"AIN'T PROUD TO CONFORM"
[2/6/2025]This is my first pride month being "out" in any public fashion, both outdoors and online, even as little as I do try not to draw too much attention to this fact. Even as factual as the origins of capital-P "Pride" are as a queer protest and resistance movement, I'm still learning what pride means to me. Like, I'm suppose I'm demisexual (only recently decided on that label), and I'm trans. Even on this personal web domain though, I'm pretty hesitant to declare these things as facts out loud. Really, I'm just not one who feels the need to declare it to the world. It's a fact that I exist and people will either take it or leave it, but that doesn't change the fact that I do exist and exist in this manner of being regardless of if I say this truth to others or not. To me, truths can exist inside of us as much as they can exist in the space between us when we communicate them to each other.
I'm fairly content with the labels, though I try not to sweat the specifics too much as identities and preferences can be exceptionally fluid as people (myself included) are ever-changing, and that's a beautiful thing. I've been on HRT for nearly two years now, which I'm incredibly lucky to have been able to start and continue to do. Having started has made a part of me feel contentedness, and my ability to see myself in the mirror has been returned to me as I picture myself in this feminine body that I have now, and have always had in an internal sense. I have always been a femme nonbinary in some manner or another, and I know that because I remember back to every time I would pick to play as the robot character in a video game because they were genderless, and I identified with that lack of strict identity. I wish everyone in the world to be able to have this option, this choice, available to them - to express and change, with love, with support without bonds, without social stigma.
I recently read a poignant thought-piece by John Paul Brammer titled "Low-Risk Flier (On bureaucracy, and confronting my inner fascist)." The parts below I've been chewing on it for the past week:
I am in a state of constant, vigilant self-surveillance, an instinct I developed early in life while attending a Catholic elementary school and then while being a latent homosexual in a rural middle school [...] my hostile environment taught me the virtues of stealth, and to adapt I became a human tuning fork capable of detecting threats that most people wouldn't register. This paranoia over my every little action kept me from slipping up, and thus, from the hammer coming down on me as it had in the past. A similar defense mechanism can be found in incredibly skittish prey animals, such as rabbits and deer, and in recently abused dogs. [...]
One might imagine such negative experiences with authority would engender nothing but antagonism toward it, that the lesson learned would be to say, Fuck what other people think, I'm going to be myself! / rainbow flag emoji. I don't want to discount my multitudes. I do sometimes feel this way, and my political views trend in that direction. But whenever I find myself in situations like “getting Global Entry,” my deep programming kicks in and I find myself firmly on the side of the machine [...] After many years of obsessive self-censorship, there's a significant part of me that loathes people who don't share my extreme sensitivity to the space around me...
I find that I'm not nearly on the same level of internal, unexpressed loathing as described by Brammer, but there still remains two facts: I did once feel this way too, and my conformist programming remains despite the emotional violence being largely dispelled in my active mind. This takes, at best, the form of emotional and conversational reservation; at worst, a complete unspoken distrust of my fellow person.
The long and short of it was I ended up stuck in rural, Christian, bigoted America for a long time (starting in late 2015 - terrible timing), much longer than I wanted or could bear, and I frequently am baffled that I somehow made it back to Canada after all that time (which I could not do without my partner who was more than willing to leave for those same adjectives). Pretty early on living there, at age sixteen, I had a secret fling with a guy I loved so very much. The first guy who took me and my homosexual flirtations seriously - he did not hide behind crassness, cheap jokes or slurs when I wanted to bond in those delicate ways that I needed so badly - yet, with punch and drive for love in the late-night summer heat, he matched my desires equally. He freed me, untying the first of many knots my brain had gotten tangled and tied into at the hands of those who I later found out did not have my best interests in mind. We had kissed and held hands in private yards at night, in alleyways in the day, in the quiet places where maybe we believed that no one could see the beautiful sprout we were growing together. He didn't feel the secrecy necessary; we often argued that he wanted to show my love off publicly, to the world, to show off and tell 'em all to fuck off because were making merry in spite of their miserable selves and violent projections. But I had my reasons to be paranoid, so I looked over his shoulder every time we kissed. I'm not sure he looked over mine.
This guy was so unabashedly and openly gay, that by mere proxy of being around him so damn much and loving the shit out of him, I eventually felt confident enough to come out to my Christian family after having dated him nearly all summer. But this was not before going to the hospital sick with stress and wracked with a self-flagellent concept in my mind that if I punished myself before they could punish me (and I fully expected the hammer to come down), that maybe they'd soften the blow out of pity that I'd already done half the job for them. But this only made it worse when I finally said 'fuck it' and decided the hammer would hurt less than not living truthfully and publicly.
Telling them right after a two-week hospital trip was probably bad timing on my part, but to be fair, I did wait until dinner that night when I was feeling happy and confident. That was dashed on the rocks. I nearly didn't make it home that night, and I fully expected to not have a home to go back to by the morning. Right before things entered the "throwing shit at my head" portion of the meltdown, I snuck out a window and called my very queer best friend at the time whom I trusted plenty and was also previously informed that this guy and I were dating. This best friend later became my now-partner, but this would only happen after one very long night, and many terrible nights over many terrible years filled with many terrible breakdowns.
I had already been (technically) homeless before this for about a year in Canada, surfing on couches and whatnot with only really a backpack to my name until I managed to get some of my stuff out of a storage locker and got temporary housing with my mother. (Trust me, I know it sounds confusing.) But now, after having lived in a semi-permanant place for about a year, my mother was now threatening to kick me out which would make me homeless again, except this time it wasn't someone else's fault - it was made to feel like it was my fault. Like being gay is just a phase, like crying was just lying, and like cutting was just begging for attention, and all this pain and punishment could've been avoided if I simply shut the fuck up about what I wanted out of life and made things easier for people who were apparently burdened with my being their child and their being my caretaker. These actions of mine - actions of trust, unashamed of my realistic desire for love - were interpreted and flipped back onto my head as acting out, a reflex of my manipulative muscle I enacted in order to hurt those who told me they "just wanted what was best for me" and in doing so, attempted to make it seem as though they were saints who could do no wrong and I was the devil defying their holy word. This was the lie: "just conform, and it'll make things hurt a lot less for everyone." I'd only find out this was a fucked-up fascist lie and how fucked-up this fascist lie is, made to crush my spirit and offload the blame on the victim, much later after years of adult therapy (and not with any help from the Mormon conversion therapist I was sent off to). But I wouldn't find this out until after being so desperate to avoid so many more almost-guaranteed years of homelessness that rather than let myself be crushed under the boot, I did what they wanted and conformed. I shut the fuck up and I conformed. I broke up with this guy and conformed. I ghosted my best friend and conformed. I went back in the closet and lied out my ass about whether or not I still liked men (including to myself), and conformed. The threat worked because I was vulnerable, and they knew it. I was afraid of what could be done to me. I just wish I'd been able to take my best friend's offer to stay with him at his place a little more seriously instead of going back in the closet... but I'm not going to pretend like I was in my right-mind to make a good decision like that with such weight behind it - I was sixteen and had nothing else. And as much as I wanted to say "our love will get us through no matter what," it was the three of us versus a town of ten-thousand bigots who watched my every move, open-carried at the Walmart, and knew my name and could find any address I stayed at if they sent enough missionaries to prowl the neighbourhood.
I've never had the chance to not be seen, even since I was young, even long before I officially came out. Where I was once a lanky six-foot-seven-inch tall teenager, I am now a six-foot-seven-inch tall trans woman with small boobs and broad shoulders who doesn't put on makeup because I'm too lazy. I'm hard to miss. It's difficult for me not to be perceived in some capacity, one way or another. It's a double-edged sword: where I do like to be noticed (and have even learned to take a compliment), I've been subjected to countless questioning and explaining myself my whole life on the other end, albeit stupid questions like "do you play basketball" or "what do you drink to get that tall?" But for all these banal lines of questioning, I often do not feel seen as a person. I am a novelty, even more so maybe as a trans woman. I mean, hell, I'll take being called a "tall, young lady" by a man old enough to be my father over a "tall, handsome ███" by my actual father any damn day of the week, even if both are ostensibly disturbing to me if I think about it too hard. But this is rarely about the compliment itself: enough of these quick comments from strangers is enough to feel like I am clumsy prey for anyone watching. Often I feel the prompt of my height bounces the more uncomfortable questions off this armor in favour of a "how's the weather up there;" regardless, sometimes I feel like I not only expose myself, but others who go out with me to become subject to some rather different uncomfortable comments on top of the usual ones women who go outside receive unprompted and unwarranted from men exercising power in their general direction. My being tall can only go so far to protect me with my projection.
Lily Alexandre has a lot of great videos. All of them are deeply uncomfortable to me in how much her writing so solemnly but unreservedly prods at these unconscious and unexplored fears and anxieties - subconscious beliefs and remnants of fascist frameworks - that I believe even the most determined and well-meaning of queer people may have, but are unsure of how to approach the topic so keep them tucked quietly under the rainbow flag so as not to spoil the fun. (This is me calling myself out, mostly.) Her video "Transition Regret & the Fascism of Endings" came shortly to me after I started HRT, and I think back on how it helped me confront why I'd been made to feel like it was such a big deal and ordeal, when it's really not, despite the most difficult pill that I may never "pass" simply because I am tall. But more particularly lately, I've been constantly thinking on her latest video, "Trans Day of Vanishing" (originally titled "Notes on Vanishing"). This video is, I feel, a very necessary watch for the times. One sitting, all the way through, no 2x speed, completely sober. Take it to heart, let yourself hear the painful words with the joyous ones. You may not agree with them all, and I don't, but Alexandre feels like she is addressing a crowd of individuals who need to hear it. I certainly did. Even in Canada, there is tension in the air; like acceptance is a state of just barely floating above the edge of complete collapse at a twitch reaction.
I don't think it's a failure of public messaging, either - activists being "too extreme" or "confrontational." Actually, I think trans people expend a ton of effort trying to explain ourselves to the public. So many of us spend time forging connections with people who don't get it, debunking myths, getting really personal about the details of our lives. [...] So, I really can't stand for this claim that we were "too harsh." Most of us are actually exceptionally patient. If anything, the limiting factor is that we aren't being heard. [...]
My point is that the odds are stacked against us. That's not new information, is it? If anything, it just makes it more tempting to go underground in some way.
This year is one where I'm sure many individuals have had a comforting illusion of generalized acceptance come crashing down into a million shattered rainbow-iridescent pieces at the hands of fascists in positions of power. These fascists who, having graciously been given the red-carpet treatment to the tune of millions of disillusioned people who, are either simply apathetic to the infinite value of any other life that is not their own, or are more than willing to throw any and all merrymakers into the human sausage-grinder of State power in hopes that the economic gods will bestow them with their promised land of sterile white gold.
For a long time for me, conformity equaled safety. But I understand something better now, for the six years I was back in the closet, considering trying to move out of town but not quite having enough money to commit completely to the notion: the surveillance doesn't stop whether you conform or not, and the need for freedom certainly doesn't stop either. By the time I finally realized in 2022 that, after kicking the idea down the road for nearly three years, I not only still loved men but needed to transition as well, I had to really sit down and accept to myself whether it was an option for me weighed against the potential risk of my safety. The scale tipped more and more in the way of coming out of the closet again with every breakdown, with every argument with my (now ex-) girlfriend, with my family, with myself. At a certain point, I couldn't bear myself; I'd rather be miserable and gay than just miserable. I looked in the mirror and saw it clearly: a life that was not mine, a person I did not make, draped over where my soul should be standing. Then, I realized a gigantic lie of what my life should look like - be a patriarch, have a family, work with people you hate until you die - was built up around me in the shape of a person who the fascists stuffed over me like a cheap bodysuit, and was not for me, but for a fascist framework of ideals built like a massive decaying playset that our humanity gets caught inside of, bumping and scraping knees on rusty pipes and nails where they get infected and rot away. Hear this truth spoken out loud: conformity equals slavery equals death.
Despite all these revelations, I still have this sense of "be a little more quiet about being queer and you'll survive unscathed." I believe I must have picked up this notion when my sibling came out as bisexual to my mother long before I even considered kissing boys as an option for myself, and what shocked and confused me was the vitriol with which my mother refused to understand. She was actively choosing to make my sibling's life worse by way of toxic ramblings behind closed doors and refusal to help with bills, for having been admitted a truth by my sibling to a parent in good trust and faith that could not be kept secret any longer. So I kept quiet when I had similar considerations, well through into adulthood. Like if I rattle the bars of my cage, it'll just serve to tire me out more, and give the prison warden more excuses to work with should they choose to end my sentence prematurely with a swift kick in the head. But at a certain point, is this not something that defeats the point of Pride completely? Being quiet and taking the abuse in hopes that one day better will come eventually is a notion for the privileged people who don't have to deal with the whippings. Stonewall (and many other queer liberation movements throughout history) happened because they were sick of all that shit, these idea you should just be happy with the cage you were given, and sick notions that it's matter-of-fact that the queers should get the boot for the crime of existing.
There is nothing to lose but your chains down there in the cage. Stonewall and Pride is a monument to this truth. I truly believe in these fascist-colonial states we find ourselves in that individual people are afraid to lose what little they have because they are given just enough of a taste of wealth, a hint and vague gesture at the nectar of plenty, that they could lose something more than their bonds and possibly their lives for resisting. The promise of heaven is so sickeningly sweet that I'm sure I could still find its faint stains on the shirt collars of the most well-meaning of people whom I know personally; I have before, and I will do so again. They take just a taste as a "just-in-case," or to be able to show the others that they know the taste, like there is a future to be hoped for beyond the four walls of this man-made prison. An "oh, well it's not so bad attitude" that says the warden will bestow to those who drink the swill and listen closely to the directions that we can all be free, someday. But I won't buy it. I realize I don't need the keys to the kingdom when I could shake the gates of hell until we're free. I'm just not at the point in my life where I've truly worked up the courage to shake the gate myself. I've been burned, but biding my time until I've healed only feels right up to a point, up until I feel I should be ready to yell at protests and get pushed around by cops... but I'm not. Instead I sit and think privately and quietly to myself how nice the thought is.
Maybe I just envy those who were able to cling onto a comforting illusion, no matter how small. But I take no joy in watching it break either. Just because I never had this illusion does not mean I am so quick to rejoice in the pain of others; all it means is that there is work to be done. I vehemently do not like to apply the popular internet term "egg" in relation to my trans experience, and I am especially reactive and resistant to those who try and apply it retroactively in my stead. For those who like the term: great, I'm glad, genuinely glad. It's not for me though. I'd describe my trans experience more with another small anecdote - when I was young, like three or four years old, I used to so freely play flash games on Barbie websites (this is serious). Maybe my parents didn't really notice or didn't really care, but I would play as interchangeably with my sibling's dolls and on the Barbie website as with my toy trains and dinosaurs. But the more and more time went by, no matter how many Hot Wheels race cars with flames on them my parents bought me, I was more interested in Webkins and dressing up on Club Penguin. Then they wanted me to join the baseball team, but I only liked going to baseball because Jeremy was also on the baseball team and it'd mean we'd get to hang out on the hill by the baseball diamond, to talk about Rocky and Bullwinkle together while chewing Dubble-Bubble and reading the comics on the wrappers. I truly stopped enjoying going to baseball games when they expected me to play seriously and stop puttering around - man up and get serious - which meant I got to hang out with Jeremy less and less. I'm glad I was able to stop going to practices.
I'm not sure if there was an exact moment where my escapades into the lighthearted and carefree were expected to end - maybe when my dad tried putting me on the football team and cussing me out in the car that I was quite literally picking flowers by myself instead of ramming into other sweaty boys (where I'm sure there was no sexual tension whatsoever to be expected or had), or maybe when I wanted to sit and drink hot chocolate in the quiet snow with the other boy scouts at those winter church camps rather than help compete with the other dads and their sons by putting up our tent the fastest - but I had come to find out that, when the moment came when I wanted to express young homosexual love and joy freely, moving a step beyond fleeting fun into wanting something more serious with touch and kisses, that a chain had been draped around my neck in secret that could be made taut at any moment I misbehaved. I was never an egg that needed cracked - I was a bird who once looked to the open sky, now stuffed in a cage without my knowing just when I was ready to spread my wings.
Maybe I fall into these exact same trappings again and again when I try to "play it down" in front of people in positions of power who get to decide passively how much my life sucks. This has happened before, and it's a song-and-dance I'd become all too familiar with while in the closet. Don't express too much allyship, don't be too adamant with my morals, don't express too much discontentedness with my abuse, because word will get around if I make too much noise. The margin of life-suckage is based on what kind of employment, housing, or social benefits I can get (if any) comparative to how much they see me as some sort of aberration, a problem by default, a radical and a risk to let slide. But the truth is that individuals under the allure of State power only let me keep on living because they are doing that cost-benefit analysis on my head any and every time they see these aberrant adjectives tied to my identity on the side - I already have "tall" tacked onto that list by default, so that applies an abnormalcy multiplier to every subsequent adjective; "Straight-passing" brings down the heat, but "trans" is going to cost more than "cis." I have to think to myself, in all my distrust knowing I am so visible, every time I see the moment I get the oh, you're one of them transes look at a job interview, if I lept into their mind palace right now, are they trying to weigh my life with all its potential HR issues against those diversity brownie points they could get for hiring me, one of them transes - weighing, will "simply killing 'em all and being done with it already" cost more than my HRT?
So what even is my point with all this? I'm weaving this rich tapestry to understand, that if the word "pride" does not mean simply "being seen," then what does it mean to me? It means being heard, it means being listened to, it means being understood and believed when I say "I am vulnerable, I am a real person whose identity is real, and I need help." It's telling others they're not alone, it's loving ourselves unabashedly and unashamedly, it's standing up for life, it's boosting the ego at least a little bit because what's a person without it really? It's being proud that I'm alive, and I am alive without having to ask for permission to do so, because all of us are not alive at the hands of any State - we are alive regardless, and will continue to be no matter how much the fascists see us as weeds sticking it out in the cracked concrete, because we are not; we are flesh and blood and real individuals with a desire for love to give and receive. It's for every gay couple struggling to pay rent for their shared studio apartment in the city, it's for every homeless trans person who won't ever crawl back to a family that doesn't love them when the going gets tough, it's for everyone who is two-spirit trying to even be fucking heard in the noise of it all. Pride is not a privilege bestowed upon us, it is a showcase of clawing back our inherent humanity from those who seek to deprive us from it. Because all of us are here, with a voice, and it can be a loud voice if we let it be.
I have a cynical pessimist in me that I try to ignore, but I need to feed it sometimes, and it needs to vomit back onto the webpage other times. I want to feed the starved optimist in me, though. The one that still believes in the power of community and inherent good-nature in most individuals who do genuinely want the best for me. All this writing above makes it seem like my dating a man and transitioning were all public displays of woe, but frankly, when I moved back to Canada I was fairly certain that it would be so much less of a big deal. I've gotten misgendered a couple times, sure, and I've gotten a couple awkward and stilted but well-meaning "she's" in my time, but largely my feminine identity presents as fact to many and so does my love for men. It's just a fact of who I am, like my being tall.
So I have only ever remembered two comments I've gotten about being tall. The first was a few years back, where an old woman looked at me up-and-down at work, long and hard with a sharp eye, until breaking the silence prominently declaring "you look like you could hunt geese with a rake." I laughed my fucking ass off at that one, it was genuinely great. The other was more recently, a handful of months ago, where I was about to exit my apartment building. I'll just put in a large portion of my diary entry from that day here below:
I am not my mother's ███. But God, do I wish I were her daughter. I wish she could accept me. But despite this, I can move on and heal knowing that there are mothers who do treat their daughters with love. The sanity, the respect, the love I feel from passing strangers is more than I've ever felt in Idaho. It feels good, and I don't want to sour that feeling too much.
Some woman, ████, flagged me down in the lobby this afternoon. She said she loves how tall I am. Not a new comment, but what came after was the new part. She said something after I said "thank you" along the lines of "no, really, I do love it - you're tall, just like my daughter; you remind me of my daughter."
It switched something on in my brain. I felt feminine. I immediately felt like I could respond, truly and honestly, femininely. Like I didn't have to pretend, consciously or subconsciously. She treated me not just like a person, but as a woman, and a real woman with feelings and thoughts. She complained to me about not feeling like she could find good places to shop for her daughter, to support her in her needs as a tall person. I came off with an admittedly bougie answer of "I'm not sure where to shop either, you gotta get stuff from a local tailor when you're like me!" We talked a short while more, and we said our names, said "have a nice day," and waved goodbye.
Sometimes I do feel bad that I forget to say "genuinely, thank you so much" more than I do. I don't even try to play it off cool, like I'm "sane" and bottle up feelings even, I really just don't even think about how impactful these moments are until the conversation is ended and I begin to ponder in my mind as I walk down the street. I am so grateful for her, for that experience. It was wonderful. I know it was genuine; she seriously stopped having a conversation with three other people just to talk to me, to see me. She talked about her daughter as someone she really loves as a parent, and because of her experience in life, she was able to see me too and know me in some way. I felt seen. I didn't feel invisible. I felt human. I felt loved by others, in some reflective way at least. I've seen her a couple times talking to others around the building. I wonder if it'd be weird to say "thank you" again; I hope it wouldn't be.
I walked to the grocery store and felt like crying joyful tears, albeit small ones. Just enough to recognize, just enough to solidify the feeling that I can hold my head a little higher, to be treated as an equal by people that surround me every day. To be treated with kindness, even in brevity. That's all I want.
In my inability to know when best to wrap it up and send it off, I will leave my optimist with one more word of determination to keep hold of. Unma Azoua, lesbian activist originally from Nigeria, is quoted below also from "Trans Day of Vanishing" with more poignant and succinct words than I could produce about all this dismay that feels so difficult to cut through:
In fact, despite the constant attacks that we get, we try as much as possible to stay out of the public eye considering that our lives are criminalized. Nevertheless, some of us are visible as a way to humanize our lives and the lives of our kindreds. Visibility also helps us let those of us who are in the closet know that they are not alone. [...]
Who would have thought it would come to this? However, I don't think the trans community should go underground. I'm not saying that they should not be cautious and safe - they need to be more careful, especially now. But disappearing should never be the answer. They should be themselves, be protective of themselves, be more vigilant about the spaces they navigate. But they need to stay fighting. [...]
There were times the queer community in Nigeria had to go underground due to constant attacks and threats and we had to go underground to let the storm pass, so to say. But in the case of North America, the trans community have always had the space and the presence, so they should not give it away. Caution, however, should be the key word; disappearing, vanishing, should not be an option to consider.
I hold onto this in truth. Keep safe. Keep sane.
When the storm passes,
When the tides lower,
When the stars shine,
I will see you again.
And to all my fellow queer people, know this: one day I may join you in posting very explicitly horny thirst traps online for strangers to see and gawk at. But that day is not today. Maybe next pride month, when I get another year in therapy, make a couple more friends, and feel like I can boast a little more about myself. This year though, know that I fully support you from the sidelines. I appreciate your being there nonetheless. Happy Pride Month.
P.S. As I write this, I'm not sure if I'm going to post it anywhere online. I write this end-piece in the middle, where at the start I set out to write a blog post on the subject of my feelings towards pride as a matter of my internal set of values, I now realize the thing I am currently writing is a lot to stomach all at once. In an attempt to make this all more digestible, I originally wanted to make all these complicated notions of personal optics into my first short-form comic. So, uh, spoilers, I guess. I realized CRUSADE is ballooning into a much larger concept than I could account for a graphic novel at first, and though aiming high is great and all, I feel I should start with something much more emotionally prevalent with a much smaller scope first. So instead, I'll be working on DOLLHOUSE, which will be out sometime later this year, in some form, I hope. If I can just keep spinning these plates- ...oh, shit! Oh god, they're falling!