Moving Beyond the Gender Binary w/ ALOK

Alok Vaid-Menon, also known simply as ALOK, joins Laverne for an inside perspective on what it means to live in the world as a person who does not belong on either side of the traditional gender binary - meaning strictly male or female. ALOK (they/them) is a gender non-conforming writer and performance artist. As a mixed-media artist ALOK explore themes of gender, race, trauma, belonging, and the human condition. They are the author of Femme in Public (2017) and Beyond the Gender Binary (2020). In 2019 they were honored as one of NBC’s Pride 50 and Out Magazine’s OUT 100. They have presented their work in more than 40 countries.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to the Laverne Cox Show, a reduction of shondaland
Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio. I know that
the recent people harm me is because they have been
harmed and they are doing harm to themselves. So I
want to break the circuitry of self sabotage and I
want to teach people healing is possible. And I think

(00:24):
that that is why trans people were historically regarded as
spiritual leaders, because of our mastery of metamorphosis. And what
I mean by that is that this world teaches us
that everything is fixed and cannot be changed, and then
trans people entered, we say we can change everything. In

(00:48):
two thousand and sixteen, I was a part of an
amazing documentary on HBO called The Trans List, and featured
in that documentary was a person by the name of
a local bade men In. In the moment a Loke
came onto the screen, I was enchanted by their charisma
and their deep, deep knowledge. I felt like a local

(01:10):
was just connected to some energy, some spirit that is beyond.
A Loke is a gender non binary writer and mixed
media performance artist. They're the author of them in Public
and Beyond the gender binary in twenty nineteen, they were
honored as one of NBC's Pride fifty and Out Magazines
Out one dred. They have presented their work in more

(01:33):
than forty countries. I knew that I wanted to have
a conversation on this podcast about gender nonconformity and a
local will take us beyond and that's where we need
to go hunting. Please enjoy my conversation with the loke
maid minute. Hello a looke and welcome to the podcast.

(01:58):
How are you feeling a day dark? And I am
feeling so enthusiastic about talking to you. Ah, that's a sweet.
I always love chatting with you. And it was really
important for me to have you on the show because
I wanted to talk about non binary folks and gender
non conforming folks, and as a trans woman, as someone

(02:19):
who identifies in a binary way, for us to support
our gender non conforming and non binary siblings, and so
many transbinary people don't, and thinking about gender non conformity
is a great opportunity for everyone. And I was reminded
of that reading your book Beyond the Gender Binary. One
of the things you say early on in your book
is that you contend that the gender binary exists to

(02:41):
create division and conflict, not to celebrate creativity and diversity.
Can you talk to us a little bit about what
you mean there? Absolutely, So I think a lot of
people mistake moving beyond the gender binary as erasing people's
right to identify as men or women, and that couldn't
be farther from the truth. For me, binary means it's

(03:05):
more about how you're policing other people versus how you
narrate yourself. So someone who's perpetuating the binary is telling
other people you can't be non binary, or this is
what it means to be a man or a woman.
So moving beyond the gender binary is not about erasing
man or woman. It's actually just about saying man and
women are to have potentially infinite options. And I think

(03:28):
that there are many men and women who believe that.
And I actually have been doing a lot of work
during quarantine historically to understand like why people are so
threatened by this, And what I've actually been discovering is
that the gender binary actually was instituted to hurt all
of us. Now, we often talk about it just hurting

(03:50):
non binary people, but I'd love to like explain to
people that actually historically it was created as a way
to control everyone. So a great illustration of this is
the history that you and I know well of the
masquerade laws. So in the United States, from the eighteen
forties and tell the nineteen forties, across the country, trans
and gendervarian people like us would be thrown into prison

(04:12):
simply for existing in public. Our community referred to these
laws as the three article law, meaning you to where
at least three articles of clothing associated with your assigned sex,
otherwise you could be thrown in prison. So you and
I would be both thrown in prison as female impersonation.
And what's so incidius about these laws is they would
often publish in the newspapers are names alongside our photos.

(04:32):
So this could actually like ruin people's entire lives. And
what makes it difficult for us is that when we
try to find historical records of why people did this,
they didn't want to tell the police. So oftentime, when
people arrested, they would be asked why you wear a
woman's clothes and they'd be like, I don't know, and
that refusal is actually resistance because they knew that their
words would be used against them, right But what most

(04:56):
people don't understand is that the cross chressing laws were
put into place actually to control cis gender women, because
the respectable cis gender woman was supposed to just stay
at home in the domestic sphere and only men were
allowed to navigate the public. So pants became an illustration
of saying men are somehow more rational, literal, agentic, and

(05:19):
women have to stay at home and reproduce and not
actually have political thoughts. So actually, these gender binary was
created to confine women to the domestic sphere and to
deny women the right to vote, and to say that
men were the rational people who could roam. So what
this look like is in the western expansion of the

(05:40):
United States, a lot of times women would just wear
pants and quote unquote dress up as men so that
they could go outside. And this is just another of
many examples of being like when it was created, the
binary was actually fundamentally about misogyny. It was literally about
saying women aren't competent, aren't smart, can't be political subjects.

(06:02):
And so now when we're pushing against the gender binary,
it always hurts that there's so much pushback that come
from women and the feminist identified women too is the trouble.
It's really awkward. Yeah, And I love that you said
that because I come to so much of this from
an intersectional feminist perspective, that the gender binary is deeply

(06:27):
harmful to those folks who identify as women, and that
there's always been a relationship between the gender oppression that
trans and non binary people experience in the gender oppression
that SIS women also experienced. So we really are all
in this together. And you're very explicit in your book
that the gender binary is all about power. The first

(06:49):
thing I think about it that there are people out
there who are like, well, what about biology, right? And
I think that's exhausting, But what would you And I
have my things I would say to that, But what
would you say to those people who would be like,
men are this and women are this? Based on chromosomes
and gonads and ovaries and all these things. I would
say this reflects the failure of the American public education

(07:11):
system on two fronts when it comes to biology and history,
because last time I checked, if you consulted actual biologists,
there are thousands of accredited scientists who say there's no
biological basis and dividing people into one of two sexes,
let alone genders, So that's not consistent with science. Actually,

(07:33):
biological refers to living matter, which means you and I
have biological ears, biological noses, which means that there's more
biological variance and anatomical diversity among females than there are
between females and males. Because news check, Actually women have
different bodies, and that's okay. What people are saying when

(07:53):
they say biological is actually reproductive or fertility, and that
reduction of men's bodies to their reproductive role is misogyny. Actually,
the framework of biological sex was created by exclusively cis
gender white men as a way to deny women political rights.

(08:14):
They would say, anatomically, you were meant for reproduction. Not
to think that's why you can't go to school because
that will ruin your menstrual cycles. So it's so awkward
that people use this term biology without recognizing what that
actually means scientifically and how that's been levied historically. So
for me, I think what I'm trying to do with

(08:35):
my work is to always have history and to the
chat and to just be like, actually, my faith comes
from the fact that I know what was before and
so it's ironic to me, and I wanted to speak
to this too with your work with disclosure, because I
think it's so important. It's ironic to me that every
it feels like decade we're having the same as tired conversation.

(08:57):
Like it's like with your career, people were like the
first trans and you were literally there being like, actually,
there were these girls that came before, And it feels
like our job is trans people in so many ways,
is to do that historical due diligence, because CIS society
always wants to erase our history and positionist as new,
even though we've been cutting up saying these things for

(09:19):
literally centuries. Recently, I read a biography of Sylvester, the
Queen of Disco, and I'm obsessed with Sylvester. Sylvester too,
Oh my god, Yes, and interviews people would say, Sylvester,
you're in drag right, and Sylvester would say, no, I'm
just Sylvester. Even before the language of non binary, Sylvester
was templating what that could look like. And it makes

(09:41):
me so angry because they were one of the most mainstream,
celebrated black queer performers in the world, and yet that
knowledge gets erased ten years later, like it's just not okay, Wow,
I am so glad you're here. You've just said so
much in such a way, like I didn't even really
have the language for. And one of the bell Hook's

(10:04):
quote I think from Yearning, but I don't know if
bell said at first. She says, our struggle is also
one of memory against forgetting and that piece of history,
that piece of we've always been here, that piece of
reducing people to reproductive organs. And I think that is

(10:25):
it's so objectifying, and it's so and it's so inherently misogynists.
And I'm so glad you've so clearly laid that out
for us. I would love for people who don't know
this to know that Laverne is also theoretical scholar. And
I will never forget watching you Live in conversation with
the New School with Bell Hooks, and she was talking
about white capitalists heter a patriarchy. Her phrase actually is imperialist,

(10:48):
white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. I'm a bell Hook, yes, And
you made the intervention and you added cis in front
of that. I said, this normative, heteronormative, imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist,
patriarchy go on alone, and I don't think people understand
what that means, and I really like to break that apart.
Trans women and trans feminine people are actually expanding feminism,

(11:12):
contributing to feminism because we're insisting that womanhood and femininity
don't have to be coupled with reproduction. We're actually saying
that there's a spiritual power, essence, poetry to women in
femininity that don't have to be part of the reproductive paradigm.

(11:32):
And instead of SIS women saying thank you, this is
really powerful and amazing, they double down oftentimes on SIS
men's definition of what a woman should be. So in
so many ways, what trans women are offering is a
feminist vision of womanhood. And that's why it's a travesty
to me that there's so many bills trying to criminalize

(11:54):
our community resourcing the rhetoric of feminism. This is not
just about theory for us, right, this is about actual
policy that's discriminating against trans women, intersect people, non binary
people using this bullshit. Yeah, for me, it's always important
to note that there are queer cis feminist you know,
women and women of color who have challenged the ideas

(12:15):
of essentialism that would reduce women to biology into reproduction.
So trans non binary feminists or in that tradition, I
always like to not erase the brilliant work by so many,
particularly black feminist and queer feminists and queer Black feminists
who have been doing work for decades, who have laid
out this anti essentialist project for us as a blueprint.

(12:38):
I mean, I've always identified as a feminist and to
be able to be in this space of anti essentialism
is so crucial for me. In my college lectures, I
would always um talk about sojournal truth first in her
sort of proclamation Anti woman and from eighteen fifty one
and at the Ohio Women's Convention in that proclamation and
talking about the history of the sort of devaluation of

(12:59):
black womanhood in America, and how there's a there's a
story that she was making a speech in Indiana, I
think in eighteen fifty six and someone yelled from the
audience accusing her being a man, and she like opens
her glaus and reveals her breast. So that so that
blackness was during abolition in eighteen fifty one was associated
with maleness, and womanhood was associated with white women and

(13:19):
black women were like, wait, hey, ain't I a woman?
And in that context, I also linked that history of
the devaluation of black womanhood with what Butler talks about
in Gender Trouble when she quotes Simon de Bouvoirs, when
Simone de Beauvois says one is not born a woman,
but rather becomes one, and Butler says, um, if I
can recall correctly, it's not clear that the one who

(13:39):
becomes a woman is necessarily female. Right. So there's been
a critical framework laid out in the history of feminism
where we can claim claim our gender on our own terms.
And that's really, for me, what it's really all about.
And let's also wake it up and say the same
rhetoric of y'all aren't real women was levied against black

(14:01):
and indigenous women by white feminists in the early twentieth century.
So white women would not take the issues that black
women were bringing up like missagen nation lynching, racist sexual
violence as women's issues because they believed that black and
Indigenous women had to become part of a cult of
true womanhood or pious, respectable women. And what I've been

(14:21):
unearthing in my research is actually white women would set
up associations to go into Native American reservations and Indigenous
communities and teach Indigenous women how to iron and how
to wear white women's clothing as a way to civilize
them into patriarchy. So the idea became, because you're part
of a savage matriarchy, you have to enter patriarchy before

(14:44):
you can be a feminist. And here we are in
one with transclusionary feminist resourcing, the same rhetoric that Susan b. Anthony,
Charlotte Perk, and Gillman all their ilk used against black
and Indigenous women, Which is why for me, the trans
Star Goes has been of our racial justice. And I
know that you've been so eloquent about this from the beginning,
and I think that's one of the most heartbreaking and

(15:06):
devastating experiences as a racialized transperson is that so many
of us, our gender comes from a deep love of
our racial and ethnic communities, and yet it's an unreciprocated love.
Often where we are fighting so hard because we understand
how white supremacy fortifies these awful gender binarians and norms,

(15:31):
and we don't get that same kind of love and response.
Oh look, I love you so much. This is so brilliant.
This is a good time to take a little break.
We'll be right back though. Okay, that's taken care of.
Let's get back to our chat. You've spoken so eloquently

(15:53):
in the past, and this is already You've gotten there
already that the struggle for gender equality and gender freedom
for everyone, including trans and non binary people, is linked
to an anti colonialist, anti white supremacist agenda. So can
you talk to us about your understanding of how gender
was not binary and indigenous cultures all over the world. Absolutely,

(16:18):
And I also want to invite people to check out
my good Reads, where I currently have over six hundred
book recommendations, because what I've noticed is I have done
the research, and yet whenever they have, like a white
CIS person, say you don't exist, that's taken as authoritative.
Whenever those of us who have actually devoted our lives
to doing this work, our credibility is undermined because of

(16:40):
what we look like. And I've decided I'm not accepting
that transposoject anymore. Like I know what I'm saying, and
it comes from a corroborated place. You have six hundred
book recommendations like just six hundred book recommendations on good
Reads and divided into different reading lists. One of them
is colonialism and gender. So get into her work. So

(17:01):
here's what's really important to understand. One of the predominant
tactics of colonization across the world was imposing people into
Western gender norms. And I say imposing people because it
wasn't just indigenous gender variant people, it was all people,
and all people were policed into what white men and

(17:22):
white women should look like. The most visible explicit example
of this is cross dressing legislation. So in India, the
British actually passed a law that forbade any public displays
a visible gender nonconformity and required gender non conforming people
to register themselves with the police so the police could
ensure that they weren't cross dressing. Right, we're talking this

(17:44):
is in the late eighteen hundreds, and so the cau
cassity of telling me that we are new when actually
what we are is disappeared. So what I want us
to reframe the conversations. It's not that we're new. This
is a struggle that is on on for hundreds of years,
So it's not just that we were visible and then
we were raised, and then we were visible again. It's

(18:06):
just that as history actually goes, they disappear us. And
so what I've been trying to ask as an artist
is why do they need to disappear us? And what
I realized is in our existence is an alternative, and
the way that power works is by erasing an alternative,
so that people think that the status quo is the
only way to live. But in trans existence is possibility.

(18:30):
We're actually showing people you get to choose your own family.
We're showing people you own your own body. We're showing
people you get to choose your own beauty. And in
that way, we actually are presenting a radical imagination to
what family is, to what community is, to what health is,
to what life is. And so what I actually think

(18:51):
is I want to reframe the crisis of anti trans
violence as the policing of our life giving like as
the policing of the world, the beauty, the glamour, the
spirituality that we bring in. There's the main reason that
part of colonization was also then doctrination of people into
a particular type of Western Christianity and the erasure of

(19:14):
indigenous spiritual traditions which long understood femininity not as weak
or docile, but as powerful, ancestral and spiritual. And in fact,
in my research, what I found is a lot of
people who were arrested for cross dressing by the Portuguese Inquisition,
who were held in Christian trials, when in those trials
would say this is not I'm not wearing this because

(19:34):
I'm a woman. I'm wearing this to receive God. They
would say I wrapped my head to receive God. They
would say I put on the scirpt to receive God.
And so for me, what I really am trying to
be more explicit about is, yes, this is about my gender,
of course, but also this is about my spirituality. This
is how I feel most godly, This is how I

(19:57):
feel most divine in it when I'm getting d So
I'm making an altar on my body, and if you're
going to degrade that altar and you're gonna spit on me,
that doesn't matter, because I know my own godliness. And
so what happens when we break out of the cis
narrative that we're broken, that we're lacking, that we're absent,
and instead we say we are the divine, we say,
we are practicing our worth and our divine feminine and

(20:20):
that is why we're being persecuted. A look, you're preaching
the word right now. I'm living. I'm getting my full
entire life. Thank you, A look so much. Now. I've
been saying to trans people for years that in indigenous
cultures all over the world, we were revered. My understanding
is that hedro you wouldn't pre colonialism, you wouldn't want
to get married, or if your child was not christened

(20:42):
by a hydro, or your wedding not blessed by hydrid,
that it would be damned. And so I say to
trans and non binary people, we are anointed, and we
must claim our sacred space and our sacred place. And
what a tragedy it is that we've been institutionally gas lit.
That's the sad part, you know, when you were speaking
to me earlier about how even within the trans community,

(21:03):
non binary people are demeaned by people who are identifying
as women or men. For me, the culpritive that is
what Western eugenics did to our knowledge systems. So what's
really important to understand here is that there was an
unprecedented coordinated effort in the late nineteenth century and early
twentieth century to pathologize gender nonconformity. We actually, and I

(21:27):
really want to wake it up for people. People say
that we're new, but baby, there were words for us
before the word heterosexual was created the nineteenth century. In
the early sevent hundreds, we were called Molly's in the UK.
Then we were called pansies. In fact, if you look
at the press in the early nineteen thirties, they called
us third sextors. They had language for us before they

(21:48):
even had the language of heterosexual. But even I mean,
if even if you think about Greeks, I mean, I
think that the term the problematic term or maphradite comes
from her maidies. I think so even if we think
about you know, sort of ancient times, there were there
were folks who existed beyond the binary. And what's deep
about so much oppression is that there's just so much

(22:08):
ignorance around it. There's a lack of understanding about history,
a lack of understanding about biology and science, a lack
of understanding about sociology. Oh my god. Look, so there
was a moment in your book when you talk about
and it just hit me in my gut. When you
talked about when you were a kid being bullied and
being told that you were assisty and acted like a girl.

(22:28):
I was like, that's exactly, literally exactly what they said
to me. And then later on they called you a man,
and I was just and I think you used the
phrase too feminine to be a boy and too masculine
to be a girl. It was like the irony of that.
I've always thought about the irony of that in my
own life, that like I was called a girl when
I was a child, um, and then now people call
me a man and as a way, and so it's like,

(22:51):
you can't kind of win in this system. Can you
elaborate on that and what that says to you right
now and in this moment. So there's no consistent definitions
for man and women, they change the definitions of man
and woman specifically to exclude us. That's where the power
comes in. So they see trans people being able to

(23:12):
change our birth certificates, so they change the law. They
see trans people being able to modify our body or morphology,
so they change the law. So it's actually that there's
no static definitions of what it means to be a
male and female. They invent those definitions specifically to exclude us,
And I think it's really important to bring up castor
semenia in this conversation. Castro Semania identifies as a woman

(23:35):
who is a South African Olympian and continually is told
that her naturally occurring rates of testosterone are too high
for her to compete in the female category. So what
they're saying is we have a predetermined idea of female
which just so happens to be defined around white European women,
and then when it comes to black and Global South

(23:56):
women who often have different distributions of steroid not sex
hormones in their bodies, they get policed out. And that's
in a literal example of a project that's existed for
hundreds of years where they change the rules specifically to
justify them winning and racialize people losing. And I think
Castro not only identifies as a woman, but it was

(24:18):
also assigned female at birth, so just so she identifies
as a woman and with the sign female at birth,
so she's she would be as this woman by definition,
but with very high levels of testosterone, right, And that's
why for me, it's like there's no there's no ethical
standpoint to policing gender and sex. There's no logical consistency,

(24:41):
there's no scientific consistency. What there is is trauma. And
I think what I was so looking forward to this
conversation is you're one of the few people in a
public platform speaking about trauma. And for me, trauma is
the origin of everything. So then the question for me becomes,
how are people so traumatized that they mistake freedom as

(25:03):
a threat? And then I began to realize it's not
that we, as gender nonconforming people, are the only ones
that are harmed by this binary. This binary has recruited
CIS people such that whenever they're presented with any alternative,
they have to undermine that in themselves and in other people.
So then the violence we experience as trans people was

(25:25):
templated on what they did to themselves. First, it's what
the CIS women said when they said, no one will
love me if I have facial hair, So I'm gonna
remove every hair on my body. And when I see
a general non conforming person do that, I can't process that.
It's sys men saying no one will ever love me
if I'm vulnerable emotional, so when I see someone else
doing that, I have to erase them. So then I

(25:46):
began to realize there's no such thing as transgender issues.
There are issues that since people have for themselves that
they're taking out on us, And I think that energy
I was only able to get by doing my own
trauma healing work because I was misled into thinking I
was broken when from the age of three I was
practicing my truth. My mom has a story that she

(26:07):
told me that when I was seven years old, she
was talking me into bed and I said, Mom, I'm queer,
and I didn't know what that word meant. I read
it because my dad was brought up in a British
colonial education system, so we read children's literature from the
UK which used queer as a word for strange. But
I knew that I was different before I had any language.
And so for the audacity for people to tell me
that I just made this up for my career, for

(26:30):
political correctness, or to undermine other people, No. Trans people
practice a kind of resonant presence that threatens a world
that thrives on scarcity, trauma, and projection. We are some
of the most real that there ever was So what
happens is other people project their insecurities because they don't
know who they are. They only know who they've been

(26:51):
told they should be. Hello, I feel like I literally
am sitting here. I'm like, okay when people ask me
about these issues and like, listen to a low girl,
I'm tired. Girl is gender neutral for me, by the way,
I'm tired. I'm like, I'm just the look you're giving
it the gospel truth right now. Hurt people, hurt people.

(27:15):
And I talk a lot about trauma publicly. We've talked
a lot about trauma on this podcast. In Trauma, my
therapist defines trauma as too much, too fast, too soon,
and it's really about our nervous systems. When I have
nervous systems go into survival mode and we go into
five flight or freeze. When we're biologically I think this
is the correct term for biology, biologically programmed, right, or

(27:38):
at least neurobiologically programmed. So when we sense a threat,
it's our bodies released cortisol, adrenaline, and when we were
out of that dangerous situation, we regulate, We sort of
come back to our stasis. If we are constantly feeling
under threat, under stress, But we're not hardwired biologically to
constantly be in that survival place, to constantly release the

(28:01):
cortisol in adrenaline over time. That can cause disease, can
cause illness, adrenal fatigue, all sorts of things. But I
think the piece there is not feeling safe. And I
think what for me, as a trans person of color
who's sort of been bullied my whole life, I've been
released in cortisol in adrenaline like all the time because

(28:21):
I've never felt safe. And I think people who aren't
trans and aren't people of color also aren't feeling safe
for probably very different reasons, maybe some of the same reasons.
Sometimes they're seeing us as a threat to them. Like
and I've always always like to remind people that feeling
unsafe and feeling uncomfortable are not the same thing. Right,

(28:42):
if I'm uncomfortable, I talked about bathrooms all the time,
like right in Jim Crow South, and white folks were
not comfortable with black people using the same bathroom as them,
but they weren't unsafe with black people using the bathroom.
And you know, sis women who might be uncomfortable with
the trans woman in the bathroom with them and unsafe.
They might be uncomfortable. In my healing work around my trauma,

(29:04):
I have to be able to distinguish between being uncomfortable
and unsafe, so I'm not constantly releasing those hormones. That
is work I have to do. People are lashing out.
I think a lot of times people are lashing out
at the wrong thing. They're feeling threatened and they're feeling unsafe,
and so they're lashing out of trans people, their scapegoating us,
and they're lashing out at us, or they're lashing out

(29:26):
at immigrants, or they're lashing out at black people, and
it's like, wait a minute, maybe there is this system,
And what you're saying around the gender binary is that
there's a system that is they're pressing you. What I
would say about people who are you know, in the
Midwest who have all their jobs have been shipped overseas.
It is not the fault of Mexicans and people from
South America who have come and taking your jobs. There

(29:47):
is a system that is in place that is not
done what it needs to do to protect your jobs.
So instead of lashing out at your fellow citizen, maybe
we should be looking at uniting as a people and
changing the system that is a pressing us. And now
that was my little Yes, scapegoating is a trauma response,

(30:07):
and it's just it. Really, this is where trauma literacy
has changed my life because often the political vocabulary is
insufficient for me. Now, like I kind of get bored
by a lot of social justice language because it's not
enough because the social justice language and oh my god,
this is, oh my god cry because I've been so
fed up with politics and like I just can't do
it anymore. But I'm still political, but I think that's

(30:30):
the piece political language is really limiting. I'm in the
space of healing. I'm in this space of like, how
do I deal with this trauma? How do I deal
with like, you know, my shame. How do I heal
myself so that I can like go into this next
fifty years hopefully you know, with some with some sanity
and some help. But this is why I connect with
you so deeply, La Fern, is that I see us

(30:51):
both struggling because we understand that actually the spiritual work
is the political work. The healing work is the social
justice liberatory work, and we're actually saying the work begins
reckoning with our own trauma and with sedimentation of all
these legacies and histories in us, how we treat each
other and how we treat ourselves the location of politics.

(31:13):
So for me, I'm not as concerned with the rigor
of your analysis, what words you have. I'm much more
concerned and how are we treating each other? How are
we practicing a loving, compassionate, trauma informed world today. And
what this has allowed me to do is to have
a very different conversation on trans politics. I am exposed
to transphobic violence every single minute of my life, and

(31:35):
I respond with love. And people don't get it, But
I want to explain that I'm choosing love not to
be the better person. I'm choosing love to heal because
if I was to be angry at every single person,
that would ruin my nervous system. And love actually equalizes
me and makes me actually want to live. It gives

(31:55):
me joy and beauty and possibility and hope. And why
would I ever subscribed to an ideology that makes me
feel guilty for hope when it's actually the very thing
that makes me survive. And then, second, I love because
I know that the reason people harm me is because
they have been harmed and they are doing harm to themselves.
And then I know that weaponizing shame against them doesn't

(32:18):
actually do anything but reinforce their self sabotage. So I
want to break the circuitry of self sabotage, and I
want to teach people healing is possible. And I think
that that is why trans people were historically regarded as
spiritual leaders, because of our mastery of metamorphosis. And what
I mean by that is that this world teaches us

(32:39):
that everything is fixed and cannot be changed, and then
trans people entered, we say we can change everything. I
hated who I was. I was problematic, I was ignorant,
I was messy, I was not in a good place,
and then I took life into my own hands and
I manifested myself. If that is not a men to

(33:00):
for a poem, a truth, a prophecy for this world,
that's the gift of possibility that trans people give you.
Two can change, and I know you and I both
believe this. The reason that I find social justice so
concerning right now is this idea of redemption has been
completely lost, and I'm actually like, we should start from culpability.

(33:21):
We should start from complicity. We are the things that
we critique, we are the things that are harming us.
But yet we fight because there's still something beautiful, redeemable
and possible alongside that in ourselves and in one another. Absolutely. Absolutely.
Oh look, there's a few things they came up from me. Um.
Corey Booker was on a talk show when he was

(33:42):
running for president in the primaries, and he was talking
about love and having an ethic of love and like
proceeding from a place of love, and the journalists, I
want to see the journalisting laughed in his face as
he said it, like literally laughed in his face. I
was like, wow, he got no traction talking about love.
That came up for me when I've listened to you.
And then Um, a psychologist we just interview, talked about love.

(34:04):
I talked about love all the time. And she talked
about how when we're in love, our bodies instead of
those stress hormones, our bodies actually released dopamine and release
oxytocin and all these good, you know, feel good hormones
when we're in love and when we feel love and
just this space of manifesting love for myself and maybe
for another person or for our thing is literally healing.

(34:27):
It's literally taking those stress hormones and bringing them down
and replacing them with hormones that are loving and our bodies,
and that is something that we all need. And the
space of metamorphosis that you just talked about, I think
that was one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard.
This is why I'm not into the cancel culture thing,

(34:47):
because it's like people can change and people, you know,
I can't change you. You have to make that decision
to change yourself. But that is possible. And then how
do we also create a space where we're assuming the
best in people? Um, I think we shouldn't be naive
about making generous assumptions, right, But I think if I'm
assuming that people are sucking on purpose and people are

(35:09):
just corrupt, it's a really dark place to be in.
Making generous assumptions about our fellow human beings helps me,
Like that helps me moving from a place of love,
helps me get through my life instead of being cynical
and sort of jaded and bitter. So this work is individual,
but if enough individuals do the work, it can become

(35:30):
collective and then we can begin to change ideology and
change structures and systems that you have to get that out.
I was gonna say my job as a poet is
to resurrect the dead things, including love and my entire life.
I've been shamed as naive immature for being committed to love,
and then I actually realized I need to cultivate my

(35:52):
naivety because of course, a system that is so cruel
will diminish, undermine, and delegitimize any alternative as naive, ridiculous, idealistic.
And now I actually believe in the possibility of transformation
of this world. I believe the healing is possible because
look at what I've done in my own life, and

(36:13):
that's what Healing Journey has done from me, is that
if I could find something redeemable in me, I wanted
to die. For the first half of my life, I
didn't exist. I was literally a fantasy of what other
people needed me to be. I perfected disassociation as my
first performance are which is why so many of as
a trans and gender a commer people are so damn
good at performance. It's because we learned the scripts really

(36:37):
early on, and and transition for me was about realignment
and if I could go from being a ghost of
myself to being able to perform and weep and feel
every emotion. How dare you tell me that hope is impractical,
Because hope is how I resurrected myself from premature death.

(36:58):
So I am actually really committed now to an arsenal
of militant compassion and compassionate militancy. And I reject this
idea that we were just somehow wrong or or short sided,
because actually the political traditions that I most learned from,
Like when I think about the history of cross dressing laws,

(37:19):
our transistors were arrested twenty to forty times. It wasn't
just like one time. It was like routinely risk and
then exposed to sexual violence in prisons, put into mental
health institution centers. Why did they keep on going outside?
And the only reason I can understand it is they
were writing love letters to us. That is the only
way I can understand it. My transform others said, I

(37:42):
am writing a love letter to those who do not
exist yet, and I am trying to create a world
such that you can't exist. So what that means is
that I'm only able to exist because of the love
and care of other people. So actually my love and
care creates the capacity for existence for the next generation
it and that idea is what propels me to keep going.

(38:03):
Is the more love and the more care and the
more intention than I put into the world, maybe I
can create a world that's livable by the people that
need to exist. Mm hmm, oh, that's so beautiful. When
you talked about your being called naive, I immediately thought
about the child that lives in all of us, and
the child who does not know bigotry that is top bigotry,

(38:24):
but also doesn't know shame, also doesn't know trauma and
sort of tapping into the child and me whose wide
eyed and it's filled with possibility, and so caring for
that little child, letting her come out and play um,
speaking gently to her, nourishing her and sometimes, you know,

(38:44):
being the adult when I need to be, but letting
her have space teaches me so much about myself. Okay,
it's that time again. A lot more is coming though,
including our guests. What else is true, We'll be right back.

(39:05):
We are back, and we're ready to pick up where
we left on. So I do want to be a
little basic and talk about pronouns. I remember when I
when I had my really first close non binary friend
who used data in pronouns, and I remember just having
difficulty at the beginning with with they them, and I
don't anymore, and and again one can change, but I

(39:27):
had difficulty in the beginning. A lot of people, I
think still have some difficulty with they them. I think
fewer people than used to. Can you talk about the
importance of pronouns and respecting people's pronouns. I would love
to say that I had difficulty miss gendering myself, which
is export often don't bring up tell us about that,
but you know what, I started to use day then, pronouns.

(39:48):
It was a transition for me because I was just
so saturated into the language of male quote female pronouns
and binaries that it was a new introduction to me.
And so I began from humility being like, of course,
it's difficult, but it's in no way equivalent to the
kinds of institutionalized psychological warfare that gender variant people exist

(40:12):
and a culture that ritualizes and naturalizes our disappearance. So yes,
it's difficult, but that difference you're alluding to between discomfort
and actual oppression. So actually, what I would argue is
the only way that we show up for other people
is through inconveniencing ourselves. So in this kind of political
vacabulary right now, people are saying defund the police. It

(40:34):
just scares people. As a framework, you should come up
with a more palate. That's not how change works. Change
works by actually being made uncomfortable. So what they them,
I think is so productive and generative in doing, is
halting a conversation and therefore halting an assumption. And that's
what we need to attack as a trans movement is

(40:56):
the preconscious. It's not just about how people are curre
did on social media, it's what they actually are thinking
before they articulate the language. And this hasn't experienced so
many of us as trans people know as well. They're
just using our pronouns to be politically correct, not because
they actually see us for who we are. And I
don't want you to use day them just because it's
like you're gonna get called out. I want to use

(41:17):
saying them because you no longer see me as a man.
And that's what I'm insisting on for trans people is
that we have accepted mere acknowledgement as the social justice
in beart it when I'm actually I'm saying no, regard
my humanity, and regarding my humanity means recognize me for
my complexity, my interiority, and that which can never be

(41:40):
rendered visible. Not all trans people are the same, because
we each have souls, and I'm arguing for bodies, not souls.
The next point I want to make about the pronoun
conversation to elevate it, just because as people will say,
it's plural, it doesn't make sense grammatically, etcetera. And I
want to actually say, in this moment of pandemic, one

(42:02):
would think that Western individualism could be revisited, because what
we should learn from this is that what's happening over
there impacts what's happening over here, and that we create
fictional walls everywhere between countries, between genders, between races that
are illusory and don't stand the test of life and existence.

(42:23):
What they them for me is actually of collapsing Western
individualism and saying I am because of many, because it
took many, loving, caring traditions and people. And so when
I say I am, I'm representing those people's communities, traditions.
When I say they them, I'm paying homage to Sylvester

(42:43):
to Sylvia, to all the people who came before me.
I'm actually saying the only reason that I can exist
is because other people existed. Yes, I'm not trying to
extrapolate myself, and so that's why I say they them
as a poem. Every time you've gendered me appropriately, we
are convening together in a poem. And the poems that
matter most to me are the poems that we speak,

(43:05):
and I think they them as a as an articulate
poem of a kind of alternative to Western individualism. Brilliant.
I knew you'd elevate the conversation. That was fucking brilliant. Yes,
I'm cursing on my podcast, but there's a moment in
your book beyond the gender binary. You right, The gender

(43:26):
binary is like a party gift who shows up before
you've had a chance to set the table. I love that.
Can you elaborate on that a little bit? To wrap up? So,
the thing is people still think that babies are born
male or female, when actually we're slowly starting to say, okay,

(43:48):
maybe not all babies are born straight. That's a cultural
position we put on. But when it comes to gender
and sex, we haven't done that due diligence. The truth
is we're all born and then we become after the fact.
But what the gender binary makes you think is that
our organic default, biological as they say, self, was male.

(44:09):
Laverne and I were not born moles, period, period. And
and to really understand trans life, you need to break
out of this paradigm that we were biological males quote
unquote that transition like that's all literally sis nonsense. Okay,
we were born a Loke and Laverne respectively, and culture

(44:31):
and society came in and accrued various meanings to what
we were giving and what was given. And so when
I'm saying the gender binary shows up unannounced, it structures
the preconscious that I was speaking before. It literally means
that even before you speak, you see address and you
think woman. But what I want you to understand is
most of what we consider now to be feminine was

(44:52):
actually worn by people of various genders for hundreds of years.
Make up, wigs, heels, leggings, dresses, lace, So actually every
symbol is structured by historical, social and political conditions. And
when you continue to make this as some like organic
innate like blank slate, that doesn't exist. You're blank slate

(45:12):
with socially constructed darling. Okay, So what I'm trying to
get people to realize is that it's not enough, and
I think this is the next generation of transactivism and
thought I'm just announcing that now. I hope that it
takes It is it's not just about saying trans women
are women, transmit our men, yes, of course, but it's
actually about saying only people can self determine their own truth.

(45:38):
It's about removing the power and the authority of families,
of religions, of governments to say you're a male or female. Instead,
what we should be fighting for is ask people who
they are, period and then believe them period. And I
just don't think we're fighting for that as a transmovient
because we've settled with our own subordination to assist frameworks.

(46:02):
So we still have to use this rhetoric of transition
as if we were some gender that was inaccurately ascribed
to us and then now we are. I'm like, no,
I've always been a low I was not the broken
I was not the problem. It was the gender binary
that made you misinterpret. So this is not about political correctness.
It's actually about honesty and factuality. When you miss gender someone,

(46:24):
you're not just like being politically incorrect, you're being incorrect.
Like would we go around calling someone named Sarah Susan,
she'd say, no, my name is Sarah. That's the exact
same thing that we're doing. When we missed gender, people
were misrecognizing them. And the final thing I wanted to
say is the trauma of misrecognition, just to sort of

(46:47):
link it into what we were speaking about trauma before. Unfortunately,
people only understand trauma is physical, like you have to
experienced physical brutality in order to say I've been traumatized.
And that's just not how our bodies believe that. Actually,
our neurological systems don't really differentiate between that. And what
I noticed in so many of our lives as transigeneral

(47:08):
conforming people is the trauma of being misrecognized. Actually, like
takes a physical toll, ultimately makes us hurt. But I
want to be fluid also in saying the trauma of
being recognized and I want to thank you for recognizing me.
And it's the anecdote to so many of those centuries

(47:29):
of misrecognition and It's a testament to the power of
of loving reconciliation, and I think that's what we exist
on this planet to do as trans people, is to
see each other for who we are, before medicalization, before
any of that. I'm staying see each other for our souls,
you know. And I want to say thank you so

(47:50):
much for seeing me from my non binary soul that
I feel like I can wear what I want to
wear and not worry that my ID entity will be invalidated.
M hm. That is really what we all want, no
matter how we identify in terms of gender. We want
to be seen as who we really are, and we
need to be seen who we really are. I like

(48:15):
to end the podcast with a very specific question that
comes out of my trauma resiliency therapy. Actually it comes
from the community resiliency model, and it's based from the
idea of both and that I might be going through
something really horrible and awful and traumatizing right now, and
I feel that in a very specific place in my body,
but somewhere in my body, the sensations are neutral and positive.

(48:38):
And if I focus on what's challenging, that's all I
can see. But if I focus on what it's neutral
and positive. Maybe I can shift my energy, shift my
nervous system a little bit. It's basically about what are
the things that help you get through so a looke
for you? What else is true? What helps you get
through history? So off in I feel incredibly lonely, like

(49:03):
in a physical sense being the only person who looks
like me on a street and having everyone stare at me.
In an emotional sense, asking as anyone ever felt this
kind of loneliness, And then I read, and reading for
me was a lifeline because I found people who felt
the same things before me. And this year, one of
my New Year's resolutions was that basically, someone in the

(49:26):
world has felt your loneliness before. Find your ancestors, become
their living memorial. And what I mean by that now
is I no longer feel that kind of loneliness. I
can say, yes, I've been slotted out of so many
predetermined communities, homes, categories, But there are other people at

(49:48):
the same time who have also felt with that devastation,
and we become each other's family. And family is not
just for the living, it's also for the debt. So
it's about finding intimacy with our answers ers who felt
that kind of loneliness. And so that paradigm has changed
my entire life because I thought forever that my biggest
fear was loneliness, and now I've realized I'm never actually alone. Right,

(50:12):
that is definitely a resource. What we have a color
resource in the parlance of KRIM or the community resiliency model. Uh.
That just made me think about Kristin Nef's work on
self compassion, which I'm obsessed with right now because I'm
really trying to be more compassionate to myself. And one
of the things she says that is a big component
of self compassion is understanding that we were part of
a larger community, that other people are also experiencing the

(50:36):
same thing, have experienced the same things that we are,
and so that share humanity. If we can use that
and say, well, no, you're not the only one who's
feeling this right now, that other people have gone through
the same things that you have le barned and are
going through it right now, You're not alone, and that
we can say that to ourselves and give that gift
to ourselves. So, really, what you're doing, and according to

(50:57):
Christin Neft's work, is practicing self compassion and which is
so beautiful and the biggest challenge right now being more
compassionate and loving towards myself. I love you below. You
are your everything, you really are, and I'm just so
blessed that you're in the world like really and truly.
I whenever you talk about your experiences being outside, being

(51:22):
in public and the harassment you experience, I feel that
viscerally because I've experienced similar harassment, particularly when I was
in age into nonconforming space myself, pre medical transition, and
really to this day, and I just I'm so grateful
that you've had the courage to speak it. But it's

(51:44):
not just that you speak it, it's the way you
speak it with so much love, authority, sense of history,
and a connection. It is deeply You're so deeply connected
to the ancestors, to an energy of power that is
greater than you. You are clearly anointed, so beauty to
fly anointed, and I love that how beautifully you walk

(52:04):
in that, And that is what I aspire to, is
to walk more fully in the part of me that
is annointed, the part of me that is the goddess
inside of me. So thank you, Thank you for existing alone.
Thank you. I'm a person who really appreciates history and

(52:28):
having an understanding of history as a way to kind
of understand where we are now. So much of how
history has treated trans people is that it's sort of
erased us and so acknowledging history and that we've always
been here in really concrete ways. It's like it just
fills me with such a sense of connection that does

(52:50):
feel spiritual. It feels very very spiritual. I feel like
this episode with a log was very much church for
me and being trans and and owning my transnis is
about owning the divine that's inside me. It's bigger than
it's bigger than politics. It's just it's it's God. It's God.

(53:11):
Sending everyone out there so much love on your journey
towards building and healing. Thank you for listening to The
Laverne Cox Show. Please rate reviews, subscribe and share with

(53:34):
everyone you know. You can find me on Instagram and
Twitter at Laverne Cox and on Facebook at Laverne Cox
for Real. Join me next week when we'll be talking
to my therapist, Yes, my therapist, Jennifer Burden Flyer, about
the therapy that we do together and specifically about the
community resiliency model. Until next time, stay in the love.

(54:01):
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