Notes on Punk

Look, punk is stupid. It's funny and it's obnoxious and in its way it's art, but it's also often intentionally dunderheaded and it was invented by Malcolm McLaren to sell £100 pairs of bondage trousers.

It's funny that you really can't kill it (punk as zombie metaphor: discuss), but it also makes sense. You can't kill it because - for all the cartoon haircuts and safety pins through faces, for all its roots in whiteness and the middle class - the big hard seed in the middle of the rotten punk rock avocado says, in capital letters, FUCK THIS. I CAN DO IT BETTER. That can empower folks to be in charge of their own lives in a pretty meaningful way.

I'm a transsexual woman. I spent a big chunk of my life with the world putting ideas into my head about what that meant: the stereotypes, the negative reactions folks have when they read the words 'transsexual woman,' the pervasive, sexualized, cartoonish images of trans women propagated by folks who've never actually known one. The world did a shit job of defining what a transsexual woman was, so when I couldn't get around being trans any more, three things that start with the letter f saved my life: friends, feminism, and fuck this I can do it better.

I've been lucky. Growing up making the occasional zine and playing in the occasional band, I knew what it felt like to take a chance and try to make a space for myself. I had some experience with saying "Fuck off, I know I'm right", which is a pretty valuable skill when, for example, somebody has known you to be kind of an artsy boy for a bunch of years and now you are trying to convince them that you are actually a girl. Or when suddenly all the vicious, messed up media images of what it means to be a woman are aimed at you, when they weren't before, and you don't have any defences. "Fuck you, Maybelline; I know I don't know anything else, but I can tell that you are trying to define 'woman' for me to sell me things. I can define 'woman' better." Or when you realise: I don't listen to any bands with transsexual women in them. (I don't think Placebo counts.) Or: I don't want a relationship like the ones I've seen on the television. Or: other people say that being trans is about expensive surgeries, but I don't have any money.

In high school, the girl I wanted to be when I grew up turned me on to X Ray Spex and Crass albums. We'd hole up in her basement and smoke adolescent cigarettes and talk and listen: suddenly I didn't need the television or the radio to tell me what music to listen to. (Even if I thought Crass was too noisy.) Over a bunch of years, but starting there, the punk thing has been the key to figuring out most of the stuff that gets me through the day: that I don't need other people to tell me what to care about; that I don't need other folks' approval of who I want to make out with; that I don't need anybody else to okay my gender; and that nobody else can tell me what my life should look like. Fuck 'em! I can do it better.