“No nipples?” I say, trying to not sound judgmental but my poor poker face is failing me. My friend was going for top surgery and describing their procedure to me. They had decided to forgo a nipple reconstruction for a variety of reasons but the principle one being that it was 1200 dollars more and they didn’t see it as a worthwhile investment. My surprise was less about their choice and more about my own assumptions and expectations when having top surgery. This was a time before the surgery was covered by insurance or gofundme’s were widely available. We had to find inventive ways to become the people we wanted to be in the world.
The more people I meet, the greater variety of paths that I see people taking to connect to their trans identity and community. Each one of them is representative of the love, support, and hardships the individual has overcome. We are in an unprecedented period of attacks on the trans community both inside and outside of the US, verbal and physical, rhetorical and policy oriented. At a time when it could be easy to divide the community, trans folks are coming together to create space, art, and change. In this book, I am curious about and explore what connections we share as trans people and how we maintain those cultural values. While being trans is far from a monolith and deeply influenced by economic and geographic difference, what is shared in trans culture? How do we pass on our language, traditions, and values? Do we have those things at all?
Of course, the goal is not to come up with a singular unified and enforced answer. What I have discovered is when we as trans folks don’t ask the questions about what it means to be in trans community and what are trans ways of knowing in the world, at least three things happen: first, each generation of trans people believe they are isolated in their experience and must ‘create’ a whole new world. Second, in the absence of a connected trans culture ‘gay’ culture, in particular, US ‘gay’ culture becomes the default. Third, access to human rights becomes culture as opposed to art, history, language or other threads of culture. And it is this last part that really motivates me to think about how we as trans people are a culture. We have to be connected beyond fighting for our right to exist. My hope with this book, is to pose some starting points for ways we as trans people and trans allies can start to cultivate trans ways of knowing and being, beyond survival.
Since clearly, we don’t all need to have nipples, what do we need to be trans? I believe that processes of building collective memory can be one tool to help build the connection to understanding, developing, and expanding trans
Much like the goal of mapping trans culture, this is not my attempt to limit or codify trans but to look at how trans identity, trans ethos, and trans practice influence a collective understanding of trans within and through the trans community. I believe that by seeing our connections we can strengthen and expand our community in ways that protect, support, and nurture joy in us. The trans community is under attack globally with a wave a conservativism and rigid gendered beliefs swinging back. It is hard to build strong defense rhetorically if there is no structure internally. That shared experience is communicated a variety of ways, through our archives, our art, and our interpersonal relationships. This books braids together my personal experience, conversations with trans artists and activists’, and art itself as a way to build our community toolbox and have us build solidarity.
In the first chapters of this book, I’ll give an overview of memory studies as it relates to trans studies. From there the book will start broadly and then work to more specific applications and discussions of public memory work. I use examples from Canada, the US, and Mexico a what could be a starting point to see the overlap in intersecting identities. By bridging the gap between memory studies and trans studies, we can strengthen the epistemic practices with and across trans communities. For if memory is the process by which individuals and collectives recall and make meaning of the past, then memorialization functions as a type of codification of these memories. Without a conversation around what trans collective memories are, efforts to protect trans historic sites of importance may fall lightly in their impact.
This way of affirming and identifying trans is sort of like learning about transness. The Compton’s Cafeteria Riot was like this moment in trans history that feels very significant to me. And a lot of what I know about that was through this kind of peripheral, living in the Bay Area. Maybe hearing other trans folks talk about it and then starting to do kind of digging on my own and then a lot of a lot of my sort of studying of trans history and, specifically, this idea of what sort of trans resistance exist.
It is accessing those rich histories that can be done through formal and informal education. Formally, knowledge can come through the act of academic work or scholarship. Informally, through mentoring, conversation, and access to media, the internet, and art. However, there are complications with only relying on one or the other.
If only left to popular media, the message that might be received is focused on the tragedy or violence in trans lives. Between June and August 2021, of the 56 articles referencing trans experience in the New York Times, roughly half were focused on the barriers or violence facing trans people in sports, housing, work, and medical treatment. Because of media focus on these events, criticisms of events like Trans Day of Remembrance have been reframed as Trans Day of Resilience after many felt it was stigmatizing (Bautista, 2019). Second, relying solely on media sources can further stereotypes and erasures of trans identity entirely. As is pointed out in the film Disclosure (2020), the dominant narrative for different genders has not been a supportive one and with that there becomes a gap in knowledge and history for trans people about trans people and trans perspectives or experience. Which is why delving into the historical thru lines and conversations trans people have with each other is so important.
Next, if one were to ask me, “what is trans culture?” my first response would be, like any culture, there is no monolith. My academic and easy answer is, “It’s a group of people who share attitudes, values, and beliefs that fit outside of and/or challenges the binary system of gender. It’s anyone in that group of people who identify as such.” This is built on a standard anthropological and sociological model of culture but is only a big toe in the pool of what makes up culture. Clifford (1986) writes of culture “as composed of contested codes and representation; they (authors in the collection) assume that the poetic and the political are inseparable, that science is in, not about, historical and linguistic processes” (2). But trans as a word is much more complicated. Trans cultural
Gender identities have a temporality and a deep connection to history, to medicalized discourse and to cultural politics. While it is a central tenet of queer theory that genders are iterative and in a constant process of becoming, it is rare that we are able to see quite so clearly that process of collective identity formation in action. (Meadows, 2016)
Finding more methods and focus for trans people can be a way to highlight that process of becoming. This might assume that there is some unifying feature of trans identity.
A transgender critical perspective thus invites us to recognize the deep connection between transgender phenomena and the discourses of power in which they are inscribed, to challenge their normativity, and to recognize the ethically and politically productive dimension of that challenge. (2017)
To be part of a trans community is to challenge the imposition of binary gender systems, the linearity of time, and grand narratives of personal and social history in ways non-trans people may not understand. I would argue this is true for people ‘passing’ or with perceived normative gender practices. “The questions that trans people present to others’ identities is a growing challenge to all who place their confidence in the binary rules of sexed lives” (Whittle, 2006). Using myself as an example, being a dyke is part of my identity. This is language that far fewer people use these days, but it informs a great deal of my lived history. It acknowledges my experiences being sexualized, harassed, and policed for my dyke appearance. It references the how my partners are/were treated and perceived has shaped the way I think about and care for others and myself in public. My current masculine presentation doesn’t erase or work to undo that history. Moving through the world, I am still terrified on a low level about physical harassment, particularly in places that are gendered or are for primarily straight cisgender dominant. I find myself willing to take on risks to challenge this, but this part of my identity is incorporated in it, a type of double consciousness. I have been informed by it, and it is held in the moments when misogyny rears its ugly head to erase or minimize gender when I’m in a room. For example, when cis-straight men assume that I agree with some misogynistic comment they’ve made. Once I was at a work event and doing group work with some colleagues. The group was made up primarily of cis women, but there was one cis man, and me. A discussion came up around California being an active consent state (not just a ‘no means no’ but having to actively say yes to sexual intimacy). The man said, ‘What happened when you could just buy a girl a drink and go from there?’ looking at me. The table got quiet. I replied, “Well, that was the problem,” smiled, and sipped my wine. To some this might have been read as an act of support for my stunned colleagues, but for me it is the residual response of having inhabited a female experience and my own frustration. As trans folks we carry all these multiplicities and the level of which we share these experiences with each other is still something we need to more of.
Until now, there has been little space for trans people to think about the impact of interpersonal interaction as a type of history. Likewise, we have increased visibility but in what ways are we incorporating that into our daily lives? In academic discussions of trans theory and ethos there is a great deal
If trans implies a movement from one gender towards a different location, then transness is always implicated with forward time and cannot exist without linear teleological time. Yet if we imagine transness to not be about crossing from one location to another but a multi directional movement in an open field of possibility then time and its direction become more fluid. (Chen & cardenas, 2019)
To be trans and to do trans is to be in conversations of the past, present and future somewhat simultaneously. This may be another reason for the deep connection between conversations of trans history and trans futurity, while these take place primarily in academic and artist circles, there is still an influence in policy and advocacy. It is not shocking then, that trans histories and trans futures are dominant themes regarding time in trans studies. Trans becomes a place where linear versions of time don’t quite capture the trans experience either for individuals or as a collective because to embody trans is to embrace the “multi-directional” movement in an open field of possibility.
Intellectual relationships to time and structures that encourage normative thinking have nurtured trans folks toward resiliency.
This takes us into one of the central issues of transgender social movements—the assertion that the sex of the body (however we understand body and sex) does not bear any necessary or predetermined relationship to the social category in which that body lives or to the identity and subjective sense of self of the person who lives in the world through that body. (Stryker, 2008)
Everyone has, at some point in time, had to cobble together their life without singular guidance; it has taken a community for trans people. Nicolazzo furthers this idea by writing, “It is by each other’s sides that we can commune and create a world in which possibilities for our gendered pasts/presents/futures are proliferated rather than stifled” (2017). It is in the company of others that trans folks can start to lift the veil off even further on the power matrix and redefine with themselves within or against it.
When we limit our understandings of what it means to be trans* only within the confines of what it means to be cisgender, it is the cisgender gaze that creates the larger narrative of how gender shows up in systems of schooling. (2019)
The impact of this phenomenon is that there is an epistemic training system that concretizes the limited understanding of a trans perspective and reinforces a type of violence against otherness in the name of cis heteronormativity.
Obviously, there are many more connective traits between individuals and communities than epistemic connection. However, it is the methods through which we as trans people become not just storyteller but educators and mentor to others in the trans community that becomes earlier. When we share our experiences of resilience and violence, we connect to our bodies to each other and begin to create trans lines of understanding. Both resilience and violence are themes across trans literature and research. They implicate the work it takes for a community to build up their own epistemic practices and manifest themselves in the material world through time, place, and resources and the ability to share those resources. These three elements will be of central focus as I start to connect trans narratives to sites of memory and public history. There is also special attention to how violence or trauma may function as context for collective meaning making related to transness. In this way, gender is a type of mnemonic device for specific types of violence, trauma, and resistance. It is a type of re-membering; pulling together body, history, and memory.
a decolonial trans of color configuration understands transness as both is not yet here and has always been here. The multiple temporalities of trans of color critique can be seen in the decolonial acknowledgment of the injustice of the present, which sees the present as emerging from a
past colonial encounter and works for futures that will exist after racial capitalism’s totalizing logics. (2019)
This is all to say that trans community’s relationship to time and place has been a product of the colonized and institutionalized systems. Through these interactions, memories are built up and transmitted through storytelling and then are solidified through art, design, and other forms of visibility.
Aware that the activist and artistic energies indexed and inspired by this material are also potentially available for recapture, they read and write for more than the infinite play of meaning, yet also for less than the total transformation of culture. In their own version of trench warfare, they collect and remobilize archaic or futuristic debris as signs that things have been and could be otherwise. (Freeman, 2011)
So, any attempt to sustain particular memories may be considered a type of activist project rooted in cultural change and preservation. This is an area of research that is just developing in the humanities in ways that move trans people from object to subject: other to knower. Formalized trans epistemic practices are fairly new; developed through activist conversations and increased publication of trans theory, memoire, and fiction. Often trans has been a way of describing other phenomena. Both Hacking (1995) and Butler have used trans individuals as objects of analysis rather than subjects of knowledge. “There are no subjects in these discourses only homogenized, totalized objects—fractally replicating earlier histories of minority discourses in the large” (Stone, 2006). Additionally, trans has been relegated to monster or cyborg parables. It’s only in the last thirty years that trans scholars have been in positions to elevate this type of critical and activist academic work. We can see this by the growth in trans studies, increased development of trans archive and oral history projects, and the amount of trans specific art exhibitions.
One focus of trans studies as a discipline has been to fill in the gaps in knowledge about who trans people have been, trans ways of approaching the world, and trans knowledges. This has led to the use of trans to include trans practices, trans identity, and trans aesthetics.
The stories of trans people from that night (Stonewall Uprising) have been lost through both historical habits of ignoring their voices as well as the pervasive silence that came with the deaths of people who were there—deaths from AIDS, homicide, suicide, or, for the lucky ones, the mere passing of time. (Metzger, 2020)
The process of art creation and archive function as a way reinsert historic and contemporary trans practices into public conversation. There has been a great deal of work to highlight, celebrate, correct, and give voice to historical experience (Morgan M. Page and Susan Stryker being two such scholars and activists) to combat this epistemic loss. One such historical point reflecting the loss of trans experience or participation is the telling of The Stonewall Uprisings. Why and how the Uprising started has changed over the years and, as with the movie (Stonewall, 2015), been pink washed to eliminate or minimize trans folks and trans folks of color participation while putting a spotlight on cisgender white folks. Additionally, the focus on Stonewall has also obscured uprisings that happened earlier in San Francisco and Los Angeles and other parts of the US, let alone perspective with an international or cross-border experience. It is for this reason that we must consider temporality and location as an element of trans collective mnemonic practices.
While a mnemonic device can be an object or phrase, a mnemonic practice is the derivative of action, or actions taken to preserve a memory perhaps leading to a mnemonic device. “Trans temporalities also intervene in what can be captured in the other natural, universal order of time considered dialectically opposed to the rational modernity of the heteropatriarchal settler-colonial state, liberal civil society, and territorial national body” (Chen & Cardenas, 2019). Trans practice challenges concepts that naturalize only one relationship to time. This is possibly why trans futurity is a theme within the literature. What does it mean to see trans across time as well as inspiring and encouraging trans people to keep going? This sense of time, as it relates to histories, is complicated because of the way trans people have been made objects, as opposed to being subjects.
The next area of importance is location. Much of the dominant narrative about trans people comes from the United States and Europe (Radi, 2019). Western academic work has caused a type of hegemonic thinking about what trans is. This means cultures that practice gender variance may have end up using Western trans language to help describe, advocate, or maintain their own gender identities. Within these accounts of people who live in US, coastal metropolitan areas have highlighted accounts too.
The final area of importance for understanding trans collective memory is access to material resources. The trans community has varying access to resources. These include access to jobs, housing, and safety and they include connection to community, possibility for healing, creative outlets, and celebration. In the US, we still see large rates of incarceration and violence against trans people, so creating a network of support is essential to re-envision what social support is. Within that variety come social situations and locations that impact each part of the community differently. There are people in the community who have greater access to wealth and other social supports. This means that while the whole community may suffer from lack of access to the means of being wholly recognized or supported, not everyone with trans identity suffers equally. For this reason, trans collective memory cannot be an umbrella, rather it must be described with an awareness of these cultural factors and needs and framed as an ongoing process to help build and sustain trans epistemic and mnemonic practice.
Note
There is some debate about the use and appropriateness of an asterisk at the end of trans. However, Nicolazzo uses it here to encompass a variety of trans identities.