Me, Robin

Should old acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind? In this season of looking forward, meeting family and friends, or simply taking some time off during the darkest days of the year, I want to propose to look back a little.

I made my first consciously queer friend about ten years ago. She was the first person I ever came out to, and the first to celebrate it with me. We cycled across small towns, like lesbians do. We went to concerts and invented new soups. We kvetched and shopped and danced to Gaga. Basically, we were besties.

Even best friends have reasons to break up, but that’s not what we’re going to talk about. I was learning to deal with my anxiety and I lost friends that way. We both moved to other countries. It happens. What’s more important is to remember the friendship. She may be gone from my life, but I think about her now and then. I think about how she made me.

She taught me to articulate and embrace my queerness after years of fear, internalised hatred and ignorance. She was there for me when I needed to learn who I was.

Now, ten years on, I still fondly think of my old friend. I think of her, somehow, still as a friend. A friend who happens not to know my name. But I think that, if we were to meet again, that we could talk. And I hope that she would be proud of me.

For the season, indulge me, and think back on your old friends. Remember the ones that were good to you. It’s okay to lose touch. But remember, privately if you must, that every step along the way lead you here, and be thankful they allowed you to move on.

Thank you so much for the kindness you have shown me over the past few weeks. You’ve made me feel welcome and appreciated. But I wish you’d know me better.

You know my name. You laugh at my jokes and you listen to my feedback. I feel like you understand me. You ask for help, and you are unafraid to ask me for work. You’re talking to me every day, but I wish you knew how to address me.

The first time you heard of me was in an e-mail that said she’s coming over to show us her work. The first time you saw me, I proudly showed off my career as a woman in type. After I started, you seem to have forgotten all about it. So much for first impressions.

You’re good people. I know you care. You’ve welcomed me! How could you be bad people? But in every meeting, I am afraid to be introduced. Every time you talk about my work to a client, I hope you leave me out of it. Every day, I brace myself for the scattershot boy, man and dude, for the casual he and him.

And every day I kind of blame myself. I should just tell you that you’re supposed to refer to me by the only obvious — I’d think! — pronouns. I should just interrupt you. I should just stop you in the middle of your sentence and correct you. But you might see how that’s not so easy. And I wish I could tell you this.

It’s a logical start of the new season to try to perform and express the idea of a witch. Witches have been around forever, and I feel a strong kinship with their historic presentation.

First of all, witches have always been the centre of their community. The women with the wisdom, skill with herbs and healing, with a connection to everyone in the area. The first doulas were probably witches. The women who delivered the new humans into the community. The doctors who served their people all their lives. And finally the person to be there and bury the dead. Witches have always been at the fringe of the village that needs them — witches have likely been everything from sex workers to doctors, from advisors to the ones holding the dangerous truths.

Let’s repeat that. Witches have the dangerous truth. Shakespeare knew it. The Romans who campaigned across England and Germany knew it and wrote about it. Witches were the women with the dangerous knowledge, and you either made an enemy for life or, and this works out best for all of us, you learned your damn lesson. They can see the future — probably because they’re the only ones who learned from the past.

Witches have been a threat to Good White Christian Men for centuries, and that’s good too.

Witches have secret, special bonds. They have seen birth, death, healing and falling ill. Their association with these things has made them suspect to many people, but if witches have existed since the beginning of humanity, then surely there’s more to it than just death and misery. Gay men were ostracised in the eighties for their association with the AIDS pandemic, and we know better than to conclude that gayness is sickness. Witches, like other gay people, have a sense of dress style that comes with an undertone of the struggle to either show or hide the capital T Truth.

This year, we’re starting with witches because witches are everywhere and everything. I was born a witch and I’m proud of it. I live in an overgrown home with a bubbling pot and a devil dog. I curse men, regularly, and I look good in hats.

All trans women are witches. All trans people, for that matter, are magic. With or without the k. I’m not picky. All queer people have access to magic. We hold dangerous truths in our mere existence. We have the wisdom, and we have the skill. We’re powerful pinnacles of our communities. We’re the sex workers and the doulas, the doctors and the demons of our society, and without us there would be nobody else to teach people about the past. We’ve learned from our past — that’s how we became who we are.

Oslo Fusion, the queer film festival in town, is always a treasure trove of engaging material. Last year I was incredibly energised, and it came at a great time, right before the first Queer Church. This year I’ve been having a harder time, so it was probably a good distraction to watch some queer shit.

The first thing I caught was a silver screen showing of Her Story, the web series that has promise of so much more. I don’t have a lot to say about it, because you can see it for yourself. All six episodes are available to watch online, and they offer a neat, digestible storyline that is incredibly relatable, while being performed in a wholly unique way. Jen Richards and Laura Zak have written and performed two honest, beautiful characters that I crave to see so much more of.

I can’t push this hard enough: Her Story is a perfect encapsulation of romance, recognition, respect and intersectional feminism as it applies directly to trans people. If you need any specific reason to watch, watch it because these things happen to me. From the site:

‘Her Story’ depicts the unique, complicated, and very human women we see in queer communities, and explores how these women navigate the intersections of label identity and love.

Sneaking in a heading about other feelings

Last week I sat down with a friend who was visiting from out of town and I told her that I was so tired and upset about my friends misgendering me, and sometimes not even using my name. I can’t begin to describe the weirdness of the feeling that I call these people my friends. Is that a friend? Someone who considers you a friend but doesn’t know your name?

When strangers do it — and I invariably struggle to correct them when they do — I wonder how they feel when they find me on Facebook and read my posts. When they see my trans activism. If they realise. I can’t even remember the many ways in which I tried to subtly work into a conversation that perhaps I wish to be addressed properly at literally every social event I attended in the past two weeks. At least they’re strangers. If they want to become friends, they can start with the right name and pronouns.

More Than T

On Saturday, I attended a screening of More Than T, the documentary about interesting people who also happen to be trans. It’s directed and produced by trans people, and like Her Story it shows. There is nothing inherently different about trans people other than their transness, and that transness is so personal and specific that it isn’t worth generalising it. The documentary shows beautiful complex people who in their own way have become like bedrock to their communities.

While transness is different for every trans person, some common traits are always there. Anohni says that trans women are all born with a natural religion, and I’d only change that to say that it’s not just trans women but also everyone else on the trans spectrum. Whether non-binary, genderqueer, genderfluid, or of a more fixed gender expression, we’ve all considered gender and recognised it as both essentially unimportant and yet personally significant. Perhaps that internalised paradox helps guide us to see others in their own right as well.

For what it’s worth, that’s what I consider to be my witchcraft. Visit me in my hovel. I bake bread and will curse your enemies.

Jen Richards was in attendance and I had only one burning feeling that I decided not to articulate in the audience. But now that I’ve spent more time with it, I come away with one sad gut feeling that I can’t shake: so many trans people end up becoming carers. It’s survivor bias in its truest sense.

The word of law is imagined, written and protected by people. In general, these laws are good. They not only have a clear function, but they also serve to protect as many people as possible, and do so with as little prejudice as possible. But some of these laws have been on the books for a long time, and the world changes. The people who imagined and wrote them may not be around any longer either.

Laws are ideas, prejudices, projections and ambitions set in stone. What many people see is only the fact that they are set in stone. They fail to recognise that someone carved them there. What we can do about it is to change those who get to decide what is written down. We get our vote.

With our vote, we can put people that we trust into positions of influence. And we get to do this, by law. It wasn’t always like that, but the old people died and new laws were made to fit the changing world.

Politicians seek the power to carve new laws. They will promise a wide range of possibilities, in exchange for your vote. We have to hold their feet to the fire, so that they fulfill their promises. It is our right and duty to make sure the laws change along with the world.

By their nature, rules, laws and rights are a reflection of our lifetime. They delineate the things we can and cannot do, and in some cases they decide who we can and cannot be, love or marry. This is what we have. The vote we get is the chance to make that better.

Yesterday, I went to the doctor for the first time in eight years. There have been lots of times over several years where I have acknowledged to myself that it’s overdue, but now I finally did something about it.

I started fresh with a new doctor, on the other side of town. Getting to their offices gives me time to read a little bit on the bus, create some distance so that I make room for my feelings. It’s not the most pleasant area – lots of faceless office blocks and a highway overpass. Perhaps the change of place makes me feel accomplished as well.

Luckily, my doctor was unfazed by my shameful history of avoiding doctors. We talked, made some new appointments, and I had to give some blood for tests. That was, honestly, the funny part. I have no problem with needles or blood, but combining the two seems to cause trouble for my body. There must be something deeply physiological about the sensation. I’ve lost more blood in a casual nosebleed, but have a nurse take it from me consensually and I get starry vision and a buzz in my ears.

For years I’ve been ashamed of not having been to the doctor. I know that I’ve needed to go for some time. Now, I’ve made a start, and I feel that a weight is off my shoulders. Stupid, stupid girl. I should have done this years ago.

Traditionally, family is the first social system you grow up in. It’s where you learn about hierarchy, sharing, patience, love, talking about your feelings, listening to other people’s feelings – it’s essentially where you learn how to treat people right.

That’s the ideal family. Ideally, you’re born into it, and you’re raised in it, and when you leave it, you come back every now and then to make sure it is still strong. Ideally, you’re loved, trusted, supported, listened to, shared with – ideally, you’re treated like a full person.

We all go into the world with a right to these connections. We deserve to be listened to, trusted, and loved. This is where we begin – and ideally, this is how we are raised.

But no family is ideal. For some, family is no more than a series of internalised expectations. You are supposed to live up to a name, or to a societal standard, or to a career path. For some, it’s something you have to grow out of, where family reflects your childhood, not your adulthood. For some of us, it is what we leave behind. Some leave behind the social norm of what love and togetherness stands for. Your family might not believe you, not trust you, not love you. And it might make you doubt the supposed inherent goodness of family.

It is then important to realise that families are made. You may be born into them; you may also be adopted into them. You may bear the same name, but you may not. These things are unimportant to a real bond. Family is a system of trust, love, sharing and caring. And, more importantly, you make your own family. Ultimately, family is what you make of it.

It’s formalities season in Norway. The big national holiday is two weeks away, the sun is out, and every Good Child is either getting baptised or ‘confirmed’, like a good Catholic. That’s right: it’s queer trans girls going to church season. Join me for a ride through one of my favourite Norwegian mine fields!

So, a kid is getting confirmed. It’s a whole thing. Extended family will attend, and there will be a photo op. Maybe a hip local bishop performs the sacraments. And somewhere in attendance will be me, the trouble maker.

You see, my in-laws have been talking. It’s about me. What am I going to wear? They’re concerned. For the children, of course. For the sake of the children. They’re only children, Robin. They just. won’t. understand. So, amongst themselves, they have been talking about whether I could just show up in ‘normal’ clothes. But please note that they haven’t talked to me about this.

It seems that every Norwegian family has in it the willingness to turn anything into a secret. It goes well with their conflict-shy tendencies. The baffling thing, of course, is that they will have whole Socratic dialogues – where the point is that I am excluded at every turn. After a few weeks of this, my partner received a call, asking, ‘so, is everything all right? I heard something about Robin’s clothes’. That’s so radically direct I think I need to lie down for a bit.

Of course, they didn’t actually ask me anything. They didn’t ask me what I thought. They didn’t ask me for advice. They didn’t even ask me nicely if I could show up a little less obvious¹. And while that request is itself an assault – more on that later – I would also, at the same time, have honoured it. It’s a twelve-year-old’s special ceremony. I don’t need to upstage a child.

I am evidently granted so little trust that they can’t even ask me directly. They drop hints at my partner, who suddenly has to bear the burden of telling me that I am not welcome.

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What lies beneath the surface of the request (as it has been relayed to me) is a violent dismissal of my identity: don’t look like yourself, please. I was asked to dress ‘gender conforming’, which is, emphatically, not what they think they are asking for. If they’d asked me to wear pants because, jeez, it’s church and there’s a lot of kids – and they don’t want to deal with having to explain someone like me to someone else’s children – fine! I have some really cool pieces of clothing that have seams down the middle too. It’s not a big ask. The problem is that they never even asked.

To ask it as if the clothing is this Thing that I do, as if my clothing, when more gender-ambiguous, is any less fabulous and pronounced, as if I am only who I say I am if I put on a dress, that’s the violence. And since they think of themselves as non-violent people, they will never understand.

PinkNews, our favourite source of gay-flavoured clickbait, is at it again. In their latest ‘community’ post, which is an opinion editorial without taking responsibility for it, they publish the notion that ‘trans people can become women for frivolous reasons like fashion or clothes’. First of all, I am anything but frivolous. I’m fucking fabulous, and in our society clothing is much more complicated than just that. If gender dysphoria had any such a simple solution, you’d think it would be resolved much more easily. Second, what of trans men? Are they just women wanting to opt out of the frivolity of fashion?

The excuse that is used for this language is a ‘feminist lens’: using the power of feminism, we can ignore that this promotes a long-standing harmful stereotype about trans people (women in particular). Fay Weldon, the woman whose opinion is elevated in this masked op-ed, says [m]an now controls the best weapon woman ever had, the body he so envied, its very moods and subtleties. He can become her, suck her up, subsume her.

As a feminist first and foremost, I don’t believe in this lens – Weldon’s excuse is that men are looking to lower themselves to become women. It entirely erases that trans women are and have always been women. But it also tries to have it both ways: man is superficial in wanting to co-opt womanhood, which itself is blatant superficiality. Isn’t the want for the superficial a superficial want?

But I’m not in this for the underlying reasons. Fay Weldon acts to reduce trans experiences to the superficial, whether that is the plot line she desired to write or not. If you write a ‘radical’ idea that you do not fully believe in, then there is no blame on the reader who takes your word for it. If you wear a trucker hat ironically, the end result is that you wear a trucker hat. If you wish to dissect and discuss the machinations of society that tend to divide people based on gender assigned at birth and then punishes them for deviating from the norm, be my guest. In fact, come over. I’ll cook you dinner and we can talk. But write it in a book as plain fact, and I’m gonna reserve the right to not cook you anything.