A Curation, or an Uncuration

I am Black. I am transsexual. I am a writer. I am many more things, but those three are most relevant for this curation. I am I. I am not you.

My writing is intended for Black transsexuals, femme queens, faggots, ponks, bitches with bad attitudes and stank moufs. I believe Black people define transsexualism therefore Blackness and transness are integral to my work and cannot be separated from it. Entangled within my work, at its heart, is a question of legacy. What will I leave behind for the archive? How will Black trans children feel about my work? How will my ancestors?

As an artist of my origin, body, and presentation, I will have to constantly fight to affirm myself and my work. I want to document the tensions I have with this fight every step of the way so that femme queens and faggots of the future know what it always gave. That even early on in my practice, I sought to define my work and curate its audience. To cut the snake at the head. The snake being non-Black people who think my work somehow relates to their specific lived experiences in any substantive way, that in my words is something for them to lay claim to, something that can manifest in their assumed and performed ownership of my time, intimacy, and, ultimately, if the snake is allowed to slither freely, my work. I am I. I am not you. This is an attempt to control my own consumption.

Introduction

Transsexuality has become a fixture within popular culture. In an age of reactionary, fascist political movements and the tumblr-fication of identity politics, trans identity, and all that comes with it, sits at the pinnacle of the American zeitgeist. Who knew trannies would be the thing to finally tear this country apart? As with all things of popularity, of spectacle, of curiosity, there will inevitably come a movement of simultaneous widening, diluting, simplifying, and commodifying from the hegemonic culture. Dollhood is just like techno, a stolen counterculture repackaged into tik toks and shitty Berlin club cosplay for the rapacious appetites of the white queer desperately seeking something “bizarre,”  something “fab,” something . . . “cunt.”

I walk up to the door of the techno club, the Ukrainian flag above our heads waving hauntingly in the breeze. The bouncer sizes me up and asks “Mirror, mirror, on the wall . . . Who is the dolliest doll of them all?”  I’m not sure how to respond other than to recount to you, Mister Bouncer Sir, a tale of my first encounter with Dollness.

I was eight years old when I saw a Doll for the first time. I was walking through the Lenox Square Mall in Atlanta, Georgia with my father. We had just arrived here for the weekend with my stepmother and stepbrother. I only saw my father every other weekend, if he and his wife were doing okay and she didn’t mind having me over. He paid very little attention to me, as I was not interested in sports and wasn’t pulling any girls, at the time, other than my besties who thought I was funny and that my eyelashes were pretty. I liked to read. All the time. Everywhere we went. I read while I walked, watching the ground in front of me from around the edges of a book. I was reading that day, as we ambled through Lenox Mall together, my eyes glued to the pages of a YA novel, my father’s eyes glued to every woman with a body that passed us by.

He taps me on the top of my head twice. “Look, that’s Ne-Yo.” A short bald man with a hat tilted ever so slightly walks past us. I did not give a fuck. I tolerated my father as he tolerated me because at the time, we both felt that we had no other choice. “Oh… Cool.”  I replied.

As I turned my gaze forward again, a rush of fierce air encircled me as the tallest, most beautiful woman I had ever seen fluttered into my vision. She had dark brown skin and wore a long, honey blonde wig with the bangs peeking out of a white, cropped hoodie that said “Bad Girl”  in gold, cursive lettering. I could describe her body to you but it was really the eyes for me. There was something knowing and decisive about them. They were brown, dense, and layered, illuminating me as she briefly caught my gaze. She walked alone but ferociously, as if flanked by an invisible militia. This woman, this Doll, like me, did not give a fuck.

“That’s a faggot,”  my dad said. Pointing to her. This was a word that I would become quite familiar with, a word my father and step brother would bond over. It’s funny. I sort of look like her now. But I also looked like her then. I knew that and my dad knew that too, I think. I felt like she was calling my name, a name I had never heard before but still answered to. A name my foremothers bestowed upon me in the womb. It was subtle, the wave of a whisper, undulating down. Then, I knew that eventually, the day, or some other metric of time, would come when I would have no other option but to remake myself completely. I needed, so desperately, so ferociously, to be cunt.

Ugh, sorry Mister Scary Bouncer sir, you didn’t ask for all that. I’m not sure who the dolliest doll of all is but I know it ain’t the skinny white girl who passes for skinny white girl who has a laundry list of dream surgical procedures to racially ambiguify herself, reconstructing her once plain Jane white transgender world into one of lights… camera… action! Oop! Here comes the doll-model-dj-influencer pipeline. Dollhood of course filters into and out of colloquial language and communal rituals once held sacred among Black femme queens and butch queens in the New York and Chicago ballroom, as well as across the U.S. South. Now that every girl on estrogen is a doll, every boy that fucks her is trade, every floor she walks upon is a runway, and every mini skirt crop top combo is cunt.

We must remember the words of Selvin MC Debra Kool Aid Linda Khan, the quintessential butch queen up in drags, ballroom mother and father, who defined for us the term “doll”  so clearly. “The Doll is like a welfare card that you tried to get into the club with.”  Then there is “Doll Baby,” different from the Dolls, meaning “soft,” “real,” “fresh,” “pure.” Now, I am only interested in this particular colloquial definition insofar as it relates to the ethnography of Black transness and how Black, queer cultural identifiers are never gatekept, but tossed over the masses like confetti, landing upon anyone or anything at random.

So, Mister Bouncer, if you are asking who is the Doll or the Doll Baby, I’m not sure how my sisters and I will ever figure that out. How will we ever define ourselves when each definition we come up with, no matter how flawed, problematic, or antiblack it may be, is then expanded to include the white usurper? How will we begin to dream more lustrously? Beyond beauty, beyond social media, beyond desirability? Will we ever abandon the illusion of safety? Will our goal post shift to things of communal becoming, of legacy, of spirit, of revolution? White hegemony often acts as a blackhole and black holes offer no history. There is no identity without history.

Ughhhh. I am rambling, I know. I guess what I am trying to say is that these white trannies wouldn’t be shit without Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey, three Black slaves who were tortured and experimented on by Dr. J. Marion Sims in Alabama between the ages of 13 and 32. Between the approximate years of 1837 and 1857, Dr. Sims experimented on their vaginas, rectums, and ovaries over 30 times, with no anesthesia, creating treatments for vesicovaginal fistula and paving the way for modern gynecology. C. Riley Snorton in Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity  writes that Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey were “rendered as raw materials in the making of women’s medicine, from which they were excluded.”  Black flesh used as tools. While the mutilation of Black genitalia did not grant us access to humanness, our sex did provide the white usurpers with their gender. Maybe, that’s all that gender is: whiteness. In a similar way, Black trans women’s continuous marginalization, memeification, and genocide provides white trans and queer people with their genders, or lack of, their history, their language, and their culture.

So, I guess what you’re asking me is
Am I fish? To some.
Am I cunt? Obviously.
Do I pass? Well, sorta kinda.
Passing, like so many terms linked to transness, only interests me insofar as it relates to Black trans femininity and masculinity. Being black adds textures of complexity to everything.

Gender was, and still is, conceptualized outside the realm of Black. There are Black, cis women who do not pass and every Black person who is feminized by their queerness, their genitalia, or their transness is subject to levels of violence no white person born in this country could ever imagine. So what does it mean to “pass”  as a Black ungendered transsexual? What is misgendering to me when I am both pre-gender and post-gender, genderless and genderfull?

Yes, I am fish, but fish in the way that my mother is fish. Her smile, which one may only witness in person, its beauty too vampiric to be captured on camera, is bright and hypnotizing. Her demeanor is a deterrent to weak-minded bitches everywhere. She was the first person to tell me all about the world and how it is mine for the making. She fashioned the best life for me with the tools she was given, ancestry, prayer, and a pack of kanekalon. She adorns herself in Bebe and Baby Phat, tight hip huggers, the Miss Me jeans, ones that she cuts slits up and down the front and back of the thighs, tosses in the wash to produce shreds of denim that tangle and sway with each swish of her hips, the OG banjee distressed look that only a lady from Brooklyn by way of South Carolina could pull off.

I am fish in the way that my cousin was, with her ghetto fab name and bright, infectious smile. She was pretty and lanky and the girls could not take her. She taught me how to drive and she taught me how to scrap. She got pregnant out of wedlock and kicked out the Kingdom Hall for it. A short time before she died, we walked along the gates of our ancestral land, picking blueberries from the vines that grew abundantly. It was there she prophesied my future, telling me that as I get older I may want to “explore the feminine sides of myself”  and that “she always got me,”  that I could call her if I was ever in trouble, that she would explain the sensitive stuff to my mother. Even in her death, she still explains things to my mother and I.

What about me is fish?
It must be the way I rock braids,
a signature of mine,
passed down from my mother who learned hair from her mother
who ran a salon in Prospect Heights in the ’70s
but sold it when she moved the family back to her homeland/ ownland in South Carolina after her sons were lured into gang life.

The same overgrown road.
where she would ultimately
end up doing the hair of her aging friends for $25 a head.

The same overgrown road that her mother
And her mother’s mother
And the mother of her mother’s mother
Lived, loved, cried, conjured, imagined, and died.

The same overgrown road where one woman saw in me,
not a woman exactly, but some feminine marrow deep inside
that I was trying so hard to kill
like we learn to kill all the femmes we love the most.

And how has the power of Cunt transformed my life, you ask? How has it informed my transness, my Dollhood? I can only laugh at that question, Mister Bouncer.

Cunt is so much more than a recently oversaturated term used to describe anyone who is pretty, wears a waist trainer, and whose style is inspired by Casey Cadwallader’s diluted iteration of Mugler. Cunt is an embodiment. With it, you in yourself are fully attuned, mind, body, and spirit. It’s eucharistic. Its power is transitive, moving through you; your direction as well as your destination. You must first learn how to navigate it.

My transness came to me with the help of a magic potion.
I created myself, birthing a quaintrelle from the ashes of a boy
I poisoned myself a hundred times over
experimenting with ingredients until I found the perfect recipe
My witch’s brew
consisting of Blackness, anger, and cunt
These three materials have been my constants
I use them to tell the time
I adorn myself with them
Bathe in them
I have synthesized them into liquid form so that I can inject them into my hips and thighs
Causing my body to go numb and my vision to blur
Into pools of crimson
If I am a mutant, then anger is my mutation
Blackness, my language
Cunt, my psionic power

Sorry, fuck. I’m still rambling. I’m done, I’m done. What I really mean to say is…

Everyone is not a Doll
Everyone is not cunt
And that’s okay.

I am on the list, though.