faithful to unfaithfulness

I use they/them pronouns. No one has ever said to my face “that’s grammatically incorrect,” I don’t think, but I have heard it. The other night (at a rather straight-heavy, cis-heavy open mic mind you) I was trying to tell a joke about how people take issue with they/them pronouns because we all have a lot of voices in our head and trans people are just admitting it. No one found that funny at all. In their defense, there’s no joke yet, there’s just an observation about how trans people provoke cisgender insecurity, fear, and probably grief. My take was not hot, it had not been sufficiently cooked.

In the front of the room I said ‘voices in our head’ as shorthand. What I mean(t) is that we all contain contradiction, multitude, and parts that are at odds with what we’ve been taught, parts that are at odds with each other. We are not reliable, even though we might wish we were. I think transness is a kind of “faithfulness to unfaithfulness,” a willingness to change in public, a willingness to accommodate multiplicity.1

Transgender day of visibility was at the end of last month (the day before April fools day amen). I noticed that I felt very annoyed at the whole concept, at all the posts about it (speaking of provoked insecurity, fear, and probably grief).

The holiday was started by a trans woman who wanted a day to celebrate trans life, a day that wasn’t just about trans ancestors, trans death (i.e. trans day of remembrance which happens in November). I understand the impulse. Yet, amidst those who feel so threatened by transness that they wish to legislate it out of existence, those who are convinced we are an abomination, visibility feels both meager and possibly perilous. I am skeptical of the ways we relegate certain kinds of celebration to days or months and then pat ourselves on the back.

The conversations and holidays about gender feel like a proxy for the conversations we are unwilling to have about weaponized insecurity. In the face of all the kinds of violence that this administration, and this country, continue to enact and instill in us, I think of James Baldwin’s words:

“It has always been much easier (because it has always seemed much safer) to give a name to the evil without than to locate the terror within. And yet, the terror within is far truer and far more powerful than any of our labels: the labels change, the terror is constant. And this terror has something to do with that irreducible gap between the self one invents — the self one takes oneself as being, which is, however, and by definition, a provisional self — and the undiscoverable self which always has the power to blow the provisional self to bits.”2

At the end of the day, we are only kept alive by the beings who are willing to be in relationship with this terror, to listen to it and hear what it has to say (i.e. James Baldwin, and so many artists, teachers, greats).

We are not the selves we take ourselves as being, not really. If you can move through the initial shock of this, it is can be a massive relief.