Death by Gender: Leelah Alcorn

By Kelly Cogswell

When I try to think about gender, I have to go lie down with smelling salts, my head swirling with all the complications that we pull on like clothes over our biological sex. Even if you stick to binary territory, gender expression is constantly shifting. A big-haired, white trash girl like my sister has bigger balls than this Bengali upper-class straight guy poet I used to know. I'd dismissed a French-Asian waiter in Paris as generically masculine until his friends turned up and he became a total swish.

There's a lot we can say about gender expression, genetics, and the intersection of biology and society, but who really cares about the nuances when the consequences are hatred, bigotry, and one more young dead queer?

Last week, at 17, Leelah Alcorn stepped in front of a truck to end years of suffering. She came out as trans at fourteen, relieved to discover there was a word for somebody like her who had never felt like a boy. Her mother's response was to drag her to Christian conversion therapists, and tell her she'd "never be a real girl" and was going to hell. At sixteen, when she decided to try the intermediate approach by coming out as gay, her parents removed her from school, took away her phone, and any access to social media. When they gave it back, not long ago, she was too isolated and depressed to survive.

It's easy to blame her parents--they deserve it, offering up hate instead of love. Hellfire instead of any kind of help. Also to blame are the Christian conversion therapists who seem to specialize in driving queer kids of all kinds over the edge. But the problem goes a lot further, to the widespread policing of gender which often intersects with sexual orientation. Gay effeminate men are never real men except maybe when it comes to their paychecks. Dyke lives rarely appear in Women's history except maybe as scapegoats for the failure of the feminist movement's second wave.

In fact, transwomen like Janet Mock have more credibility as women than I do. When her book, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More, was reviewed in Jezebel, the reviewer began by announcing that it was "unfortunately not about how to achieve her fantastic hair. Oh, because those curls are glorious."

The readers got the message: she's one of us. One even commented that when it came to viewing trans people as humans like everybody else, "It helps that she "passes"- it's hard to see her as anything BUT a woman. While it's unfair for transpeople to be held to a societal standard that is for many unattainable, it definitely helps blur the gender boundaries. A lot of people still have this ridiculous view of transwomen as hulking dudes stumbling around awkwardly in heels dudes playing dress up."

Janet Mock doesn't just read as a woman, but a certain kind of woman. And even when she, and other trans activists like Laverne Cox have tried to shift the narrative away from transition and surgery, biology and beauty, nobody's hearing the message. In fact, they probably wouldn't get a platform at all if they looked more like early transactivists Marsha P. Johnson or Sylvia Rivera. Or even any aging housewife watching her own original tits sag.

This is important, because Leelah's suicide note reveals that it wasn't just the transphobia of her parents and church that drove her to suicide, but the belief that she had to transition early or she'd be an "ugly woman", which would literally be a fate worse than death.

"The longer you wait, the harder it is to transition,she wrote. "I felt hopeless, that I was just going to look like a man in drag for the rest of my life ... I’m never going to be happy with the way I look or sound. I’m never going to have enough friends to satisfy me. I’m never going to have enough love to satisfy me. I’m never going to find a man who loves me. I’m never going to be happy. Either I live the rest of my life as a lonely man who wishes he were a woman or I live my life as a lonelier woman who hates herself."

It's unbearable all the anguish and fear in her letter. It indicts the whole LGBT community, and our failure to grapple with our diversity and accept it. The more we advance, the more we put forward only our most pedicured feet, our most photo-shopped faces. Above all it underlines our long estrangement from feminism, which at its best yanks the clothes off both the emperor and the empress, and leaves them both shivering equally in the cold.

All #BlackLivesMatter, and Advice to That Young Activist

By Kelly Cogswell

If there's any cause for hope on America's racism front, it is that young black woman in braces on the TV. She wasn't just a participant, but an organizer of some of the New York marches protesting Eric Garner's death, and the verdict that gave his cop murderer a free pass.

Watching her talk, you have to wonder how long it will be before the old guard try to wrangle her into speaking at one more March on Washington, or a big New York Rally Against Something or Other, sandwiching her in between reverend this, or congressman that, sucking up her youth and vitality the way they always do.

As an "older and wiser" activist, I feel I should give her some advice. Which first of all, is to ignore older and wiser activists of all kinds. You seem to know what you're doing, keep it up. And be especially wary of anybody offering a platform you haven't built yourself. The more successful you are, the more the old guard will come knocking at your door, and you can bet your bottom dollar they won't give much in exchange. Before you know it, your cause will have become a career, and whatever new ideas you had, whatever lines you were willing to cross will seem ridiculous, outlandish, not at all worth the risk.

I mean, really, what kind of sucker actually believes this U, S, of A, can deliver on its promises of liberty and justice for all? Or that it's worth putting yourself in harm's way for a man that's already dead? Naw, take the crumbs you can get and milk that expense account for all its worth. Not that they'll tell you that up front. They'll tell you that they're actually considering your ideas in Committee A. And adding some language to the guidelines Committee B is going to present. Change takes time, and blah blah blah. Come back next Thursday at nine for the photo op with the mayor.

No, my friend, better to do what you're doing, and refuse compromise. Let the wheelers and dealers wheel and deal. You stick to the streets. Allow yourself to dream a better city, better country. Demand everything. Fight hard, resist violence, and keep each other safe. Maybe even fly the freak flag once in a while. Avoid any proposition that requires new clothes.

All I want for Christmas is to see the hashtag upgraded to read #allblacklivesmatter. We know the names of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, but what about Dionte Green, another black death in Missouri, but gay this time? Doesn't he count, too? Or how about black cis-woman Yvette Smith who was shot twice by a deputy sheriff earlier this year in Texas? In 2010, Detroit police officer Joseph Weekley killed a young black girl Aiyana Jones. Sakia Gunn was killed for being a dyke, neither the first nor last. Friday, DeShawnda Bradley (Sanchez), a black trans woman was killed while she was pounding on a stranger's door for help.

All black lives matter, not just those of black men, and not just those killed by cops who wear on their shoulders the power of the State, and carry terror in the increasingly large guns, and teargas, and I never thought I'd say this--tanks.

Black women come in for more than their share of violence. And the deaths of black transwomen should inspire an equally enduring rage. Often committed brutally, and publicly, with extraordinary violence, their horrible deaths are meant to inspire fear in a whole population, just like lynchings. The life-and-death power on display here is not so much that of the State, but of an entire society that already forces transwomen of color to the margins. Makes school impossible, like finding decent jobs. Their lives matter, too.

Don't be afraid to say it. Maybe for the first time it would work. The movement seems open and free -- for the moment. I went down to a protest at Foley Square this week, and on my way saw young people of all races arriving together, as friends. Even if you don't believe the white kids are there for the long haul, and even if you'll often find their privilege shows, a generation ago those white kids wouldn't have been there at all. So they're learning. They're educable. And accepting. Dare everything.

Beyond that, what can I say? I've been at this a while, know how to work the press, marshal organized demos, but these free flowing, wonderful, cop-thwarting things popping up all over the city are beyond me. I'm thrilled to see street activism and direct action renewed, go beyond those sterile Facebook clicks. Some things like racism, like homophobia, won't change unless we confront them in the flesh. It's what our enemies are so afraid of.

Kelly Cogswell is the author of Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (U Minn Press, 2014).