Burn It Down Page 6

  The problem was, I had no idea why I’d been doing the things I did. Terrified and ashamed, I sat in silence the entire ride and received a thorough lashing with Dad’s leather, buffalo-nickel-studded belt when we got home—a beating that, true to his word, still makes me cringe today. It completely destroyed what little emotional communication I shared with my father, and we never spoke of that day again.

  By the time I figured out why I’d acted so aggressively, my father was dead, and I would never get to share with him the truth: I was transgender—a girl who didn’t understand how to be herself; a girl who tried to perform masculinity in the only ways she knew how, through violence and aggression; a girl who would grow into a woman who knew the power of anger and how to wield it.

  Despite not actually wanting to be a boy, I spent my middle school years desperately trying to figure out how to be one. Bands like Weezer and Green Day, fronted by sensitive but angry boys who railed against everything from the Iraq War to the injustice of getting rejected by cute girls, became my fascination. I read Batman comics and their myriad stories of one man’s eternal fury, turned to noble ends in the war on crime. Somewhere therein lay the answer, I was sure; I just needed to put together the pieces to find the kind of masculinity I needed to perform.

  I wasn’t just trying to be a boy for myself, though; I learned to replicate masculinity for safety. At recess, boys who I considered friends would often steal some possession of mine (usually a lunch box) and play a rousing game of keep-away. I quickly learned that while tears and pleading only exacerbated the problem, a performative display of fury backed up by physical aggression would halt the bullying for a few weeks. One weekend, a boy stole my bike for several hours as a joke. That Monday after class, I chased him through the churchyard near our school and tackled him to the ground. My safety was assured for months. This was the learned language of boys.

  By the end of high school, I’d figured out how to ape the kind of masculinity I thought I could live with: a soft-hearted punk boy who just happened to harbor a top-secret crossdressing fetish. I scampered off to college and immediately began writing editorials for one of the student newspapers, based entirely on what made me angry that particular week: the Israel-Palestine conflict, misconduct by the school administration, Bristol Palin—everything was up for grabs if it sufficiently stoked my ire. I wrote with passion, fire, and very little self-reflection or research, burying myself instead in the theatrics I thought were essential to my “quirky nerd boy” personality; the administrative council became the “Dark Council,” with our president “in her ivory tower” meting out unjust punishments. I was, to put it mildly, A Lot to Deal With.

  During this time, my father passed away after a long battle with brain cancer. I sat with him in his last hours, the two of us alone with the lights off in his cold and sterile hospice room, once again unable to find the right words. I couldn’t even cry. Emotionally illiterate and wracked with guilt and shame, I turned my anger inward. Someone like me would never experience the happiness I wanted. I didn’t deserve it. Instead, I bottled everything up (just like I knew men were supposed to do), graduated from college, and started writing professionally.

  Eventually, though, I came to a tipping point. After an extended stretch of unemployment left me with ample time to contemplate my feelings, I had to face up to reality: my depression and emotional self-harm were just symptoms of my larger problem—I wasn’t a boy, I didn’t want to live as one, and the only way forward for me was to transition.

  Mere weeks after I took my first estrogen pill, a transgender woman named Kathy Sal was followed home and beaten so badly she had to be hospitalized. Not long after, a man who lived on my block followed me to the door of my own building and watched until I entered my apartment. I bought a canister of mace on Amazon the next day. All of a sudden, the symptoms of misogyny and patriarchy I’d previously thought of only in academic terms were far too real.

  My anger throbbed, and for once, I knew where to put it. Finally, I had a cause beyond aimless self-loathing and liberal talking points: I would return to essay writing and skewer the forces of misogyny and transphobia wherever they flapped their tongues. I emailed an old editor friend of my father’s, who eagerly took me up on my pitch for a weekly column about transgender life and politics, which I wrote for a year after beginning hormones.

  My early essays, unfortunately, were still reflections of that “boy” I had been in college, who I was trying with limited success to leave behind. My words were thunderous, needlessly combative and unkind—when a band behaved rudely to my friends at a set in the Bowery, I wrote an extra edition of the column to call them “generically wimpy.” But it wasn’t just strangers who became targets. After a heated exchange about tone policing on Facebook, a cisgender friend continued to push my buttons through text; I responded by writing an entire essay called “How to Be an Ally,” using him as an example of what not to do.

  Finally, two of my best friends (one, my recent ex; the other, a mutual friend who’d taken me shopping for my first dress at H&M) had had enough—but they expressed that in a more helpful way than I had ever considered possible. They invited me over for dinner, poured some wine, and bantered with me for a while, setting me at ease. When the meal was prepared, they told me we needed to talk. “We love you,” they said. “But we feel like we can’t talk to you anymore without becoming fodder for your next column.”

  I was shocked and distraught, but I couldn’t deny the truth of their words. I found myself crying for one of the first times in years (a definite sign they had gotten through to me, but also that my estrogen was finally doing its job). How could I not have noticed the callousness in my writing? Wasn’t I doing this to help people? My anger may have been an effective communication tool, but wielded recklessly, it was hurting and repelling those I cared about. I had been so used to channeling every negative emotion into anger that I had almost missed the opportunity to leave that life behind. My transition didn’t need to be a simply physical one; while the hormones reshaped my body, I could unlearn the harmful socialization of my youth and become a kinder, more understanding woman.

  By calling me in (rather than out, as I had been doing to others) that night more than three years ago, my friends helped recenter me in a way for which I can never properly thank them. Although it would be a lie to say I no longer struggle with self-hatred or lashing out, I’m not ruled by those manifestations of anger anymore. I’m forging a new relationship with anger now.

  Late one night, I was walking from a friend’s place toward the last bus home. Thankfully, it’s a short ride, and I wouldn’t have to wait long. The streets of Brooklyn were mostly quiet, but as I strolled briskly down the block, I passed a man accosting a woman by a storefront, yelling “you can’t” repeatedly as she attempted to escape. My first instinct was to not get involved and keep walking; by now I’d learned exactly how dangerous men can be for people like me. But they can be dangerous for people like her, too.

  My bus was approaching. I couldn’t make out much of their conversation, but rising above everything else, I heard her voice say, “No.”

  To hell with the bus. I backtracked quickly.

  “Excuse me, is he bothering you?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she sobbed. Please, said her eyes.

  The man turned his attention to me, told me to back off, that it was fine.

  I didn’t, because it wasn’t. I sized him up; he was slightly taller than me, but skinnier, and my approach had knocked him off balance. I stepped between them, wondering how quickly I could get the mace out of my purse if I needed it.

  “Let her go home,” I snapped. His protests meant nothing to me. I felt like I had been training my whole life for this moment. I could tell he was drunk, that he wasn’t ready to throw down; his bluster was a bluff, only powerful enough to intimidate one woman—not two, and certainly not one who knows how to hold herself, how to match his anger and not blink. I empathized with her terror, but th
at night, I did not share it. When I looked into his eyes, it was with all the fury and contempt I felt for the men who had forced me to learn their ways and pretend to be one of them.

  I ordered him again to let her go, and she and I stepped away together. Her apartment was only a few blocks away, so I walked her home. We talked like new girlfriends, gushing over how much we loved Brooklyn, glad to have found one another in this vast city. We parted ways, and I flagged down a taxi with the joy of solidarity ringing in my heart.

  Deep in the fires of sisterhood, I was reborn.

  As a confused trans child, I used my anger as both armor and camouflage—after all, the best defense is a good offense, and lashing out at people seemed like a good way to keep myself from being hurt more deeply than I already had been. But that night, standing between another woman and her abuser, my anger afforded me no protection. I was perhaps more open and exposed than I had ever been in my life, yet I found I didn’t need the kind of protection my old anger had afforded me. Instead, I was finding another way to live my most passionate truth.

  Trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), or women who don’t believe trans women are really women, would give you a far more chilling interpretation: my propensity for anger and even violence marks me as irrevocably male, a colonizer of women’s spaces who has never truly been—and never will be—female.

  TERFs believe that because trans women are not often raised as girls, our socialization alienates us from “true” womanhood. I’ll admit that on the surface, it seems like they have a point. Repressing a transfeminine identity can hold back emotional development in areas that are culturally constructed as “female,” such as the expression of grief or anxiety, in favor of “male” expressions such as channeling those emotions into anger. But all this theorizing falls apart when you try to apply it to cisgender women’s lived experiences. There are many women in America and all over the globe whose circumstances require very different socialization; as other marginalized feminists have long pointed out, the concept of a “shared girlhood” is intrinsically false, relying on white- and cis-dominant ideas of how girls are socialized. Women born in areas with high rates of violence, for example, may have fewer issues expressing their own violent anger; in such an environment, repressing such emotions can be a dangerous sign of weakness, while demonstrating strength through fury acts as a powerful deterrent. Does that make them male?

  Contrary to TERFs’ assertions that trans women pose a threat to cis women and their spaces, I believe we have much to teach one another. Imagine radically inclusive spaces where inquisitive minds explore both cis and trans femininities, where we can each open ourselves to new possibilities of the self and take the next steps toward our collective liberation. When we fill in the gaps in one another’s experiences, what possibilities could we discover? On that night in Brooklyn, I tapped into the past I never wanted and found an expression of solidarity waiting where I least expected it. Did I go through that trauma for a reason? When our anger has both power and temperance, what barriers may we yet demolish?

  Smashing walls like these isn’t easy, of course. The last four years of my life have often been frightening and strange, filled with confusion over my own changing emotions. It’s been hard to keep my feet under me. I’m still learning to recognize when I hold onto anger and use it for self-abuse, to let go of that along with nonproductive hostility toward those around me. But the joy of expressing myself authentically is a greater reward than I ever could have dreamed, one that far too many women are still denied. It’s time for us to reclaim our anger—and in doing so, redefine ourselves.

  Unbought and Unbossed

  EVETTE DIONNE

  I have always been slow to anger. As a child, sensitivity controlled the way I reacted to criticism. It didn’t matter if the person critiquing something I’d done or said used a calm voice or a roaring one. It didn’t even matter if I’d done anything at all. As soon as I felt verbally attacked, I curled into myself, hung my head low, and bit back the tears that always threatened to spill onto my chubby cheeks. I was familiar with crying silently in bathrooms and in my bed after all of the lights had been turned off, but rage—the kind that bubbles up and spills over—was foreign. I didn’t have the language or the understanding to grasp that there’s an intricate relationship between fatness, Blackness, and rage that could make me appear as the aggressor even when I was merely defending myself.

  In elementary school, though, I learned that I needed to tread lightly as my body began expanding faster than my peers’. Thanks to prednisone, a steroid prescribed to treat asthma, I grew rapidly between the ages of seven and eight, and more than anything else, I desperately wanted to make myself small enough to be accepted, to be seen but not targeted. Instead of growing angry when children taunted me and doctors spoke about my weight gain as a moral failure, I sank further into myself. When fellow children would touch my hair without my permission and skip me in the lunch line, I just quietly observed, as if their cruelty was happening to someone else.

  One day in the fifth grade, however, I snapped. One of my classmates, whose name has long since slipped my mind, was standing behind me in the tetherball line during recess. I had several quarters in my pocket, and when a few of them fell out while I was playing, she put her foot over them, and then proceeded to pick them up.

  Ordinarily, I would’ve pretended I didn’t see her pick up the quarters to avoid confrontation, but something deep within urged me to confront her. Anger broiled under my skin, creating a prickly feeling in my hands that still strikes me whenever my emotions get the better of me. When she denied taking the quarters and then refused to return them, I attacked her, putting both of my hands around her neck, cutting off her oxygen, until a teacher saw the scuffle and proceeded to break it up. I realized, in that moment, how fragile her neck was in my hands, and I flushed with shame. How dare I respond to confrontation with violence?

  I’ll never forget the principal chiding me for physically assaulting someone. “You have to control yourself,” he said. “You have to figure out a better way to express your anger.” I heeded his words, and tucked my anger away. I even apologized to the girl I had harmed, though I remember feeling confused about what I was actually sorry for. She’d taken from me. I’d responded. How could I possibly be wrong? I didn’t know, at that time, about the educational systems that penalize Black girls, suspending them at six times the rate of white girls, but I knew that my principal wasn’t just scolding me for his greater good or to uphold a zero-tolerance school policy. He was offering words of wisdom to a girl already perceived to be older than she was because of the size of her body. It was misguided wisdom, but wisdom nonetheless.

  After that encounter, I worried about perception. I was concerned about being seen as aggressive and uncontrollable. I learned in that moment that, no matter how I was provoked, anger wasn’t a reasonable response to mistreatment. That lesson has lingered for more than twenty years, as I’ve gotten older and fatter and more aware of how the world understands fat Black bodies. When you inhabit a body as large as mine, there’s a harmful assumption that aggression is inherent, and no matter what has happened, the larger person provoked the disagreement and should be the person to deescalate it. When I enter a corporate office or an airplane or any public space, I am consciously mindful of my approach. A smile graces my lips, politeness attaches to every word, and in an effort to show that I am in no way a threat, I over-accommodate. I find myself shrinking, speaking with an inflection in my voice, adding exclamation marks in written communication to push against the idea that my being Black, fat, and woman automatically makes me a threat. In many ways, though these are protective measures, they do not protect me from fatphobia or racism. Instead, by shunning anger, I am allowing transgressions to happen without penalty.

  This is one of the many consequences of existing in a society that frames Black women’s anger as unjustifiable. The “angry Black woman” trope, like other controlling images, is
rooted in the enslavement of Africans, as Patricia Hill Collins explains in her groundbreaking book Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Through her research, Hill Collins determined that “portraying African-American women as stereotypical mammies, matriarchs, welfare recipients and hot mommas” justifies the oppression of Black women across the intersections of gender, race, and class, and these controlling images were created and then entrenched in everything from policies to media to present social issues like poverty and racism as “natural, normal and inevitable parts of everyday life.”

  When I first read Black Feminist Thought in a graduate course titled after the book, I had what Oprah Winfrey calls an “ah-ha moment.” Reading Hill Collins’ explanation of the “angry Black woman” trope, which Dr. Rachel A. Griffin calls “crazy” and “domineering” and Johnnetta Cole and Beverly Guy-Sheftall describe as “overbearing, bossy, sharp-tongued, loud-mouthed, controlling and, of course, emasculating,” it finally clicked why that principal had encouraged me to apologize: our anger is seen as illegitimate and wielded without discretion, so it becomes easy to overlook, dismiss, and shun us. That was why my anger had been dismissed, my reasoning overlooked, and I was penalized—even though I’d been wronged too.

  Pop culture, in particular, has guided the understanding that fat Black women’s anger is always illegitimate even while it presents it as the only way we can gain respect. Take, for instance, Mo’Nique’s character, Jazmin Biltmore, in the 2006 rom-com Phat Girlz. In one telling flashback scene, Biltmore is taunted on the playground by fellow students because “she can’t fit through the cafeteria” door, and her cousin, Mia (Joyful Drake), doesn’t even attempt to intervene. Her only friends, she monologues, are herself, her diary, and a prayer to God to become thinner—until she decides to physically react. Later, when a classmate calls her a fat bitch in front of her crush, Biltmore pounces, beating the girl up as their peers surround them and cheer her on. In that moment, she’s finally seen after being ignored and bullied, reinforcing the idea that violence is the only way she’s afforded recognition. Throughout the movie, Biltmore participates in several fights, including a romp at a fast-food restaurant, and each time, she’s able to walk away with more dignity than she came into the encounter with. If you’re fat, Black, and woman, it’s impossible to wrangle anger in a way that both dismisses the “angry Black woman” trope and acknowledges the harm that has been done to you. Instead, we’re often reduced to reactionaries, women intent on using the size of our bodies to bully others.