Me, Robin

Kinky Boots is a feel-good movie turned feel-good stage production based on a presumably slightly more grounded real-life documentary about a struggling shoe factory turning to a niche market in order to survive. And for the most part, it works. The romance is predictable but cute. The hero’s journey is predictable but executed well. What I think isn’t that good is the writing of the lead woman.

Chiwetel Ejiofor shines in the part of Lola. He’s a great counterpart to Charlie, the stubborn sort of character that Joel Edgerton seems to be made for. The problem is with Lola’s portrayal. The letter of the script says she’s a drag queen, and definitely not a transvestite. Let me quote her directly: I’m not merely a transvestite, sweetheart. I’m also a drag queen. It’s a simple equation. A drag queen puts on a frock, looks like Kylie. A transvestite puts on a frock, looks like… Boris Yeltsin in lipstick.

It’s obviously written as the sort of shade a drag queen would throw, but Lola is a successful queen: she doesn’t need to attack anyone but hecklers and bastards. When she’s heckled at her own show, she not merely responds weakly, she’s actually crestfallen and retreats miserably to her dressing room.

The film in no way suggests that it is somehow not congruent for Lola to say something negative about transvestites, or to be so hurt when challenged on the fakeness of her breasts. If we’re reading the film more critically, there are a few things that should give pause, and the above quote is, to me, the core of the issue. When we read it now, eleven years later, Lola is a drag queen who doesn’t yet realise that she’s a trans woman. In this context, her remark is a statement of insecurity: ‘I am more than just the clothes I wear, unlike other men in women’s clothes’.

Can you out a fictional character? Well, here we are. It is not common for drag queens to be dressed up all of the time. Most drag queens are men who dress up for entertainment purposes – and not just as women, but as larger-than-life goddesses. Lola is always in drag. She’s always Lola. Calling her Simon – her name assigned at birth – is used as an attack, as a means of dragging her down. There certainly are drag events in this film: they are the exception in Lola’s life, not the rule. As I read it, she’s a woman first, drag queen second.

The story’s plot, ultimately, is about Charlie’s arc. His journey takes him from insecure to not so insecure. Lola is not provided the same courtesy, and it’s a missed opportunity. She never finds closure on her father, she never accepts her own identity, and we’re left to wonder what becomes of her after she quits her drag show (spoilers!).

At the end of the film, we are given the underlying moral lesson that the writers had in mind. After all the struggles, Lola is considered more of a man in a dress than Charlie will ever be as a ‘regular’ man. It seems a massive irony that this is what Lola takes away from it, but then again, she opens her show with the phrase Ladies, gentlemen and those who are yet to make up your mind. Maybe it is you, Lola, who has yet to make up your mind.

Finding – and sticking with – one’s identity can be a lifelong struggle. From a very young age, people have expectations of you. Parents and guardians have very strong expectations of what you should like, like hobbies, clothes, food and friendship. When you hit your teens, and you become more aware of the individuality of your feelings, these expected ideas might stop fitting you. You want to decide on your own clothing, you develop tastes in food that you had never eaten before, and you might make friends in unexpected places.

When you struggle with your gender expression – commonly from gender dysphoria – the feeling of failing expectations is compounded even more. Now, you’re ‘not who they thought you were’. If you’re born a little baby boy, then there are people who expect you, entirely without reason, to grow up to love cars, bacon and sports. These hobbies, clothes and foods that we all love to hate are tied to a very specific expectation of you. And when the root cause of that story – because it is only a story that parents tell themselves – falls away, parents don’t always know what to think.

Would that it were only the parents. We carry these expectations forth into the world, and turn a wicked amount into prejudice. We internalise our prejudices, and we become the person our opinions shape us to be. Even if those opinions are disguised self-hatred.

We internalise expectations so that we eventually trip ourselves up.

Anohni and internalisation

All of this is a roundabout way of talking about how deaf you can become to even the most obvious of things. When I first listened to I Am a Bird Now, it was love at first sight. I devoured the album, but I never read anything significant into the lyrics. I think I was avoiding them. From For Today I Am a Boy:

One day I’ll grow up, I’ll be a beautiful woman.
One day I’ll grow up, I’ll be a beautiful girl.

I know, right? How fucking thick am I? I know now that the album was for Anohni herself. That it isn’t a selfless record for some ‘other’. It was always the story, the voice and the pain of Anohni that we were allowed to listen to.

But now I can’t hear it without hearing my own struggle. When I first heard that song a decade ago, did I hear it then? Why did I not get it? Had I internalised transphobia ’til my eyes clouded over?

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My dad has always been the musical one. He played me my first classics, showed me concerts on tape, and took me to shows and festivals. He’s the literal kind – he loves lyrics that describe something beautiful and emotional and deep, even if it’s a bit on the nose.

From him, I got my love for Queen. I watched the Freddie Mercury tribute concert so many times that I’m sure the tape is now a tattered rag of magnetic plastic. It’s a tribute concert to a bisexual, queer man who died of AIDS, and it has one of my earliest memory imprints in the form of David Bowie and Annie Lennox performing Under Pressure. Pretty queer stuff.

Despite all this, I don’t think he’s ever really heard the messages of love and support, and of insecurity and self-doubt. Maybe he can’t hear what Anohni says, either, in the same way that I couldn’t.

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The fact that questioning your gender is an inherently insecure thing doesn’t help with impostor syndrome. It certainly doesn’t help in conversations with people who dismiss insecurity as de facto being wrong. Self-doubt is a multi-layered feeling for me: I feel it when I look in the mirror, I feel it when I introduce myself to strangers, and I feel it when I think about my parents. What they ‘own’ of me is what they are used to. Their expectations of me are, for them, law. Born a son. Always a son. Whatever I do that differs from their expectation is a breach of contract, and a breach of trust.

If they see me simply as their child, then what does that stand for? Do I stand for these ideas of masculinity? Because I have never stood for those, and they know that. Do I stand for their expectations of the typical boy? Because those too never really lasted. I am the same as ever. What are they unwilling to see?

Recently, at a local queer function, I was talking to an acquaintance who figured that I must be an American, because I was so worried — wait, it doesn’t make sense to start there.

He assumed I was an American because I had expressed worry about the current election. In particular, the fear that Donald Trump might succeed in his bid for presidency. And, since this is an American election and we live in Norway, why was I worried, he asked.

If we ignore for now the fact that Trump’s election would be terrible for Americans and America in general, then I still have valid worries here in Norway. Every public statement of hatred, bigotry and prejudice that goes unchallenged strengthens the resolve of bigots and lowers the threshold for others to express the same. The reason Trump is so worrying for me is that he has an extremely visible platform – the run for presidency – and virtually no critical response in the media. He gets away with his worst statements.

When such actions go unchecked, people start assuming they are ‘okay’. You might be tired of hearing ‘first they came for the Socialists…’ but I can assure you, you’re not as tired as the people who lie awake at night, worrying about their next president, what he might say, what he might do. Nobody is telling him ‘no’ right now. Why would that change?

I’ve been blogging for more than half my life. I’ve blogged about design and web development, I’ve participated in some shitty memes on Tumblr, I’m Twitter user twenty-thousand, I have several Instagram accounts, and I’m pre-producing a podcast. But the one thing I’ve never tried is a blog in the style I like to read them.

My favourite sites have always been clearly focused on personality and opinion. Andy Baio, Jason Kottke and John Gruber are among my regular visits. And their self-governed sites are comfortable places. No ugly ads, no corporate interests. But it’s people like Rani Baker and blogs like The Queerness who have made me feel more strongly about expressing myself. At the very least, it will be a place for friends in remote places to catch up with me. At best, I’ll be able to write things that matter to people beyond my social circle.

I might still talk about business or design. I might still post terrible jokes or cute pictures. But now I can also write more personal things. I own every part of the production, so I know it’s all in my control. And while it doesn’t mean that much in practice, it helps me to know I’m building my own space.