Trans-gressions

Back in November when I was listless and unemployed, I had the audacity to ask the folks at the Reeling Queer International Film Festival to give me free, advanced copies of all the films I wanted to see (and review). To my surprise, they said yes, and soon I was loaded down with armfuls of films (in reusable, environmentally-friendly canvas bags, of course). The best documentary film of the fest was Sam Feder’s and Julie Hollar’s Boy I Am, which provides a critical and challenging look at contemporary trans issues told through the narratives of three transitioning transmen: Norie, Nicco and Keegan. Their insights, triumphs and hardships are punctuated by interviews with gender theorists, lawyers, and activists who attempt to clarify and complicate issues surrounding trans identity within the broader queer community and the world at large. The heart of the documentary is the voices from the transmen themselves, who come from racially and economically diverse backgrounds and who beautifully dispel the notions of trans identity as a “cop out” or as an appropriation of male privilege by rejecting feminism and butch lesbianism.

Such notable names as Mike De Luca (producer of Magnolia, Boogie Nights, Life as a House, Blow and Hedwig and the Angry Inch amongst others) have taken notice of Boy I Am. De Luca said of the film: “Boy I Am does justice in its exposure of the tragic double standard gender modification is held to in America. I am reminded of the very brave scene in All About My Mother where Agrado (Antonia San Juan) describes to an audience each and every procedure she had to become the woman she is today. As technology catches up to identity, still there are hypocritical collagen sneers. Perhaps, in their ignorant heart of hearts, they are jealous in their inability to be who they are. Men like Norie, Keegan, and Nicco deserve better.”

I was lucky enough to sit down with Sam Feder at a Chicago cafe on a recent faux spring day in April to discuss the film and some of the necessary and complex issues it inspires.

Q: What kind of reception has Boy I Am received, from the trans community specifically, because one of the major criticisms I’ve read comes from non-trans people talking about/speaking for trans people. You certainly give a voice to the three FTMs in your documentary, but what are your thoughts on tackling issues that directly and physically pertain to experiences that you haven’t lived?

SF: Some trans folks have thanked us -one trans youth asked for a copy to show to their parents before they came out to them-others feel frustrated by the discussion being presented. Ultimately, we expect a variety of reactions and are more than eager to hear them. We made this to promote dialogue. In respect to non-trans folks making a documentary about transfolks, Julie and I made a documentary that turned the mirror within our community; we discussed an issue within and about our own community - the dyke community. We have not taken an isolated event and presented it as outsiders. We are extremely invested in the issues we explore for social, political and personal reasons. As two gender variant people, a lot of these issues permeate into our lives. And, every aspect of the films comes from our stories.

Q: It’s interesting that all three of the guys you chronicled decided to go on T (testosterone therapy) and get top surgery. Do you think there is now pressure for FTMs to conform to the chemically/surgically altered body? Is there a cultural ideal that trans people feel pressure to uphold?

SF: Yes…I think pressure exists. As, Keegan states, there is policing within the community. He expressed there was pressure on how to be and how not to be a transman. As a non-transperson I can’t speak about personal pressure. The community I am part of has come a long way from the narrow definitions of what it once meant to be a transman. And that’s something I see celebrated and encouraged. As for all three undergoing hormones and surgery, we aimed to document a variety of trans masculinity, and worked with the guys accordingly, but this changed over time and the film ended with them all being on hormones and having surgery-we weren’t looking to portray that form of masculinity solely. And, the film is by no means suggesting that hormones and surgery are the end all for a transman. That was just their stories.

Q: Boy I Am does a really good job of bridging the theoretical aspects of identity with the lived experiences of those who are theorized. What role/relevance do you think theory plays in these discussions of gender and identity?

SF: The relationship between theory and practice is tricky to follow and work with. Ideally, theory needs to be more respectful, should reflect what’s going on in the subject being theorized, question what’s going on, and inspire dialogue. Theory is risky when it starts establishing norms and predicting what those norms should be. I do think theory is helpful in the sense that it gives us a vocabulary - a jumping off point. However, I think theory itself needs to be theorized more, that theorists need to take more responsibility for the role they play in people’s actual lives and not be so removed from it. I’ve heard some gender theorists express shock and offense when they hear the community critiquing them or even devaluing their work. I would think that would be an inherent expectation for a theorist and encouraged. Additionally, for many people’s practice, i.e. their lives, theory surrounding isn’t accessible and/or has no cause and effect relationship for them.

Q: I wanted to talk a bit about binaries and choice. Because binaries are almost always hierarchical-white is better than black, straight is better than gay, etc.- transgenderism has the potential to invalidate those either/or politics, which is one of the reasons why I think it’s perceived as so threatening. It’s the whole “you’re either with us or against us” mentality. How then do we respect choice (the choice to live as male in a patriarchal society, for instance) without destroying political foundations, alliances, and laws for our “protection”?

SF: I don’t see how respecting choice lends itself to destroying political foundations, alliances, and laws for our “protection”. Not respecting choice is policing within. How can we knowingly do that? Not supporting choice is the antithesis of feminism. Remember, “My Body, My Choice”?

Q: Another thing I loved about your film was the dialogue from girlfriends of FTMs. You don’t often hear about the odd reality of lesbians suddenly being read as straight and the implications of that identity/sexuality shift. How does a lesbian reconcile her sexuality without undermining her trans partner’s male identity?

SF: I think this is an important topic, and a touchy topic as well, for people because sometimes partners of trans people are seen as accessories-their sexual identity changes based on who they’re with. Speaking from personal experience, why should I have to give up my political identity or sexual identity based on who I’m sleeping with? On the adverse, how do we maintain our sexual identity when it’s inherently defined by the other person involved. Kate Bornstein has begun discussing an idea of moving self identity away from being defined by who we are with and turned back to how we see ourselves. I see myself as a queer dyke regardless of who I am dating be it a fag, femme, butch, transperson, transman or transwoman and so on…

Q: Do you watch The L Word? If so, I wanted to get your thoughts on Max, the trans character. Do you feel that there are elements of tokenization and/or unrealistically negative portrayals of trans issues on the show, like taking testosterone, etc?

SF: I have seen it enough to have an opinion about it. I was turned off by Max’s character because he was way too one-dimensional. A perfect example of how the mainstream media can be irresponsible when addressing these kinds of nuanced issues. I heard of young folks who feared if they transitioned they might become like Max. I’m glad they have included a transmale character (though I do wish there was more inclusion of dykes and butches) because I know it has started dialogue that wasn’t there before. However, in my opinion, it’s pretty transparent what the agenda in presenting Max was and that’s not an agenda I support.

Q: Trans issues are further complicated by the medical component. Whereas homosexuality was removed from the DSM list of pathologies in the 70s, transsexuality remains firmly controlled by medical and psychological technologies. To what extent does trans identity become inhibited by the medical aspects of body categorization, gender dysphoria, etc.?

SF: The medical community still dictates what a trans person is. Because of this, people have learned to tell doctors what they want to hear regardless of its relevance to their lives. And, essentially this just reinforces the medical component. As long as there’s a medical format, trans people can never have complete ownership of their bodies. As long as doctors continue to have this much control, transpeople will be denied a very serious human right. As a friend said the other night at a Q&A, “Why do transmen need a doctor’s note when you can get a shot of botox on a whim without a note saying, “you’re crazy”—which, maybe they should.”

Q: What are you working on now?

SF: I’m in post-production on a short narrative called “F. Scott Fitzgerald Slept Here” with my partner Jules Rosskam. And I received a research fellowship from Columbia College’s The Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media to work on a feature length doc. That explores feminism. That narrows it down, no?

Check out www.boyiam.mayfirst.org for the latest news regarding the film, dates of upcoming screenings and for additional resources concerning trans issues. While you’re at the site, check out the Boy I Am blog, where the issues raised by the film continue to be discussed.

Written by Anna Pulley

Anna is a post-Creative Writing major and validation junky. In addition to Queerky, she also writes for dykediva.com, centerstagechicago.com and does film reviews for theaspectratio.net. She uses quotation marks unnecessarily and spends entirely too much time justifying the artistic merit of limericks. You can contact her at banannarama01@yahoo.com

A Season in Hell

Just about everybody had that friend in high school who got busted smoking. Maybe his dad walked in on him and some friends smoking in the basement. Or maybe his mom found a pack in his coat (this was the scariest Brady Bunch episode, ever, by the way - we all knew that the ciggies weren’t Greg’s, though). Maybe he burned down the block with a cigarette, killing hundreds including the entire population of the geriatric home down on the corner, whose inhabitants died scraping their gray, grizzled fingers raw on the bars outside their windows, screaming to be shot in the head by passing policemen so as to avoid the charring, searing agony of having the very flesh melted from their aged, brittle bones. This, as an aside, WOULD have been the scariest Brady bunch episode ever if it hadn’t been for those damn censors.

Actually, I didn’t have one of those friends. But I did have a story from a friend about what happened to his cousin when his dad caught him smoking. Some parents live on the edge a little and I guess my friend’s cousin’s parents lived there, too. His dad made him smoke 2 entire packs of cigarettes at one sitting, while he watched. The idea was “Hey, many smokers smoke 2 packs a day once they’re addicted. Let’s show you what that feels like.” Supposedly, it worked, as my friend said his cousin got so sick he never smoked again. Happy ending, right? Beautiful. Everyone went out for ice cream and all was right with the world. We called this the immersion method.

I think I had my doubts about the methodology, but I couldn’t think of a better alternative. I’d never found a way to talk anyone out of smoking and I’d never seen anyone who had. No one believes they will actually get sick or get hurt in any way. Maybe this immersion works. I lived, later, with a friend named Doug who kept falling asleep in his chair holding a cigarette and lighting various clothing on fire. I soaked his chair in non-flammable plastic at his request. We spent hours out at various clubs talking about how to forestall the inevitable fiery death he faced one day when he fell into a slightly deeper sleep. I was ready to start missing charred little Doug. Sometimes it’s important to get emotionally prepared. We had a little eulogy and funeral at the Metro in Chicago. Great guy. Not much left. Smelled bad on the way out.

So he suggested a radical version of this immersion method. Maybe a group of people should show up at your house and kidnap you, drag you off to a dungeon somewhere where you’ll spend weeks tied to a wall, covered in ashes with ashtray filth and tar-filled water filling the room up to your neck. It would be a very expensive but effective program. A big moneymaker if we could get funding. We called it “A Season in Hell” after a book of poems by Rimbaud. This was not to be the final marketing name, although it did have a catchy logotype.

By the way, this was our second big moneymaking self-help program idea. The first was the Coma Diet Plan. Our ultimate easy weight loss plan. People of heft (politically correct term for the chubby) would sign up for 50,000 dollars a piece and be put into an artificially induced coma for 3 months. During that time orderlies would exercise them by moving their limbs to prevent atrophy and build muscle mass. They would be fed intravenously a minimum number of calories and the weight would just drop off. They would wake up 3 months later, having gone through no extensive trouble, lean, fit and ready to dive right into their new skinny lives. Sweet. And after 3 months away, their families could be expected to be so happy to see them. We even had cards made, for fun. The coma diet plan. My old friend, the photographer Steve Diet Goedde was in a pretty interesting punk band named Coma Diet as well. It’s where the “Diet” in his name came from (There was a time when people in Chicago used to call people by their first names and band names. Eric Spicer was Eric Raygun. I heard myself called Jim Warzau. The first person who ever introduced me to Paul Barker called him “Paul Blackouts” which, disturbingly, made him sound both plural and like a drunk. Chicago.)

So we never did it. The millions of dollars we might have made from our revolutionary self-help plans never materialized. My big idea dreams are smaller now, like entering the Pillsbury bake off (it’s a million dollars if you win, people). But maybe the ideas are sound. Does immersion work? Give people exactly what they want and they realize that it sort of sucks? Can you cure an addiction by letting the person wallow in the results of their addiction?

Whether this works or not has become more relevant to me lately. We have a unique addiction happening in this country. It’s an addiction to magic. This isn’t magic like on Bewitched where we, as a nation, were expected to believe that Nicole Kidman would want anything to do with Will Ferrell. Not like Harry Potter Magic or Buffy the Vampire kind (too bad, really, because I could totally get with a little more Buffy). The kind of magic we’re addicted to is magical thinking.

We’ve seen a growing support for pharmacists refusing to service women because it went against their religion. We’ve seen popes and trains of their followers fight against reasoned, scientifically proven sexual education and contraception because it went against their religion. We’ve seen churches do battle with laws that would protect children from sexual predators because they would potentially force their religion to behave in a reasoned way. We’ve seen attacks on science from all angles because the traditions of various religions are impacted - Muslim speakers advocating beating their wives, Christian speakers fanning the flames of anti-gay violence, Seventh Day Adventist speakers feeding into sectarian genocide, Jewish speakers treating a whole group of genetically near-identical people as de facto inferiors because their religion, again, pits magic against science, revelation against reason, superstition against introspection.

And the addiction to magical thinking seems to be growing. Well over half of Americans now believe that, despite scientific evidence to the contrary, God created modern man as he exists now through the process of creationism. Over 2/3rds of Americans want Creationism to be taught in schools - hundreds of millions of people.

A comparison of peoples’ views in 34 countries finds that the United States ranks near the bottom when it comes to public acceptance of evolution. Only Turkey ranked lower. The widespread popularity of American fundamentalists, aided by politicians who want to curry favor with that influential voting block, has created an environment more averse to science than we find in other countries, even those far less developed than we are. The primary advocates of Creationism are not accredited scientists. They are pundits and laymen, politicians and theologians. Our addiction to magical thinking in this country has created a set of conditions that put non-scientists in charge of the scientific education of the population.

At the same time, a movement has begun to replace the findings of doctors and professional people of compassion with more magical thinking. Recently, in Danbury Connecticut, the school observed a day of silence. This was meant to honor and remember people, gay, straight, black, white, etc. who were victims of violence just because of who they are. Local religious institutions fought for, and won, the right to stage their rebuttal to this idea with a “day of truth” where they advocated for homosexuality to be considered sinful, unnatural and wrong. By positioning their event as a rebuttal, they made it clear how they felt about the Initial event, whose sole focus was to remind people that violence in the service of intolerance is wrong. Valerie Pinnex, the pastor who instigated the Day of Truth refuted the intent of the Day of Silence by asserting, in opposition to the findings of medical professionals, psychiatrists, etc. that homosexuality was a clinical condition and unnatural. An ex-police officer and security guard, Valerie has exactly zero years of medical experience or training. And yet, hers was the medical advice heard by the population of the school. A message of distrust, division and alienation, specifically intended to counter a message of nonviolence. And paid for by tax money.

We have in front of us a strange addiction. But I’m starting to wonder if there isn’t a cure. It’s brutal and painful, like the rabies cure, a long string of painful shots. It’s expensive, like the most elaborate cold remedies that involve ground up animals, endangered and rare. And it’s ugly. Sort of like a proctology exam.

Let’s just let them win.

I suppose we need to let the hatemongers into schools to counter the conversations on tolerance. For every Martin Luther King Day or Harvey Milk Discussion, let in the The Ku Klux Klan and a Valerie Pinnex. For every scientifically verified and exhaustively researched finding on the origins of human life, let in the magicians, preachers, pundits, and grade school graduates with dissenting opinions. For every responsibly compiled history text, let in a work of collaborative fiction detailing what might have happened, how we didn’t walk on the moon, the Holocaust didn’t happen, etc.

And when a generation of American politicians have been raised to hate and fear what’s different, the religious right can bask in its triumph. When a generation of American doctors have been raised to elevate wishful thinking above science, the American Religious Right can visit those doctors with joy, prescriptions in hand for antibiotics, taken without respect to the evolution of the various diseases countered. And when a generation of American historians have been raised to think that whatever revisions they want to introduce into history are as valid as what is documented, the Religious right can enjoy the results of their work. As we descend into sickness, intolerance and ignorance, we can light candles along the way, mutter newly learned magic words and forget what tools we sent thousands of years developing, all to make political communication a little more vital - a little more understandable.

What would a country like that look like, just one generation from now? I couldn’t say with any degree of certainty. But maybe it’s time to stop fighting and let the addiction win. Many of the pro-theocratic members of the religious right in this country have never lived under a theocracy - never lived in a place where religion and magic determined the entirety of public policy. If they don’t have the vision to understand what the most vocal and outspoken theological voices in our community would do with even more power than they enjoy right now, maybe we should supplement that vision with empirical experience. Maybe, if we’re lucky, we’ll only sacrifice one generation before the nation wakes up and rises to the countrywide challenge to pass through dark ages swiftly and without regret. Maybe only one group of men and women will have to be sacrificed to absurdity before we wake up as a nation and resume our movement towards the future.

It’s probably time to give the fundamentalist what they’ve been wanting. A true American season of hate and ignorance. A return to superstition and the intellectual jungle. A Season in Hell. Let’s see how they like it.

Written by Jim Marcus

im Marcus is a singer/songwriter, director, photographer, writer, performance artist and social activist. And really, that list doesn’t even touch the surface of all the things he’s done or is doing.

A founding member of the seminal Industrial band Die Warzau, Jim Marcus has worked with artists in all genres, from Bjork to Revenge, Steel Pulse, Pansy Division, Machines of Loving Grace, George Clinton, KMFDM, Gravity Kills, Pigface, Little Louis, and more. Die Warzau’s fifth album, “Supergangbang” is slated for release in October of 2006. Mr. Marcus is also currently at work on his first solo release, entitled “Wonderland”.