Gender Outlaw

Coming face to face with my idols always make me go a bit EEK! So when I was walking out of the bar at the Transfabulous festival this Saturday and found myself almost colliding with my trans hero Kate Bornstein, I was understandably giddy.

It was at this point my escort, ElvisKate, realised I wasn’t joking when I requested that she keep me on baby reins and prevent me from screaming “we are not worthy” at an inappropriate moment.

For those unfamiliar, Kate Bornstein is a transsexual writer, activist and performer who wrote an amazing book called Gender Outlaw. The book explores the whole issue of transgender, gender queer, the social construct of gender and how one’s behaviour shouldn’t be dictated by one’s physical form.

In short, I blummin love her.

She opened her performance at Transfabulous, On Men Women and the Rest of Us, with a piece she wrote a long time ago for the New York Times. It’s set around her mother’s funeral when she had to go back and encounter a lot of people from her past, some of whom didn’t know about her sex change. It describes her life experiences, the period leading up to her sex change and her involvement with the transgender movement. She laughs as she recalls being contacted by the editor who asked if she would remove her reference to the “transgender movement”. This was because they weren’t aware of its existence, but if they mentioned it then it would mean that there would be one. She refused to remove the phrase and thus the transgender movement was born.

Later she talks about her mother again as she dramatises her coming out story – presenting it from her mother’s perspective, not her own. At first her mother told her to get out of the house, but later came to accept her decisions and referred to her as “my son, the lesbian.”

In her essay The Seven Year Itch she analyses the time she spend trying to “be a boy”, then the time she spend trying to “be a girl”, concluding that neither identity would truly suit her so she set about constructing her own agenda. This is the agenda of being openly transsexual and not trying to “pass” as male or female. She also wonders why anybody else would be bothered taking the trouble to be “male” or “female” as opposed to just trying to be themselves.

From the sniggering I was subjected to on the tube for being “the bird in the suit”, it seems to rest of the world are trailing way behind this viewpoint. A little bit of mockery from the knuckle draggers is child’s play – Kate is condemned as a suppressive person by the church of scientology, despite the fact that she worked for them as a minister for 12 years. Her 35-year-old daughter, who was born into the Church of Scientology, has been taught to consider her “evil”, and if she calls her ex-wife, her ex hangs up the phone.

Kate’s latest work is Hello Cruel World – a survival guide offering "101 alternatives to suicide for teens, freaks and other outlaws". She ended Saturday’s performance by encouraging us to “do whatever it takes to make your life worth living,” the condition is we're not allowed to do anything "mean." We were then presented with a Get Out of Hell Free card just in case her advice got us into trouble. She’s a big old masochist, she explained, she’ll do our time for us and enjoy every minute.