cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/920492
Had a video call with my brother Chuck the other day. Things got heavy:
KATE: Was Kurt Cobain a trans woman?
CHUCK: What?
Kurt Cobain. Rock musician. He was in a band called Nirvana.
Iām familiar with him, yes.
Was he a trans woman?
Um. No?
OK. Why not?
I mean, he wasnāt. Itās like asking why he wasnāt an astronaut.
He wasnāt an astronaut because he never went to space. Why wasnāt he a trans woman?
Because he didnāt transition. I mean, he didnāt ever say he was a woman, didnāt ever say he was trans. So no. Kurt Cobain wasnāt a trans woman.
So someone is trans if they say theyāre trans. Self-determination.
Thatās what youāve told me. Is that wrong?
No, thatās right. We know ourselves better than anybody else can know us. If we say weāre trans, nobody can say we arenāt.
And Kurt Cobain never said he was trans.
So was I trans in 1994?
I donāt know, were you?
Yes, but if youād asked me in 1994, I would have told you ānoā.
So if I tell you Iām trans, Iām transā¦
Right.
But if I tell you Iām cis, I might still be trans?
If you tell me youāre cis, I believe you.
Thatās not the same thing as āIām cisā.
Thatās a really good point. This is sort of what some queer people are getting at when they say āgender is a constructā.
Come again?
Well, youāre cisgender, right?
As far as I know, yes.
Aha.
Hmmm?
You hedged. āAs far as I knowā isnāt the same thing as āyesā. āAs far as I knowā opens up the possibility that you could be trans and not know it.
It doesnāt seem terribly likely.
Thatās an interesting statement. Early on in transition one of the biggest problems I had was dealing with the sheer unlikelihood of my being trans. I mean, I knew trans people existed. I knew somebody had to be trans. I just couldnāt wrap my head around the idea that it would be me.
Do you think this is why youāre on this whole āKurt Cobain was a trans womanā kick?
Hey now, Iām just asking questions. You know. Like J.K. Rowling is ājust asking questionsā.
Kate, you are literally wearing a T-shirt that says āKURT COBAIN WAS A TRANS WOMANā on it right now.
Am I? Oh, shit. I thought I was wearing my āSkip school, take hormones, kill Godā T-shirt. To your question, though - yeah, I do think thatās part of it. Honestly, the hardest thing about growing up trans was believing that nobody in the world had ever experienced what I was experiencing. I didnāt have any role models. I didnāt wonder if I was the only one. I was convinced of it.
So being able to say that this incredibly gifted songwriter, the voice of a generation, was a trans woman like youā¦
I need someone like that. I need to not be the first of my kind.
Of course youāre not the first trans woman. No, but before a couple of years ago almost every trans woman would tell you they always knew, unquestionably and innately, that they were women.
So itās not just about him being trans, but specifically his being a trans woman who didnāt know he was a trans woman.
An egg. Right.
Why Kurt Cobain, anyway? Whatās so special about him that youāre trying to induct him into the Egg Hall of Fame?
He knew things. Things cis guys donāt know. Things I didnāt know until after I started transition. He understood women, what weāre like, what we experience. āPennyroyal Teaā. āRape Meā. I just have a hard time thinking of a cis man who could write songs like that.
It wouldnāt be the only way in which he was exceptional.
True. Ahhh. I donāt know. I mean, I know, I can give you all the reasons, but thereās something in his eyes.
Something in his eyes.
All the pictures of him. No matter what heās doing. If heās grinning, or sad, whatever heās doing, you can see something trapped there. Trapped and in pain, wanting to get out but not quite knowing how.
Huh. You, uh, know that what youāre doing is pretty much the textbook definition of projection, right?
Maybe. Chuck, do you think Iām happier?
Since you transitioned?
Yeah.
Of course. Absolutely. Night and day.
Everyone says that, and honestly, I see it. Even in pictures, you know? I see it. Youāve seen some of my transition timelines, right?
You do look really different.
Itās not just me. Every single person who transitions looks like that. We look so much happier, so much more alive, so much more us. I donāt understand how anybody can hate us.
I donāt get it either, Kate.
And when I look at any timelines, I look at the before photosā¦ and I see something in their eyes. Transmasc, transfem, doesnāt matter. Thereās something trapped wanting to get out. Every picture Iāve ever seen of Kurt Cobain looks like the ābeforeā picture on a transition timeline. Itās just that with him, there arenāt any after pictures.
And itās not just the eyes, either. The way he dressed, the whole āgrunge lookā. Itās just literally egg fashion. We dress with total disregard for our appearance or how we look because no matter what we do itās wrong.
āEgg fashionā, egg this, egg thatā¦ isnāt it a little bit anachronistic, judging him by 2022 standards, 2022 values?
Is it? Chuck, I was alive in 1994. I was an 18 year old egg. I know what that feels like. I know what that looks like. I lived that. Why didnāt I come out as trans in 1994? Because I didnāt have the opportunity. Because self-determination needs to be informed, and none of us were. None of us. Look. You know what he said to Melody Maker in 1991? āI knew I was different. I thought that I might be gay or something because I couldnāt identify with any of the guys at all.ā Thatās what he said.
Holy shit. Really?
Really. September 14, 1991.
Hold on, let me look that up. Oh, yeah, I see it. Look, if you look at the full quote heās just saying heās not a jock. Like he didnāt fit in with the jocks.
Well, what about the dresses?
What dresses?
Kurt Cobain wore a lot of dresses. Like, a lot, both onstage and off. On MTV in 1991, he said āItās āHeadbangerās Ballā so I thought Iād wear a gown.ā He said in a 1993 interview, āI personally like to wear dresses. I wear them around the house sometimes.ā This is not some shameful secret he kept hidden from the world. He was open about this. He was proud about this.
Yeah, butā¦ itās just clothes.
Except itās not just clothes. Listen to his songs. Listen to his lyrics. āShould have been a sonā. āIām a lady, can you save me?ā āEveryone is gay.ā The original lyrics to āAll Apologiesā from his journals ā āBoys write songs for girls. Let me grow some breasts.ā
I mean theyāre song lyrics. There are all kinds of ways to interpret song lyrics.
Sure. All kinds of ways. You ever read Michael Azerradās biography of Cobain, Come As You Are?
Nope.
Azerrad spent weeks talking to Cobain. He was Cobainās biographer, but also his friend. And he has his own interpretation of the lyrics. For instance, Azerrad talks about all the lyrics about guns, and to me, now, I look at that, and I think of how he died, but Azerrad, when Kurt was alive, he looked at it another way. He thought itās about dicks. āTo paraphrase Dr. Freud,ā he says, āsometimes a gun is just a gun. But not this time.ā He talks about āCome As You Areā, where Kurt keeps singing āI swear I donāt have a gun.ā Thatās not my interpretation. Thatās never been my interpretation. Thatās what this cis man says. More than one cis man. Kurt says Dave Grohlās dad, he said the same thing. Yeah. There are all kinds of ways to interpret lyrics.
āBy this time,ā Azerrad wrote, āone begins to wonder how Kurt rationalizes being a man at all. His first response is revealing. āI donāt know,ā he says. āCastration.āā I donāt wonder how Kurt rationalizes being a man. I rationalized ābeing a manā in all kinds of ways. What strikes me is that he needed to rationalize being a man. Had to come up with some kind of excuse. It just strikes me kind of funny.
Kurtās songs have meanings. The lyrics to āIn Bloomā, Kurt was pretty explicit about that. The lyrics he wrote have meanings. āHeart-Shaped Boxā. You know what that refers to? When Courtney Love was flirting with Kurt, Michael Azerrad says in Come As You Are, āShe gave Dave (Grohl) a package to give to Kurt ā little sea shells and miniature teacups and a tiny doll, all packed into a small heart-shaped box.ā A tiny doll locked away inside a box shaped like a heart. That was what I felt like before I came out. A tiny phantom doll. Kurt and Courtney first kissed after a show at the Cabaret Metro in Chicago. Rumor was that they fucked against the bar, but they denied it. What actually happened, Azerrad says, is that āCourtney had a bag of lingerie with her for some reason and Kurt ended up modeling the contents.ā And then they went to Kurtās hotel room and they fucked.
Youāre making it soundā¦
Maybe it was. Because you look at that and you think that if it was like that, it was perverted and wrong, because thatās what you were told, that itās a sick fetish thing, and I look at it and it isnāt. To me, thatās normal. That Kurt Cobain was sexually aroused while wearing Courtney Loveās lingerie, thatās normal.
Kate, he was a punk! He hated jocks, and wearing a dress pissed off jocks, so he wore dresses. He talked about wanting to wear a dress and piss on a redneck A&R manās desk! You think that was some kind of sex thing?
Sexuality is part of being a woman. Part. Rage ā and Kurt Cobain had a lot of rage inside him ā thatās another part. Am I interpreting, am I looking at things from my perspective as a trans woman? Yes, certainly, just like youāre interpreting, looking at it from your perspective as a cis man. When cis people interpret things, their conclusion is never āthey were transā. Never.
Ed Wood wasnāt a trans woman. He was just a transvestite. He was a man.
Pete Burns from Dead or Alive wasnāt a trans woman. Sure, he got all sorts of feminizing surgeries, but he never said he was a woman. Man.
Prince Nelson adopted a female persona, feminized his voice, and recorded a song about wanting to be a womanās girlfriend, but he was also a Christian and believed that being queer was wicked and sinful, and thatās the identity of his we need to respect. Man.
Richard Wright, who wrote the Phish song āHalleyās Cometā, spent most of the 1980s telling everyone he knew he was a transsexual lesbian named Nancy, but after being consistently treated like shit changed his mind about that, so none of that counts for anything. Man.
Dave Carter was on HRT when he died, but he was just questioning. He didnāt tell anybody for sure that he was a woman. Man.
Quentin Crisp said just before he died that if he was younger, he absolutely would have transitioned, but wanting to transition isnāt the same as actually transitioning. Man.
All men. Always, always men, whatever they do, whatever they say. I know how that works. I was told all these same things about myself for decades, all these same reasons, and now, I donāt know, I guess people will make a personal exception for me, but for everybody else, the same old assumptions, the same old arguments, they still apply. Theyāre still legitimate.
I thought we were talking about Kurt Cobain.
And the only way to do that is to talk about him in isolation. Thereās no larger context to consider, no bigger picture. I canāt really know. I canāt really judge.
I mean, everybody else does. I guess I canāt tell you not to. But all of this circumstantial evidence, all of the dresses and the lyrics that you I guess know the real meaning of ā none of that makes him a girl.
Sure. And nothing can make him a girl. Because heās dead. Because he killed himself.
Oh, here we go. After thirty years and countless speculation, you have at last uncovered the real reason Kurt Cobain killed himself ā gender dysphoria. Do you have a book deal yet?
Working on it. And yes, people say a lot of stupid things about Cobainās death, like itās this big shock that this guy who hated himself and wanted to die killed himself.
Right. He was pretty well-known for being a heroin addict, which isnāt exactly something that improves oneās quality of life.
Sure, but why did he start heroin?
I donāt know. Why does anybody start heroin?
To help him cope with his eating disorder.
Wait, what? Eating disorder?
You donāt know about that? He had stomach problems, for a long, long time. He could only eat certain kinds of food, certain kinds of food that wouldnāt make his stomach hurt. Doctors looked but they could never find any organic cause for it. Nobody took it seriously. So he self-medicated with heroin. āIt was my choice,ā he told Azerrad. āI donāt regret it at all because it was such a relief from not having stomach pain every day.ā I know, though. Lots of cis guys have eating disorders. Doesnāt mean anything.
Kate thereās a lot of interpreting going on here.
Yeah, I guess there is. Is that necessarily a bad thing, though? Is that necessarily wrong? Like. Youāve seen The Matrix, right?
Only the first one.
Yeah, thatās fine. So you know how important The Matrix is to a lot of trans women, right?
Yes, but Iām not really sure why. Just seems like a retelling of Platoās āAllegory of the Caveā with extra fight scenes.
Itās pretty trans, though, right?
Clearly. It was directed by two trans women.
And trans women who watch it ā eggs or otherwise ā find their own lives and experiences reflected in it in ways that cis people, like you, donāt.
I guess, but the fact that it was actually made by two trans women carries a little more weight with me.
OK, but what if the Wachowskis had died in 2000? In, likeā¦ a car crash or something? Does that mean The Matrix isnāt a trans film?
Well, no, because itās still a film made by two trans women.
A film made by two trans women that speaks to the trans experience, and that is recognized by living trans women as speaking specifically to the trans experience. The only difference is that, in this scenario, nobody knows the Wachowski Sisters are trans women. And we canāt prove it. We canāt possibly prove it, and nobody is going to just believe us when we say itās a trans movie, that the Wachowskis were trans women, because they didnāt say it, they didnāt say the special magic words. Self-determination. You know what self-determination meant to Kurt Cobain? I remember seeing Courtney Love on television reading his note, I remember her interrupting to say that he was an asshole, that what he was saying was bullshit. She didnāt respect his self-determination.
Umā¦
āPennyroyal Teaā. Cobain told Azerrad āItās a cleansing theme where Iām trying to get all my bad evil spirits out of me and drinking Pennyroyal tea would cleanse that away.ā Pennyroyal is an abortifacient ā but, Azerrad notes, only in lethal doses.
Hell, not just that song. The whole album. In Utero. The collage on the back cover, the one Cobain described to Azerrad as āSex and woman and In Utero and vaginas and birth and death". The occult symbols surrounding it, taken from Barbara G. Walkerās The Womanās Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects1. There was something inside Kurt Cobain, something inside him waiting to be born, but he was told, over and over, that it was a monster, so he killed it, the only way he could. By killing himself.
That could have been me. That could so easily have been me. I was told all the same things he was. We all were. When I was 27? When I was 27, I was addicted to benzos, benzos they prescribed me because I was trying to bury, trying to kill this thing, this thing I had inside of me. I was a zombie. Walking dead. When I quit, I quit cold turkey. Nobody told me about the withdrawal syndrome. Nobody told me it could have killed me. And if it had, everybody would remember me, everybody would think of me, as a cis man. Forever. They would perpetuate the Lie. Thatās why I transitioned, why I chose to go through all the shit I went through. The writer and musician Margaret Killjoy, in 2017 she talked about what she went through the day before she came out:
āAll I could think was: āOh god, I donāt want to die a boy.āā2
I felt the same way, came out for the same reason. I figured no matter what I did, I was dead. I didnāt do it live, but to at least have an honest death. I genuinely believed transition would kill me.
It didnāt, though! Youāre alive and youāre beautiful and Iām so, so glad for that. It didnāt kill you.
It could have. Still could. Transition has helped, has made it easierĀ for me, but itās not that way with everyone. People have been kind to me, in ways that they arenāt kind to other trans women. Others of usā¦ arenāt so lucky.
Who are we respecting, exactly, by remaining silent about our shared experiences, our shared perspectives, things we see that you fucking donāt, that you canāt see? Of course I canāt prove it. I canāt prove that Iām trans. You canāt prove that youāre cis. Cis people, though, cis people never have to prove anything. Their prejudices are the null hypothesis3. If I was to go out there and say that Kurt Cobain was a cisgender man, would anybody say I was wrong? Would anybody object or complain? Even though my saying that is an anachronism, is meaningless. The word, the concept, it literally didnāt exist when Cobain died. Have you ever heard the word āagnotologyā?
No?
It means making a false claim to ignorance. Claiming that we donāt know something that we do. That we canāt know something that we can. We know things now, Chuck. We know what the symptoms of gender dysphoria are. We know what it does to people. How eggs think. How eggs act. How eggs die. But we pretend we donāt. We still pretend. We pretend suicide is an individual act, even when we know itās not, that the reasons for it are wholly personal. We pretend that when someone dies by suicide, their reasons for doing so die with them. And they donāt, Chuck. Weāre still dying, still dying for the same reasons Kurt Cobain did. Itās not just that we arenāt allowed to recognize ourselves. We arenāt allowed to recognize each other. Individual choice or social contagion. Those are the options weāre given. And neither of them are right. Neither of them are who we are.
Kurt Cobain wrote, thought, talked, died like eggs do. I donāt care if he never said the magic fucking words. We know our own. We recognize each other. And if someone is alive? If someone is alive I will go my whole life without ever breathing a word. Because as long as weāre alive, we do choose, and that means we can choose ignorance. What I think, what I want, for someone else, for us, it doesnāt matter. I do that, I follow that code, for the benefit of one person ā the egg themselves. Once they die, all bets are off. Omerta no longer applies. Kayfabe no longer applies.
To be queer is to be erased, to experience erasure. I still hear straight men arguing, as if they have any right to argue, as if they know, that Emily Dickinson was not a lesbian. Emily Dickinson! Iām supposed to listen to people who say this shit? Iām supposed to take them seriously when they say well, actually, calling Dickinson a ālesbianā is historically anachronistic, we canāt apply the standards of the present to the past, and Jesus fuck have you read her letters? She liked girls. She really liked girls. Kurt Cobain was a trans woman. Kurt Cobain was every bit as much a trans woman as Emily Dickinson was a lesbian. Refusing to say it isnāt ārespectā. Itās perpetuating the crime perpetrated against Cobain, against every other trans woman who ever killed herself because of the lies we were told about ourselves. No more. Kurt Cobain was a trans woman. I canāt, as an individual, say that. I donāt have the right. No trans woman can say that, individually. But collectively? All of us together? The things we see in each other, we see those things in him too. Not all of them, and not all of us. Absolutely not all of us. But enough of us. Enough that we have the right. We have the right, and I will fucking say it, and if you donāt like that, you can go fuck yourself.
Kate, are you ok?
Iām fine.
Do you want a hug?
Fuck you, Chuck.
OK, well. Iām, uh. Gonna go to the other room. You should, uh. Drink some water. Stay hydrated. Love you, Kate.
Love you too, Chuck. Sorry.
Shhh. Itās OK, Kate. Itās OK.
1 Diane Purkiss criticizes the occult nature of Walkerās encyclopedia in āWomenās Rewriting of Mythā, in Carolyne Larrington (ed), The Feminist Companion to Mythology, London, 1992, p. 444: āIn Donna Harawayās influential terms, these women may wish to be goddesses, but they are cyborgs all the sameā. The work sheās referencing is Harawayās āA Cyborg Manifestoā. Haraway was, it happens, an academic advisor to the trans woman Sandy Stone, and her āCyborg Manifestoā was a pivotal influence on Stoneās āThe Empire Strikes Back: A Post-Transsexual Manifestoā, one of the foundational works of transgender theory.
2 Margaret Killjoy, https://birdsbeforethestorm.net/2017/06/im-not-even-going-to-try-to-pass/
3 Natalie Reed, https://freethoughtblogs.com/nataliereed/2012/04/17/the-null-hypothecis/
Jeezus fuck this whole thing had me ugly crying.
It reminds me of a Margaret killjoy quote that Iām probably butchering but it was basically āAsk ourselves what we owe the dead who came before usā
same. iām really glad other people felt the same way about this piece, it had a lot of discussion over on the c/traa crosspost that really got to me almost as much as the piece itself did