergence of trans lives and issues into the broader queer community. We then explore some of the challenging theories of trans identity that have been circulating in intellectual and political spheres over the last few decades. We conclude with consideration of the ongoing (and developing) social and political challenges facing trans people. Throughout we are attentive to how trans identity always intersects with racial and class identity, noting the contributions and interventions of trans-of-color thinkers, writers, and activists.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
Upon completion of this chapter, you should be able to do the following:
· 7.1 List the important contributions of trans people to the queer community.
· 7.2 Explain the complexities of gender as considered by trans theorists.
· 7.3 Describe the challenges facing trans people and activate a sense of social justice in helping to address and alleviate transphobia.
INTRODUCTION
Leslie Feinberg (1949–2014) presented a striking appearance. On the shorter side, with a close-cropped buzz cut and often appearing in men’s clothing, Feinberg identified as “female-bodied” while also being a “butch lesbian” and a “transgender lesbian.” Feinberg’s pronouns varied from context to context: “I like the gender-neutral pronoun ‘ze/hir’ because it makes it impossible to hold on to gender/sex/sexuality assumptions about a person you're about to meet or you've just met. And in an all trans setting, referring to me as ‘he/him’ honors my gender expression in the same way that referring to my sister drag queens as ‘she/her’ does” (Weber). Feinberg’s books include Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come (1992), Stone Butch Blues (1993), Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman (1996), and Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue (1999). As you can tell from hir comments and the titles of hir books, Feinberg was among the first intellectuals, writers, and activists to promote trans visibility, as well as some of the complexity of trans experience. While Feinberg rooted the trans experience in history, documenting gender variance, experimentation, and shifting identities across many centuries, ze was never categorical in determining what constituted “trans,” arguing instead that the ability to express one’s gender, whatever that gender might be, should be a primary freedom guaranteed all human beings.
This chapter honors the legacy of Feinberg’s work and turns attention to the many ways in which trans, variously understood, has emerged as an important and powerful queerness, a way of claiming a right to self-determination in terms of gender expression and identity as fundamental to the human experience. We begin with an historical overview of some major contributions to trans life and the emergence of a trans culture, and then consider some theoretical positions and debates within contemporary trans thought. We then discuss the emergence of nonbinary identification and conclude with some challenges facing the trans community and trans people.
TRANS HISTORIES
In Chapter 1, we introduced several gender-nonconforming people from the past. Using Jack Halberstam’s concept of perverse presentism, we observed phenomena that resemble—or even seem to prefigure—familiar LGBTQ identities of today. The ancient Egyptian manicurists Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep, who were buried together as a married couple might have been, recall gay men in the era of same-sex marriage. The Zuni We-Wha and South Asian hijras, born male but living as female, bear some resemblance to 21st century trans women. Attending to Halberstam, of course, we also acknowledge that while We-Wha and hijras occupied recognized social locations in their cultural life, trans people in the United States possess no such preexisting cultural space. With Leslie Feinberg as a central figure in our discussion, let us consider the complex connections among trans, lesbian, and gay identities in late 20th century America.
Raised in Buffalo, New York, Feinberg came out into a strongly butch femme organized lesbian community in Buffalo’s gay bars in the 1960s and early 70s. This community has been described in detail in Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (1993) by Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis. This book focuses on the decades immediately preceding Feinberg’s arrival. It describes the highly organized, even policed, butch-femme scene, in which mannish-looking butches engaged in elaborate dating and sexual rituals with “womanly” femmes. So powerful was the butch–femme pull in that community at that time that Kennedy and Davis quote an elderly butch as remembering that she and others considered their primary identities to be butch or femme, rather than lesbian or woman. In Feinberg’s semiautobiographical novel Stone Butch Blues, the Leslie-like s/hero Jess is immediately recognized as a “baby” butch from the first moment she sets foot in the bar. An older femme takes Jess under her wing, and for the first time in her life, Jess experiences her heretofore problematic masculinity as a positive attribute. Later, however, Jess’s self-identity shifts, and she feels a need to transition to male. He begins taking testosterone (T) and embarks on a new life as a man. Later in the novel, Jess is ready to give up T but seems to refuse the old female self as well. By the end of the book, Jess sees herself as a “he-she” and moves toward union organizing. Envisioning trans as an ally identity, working in solidarity with others, Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues advances the Marxist-oriented theoretical position ze called “transgender liberation.”
In hir writing, Feinberg relentlessly refuses one-issue politics, no matter where they originate. In the Author’s Note to the 2003 edition of Stone Butch Blues, ze wrote
Like my own life, [Stone Butch Blues] defies easy classification. If you found Stone Butch Blues in a bookstore or library, what category was it in? Lesbian fiction? Gender studies? Like the germinal novel The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe/John Hall, this book is a lesbian novel and a transgender novel—making “trans” genre a verb, as well as an adjective. (lesliefeinberg.net)
Always aware of hir own tenuous relation to established cultural norms, Feinberg pointed to solidarity as the highest value. Throughout the last decades of hir life, ze could be found both leading and supporting widely varied social justice causes around gender, race, class and other perceived inequalities. Unlike a hijra in India or We-Wha in the Zuni pueblo, no preestablished role existed in American culture for trans people in general, or Leslie Feinberg in particular. Hir desire for solidarity reveals a sense of lack or loss, while at the same time hir extraordinary success as an author and activist helped hir build a community for hirself and many others. Unlike, say, Christine Jorgensen [λ Chapter 9], whose astonishing fame in the 1950s came because of her transformation from what tabloids called a male “GI” into a female “blond bombshell,” Feinberg saw hirself as occupying a middle “transgender” space. Moreover, ze emphasized hir common purpose with other oppressed people, thus distinguishing hirself from TERF (trans-exclusive radical feminist) activists, who focused on cis women (or what they sometimes called “womyn-born-womyn”) only.
Trans people had, of course, been organizing for a century and more, from Magnus Hirschfeld (et al.; [λ Chapter 3]) and Roland Reeves (an early “androgyne” activist) in the 1890s, to Virginia Prince and others in the mid-20th century (Stryker, Transgender History). Trans women Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, for example, were front and center at the Stonewall riots in June 1969 [λ Chapter 4]. In the 1990s, the new term transgender began to replace earlier medical terms like transsexual, hermaphrodite, and androgyne. The increased fluidity implied by the term transgender has taken hold in LGBTQ circles in the 21st century. For Black trans people and drag queens, a subculture of drag balls began in Harlem in the 1860s (Stabbe), continued through the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and 30s, and exists with variations in large American cities today. Jennie Livingston’s well-known 1990 film Paris Is Burning [λ Chapter 13] documents the ballroom culture and practices that provide community, safety, and even housing arrangements for a particular group of drag queens/trans people of color involved in the elaborate ball scene in New York City in the 1980s. Those people and this time and place were also featured in the FX television drama Pose.
Figures 7.1 Poetry Slam and Harlem Drag Ball.
Catherine McGann / Contributor
Minnie Bruce Pratt
Ball culture was created by queer, transgender and gender non-conforming people of color as a countercultural interruption to the queer pageants of the 1960s and 1970s. Ball culture started because white LGBTQ pageant organizers and judges excluded Black queer folks (or, sometimes the in-group gender-neutral term “folx” is used) in the drag pageant scene. Resenting their exclusion and mistreatment, many Black pageant participants decided to set up their own “balls” (modeled after masquerade balls of the Renaissance and later) to show representation and community with each other. Each ball has a theme, a set number of categories and requirements, and participants are typically part of a house (a chosen family group usually led by a “mother” or leader). Many houses have names taken from haute couture to mimic the images and desires found in magazines and high fashion. The ball structure is a system of competitions where individuals “walk” (often including such activities as voguing, posing, and performing) in predefined categories usually within multiple predetermined themes. The goal of walking is to receive scores, tens being the highest, to win individual titles. Awards and titles are then given to winners to signify their being chosen as the best in each category. It should be noted that the role of houses and mothers is not facetious, as many of the participants are young queer individuals who have been kicked out of their homes, are experiencing homelessness, or have no other place to find food or shelter. So, in effect, Ball houses are actual places where young LGBTQ individuals are taken in to provide shelter, and they are looked after and instructed by mothers, who serve as parental guides.
Notable in ball culture is Crystal LaBeija, founder of the House of LaBeija. Upon her refusal to ascribe to the pageant system which she viewed as racist, she decided no longer to participate in the whitening that was required in the Manhattan drag circuit. She and other Black drag queens worked to host their own ball competitions, so that Black drag queens could freely express themselves. Her ball was one of the first to be hosted and it is said that the term house was first introduced there. Crystal LaBeija also appears in the documentary Paris Is Burning.
Interestingly, and perhaps following in the tradition of Leslie Feinberg, other trans-of-color folks discovered and created other lineages to build a history and help nurture their trans identities. Andy Marra is a Korean American trans activist who understands her gender journey as one deeply tied to her Korean heritage. In “This Is My Unbelievable but Totally True Transgender Ghost Story,” she describes reading the work of Pauline Park, another Korean American transwoman, who traced the history of trans identities in Korean culture. As Marra discovered, “Shamanism has existed for thousands of years on the Korean peninsula, where shamans serve as an intermediary between the living and a rich pantheon of gods and ancestors. But what specifically resonated with me about Park’s research was the baksu mudang, a type of shaman where men took on the role of women and performed the rituals for those seeking answers from the many spirits. [Park] asserted the baksu to be an early trans identity in Korea not unlike the hijra of India and Pakistan, the māhū of Hawai’i, the muxe of the Zapotecs and the two-spirit found among many Native American nations” (Marra). Notably, these examples all represent trans (or trans-like) figures that occupy identifiable spaces and roles in their cultures.
THEORIZING TRANS AND THE EMERGENCE OF NON-BINARY IDENTITY
Trans encompasses a variety of diverse ways of thinking about and embodying gender. Some trans folks seek medical interventions to have the bodies that most resemble their deep sense of gendered selfhood. In fact, as we discussed earlier in this book, many trans people have often had to narrate stories of gender dysphoria to have access to the hormones, surgeries, and psychiatric assistance needed to undergo transition [λ Chapter 3]. While some trans people experience such dysphoria and seek to remedy it, other trans people think of their gender differently, as more mobile or changing without an acute sense of dysphoria. Still other trans people think and feel their gender in ways that aren’t yet widely categorizable.
Gender, queer, and trans theorist Jack Halberstam has been tracking developments in trans thought, culture, and identity for a long time. Their 2018 book, Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability, combines history, critique, personal narrative, and its own manifesto for embracing the creative art of living that trans*-ness signifies. That embrace relies on a critique of the systems and structures that produce power through the proliferation of classificatory schemes and knowledges of gender and sexuality. For instance, the nonbinary-identified actor Nico Tortorella, who uses “they” as their pronoun, identifies as a “queer, nonbinary, bisexual […] happily married, polyamorous/non-monogamous human being” (xxiv). Some critics argue that such a list seems less like fluidity and more like a checklist for being hip, cool, radical, and progressive. Halberstam might assert instead that “[t]he solution […] is not to impose ever more precise calibrations of bodily identity but rather to think in new and separate ways about what it means to claim a body” (50).
Halberstam’s radical vision of trans* comes with an asterisk. While not all trans people embrace the asterisk, Halberstam uses this punctuated marker of open possibilities to signal the desire for connection, with the word trans itself able to affix and modify nearly anything so that “trans* bodies challenge the nature of reality itself” (72) [λ Chapter 5 on the use of the asterisk]. Halberstam further clarifies their position: “If we shift our focus […] away from the housing of the body and toward the notion of ‘transition’— perpetual transition— we can commit to a horizon of possibility where the future is not male or female but transgender” (131). This understanding of trans* does not negate previous models of transsexuality that viewed the body as the house of gender, a house that sometimes needed to be renovated to match better the perceived gender of its inhabitant. Rather, it expands the notion of trans to include models of life fashioning around an embrace of the transitoriness of identities, intimacies, desires, and potentialities. By moving beyond gendered and sexed constructs of male/female and masculinity/femininity, trans* can “throw the organization of all bodies into doubt.”
In many ways, Halberstam’s work picks up and expands the theories of Susan Stryker, whose 1994 essay “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix” helped establish trans studies as a discipline not only—and perhaps not even primarily—concerned with medical interventions. For Stryker and other trans theorists, such as Halberstam, trans is about transformation, about embracing possibilities for change, and about using different technologies to create satisfying lives. As she puts it, “To make that gender transition, you confront the possibilities and potentials and terrors and dangers of what it means to radically transform” (Sanders). She does not deny the existence of gender dysphoria or the deeply felt need of some trans people to undergo medical transition. Rather, Stryker, and Halberstam, understand transness as about the queer potential of embracing radical transformation as a way of life [λ Chapter 6].
Find Out More about Susan Stryker in the readings in Chapter 6.
With that said, Halberstam worries that contemporary trans youth are cut off from their histories, the complex and sometimes painful histories of trans experiences, of people who countered or even fought medical, social, legal, and political understandings of what it means to be a “man” or a “woman.” Halberstam worries that the contemporary pursuit of trans visibility might lessen an appreciation of the messiness of the past—a past full of creative accommodations, artful survival, and ways of making community and kin that might provide inspiration for trans folks seeking to expand our sense of the possible through our bodies, our desires, our genders. Halberstam cites, for instance, Paris Is Burning as a film that both documents the fierce rivalries of a community of color’s performers and celebrates the fiercer friendships and networks of care of “adults taking a somewhat different path to normative maturation” (70). These are folks who not only claimed agency over their own bodies and identities but also forged nurturing ties of kinship, family, and collectivity. How many young trans people know this history, celebrate its creativity, and learn from its innovations?
Halberstam’s reference of Paris also raises the issue of race and ethnicity, and we should never assume that queer and trans folks of different races and ethnicities experience, understand, or identify in the same way. Halberstam notes especially how trans folk of color offer their own understandings about the operation of gender in our lives. Halberstam points to the thinking of Saidiya Hartman, Roderick Ferguson, and C. Riley Snorton, among many others, when considering that transgenderism has often, been treated in pop and mass culture as a white phenomenon: In many communities of color, “other terms exist […] and […] these other terms indicate the function of gender in relation to a specific set of life experiences” (36). Fortunately, newer pop cultural images from shows like Pose and Legendary are calling attention to the diverse ethnic and racial identifications and communities of trans folk. Moreover, Halberstam reminds us that the “bathroom issue” that many trans people face is curiously parallel to the segregation of bathrooms into white and Black spaces in 20th-century America; public bathrooms have often been a “charged” space for regulating race and gender, often at the same time. Halberstam asks how we might imagine public toilets as spaces to remove the disciplining of bodies into fixed categories of either gender or race. At the same time, we must also consider the complexities of thinking gender as it intersects across ethnicities and identity groups, adding in a class dimension as well. Some people can’t afford economically the kind of gender play that Nico Tortorella and other public figures might be advocating. People from working-class backgrounds are often subject to disciplining and punishment when enacting gender “deviations” from cultural expectations of masculinity or femininity. The number of trans and queer youth experiencing homelessness remains disproportionately high compared to non-trans and non-queer young people (according to the True Colors Fund upward of 40% of youth experiencing homelessness identify as LGBTQ), the former often outcast from their homes because of their “deviance” (“Our Story”). Such kids can’t afford fluidity, as some of them would likely die, by their own hands or the hands of others, if they attempted to remain in their communities and hide who they are.
Still, many trans folks push the boundaries of how the normative culture understands what gender is. And the idea of transness as a transformation of the body through medical, hormonal, and psychological intervention continues to be challenged as fluidity in gender expression can complicate our conventional and traditional notions of gender expression expectations. One notable maverick of this movement is Big Freedia, a New Orleans bounce artist who blurs the lines of femininity and masculinity. While she doesn't identify as a woman or transgender, she expresses her gender on the feminine spectrum and utilizes feminine she/her gender pronouns (Hoff). She says,
This is how I look at it: When it comes to the pronouns, he/she, I'm comfortable with who I am, and I'm more than sure [RuPaul] is comfortable with who he is, and all the people on [RuPaul’s] Drag Race. Sometimes the fans get … it's whatever they feel comfortable with. I have fans who say “he” all the time; I have fans who say “she” all the time. I'm confident in who I am, and I know what I stand for. When they say either/or, I'm not affected by either/or because, like I said, I know who I am.
Whatever makes my fans comfortable—to be able to call me “he” or “she,”—I'll allow. I let them have the freedom to choose either one. I'm more than sure that's the same way they feel on Drag Race. A lot of people just can't accept the fact of calling a man “she.” I totally understand that, and it's never offensive to me, because I was born a man, my personal pronoun is she—but it's not a big thing to me. (Hutt)
We delight in Big Freedia’s celebration of her gender identity, even as we must acknowledge in the next section how others refuse to honor the right of trans people to self-determine.
TRANS CHALLENGES
Unfortunately, transphobia constitutes a significant, sometimes lethal challenge facing many trans people across the globe. In 2020, more than 44 transgender and non-conforming people had been fatally shot or killed in the United States alone. Most of these individuals were Black or Latinx (Latiné), making it one of the most violent years for attacks of transphobic violence. It is unknown if these crimes were the result of the targeting of individuals or due just to anti-trans hysteria. The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) began tracking anti-trans violence and has confirmed that these are some of the highest numbers since they began recording data (“Fatal”). The issue of anti-trans murders is not specific to the United States; it is a global issue. The Transrespect Versus Transphobia project (https://transrespect.org/en/) has noted that over 350 trans and non-binary people were murdered between October 2019 and September 2020 worldwide–and these are just the ones we know about!
Such violence against trans people is longstanding, and victims are often targeted even if they are just suspected of being trans. Kathy Y. Wilson describes the 2002 killing of 21-year-old Gregory Beauchamp in downtown Cincinnati. Beauchamp, an out Black gay man, was standing with three friends—at least two of the four dressed in drag—on a street corner on their way to a New Year’s Eve party at a nearby gay bar. A car carrying several Black men drove by Beauchamp’s group several times, the occupants shouting antigay insults. Then shots came from the car; Beauchamp was hit and killed. Details of the crime were never made public. Thus, it is not clear whether Beauchamp was dressed in drag when he was shot. It is also not clear how he identified. Was he a cis gay man? A drag queen? A transwoman? A cross-dresser? It seems likely that he was killed randomly, because the shooter fired into a group of men who appeared to be gay, not because he was singled out for wearing women’s clothes. But such incidents serve as a striking example of how gay and trans people often merge in the minds of homophobic and transphobic cis assailants.
Other forms of discrimination may not result in fatalities but are nonetheless damaging and traumatizing to trans people, particularly in the arena of sports. Trans athletes face ongoing discrimination, with some claiming that it is unfair for trans people to compete against cis men and women. Even in the Olympics, which are supposed to be games emphasizing equality and unity, trans athletes are subject to scrutiny and bias. Even athletes who are not trans identified but who are suspected of potentially being trans are often given “gender tests” to confirm their “authentic” sex. Increasingly, though, some trans athletes are being allowed to compete. Chris Mosier and Megan Youngren, for instance, have broken some barriers for trans athletes. Sports Illustrated reported in 2020 that Youngren would “Become First Openly Transgender Athlete to Compete at the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials” (Chavez).
Figure 7.2 Chris Mosier.
Slaven Vlasic / Stringer
The complexities of such discrimination and violence deserve critical attention, especially as they often bring together anti-queer and racist forms of violence, as well as anti-queer and anti-trans sentiment within communities of color. Within LGBTQIA+ of color communities, there has been an emphasis on conversations around acceptance of womanhood, femme identity, queer culture, and the transgender experience. These conversations have always centered around aggression toward transgender women, particularly around issues of womanhood. Recently, the narrative has changed to consider the intersections of racism, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia. Many feminist and queer scholars have taken on the challenge of addressing violence against transgender women, violence against Black bodies, and beliefs around the “effeminization of Black men.” As Ashlee Marie Preston writes, “Trans misogynoir, which describes our experiences at the intersection of misogyny, transphobia, anti-Blackness, isn’t simply a social problem; it’s also systemic” (Bazaar). It is important to situate this conversation in a historical, cultural and relational perspective.
In many cases where Black transgender women have been murdered, perpetrators will often say they experienced a state of panic and surprise when finding out the victim was a transgender woman. This is often called a panic defense. It is important to note that this “fear and panic” is used as a defense to insinuate that the fear of the transgender woman, combined with a fear of being or appearing gay, causes the perpetrator to act irrationally, resulting in violence against the other person. The “panic defense” is unfortunately bolstered at the cultural level since LGBTQ identity has often been viewed negatively in the African American community, so it is accepted in many circles to reject, sometimes even physically, LGBTQ individuals when they come out. Fortunately, scholars and activists such as Preston are trying to push back against homo- and transphobia within their communities, and television shows such as Pose are introducing the rich histories of Black and trans identity and community building to new generations of young people.
Unfortunately, even people we might think should know better can participate in transphobia. In Chapter 13, we discuss the exclusion of trans-women from the now defunct Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. Such exclusions continue in other domains and a group of feminists called TERFs—trans-exclusionary radical feminists—actively denigrate trans people, both trans women (for caricaturing women and femaleness) and trans men (for abandoning their essential womanhood). Mostly white cis feminists, TERFs maintain an essentialist understanding of gender identity that sees the visible body as the primary determinant of gender. Philosopher and critical theorist Judith Butler has spent a lifetime analyzing the power of gender constructs as one of the most important forms of social and political control and has come out as nonbinary. They argue that “The anti-gender ideology is one of the dominant strains of fascism in our times. So, the TERFs will not be part of the contemporary struggle against fascism, one that requires a coalition guided by struggles against racism, nationalism, xenophobia and carceral violence, one that is mindful of the high rates of femicide throughout the world, which include high rates of attacks on trans and genderqueer people” (Gleeson).
This book has chronicled the historical and contemporary phenomenon of violence perpetuated by cis people against gender nonconformists. But where does this hostility come from? A common notion among homo- and transphobes today is that transwomen, transmen, and even drag queens are on a mission to fool cis people for their own benefit. Here are three examples of typical accusations:
1. Some high school boys dress as girls so they can join the girls’ track team and win championships racing against cis girls. Similarly, transwoman Laurel Hubbard finagles her way into making the New Zealand Olympic women’s weightlifting team.
2. Cross-dressing men–trans or cis–seek to use public women’s bathrooms to prey upon (presumably defenseless) cis women and girls.
3. Female-to-male (FTM) trans folk become men to benefit from the array of economic and social advantages men enjoy in nearly every culture worldwide. (This of course begs the question, Why would a transwoman choose to give up those advantages?)
In all these cases, a common thread is misogyny. Any trace of femaleness in men can provoke hostility and violence born of the fear of being seen or treated as a woman. Gayness in men, for example, has often been despised because no man should permit another man to penetrate him. Similarly, cis men feel victimized by trans women, fooled into believing they are “real” women and so enticing them to engage unwittingly in gay behavior. Transmen pose their own problems for cis transphobes. In transitioning from female to male, transmen can be seen as attempting to “steal” male privilege from born men. In addition, trans men and butch women, in their embodied female masculinity, represent a threat to cis men, who must compete with them for the affection of femme women, who presumably would otherwise be attracted to cis men. Understanding the interlocking dimensions of homophobia, transphobia, and misogyny must be the first step in creating a society that is not only more equitable but that honors the choices and right to self-determination that is at the heart of much queer and trans activism.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. As you can tell from our discussion in this chapter, defining trans is complicated, with many different views circulating both within and without queer/trans communities. What do you think the value is of not having a definitive or one-size-fits-all definition of trans? What are the challenges posed by not having such a definition?
2. In this chapter, we have not discussed drag queens or their appearance in the larger culture, as evidenced by the popularity of the television show RuPaul’s Drag Race. How are drag and trans similar, and how are they also quite different? Are there ways in which drag has common goals and values with trans? How are these values also potentially quite different?
3. Trans communities are often hidden, even in large urban areas. Consider how you might find out more about the trans communities in your own area. What resources are available to trans people? What laws or cultural norms discriminate against trans folk in your area? Check out the Digital Transgender Archive at https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/ to find out more about the history of trans people.
READINGS:
“I Want a President” by Zoe Leonard (http://www.lttr.org/journal/5/i-want-a-president)
Zoe Leonard
I want a president
1992
Typewritten text on paper
27.9 x 21.6 cm / 11 x 8 1/2 inches
© Zoe Leonard. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne and Hauser & Wirth
Pushing Up Onto Its Elbows, the Fable Lifts Itself Into Fact.
BY JUSTIN PHILLIP REED
After Tafisha Edwards
To disappear Black girls at a low volume of sustained public panic is to insinuate the inconstancy of Black girls. The disposability of Black girls who are prone to disappearance. A body bag somewhere waits with little hoopla about its lot. Absence becomes the lot of Black girls.
_________ will eventually accept as fact that absence becomes a lot of Black girls. In what becomes the normal day-to-day, Black girls are harder to find, _________ would think first, not that there are few attempts to find them. The question isn’t whether Black girls often go missing. If no one else, Black girls miss each other.
_________ would be remiss to not recognize how everything is made less in the absence of Black girls, if _________ could miss what _________ have never been required to recognize, such as:
Unlike missing Black girls, taking Black girls is a Western custom. It seems likely that such a statement will soon appear inaccurate: the white space in new textbook editions will have nothing to say about it, if the white spaces behind those textbooks have anything to say about it. That Black girls are quintessential American palimpsests is not a question but an anxiety. _________ would rather forget that Black girls were made receptacles for what the authors of Liberty and Independence would not speak. That Liberty and Independence were imaginable only in the absent-presence of taken Black girls, enslaved Black girls, Black girls on whom a foundational economic system so depended that white men would kill each other and take taken Black girls.
The constancy of Black girls is someone’s anxiety. The soil is thick with hidden Black girls, the myth that only quiet Black girls are worthwhile Black girls. The soil turns as _________ turn away from loud Black girls and their cacophonic insistence on Black girls.
_________ have not insisted enough upon the fact of Black girls, are often loudly shocked to find Black girls disappeared. Loud, unsustainable shock has a way of disappearing Black girls. Outrage, too, has a way of being disappeared.
Justin Phillip Reed, “Pushing Up Onto Its Elbows, the Fable Lifts Itself into Fact.,” from Indecency. Copyright©2018 by Justin Phillip Reed. Reprinted by permission of Coffee House Press, www.coffeehousepress.org
Descriptions of Images and Figures
The text reads as follows:
I want a dyke for president. I want a person with aids for president and I want a fag for vice president and want someone with no health insurance and I want someone who grew up in place where the earth is se saturated with toxic waste that they didn’t have choice about getting leukemia. I want a president that had an abortion at sixteen and I want a candidate who isn’t the lesser of two and I want a president who lost their evil last lover to aids, who still sees that in their eyes every time they lay down to rest, who held their lover in their arms and knew they were dying. I want a president with no air conditioning, a president who has stood on line at the clinic, at the d m v, at the welfare office and has been unemployed and layed off and sexually harassed and gay bashed and deported. I want someone who has spent the night in the tombs and had a cross burned on their lawn and survived rape. I want someone who has been in love and been hurt, who respects sex, who has made mistakes and learned from them. I want a Black woman for president. I want someone with bad teeth, someone who has eaten hospital food, someone who cross dresses and has done drugs and, been in therapy. I want someone who has committed civil disobedience. And I want to know why this isn’t possible. I want to know why we started learning somewhere down the line that a president is always a clown: always a John and never a hooker. Always a boss and never a worker, always a liar, always a thief and never caught.