“We End Transphobia By Making People Feel”

An interview with Alok Vaid-Menon

Alok Vaid-Menon is an artist and activist in New York (and uses the gender-neutral pronouns they/their). They are half of the performance duo DARKMATTER, a poet and essayist, and the communications and grassroots fundraising program coordinator for the Audre Lorde Project.

You’ve said that there has been a de-emphasis on cultural work like art and performance in the LGBT movement. Can you talk more about that?

I think what we’ve seen in the past couple of years is a move toward policy and away from queer and trans art, which is really, really frustrating to me. I don’t think that we end homophobia and transphobia by educating people. I think we end homophobia and transphobia by making people feel.

I think there’s a trend towards language in trans politics. We’re like, “Get my pronouns, get my identity names.” It’s kind of counterproductive, because our genders are way more complicated than that — art gives us a space where we can actually tell the story of our gender and the story of our lives and experiences. I think in a lot of ways it humanizes us and makes people less susceptible to be violent toward us.

Did you became an artist and activist around the same time or did one come first?

One definitely came first. I started writing when I was about 12 or 13 years old. At the time I didn’t view what I was doing as political, I just viewed what I was doing as a survival tactic. I grew up in a super conservative, white, sort of straight, Christian town where I had no spaces to talk about the violence and intimidation I was experiencing, and the depression and dysphoria I was undergoing. Writing became the only space where I could be honest.

I began to put my writing online anonymously, and a lot of people commented, saying, “Oh, my gosh, I feel the same way.” And I was like, what? People are lonely and depressed everywhere? I think we experience sadness as if it’s just something we’re going through individually and not a shared or collective experience. Since then I’ve realized that that was political art. We live in a world that teaches us that it’s our fault that we’re lonely and we’re sad that we’re hurt. I think what art allows us to do is to actually build connections with people through our trauma and our struggle. I’ve become much more explicitly political in my art now and done more activist work. But I think it is activism to validate people’s pain, especially in a world where people are desensitized to pain.

Humor is a big part of your performances as well. Can you talk about the importance of humor in your work and in activism?

I really feel like humor has always been a strategy of depressed people in order to get by…depression is so freaking hard and tragic, sometimes you just need to laugh to keep on going.

So much of what I think about is that we can’t just critique; we have to create; we have to imagine the type of world that we’re trying to build. For me that world is one in which we are laughing and joking and having a good time. Humor is its own form of politics.

What I often worry about and think about is that to be a transfeminine person is already in so many ways to be a joke…so much of the way transmisogyny works is that people just think it’s really funny that we’re wearing women’s clothing and you get laughed at all the time. It’s an awkward, double-edged sword where I feel like I had to be funny because that’s what people already saw me as because of my body. So humor was something that I learned how to do, because people already wanted to laugh at me when I walked on the stage, so I had to make it more literal. It’d be like “Okay, it’s permissible for you to laugh at me, you know?”

You’ve written that “‘this whole trans rights is the new priority’ fiasco needs to stop” and “representation does not trickle down to justice”. Can you talk about that?

I think we’re in a really strange moment in the trans community where a lot of people think that just because we have media spokespeople and that people are talking about our issues, that means that the movement is done. Certainly it’s progressive and it’s doing things, but I think that we keep on mistaking representation as the end goal.

Is there anything you’d like to add?

I would really like to say that I get really frustrated when we frame conversations about trans issues as being “new” or “innovative” or the “next” whatever struggle, because we would not have transphobia if it wasn’t for this thing called “colonialism.”

Gender non-conformity and trans-ness are actually very, very, very old. This is very ancestral and sacred, and I worry that we’re trying to reinvent the wheel when there are already indigenous trans folks across the world who have always been outside of the binary. I just wish that we could reframe the way that we’re doing not only our trans work, but our queer work, to be like, “Hey, actually what we’re doing right now is about decolonization.” It’s not about creating something new, building new media visibility. It’s about remembering something very old and going back or trying to go back to what it was like before.

Read more personal accounts of the trans activism movement.

Interview by Andy Wright. Parts were omitted for clarity and brevity.