A while ago my online chum Miriam, whom I have officially dubbed The Sunniest Girl on the Internetâ„¢ (because she is), posted this:
my cohort of trans girls, the girls who transitioned about a year before or after i did, give or take, all seem to be looking, and i dont mean this disparagingly at all, so profoundly normal. just regular women. half of them look a lot like the women i grew up around, my mother's friends, church ladies, teachers. absolutely love to see it.
This is one of the least obvious and most true observations I've ever come across.
For the most part I wear jeans and a t-shirt, or at best a smart casual top and dress pants. I'd love to wear something lighter in summer, and I do occasionally, around the flat. But decades of mistreatment at my own hands have left me with prematurely swollen ankles and arthritic feet, so skirts and open-toed shoes are out of the question. It's a horror show down there; I don't want to frighten the horses.
So for a long time, I felt like I was letting the side down. Then one day I was walking up Lygon Street in Carlton (the old lady capital of the universe), and made a point of noting every woman of around my age that I passed. Jeans and t-shirt, or something of that sort, nearly every one. If it weren't for all the testosterone I'd allowed to flow under the bridge before sorting myself out (leaving me over-vertical, and arrestingly polygonal in the face), there would be nothing visibly exceptional about me at all.
Yet there is this perception that there's something distinctive and immediately identifiable about LGBTQIA+ people. Recently somebody I know remarked that trans women always dress like Carmen Miranda.
Um. Hello? I am here right now, in this room with you. If Carmen Miranda ever looked anything like this, she must have really let herself go.
But I know what he meant. Look at promotional material for any LGBTQIA+ service, community group, event, whatever. On the one hand yes, PDF files and websites chock full of stock photographs are a cringe-inducing blight upon us all, not just marginalised people. However, I have to say that I look at this stuff and instantly dismiss it with "Oh. This is clearly not something intended for me."
Something similar goes on with culture and community. The times being what they are, I have of late felt like I'm letting the side down again when it comes to engagement with "my people". So when a local queer festival which shall remain nameless was on recently, I dutifully ignored the stock photography and went through the programme, item by item, looking for exhibitions, productions, or events I might like to take in. It went something like this:
"Hmm. Let's see. No… Nope… Uh-huh, I see the merit in it, but not for me thank you… No… I think not… Oh, goodness me no… Pass… Eek! Good grief! I couldn't think of anything worse!…" And so on.
As for community, I am not a social butterfly. In fact, whatever the logical opposite of a butterfly is, that is what I am, socially. Which is not to say I'm a misanthrope. I'm inordinately fond of people. It's just that open-ended interactions with no set agenda that aren't a pub crawl fill me with anxiety. Compounding that is the fact that I was completely insufferable before my egg cracked. So statistically, the fact that I have two or three queer people among my very small circle of kith and kin is really quite remarkable, but still they are quite definitely the exception.
Online, of course, a good half of the people I follow are trans, but I assume that's true of everyone. We're just so much more brilliantly witty, insightful, and generally irresistibly attractive than the rest of the population. Sorry; I don't make the rules, I just follow them.
My point is that while I accept the "q" word when it is applied to me (well-meaningly), I don't exist day-to-day in a queer community or culture. I am the most middle class (by every metric except financial) Anglo-Australian old lady you're ever likely to meet. I've even started watching murder mysteries. (I know! I'm as appalled as you are, but at least it gives me something to talk about with my mother.) I can hardly claim to be mainstream, but I exist in a me-shaped intersection on the Venn diagram between the Anglo-Australian mainstream blob and a variety of eccentricities.
Give or take a bit at the margin, if you can speak English and name all four members of the Beatles, in all probability my culture is your culture, and my community is your community.
Which is not to say that jumping in with both feet to embrace queer identity, culture, and/or community is a bad thing. Bless you, if that's your thing. Quite a number of people who have done so are among my heroes. What I want to argue is that the assumption that all queer people exist in some sort of esoteric bubble is a problem; a comforting delusion for many people, and perhaps also a deliberate strategy to marginalise us.
About ten years ago (when you're my age, everything happened about ten years ago), the local council in the awful little coastal town where I then lived mounted a little festival it called "Coast Out". It might have been well-intentioned, or it might have been a cynical bid for the "pink dollar". Either way, I didn't go. I can say with confidence that it would have included all the usual stall holders who made up the bulk of all the other festivals and markets in the area, only now with rainbow-themed fairy floss, rainbow-themed sherbet-filled liquorice, and rainbow-themed Dagwood dogs. I can't say that rainbow-themed wood chopping, bagpipes, or a dog show were included, but I wouldn't be at all surprised.
Anyway, the usual stock photos of drag performers heralded the event on the front page of the local paper, and the letters page was in an uproar: "I'm not prejudiced, but this is a waste of ratepayers' money. We don't need this here. Being gay is a Sydney thing. It's nothing to do with us, and anyway this is a family holiday destination." (Paraphrased from memory.)
One of the first things that struck me upon moving to that town some years earlier (after first realising I'd made a terrible mistake) was that around dusk, the car park of every playing field or nature reserve in the area would fill up with utes and white vans, concentrating about the lavatory block.
"Oh, my goodness," I thought, "I've moved house to the 1980s."
I've no idea what the locals thought was going on. Not cottaging, that's for sure, because being gay is a Sydney thing.
This denial of obvious realities is I think, at least as much as lazy stereotyping, at the heart of the usual limits of queer representation. We're defined by exclusion; by cutting away everything that's "ordinary" and "normal" about us and holding up the tattered remnants to define us. Straight people see themselves represented in the culture as whole people. LGBTQIA+ people are overwhelmingly defined by their differences.
I'm not saying this is deliberate, or malicious, and I think queer people do it to themselves as often as not. But I think it does cause people to feel excluded where they ought to feel included, or to feel a kind of impostor's syndrome — that they aren't performatively queer enough.
Also I think it grants an entirely unwarranted degree of ontological security to people who like to think of themselves as defining normality, with license to think of people who slip outside those bounds as aberrant, foreign, and a threat.
"Barry?! That's ridiculous. Barry's not gay! He's never even been to Sydney. He drinks bourbon and coke. And he's devoted to his football; I've seen his ute parked down by the oval at all hours. He's just not found the right girl yet."
So in conclusion, dear straight people of the suburbs, you need not fret about the possibility of us leaving our inner-city garrets and storming the Colorbond curtain. Statistically, most of us were born and raised among you, and many are harmlessly inhabiting those very crescents and cul-de-sacs at this very moment. We are you, and you are us, and relatively few of us are wildly eccentric, but those that are so are for the most part perfectly lovely and nothing to worry about. Most of us have families of some sort, do the washing up, and some of us have been known to occasionally fall asleep in front of the telly with a half-eaten chocolate digestive in our laps.
I can also recommend taking some time to ask yourself what you want from life, rather than assuming that what you're now doing is normal and inevitable. It's almost certain that you won't come to the same conclusion I did, but even if you elect to change nothing more than next year's holiday destination it's a worthwhile exercise. "Normal" is a much more accommodating term than some would have you believe.
