i don't know that i agree with everything here, but it's a piece of writing that hit me like few others have. incredibly thought provoking and i wanted to share it. the section on how high the bar is to get a historical figure declared queer really hit me
regularly scheduled fun posts will be back shortly, but if you have any thoughts on this please share because this really got me and i'd love to know what other people here think
also if you notice anything else in this that needs a content warning lmk and i will add that as soon as i see it
Cobain was trans. I suspect Michael Jackson was too, but I'm iffier on that one.
Joan of Arc? Trans. Elagabulus: Trans, obviously. J Edgar Hoover: Trans. Ugh. Dennis Rodman? I think maybe he's straight, despite everything. But it's a big maybe! If he's not trans, he can be honorary.
*Points at seagull* Trans.
Source: Vibes.
I read about j Edgar hoover and iirc the cross dressing evidence comes only from like one person and it was very reasonable to read as that person trying to slander j Edgar hoover with allegations of being a transsexual
pedo
I don't know. He was accused and settled out of court. People argued about this then and argue about it now
“It” lol. Abbey’s a leftist journalist and commentator. Famous for Palestine and 9/11 truth. A bit of a centrist geopolitically. A bit doomer but interesting and knowledgeable on various things and this came up at some point on Media Roots Radio.
These are the real painful cases, the ones were the only outlet for all the repressed dysphoria and internalized transphobia was violence. Forcing people into the closet has always led to some people harming others instead of having to harm themselves. It's part of why fascists want people to repress as much as possible, it makes it easier to turn them into tools for murder.
I'm sure that there's some repressors who are watching Andrew Tate today to stop "failing" at man-ness. The "queer people are just giving into temptation" narrative can't be 100% fabrication. That's basically the ideal endpoint for a queer person according to fascist ideology.
Eh, kinda weak sauce. I was thinking it’s something similar to the Cobain thing. Granted, we’re all pretty biased on this issue
the rumor was he was a repeated crossdresser. pretty weak evidence, but not nothing. but as mentioned, this was probably not true
This hit me really hard tbqh
And I'm thinking about how this ties into modern egg joke discourse, because I'm very online. Lot of discourse on twitter and tumblr about how joking that someone might be an egg, even in a way they won't see and exclusively to other transfems, is this awful thing. Get people talking about it enough and it becomes pretty clear that a pretty significant part of it comes down to like "how dare you see yourself in this person and how dare you ever suggest they could be a worthless transfem". Like they treat it as a deep insult in a way that's really revealing.
And like, there are shitty egg jokes, don't get me wrong. But I feel like there's a part of them that is like "god, I wish someone had recognized these behaviors of mine that were in retrospect a cry for help. I wish people had seen me for who I really was and told me and saved me." And I feel like looking at someone like Cobain this way serves a similar purpose.
Beyond the fact that there is legitimately some really compelling evidence and beyond the idea of breaking the cisnormative assumption that anyone who didn't explicitly say they're trans must be cis, this kind of thing feels like "I see my experiences in him and I wish we could have saved him" more than anything, to me. Like, I wish he could have been in transfem communities as they existed at the time and I wish he'd had someone to tell him it wasn't shameful, because honestly if I'd been that age at that time I might have gone a similar way
yeah. it's the same thing as whenever anyone says they see themself in a fictional character in some trans ways. cis people (and some trans people!) get incredibly mad at the suggestion that anyone who did not explicitly declare themselves trans might not be cis
i mean some cis people get mad even when they did declare themselves such, but that is a separate type of transphobia
Fuck me this hits close to home. Lots of words here I could never put together myself, thank you for sharing this.
This is making me reassess the learned guideline of "actually we shouldn't speculate about and project onto people where there can never be a conclusive answer." Because obviously it's unfalsifiable, and I know from experience that it's easy to fall into a mindset of "when all you have is a hammer, every historic case of untreatable depression looks like undiagnosed gender dysphoria" after going over one's own life with a fine toothed comb looking for signs either in search of evidence or as a simple matter of self reflection, but maybe it doesn't matter if it's literally correct or not. Maybe an overcorrection like that is necessary to plant seeds of doubt in the cishet-by-default orthodoxy.
Also fuck, the section about how you can see it, how there's something ineffable to the look and bearing of eggs, that drags me back to how long before I had any context or understanding of any of this I would often pick out something in certain people that set them apart in a way I couldn't articulate or understand. Two in particular stand out from college: one in my chemistry class, and another that was in both my polisci classes and one of my anthropology classes; never got to know either of them, but the former I'd swear I saw in a transition timeline some 5-6 years later, and the other did an assignment and presentation on trans people in a way that in retrospect was definitely somewhere along the chaser-to-egg spectrum.
"when all you have is a hammer, every historic case of untreatable depression looks like undiagnosed gender dysphoria"
Sure. But when that case also involves crossdressing, genital hate and artistic works that are incredibly blunt when put in this context I think it stops being a stretch.
"Please, God, don't let me die a boy", and isn't that just how it feels. Thank God I let myself be a removed, thank God I learned to break the unwritten rules.
i'm glad you let yourself be a removed too. and i'm glad i let myself be one. and reading this piece made my heart break for everyone out there who couldn't take that step, because god knows i understand how terrifying that is
In general, I do not feel comfortable with people assigning a definite gender identity to other people, especially people who are dead, without the live input of the other person. There's a difference between saying Kurt was an egg and Kurt had a specific gender identity of a binary trans woman. Kurt doesn't seem cis at all and we can safely rule out some enbie identities like demimale and agender (since a demimale/agender AMAB doesn't have the same trajectory as Kurt). But could anyone say with confidence Kurt was a binary trans woman instead of a femme enbie or a demifemale? I don't believe you can because that requires a degree of fidelity that can't be reached by analyzing song lyrics or reading diary entries. Unless he had a diary entry that straight up said, "I am 100% a woman with not a trace of man in me," the lines that demarcate Kurt's particular gender identity will always be fuzzy. To get to this level of specificity, Kurt has to actually be around and know enough about binary trans women/femme enbies/demifemales to actually pick which gender identity fits best.
sure, i agree. we can't know. but that's not really what this is about. she doesn't she/her kurt, this piece is much more about how society at large is unwilling to acknowledge that kurt cobain (or anyone else) could possibly be anything other than cis. i think it's important that this goes for a direct concrete argument because of this, i think it would weaken it rhetorically if it had to keep throwing in caveats
i do think you're totally right though, it's a little fucked to say with confidence kurt cobain was a completely binary trans woman. i just don't think that's as big a problem as society at large saying he was certainly cis
That makes sense. Kurt was definitely not cis. There are dude ways of wearing a dress and Kurt was not wearing the dress like a dude.
when i first heard kurt cobain wore women's clothes i figured he did it once or twice at a concert or something as a joke, i didn't realize how often he did it. he did photoshoots in dresses, wore them everywhere. it might be harder to find pictures of him in men's clothes than women's
Just commenting here saying this piece and this comment really, really helped me think through things and I really appreciate it 💜
i'd seen posts about it before this but never really thought about it, and this really convinced me
actually the first time i thought about it was a few days ago when i saw a post about how "i'm not gay but i wish i was" is the most transbian egg thing imaginable and described the thought process behind it being about how being gay would be a way to distance yourself from being a standard man. i wish i could find it again, i think it was pretty recent but i can't find it anywhere on tumblr
There is and this doesn't go into some of the more obvious clues. He wrote some extremely revealing things in his diaries
And like this person said, I see a LOT of my own pre-transition experiences in him
Kurt Cobain was a trans woman. I can’t, as an individual, say that. I don’t have the right. No trans woman can say that, individually. But collectively? All of us together? The things we see in each other, we see those things in him too. Not all of them, and not all of us. Absolutely not all of us. But enough of us. Enough that we have the right. We have the right, and I will fucking say it, and if you don’t like that, you can go fuck yourself.
learn to read, also go fuck yourself
I see the same signs, as does the author of the piece, and thousands of other trans people out there. It's honestly grating to read this shit under an article going to such lengths to explain why cis people need to shut up with denying other peoples' transness, none of you have the tiniest understanding of these issues. You just lack the experiences we're talking about here. Your ignorance of this, your insistence to be able to judge who is trans enough is part of decades of cis people policing our identities and our right to live as our authentic selfs, to access life-saving medical treatment, to simply exist. Your mindset has destroyed thousands of our siblings, it has taken years or even decades away from all of us that we could have spent as ourselves instead of trying to survive and prove ourselves worthy to people like you. It's disgusting to have to read this in a safe space for trans people, disgusting and infuriating.
So yeah, as the other person said, learn to read and go fuck yourself.
The absolute audacity to come into a trans space, on a topic about the validity of a trans experiences and a (kind of?) trans gaze, and go at it with "well have you though about maybe you're seeing things wrong?" F on reading comprehension (of the room and the article), F- on being a halfway decent person.
Literally the first rule of this community/space is that it's "an anti-capitalist meme community for transgender and gender diverse people." Which is exactly why I don't comment or post on here. (Except for this.)
The idiot that got their comments removed, and rightfully so, couldn't even do that.