queer – The Establishment

Finding Community During Pregnancy As A Black Non-Binary Femme

Jesi Taylor Cruz — Mon, 04 Feb 2019 12:00:01 +0000

During my pregnancy I experienced racism at my OB office at nearly every visit; I finally stopped going around 35 weeks.

As a Black, non-binary femme who, while pregnant, intended to raise a “gender creative” child after birth, many of my concerns as a parent-to-be weren’t—not surprising, but disheartening nonetheless—addressed in the traditional parenting books I read about, was gifted or purchased.

I had countless romanticized ideas about the experience of pregnancy combined with feelings of paranoia regarding things that could go wrong, anxiety about how I’d cope with the upcoming changes while in recovery for an eating disorder, and general curiosity about what it meant to be pregnant. Due to health reasons, I’d been warned by doctors that my pregnancy would be high-risk and I had to take special precautions to ensure that myself and the baby would be healthy and safe.

Given the alarming statistics and data regarding Black maternal health in the U.S. (according to the CDC, Black woman are three to four times more likely than non-Hispanic white women to die as a result of giving birth as just one concern), I was riddled with worry at the potential for problems. Thankfully, I had a solid support system primarily in the form of an understanding and loving partner who supported me fully. Still, I hoped to find a sense of community or even a small village of people who could relate to my journey as a pregnant person and soon-to-be mom.

I started my pregnancy on Medicaid, enrolled in my final semester of undergraduate studies as a returning student, battling hyperemesis gravidarum—a severe form of vomiting and nausea vomiting—and hoping to have a doula-assisted home water birth. Fast forward eight months to an unexpected hospital birth, after over a day of excruciating but lovingly-supported labor at home, and an earlier-than-planned transition into motherhood.

Despite the last minute drastic changes to my birth plan, any sense of preparedness I had while birthing—and upon returning home with my newborn—was fostered and instilled in me not by any of the conventional pregnancy and parenting books I eagerly devoured early on in my pregnancy, but by a source not available to most prior generations of parents: social media-based forums and pages. I was gifted so many books and out of curiosity and fear of the unknown I read each one cover-to-cover.

I mostly read them with my future doula work in mind, gathering tools and information I could possibly need given the diversity of possible clients in my area. For me personally, though, the book just didn’t help for my unique journey as much as I hoped they would. They lacked the intersectional analyses of different issued related to pregnancy and birth I longed for.

During my pregnancy I experienced racism at my OB office at nearly every visit; I finally stopped going around 35 weeks. Each time I went I wished I had the confidence to advocate for myself and my child. Thankfully, my partner and I were honest and open with each other every step of the way so during moments of stress he would support me. Further, he would respectfully advocate for me if I was on the verge of a breakdown.

The levels of discomfort felt by my partner and I subsequently lead to crippling anxiety. Primarily for me. We would unpack the visits together because the racism we experienced was blatant but we decided to hang in there for as long as possible given the risks of my pregnancy. When we did stop going, though, if we needed help we sought the help of midwives, doulas, and nurse relatives for guidance. As a doula myself, I felt confident in my ability to seek the help of a new doctor if need be or to find other forms of professional, medical help.

Racism During Prenatal Visits isn’t a topic covered in any of the popular pregnancy books so I scoured the internet for people who could relate beyond peer-reviewed articles and academic texts about the intersections between institutional racism and the medical industrial complex. Sure I read those as well, but I wanted personal stories and honest narratives written by other pregnant people with relatable transparency.

There were other issues I yearned to talk with other pregnant people that the popular texts simply didn’t begin to broach: dealing with misgendering as a non-binary femme, choosing a parenting style that no one else in your family takes seriously or will most likely criticize, opting to raise gender creative children, planning for a home water birth with a doula in New York City, coping with body image issues as someone in recovery from bulimia, issues regarding receiving different physical exams during pregnancy as a survivor of sexual assault and rape, addressing intergenerational trauma as a soon-to-be Black mother. The list went on and on (and on) but luckily I eventually found exactly what I was looking for.

About halfway through my pregnancy I saw a shared post on Facebook that led me to a private group for pregnant people suffering from hyperemesis gravidarum. This was the first space I felt I could be open and honest about my experiences because the thousands of other people in the group could genuinely relate to me and I didn’t have to worry about suggestions for ginger or crackers. They, too, knew the struggle of wanting to take just a sip of water only to have your body reject it. Not eating for days, vomiting more than ten times a day, emergency room visits.

There were other issues I yearned to talk with other pregnant people that the popular texts simply didn’t begin to broach like theintergenerational trauma as a soon-to-be Black mother.
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Having found a sense of real community and understanding in that group I began to search for more solace, more solidarity. In time I was a member of about ten different groups that focused on the issues I was dealing with. I would discuss different topics everyday and eventually I made close bonds with people around the world by becoming friends on Facebook, texting, and following each other’s journeys on Instagram. Everything I couldn’t find and would never find in traditional parenting books I found online at all hours of the day.

Something that most traditional parenting books leave out are the effects that structural, institutional, and systemic forces have on lived experiences. Race, class, gender (or the lack thereof), nation of origin, disability, sexual orientation, region, and so much more impact our lives in ways that make experiences like pregnancy and childbirth truly unique.

Our bodies alone, and their differences and histories, make pregnancy and childbirth a unique experience, but so do things like the food we have access to, the way we are perceived by others, the type of insurance we have (if we have insurance at all) whether or not we work, whether or not we have a partner or partners, implicit biases medical professionals have toward us based on our race—there is so much silenced and overlooked.

But thanks to the internet, there are online spaces for people with shared experiences to connect, bond, and offer each other support. I’m thankful I found those spaces because they made my journey feel less helpless and made me feel less alone. I didn’t feel silent, I felt understood. My experience wasn’t erased. I, and thousands of others, could be seen and heard in those spaces.

Those spaces helped me see that for some pregnant people and parents, or people considering starting that journey, the most helpful guides to turn to for advice, useful information, and necessary guidance won’t be found on your local bookstore shelf (or online shopping cart). Instead, it’ll be found on social media, most likely Instagram or Facebook. And while we all navigate these journeys in our own way, if you’re like me and enjoy a sense of community with others who genuinely understand you, then I highly recommend you find an online space you consider safe.

Our bodies alone — their differences and histories, make pregnancy and childbirth a unique experience and there is so much silenced and overlooked.
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Sometimes you can’t always turn to family and sometimes the books won’t have answers to your questions. If you go into these spaces knowing you can learn, as a supplement to whatever level of professional and medical advice from doctors or other specialists you seek out, then your journey as a pregnant person or parent can be deeply enlightened and maybe, just maybe, less stressful.

It’s comforting to know that you’re not alone and it’s empowering to feel affirmed. Online communities offer that and I’m grateful I found them during such a major transitional and transformative time of my life.

Practicing Self-Defense From A Radical Feminist Perspective

Cammi Morgan — Mon, 10 Dec 2018 09:41:46 +0000

I can’t wait for men to get better. I need to fight back now.

The dominant feminist discourse in the struggle against gendered violence against women (trans and cis) and genderqueer afabs (assigned female at birth) rightly proclaims that men must unlearn, and teach other men to unlearn, societal conditioning and misogynistic behaviors. This discourse comes as a response to the common accusations that are thrown at us when we are assaulted by men (But what were you wearing? Why were you at that bar? Why didn’t you leave him sooner? Why were you walking home alone? Etc, etc, and onward for eternity).

It powerfully asserts that we are not the ones who should be the subject of scrutiny after these attacks, but rather abusive men must be the ones under fire for their actions, and must be the ones to change their behaviors.

But, what happens when they don’t?

I applaud the work that men have done to fight misogyny, and am heartened by this powerful shift in the cultural expectations of who must shoulder the burden of misogyny and transmisogyny. Cultural shifts take decades of work to see changes in dominant society. Consent has been a critical discussion in radical feminist scenes since the 1990s and yet, I find myself getting excited to see a consent poster up in a mainstream sports bar like it hasn’t taken almost 30 years for that poster to finally, and painstakingly, get posted. I’m glad the poster is there. I truly am. But presently, we are still in the midst of astronomical rates of violence against trans women, cis women, and queer people.

The reality is that there are still far too many men who hold misogynistic mindsets and who are more than willing to cause physical harm because of them. It hurts to consider how many times I have been cat-called, harassed, stalked, assaulted on the bus, assaulted at the store, assaulted on the walk home. It hurts even more to consider how many times misogynistic violence has resulted in intimate partner violence against me. I am absolutely sure that far too many folks reading this are recounting their own stories of surviving violence too.

For myself, after I was almost kidnapped by a random dude at a rest stop in the middle of the night, I finally decided that I could no longer wait for enlightened men to teach jerks like him to not commit violence against me. I could no longer be satisfied with theatrical street marches or hashtag movements. I decided that the next time a man pulled this kind of violence on me, I would be ready to defend myself, and in this defense, perhaps he would finally learn a lesson. Perhaps he would decide that it’s too dangerous for him to pull that stunt again. Perhaps this cultural shift could be expedited if the feminist norm is such that when men try to attack us, they are met with fierce resistance.

The reality is that there are still far too many men who hold misogynistic mindsets and who are more than willing to cause physical harm because of them.
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I began training. I joined a Krav Maga gym, and channeled my hurt, rage, and determination into self-liberation. Krav Maga, which literally means “close combat” in Hebrew, was developed in the 1930s by Jewish fighter, Imi Lichtenfeld, in (then) Czechoslovakia. Lichtenfeld developed a brutally effective form of self-defense that he could teach to his fellow Jewish neighbors who were facing violent anti-semitic attacks in the years leading up to World War II. The fighting form had to be one that could be easily taught, work for a variety of body types and ages, and was applicable to street fighting scenarios. As such, Krav Maga is a fighting form that is used to immediately incapacitate an attacker. A groin kick, followed by an elbow strike to the face, followed by a strike to the eyes, for example, is completely acceptable, and encouraged, because it works. This differs from sport fighting techniques that bar the use of these particularly brutal strikes and kicks.

Unfortunately, Lichtenfeld went on to train soldiers in the use of Krav Maga in the creation of the Israeli state, which has committed an ongoing genocide against Palestinian people since its violent formation in 1948. I choose to train in this fighting form, not because I support the Israeli Defense Force, or the numerous military and police forces that use it, but because it is an incredibly effective and teachable self-defense form. In fact, as a police and prison abolitionist (I strive to co-create a world in which police and prisons don’t exist), I see my training in self-defense as even more necessary. Learning self-defense has created a way in which I can further my safety and power in a world that seeks to disempower me, without having to rely on institutions that I don’t believe in.

For the past two years I have been intensively training and building fighting skills, not only for myself, but to share with my friends who also must navigate the world in bodies that are targeted by state and interpersonal violence. I am certainly not an expert in Krav Maga, but I share the skills that I am confident in my ability to explain, demonstrate, and teach step-by-step. I have spent the last year traveling in my region of Southeastern Appalachia teaching free and sliding scale self-defense workshops.

Learning self-defense has created a way in which I can further my safety and power in a world that seeks to disempower me, without having to rely on institutions that I don’t believe in.
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Unfortunately, the idea that those who experience misogyny should learn to fight back has been used against them. Many have argued that “boys will be boys,” and that self-defense should be the only tool used against violent men, whose actions are treated as inevitable. My desire to share my skills does not come from a victim-blaming narrative that would fault someone for not successfully fighting back. Nor am I arguing that learning and practicing self-defense is some kind of imperative. If someone can run or otherwise leave a situation without having to fight, that’s great, and men still need to take responsibility for their actions. But I am interested in the radical liberation that comes from protecting ourselves, and from protecting each other.

Some might respond that it is dangerous to fight back against an attack, that we are putting ourselves in more harm by attempting to resist. But, the world we live in is already dangerous. Simply walking to our cars (or in my queer, redneck, Appalachian case- walking to my truck) at night can be dangerous. For trans women, cis women and queer afabs who hold additional marginalized identities, such as trans women of color, this world is already immensely dangerous. My argument, therefore, is that we become dangerous. We can be a dangerous force that causes abusive men to seriously reconsider their confidence in assuming power over us.

Ode To My Clumsy: The Feminism Of The Awkward Body

Leora Fridman — Tue, 04 Dec 2018 09:15:06 +0000

To be clumsy is not to be fragile: it is to know that one is breakable, and to live (speak, interact) knowing this.

Men always want me to share more. From my first boyfriend on. Craig slurred at me in a dorm room hallway that I’d never really let him in, never talked about my feelings or had a single serious talk with him throughout our senior year of high school.

I shook his grip from my arm.

“But you didn’t either?” It was a question how I said it, and stepped back against the damp wall. We’d been broken up for months, the way I’d expected us to when high school – and what I saw as our role for each other—was over. I was less drunk than him (always) and couldn’t quite follow his logic.

But, then, it wasn’t actually a logic I could cross into: at its heart was the belief that I should open myself to him, and fully. My thoughts along with my legs. And because I hadn’t, he explained to me, I was “super fucked up,” around relationships. He teetered and slumped to the floor.

“You never even gave me a chance to know you,” he looked up, his lush eyelashes in full effect. I was fucked up because I didn’t open: instantly, easily, for him. We’d known each other since we were 12, but he felt he’d never gotten enough of me. He wrenched up his face and twisted toward the floor, and so, across the narrow hallway from him, I sunk down too.

“I’m sorry?” I said, hoping that would end it, but regretted it as soon as I spoke.

In The Body in Pain, her classic text describing the philosophical and spiritual features of pain, Elaine Scarry addresses biblical depictions of the inside and outside of the body, and the dynamics of the divine that operate between. Scarry observes that when a person in the Bible resists God, or belief in God, “…the withholding of the body…necessitates God’s forceful shattering of the reluctant human surface and repossession of the interior.”

I can’t help but see here a masculine God, one that refuses any scenario in which a person refuses to fully give themselves over. As Craig did, pulling at me in that dorm hallway for something he felt he wasn’t getting.

It wasn’t actually a logic I could cross into: at its heart was the belief that I should open myself to him, and fully.
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It’s not fair, though, to make this only about men.

“He just wouldn’t open up to me,” Cara sighs. “We spent a whole weekend together and I barely feel like I know him.” I’ll readily admit it’s not always the case that the one prying open is gendered masculine: the penetrating gaze of women and queer people all around me bores towards the deepest darkest secrets of the people we want to know.

“I want him to let me in.”

“She’s hiding herself from me.”

“I want more of you. All of you.”

As if there was only one way in to where we’re trying to go, and the tunnel is to blame for not being open.

One weekend camping with friends in the Sierras, we laugh the whole time and I feel closer to them than I have to anyone in a while. My eyes tear and my throat is sore from laughing about our sad and weird experiences learning sex at summer camp from older kids, the stupid things we’ve said while trying to be cool. We are academics, therapists, entrepreneurs and artists—adult people whose intelligence (emotional and otherwise) I respect. But in this weekend I get a break, mostly, from speaking this intelligence. And in these conversations that I’ve sometimes termed more surface, I feel something more like closeness. More like trust.

The Sierras, courtesy of the author

“Yes, because we’re trusting each other to know we’re not stupid,” Ellie says from her perch on the granite boulder. “We don’t have to spend the whole time proving we’re smart or emotionally articulate, or have good politics, or have worked through our childhood shit…” She trails off and scratches the back of her leg, reaching awkwardly around to where a patch of calf got ravaged by mosquitos. I look away instinctively, not wanting to witness her weird body position. But then I look back.

“…the pose of awkwardness is very dangerous, because at this post-feminist moment one should be a top, one should win, etc,” writes Eileen Myles in “Long and Social.” Myles is speaking here about the ways in which their own work is “a bad recording” of lived experience, as opposed to the careful curation of a memoir. They term this position of “bad recording” dangerous for women expected to be getting things “right,” topping the narrative, so to speak. Myles points here also to the precarity of power by noting their refusal to top. This choice to maintain an awkward pose (a crouch, perhaps) leaves their narrative-body vulnerable to risk. The awkward narrative allows for others to also enter and also make claims upon the truth. The awkward body leaves the story open, incomplete.

I want to see this awkward body – in part because I have it. I’ve been managing chronic illness and pain these last few years, and lately doctors have focused on a problem with my hormones. The OB-GYN says too much estrogen in my body is forming the cysts on my ovaries, and the herbalist says my diet has too many estrogen-heavy foods, that I need to eat less of everything on the list she hands me.

“It’s important not to feel defeated if the diet changes don’t fix everything right away,” she tells me. “You are managing a chronic condition.”

I’m still trying to understand what exactly this means: how to explain that I’m incapacitated by endometriosis pain one month, but the next am out late and energized every night. I’ve been turning to sick, crip and disability theory to try to better understand – even though of course I know these are not all the same. What I’m trying to understand between them is how to manage a condition that is largely invisible much of the time, how to manage something intentionally or inadvertently pushed out of view.

But: “…disabilities are not exactly ‘visible’ or ‘invisible’ but intermittently apparent,” writes theorist Margaret Price in “The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain,” “…a better metaphor than vision for some kinds of disability might be apparition.” I latch immediately onto this, the way “apparition” flickers and returns at unpredictable times – often frightening those present when it appears.

The idea of chronic illness as apparition also feels soothing after years of trying to bore down into the core of how to fix this, how to find one thing I can do that will eliminate my symptoms – and failing, failing to nail it down. Sometimes I feel better but I don’t know why. I get up from bed, then later fall over, over and over, never over. I stumble on my words when anyone asks how I am and I try to explain.

“Clumsiness might provide us with a queer ethics,” writes Sara Ahmed in Living a Feminist Life. “Such an ethics attends to the bumpiness of living with difference, so often experienced as difference in time; being too slow or too fast, out of time.”

The apparition of chronic illness is also “clumsy.” Because my body moves clumsily in pain, but also because it is out of time, unpredictable, inconsistent. It does not respond well when asked to be consistent or reliable. (“Sick time is always escaping the institutional technologies invented to contain it,” writes Anne Boyer.) It does not respond well when asked to be fully seen and understood. And it does not respond well to normative relations, queering the sense of my relationship to others in care, in attraction, and attractiveness: always incomplete and refusing the happy ending.

This is why I began with my teenage boyfriend. Because what’s awkward and clumsy if not one’s first relationship, one’s first times attempting sex? Especially in a relationship where I was primarily attracted to the idea of sex, the performance of relationship and its accompanying teenage drama: not to any kinds of hot sex we were actually having. I didn’t have the knowledge or communication skills at the time to re-direct or explain this, and so remained stilted in what I told him, how our bodies moved together, and the way, ultimately, we broke up. I guess we should stop dating now, I bumbled on his porch steps the week before we left for college, and bolted away across his lawn into the night.

He remained angry at me for years for this breakup, and for refusing to “let him in” on what I had been thinking, wanting, needing. Things I didn’t exactly know myself at the time. And I’ve come to understand the ableism beyond the misogyny in his anger, the insistence that a body and mind should even be available to seamlessly open.

But also I am grateful now for the clumsiness that surrounded us then, my hormonal body ineptly attempting to work alongside another. I remember us in basements pretending to listen to Dark Side of the Moon on a couch we couldn’t figure out how to arrange ourselves upon. Our limbs not knowing where to go against one another, yes, but also the emotional inelegance, how I rarely knew where to look or what to say.

“I considered how one cannot continuously manage one’s emotive surface and, mostly, that this lack of control is something to be grateful for,” writes Caryl Pagel. So I am grateful to my teenage self, the self that stuck her ass in boys’ laps while dancing and didn’t know what it meant, genuinely shocked later by their desire. I am grateful to the awkward teenage self who avoided intimacy wherever possible, terrified of risk and then on occasion spilling it all, with Smirnoff Ice.

And not just me but him, her, them, us: crouching underneath bathroom stalls because we’d locked ourselves in and didn’t know where else to go but the sticky floor. The sense that we did not need to blast one another open in any masculine-, female-, God-like or therapist-way, because, really, we already were shattered (a la Scarry) open, slithering on the floor and around in our hormones. Our unpredictable bodies our first hint that we might be that way—forever.

This is how I’ve found myself embracing the clumsy, as a body half performed and half messy, half closed and half open. A person allowed to open only sometimes, a body willfully aware of change and potentially shifting states. To be clumsy is not to be fragile: it is to know that one is breakable, and to live (speak, interact) knowing this.

Clumsy might come in any gender, but because they’re the ones I use, I’ll use she pronouns here. She’s been a beacon to me when I’m in pain, and a beacon to me when I try to explain my illness. She lets me shrug: “it’s hard to know how I’ll feel next week.” She lets me refuse to talk about it when I don’t want to. She performs gender as she is available: she lets me spend half an hour on my eyeliner and then say fuck it, and smear it off.

She wants to be seen, but at the same time refuses to be seen completely: a position I’d want, for any person—the understanding that a public presentation doesn’t necessarily mean she wants to be taken, opened or entered entirely. Or that she’ll be available in this same way tomorrow. Her hormones, her blood, her gender, her feelings, her laughter: none of it demands to be shattered or unwrapped for consumption.

I summon the spirit of clumsy from my teenage self, picking nervously at the pimples alongside her mouth as she tries to end the conversation with Craig on the porch. She doesn’t know how to break up with someone gracefully. Her legs are half-shaven and bumpy, and her shorts are the wrong thing to wear in this late summer chill. She blurts and runs. She’ll learn more later about what people want to hear. But for now she doesn’t know what to say, and I love her for it.

Meet The Queer Musicians Fighting For Art And Their Lives In Brazil, The World’s LGBTQI Murder Capital

Beatriz Miranda — Tue, 13 Nov 2018 08:42:11 +0000

“Maybe it’s time for us to scare those who are afraid of losing their power.”

Brazil holds the world’s highest LGBTQI murder rate. Here, a LGBTQI person is brutally murdered or commits suicide every 19 hours. Every. 19. hours.

Among such crushing hostility, it would appear there should be little room for LGBTQI artists to exist at all. The reality, however, is quite the opposite: the queer music scene of Brazil is exploding.

The current aural landscape is comprised of incredibly diverse performers whose work ranges from rap, rock and R&B to soul, indie music, Brazilian funk and even K-pop.

Together, artists like Gloria Groove, Linn da Quebrada, and Pabllo Vittar have founded a brand new paradigm in Brazil’s music scene. The moment they dared to go up on the stage, a revolution began. And there’s no turning back.

“You Either Resist Or Die”

Refusing the second option, five rappers from the edges of São Paulo decided to found Quebrada Queer; they self-describe as the first LGBTQI cypher in Latin America.

Cyphers — singing as a group — have become very popular in Brazil’s music scene. For Quebrada Queer members, rapping as a cypher is their weapon against invisibility and prejudice.

Quebrada Queer

“Once we gathered, we became the first openly gay rap group in Latin America,” says Guigo, a member of Quebrada Queer. “We are queer, black, peripheral artists, singing one of the most homophobic music genres of all. And that means resistance and representation.”

Only a month ago, Quebrada Queer (‘quebrada’ is São Paulo slang for ‘periphery’) launched its very first single, “Pra Quem Duvidou” (which means, “For those who doubted”). Turning the traditional rap aesthetics upside down, the music video has already amassed over half a million views on YouTube.

“It’s fucking cowardice/To say it’s opinion, when it’s homophobia!/ (cut this shit) They threaten to kill my fellows/ When did it all get lost?/Can you see how contradictory it is to kill in the name of God?” demand the lyrics of “Pra Quem Duvidou”.

Guigo believes it’s time to kick in the doors that have always been closed; being celebrated in these traditionally excluding systems, however, is a whole different story. But Quebrada Queer is ready to fight: “We want to make sure that future queer artists will be welcomed with a red carpet,” says Guigo.

“Half Drag, Half Rapper”

This is how Gloria Groove defines herself. And it is this exact same duality that deftly puts Gloria — a 23-year old queer singer — beyond any stereotype: “When I sing, I can be girl and a boy. This makes my music unique.”

Groove is exemplary in her versatility, signing a whole range of genres from Soul to Trap, to R&B and Brazilian funk music. In her latest R&B single, “Apaga a Luz” (“Turn off the light”), Groove explores her vocal duality, singing both as a “male rapper” and a “female queer”.

Launched in 2016, Groove’s very first hit, “Dona” (“Owner”), is a sarcastic criticism to how queer people are portrayed in society: “Oh My Lord / What animal is that? / Nice to meet you, my name is art, darling”.

Groove is considered one of the most influential queer musicians in Brazil: her hottest hits, such as the Brazilian funk track “Bumbum de Ouro” (Golden butt) and the Reggaeton-like song “Muleke Brasileiro” (Brazilian dude), are present on every dance floor across Brazil — not just within the LGBTQI community.

But behind all the humor and glamour involving Groove’s music, her lyrics are an effort to shed light on the oppressive and dangerous reality of being queer in Brazil. “My music hopes to signify the existence of thousands of LGBTIQ people—our music becomes a platform of love and self-acceptance.”

Gender Terrorist

Linn da Quebrada is another performer who is busy proving rap can be queer as hell. Once a Jehovah’s Witness, the singer believes she has broken free from an “overdisciplined, self-repressed body,” to finally belong to herself.

The 28-year-old artist — who helped to found an NGO for trans people in São Paulo — calls her last album, “Pajubá” (2017), the “transgender Lemonade”. Highly politicized, the afro/Brazilian funk/vogue album “Pajubá” sounds as rough as the battlefield they find themselves warring on.

Linn da Quebrada

“Transvestite faggot/ of a single breast/ the hair dragging on the floor/ And on the hand, bleeding, a heart,” says “Bixa Travesty” (Transvestite Faggot), one of the most lacerating songs from the album, depicting the everyday violence against trans people in Brazil.

Calling herself a “Gender Terrorist,” Linn da Quebrada believes this boom of queer musicians in Brazil can work as a fundamental game changer: “Haven’t we been harmless for too long? Maybe it is time for us to scare those who are afraid of losing their position of power.”

Trans Pop Star Changing The Course Of History

Coming from one of the poorest states from Brazil (Maranhão, in the Northeastern region), Pabllo Vittar has taken LGBTQI representation to a whole new level. This month, Vittar became the first Brazilian artist to put land all the songs from one album — “Não Para Não” (Don’t Stop), Vittar’s second and latest album — on Spotify’s Top 40.

Having debuted in the music market with a well-humored parody of Major Lazer’s “Lean On,” Vittar’s career skyrocketed in late 2017, when she recorded with Brazilian singer Anitta and Major Lazer himself.

A constant victim of fake news (rumors ranged from Vittar being the new owner of Apple to the artist being canonized by the Vatican!), Vittar says the album aims to soften the dark days in Brazil.

A couple of weeks ago, Vittar broke professional relations due to political reasons. She was the sponsor of a shoe brand whose owner publicly supports Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right newly-elected president known for controversial LGBTQI-phobic statements.

Hacking The Process With Art

Rico Dalasam

Like Vittar, Rico Dalasam doesn’t hesitate to speak out against political regression now, when Brazil’s democracy is under serious attack. Along with Brazil’s most prestigious rappers, Dalasam, an openly gay and black artist, recently signed a petition against Bolsonaro, which alleges the presidential candidate represents a “mortal threat” against poor, marginalized people from Brazil.

Having recorded “Todo Dia” (Everyday) — one of the greatest hits from Carnival 2017 — with Pabllo Vittar, Rico Dalasam currently sings about being a black, gay, peripheral man in society.

For him, Brazilian queer music arises as an art of emergency, from the need to narrate a silenced story: “queer art is unbeatable, it is relentless in the pursuit of finding a way out, in hacking this oppressive process,” he says.

Queer Invasion Of The Indie Scene

Assucena Assucena and Raquel Virgínia.

Following quite a different path from pop star Pabllo Vittar is the “As Bahias e a Cozinha Mineira” band. More popular in the alternative music landscape, “As Bahias” stands out for their politically engaged rock and MPB (a generic term used to refer to Brazilian popular music) songs. The band is composed of three cis male instrumentalists and two transgender vocalists, Assucena Assucena and Raquel Virgínia.

Placing the trans issue at the core of their lyrics wasn’t exactly what Assucena and Virgínia had been looking for. However, the transgender vocalists couldn’t see any other option: “being silent about this issue would feel like denying something that is in eruption inside me,” says Virgínia.

Having started her career in music as a cis man, Liniker self-identifies now as a trans black woman and activist of the LGBTIQ rights. One of the most prestigious singers from the contemporary R&B and black music scene in Brazil, Liniker highlights the importance of taking sides. “This is the moment we have to resist through art. We can’t stay in the margins any longer.”

Find more amazing queer artists who are transforming the music culture of Brazil right the hell here:

What’s The Future Of Gay Slang?

Chelsea Paisley — Wed, 10 Oct 2018 08:46:13 +0000

For generations the LGBTQ+ community has found unique ways to communicate. For better or worse, that language is becoming mainstream.

In 2011, RuPaul’s Drag Race season 3 saw need enough to include definitions for slang terms like “fishy” across the bottom of the screen. Watching this season for the first time in 2018, I almost burst out laughing. The thought that a viewer wouldn’t know what “fishy” meant seemed absurd. But that’s what Drag Race, and other touchstones of queer culture, do: introduce its viewers to a slew of slang terms that quickly become ubiquitous. In 2016, Bernie Sanders accused the DNC of throwing shade, and the phrase “Yass, queen” has permeated from Broad City gifs to Target merchandise. Queer slang has never been more visible in, and interactive with, mainstream Western culture.

Slang used in gay and queer spaces, while yet to be officially named, is considered an “anti-language”—the vernacular used by an “anti-society,” or a marginalized group within a society. Anti-languages generally aren’t full languages of their own, but “provide… a new and different reality in which [members] can construct and portray alternative (i.e., non-normative) identities without fear of censure or reproach” (Levon, 2010).

Queer anti-language in particular is hard to pin down, because slang terms are generally learned from exposure to queer communities, rather than being inherent to them (like a native language). But what we’re here to talk about is when an anti-language like this comes into contact with the mainstream it initially branched away from. Let’s watch the sauce, shall we?

It May Die Out

If you’ve ever looked into the history of queer vernacular English, you’ve probably stumbled across Polari. It was a British vernacular used by performers, thieves, people of color, and, in particular, gay men. It’s also the darling of Lavender linguistics, as one of the best-known instances of queer anti-language. Adapting words from romance languages, Yiddish, and London slang, certain phrases could signal your place in an anti-society, while straight people who overheard you would remain none the wiser.

Polari was necessary because being openly gay was a crime. But the rising homophile movement of post-WWII British civil rights exerted pressure on queer people to abandon identifiably gay characteristics like the use of Polari. Homosexual sex between men was decriminalized in 1967, ostensibly removing the need for covert language among gay men. (So often a chance at legal recognition comes with increasingly conservative politics—what of arguments to segregate trans people from the queer community after the legalization of same-sex marriage?) But the final blow came with the radio show Round the Home, where millions of listeners were treated to an education in Polari that evaporated both the vernacular’s secrecy, and the use of Polari itself.

Anti-languages like Polari fulfill two purposes: creating a community of people in the know, and keeping out people who threaten that community. Once the threat wanes, so does its use, though Polari echoes in both queer spaces (“trade,” for example, was one of its gifts dating back to the 1600s) and beyond (in words like “scarper” and “naff”). Given that shows like Drag Race and Queer Eye are being renewed into infinity, however, the likelihood of this slang dying out altogether is “nada to vada.”

Anti-languages like Polari fulfill two purposes: creating a community of people in the know, and keeping out people who threaten that community.
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Its Meanings May Change

As a niche vernacular becomes accessible to more people, its definitions tend to the general. Where “trade” under Polari meant “sex,” I first encountered it to mean “a straight-presenting man who may have (possibly paid) sex with a man or with a trans woman.” The associations with “macho” presentation were on display in the Drag Race’s Trade challenge (where we learned that some of these girls simply do not know the meaning of the word). A drag queen would seem to be the antithesis of all that is trade, yet during the same season Kameron Michaels is identified as “the trade of Season 10.” All of these meanings have to do with sex, and often with masculinity, but the flexibility for a single syllable to indicate anything from “the sexual act” to “an attractive man” indicates that the ongoing process of meaning expansion. More people are exposed to queer slang means more meaning expansion.

On the other hand, the interaction of queer slang with mainstream English may multiply the meanings available to them both. As Milani (2015) found, when an anti-language (in this case, Tsotsitaal, associated mainly with black South Africans) is exposed to the mainstream, their coexistence can yield new and “highly hybridized linguistic combinations” that didn’t previously exist, or weren’t previously possible. (Think of how “realness,” handed down from ballroom queens of yore, can now be comprehensibly appended to just about any word) Just like connections via the internet have engendered a proliferation of queer slang and in-jokes, the bigger the number of people using the language, the more different uses of it there will be.

Sometimes, an anti-language becomes so absorbed by a mainstream one that it’s almost impossible to tell them apart. Just like (probably British) people use “scarper” and “naff,” unaware of their origins in Polari, the incorporation of queer slang terms into mainstream English language obscures their origins. Even innocuous terms like “hot” and “hunk” came to us via the Harlem club scene—the ordinariness of a word seemingly inverse to our familiarity with its history.

In Indonesia, this phenomenon is occurring without the corresponding visibility of queer folk that we see in the West. There is limited understanding or presence of queer people in mainstream Indonesian society, possibly as a result of the lack of legal protection for them and anti-LGBT+ rhetoric among politicians and religious conservatives.

However, a vernacular known as bahasa gay is much more widely known, especially in Indonesian popular culture (Boellstorff, 2004). This is partly attributed to television personality Debby Sahertian, who gave the public an education in the anti-language when she published Kamus Bahasa Gaul, a dictionary of terms that doesn’t hide their roots in bahasa gay. On the one hand, it’s said that she once apologized to queer Indonesians for popularising bahasa gay and destroying the secrecy of the anti-language. On the other, it means that queer people’s uses of language aren’t a potentially dangerous give-away, because they’re common linguistic currency.

The phenomenon of queer anti-languages being ‘outed’ via the media is hardly unique. As soon as Drag Race ceased to define its own terms, the internet stepped in for anyone out of the loop. In the Philippines, the incredibly complex vernacular known as Swardspeak gained wider recognition after a series of instructional videos by (straight-identifying) YouTuber Wil Dasovich. Queer slang has never been better-documented, or more accessible, though whether it will keep in touch with its roots remains to be seen.

As soon as Drag Race ceased to define its own terms, the internet stepped in for anyone out of the loop.
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It Will Probably (Continue To) Be Used To Sell Us Stuff

It’s an ancient cliché that the entertainment industry is especially influenced by queer culture, and it follows that its slang would become the media’s lingua franca. In the Philippines, it’s almost a requirement that people working in entertainment be versed in Swardspeak (Hart & Hart, 1990). Drag Race incorporated the slang of queer nightclubs because that’s where its contestants work. Performers from Katy Perry, to Morrissey, to David Bowie have woven queer slang terms into their work—it was inevitable that the language of the people working in entertainment would bleed into what they produce. Especially with the new forum of social media, like Dasovich’s instructional videos, slang is able to move faster and further than ever before.

This exposure has its perks. Drag queens, once reviled as everything undesirable about gay men, have risen to a point of cultural reverence—and they’re making a mint off of it. Queer media (independent and non-) is able to attract bigger audiences and more lucrative advertisers—can you imagine Nanette or them existing in the days of Drag Race’s infamous season 1 filter? But corporations and non-LGBTQIA+ individuals, too, want a piece of the pink dollar, and speaking the right language is a proven way to get it. Enter the Target shirts.

Being absorbed into the mainstream means being brought into everything Western society represents—including capitalism. When queer slang’s associations shift from the queer simply to the fashionable, those in the know (and those who stand to gain) suddenly and infinitely expand, and as any linguist will tell you, the changes that come with this will be almost impossible to hinder. But don’t mourn what may or may not be lost to history—enjoy this unprecedented chance to write (and speak) it.

Welcome To The Club: How Women Are Changing Tattoo Culture

Katy Hartnett — Mon, 24 Sep 2018 08:00:42 +0000

Women make up the majority of those getting tattoos. And they’re creating inclusive spaces where everyone feels comfortable.

I got my first tattoo when I was nineteen. A small pink and white lotus on my left hip that represented purity, spontaneous generation, my new found independence and, above all, that I was hopelessly in love with a heavily tattooed Buddhist who I wanted to take me seriously. I don’t see him anymore when I look at the tattoo. Instead, I see myself at nineteen, fresh to New York and so overwhelmed with so many new feelings and emotions that I needed something to permanently remember them. It’s nice to think of it that way.

I also think of the experience getting the tattoo. It was done at a small shop in the East Village by a man who lived in Vermont most of the time, who rolled his own cigarettes and could not have been less interested in chatting with the young woman on the table under his needle. The only time Vermont spoke to me directly once we started was to yell at me to stop moving; because of the location of the tattoo it tickled intensely, and I was stifling a laugh but my body wasn’t quite cooperating. Pretty quickly the friend with me noticed I was on the verge of tears and asked Vermont to give us a minute. We went outside so I could take a few deep breaths while holding my pants up with my hands because I couldn’t button them over the partially tattooed skin. I went in, my girlfriend leveled Vermont with her eyes and he completed the tattoo, all of it in silence.

“I hear so many stories like this. If not once a day at least a few times a week,” says Jessica Dwyer, tattoo artist and co-owner of Nice Tattoo, a woman- owned tattoo shop in Brooklyn. ”People will be happy with the tattoos but not the experience and it’s basically just a permanent reminder of that.”

This isn’t a new phenomenon. Women have played a huge role in the history of body art, but remain underrepresented in the culture. In the early 19th century tattoos became a way for women to take part in circuses and freak shows. Billed as “The Tattooed Lady,” these women were able to assert a financial autonomy not otherwise available to them at the time. In her book, Bodies of Subversion, The Secret History of Women and Tattoo, Margot Mifflin catalogs many of these forgotten stories. Women are so intertwined in the history of body art, Mifflin argues, the Women’s Movement of the mid 20th century is what revived the declining tattoo industry, while removing some of the stigmas of tattoo culture as hyper-masculine and delinquent.

In the ‘70s, women coming from the art school world would teach themselves how to tattoo as a way to make a living and expand the idea of what makes a true canvas, adding new styles and aesthetics to an otherwise stagnant industry. Tattoos also served as a form of protest, with women looking to distinguish themselves from mainstream society or, as famed artist Ruth Marten recalls, recently divorced women who wanted to commemorate their new freedom.

The Women’s Movement of the mid 20th century is what revived the declining tattoo industry
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However, Vyvyn Lagonza, still considered one of the early design innovators in the industry, noted how once the novelty of having a young woman in the parlors wore off, her colleagues became increasingly dismissive of her work and watched as less experienced male artists moved ahead of her in the field. Shop owner Danny Danzl “couldn’t be bothered to fix Lagonza’s broken machines,” Mifflin writes “but he did find time to lovingly inlay them with fake glittering jewels.” Women in the tattoo parlor were one of two things: an adornment, or a nuisance.

It was thirteen years before I got my next tattoo. Throughout that time I had several themes that piqued my interest (some of which I am forever grateful I didn’t get) and would bring my ideas to different shops. Each parlor I walked into the artists, always men, gave me the same response: If I wanted all of the lines I would be committing to a much larger piece, the small delicate lines I envisioned were impossible and if I really wanted this tattoo, I would have to get it done their way. It was a choice between getting a tattoo I wanted but not the way I wanted it, or not getting it at all.

“A lot of tattoo artists do have that holier-than-thou arrogance. And at the end of the day, we’re in a service industry. Yah, you’re an artist but you’re doing art for somebody,” Dwyer says when I relay the story to her. “A lot of times it feels like a club, and you’re made to feel like you don’t belong in it. People will say something can’t be done because they don’t want to do it.”

Last year, I found myself working with several women with the exact style of tattoos I had been told were basically impossible. Clean, thin lines, negative space, pointillism instead of shading. When I asked they were all going to the same studio, Welcome.Home. Located in Greenpoint, Brooklyn the shop, I was told, was run by women who gained a following through word of mouth and Instagram. By the end of summer, I had three new tattoos.

Based on a 2012 Reuters poll women made up 59% of people getting tattoos. Instagram and Pinterest have certainly cracked the club open a bit, but the industry as a whole still has an air of hypermasculinity and exclusivity. That has a lot of women, and others, heading to places like Welcome.Home and Nice Tattoo for a more inclusive and relaxing experience. Both studios have a living room feel. There’s no front desk so consultations take place on couches, and plants and minimalist art hang on the walls instead of tattoo flash art. The music is usually more soothing and at a lower volume, and artists book out extra time per session so that clients don’t feel rushed and can take breaks if needed.

Instagram and Pinterest have certainly cracked the club open a bit, but the industry as a whole still has an air of hypermasculinity and exclusivity.
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One of the through lines I found when researching different women owned shops was that this sense of community and comfort was front and center in their mission statements. San Francisco’s Black + Blue, which was founded by Idexa Stern in 1995, started as a safe space for women in what was a predominantly straight white male-dominated industry. Originally employing only lesbian artists, in 2005 as the constraints of gender and orientation became looser in the public discourse, Idexa began to change the shop’s original mission. “We didn’t need a ‘women’s space’ we needed an inclusive space,” she says on the studio’s website.

In Minnesota, Jackalope Tattoo, a women and queer-identifying run studio, echoes the same sentiment in their mission statement. “To empower others to be their very best, brightest, most creative selves. To try that one thing you’ve always wanted to try, reach for that huge goal because you know you can, and do it all with a fabulous smile and sense of self that radiates confidence. Jackalope Tattoo is more than a tattoo shop, it’s a family, and a way of living.”

It’s not just a better way to treat clients, it’s also a better business model in the current political and cultural climate. Since the 2016 election and prevalence of the #MeToo movement, many are going back to the idea of body art as a form of protest. In early 2017 over 100 women and men lined up to receive tattoos outside of Brass Knuckle Tattoo in Minneapolis. They were all there to get Mitch McConnell’s now infamous dismissive comment about Elizabeth Warren, “Nevertheless, she persisted” permanently etched on their body, with the days proceeds going to a local organization that supports pro-choice women in politics. Most of the shops I researched were booked for months ahead of time, with either return clients or new clients who were compelled to come in because they heard the spaces weren’t intimidating, and the artists were as interested in the experience as much as the art itself.

While I would rather cut off my arm than have to think about Mitch McConnell daily, I understand the reasoning. Few, if any, women and queer people get through life without carrying the scars of societies projection about our bodies. Tattoos represent a choice, something we can put on ourselves that express our own ideas about who we are. Even if you’re getting a quick tattoo, the ability to assert control over what you see, and society sees, is an act reclamation and exertion of body autonomy.

“I want to have a safe space for everyone,” Dwyer says towards the end of our interview, “I get a lot of straight people and gay people and trans people. Tattoos are not for one type of person anymore across the board. Everyone’s got tattoos, everyone.”

Tattoos represent a choice, something we can put on ourselves that express our own ideas about who we are.
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Before opening Nice Tattoo, Dwyer liked the shop she was working at and had no plans to leave. When approached about opening a new shop she wasn’t convinced until her business partners talked about the kind of inclusive, women run, comfortable studio they wanted, and she realized that she couldn’t pass the opportunity up.

“I want people to know when they come to my shop they’re getting a safe experience, a pleasant experience, and a comfortable experience. I want them to have the experience I wish I had had.”

Compared to this type of welcoming, all-embracing mentality, the notion of the tattoo industry as an exclusive club feels antiquated. Exclusivity as a pillar for any business model has always baffled me; what do you actually gain by leaving money on the table? And when it comes to something as personal and permanent as body art, what value is there in making clients feel more vulnerable than they already do? It’s that distance and vulnerability so many new shop owners understand, either through their own experience or from hearing stories from their friends and clients. The rise in women owned tattoo shops isn’t just an extension of the industry, it’s a reaction to it; creating a new space instead of fighting for what is offered. A club with open membership that people are lining up to be a part of.

Reclaiming Femme: A Practice in Radical Vulnerability

Amber Stewart — Fri, 21 Sep 2018 08:17:53 +0000

In a world that wants me to see strength as rigid, being femme allows me to find it in vulnerability and community.

I feel my most queer in a skirt. Dresses feel like drag, like a performance I learned a long time ago, and am now reprising. Not quite a reenactment, but rather, a gender reckoning.

I do not remember the first time I was taught to demean the feminine. Maybe it was when my play was restricted by well-meaning adults telling me to keep my legs together—though they were the ones who put me in dresses. Maybe it was when I was a pre-teen and was told that girls should be good at school, but not too good, for fear of scaring off men. I began to see, as many see, the feminine as less important, frivolous, false, an act performed for the benefit of men.

But the feminine was also my community (which at the time was all cis, straight women). It was daiquiri mix in the fridge and all girl nacho nights with my friends and their moms and my single mom. We bonded over mandatory pedicures and Reese Witherspoon and Julia Roberts. We asked each other for makeup tips and knew that men were no good, but should be pursued nevertheless. It was Jude Law and Hugh Grant and finding the sensitive, but not too sensitive, men. It was not judging each other for crying at the end of sad movies, and giggling at other women’s bad haircuts. It was letting ourselves be joyous when the makeup bag came in pink, and promising to never “let ourselves go.” And it was the power of being vulnerable with one another when we found out my mother wasn’t going to live out the year. It was the way she held me and let me cry.

When I was young, I would watch my mother get ready in the mornings. She was a project manager at Ford, which, she was reminded daily, was a good job for a woman with only a high school diploma. It was my job to pick out the shoes she was going to wear for the day. I knew when she had meetings with the mostly male higher ups, because she would wear red, her power color. She rarely wore pants to work, preferring skirts and dresses. These were her armor.

There’s a certain type of femininity for the white, middle class below the Mason-Dixon. It’s blonde and perfect foundation and blush. It’s pretending to be upper class. It’s fake pearls and hot pink dresses. It’s monogrammed towels and a perfect wreath on the door, appropriate to the season. It’s also a passive femininity. It’s gossip and prayer groups and PTA meetings, but it definitely did not include the assertiveness needed to manage a team or go after that promotion. It was not the power femininity of the self-help books on my mother’s shelf: How to Succeed in Business without a Penis, and The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. When my mother called her makeup her “war paint,” I knew that on some level she was not joking or being metaphorical. She defied the femininity of her surroundings, and wore it into corporate battle, weaponized it. I remember her power. I remember her joy. I also remember her frustration.

To be a woman with ambition meant sacrificing the social training of woman. It was learning to look down on previous iterations of yourself. This was a lesson my mother never truly learned, or perhaps refused to, always keeping a small sense of play in her wardrobe. But when I moved in with my dad and crossed a class boundary, the pearls were replaced with leather bands, the pink with neutrals. A different kind of femininity was enforced here, in the upper middle class. This was a femininity that played a man’s game: its colors darker, its lines neater. This femininity was less social and more capitalistic. The bonding rituals stayed the same: The Notebook, blonde highlights, men. But the consequences for violating that femininity shifted. Where once I only had to fear the loss of community, I now had to fear the loss of status. Qualifications are irrelevant if you violate the social order. To be an outsider also meant being a failure. Success equaled wealth; there were no other barometers.

I began to see, as many see, the feminine as less important, frivolous, false, an act performed for the benefit of men.
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After my mother’s death and cut off from my main feminine role model, I also became cut off from the community of women she had introduced me to. Sure, by the age of thirteen, I had gleaned a little of how to perform woman. I knew how to put on a little makeup, and I knew what cut of pants was most flattering to my emerging pear shape, the same shape as my mother. I could quote Miss Congeniality and Legally Blonde, and I knew which Titans players had the best asses. But I had very little language for this new brand of femininity, and it was becoming and harder to allow myself to remain vulnerable and open to it. Grief has a way of making a person insular, of making emotion inaccessible to others. PTSD deepens the divide between you and others, and, the protection of others gone, you learn that it is necessary to protect yourself.

Women’s clothing exposes. At best it is supposed to empower. At worst, it objectifies. I could not afford to be an object. My senses on high alert, I already felt outside my skin, outside of time, moving back and forth between the past and present jarringly. I began having flashbacks of my mother’s last moments and trouble sleeping. It became important to fortify myself. Often, that meant layers. That meant stoicism. It was James Dean, who knows how to be sad, but artfully. It was John Wayne, un-phased by massacre. It was denim, no makeup. Bravado.

And those men, the stoics. They always got the girl. And that was something, I was just figuring out, I might want too. And if my femininity was not solely to be performed for men, then what was its purpose? I discarded it, figuring it could no longer serve me.

The dictionary defines femme as “a lesbian whose appearance and behavior are seen as traditionally feminine.” However, that’s what makes it subversive. To be “femme” is to capture femininity on your own terms, reclaiming it from the heterosexual gaze and performing it instead for a queer community. Moving to New York at age eighteen, my ideas of femme possibility expanded: no makeup, unshaven armpits, shaved heads, not just lesbians but queer and bisexual women, too. These women exuded the same type of strength my mother had, but without the fake pearls. And, somehow, they still displayed traits of what we traditionally assign as feminine. They could allow themselves to be vulnerable, to take care of others while also allowing themselves to be taken care of. They prioritized intuition, not necessarily over logic, but alongside it. There’s a generosity in femininity, and an honoring of the role emotions play in our lives. In the feminine, they can be embraced; in the (toxic) masculine, they are something to be done away with. There’s a practicality to this femininity in the way that I imagine it. The feminine rolls up her sleeves and gets shit done.

But there is also a danger to femininity. How many gendered insults can be thrown against us without a few sticking? How many times can I be called a cunt or a pussy or a bitch and still maintain that there is strength in my womanhood. How many times can I be harassed? Raped? Walking down the streets of New York after I was assaulted my freshman year of college, it was hard to differentiate between annoying catcalls and threatening men. In some ways, I imagined the feminine as a victim.

The stats vary, but something close to one in six women will be raped in her lifetime. Hate crimes against trans women are on the rise. Femme gay men are often the targeted victims of hate crimes for threatening the masculine’s sense of world order. So I told myself a story. Masculine does not get told to smile on the street. Masculine does not get catcalled. Masculine is not raped. I understood that to be masculine meant being safer walking home at night. And it was that safety that I craved. This is of course, not true. The masculine is also policed and is sometimes the victim of violence. I knew that the more masculine my appearance, the more likely I was to be identified as gay by passersby, which presented new dangers. But I also knew that it was my femme and feminine sisters who had been taught to walk with our car keys tucked between our knuckles.

To surrender to the feminine began to feel like surrendering to pain. It seemed easier, safer, to hold myself at some remove. Withholding brought stability. The masculine myth of self-sufficiency made it less painful to acknowledge a lack of familial connection. But, for me, this remove was not sustainable. Stoicism meant isolation. Masculinity made me feel shored up against something. But though it was scarier, femininity meant healing, meant community. My femme identity exists in direct opposition to toxic, cisgender masculinity that would have me fear for my life no matter how I expressed my gender. Femme identity is my letting the guard down.

To be “femme” is to capture femininity on your own terms, reclaiming it from the heterosexual gaze and performing it instead for a queer community.
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Over the last several years, as I have begun my slow, femme re-education, I have found a new type of community. It is a sisterhood of queer femme-ininity. It includes cis, femme, queer women, trans women, femme trans boys, gay men in nail polish, and lipstick with beards. What I have learned is that there is no one way to be femme. Some wear their fierceness on their sleeves like a weapon, and others hide it beneath pastels. I have found power in many different avenues of the feminine, reclaimed.

Sometimes, it can be easy to let myself regress into the trappings of Southern femininity, especially since I’ve moved back to Tennessee. And it can be especially easy when I am rewarded with the mixed privilege of passing as straight. My queerness is routinely erased in the workplace, and it can be difficult to decide to out yourself when Tennessee currently does not have laws on the books protecting queer people from discrimination. So passing can start to feel, not only like a social mandate, but also an economic one. In what class does my femininity sit? In which class do I wish to sit?

But that’s when I decide that it is time to play, just like my mother taught me. I sit in a chair with my legs spread, just like I was told not to. To be femme is not just to be feminine, but to allow myself to practice femininity in ways that empower me. Most days, I choose not to wear makeup, but I also choose to center the personal in my writing, and to ask for care when I need it. I let myself take care of others because I know my community needs to be strong for each other. I allow myself to be vulnerable because it grants me power to take what I want. I now find myself reenacting the rituals, but I choose to go in sans war paint.

Listen To The Sound Of Gender Transforming: Five-Tracks Of Resistance

Ayesha Sharma — Wed, 22 Aug 2018 08:17:35 +0000

Diasphoria: A Narrative Archive for and by Trans People of Color by Ayesha Sharma

We experience not only the in-betweenness of gender, but also the instability of ‘home.’

I’m Ayesha Sharma, and I’m an agender multimedia creative. I move through emotions like waves and, especially with the experience of gender and cultural dysphoria, I’ve felt an urgency in the past year to find a community that would provide comfort in shared identities and could foster mutual growth at the same time.

I was motivated to find a medium to share these discussions around gender and cultural dysphoria sonically.

On several warm December afternoons in Cape Town, South Africa, old and new friends sat down around a coffee table to discuss something that was relevant to all of us: gender disruption. We are six trans and gender variant people of color who share a real boredom in the gender binary.

Some of us were determined in our resistance of gender conformity while others had grown tired and frustrated from the backlash we’d received and the dysphoria we experienced.

We had gathered on these afternoons to collaborate and spend time with one another, but our meetings offered us much more: community affirmation toward some of our daily struggles.

Shared identity definitely does not mean shared experience, but it can provide mutual comfort and potential growth.
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The group of us includes Rumano Fabrishh, Jay-Aeron Gertse, Reinhard Mahalie, Nazlee Saif Arbee, Suhail Kapdi, Saadiq Shiraz Soeker, and me, Ayesha Sharma.

We’re from South Africa, Namibia, and the United States.

From Southern Africa, East Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia; we are diasporic migrants through generations.

And so we experience not only the in-betweenness of gender, but some of us also feel the instability of “home.”

I produced the beats for each track through personal meditations on diaspora and gender resistance and then traveled to Cape Town to take part in relevant conversations with other trans and variant people of color.

I then recorded our conversations and later sampled words, phrases, and sounds from these recordings to overlap and mix with the theme-inspired beats I had produced.

The process evolved to become this autoethnographic EP, called Diasphoria: A Narrative Archive for and by Trans People of Color. The EP features two main tracks, “Catharsis” and “Imagining.” “Catharsis” is meant to stand as an ideological and emotional exploration of (gender) oppression and imagining as a journey in seeking elevation from the personal struggles that oppression brings as well as from the mental restrictions that keep us from actualizing our expansive selves.

This five-track recording offers a taste of our theory-forming, community-affirming group discussions.

Trans and gender variant people of color, like in this very project, are often the creators of content; the teachers, and the earth-shakers.

That’s why, when several conversations are sliced up and put together, they stand as an exhibition of new knowledge — new theory. Trans and gender variant POC are academics, journalists, and creatives in the fact that our personal acts of resistance and persistence boldly oppose colonial social structures. In that, people who occupy these identities have the potential to be role models and uncomfortable truth tellers.

The sentiments shared in this EP are arranged specifically for trans and gender variant POC listeners, as the discussions themselves were initiated with the intention to promote insight, affirmation, and expansion based on shared identities.

They comment on colonialism and the gender binary, gendered bodies, queer desire, self-confidence and community affirmation, religion, morality, social media community, and much more.

Others who are not trans and gender variant POC are invited to listen to this EP too, but with the understanding that the goal shouldn’t only be to consume, but to hold oneself accountable to meaningful reparations as well.

Some of the ways that this is possible are by promoting the media visibility of trans and gender variant POC creatives as well as by supporting representation of trans people by trans people, when cis queers often gain disproportionate mobility for capitalizing on them instead.

This project would not have been possible without the energy and time of my friends and collaborators.

Jay, Rumano, and Reinhold

Jay, Rumano, and Reinhard are an inspiring team who possess the capabilities to revolutionize their industries and people’s lives in the process.

Saif, Suhail, and Shiraz

Saif is passionate, intentional, and steadfast in their messages of liberation, meaning that they come away from most interactions either getting free things, loyal admirers, or stupefied students. Suhail is a hilarious, humble, and explorative soul whose interests are subtly rooted in a motivation toward deeper meaning and morality. Shiraz is a force whose essence and beliefs challenge traditional knowledge through creative practice.

Wandile Dhlamini

Wandile Dhlamini was the illustrator for this project and created its cover in addition to individualized designs for each track. They’re brilliant, bold, hilarious, and talented in pretty much everything they do.

If you like what you hear in this project, share it. You can also download all five tracks directly through Bandcamp.

Also, check out my feature on this project’s collaborators soon to be released on Everyday Feminism and be sure to follow everyone on social media to support their latest work. You won’t regret it.

‘You Had No Father, You Had The Armor’

Melanie Brown — Tue, 21 Aug 2018 08:45:28 +0000

When did you first split open? Did you spill into your own hair? Did you ever find the pieces? How does it feel to look at yourself and wonder if you’re really there?

At the long end of 1986, two households emerge and I absorb the remnants of the home that split four people open. After my parents’ separation, I am always looking around for the rest of me, making sure I am still there. I am several parts of one body, holding two homes and four people’s memories.

When the phone rings at my mother’s house, my father’s berating increases to make up for the fact that he can no longer yell at her in person. Instead of embodying different parts of myself with each parent, I begin to present all of me with my mother and a shadow of me with my father. When I am with him, I am a mistake to be corrected. Most of what comes out of my mouth is wrong, so I eventually stop talking.

In my sixth year I learn that I should never have to go to the bathroom away from home. When I need to, it’s very bad and it upsets my father, but I do not know how to stop. He asks me why I don’t go before we leave, but I don’t have to go then or I do and then I have to go again. I do not know why my body works this way, but it must be wrong because he gets very irritated and lectures me for a long time—whether we find a public restroom quickly or not.

Dinners at his house feel like sharp teeth on me. He picks at me for how I eat, how much I eat and the baby fat I gain in adolescence. I come to realize he is using meal time to poke at my brother and me; asking us questions that no kids could answer, only to laugh at us then lash out at us for getting them wrong. Eventually my brother loses patience with the picking and starts to respond back. This results in a Ping-Pong game of verbal confrontations that bounce back and forth between them and latch onto my skin, assaulting me. I want to escape to the basement or the attic but my limbs are stiff against me. My body is still though I am slowly floating away from me.

In my 13th year, my brother begins to taunt me. We are at my mother’s kitchen table when he smiles, insisting I am holding my fork wrong and people will shun me for it. I melt into my plate and realize I am being eaten down to the core of me. When I look for myself in my body, I can barely find a trace of me.

How old were you when your face fell through? Did you hold it in your hands? Did you catch it in your skin? Did you lose track of where they end and you begin?

In my 17th year, I am in my first year of college when I meet Daniela*—the older cousin of one of my best friends. She becomes part of our friend group and we’re envious when she starts dating the cute guy we’re all curious about, until we find out he pulls her hair by the root when he’s angry.

We are parked in front of the house Daniela grew up in when I notice my skin becoming heavy, as though I am falling out of myself. I feel a draft in my body as though a door has opened that cannot be closed. It is on this day that I learn from my friend, that Daniela’s brothers used to throw her down the basement stairs when they were angry. I look up and stare at the house, as if for the first time, and something cracks in my bones.

I am ripped open and that tear becomes the catalyst for my sociology project—women rappers using art to discuss gendered power dynamics and abuse. When I take the risk of telling my brother and father about it, I do not mention the door of the house, the staircase or the hair pulled from Daniela’s head. I do not tell them the focus is on Eve’s Love is Blind. I simply say that I did a presentation on women rappers using music to illuminate social issues. I explain that I worked really hard and I know my professor doesn’t care for hip-hop, but I have the sense that she might be able to look at the genre in a different light after this.

For a moment, neither of them are saying anything, but they’re both smiling and they eventually begin to laugh. They make fun of me for thinking I had an impact on my professor and I begin to disappear into the length of my hair. I sail away to all those nights at the dinner table, the staircase at Daniela’s house, and the distance from the top of that first step to the basement floor.

I imagine the door to my father’s basement, the safety of his attic and the way edges of houses hold some little girls together, but pull other ones apart. When I float back, they’re still laughing. I know how quickly they erupt when disagreement is present, so I draw a smile on my face too.

Were you tangled in your words, when your flesh fell to your ankles? Could you see yourself around? Were you stuck inside your own sound?

In the last week of my 28th year, my agoraphobia and sensory processing disorder spill out on either side of me. Preparing to get on a plane for the first time since high school, I am terrified. I am washing my hands in the airport bathroom when my mother appears, telling me it’s time to board the flight.

I check my hair and make-up and walk back to where she and my brother are sitting, only to find him exploding at me. I try to figure out what I’ve done, but I am fading down to the seams of me. I am transported back to the ‘90s to the small apartment we shared with my mom. My skin snags on the image of him shouting in my doorway. I remember the shape of the bedroom door, the contour of his mouth, and the screams that shook my skin out. I think back to the day I found my room trashed and the way I held the damage like souvenirs. I recall the string of punches that came after I interfered with his business call; I remember the rhythm of his fists hitting my arm.

When I drift back to the airport he is still yelling, grating me down to my ankles. Apparently, my having to pee was very selfish and those two minutes I took to look myself over meant that the three of us could’ve missed our flight. As the screaming tapers off, I find the edge of my abandoned body, pick it up by the shreds and drag it onto the plane.

In the coming months I begin to wear my silence like armor. It becomes the protector of me. I find that the only way to be around my brother and father is to be a ground down version of me, an acceptable facsimile; it stands in for me as a way to survive. This makes me feel like I am not a real person or they are not real to me. I start to feel like I don’t really have a father or a brother. The two of them are essentially strangers to me, flaming things that mostly know how to rage at me.

Do you live inside the skin of you? Are you the girl behind the face? Did you find yourself in the shadow box? What’s left of you after the chase?

As my twenties begin to evaporate, I begin to part down the length of me. I feel enamored with men, but when they’re standing in front of me, it seems like there’s a wall between us. I think there must be something wrong with me that cannot be fixed or reconciled, so I eventually stop dating them—but the pull towards them remains.

When I tell my therapist about it, she asks if I am more attracted to men’s or women’s bodies. I tell her that is not the right question. I ask a friend for advice and they tell me that if I enjoy having sex with women, then I am queer. I know that is not the right answer. I feel drawn to men inside my bones, but when I get close to them, it feels like the best parts of me drop out of my body. I know there must be a reason why thinking about it makes me feel like I am holding my breath. I know there must be a reason why they light up so many parts of me, then leave me split up in messy piles.

On the raw edge of my 29th year, my long-term partner starts transitioning and something is pulled up and out of me. I begin thinking about the way people both transcend and encompass gender. I think about the way I am absorbing and categorizing gender and I begin to ask what I mean when I say I cannot connect with men. I begin to ask if I mean that I cannot connect with cis men. Like my other relationships at the time, there is unwarranted anger and an inability to show up for difficult conversations. But when I think about all the ways he is different than my recent partners, the most obvious difference on both a superficial and spiritual level is that he isn’t a girl.

I freeze into myself when I think about the way our relationship took shape. We are best friends and it is New Year’s Eve—one week after my 27th birthday.

He’s coming from work as a bartender, but I’m the one who’s been drinking. He starts a violent argument with me in the public hallway of my apartment building and I fall out to the edge of me. His words draw a fence around me, yelling that he can no longer play this “friend role.” I am confused and tired, but I understand he feels I’ve wronged him and now I owe him a right. I am drunk and drowning in this hallway. I just want it to stop. I cannot imagine losing him, so I have sex with him. When I come, it’s the kind of orgasm I wish I could take back.

I know there must be a reason why men light up so many parts of me then leave me split up in messy piles.
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Five years after the waves rush out and over our relationship, I read Jenny Lumet’s letter to Russell Simmons, and I am cut through to the other side of me. Her words are gentle but unapologetic and I am reminded of the intimacy that is having patience with Black men, even after experiencing harm at their hands. I wipe my face with my own hands and count how many years I’ve held on to things for fear that the men who have hurt me, would feel some of the same hurt if I use words to say what they have done to me.

She talks about making a trade—”just keep him calm, and you’ll get home” and I am yanked down to the tightest threads of me. I think about the way silence and sex turn into offerings when men decide you owe them something. My eyes spill out to my formative years and then back to adulthood. I remember the weight of being covered by flesh that never asked.

I think about all the times my eyes stood still while my body stiffened into a “no” because my words couldn’t do it. I’ve been making trades with trauma since I was 14.

Did you make oceans with your eyes, when your legs dropped out from under you? Do you recognize your body, when you split right down the length of you?

In the wake of 4:44, I awoke—30 years after I first swallowed my mouth closed. Three decades after one house became two, I widened out like unfolding fists. When I heard those words, “You had no father, you had the armor,” it felt as if they lived inside my fingers. When Jay Z says, “You got a daughter, gotta get softer,” I am holding both lines in both hands; I am holding the child me and the grown-up me in the skin of my palms.

I consider the way the world conflates hyper-masculinity with Blackness and vulnerability with femininity. I think about the way self-reflection is conceptualized as something men do in honor of daughters—but not wives. I remember my mother’s ability to hold my father’s rage. I think about the length of my emotional intelligence and how little I was when I learned to shut my mouth. I consider the way abuse patterns wrap around us like rope.

Of all the things that tried to split me, it was the juxtaposition of having a white mother and a Black father and the pain of being accepted by her and rejected by him that ultimately severed me in half. It was the confusion of not being Black enough for my father and feeling like I was supposed to partner with men who acted like him in order to prove that rejecting his abuse does not mean rejecting my Blackness. It was the cut of feeling so guilty; I would see his face in other people and believe I could undo what had been done to me by having it done again by them.

Feeling like men were in charge of me made me feel like my body wasn’t mine long before I knew what words like consent meant. So when it came time for me to say yes or no to a man, I would tighten into my mouth and fall out of my skin. I would later attribute it to my Selective Mutism, my Non-Verbal Learning Disability, and a confusion around my sexuality.

But my tendency to lose my words was born out of a trauma that developed from being unable to speak freely in my home as a child. And my difficulties with non-verbal communication were informed by a childhood that left me feeling like I was safer when I didn’t speak.

In my 36th year, I learn about the R Kelly sex cult accusations and several memories converge as if on cue. The idea of a man controlling women so much that he has power over their eating and going to the bathroom makes me fall backwards into my six-year-old self. I realize that I have spent my entire life being unsure if it is ok for me to speak, eat, go to the bathroom or do anything that reveals me as human around men.

You are not a shadow box, an after-thought or a vacant sketch of you.

My father did not get softer, as a result of having me. He simply reproduced what had been done to him as a child. And my brother’s ability to replicate my father’s abuse came from absorbing my parents’ dynamic and being able to identify more with losing yourself to a fit of violence, than being able to identify with the body that holds the scars after the fit.

I know now that people rage when they are disconnected from their person. Having so much rage projected onto me eventually resulted in my belief that I am too much of a person. Men regarded my most basic needs as something to get rid of. So I believed that if I wanted to be with a man, I’d have to get rid of myself.

When I was able to connect with queer and lesbian people, I thought it meant there was something queer about my attraction to masculinity. I started to think there was something inherently queer about me—something internal that exists outside of my attractions. But as my queerness became wider, it felt like the puzzle was being solved outside of me. The more I tried to grow into these understandings, the more I seemed to grow out of me.

When I learned I was dating a man, I simply thought the way in which I was attracted to men had revealed itself as a different shape. I thought my attraction to him could explain why my chemistry with cis men never translated properly. But I left the relationship still feeling like there was something wrong with me.

It is only now after spending years of my life depriving myself from relationships with all men and then cis men specifically as a way to protect myself, that I realize the only relationships I’ve ever had were replications of the abuse that led to the repression.

And most of the sexual experiences I’ve had with men reinforced that my body was theirs. So I became averse to the abuse and called it an aversion to men.

As I thaw out into the larger part of me, I know that the thing standing between myself and other people in relationships is not their gender. It’s the way my body viscerally responds to gender, since my early understandings of masculinity and intimacy were tied up in abuse. It’s about the way my skin translates injury, after years of experiences taught me to anticipate blood instead of love from men.

I am finally starting to ask if I am truly a poor fit for cis men or simply not attracted to men who act like my father and brother.

You are real raw love and gorgeous flesh. You deserve to be held like the entire shape of you.

In the aftermath of the home that broke open, I know that girls like Daniela* and I will have a steeper climb towards finding home in the arms of a man, because of what happened at the hands of men in our homes. I know that relationships aren’t about breaking somebody down or taking away their person, as a way to regain yours. I know that intimacy doesn’t feel like being trapped inside a house. I know that love doesn’t feel like the wrong side of the basement door.

When I look at the place inside me that split, I can see the wound and feel it closing. I know that people are neither good nor bad, but in a constant state of becoming. When they engage in harmful behaviors it’s because they’ve been profoundly hurt and they’re perpetuating that learning. I know unlearning is a process. I know I’ve survived both my child and adulthood due to my ability to read people who were so checked out from their person, they didn’t care if what happened next froze me out of my person.

I know that brain structure, systemic and familial post-trauma can complicate the ability to say or hear a no. I know that doesn’t make it a yes. I know the thing that causes people to control and rage is the same thing that allows them to keep going during a sexual act, after a face has gone blank. And I know I don’t owe it to anyone to be an emotional punching bag while they work through their trauma superficially through me.

On the long end of my 36th year, I figured out why that complex, primal, physical and emotional longing for men never went away. It is part of me, but it is no longer a gash on me. I am learning how to stop the blood. In the wake of my healing, I know that trying to love people in similar pain as me was an attempt to grow the skin over the cuts that once divided me.

I am not broken, but I have existed in pieces and I know that being deeply harmed during childhood is a particular kind of bruise. I have a higher level of empathy because of it and I know that empathy will translate into the highest level of love for myself as I continue to learn that I cannot love the rage out of a person. And if you are navigating that kind of trauma, you deserve to learn it too.

You deserve to be loved like survival, like the spelling of your name, like the softest whisper and the loudest yell that sounds like the entire length of you. And you deserve to hear it over and over again until you know it’s true.

Mongolian Pride: LGBTQ Activism In One Developing Country

Aubrey Menarndt — Wed, 15 Aug 2018 08:41:37 +0000

In Mongolia, LGBTQ activists are leveraging political transition to create progressive change.

Nyamdorj Anaraa has come out to his friends and family three times: first as a lesbian, second as a transgender man, and finally as a transgender man who is attracted to other men.

From a young age, Anaraa knew that he was different from his peers. For many years, he identified as a lesbian. He married a woman and the two became pillars of Mongolia’s burgeoning LGBTQ community. However, even within this community—which did not yet include people with alternative gender expression—Anaraa felt out of place.

Anaraa hated his female-assigned body. At first, in speaking to other women, he thought the body shame that he was experiencing was endemic to being a woman in a patriarchal society. When he tried to express his feelings to the group, he was met with sympathy and told that all women hate their bodies for falling short of established beauty standards. While he at first thought that his feelings stemmed from the same toxic source, he eventually realized that what he was feeling was instead gender dysphoria, the distress experienced from the misalignment of one’s gender identity and the sex one is assigned at birth.

In 2004, Anaraa embraced what he had not been able to express until then: he began telling people that he was trans. In 2011, he began his physical transition by pursuing surgery and hormone therapy. As Anaraa transitioned, he began to see the beauty in his body for the first time. “The more I became me, the more I came into my body,” he said in our April interview. “I began to see the beauty of myself and other men.” This profound psychological and physical change also precipitated his attraction to other men, and now he identifies as a queer trans man.

Anaraa Nyamdorj, a co-founder and advisor of the LGBT Centre, making opening remarks during the annual IDAHOTB (International day against homophobia, transphobia and biphobia) exhibition of visual arts that he established in 2014 to promote young artists’ engagement in LGBTI issues in Mongolia, photo by Erdeneburen

In the same way that Anaraa has undergone tremendous transition, so too has Mongolia. Only 28 years ago, the vast, yet sparsely-populated country became an unlikely democracy situated between two global superpowers. Mongolia has endured many economic and political trials, but because of its own commitment to democratic values and the urging of activists like Anaraa, it has become a leader in human rights protections for developing nations.

For Anaraa, the lack of resources available to him during his struggle for self-realization made his life more difficult. “Had I the language, had I the environment, had I even an inkling of [transgender] people […], had I been in a community where there was knowledge of other gender expressions, I wouldn’t have complicated my life so much by having to come out three times,” he laments. Indeed, Anaraa, now 41, came of age during a turbulent time for the country of Mongolia. During his childhood, Mongolia was a puppet regime of the Soviet empire. The country suffered under the poverty of late-stage communism and information did not easily find its way in or out of the country. In 1990, Mongolia’s youth staged a revolution, throwing off the Soviet yoke. As was true for many former socialist countries, the 1990s were a desperate time as the country struggled with its economic transition to democracy and capitalism. The Mongolia of Anaraa’s youth was not a place with access to resources for people struggling with queer identities.

Though not an ideal environment for navigating queer identities, Mongolia’s political transition provided Anaraa with the inspiration he later used to fight for LGBTQ rights in his country.

The Mongolia of Anaraa’s youth was not a place with access to resources for people struggling with queer identities.
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Anaraa’s was inspired by his mother’s activism. Tsendmaa Khorchinjav worked her whole life as an engineer in agrarian Mongolia’s iconic wool and cashmere industry. When Mongolia’s economic and political transition began, domestic manufacturers were unable to compete, and eager Chinese traders bought companies and raw agricultural materials wholesale. Tsendmaa’s colleagues chose her to lead the Federation of Wool and Cashmere Producers, an industry association, and she took to her charge of saving the quickly collapsing domestic industry. As Anaraa describes, his mother—who had lived her whole life under a communist system—threw herself into researching marketing, commodity pricing. She presented her findings to parliament and organized politically to pass a law that prohibited raw cashmere exports. This protectionist measure ensured that cashmere would be processed in Mongolia before being sold to other countries, protecting the industry and saving the jobs of countless Mongolian workers. Because of his mother’s work, Anaraa learned firsthand that change can be won by ordinary people organizing for legislative change.

Anaraa has dedicated his life to helping others find the self-knowledge and acceptance that was once elusive to him. In 2007, he and a group of passionate activists founded Mongolia’s LGBT Center, the first resource of its kind in the country. The group focuses on not only creating social awareness and acceptance of its community, but pursues an ambitious legislative agenda. While there is certainly discrimination against Mongolia’s queer community, the work of the LGBT Center has pushed the Mongolian government to adopt a legislative framework far more progressive than that of its neighbors. While other post-Soviet republics have seen an increase in intolerance towards queer communities, Mongolia has recently introduced new protections into law.

The LGBT Centre staff, volunteers and allies at the 1 Billion Rising March on 8 March 2018, photo by Erdeneburen

The LGBT Center’s political organization is savvy. In addition to finding allies in country, they have leveraged Mongolia’s international allies and the treaties that the country is party to in order to promote their legislative agenda. As a member of the United Nations (UN) and signatory to its treaties, Mongolia is periodically reviewed for its protection of universal human rights. In 2010, the freshly incorporated LGBT Center inserted itself as a civil society organization involved in evaluating Mongolia’s human rights progress and reporting back to the UN. This process yielded the recommendations that hate crimes should be outlawed, investigated, and that the perpetrators of such crimes should be punished; that the country should pass a comprehensive stand-alone law on discrimination that includes sexual orientation and gender identity; and that it improve public education on human rights and non-discrimination.

By going through the UN processes, the LGBT Center had established a mandate, which it could then use to hold the country of Mongolia accountable. The Center used this platform to maintain a dialogue with government and the National Human Rights Commission in order to push for reform.

Becoming Trans: Transgender Identity in the Middle Ages
theestablishment.co

Victory was not straightforward, however. When Mongolia overhauled its criminal code (which had been written in the communist era), the LGBT Center had hoped to include a classic anti-hate crime definition so as to expressly protect minorities. Instead, the new criminal code, passed in 2015 and in force since 2017, outlawed discrimination of any kind. While this was a victory, the broad wording of the new law does not explicitly protect the LGBTQ community in the way its members had hoped it would.

Anaraa and his colleagues realized that in order to receive this protection, they needed to make sure that hate crimes became recognized as discrimination. Mongolians needed to learn that engaging in hate speech or otherwise harming others because of their gender identity or sexual orientation did not constitute freedom of speech, but was now a form of discrimination under Mongolia’s new criminal code. They launched several initiatives to make sure that discrimination is widely recognized: they helped pass a law preventing medical discrimination against LGBTQ people and have provided education and treatment guidelines for medical professionals; they pushed for a ministerial resolution against police discrimination; and are currently fighting against employment discrimination and are actively engaged in debating a labor law in parliament.

In November 2017, a transgender woman was arrested for being drunk and disorderly. While in police custody, an officer pinned her to the floor and forcibly stripped her. The police division responsible did not find the officer guilty of any wrongdoing, and to date the LGBT Center is not aware if any disciplinary action that has been taken against this officer. The Center helped the victim file a complaint with the National Human Rights Commission. In helping bring her case to authorities for prosecution under the criminal code, the LGBT Center realized that beyond pursuing justice in her individual case, the police force as a whole would benefit from a better understanding of discrimination.

Staff, volunteers and allies of the LGBT Centre during the 1 Billion Rising March on 8 March 2018, photo by Erdeneburen

Aside from legal action, the Center focuses on education. As Anaraa explains, providing information and taking away fear of the unknown is crucial to changing people’s attitudes and gaining acceptance. “Once you’re able to claim your identity and fully live as yourself and be honest about your feelings […] people do accept you,” he said. “They might be shocked at first, but then you take the time to educate them and actually acceptance is very easy to come by.”

With support from the Asia Foundation and the U.S. and French embassies, the LGBT Center has developed a curriculum on discrimination and is training the Mongolian police force. The training—called “A Hate Free and Tolerant Mongolia”—uses lectures, case studies, and exercises to help police officers recognize discrimination and hate crimes. At the outset of training, some officers did not see the harm in discrimination and were inclined to express their personal opinions about minority groups in response to training prompts. Many officers expressed the belief that hate crimes do not exist in their country. Trainers described a divide between older and younger officers, gleaning optimism from the younger officers’ more tolerant attitudes and willingness to learn. Moreover, the training has been successful in that it has offered guidance to officers as to how to implement the new criminal code in their daily work.

As Anaraa explains, providing information and taking away fear of the unknown is crucial to changing people’s attitudes and gaining acceptance.
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Beyond creating a safer and more equitable country, training police officers in this way generates data to understand the depth of the problem and identify areas for improvement. Officers admitted that before the introduction of the new criminal code and training on its implications for their work, they were inclined to classify crimes that they could now identify as hate crimes as something else. For example, what they may have previously classified as a straightforward assault case, officers now know to classify as a hate crime if it was motivated by discrimination and bias towards a minority group.

The LGBT Center has now conducted six trainings of over 300 police officers, as well as some prosecutors and judges. They have been able to include officers from rural areas spanning Mongolia’s vast landscape and are currently completing training for all nine divisions of Ulaanbaatar’s police force. Anaraa believes that while this has been a strong start, for this training to truly have an impact over time it needs to be included in compulsory police academy curriculum to ensure that every officer understands what hate crimes are and their responsibility in preventing and prosecuting them.

Mongolia began its fight for LGBTQ equality by modeling the laws after other nations, but in doing so became a leader that other countries may now follow. Anaraa recently became the third transgender person in the country to legally change his gender marker on his government documentation, something that only one third of governments worldwide currently allow. He has spent the last eighteen years fighting tirelessly to improve the lives of LGBTQ people in Mongolia, and due in no small part to his effort, there is now a thriving community of leaders and activists.

After three years as the Executive Director, Anaraa recently resigned his leadership position. He will continue on in an advisory capacity while Munkhtuya Dashtsend, the Center’s former Legal Program Manager, leads the Center. He is content to live his life knowing that the group he helped found will continue to advocate for a more equal Mongolia. Looking ahead to the future, Anaraa believes the best times are yet to come. “Things will only get better […] the work of the LGBT Center will never be complete,” he said.“We have another fifty years of work ahead of us, but I do believe that in another ten years, we will have a very, very beautiful society.”