Polly Pockets, Periods, and Penises
On Girlhood and the Enduring Power of Queer Friendship
In order to assimilate into girlhood when i was a little faggot growing up in the late 2000s and early 2010s—inundated with American Girl books, Flash Player dress-up games, Polly Pockets, and scholastic book fair diaries For Girls, and also with pick-me pop punk (Paramore’s “Misery Business” or even kind of Demi Lovato’s “La La Land”), Jennifer Lawrence at her peak, and a tomboy older sister who hated pink—i too decided to hate pink. To be more like the girls around me, i performed (seemingly counterintuitively) being not-like-the-other-girls. To be clear, this distancing of myself from “the other girls” was not me distancing myself from femininity/sissyness in reaction to transmisogyny or homophobia (though at many points in my life, i certainly did try to do that). On the contrary, deciding to hate pink (when in reality i liked it, or at least felt rather neutral toward it) was about positioning myself as one in the same with kids like my sister: by adopting an outspoken distaste for pink, identical to that of my cis girl peers (that is, a distaste that was going against the grain), i was situating myself within a group of children who were supposed to like pink, who were assumed to like pink. What didn’t even have to be addressed for boys was addressed for (by) me.
This hatred of pink, so popular in the 2000s, might seem benign or even positive at first glance—it makes sense that girls would want to resist being put into a box! And indeed, the actual disavowal of pink by these girls was perfectly innocent, but it was part of a larger trend of Girl Power being defined as girls having the power to “escape” misogyny (not unliking chasing the American Dream) by proving themselves to be [fill in the blank: tough, smart, not girlish, but also not too masculine, etc., etc.]: abnegation of femininity was used to position oneself as not just different from but better than other girls. In order to become a girl, i joined my peers in embracing an antifeminist girlhood.
Of course, from my perspective, i was just choosing to dislike pink, to like roughhousing, and to set my sights on becoming a marine biologist. And from the perspective of many of my peers, being “not-like-the-other-girls” was the only accessible way for them to eschew being a girl at all. Periodic instagram stalking of peers from my preschool/elementary years has shown me that many of the friends i made at the time now skirt around the edges of girlhood(/womanhood) or have left it altogether. Queer kids often gravitate to each other by instinct. It makes sense that these “girls,” who were already pushing (or being pushed toward) the boundaries of girlhood, were often the ones to welcome me into a space of play and friendship. I adored the 1997 Cinderella as a kid; i adored the wonder and the longing with which Brandy sang “In My Own Little Corner,” and i’d sing it over and over and over again, celebrating the power of imagination. Of course, i had no fairy godmother and i had no prince, but i did have the support of the queer people around me, especially misogyny-affected queer people—even when all that meant was playing make believe together on the playground. This kind of friendship—of solidarity even—has endured in various ways in various parts of my life. It’s sometimes been fickle or downright hurtful, but it’s also been beautiful and frankly life-saving.
This is a love letter to all the freaks who’ve gotten me where i am today.
When I was a very young child, gallivanting about the concrete walkway of the student housing complex my family lived in—wearing a purple wig, a toy Britney headset, and tattered hand-me-down pink leotard from the family costume bin—i remember saying explicitly that i wanted to be a girl when i grew up. I didn’t think much of this declaration, though; this was not a dream i held steadfastly: i didn’t have enough of a frontal lobe to think particularly seriously about the future.
For the vast majority of my childhood, i did not explicitly name a desire to be a woman. What i did want, though, was to be included with the girls and women around me. I remember a camping trip my family went on with several other families we knew, and i remember my sister and some of the other girls were playing together, and i wanted to play with them (i was quite young at the time, i should note). They said “no boys allowed,” and i, out of pure stubborn defiance, challenged them: “well, what if i am a girl,” and one of the girls said “well then only people who pee from their butts are allowed to play with us.” I hadn’t given much thought to how other people peed, though i was aware that i had a penis and these girls did not. I was not, however, an expert on anatomy by any means, so when she said this, i thought about the fact that my butt did in fact get wet sometimes. What i was thinking about was, of course, what is known as sweat. But i didn’t really think that through. Instead, i threw caution to the wind and declared that “well i pee from my butt sometimes.” The girls giggled, and the one who’d made that condition in the first place retorted, “well then only girls who pee from their butts all the time can play with us.” And that was that.
(Trigger warning: annoying wasian bullshit.)
For young children, the performances of gender that society at large deems “natural” are in fact incredibly explicit: “boys don’t do this, girls don’t do that,” rings out across playgrounds everywhere, drilling into our heads lessons about how to behave. But although i was often made keenly aware of my exclusion from girlhood/sisterhood, and though i categorically failed at performance of boyhood/manhood, the ritual of these performances largely faded into the background. Despite my discomfort, i rather implicitly accepted the world as it was. Everyone around you is doing it, so you just don’t think much of it. . . Except not everyone is doing it the same. Gender is not performed the same way everywhere, and when exposed to performances of gender outside your status quo, it becomes more obvious to you that rules you’ve learned about gender performance are arbitrary and contrived, which is what happened with me over time as i interacted with the Tamil side of my family. For instance, at Bugis Street Market in Singapore circa 2009, when i bought myself a henna cone, eager to adorn my body with the intricate designs i ogled at in pictures, my aunties saw this as a mere quirk of my naive, juvenile, white americanness—not as evidence that i was a sissy. Still, other markers of femininity remained firmly off limits. I remember my sister recounting a story from their early childhood when my dad’s sisters were visiting the States and our one older Girl Cousin on that side of the family got to try on our aunties’ saris, but my sister did not, being that she was, give or take, 4 years old and would not commence menstruation for, give or take, another half a dozen years. She was devastated. But in time, my sister was given a sari to wear. I, of course, was not.
Of course, the whole thing was very silly anyway. It was like playing dress up: fetishized commodification of culture, framed as heritage but performed for the sake of spectacle more than anything else. Or maybe I’m just being overly critical.
Before i abandon the subject entirely, it is interesting to observe the ways that certain things deemed masculine in one context can be neutral or feminine in another, and it’s interesting to wield this to my advantage in impish subversion: i giggle smugly, for example, when i wear one of my grandpa’s sarongs and get complimented on my “cute skirt.” But sometimes, the (trigger warning: buzz word) liminality of these cross-culturally ambiguous gender markers leaves me with unsettl(ed/ing) confusion more than anything else. My given middle name, Nayagam, is decidedly a man’s name for Tamils and other South Asians, but in the u.s., its unfamiliarity masks any gendered connotations. This is helpful, in theory: Ezra Nayagam, such a perfectly elusive combination of two imprecisely gendered names. And yet, i am left dissatisfied. The context (not only of how these given names may be gendered in general, but of how they have been gendered for me in my own past) may be missing for those i introduce myself to, but it isn’t missing for me. I’ve been feeling an increasingly pressing need to be shed of these names (in most, though certainly not all, contexts); but just as strongly, i feel resistance to change, a dragging of feet, a fear of commitment (driven, perhaps, by a dearth of suitable alternatives), etc., etc.
“So. . . what now. . .?”
Fuck if i know!
Moving on.
I remember when my sister started their period. Like not the exact moment or the very first one or anything, just sort of generally when it started being a thing. She was taking forever in the bathroom one day, and, impatient twat that i was, i stood outside rattling the doorknob incessantly. My mom pulled me into her and my father’s bedroom: Your sister is going through something, she said (more or less). She told me all about periods—i don’t remember how much detail she went into nor do i remember how much i already knew, but the moral of the story was Be patient with your sister.
Of course, i was not patient. At the end of the conversation, i went back into the hallway and promptly resumed my rattling of the doorknob. I had (and continue to have, in different ways) a pervasive need for (what i perceive as) fairness. My continued pestering wasn’t a refusal to see what my sister was going through or that other people had their own problems and i was not the center of the universe. It was just that i felt i had the right to use the bathroom: i was used to not having to wait and now i was having to wait and i didn’t sign up for this and this is not what i was promised and (basically i was just like really bad at dealing with change). But there was more to it than this, i think. I think, deep down, i needed to insist that i didn’t have to treat her any different just cuz she’s a girl because that would mean that i wasn’t one. (Of course, it wasn’t special treatment at all, it was just basic decency. I couldn’t see that, though.)
Sometimes when i recount stories from my childhood, i feel like the authors of the Gospels alluding to Isaiah or the early Christian compilers of The Bible ordering The Old Testament in such a way that retrofits messianic foreshadowing into the several-hundred-year-old texts of several major and minor prophets. Like were all these signs of me being a girl really there? Could they have been as glaringly obvious as this? Surely not. . .
Except, of course, they were.
As a kid, i was never particularly uncomfortable with my penis, at least never in and of itself. I did ponder what it’d be like to wake up one day without a penis, thinking merely of its absence—how odd it would feel for it to not be there. With less frequency (if for no other reason than lack of regular exposure), i would take it a step further and ponder what it might be like to have a vulva. Still, i held no disdain for my penis, which to me felt familiar, normal. But while my own penis in and of itself was something i felt neutral or positive about, i felt negative about being grouped together with other boys (or excluded from other girls), and i often became frustrated with the existence of my penis on account of it seeming like the source of that exclusion: firm, irrefutable evidence that i was a boy like all the other boys; inflexible evidence i could not worm my way around. A prime example of this was conversations about genitalia, puberty, and sex, which often included that division.
But not always. In high school, i continued to internalize what i’d not yet named as transmisogyny, continued (trying) to suppress certain unManly traits, etc., but i also settled into an ingratiating (if occasionally bitchy) faggotry that served me well for many years, however insecure i (of course) continued to be. I am lucky to be able to say that my relationship to the boys i went to high school with did not feel like one where i was coerced or cajoled into manhood alongside them. It was clear i was not one of them, and it was as simple as that. I don’t mean to say that i was excluded per se, more like i was. . . extricated, i guess. When me and my tomboy hag would hang out with her stoner friends (usually during class, mind you (especially when we were outside (cuz like half the classrooms at my high school had a door straight to the outside and sometimes teachers would take us out there to, ostensibly, let us. . . “work” in the fresh air or something. . . which naturally we did not do))), we would default to talking about all things taboo—including, of course, sex and all sex-related topics. My ability to chime in alongside the boys (when, socially, i was so clearly situated within this hang-out as one of the girls, i.e. as a fag) was like. . . subversive in a very silly way. I got a kick out of it; it was funny to me that i, a fag so clearly distinct from these (immature) boys, nevertheless shared so many experiences with them. . . and somehow we were never any more similar because of it; somehow we remained our own entities.
At the time, i hated being a fag. I didn’t hate being queer, but i hated being a fag. I hated that i could not hide who i was. I understood (and resolutely, outspokenly affirmed) that there was no one way to be a man, that femininity (sissyness) did not negate manhood, did not detract from manhood, etc. (I was theoretically defending myself, but, true as the sentiment may be, it really didn’t have a damn thing to do with me, given that—as we know—i was not a man, nor was i on any viable path toward becoming one, and redefining/reclaiming manhood was not going to do me an ounce of good; but of course i did not know this then). As i was saying, i was able to convince myself that my version of manhood was a-ok. . . but i still felt the need to prove that it was a choice, that these were mannerisms i could depart from if i chose to. It was one thing if i wanted to be the way i was, but being downright incapable of a more traditionally manly presentation? Not as easy for me to accept. This incapability became particularly troublesome given that i spent like all of my time trying to be an actor, and in order to be an actor, i needed to be a man—that is, in order to act well, i needed to be able to act like a man. And as we know, i couldn’t even do that in real life, so naturally i floundered onstage and onscreen as well. On August 5th, 2020, just a couple months after graduating high school and just a couple months prior to accepting that i was trans—(i was already heavily considering it at this point, but continuing to deny it because i didn’t want to Take Up Space)—i wrote the following in my notes app:
acting to me has for so long meant the ability to erase my queerness. i have been told my entire life that i will never play the leading man or the straight man (not referring to sexual orientation). and most of the characters that we are meant to aspire to playing, the characters i loved in the scenes and plays and movies that i read or saw or was in, were straight. my queerness (as manifested in my vocal fry, my intonations, my expressivity, my hair, my skinniness -- none of which, of course, actually indicate queerness) was antithetical to serious acting. i could be a Character actor and a good one at that. but a serious actor? i must be able to embody drama within the context of a specific idea of masculinity. but these characters are diverse and varying: this isn't just the jock, it's the nerd and the businessman and the even the artsy boy. why, then, must my queerness not also be diverse? why does incorporating characteristics seen as queer into my acting mean that i'm not acting? i undergo no less transformation when i act and include my queerness than actors who are already traditionally masculine when they portray the traditionally masculine characters.
More succinctly, because i had been spending every ounce of my energy as an actor trying to become a man (and getting stuck), i never really gave myself (nor was given) the chance to actually act—to listen and react and be and to let that be enough.
I have always—to the extreme detriment of my health and wellbeing—been remarkably averse to asking for help, communicating that i need help, etc. Early in my potty training days, my family went on a road trip and plopped me in a diaper, planning to rely on my old self-pissing habits to ease our journey. The story goes that i seemed sick or something, and in her troubleshooting efforts, my mother touched my stomach and it was rock hard. She was terrified, thinking i had developed a tumor or something like that. As it turned out—because even though i was wearing my diaper, i was better than that and knew not to piss myself anymore and apparently hadn’t gotten the memo that there were exceptions to that rule—i was just holding in a fuck ton of piss. Then they took me out of the car and i pissed for a good minute, then looked up at the sky, and asked what all those things up there were. (They were stars. I’d never seen that many.) (Also, i know access to accurate information about autism was scarce in 2004 or whenever this was, but jesus, some stories from my childhood leave me absolutely flabbergasted that none of the adults in my life caught on, like i took that potty training lesson seriously. Another autistic pee-related story, i was at the beach one time and asked my mom to walk to the bathroom with me and she was like . . .just go in the ocean, so i walked up to the shore, pulled down my pants, and peed. . . like how was i supposed to know she was telling me to get waist-deep and piss myself???)
This trend of non-communication carried on, exacerbated by shame and parents who felt impossible to talk to. Sometimes, though, a problem would feel so severe that i’d allowed my walls to slip and venture to reveal a vulnerability or embarrassment to an adult who surely had all the answers and would make my (probably life-threatening (because why not go to the worst case scenario right away)) problem disappear. The first time i popped a blood vessel in my anus, i was probably like 11 or 12, and when i saw the blood in the toilet, i freaked the fuck out. I was incredibly intelligent—like i knew quite a bit about anatomy and reproductive systems and all of that and very much knew, for example, that i did not have a uterus—but i also had never heard of a fissure or a hemorrhoid before and i was momentarily convinced that i had gotten my period. There is a kind of innate hopefulness, i think, to this true feat of imagination—it takes a good deal of daring to suggest to yourself that you might somehow be a freak of nature who has defied every single facet of biology you have thus far been familiarized with in your puny lifespan. But what i felt in the moment was nothing remotely like hope. I was fucking terrified: What am i? What does it mean that i am a boy who has gotten his period? What is everyone going to say? (and, in a quieter, less listened to voice of hope, Does this mean i get to be a girl now? a thought i obviously suppressed and which probably led only to more fear). By the time i left the bathroom in search of my mother, i’d largely assuaged my fears, rational beacon of intellect that i was, but i didn’t completely let go of the fear(/hope) that i was some freak of nature until my mother—after she asked what color the blood was and i responded that it was bright red (which in all honesty, i had hoped would garner more urgency and fear instead of less)—explained to me that there are blood vessels near the rectum that sometimes bleed when you poop, and assured me that it was totally normal and there was nothing to worry about. (This is sort of beside the point because she was right to calm me down and also she was right that it wasn’t the end of the world, but she couldn’t have like told me to eat some damn fiber or something??)
Looking back on this incident, thinking about the complicated mess of emotions i experienced, my mind immediately goes to the cult classic Ginger Snaps, one of my all time favorite films. A teen werewolf movie about resistance to change that frames puberty as monstrous and captures the fear, anger, and discomfort of adolescence, it is a film that i (and many other trannies) relate to deeply. Getting into this trans identification with the film, Sally Jane Black wrote in her Letterboxd review:
The difficulty in explaining your problems, though, to people who seem like strangers, like aliens without a common language, when your problems are unthinkable, mythical, punchlines in the common understanding, that, too, is specifically resonant, a familiar barrier to my own self-understanding and self-acceptance as much as to my connecting with others, especially those who love me most. To put it another way, yet again we face the seemingly insurmountable obstacle of lacking the words for it. “I'm a werewolf” is an impossible phrase to utter--I don't recall if they even said the word “werewolf” in the film (“lycanthrope,” yes). It's a matter of not believing you're real despite the intense physical evidence otherwise.
In my review of the film’s sequel, Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed, i called it a
very relatable film in the sense that my life is like so outside my own control and idk wtf i'm doing and no amount of shooting up wolfsbane can stop me from hurling toward the inevitability of transforming into a werewolf and being left for dead in an abandoned basement at a young age. like “metaphorically” speaking or wtv.
I then included a quote from the sequel: “Today you wanna fuck him, tomorrow you just wanna bite a hole in his sternum.” Soo true. I treasure the downright gnarly girlhood/womanhood represented in films like Ginger Snaps or the recent Love Lies Bleeding. Certainly my own relationship to gender is one that is gnarly, grotesque, fucked up. Here are two gnarly quotes from the original Ginger Snaps that my dear friend Sofia included in their review:
“Suicide is like the ultimate fuck you! It’s so us.”
“Kill yourself to be different, your own body screws you.”
James Baldwin pens a similar sentiment in Giovanni’s Room, with the narrator David recalling,
I had thought of suicide when I was much younger, as, possibly, we all have, but then it would have been for revenge, it would have been my way of informing the world how awfully it had made me suffer.
And, like an inverse of the Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed fuck-him/bite-a-hole-in-his-sternum quote, David later recalls,
I lay in the dark . . . and dreamed of the touch of hands, of Giovanni’s hands, or anybody’s hands, hands which would have the power to crush me and make me whole again,
the desire for sex being linked here not to a desire to destroy (as is the case in Ginger Snaps 2) but a desire to be destroyed. Oh, how deeply i relate to both.
But David’s desire to to relinquish control does not last. He later expresses feeling
that a decision—once again!—had been taken from my hands. For neither my father, nor Hella, was real at that moment. And yet even this was not as real as my despairing sense that nothing was real for me, nothing would ever be real for me again—unless, indeed this sensation of falling was reality.
I certainly relate to the sensation of falling, of helplessness, of being out of control, having no agency in my own life. But David seems to seek something more than agency: ever the individualist—a vrai americain as Giovanni puts it—David seems to desire a sense of self devoid of any outside influence, unmarked by his environment or the people he interacts with.
And it is here that my identification with the book’s narrator weakens. There is no version of me that exists in a vacuum. There is no version of me that exists unshaped by the world around me.
In the words of the prophet Lauren Olamina in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, “All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you.”
Or as Mao puts it in On Practice,
If you want knowledge, you must take part in the practice of changing reality. If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself. If you want to know the structure and properties of the atom, you must make physical and chemical experiments to change the state of the atom. If you want to know the theory and methods of revolution, you must take part in revolution. All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience.
And as he observes in On Contradiction, the
metaphysical or vulgar evolutionist world outlook sees things as isolated, static and one-sided. It regards all things in the universe, their forms and their species, as eternally isolated from one another and immutable,
whereas
materialist dialectics holds that in order to understand the development of a thing we should study it internally and in its relations with other things; in other words, the development of things should be seen as their internal and necessary self-movement, while each thing in its movement is interrelated with and interacts on the things around it. The fundamental cause of the development of a thing is not external but internal; it lies in the contradictoriness within the thing.
To refute transphobic narratives that our Perversion originates in some early childhood trauma or in some other way being failed by those tasked with our nurture, it is often retorted that (baby,) we were born this way. There is truth to this, but it is also a gross oversimplification. It is true that there exist various aspects of myself that are entirely immovable; it is true that many of these things have been incorporated into what is called my gender—my prepubescent faggotry, rife with plastic princess shoes and femme fatale daydreams, was neither conscious nor deliberate. It was, i suppose, innate. Still, I am a girl not because of the contents of my DNA or my brain chemistry or some event at my conception or birth, but because of and in relationship to the world and how it has shaped me.
I was shaped by sneaking into the women’s bathroom with my friends as a kid and i was shaped by valiantly stepping up to play the role of Husband so the girls hidden behind a play house at recess could play Wedding (having to play the Boy role because i was a Boy, but also not feeling forced into an uncomfortable manhood or husbandhood because we didn’t really know what that entailed; and even though i was a Boy in relation to them, the mere fact of my playing with them at all was still incredibly girlish, so i was still, in a way, one of the Girls, and also i was getting to kiss these other girls, so i was perfectly happy). I was shaped by playing dress up and stealing my sister’s makeup. And i was shaped by shame that muffled this early foresight, so that for a very long time, i cringed to remember the visions of womanhood i’d once held for myself: What naiveté, what foolishness, i thought. I was shaped by leaning adamantly into some muddled concoction of faux manliness; shaped by fighting harder and harder to push past my discomfort with manhood; shaped by this discomfort, in turn, fighting harder and harder to make itself known, so that for much of my childhood, i hated men—despised them. I could do all the mental gymnastics i wanted to to make myself okay with being a man in my head, in a vacuum, but all that would go out the window the moment i was grouped as a man with other men. I was shaped by every division of boys over here, girls over there, shaped by the panic, belligerence, and indignation this set off inside of me: Why should i be forced to abandon all of my friends, forced to associate with people i don’t want to be anything like. And i was shaped, too, by the moments when i was given the choice; when, rather than—say—zone out in the living room while my dad and his friends droned on about things i didn’t care about, i could station myself in the corner of the kitchen drying dishes as my mom and her friends cleaned up after a dinner party. In such sacred instances, i dipped my toes into sisterhood, sneaking scraps of unidentified euphoria where i could. And later, when i began to more explicitly and intentionally explore my gender identity, i was shaped by a sisterhood that helped to usher in a way of life i found livable: i was shaped by girls and all variations of genderfucked hags giving me their clothes or makeup, or leading the way into public women’s bathrooms without any question that i would follow right behind; and i was shaped by following them, learning not to spend all my energy fearing the (very real) repercussions, because at least we had power in numbers, power together, and because there were better things to spend my energy on.
My parents were always fairly old-fashioned, my dad in particular—i mean this in the sense (though it is true in a number of other senses as well) that he didn’t get a cell phone til i was well into high school and that we got the LA Times delivered to our house every morning for my entire childhood. As such, i was able to keep up semi-religiously with several comic strips, reading them at the breakfast table each morning—going straight for my favorites, then reading others if i had the time, still others if i got bored, and avoiding the few i hated at all costs. I love comics. I think it is an incredible medium for both humor and storytelling and i wish they featured as largely in my life now as they did once upon a time. Maybe i should do something about that, maybe i should seek them out more. Still, they’re not entirely absent from my life these days. While i don’t keep up with the strips i read as a kid/teenager, i’ve found others that suit me. . . I’ve found, of course, Dykes to Watch Out For.
In critiques of the ways that popular proliferation of Bechdel’s infamous Test has stripped the test of its original context (an off-the-cuff joke made in a comic about a friend group made up of dykes), many have described (more eloquently than i currently have the dedication to do myself) the elaborate world that the comic strip has built around its characters, which accurately reflects the reality of many lesbians whose entire social life is anchored around other lesbians. A tongue-in-cheek line from Cheryl Dunye’s 2010 murder comedy The Owls inadvertently demonstrates this phenomenon perfectly. Guinevere Turner’s magnificently bitchy character is asked if she ever had feelings for her ex (whom she is still friends with) and her (defensive, condescending) response is “No. I mean ‘was I ever in love with her?’ is the question, but i mean yes I love her blah blah blah we’re all lesbians and we love each other to the end of time but yeah no.”
I never really think about The Rule when deciding whether or not to watch a movie, but a common thread across many of my favorite films is a central focus on friendship between women. Sometimes, these friendships very closely resemble the (among other things, explicitly lesbian) dynamic of the friends in Dykes to Watch Out For—films like Rose Troche’s Go Fish, for example. But often the friendships in these films i love are merely queer-coded—or not even intended to be queer at all, only to then be claimed by queer viewers anyway because the reality is that queer women (and, in particular, lesbians) are more likely to lead lives and build friendships not centered around men, so that films featuring women with a strong bond tend to feel rather queer and thus be claimed as such.
Letterboxd user Sarah Williams quipped in his review of Chabrol’s La Cérémonie that “the French love being homophobic but accidentally making all their movies about lesbians,” and truly, Isabelle Huppert and Sandrine Bonnaire make a powerhouse duo whose distinctly non-normative dynamic feels very lesbian indeed.
Of course, i cannot talk about French films featuring debatably lesbian protagonists without talking about Rivette’s masterpiece Celine and Julie Go Boating, which, though more explicitly queer than La Cérémonie, remains murky about the exact relationship between its leads.
A caveat: i am against the growing culture of like in all seriousness “head-canoning” films, other media, and literal real people as queer when that is not explicitly stated, particularly when it comes at the cost of centering and uplifting actual explicit works of queer art and actual out queer artists; it is important to me that i clarify that what i am interested in here is grappling with the legacy of films that have been cherished and embraced by queer people, and unpacking what it is about these films and the relationships within them that we identify with.
When i propose that Celine and Julie are queer, i am not (necessarily) proposing that they are lovers. Maybe they are! But it is the richness of their friendship, the depth of their love for one another, and the centrality of their relationship (within the action of the film, and ostensibly within their own lives) that makes them feel queer. Their friendship mirrors so much of what i love about my own platonic relationships with other queer women and queer people in general.
I recently read Joanna Russ’s On Strike Against God, and the narrator, Esther, repeatedly refers to her friend-turned-lover as “my friend” in contexts that make it so damn endearing to me. “From neck to groin, my friend was covered with pale-red spots,” observes Esther as they lie naked together; and twice, “said my friend,” is how Esther describes Jean’s postcoital farewell. Between this, The Owls, and Dykes to Watch Out For, a pattern begins to emerge: regardless of whether we’re looking at a romantic or platonic context, friendship is a stable of lesbian relationships. Lovers or not, Celine and Julie are friends—intimate friends—and there’s something rather Bechdelian about that indeed. (smth smth queer platonic, blah blah blah, also someone remind me to read Lesbian Friendships: For Ourselves and Each Other, i’ve like skimmed the foreword, but haven’t actually read any of the essays, and i want to!)
Interestingly, a shared quality of both Celine and Julie’s friendship and that of Jeanne and Sophie in La Cérémonie is mischief. I want to embody this mischief. I want to embody the tenacious unruliness of weeds, so smartly uplifted in It's in the ‘Weeds’: ‘Pesky’ Plants as Teachers in Imagining Decolonial Futures, written by the same Sofia whose Ginger Snaps review i pulled from earlier. In it, he writes the following:
Defined as uncultivated plants that grow where they are unwanted, “weeds” exemplify the site of the “unexpected,” bringing into question and consequently challenging the dominant ideologies embedded within these contrived landscapes.
He goes on to say that
In resisting normative standards of being and existing under the capitalist, settler colonial structure, “weeds” not only teach us about what these norms are, but how we can effectively resist them.
I was recently reflecting on the picture book Good Dog, Carl, which i loved as a kid. In it, the baby is left home alone with the dog, Carl, and the two of them get up to various shenanigans. The baby is never explicitly gendered, so in my little kid head, i’m like ok well obviously this baby is me (because isn’t that relatability/self-insertability the whole point of books like this), and i’m a boy so obviously this baby is a boy, so when they get into the mom’s makeup and try it on, there’s an added layer of mischief where not only is this mischievous because they’re like . . . stealing the mom’s shit but also because like . . . he’s a boy . . . and obviously the dog is a boy . . . and they’re trying on the mom’s makeup. (The baby is in fact intended to be a girl, as is apparently confirmed in sequels to the book, but that’s not really relevant right now.) What’s relevant is that this whole makeup mischief is benign enough to make it feel approachable, achievable—akin to sliding down the laundry chute or raiding the fridge or whatever else they do in that book. I was always really drawn to womanhood as a kid, but i think these aspirations were like intrinsically couched within this very mischievous context. And that’s had an impact on me. Before every really considering the possibility of not being a man, before having the language for that, i still had somewhat of an understanding of the performance of gender, and i felt innately at home in the art of troublemaking. Perhaps, at my core, i’m still that little four year old who doesn’t entirely understand how sentences work, much less gender: a little boy who loves his mom a lot and wants to be just like her when he grows up.
A troublemaking gender performance . . . i rather like that. And it feels rather true. Sometimes, this mischief has erred more sweet, sometimes more brazen. I like that, too. I want my performance of gender to spit in the face of respectability. Like Lady Marmalade in Chocolate Babies, “I am not innocent. Ha! I was never innocent.”
To cis people, i am a woman. And this is rather true in any context: i am, indeed, a woman. Saying i’m a woman certainly tends to be the truest thing i can say around cis people. But there are greater, deeper truths, and with trans people, i get to transcend that framing of my gender: i get to mold it and shape it and shatter it and fuck it and heal it and hold it and toss it and throw it and punch it and stroke it. With trans people—and with some lucky others, too, i suppose—i get to arrive at a fuller, more robust truth: that the defining feature of my gender is not womanhood but sisterhood. I love dykes, i love fags, i love trannies, i love being among y’all, i love being one of y’all. (Cue the infamous one of us chant from Freaks, a film that is always worth bringing up.)
I mentioned earlier that i spent my childhood and adolescence harboring a nasty resentment for men, even as i sought to prove that i was one. I adhered to an arduous hair care process to prove that i was not like other men, stuck up my nose at men who didn’t do this to prove that i was not like other men, listened to women to prove that i was not like other men, complained to women about men to prove that i was not like other men, etc., etc. But this juvenile misandry was reactionary, an overcompensation for stifled, ignored dysphoria; it was not anything sturdy enough to build an ideology around.
Of course, i don’t fault myself for having fallen back on misandry in the past, nor do i fault the many people who fall back on it today: misandry is easy, it’s simple. Saying i hate men off the cuff or structuring a social life absent of men are both understandable, and cutting off men altogether is a sensible way to avoid having to vet them individually. But for me, this falls short.
(Another On Strike Against God gem: “Even if it were permissible to hate men, I don’t think I would. You can hate some of the men all of the time and you can hate all of the men some of the time.”)
The reality is that i love men, that there are men in my life—queer men in particular—who are subverting and reshaping manhood (and isn’t it weird to think this wouldn’t be the case? to draw a sharp binary of man vs non-man, where the latter necessarily has no hand in or insight into expansive and challenging modes of being?). There are men in my life who make feel incomparably safe and loved and whole, men who make me cum (and men who are chill and egoless when they don’t), men who make me laugh, and men who dedicate countless hours of their life to caring for our communities. And there are also men not in my life whose liberation i am nonetheless invested in (which brings me to the point that i am quite literally a white woman in the imperial core—i have zero business professing misandry because, like . . . come on now. I mourn the men whose lives have been and continue to be lost to the u.s. war machine, and i will fight for the ones who still live, that they may continue to live).
Another Juliet Berto project featuring a truly beautiful friendship is the 1981 film Neige. Berto and Robert Liensol as Anita and Jocko create a brilliant onscreen intimacy, an effortless rapport that sustains their passionate endeavor to get a life-saving fix of heroin for their friend (a young trans cabaret performer going through bad withdrawals), with cops on their heels every step of the way trying to make this harm reduction impossible.
I adore this film and i adore Anita and Jocko’s friendship, the way they walk arm in arm, the way that chat, the way they care for each other—all this while joined together in the pursuit of caring for their community. Often, it’s this exact kind of setting where my relationships with men prosper: joined together by a shared commitment toward Doing Good in our community. Definitely a rectangle/square type of situation, like if i have a good relationship with a man, this is very often the setting, but being in this setting does not guarantee that i’ll get along well with the men around me. Far from it. (The Hermit’s latest piece resonated with me immensely if you want to read more on the subject of men in “leftist” #spaces being awful.) My point—not even a point, just an observation really—is that a lived, practiced commitment to taking care of your community has a tendency to seep into the way you interact with the people around you. If you truly care about the big picture, you change how you act in the small picture.
I’ve been rather hopeless lately, not even in a despairing way, but just kind of in a numb way; what i mean to say is that i haven’t been feeling particularly convinced that any of the organizing i can do right now is going to lead to any lasting or meaningful change. And yet, i don’t feel as disillusioned by this hopelessness as i often have in the past. I just feel . . . stripped down i guess—like, i just don’t have the capacity to think about Big Picture shit right now, i’m skeptical of accelerationism even though i’m dissatisfied by anything less, and i know i never shut up about #revolution, but i also don’t feel particularly connected to it in any real way. And still, i have this sense that, if nothing else, investing in The World (whatever the fuck that means) is an investment in our immediate lives, too. “Organizing” (or whatever) with the pretense of making the world a better place, with the belief that change is indeed possible, at least has the impact of creating interpersonal relationships that are more robust, more whole, more egalitarian. That’s enough of a reason for me. And, on the days that i’m feeling more hopeful, more ballsy, maybe i’ll allow myself to believe that these strengthened relationships might compound into something of a legitimate foundation for sturdier communities capable of—dare i say it—sustaining us through revolution and delivering unto liberation.
Okay, but reeling it back in for a second, i guess the connection i’m trying to make is that Patriarchy and patriarchy are connected, that the Big Bads of capitalism and imperialism and all that shit are directly related to the misogyny we see on the daily at a smaller scale. In “LTTE and the Annihilation of Caste,” detailing the LTTE’s impact on casteism and misogyny amidst the struggle against Sinhala chauvinism, Athithan Jayapalan writes:
The LTTE through large scale empowerment of Tamil women and the transformation of them into revolutionaries embodying an agency of change effectively challenged the positions and collective perceptions of gender and patriarchy whilst fighting casteism. With the absence of the LTTE, women are among the main targets of the patriarchal and brutal military occupation of the Tamil homeland by the Sri Lankan state and the radical changes achieved by the LTTE are being dismantled, violated and reversed.
. . .
While it is absolutely required to document and voice the inhumane caste discrimination and oppression, it is equally necessitated to acknowledge the changes and progress brought on about by the Tamil women and men who besides fighting a chauvinistic state and its armed forces also strived to establish an egalitarian society.
Fighting one is fighting the other, fighting one necessitates fighting the other, and perhaps there is some fluid cycle where big picture and small picture each guide each other in an improvised pas de deux, putting just one foot in front of the other to better our relationships and our world.
Gross. This is just the kind of flowery language i’m sick of. What does that even mean!! Anyways, someone remind me to read Sanyika Shakur’s The Pathology of Patriarchy, i keep meaning to but haven’t gotten around to it yet—i feel like his idea of a grand/minor patriarchy might bear some relevance here. Sick as i am of my own words, i turn instead to the words of Tracy Chapman, which help me to ground myself in and remember the importance of simple, everyday, interpersonal acts—the importance of a whisper:
While they're standing in the welfare lines
Crying at the doorsteps of those armies of salvation
Wasting time in the unemployment lines
Sittin' around waitin' for a promotionDon't ya know?
They're talking about a revolution
It sounds like a whisper
Poor people gonna rise up
And get their share
Poor people gonna rise up
And take what's theirs
(The revolution starts in your mind, the revolution starts in your home, etc., etc., etc.)
A lot of what i’ve just said about the circumstances under which i’m likeliest to build a friendship with a man really applies to friendship with anyone. I’ve talked a lot about sisterhood so far—glorifying it and being grateful for it—but that sisterhood is not a simple one. I will not be in communion with just anyone (nor, of course, will just anyone be in communion with me).
Cis white women sometimes attempt to perform allyship (or rather to take their Hag status to the next level) by inviting me into their racist victimhood, expecting me to relate to and enable their construction of the patriarchal Other who lurks amidst the shadows around every corner in Unsafe areas. What these cis white women do not realize is that i am far more likely to feel uncomfortable and unsafe around them than i am around the wretched of the earth whom they condemn. I reject their construction of the threatening Other. Do i deny that there is danger in roaming the streets alone as a woman? Of course not. Walking or sitting or taking the bus, i have had men follow me, i have had slurs hurled at me, i have had rocks thrown at me. But i have also found with strangers—with neighbors on the street—a camaraderie free from the restrictive social expectations that have brought me so much strife.
I refuse to remove myself from the Stranger, the Other, the Outcast—i am that. I refuse to incorporate myself into a white supremacist womanhood. I refuse to let go of being a faggot, a tranny, a freak. I refuse to let myself be stuffed into a version of sisterhood that is nonthreatening, a version of sisterhood that is not directly counter to the powers enforcing patriarchy. I am sick of liberals who “accept” me on the basis of whatever mental gymnastics they’ve done to fit transgenderism into their existing worldview. There is not a version of my transsexualism that is compatible with capitalism, that is compatible with the fascist Democratic Party, that is compatible with pinkwashing. Let me return to the wisdom of my dear Sofia, calling on us to be like weeds:
To believe that “weeds,” despite their vilification, have goodness and are worthy of life is to believe that human beings, systematically degraded and criminalized, have goodness and are worthy of life, too. If we want to be agents of the futures we want to live in, we must be pesky nuisances to the oppressor, refusing to go away or obey the laws and ethics of States not concerned with life’s wellbeing on this planet.
I am not particularly interested in uncomplicating my relationship to girlhood or to womanhood, i am not interested in pinning it down or pathologizing it or sanitizing it or defining it. (Like how you can’t known an electron’s speed and position at the same time. Actually i don’t know what that really has to do with anything and i also know like nothing about physics. But it felt relevant.) I didn’t start writing this piece with a point in mind, and i haven’t arrived at a point in the process of writing it. I guess, though, the common thread that i see throughout these reflections is that my relationship to gender is deeply informed by, shaped by, changed by, upheld by my relationships to the people and the world around me.
I am grateful to the people who make me feel like a girl: little girls playing with me on the playground, partners who call me a good girl in bed, partners who call me a bad girl in bed, and neighbors—strangers, Others—who lend me their ears unquestioningly, who treat me with easy respect when we praise the weather or curse this fucked up city for however it has wronged us this time. I am grateful for all those who helped facilitate my departure from the popular pick-me misogyny of my childhood and for those who helped usher me into a borrowed girlhood, a girlhood of solidarity and sharing and laziness and joy and many other things. I am grateful for estradiol valerate and spironolactone and progesterone. I am grateful for my incredibly southern californian fagcent. I am grateful for trans women at various clinics who have made accessing health care less hellish, whose clocky voices have put me at ease over the phone. I am grateful for my tits. I am grateful for gnarliness and caring and mischief and silliness and troublemaking and rage and camaraderie. I am grateful to be a girl among girls, a queer among queers, a freak among, a tranny among trannies.
I don’t have much of a point in writing all this, and i don’t want to force any more of a clunky conclusion than i already have, but thank you for reading, and i hope my all-over-the-place thoughts have perhaps resonated with you or helped to illuminate for you something (or many things) about me (and/or about the world).
XOXO