Dance Like Your Family Unconditionally Accepted You

THE FIRST THING I thought the first time I saw Lil Nas X’s “Industry Baby” video—recently, though it’s been out for years—was, “Fuck. Yes.” A prison shower full of nude brown men dropping it low and shaking their spread, blurred-out buttholes directly to camera is the most wonderfully subversive thing I’ve seen…maybe ever.

My second thought was, “His grandmother loved him.”

It’s not a guess. I read a New York Times profile a couple of years ago, after he’d scandalized people by lap-dancing the devil in his video for “Montero (Call Me By Your Name),” and it said so. He was her favorite. He was always exalted and loved and beloved; he carried the confidence of it in general, and in bravely coming out, at the start of his career as a rapper, in specific.

There’s a big difference between giving a fuck but doing it anyway—like some of us do—and not giving a fuck, truly, because your roots are holding you down.

Finding Fuck Yes

Simplify your decision-making. Kind of.

The Faggot-Witch WheneverGabriel Mac

When I first started transitioning, one hundred thousand years ago (I always say trans years are like dog years, but since even those are too short, I guess trans years are more accurately like trans years), I went to a weekly transmasculine support group in the Bay Area. There was a guy there sometimes who was a similar age as me but had transitioned as a teenager—around the nineties, that meant. That meant, in his case, that his parents had believed him and helped him and fought a medical establishment that even now let alone then fought back against his personhood.

“I transitioned as a teenager,” he would say to start a sentence sometimes, oftentimes with ’tude. This, it seemed he felt, made him cooler or braver or like some sort of trans wizard, and the rest of us practically drooled over the concept, even those who were already transitioning in their early twenties. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that a trans day is like a dog year; every fucking second of dysphoria and erasure is an agony that draws out, impossibly elongated, like a hard time on acid.

Every time this dude said this, I drooled inside, too, in the most painful way. (“I got out of prison way before you guys,” would be, for example, a similarly insensitive brag.) At the same time, I thought: Fuck this dude. Yeah it was awesome that he got to be an extremely early-onset AFAB testosterone recipient, but that was enabled by his support system. I know probably more trans people who are homeless and/or formerly homeless than most people, and they didn’t get access to gender care as teenagers because they were trying to figure out how to survive. I didn’t get access to gender care as a kid even though I came out at four because my father was a violent psychopath.

Okay but what if he hadn’t been? What if, like Lil Nas X and this douche in my support group, my relatives had embraced and celebrated me from the start, whether that was my gender as a child or my queer sexuality after I got caught, as a teenager, having sex with another genderqueer queer. What would I live like? What would I dance like?

What would you do? With your personal choreography? Or your job, or your life, or your butthole?