Josephy Media

For a long time, I refused to use a gendered pronoun. At all. After experimenting with Spivak pronouns, third-person pronouns, and gender-neutral pronouns of all sorts, I settled upon a salad mix of third-person pronouns and the zie/zer contingent. If the words “he” or “she” entered my speech, they were accompanied by a painful wince at the knowledge that somebody, somewhere, was gendering me without my consent.

The only times I ever used such pronouns was with trans men or trans women, who I privileged as having interrogated their gender more fully and whose gender I felt I could actually respect.  Dear friends validated me through confessions about how much more free they could be in their language, which had otherwise forced them to conceptualize people as a gender in lieu of people with a gender.

I fancied myself a brave gender deconstructionist, boldly subverting norms in the hopes that maybe somebody would have an entry point to understand me and my contentious relationship to gender.  If someone asked “Man or woman?”, I would smartly reply, “I don’t know.  I didn’t ask.”  Perhaps somebody would in turn ask me, and I could talk about my sense of gender dysphoria, my history of ungendering, and my current sense of myself as an ocean in which gendered characteristics float around like flotsam and jetsam, waiting to be swooped into a net and rummaged through every so often.

Meanwhile, I was being a big ol’ sexist.

It first struck me when flying back from Los Angeles, reading the incredibly deft, incisive Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity.  What I had been doing, as scared as I was of anybody doing it to me, was disrespecting people’s own personally felt sense of gender and not giving them the accordance of referring to them by the pronoun of their own design.  It was this passage in particular that finally dismantled the internal contradiction:

When we project our own gender-based assumptions and opinions onto other people’s behaviors and bodies, we necessarily erase the distinctness of their individual genders and sexualities.  Each of us has a unique experience with gender, one that is influenced by a host of extrinsic factors, such as culture, relition, race, economic class, upbringing, and ability, as well as intrinsic factors including our anatomy, genetic and hormonal makeup, subconscious sex, sexual orientation, and gender expression (page 112).

A majority of the violence and debilitation I’ve experienced has been that of a masculine nature: physical and emotional abuse at the hands of a brooding, rage-filled father, tearing a number of joints through wrestling and football, and being brought to a physical wreck through bicycle collisions with cars.  To that end, it seems almost too obvious to make the connection between my own reactionary wariness of masculinity and subsequent crusade to disrupt gender.  However, it would be disingenuous to think otherwise.

These notions came to a head the other week, when I spent the day giving library services to incarcerated teens at a local juvenile detention center.  For many of these teens, their masculine male identity is one of the foremost important aspects of their being.  And for each of these teens, I gave them the benefit of the doubt.  I modeled their approach and engaged them on the gender they presented.  When they complained that some of the books were “too girly,” I happily responded with books featuring car chases, sports, and violence.  I even threw out a “he” and “guys” every so often.

It felt strange, but I left the day quite pleased with myself.  And I’ll be darned if I didn’t just give about 100 incarcerated teens a respectful introduction to the library and its resources.

The other day, I took a trip to the
Aquarium of the Pacific. It’s a beautiful facility filled with sharks, manta rays, jellyfish, lorikeets and all sorts of gorgeous tropical sea creatures and plant life, presented in the context of habitat preservation. I spent most of my time ambling about, enmeshed in the vibrant beauty of the deep.

That’s when, to quote Ace of Base, I saw the sign.

I have never been a fan of using parallels from other animals to build support for queer and trans people. I wouldn’t use lions eating their children as an argument for legalizing child cannibalism as far as I would use these fish as an argument for dismantling the barriers to health care, employment, safety from violence, and other factors affecting trans people (much less myself). And these metaphors validate a dangerous game of ceding to questions of “What is natural?” when trying to impress a basic human rights issue among the public, many of whom have the same exoticized relationship with the “natural” world as many trans people are trying to avoid fostering with themselves.

However, these examples do find some utility, such as in Ellen Wittlinger’s novel Parrotfish. This humorously touching novel features Grady, a young trans man who navigates new relationships with family, friends, and greater society after making the transition at school. Grady soon finds unexpected friendship in Sebastian, a geek who is able to take Grady’s gender transition in stride after having finished a report about the parrotfish, which–along with the blackspot angelfish and others–are malleable with their sexual organs and social roles. While you get the feeling that Sebastian is simply a generally accepting and light-hearted person, Sebastian’s line of thinking parallels many young adults who simply love the exercise of drawing comparisons between life sciences and human behavior.

However, the way I imagine Sebastian came across information about the parrotfish is quite different in tone than encountering a tank of sequestered, gender-switching fish, punctuated by the exclamatory & sensationalized “Before long, she’s a he!”

It’s no wonder that I was soon surrounded by children and adults alike clutching their genitals and joining in murmurs of “EW” and “WEIRD!” These sounds echoed off the thick glass walls as I moved along to view the fish of the North Pacific.

Ever since my six year-old self ran screaming from the “feed me” scene from Little Shop of Horrors, I’ve avoided horror movies like the plague. However, that never stopped me from combing the horror section of the video rental store for every plot nugget I could glean from the backs of the tapes. Now that local video stores are mostly closing up shop, I’ve transferred my obsession to Wikipedia articles and full summaries. I’ve often wondered: without the visceral thrill, what’s there to love? For me, horror movies have been less about the thrills so much as the mythologies behind them–especially when it comes to playing the media studies game of determining which cultural anxieties are getting massaged out of the public’s consciousness.

For instance, were Texas Chainsaw Massacre or These Hills Have Eyes forged by a classist fear about the rural poor and–in an ancillary way–the dominance of the southern doctrine in American politics? Or did Prom Night arise from anxiety over the death of the traditional, white, middle class heterosexist narrative of youth as symbolized by the popular prom ritual? I wonder if the true villain was not obsessed teacher, but the gutting of sex education for teenagers, whereby teens have faced the worst STI outbreak among youth in modern American history (not to mention the rising college costs, subsequent debt, declining job market, and poor benefits which await them).

Once I started, I couldn’t stop. Hostel was really about tourism, multinational capital, rebuilding efforts in the Eastern bloc countries, and the rise of neofascism. Saw was really about the failing health care system and the unjust way it metes out punishment against the poor.

But when it comes to American horror movies, almost nothing gets a more unfair shake than ancient “Indian burial grounds.” Whether it was Pet Sematary, Poltergeist, The Shining, The Amityville Horror, or any of the others, viewers were faced with vengeful, uprooted American Indian spirits taking their savage and irrational anger out against–in almost all cases–a ragtag bunch of innocent white people who become drawn into their trap.

from First Nations: Land Rights and Environmentalism in British Columbia

Nevermind the fact that these mythologies substitute a diverse range of peoples for a singular, vengeful amalgamation and that the iconic “burial ground” neglects a wide range of funerary practices:

Native American burial customs have varied widely, not only geographically, but also through time, having been shaped by differing environments, social structure, and spiritual beliefs. Prehistoric civilizations evolved methods of caring for the dead that reflected either the seasonal movements of nomadic societies or the lifeways of settled communities organized around fixed locations. As they evolved, burial practices included various forms of encasement, sub-surface interment, cremation, and exposure. Custom usually dictated some type of purification ritual at the time of burial. Certain ceremonies called for secondary interments following incineration or exposure of the body, and in such cases, the rites might extend over some time period. Where the distinctions in social status were marked, the rites were more elaborate.

The Plains Indians and certain Indians of the Pacific Northwest commonly practiced above-ground burials using trees, scaffolds, canoes, and boxes on stilts, which decayed over time.

More permanent were earthen constructions, such as the chambered mounds and crematory mounds of the Indians of the Mississippi River drainage. In some areas of the Southeast and Southwest, cemeteries for urn burials, using earthenware jars, were common.

BURIAL CUSTOMS AND CEMETERIES IN AMERICAN HISTORY — U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service

It’s hard to deny that there’s a subtext of assuaging white guilt over the displacement–and continued political subjugation–of American Indians by the English and French WASPs as well as the American government. Questions about why the (reductively amalgamated) spirits should be so angry are soon subsumed into pathos for, for example, the innocent Jack Torrance who’s just trying to forge a new, sober life. Why should audiences feel any bit of sympathy for a faceless, generic mass of American Indian spirits who are presumably just as savage in death as they were in life?

Sprawl and gentrification are often tied into this notion of “better to ask forgiveness than permission,” which is frightening on the large scale of policy, governance, and urban planning. It’s why I shudder to see the government of the city of Pittsburgh forging ahead with a weak community benefits agreement for residents of the Hill District. Because once the deal is done, the questions are subsumed into that acculturated notion of innocent whites subjected to the anger of those who they trampled on, leaving subsequent generations to look on with horror as they beg, “Please forgive me!”

And who do you think is going to get the sympathy?

Ever since I was little, I felt a secret affinity for two albums: Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (1973) and the Beach Boy’s Pet Sounds (1966).  In many ways, music was iconographic of my familial relationships at the time.  The kitchen hosted my mom and I as we danced to the sharp beats of Annie Lennox singing “Walking on Broken Glass.”  Black Sabbath signaled the transformation from living room to wrestling ring, in which I evaded my father under tables and around the backs of couches for as long as the “Crazy Train” could last.  Yet, when it was time for me to saunter back into my room, the relationship I had with myself was shaped through those two albums.

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road seems obvious enough in hindsight, with its versatile array of rocking numbers, mournful balladry, and glitzy pop anthems.  However, it wasn’t until walking home from the bus last November that I realize why my little queer self turned to Pet Sounds again and again.

It was a typical November walk.  Cold winds nipped at me.  Leaves shuffled under my feet.  The sky was a dusky grey.  That’s when Brian Wilson broke through with gorgeous upper-register singing, bending and swaying the notes of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” over layer upon layer of orchestration.  I forgot I had uploaded the album to my MP3 player, and the surprise caused me to listen more closely to the lyrics than I had in years.

What I found were lamentations of a love that the world wouldn’t support or understand (think: queer love), coupled with a longing to live in a time unconstrained by such repression.  I imagined my young queer self yearning along with Brian Wilson as the following lines frame the album:

Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older
Then we wouldn’t have to wait so long
And wouldn’t it be nice to live together
In the kind of world where we belong

You know its gonna make it that much better
When we can say goodnight and stay together

or these lines from “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times”: 

Sometimes I feel very sad
Sometimes I feel very sad
(Can’t find nothin’ i can put my heart and soul into)
Sometimes I feel very sad
(can’t find nothin’ i can put my heart and soul into)

I guess I just wasn’t made for these times

I wonder now too if me at age eight was sensing those moments, like I did on that fall walk home from work. Or if I cried, as I do now, at those final moments of “God Only Knows,” when the round of voices chase each other with the lyric “God only knows what I’d be without you,” over and over again, until the song has no choice but to simply fade away.