[Interviewer] So can you talk about 
how you feel about doing this?

[Alok] I think so many narratives 
around trans people

is that we hated ourselves 
when we were younger,

and that now we love ourselves 
when we're older.

And that's just totally not true 
for so many of us,

because no matter how much 
we are comfortable in our bodies,

the minute we go outside we're under attack.

[Interviewer] Can you talk about 
what your style says about you?

[Alok] I think my fashion is its own form of armour.

Our daily acts of resistance are just seen 
as frivolous or excessive,

but I think style is actually extremely political.

[Interviewer] Can you talk about assumptions

that people have about you 
based on your style?

[Alok] I grew up in a small town in Texas.

It was like a predominantly white, evangelical, 
republican, straight, cisgender

type of town.

And I grew up in a sort of post 9/11 queer body.

Even despite being told that I was a terrorist
every single day,

being called a faggot
every single day,

being called a tranny.

And I think that there's this hierarchy
that gets drawn between

sort of flamboyant faggotry,
or like queer femininities,

or like trans femininities

as being somehow inferior

or less legitimate than "womanhood"

because we're always seen as sort of 
[em?]posturing to be women.

I feel like the way I understand my gender

is that I am both a man and a woman,
and neither a man or a woman.

I'm outside of these entire categories.

I think they see me, and they see me as a failure.

I think so many of us who grow up 
in the south [of the U.S.],

or in small towns,

think that moving to New York means 
we'll finally be acknowledged.

Like, we'll finally be safe!

That's a total and utter lie.

And I've had to learn the really hard way.

But in New York, I think, 
because it's such a large city,

there's so much anonymity,

I think people don't feel 
empowered enough

to defend people getting harassed on the streets.

People will just stand and stare and watch.

I've had people spit on me,

I've had people call me an "it".

This one day, I hadn't shaved 
in like 2 weeks or something,

and I was getting off the train

and this white man was 
about to enter the train,

and the doors open and he screamed

"OSAMA!!!!"

Like, really really loudly!

And then I was like, petrified

because my entire life i've known

that when people call me a terrorist,

or Osama, or Bin Laden, or whatever,

you run.

You run because no one's going to defend you.

And then he looked down and saw 
that I was wearing stiletto heels.

So I had a beard, but then I had heels,

and then he cut himself short, 
he says "OSAAAA..."

And there's this really weird moment

where I didn't, I no longer fit his stereotype

of a "man of colour sort of a terrorist".

So when people see me as a brown person,

they automatically masculinize me too,

because of this idea of the like terrorist idea.

Like the other day I was using the bathroom,

and I walked into the women's restroom

and this older white lady
came up to me and said

"What do you think you're doing, sir?"

And I said "using the bathroom."

And then she pointed to the door,
like, very vehemently,

and was like "This is the women's restroom!"

And then, in this moment, I was so frustrated 
because I knew that I had to say I was a woman.

Like, if I walked into the men's restroom 
in this dress right now,

there's a serious chance that I could be attacked,

like, "what are you doing?!"

And so I just said "I AM a woman",

and then she looked at me and said

"Oh. You must understand why I was confused."

And I think that's because when women see me,

they're trying to protect this category 
that they belong to.

And I think so much of the ways 
we talk about patriarchy,

is that it's just men doing it.

And I think actually women do patriarchy every day.

I was really nervous about going back 
to my family home in India,

like a couple of years ago,

because I knew that my family had all found out,

that I was no longer, like, a straight man.

Even though I was so scared,

one of my aunts, like, took me aside

and gave me one of her necklaces.

And she didn't explain why,

and she didn't say, like,

"Look, I'm validating your femininity."

She just said "here you go."

And all these subtle moments in my life

matter a lot to me.

People would come up to me and say

"why do all Indian people smell bad?"

"Why are you all, like, dirty?"

Um, I would go home and tell my mom,

like, I kept on washing my hands

but this brown wouldn't come off of me.

I grew up feeling ugly because I was brown.

I thought brown people could never be desirable,

could never have sex,

I thought we were all ugly, and 
we all needed to be white to be beautiful.

And then when I started to be more... 
present more feminine,

people started to call me a faggot.

When we go to the club,

everyone's gonna be like
"Oh my god I love your outfit!"

But no one's gonna ask us 
"how are you getting home?"

They don't care because I think 
trans feminine people only matter

when we're fabulous.

The very core of misogyny against trans people,

or transmisogyny,

is that we're always masquerading 
as something we're not.

That we're always just
put on this dress to trick someone.

And so therefore we are always seen 
as worthy of our violence.

That's why people don't stand up for us,
it's kind of like

"you chose to be that way,
you have to take the brunt of it."

I have an older sister

and I loved my sister so much

that I just wanted to be her.

So when people would ask me "what are 
you going to be when you grow up?"

I would say "my sister!"

I would say I want flowers 
on every single birthday cake.

And my parents were totally down,

but then things changed
when I hit puberty.

I began to develop facial hair,
people started to say

"you need to be, you're a boy, you need to 
be a man now, you need to butch up."

I became really really really depressed.

I attempted suicide when I was 13 years old.

I took a belt to my neck.

I was alone in my room,

and I felt destroyed.

I felt attacked on every level.

I decided that I needed to get out of my town,

so I made a plan.

I said "work really freaking hard,

and then get a full scholarship or something

to get you out of this place."

And so I moved to California because literally 
I was looking at schools,

like, where can I do my activism?

And I just, like, joined the movement
the minute I could.

And that's why for me,

my "coming out" is much less 
about my gender and sexual identity,

and much more about my politics.

The world I'm fighting for

is where we stop making assumptions

around everything.

Where we allow people to 
self-narrate their bodies.

I think that's a profoundly radical act.

Cause we exist in a western colonial system,

that's invested in categorizing 
every single thing about you.

And creating norms about every single thing.

Rather than actually recognizing

NONE of us fit into norms.

My politics is "I am me. I am Alok.

And Alok exists outside of your colonial white 
supremacist heteronormative gender binary!"

I don't have to be a woman or a man
to be coherent.

And I think that threatens so much 
of the fabric of this society.

I wasn't born in the wrong body,
I was born in the wrong world.

I see my hair as part of my femininity.

If I have a beard and lipstick,
that's part of who I am.

Why do we always put the onus on people 
to change their bodies,

and the onus on people to prove 
or authenticate themselves to other people,

versus have society shift their norms?

This is why trans women get murdered.

Because what ends up happening is that

when they're hooking up with someone,

someone sees a penis and then kills them.

Like, literally, it's the most misogynist idea

where women are defined by vagina.

That's why, like, transmisogyny 
also effects cisgender women,

because cisgender women, "womanhood",

should be more than your vagina.

A lot of the trans people I know

will, like, have surgery, have hormones, whatever,

because of safety.

Not because they wanted to.

What I'm fighting for our world,

is that we can just say

"Y'know what? My body is on my own terms."

I think what's also frustrating is that we 
ask trans people to have all the answers.

How the hell am I supposed to have all the answers

when I grew up in a world that erased my existence?

I'm still figuring it out!

But I have people in my life,

I have lovers in my life,
I have friends in my life,

who are willing to work through that with me.

And that's been the most liberating part

about becoming politically active.

I would much rather know that y'all

would, if someone was yelling at me on a train,

say "hey stop that!",

versus, like, knowing my pronouns.

I know that people hurt me because they're hurt.

I know that people,

especially people of colour,

are discriminating against me 
because of their own trauma.

And so for me, like,

unless we liberate both 
perpetrators and victims of violence,

then we're still caught in the same system.

My fervor comes from being... 
from wanting to be a nicer person.

I'm really invested in niceness!

I think it's really radical.

I think the state is SO BAD,

I think we grow up with so much toxicity,

and we're so mean and disposable for each other,

[Interviewer] When do you feel the most vulnerable?

[Alok] Hm. When I'm writing poetry.

So, um, I started writing poetry
after my suicide attempt.

Art is the space we go
when language fails us.

Yes, go get therapy
if you need to have therapy,

but how can our friendships 
BE that therapy?

How can we really love each other hard enough

where we don't have to outsource our trauma?

Where we don't have to leave 
where we're at to deal with shit?

So much of my identity
has been framed by violence.

I didn't understand my gender,
other than being called a faggot.

I didn't understand my race,
other than being called a terrorist.

I think when I moved here

I was like "oh my god, you're never gonna feel 
lonely 'cause there's a million things to do!"

And those million things to do 
actually make you more lonely.

We keep on making this mistake in the west

where if we have more things, we're happier;

or if we're around more things, we're happier.

Versus recognizing that 
we already had everything we needed.

So moving away from scarcity towards abundance,

recognizing that we are enough.

So it's a poem called "Funeral".

Our train is delayed and I am 
late for lunch with a boy I like

because his smile makes me feel 
a little bit less lonely.

And this feels like a working definition 
for love these days in the city

where it's possible to be surrounded by 
the warmth of over a million apartment lights

and still feel cold.

The lights turn off and the train starts moving.

...stops moving.

And it's one of those rare moment when

we're forced to look up from our screens

and remember that we exist outside of them.

They tell us that a man jumped in front of the train.

That he died upon impact.

So we just sit there in silence

as they remove his remains from the tracks.

And some part of us is happy

because this, this is the first time in a long time

we have been forced to feel 
like something greater than ourselves

in the city, where sometimes it takes an accident

to remember what the purpose 
of a body is to begin with anyways.

The lights turn on, the train starts moving,

and the woman next to me starts complaining.

Asks why this man couldn't have taken 
a bottle of pills before leaving the house.

How selfish it is to delay others with your own death.

And I want to hug her, say

"remind me the purpose of arm."

I want to love her, say

"remind me the purpose of heart."

But then I remember that this is America,

where bodies fall on streets like discarded leaves,

only touching accidentally as we all 
tumble onto these cities we grew up with,

circling a map saying "remind me happiness",

and somehow convinced ourselves that they did.

The same way we learned about 
the borders between countries so well.

That we built walls around them,

call them "mine".

This is America,

where pain is ritual we are 
required to conduct in private.

An elaborate symphony on mute.

Call it "he lived to be 86 years old",

not "he hated himself for 30 of them."

Call it "he died in his sleep peacefully",

not "the stroke tore him to pieces."

Call it "accident",

not "no healthcare".

Call it "casualty",

not "calculation".

To live in America,

is to live in a constant state of illusion [allusion?]

is to be 30 people underground on a train,

unable to hold one another and weep,

is to sit there in silence

until we can just keep on moving

and forget how much death is required in the soil

to birth such beautiful denial.

And I want to text the boy above ground, ask

"have you ever been to a funeral 
with complete strangers?"

But instead, I look at the woman next to me

the one who told a dead man 
to die more considerately,

and then I remember that to live in America

is already to attend a funeral 
with complete strangers.

How many ghosts does it take before 
a cemetery can call itself a country?

To live in America

is to blame the dead for their own death.

Not the country for creating the conditions

that already killed them before they

caught up and made things more clear 
for the rest of us.

Which is why, when the liberal who 
wears words like "democrat" and "diplomacy"

calls me a terrorist after I tell him

that I'm not interested in paying his taxes

because I do not want my coins 
to cause more carnage,

I understand.

Which is why, when I tell him that

I do believe in monsters who come out at night

call them "men" for short,

and he tells me that I only dress femme

because I want to be bashed,

I understand.

Which is why, when I tell him

that the same women who started his movement

are still being murdered,

and the same cities he's getting married

and calling it momentous

and he gasps and says

"that happens HERE? In America?!",

I understand.

The way we've been taught 
to apologize for the pain,

to erase the hurt,

to numb the violence,

to deny that we may not be able 
to wake up in the morning,

that we may see a pill 
coming in the place of the train,

that we may wonder

what it would feel like to finally have 
others empathize with our struggle,

for once, in OUR GODDAMNED LIFE,

what it would feel like

to hold captive attention

of a funeral of strangers, so

I would run back on that train,

hug that woman, say

"I'm afraid too." say

"remind me trust" say

"sometimes silence feels like 
the highest pitch of screaming" say

"this is the first time in a long time

I have been forced to publicly mourn death

and there is something 
beautiful about that", say

"what if we allowed the pain to fill us 
a little bit less empty?"

But instead, I will sit there 
in silence on the train.

I will say nothing to the woman next to me.

I will disembark at the next stop.

I will have lunch with a boy I like,

because his smile makes me feel

a little bit less lonely.

I will apologize for being late.

I will not have the word

for a type of loss that is so distant it is intimate.

After lunch, I will get back on the train,

I will remember,

I will soon forget.