David Davis XIII, Part 2
Of all the things Jade and I do together, talking about ~the discourse~ while making and eating vegan food is one of my favorites. The other night, as we cooked “Korean” “beef” with bok choy, we discussed an essay about “self-awareness” and literary critique that had come out that morning. Conversation about reflexivity and the practice/scourge of listing one’s privileges like credentials (with just the right amount of performative shame) in one’s creative work invariably leaves us irritated and indignant. How does an affectation of liberal contrition make for good art or mutual aid? Who is deluded enough to believe that it can? And why are we still stuck on this stupid question? We see this, what Alex Verman calls “social media identity politics,” everywhere and all the time, and have for some years now.
As Hannah Baer writes in her book Trans Girl Suicide Museum, “I am hesitant to use identity categories as my primary tools for decoding all of reality.” (I had more quotes from this book on this subject, but I left it back in Brooklyn. Yes, readers, I am returning yet again to infernal California in her plague-stricken winter). In a recent newsletter on accountability in radical communities, Verman links this phenomenon to what they call liberalism’s fetish for the real, a preoccupation—a fantasy—that distracts us from true solidarity.
“Everything gets reduced to a mere question of authenticity, of true emotion, good intention, etc. That is the problem, and it’s a big problem: when this sort of confessional, cringey, Catholic reading of what it means to “do the work” becomes accepted as activism in and of itself, as marking the shift to The Good Side, instead of an ongoing process requiring both community and criticism.”
It’s a (liberal) fantasy that your intent matters more than the harmful effects of your behavior. It’s a (liberal) fantasy to claim that someone’s “secret” or even public beliefs, desires, or affiliations outweigh their political actions (Octavia St. Laurent spoke very wisely on this topic). It’s a (liberal) fantasy to insist that internal subjective reality magically transcends material circumstances. Or so Jade and I scream at each other over our beef.
Maybe it’s our collective investment in this kind of reality that has compromised our sense of reality overall. Like what is real, anyway? And how does our focus on it get in the way of more important or interesting things—like have you ever squandered the pleasure of a new romantic relationship on worries about whether your feelings were big enough, true enough, real enough?
It seems that this fetish for the real manifests in our segmenting senses of self. To be sure, there’s a lot of good in language that allows us to better identify our communities and our struggles; I’m not sure how I could have begun to self-actualize as a transsexual without it. But there’s also something eerie about our reliance on ever-lengthening self-descriptors—labels and boxes, as some people disparage them—that call to mind upgraded DSM manuals or medical intake forms. When I say I am a white genderqueer trans masochist faggot dyke, am I describing my kyriarchical position as filtered through and informed by aesthetic, desire, and relationships, or am I filling out the census so as to be a better, more legible, more easily surveilled, more governable citizen? Without seeking to deny anyone the succor or relief they provide, when I encounter non-binary markers for drivers licenses and trans-affirming credit cards, do I feel less dysphoric? Less alienated? More safe?
This fear of inauthenticity manifests in the most peculiar places. I’ve noticed that some queer and trans people seem to spend a great deal of time and energy worrying about whether they are queer enough or trans enough—real enough. I hear it in conversations, see it in memes, and watch it throughout social media, expressed primarily as anxieties around sex, dating, and belonging. Am I queer enough to attend this community event? Am I trans enough to receive this form of medical care? Who is allowed to say this or that slur? There are of course material repercussions to being viewed as failing to meet some kind of queer or trans ID metric (biphobia and medical gatekeeping come to mind), but there are many circumstances in which all (“all”) that’s at stake is a moment in a lifetime of shifting self-perception.
How is this possible? Why is not knowing exactly who we are and by exactly what we are constituted every single second such a threat? Why do I reread that earlier line of inquiry—Am I queer enough to attend this community event? Am I trans enough to receive this form of medical care? Who is allowed to say this or that slur?—and immediately recall Annelise’s viral tweet from a few years back.
Somewhere along the way, we started employing the concept of “validity” to reclaim our realness as queer and trans people. You are valid is a remnant of a more earnest desire to convey legitimacy and bear witness. Now co-opted to sell partnerships between queer influencers and venture capitalists, we are reminded (often through pastel infographics posted on dubious “therapeutic” and “wellness” Instagram accounts) that our validity is as unassailable as the postal worker’s work legendary ethic: though we may violate norms of gender, sexuality, and erotic conduct, we, the brave and beleaguered, are valid, and that can never be taken away. You know what can be taken away? Food, shelter, medicine, hormones, human touch, communal care, and personal agency, to start.
As I wrote last time, as discourses around our identities in relation to commodification by racial capitalism continue to evolve, validity has become a source of bitter parody, not unlike the concepts of tenderqueer, gaslighting, and trigger warning. Which is why I would like to know:
When someone tells says to you, “You are valid,” what do you feel? How does this sensation inform your personal sense of being queer enough or trans enough? What is it like to feel queer enough? To feel trans enough? And why do these things somehow exist on the same wavelength as being good enough? If you know yourself to be a certain way and identify yourself that way, why is it so hard to feel that knowledge as you know it?
While I am driving at something, I promise I don’t ask these questions in bad faith. There was a time in my life when I was concerned with authenticity along these lines and in a way that I’m not anymore. Like when I was still new to the world of messy Saturn returns and uhauling for love, I wasn’t smarter or more insightful than any other baby dyke. In fact, having recently come from an evangelical home where I was by and far the most observant member of the stupidest religion on record, I was probably a lot stupider than your average baby dyke. No sooner had I started sleeping with women, experimenting with men’s clothes, and getting organized by communists, when I began to worry that I was being gay in the wrong way.
Like why was it that the women I tried to cruise, at 21 and 22, were rarely interested in me? And if I was really gay, and not just kidding myself, why was it that I was not attracted to every single feminine cis woman I saw? And why couldn’t I find them, all the dykes, whoever they were? Prior to coming out, I didn’t have gay friends, and this was still at the dawn of app-based dating, when my peers—people in college, mostly—didn’t even want to admit they used OkCupid, much less who they were hooking up with it.
This kind of insecurity—am I gay enough? Am I even gay?—is fairly normal, I think, among those of us lucky enough to choose to out ourselves and to exist in environments where we can explore our gendered sexualities without total recrimination. If you weren’t radicalized prior to coming out, the time immediately following decloseting is a strange kind of limbo, with lots of change and little understanding: It’s generative as an embryo but goo nonetheless.
Please remember that the internet of 2010 was different than the internet of 2020. If you’re significantly younger than I (I’m 32), it might bear reminding that I came out before trans people were onscreen as anything other than jokes or serial killers or scapegoats; gay marriage was illegal in my state and country; Pride didn’t have Chipotle floats and cops didn’t wear rainbow decals. Back then, the gayest thing on American TV was Will & Grace. I’m not saying those years were harder, because I’m not sure that they were, at least for me, anyway. But I am saying that the political landscape was different, and that one of the biggest differences was that queer visibility and representation, as we conceive of these things today, did not exist. There was little to no political value in being seen as “inclusive,” in corporate diversity programs extending beyond (white, straight) cis women. As talking points or rhetorical doorstops, inclusivity, diversity, representation, and visibility had not yet been co-opted, were not yet the political dead ends that they are now.
Because that is what they are: dead ends. When you internalize neoliberal messages of respectability—this goes quadruple for us as white people—you’ve turned the good, nourishing things that birthed validity discourse and turned them into noise and platitudes. These days, no one tells me I’m valid except for cis gay people that I, personally, find indistinguishable from heterosexuals. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that around the time I started being asked by employers what my pronouns were, right around the time that Trump took office, that I started getting told I was valid by the same people who tokenized me while underpaying me. I don’t need anyone else’s approval to exist—I am well aware that my existence does not merit most people’s approval—but every so often, there it is, prosodically identical to, “You’re so brave,” which is what my mom says to me now rather than engage with me as another human being.
I used to think of it this fear of inauthenticity as a sign of immaturity or inexperience. It was for me, anyway, and naturally it disappeared once I’d lived long enough to experience the repercussions of being gay—or something—in public. Now ten years into walking around as an undeniable dyke, I make meals with my girlfriend and our wives and mommies and daddies, talk shit, and then sleep the pristine slumber of someone who never has to wonder if they’re gay enough, because the world won’t let me forget it.
As for You are valid: Take it from me, as someone who sleeps the less pristine slumber of someone who works in marketing, or as I like to call it, the commercial factory: Validity has been co-opted. But who cares anyway, right? There are better, more useful things to be than valid.
David tweets at @k8bushofficial.