Welcome to Trans Futures Week, a project that joins our community's foremost thinkers in historic discussions about the future of transgender storytelling, power, healthcare, and more. Find the full series here as new conversations roll out each day.
The longer I’ve been out as trans, the less central the idea of “gender” has felt to my experience. That may be surprising, but it’s probably just a function of time passing: What was once a fundamental framework for understanding myself now feels a lot more like fuel for jokes and playful interrelation. These days, I call my friends “bro (she/her),” and we can laugh about the twisted affirmation of being called a “dyke” or a “faggot” by those who will never know just how right they are. To be trans is so much more than to be at odds with the sex you were assigned at birth; it’s an orientation to selfhood that welcomes change, a divine practice of making and remaking yourself in your own image — over the course of a lifetime, but also sometimes within the same hour.
While I’ve never preferred the term “gender abolitionist” — surely there are worthier targets than a concept that’s widely open to interpretation — it does seem like the future of “gender” may indeed involve some demolition, or at the very least dismantlement. And so what might gender become when it's not tied to that tired calculus of masculinity and femininity?
For ALOK, it’s what they call “wonder-making.” In a recent Zoom conversation with Atypical actor Brigette Lundy-Paine, the poet and performer continued, “I just want to feel, be, and live wonderfully, which means I want to continually be in situations that I have no vocabulary for.”
It’s a sentiment that Lundy-Paine deftly echoes when sharing how deeply they were impacted by Argentinian social psychologist Marlene Wayar’s theory of transness as a performance of “color and shades, shadows and light.”
“I’ve really tried to move away from using words like ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ to describe anything in my life,” Lundy-Paine explained. “I just want to feel like pure energy.”
Thankfully, when it comes to parsing the future of gender play, both ALOK and Lundy-Paine have quite the vocabulary. From the pitfalls of “passing,” to the intricacies of auditioning while nonbinary, read more from the pair’s decidedly Big Brain conversation below.
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What does “gender play” mean to you, and what place do you see for it in our collective future?
Brigette Lundy-Paine: “Gender play” has expanded in my mind to take on a spectrum of different mediums and textures and feelings and experiences. The more relaxed I get in my body and at peace with the fact that there’s no way to leave it, gender play has become a mythology that I create for myself. It’s something that I find in the books and the films that I watch. It’s something that I find in my friendships. It’s less and less about the way that I present, I think, but about a web of references and experiences that I gather and hold underneath my skin; that I trust that the people who are close to me can recognize.
ALOK: The distinction between living and existing is one that’s very precious to me, and I think play is one of the vital resources that makes existence into life. Where existence is so much about fitting into other people’s ideas of how you should act, how you should adorn yourself, how you should allocate your time, play is an experiment with freedom here on earth. I’m trying to incorporate a zest for play into everything I do.
There used to be so much of an investment in sincerity around my gender like, this is who I really am. Then I realized that was me overcompensating because of other people’s disavowal of myself. When I stopped centering other's imagination of me and started to witness myself for myself, I allowed myself to play. I allowed myself to make joy a compass and follow what charms me: different experiences, different aesthetics, different accessories, different prints. I try not to ask why.
BLP: I love that idea of not asking why. It’s so easy to get caught in a constant debate with yourself over your own validity if you bring “why” into it too often. For a long time, I was obsessed with seeing myself reflected, with making sure there were others doing the same things — especially with gender play — because I wanted to be seen, to be loved, to be accepted. I felt like I had to ensure there was a community that was a base for that. But when you close your eyes and ears, when you limit your senses so you can be more finely tuned to your gut stream of energy, you realize your community expands and is electrified alongside you.
A: When I first started to understand myself as trans, I actively sought people who could reconfirm my deepest hesitations and intuitions. I found those people and then I realized that, actually, we were far more dissimilar to each other than [alike]. At first, there's a sense of grief there of having to confront that you might be the only person in the world who experiences the world like you, and then at some point, I became grateful for that fact: How special it is that each person in the entire galaxy is their own universe. I wish that we could romanticize and glorify that — our fundamental incongruity, our dissonance, our alterity. I want us to develop a form of belonging where people are encouraged to be expansive and unruly.
BLP: And where no one has control over our own body, and where we release control over other people’s bodies. Having a trans body, there’s a lot of desperation and fear that everywhere you go, the narratives that are projected onto you are real, that they’re going to tear you away from the self that you know are. You literally have to build a shield, a love shield, within which you know that others have no power over you.
A: I love this idea of a “love shield.” When I’m thinking about play, I don’t want to romanticize the fact that all of us can live lives of powerful self-concept outside of other people’s projection, but I also want to create moments of that with each other. Safety, for me, feels like being experienced for myself, not for other people’s projection of me. I want that kind of delicacy with my friends. That’s where I know that I feel most me — when I’m given permission to not make sense.
A specter that feels as though it’s brewing in this conversation is, in many ways, the opposite of play — passing. What does this term bring up for you, and how should we approach it as we dream into the future?
BLP: I feel like I’m past passing, or deciding that I want to commit to passing. I’m just not interested in perception in that way; I'm interested in energy exchange. I’m interested in staying grounded in myself and my ideals and morals, and I’m interested in being around people who have flexible minds. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to realize what we are to other people is really just a brief splash of color and energy in their story of their own self. What people see when they look at me is not my responsibility; there’s nothing I can do.
A: I struggle with the language of “passing” because it presumes that there’s a particular way to look cis, which is a myth because there’s a zillion ways to look like a woman and a zillion ways to look like a man. So when we say “passing," we reinscribe the idea that what we associate with cisness belongs to just cisness — not that trans people have always looked like that. What does it mean to “pass” when you’re just being yourself? I just don’t think that gender norms exist, and so I’m not sure if it works anymore to say someone is passing as a woman or as a man, because trans people are women and men.
Instead of “passing,” I use the words “conforming and nonconforming,” as we exist in a world where power is distributed to people who conform to society’s ideas of who they should be, not just in terms of gender, but class and race and all other vectors. Those of us who are seen as non-conforming to those ideas, those made up beliefs, are punished for it as a way to force compliance.
BLP: I really love what you said about passing and about that not being really an applicable concept anymore because, also, it's the coolest thing to be trans. I would never want someone to think I was cis. Why? We get to be this.
A: It's taken me so long in my life to get to that point of, “How blessed are we?” That's why it makes me really frustrated that the only narratives that circulate around trans people are that we're woefully inadequate or that we're perpetually aspirational or that we're broken or disorderly, because in my experience, transness has actually been the most grounding practice imaginable. It's allowed the reunion of my mind, body, and my spirit and the enrichment of my existence into becoming life. It's made living beautiful and sacred and precious. And those things don't mean easy, and those things don't mean happy, but they mean sentient.
What’s devastating for me — and this is something I want to ask you about — is how we [reenact these patterns] in our own spaces. In trans community, I found myself lassoed into a whole new set of parameters — oh, you’re not masc enough; you’re not femme enough; you’re not trans enough. All of these metrics of “real” were even more heartbreaking for me. I was like, we know what it’s like to be punished for not conforming; why are we doing that to our own? Have you experienced this in your journey?
BLP: I really have, and I think it's a result of fighting for survival within this capitalist system. We have to support ourselves, [and many of us do so] by creating brands for ourselves on social media. But what’s so difficult about constantly reinventing your identity through the lens of gender or genderlessness is that it’s impossible to sell, and it should be. My goal is to continue to pervert, like Donna Haraway says in Cyborg Manifesto, my body, my mind, my ideas, so that the capitalist mouth can’t digest me.
I’d love to talk about gender less as an identity than as a medium. What does doing gender, or making it, mean to you?
A: I’m just trying to live my best life, which means the art I'm making is not about the composition of a poem, or the creation of a joke, or an outfit that I choreograph. It’s about the life that I choreograph — how I structure my time in the day, what I'm saying, how I say it. [Through this mentality] I realized everything could be redone and remade and rehashed; that my life could be a rough draft, which means that new information, new people, new experiences can make me fundamentally change who I am. Even in the course of this conversation, I’m a different person because of the things that were shared.
I think gender, for me, is about wonder-making, which means I want to continually be in situations that I have no vocabulary for. I want to continually fall in love with absolutely absurd things. I want to delve into Wikipedia articles on niche moments in history for the rest of my life. I want to watch documentaries about the galaxy and reflect on how infinitesimally small I am. That’s all part of my wonder-making, which is part of my gender. I think a recurring theme here is that gender is not a sufficient framework to speak to the larger spiritual project of presence. Gender is so deeply wedded to the body in Western psyche when in fact what’s so powerful about trans people is that we forefound a vocabulary that’s more vast than the body.
BLP: I had the opportunity to meet and interview Marlene Wayar earlier this year. She's one of the leaders of the trans liberation movement in Argentina and the author of a book called Travesti, which is a word that originated in the theater describing men who played female parts. Marlene’s whole theory about transness is that it’s a performance of colors and shades, shadows and light. I loved that and have really tried to move away from using words like “masculine” and “feminine” to describe anything in my life because it’s so limiting and uncreative. I don't care what people think I am. I don’t care what I think I am. I just want to feel like pure energy.
A: That was something I wanted to ask you about. I’ve started auditioning more, and it’s deeply soul-crushing, because the roles have so much gender-coding and such a lack of imagination for casting. When you ask why gender is essential to a character, [casting directors] refuse to go there. They’ll say, “Okay, we think you’re a better fit for this role,” and it’s some weird nonbinary part that makes so sense and just feels like someone trying to make a profit. What’s it like for you navigating the binary in casting?
BLP: I’ve completely given up. I audition to keep myself in practice when people I like are involved, but I don’t get cast from auditions anymore because people don’t know what to do with me. I used to do the whole story of a girl going home to her family, looking all femme, doing a fucking voice, but I don’t do that anymore, because I don’t care. I want to be like John Waters and stay a pervert forever. And you can’t stay a pervert if you’re contorting yourself to be part of the sale of an identity.
Thank you both so much for sharing such intimate and creative thoughts. I have just one more question for each of you: When will we know when we are free?
A: The paradox of freedom is that in every moment, we're like, “I’ve done it, I’ve reached it,” and then life gives you the opportunity to realize, "No, I haven’t." I think freedom is more of an orientation; It’s actually recognizing that we’re never going to get there, and that’s the same thing for almost everything in the world. It’s really all about the journey.
BLP: Hell yeah. It’s so exactly that. There's no place that's absolute freedom, but I will say that I feel free right now talking to you, and I feel free in my body in a way that I have never before, and I cannot wait to feel more free, because I think the more you access the knowledge and the stories and the complexities around you, then you have no choice but to give in, and giving in is freedom.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
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