by Jessica Fisher

I've been thinking a lot lately about the concepts of lived experiences and the personal
as political. I've been thinking about how I haven't been writing a lot for more radical sites.
I feel like I don't have anything to offer these radical sites because I'm not exactly at the
center of any protests, marches, petitions, or radical conference spaces. Hell, I've only ever
been able to attend one radical conference space in my entire life, and while everyone else was
drinking and selling $25 dollar books, I was using the $50 bucks I had to my name to try and get
my sister and I through the week (free food and water had been provided all week throughout
the event, it can't be said that it is the organizer's fault that my 250 pound stature wasn't
satiated). I tried to spend as much of that week as I could listening, because I was finally, for the
first time in a place where I wasn't the most radical, most politicized person in the room.
The conversations I heard, the training I got, and the panel discussions I was able to sit
in on were a breath of fresh air. I was 16 when Barack Obama got elected president, and at the
time I was ecstatic about the idea that John McCain, who to me would be just another four or
eight years of George W. Bush, didn't win. I would adamantly tell people what I thought to be
true we didn't need four more years of some old, rich, white guy.
It's been six years since then and while the only presidential candidate I've ever voted
for has been Jill Stein, every time my dad gets flustered with politics, or more specifically,
flustered at my politics, he talks about my president Obama, as he sees it. I grew up in an
environment where it was not uncommon to hear my dad or one of my uncle's ask why there's a
Black Entertainment Television, but not a capital 'W' White Entertainment Television. It was not
uncommon to hear them laugh at effeminate men on television and throw around homophobic
and transphobic slurs as if they weren't steeped in actual real violence, vitriol and erasure of
people's actual lives. It was not uncommon to hear them make misogynistic jokes, not only in
front of, but often directly to, their wives.
I grew up in direct opposition to all of this. None of it ever sat right with me, but often
times I did not possess the language to inform them why what they said and did was
problematic. I didn't have the language to inform them that most other channels besides BET
were capital W White Entertainment Television. I didn't have the language then to express to
them how their misogynistic jokes were harmful and unnecessary, even when everyone laughed
at them, and ultimately, I didn't have the language to express to them the way their use of
homophobic and transphobic slurs and their ridicule and dehumanization of effeminate men and
supposedly transvestite and transexual women on television (does anyone remember Jim
Carrey's response to having found out he slept with a pre-op transexual women, a reaction
everyone in my family felt was completely justified, and lacking in violent follow-up) impacted
me.
In an age before I knew Tumblr (which I didn't find out about until 2012), I had very little
access to language that, honestly, has been necessary to my ability to even survive. I lived
through middle school a time where it was not uncommon for me to get asked on an almost
daily basis if I was a girl or a boy, and I tried to turn my music on my headphone's up because I
knew the wrong answer could illicit anything from condescension, to ridicule to violence. But I
knew when I went home at night and watched South of Nowhere that I was unequivocally a
woman. I had such little access to language and concepts of queer identity, that it took a short-
lived show about teenage lesbians for me to realize that it wasn't in conflict that I both felt like a
girl and was also attracted to girls.


I was 13 or 14 but I loved this show. I dont know how Id feel about it now, and Id rather not find out

There is no mistake that watching that show gave me resolve, real resolve to actually
express who I was, and not in the language I had been using not in the cautionary language of
being a crossdresser, and for a short time, due to a deficit of language not in the language of
being a transwoman, but of recognizing myself as a girl (I say girl because I am still writing
about myself as a 13, 14, 15 year old). The resolve however was extremely short-lived. It
consisted of a Marilyn Manson inspired tendency to draw my face with eyeliner and to wear
thick, dark, lipstick. This episode of resolve climaxed in what is still probably one of the most
traumatic experiences of my queer experience.
I've written about it before and find it so important to continue to write about, because I
do not think what I experienced was unique, but symptomatic of an international queerphobia
that is magnified in the southern United States. I have very few lived experiences with what
exactly Atlanta or any other urban area in the south produces via acceptance/tolerance or
empowering of queers and especially queer youth. I lived my life off of the proverbial grid, in a
town of 3000 people, in a county whose politicians get elected quoting the Holy Christian Bible
and Glenn Beck.
The incident that decimated my resolve started innocently enough. There should be
nothing exceptional or extraordinary about a 14 year old girl painting her nails while watching
Full House... should there? The apparent reality of it is that the whole situation changes if that
girl has a penis. It isn't her, or really anyone else's fault that she has a penis, but it seems to
some, to be so necessary in identifying and classifying her to such an extent that, conclusively,
she needs to understand she is not supposed to wear nail polish because of it.
For anyone who has ever painted their nails, you understand how permanent nail polish
can be (that is, until you want it to stay on and then if you breathe on it wrong it chips into a
million pieces and falls away). Painting my nails was no accident, it took a lot of courage and a
lot of gumption to finally decide to take that step, to make that dedication. I wouldn't be able to
hide it, I couldn't just go to the bathroom and wash it off like I could eyeliner and lipstick, not at
school or at home, I didn't have any fingernail polish remover.
As fate would have it, the weekend after I painted my nails, a bunch of my family came
over. I spent the entire weekend trying to hide my hands in the sleeves of my jacket, which
proved awkward, but successful enough to the end that no one said anything to me about my
nails being painted. Moreover, when my dad picked me up from school on Friday afternoon, he
saw the nail polish and didn't have me remove it, a moment I thought of as a victory. That is,
until that Sunday night after everyone had left. As I've already said, what happened next has
stayed with me. It was not a request, or even a parent's firm suggestion that I remove my nail
polish, though he probably remembers it differently. There was a demand. Here was the man I
had spent my entire life butting heads with. The man who had married and divorced my mom.
The man who had adopted me. The man I decided to live with when my parent's got divorced.
The one I knew as a homophobe and transphobe, though I didn't have the language at the time.
He sat on the couch, probably more than a little buzzed, and the way he stayed so cool and
calm made my emotional distraughtness that much more intensified. He was watching t.v., and
plainly told me that I needed to remove the fingernail polish. Which would be a simple enough
demand, if it were not for one glaring problem, But dad, we don't have any fingernail polish
remover.
This fact didn't bother him, and so I asked, half hoping I had him stumped, how I was
supposed to remove the nail polish. Hot water and bleach, was his solution. And if you've never
felt as if you were forced to remove your nail polish with hot water and bleach, I envy you. If
you've never been alone in a house in the middle of the woods, the nearest 'safe place' a good
five or ten miles away, with the man who feeds and houses you, faced with the option to do it or
to not do it, I envy you. So as he watched tv, I stood in front of my half-bath sink, the water so
hot it was steaming, and applied bleach to my water-soaked fingertips, scratching with nails at
other nails, crying and wishing that it would all just be over.
I can't remember now how soon after it all I wrote the poem Bleach, but I'd be willing to
bet it was almost instantly, that night or the day after. A few short lines, and probably some of
the best I've ever written, even to this day. It captured completely how absolutely defeated I felt.

Bleach (TW: Suicide)


The smell of bleach on my hands,
Smells like a forced suicide,
I force myself forward,
And he gradually kills my soul.
Blind to his actions,
He blames me for everything,
And the tears I cry mean nothing.


Im weak and defeated
Lost and cheated
Ready to give up,
Ready to give up,


ready to die

Maybe it was simply the poetry of a melodramatic teenager, he certainly would never
read too far into it. But when I asked my English Lit teacher if I could read it to the class, and
was subsequently afforded the opportunity, it was almost an instant reaction by my teacher to
ask me to visit the guidance counselor, and there is no mistake that my classmates were
themselves stunned. In hindsight, it wasn't fair to have put them on the receiving end of my
having read that poem, them just being kids like me.
When I walked to the counselor's office, I remember feeling powerful. I remember feeling
strong, like the protagonist in my favorite heavy metal songs. In hindsight I can't remember why
I felt that way. What had I won? Further fueling the beliefs of my peers that I was weird and
strange and crazy? Being on the radar of the counselor didn't win me any sympathy, there was
no compassion to be found. What was I going to do? Tell on my dad, and what? Risk being
flushed out of one home and into the home of a complete stranger? I can't be sure, but I feel
confident that I just fed the counselor some crap about how it was just poetic expression,
nothing to be concerned about, that is, honestly, if I ever actually made it to the counselor's
office that go round.
The whole event started a new trend. Long gone were the ideas of Jessica, I
disassociated from the only identity that ever made sense to me, the only me I ever felt
comfortable being. Sometime after the whole bleach fiasco, my father attempted to make a
'deal' with me, that I could wear nail polish as long as it was black. The way he deduced it,
Alice Cooper wore black nail polish, Ozzy Osbourne wore black nail polish, Marilyn Manson
wore black nail polish, he compromised with himself, deciding that my decision to wear nail
polish was an extension of my desire to be like my idols, to be a shock rocker.
I didn't own black nail polish, and I didn't run out to buy or borrow any either. It would be
no consolation to me to satisfy his absurd theory by plastering black fingernail polish all over the
very nails that deserved only the most femme of colors. And it has only been in the past six
months that I have ever, ever wore black nail polish, and then in an attempt to reclaim it from his
bullshit attempt at logic and bargaining.
I spent my high school years trying to form an identity as a genderless academic-activist.
Feeling miserable and just drumming it up to untreated, unmedicated depression everyone
quick to tell me that maybe if I ate better, maybe if I exercised, maybe if I didn't take everything
so seriously, etc, etc, etc I ignored my gender and my gender identity. I quit dressing up in
clothes that made me feel good about myself, I listened to Fergie and Shania Twain less, I didn't
tell anyone about how I'd prefer to go by Jessica, instead of by what they were calling me.
Occasionally I would engage in a conversation in defense of the idea that men should be
able to wear women's clothes, but then conversely I went through a phase of writing poetry
depicting images that destroyed and belittled the effeminate man. The longer and longer I went,
the more and more lost I felt, and the more and more disconnected I became. I honestly wonder
where I'd be if it were not for the chance that I happened to be at Barnes & Nobles one day, and
they just so happen to carry a small collection of Kate Bornstein and other gender and sexuality
related literature, and I just happen to eye a copy of Gender Outlaw, which I bought.
The buying of Gender Outlaw, in hindsight, marked a very interesting period in my life,
and maybe even the most dynamic shift I required to survive, and to begin to transition in every
non-medical way that I could afford to (and only to not transition medically due to expenses I
cannot yet afford). I read it feverishly, captivated by Kate's stories, and identifying so strongly
with this person who was transgender, and a writer, and generally a creative person. The way
with which Kate approached the fluidity of sexual orientation and gender identity gave language
and validation to what I feel is something I've always believed in. After finishing the book, I was
enriched, I was full of new language and determined to lead a new life. I almost immediately
went online and took the Sex and Gender Explorer (SAGE) Test, which came back with the
same results it had when I was in middle school. While the test warned me that it was not a
proper evaluation by a trained psychological professional, I knew that the results were accurate.
I was, I did, I am and do experience gender dysphoria, I am a transgender woman, and yes,
despite my lower-middle-working class background, I do want to transition. I was socialized to
be a man when I grew up, but I have never consciously identified as anything other than a
woman and I have internalized the transmisogyny that tells me I have to have the traditionally
culturally feminine physical aspects namely a vagina and breasts to be a 'true' woman. This
of course intensifies my dysphoria but so to have the moments over the years when I realized
that the sex organ I have has a grand tendency not to work. To say it has underperformed in the
moments when I have been intimate with someone is an overstatement it suggests that it
performs at all. Of course there could be other psychological or physiological aspects at work
there, but I believe the root cause is the crushing weight of dysphoria, being reminded by the
very presence of my sexual organ, that most people won't see me as a woman. My identity is
valid, I am a woman. Over the last year or two I have taken to very staunchly identifying as a
trans-woman. The reasoning behind this is two fold. Firstly, the way in which people react to it is
very telling. There are those who will say, I don't see you as a man or a woman, I see you as a
human. These people, even when they come from a place of allyship and/or good intention, are
doing a very harmful thing in not only erasing my identity as a woman, and my identity as a
transwoman, but in erasing the very unique experiences that transwomen have, in varying
degrees depending on the individual.
This trend of erasure continues with the group of people whom insist that the prefixes
'trans' and 'cis' are excessive, unnecessary, and ultimately harmful to the cause for trans rights.
I have to try not to become overwhelmed with the sensation of being stunned when I hear this
argument. It is flawed on so many levels. It is important to note, first and foremost that 'cis' and
'trans' are both Latin prefixes. Cis means on the side of and Trans means across from. It is
secondly important to note, to the people who feel othered by the prefix 'Cis' that I, at least, am
not trying to other you. It is more about a level playing field. Trans people have been othered for
years, pushed outside of the gender binary, even when they transition inside of it. Trans children
are incorrectly socialized, forced to endure uncomfortable socializing, social situations and
conform to social norms that make them feel uncomfortable and out of place, and more often
than not they grow up to experience extreme body dypshoria in addition to this (not to say that
such dysphoria is a pre-requisite for being trans, as it isn't). Then we grow up, and if we're able
to, we transition; socially, culturally and physically, to fix what negligent social norms and
unfortunate pubescent hormones have forced upon us. We go through great pains to 'pass', to
appear to the naked eye as 'cis' to appear to the regular person on the street as 'normal'. All of
this, though, is not enough, as we are mocked, called out, fired, harassed, abused, imprisoned,
enslaved, if not killed, if our transition is not quick, seamless, and executed in an environment
that will at least tolerate us for being trans (most days understanding and acceptance seem but
a pipe dream in our world of 'baby steps' and bible thumpers, especially here in the rural deep
south, where my personal narrative is still being written).
And then, for some small percentage of those seeking it, they reach the wondrous land
of pass-ability, and what greets them on the other end? Well chastisement, of course. Demands
that it is imperative that every trans person who wields pass-ability is obligated to tell everyone
they meet, and romantic and sexual partners in particular, that they are in fact trans. In this way
transgender people are unable to escape their transness, even though they are not encouraged
to embrace it either.
The second reason I identify as a transwoman, specifically (or more specifically, a queer
lesbian transwoman) is because of the unique lived experiences I have as a transwoman. Of
being raised in a home where the idea of femininity was seen as a punishment (literally, if I
wasn't doing something my dad wanted me to do, he would often threaten me, or so he saw it,
telling me he'd dress me up in my sister's dresses or have her paint my nails). I have the unique
lived experiences of naturally sitting to pee. One of my dad's favorite things to say used to be,
when my sister would do something, and then I'd do it to, but I'd get in trouble for it and I would
remind him, But she did it, as every kid is likely to do, he would say, Well she pees sitting
down! as if I was supposed to find peeing sitting down to be something shameful and below
me.
So I have the unique lived experiences of feeling shame the first time I had the
conscious urge to wear a dress, and having to wonder what exactly was wrong with sitting down
to pee? I understand now that the reason I was socialized to feel that shame, and why I was
supposed to have been socialized to want to stand up to pee, whereas my sister (the tomboy)
was socialized to want to wear dresses and to pee sitting down, wasn't because she's two years
and four days younger than me, or because she was the youngest of all my mother's kids, or
because she wanted to wear dresses (she never really did). It also wasn't because I was two
years and four days older than her, or a middle child, or because I did want to wear dresses, it
was because some person(s) I've never met looked at her at birth and said, It's a girl and
looked at me at birth and said It's a boy, and from there parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles,
etc went full force in the way they engaged with and attempted to socialize us, and soon all of
society was following suite of our families socializing actions, which were ultimately based on
the opinion (gendering based on sexual anatomy alone is a far cry from even the educated
guess of a hypothesis) of some person(s) I've never met.
I would like to take a moment to talk on the rigidity of social genders as I know them. I do
not claim to be a knowledgeable expert on ideas of gender socialization and social genders
nationally or internationally, I only know these things intimately as I have experienced them
firsthand. Most important, it is taught to us, is that there are boys and girls, men and women.
Two rigid and very binary genders. It is understood that a person does not get to swap genders,
they do not get to transcend the binary, the dated-though-still-perpetuated science that is relied
on sees any psychology that acknowledges transgender people as psuedo-science, while
accepting and teaching their children an evolutionary biology that says that men are stronger
than women, and thus they are the dominant sex. These are things I was supposed to believe
as I was growing up. Men were attracted to women and women were attracted to men and if
they weren't, well they were probably going to burn in hell. Gay men, represented on television
as effeminate (especially in the '90s and '00s when I was growing up), were mocked and
belittled. The idea has always been that, I don't mind gay people as long as they don't hit on
me.
This is important as it doesn't just show individual conceit, but perpetuates a cultural idea
that homosexuality equals sexual perversion and more over, a constant insatiable desire to
have sex (that is somehow more immoral than the heterosexual capacity to crave sex). This is
compounded by the common attitude that an appropriate response to a hypothetical situation
wherein a gay man hits on a straight man is violence towards the gay man. This idea is worked
up into such a fervor that if an individual socially perceived as male deviates in their gender
expression away from masculine/masculinity at all, they face the threat of violence and
aggression. The fear moves from the fear of the gay man, to the socially perceived feminine
male. Cisgender men have a very real fear of crossdressing men, drag queens, transvestite
women, transsexual women, designated male at birth (DMAB) genderqueer and genderfluid
people and transgender women. They fear, for (probably) some psychological (and some would
argue Freudian) reason, having relations with someone who may have been born with a penis.
This fear of being, as they see it, de-heterosexualized, homosexualized or tricked in anyway has
caused them to move further in their dehumanization and sexualization of transwomen, calling
them traps. Thinking of gender identity as something that is not complex and integral, but
instead thinking of it as a dedication to making heterosexual cisgender men uncomfortable, and
forcing them into sexual acts that make them uncomfortable and complicit, as they see it, in
homosexuality.
And still, these same cisgender heterosexual men will go scouring the internet for
depictions of people who have breasts and a penis, the reaction changes when the cishet man
feels back in control. This is very similar to the way in which lesbians are then treated. Cishet
men will fetishize and sexualize lesbians and lesbianism, while of course denying them their
rights, and further, insisting in public that all a lesbian needs is 'a good dick' (the irony lost on
them that for all intents and purposes, any lesbian desiring anything phallic shaped item
attached to her partner can go to the nearest sex store and buy a dildo/strap-on that is closest
to the preferred length, girth and texture). Of course, that offends the man and threatens his
dominance and masculinity.
Continuing to discuss social gender, I would like to look at the phenomenon of the
socially acceptable 'tomboy'. While we are just seeing an acceptance of 'tomgirls' if you will, and
in an extremely limited capacity, the tomboy has been widely and wildly accepted for some time.
It is interesting to see this phenomenon, and the way that cisgender heterosexual men do not
tend to react as if threatened by it. My father has always been very against my femininity, but
enjoyed my sister's tomboyism. Without pontificating and waxing psychological too much, it's as
if the socially perceived masculinity of a socially sexed female is not threatening because there
is no transgression of power dynamics. Cisgender heterosexual men feel they have nothing to
fear or be angry about, because they feel they still hold their power over women, regardless of
whether or not they present as tomboys. But then, why would the socially perceived femininity of
a socially sexed male be threatening? Because it is rooted in our socialization that we are
supposed to continue our overly-abundant species. No man can have their child that they see
as a young man, embracing what they see as the 'weaker' femininity, forsaking their
reproductive birthright, the strength and responsibility given to them, all ultimately represented in
their phallus. And when these men see out on the streets, or in the stores, or in the bars and
clubs, or on the train, individuals who look to them as if they were raised by father's who
ultimately failed, they then take it upon themselves to attempt to correct the error, to
remasculinize the individual, to force them upon their duty to wield the phallus in the efforts
towards reproduction.
Ultimately, as I was raised to understand social gender every socially perceived
woman will end up wearing a dress to prom and on her wedding day and every socially
perceived man... can pretty much do whatever he pleases, as long as he works for it and
doesn't express or show any signs of femininity.
I often wonder if queer activists across the world, and across the U.S. more specifically,
spend a lot of time thinking about queers in the southern United States? I think outside of
driver's license pictures in Mississippi, MARTA-train-ride-violent transphobia and battling for
marriage rights, we're largely overlooked and left to fend for ourselves. It is easy for me to
believe that other regions of the U.S see the south as a kind of barren wasteland. I cannot help
but to observe the intersection here of transgender rights to class privilege. According to the
American Community Survey, which is released through the U.S. Census Bureau, all of the
'Poorest Areas in America' are located in the South. A majority of the comments on this article
do one thing and one thing alone, attack Republican Congresspeople, and seem to, in a way,
lay blame for the policies of these politicians on every living person in the south, every queer
youth, every person of color, every person ineligible to vote for whatever reason. A fuller list of
100 cities across the states still shows mostly (though not exclusively) southern cities. It
becomes very real to wonder, as a trans person, if living trans is a privilege of class. If
expressing my trans-feminine gender is a privilege of class, if being able to move further away
from a masculine presentation to a feminine presentation is a privilege of class.
I do have a lot to think about, and a lot of work to do. Rural queer youth across this
country need people to actively stand up for them, they need a voice. I think that's something
we all should think about, and work on.