Reclaiming the past: was Kurt Cobain trans?

Queer identities have frequently been erased from history, but we have always existed.

For sexuality, this is easier to evidence without causing a stir — we accept that men fucked men and women loved women in Ancient Greece, though it says much of the modern heteropatriarchal understanding of gender that we understand these relationships in these terms.

By viewing sex as enforcing power imbalance, and love as something separate and pure, the assertion is that ‘cultural differences’ mean these relationships are not queer. The academic equivalent of ‘No Homo’.

However, queer people see themselves in these examples through history, and there is nothing to say these people would not see themselves in us too.

Our current culture centres labelling and coming out as core experiences, and thus the metric by which it is appropriate to call someone gay or trans, whether they say or do something relatable to that experience or not. But this is grounded in the experiences of the living — living people must be given space to come to their own conclusions about their identity and disclose it on their own terms.

The dead do not have this luxury.

Whether they would have eventually come out or not, we only have textual evidence to go off when asserting whether someone from history may or may not have been gay or trans, and it does no harm to use modern terminology to do so. It allows new generations to feel less alone if we describe such people in ways relatable to them, and when we do not our culture assumes an identity as the default regardless.

This is where we come to Kurt Cobain.

There is a wealth of textual evidence for the fact that he experienced gender dysphoria in his published journals and other personal accounts. These journals were largely written between 1989 and 1990.

In interviews, he spoke of being confused regarding his sexuality because of how deeply he related to girls:

“Yeah, I even thought that I was gay. I thought that might be the solution to my problem.”

The mistaken belief that femininity would mean he was gay makes sense within the strict view of gender norms when he was growing up, and the way he rationalises it in the 90s has not evolved much. It is a part of him he has tried to make piece with but is still more intimate than external appearance.

“Throughout my life, I’ve always been really close with girls and made friends with girls. And I’ve always been a really sickly, feminine person anyhow, so I thought I was gay for a while because I didn’t find any of the girls in my high school attractive at all.”

Imagery around birth seems to fascinate him in both his journals and lyrics. The male seahorse giving birth is something many trans feminine people will relate to through the gender dysphoria around wishing to experience pregnancy.

The song Been A Son includes the lyrics ‘She should have been a son’ and the way it repeats has striking similarity to the later song True Trans Soul Rebel by trans woman Laura Jane Grace, instead reflected at the self — ‘you should’ve been a mother, you should’ve been a wife, you should’ve been gone from here years ago, you should be living a different life’.

You Know You’re Right? similarly contains the lyric, ‘She just wants to love himself’.

Many of Kurt’s songs appear to be conversational between ‘male’ and ‘female’ persona’s with the male aspects taking on more negative qualities.

“I definitely feel closer to the feminine side of the human being than I do the male — or the American idea of what a male is supposed to be.”

He always refers to himself as ‘male’ not ‘a man’, and also writes about wishing he had breasts — the most obvious sign of gender dysphoria within his writing:

Here he mentions his breasts lactating, and adds that he continued to enjoy playing with dolls while his peers were undergoing puberty:

We can never truly know how he might have identified. Which is fitting with the quote:

“I’m not a man, I’m a miserable pile of secrets.”

Though it should be seen as just as bad to assume someone is cisgender as to assume they are trans. It is only speaking ill of the dead if you believe transness itself to be bad.

I am not asserting that he was trans. This is merely an analysis of his own words through a queer lens — one many trans people find deeply relatable to their own experiences and see a form of kinship in.