[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.