I reach my usual spot, a secluded 10-by-10-foot square in the middle of the platform. I’ve got a wall to my right, thanks to the staircase on the other side, while a steel column, covered in who knows how many layers of hunter-green paint, forms a moderately effective barrier to my left. I remove my coat and adjust my top, making sure the pins I’ve fastened at my neckline keep the polyester blend resting snugly over my Adam’s apple. I didn’t have time to do my makeup at home, so I hug my folded-up coat close to my chest and hunch my shoulders in an effort to hide my tits. They’re small but visible — visible enough to sound the alarm for anyone who also happens to see the patches of stubble still dotting my chin after four rounds of laser hair removal.
I hear the train approach and ready my sideswept bangs for the gust of subway tunnel air that’ll try to blow them wayward. I win that battle and move on to the next one, beelining to the corner of the car as soon as the doors open. There are two seats in front of me and two seats behind. They’re all taken this morning, but I would’ve remained standing either way, because it’s easier to move if you’re already on your feet. I pop in my second earbud, turn up my music, and open Alexandra Kleeman’s You Too Could Have a Body Like Mine to the page I’ve dog-eared, periodically looking over my shoulder to know who’s behind me, beside me, and 30 feet away. I catch somebody staring, so I retreat back into my book.
This is what it’s like when I step outside my apartment, to say nothing of the catcalling, propositioning, harassment, groping, and public masturbation I’ve had to contend with since I lost access to the relative anonymity that came with being read as a white man in public. It’s something we all go through, with varying degrees of awareness. Every time we leave the house, we fall into these “webs of surveillance,” as gender and sexuality studies professor Eric A. Stanley calls them in Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, a collection of writing that approaches prisons and incarceration from queer and trans perspectives. For some of us, the risk of getting caught is so low that we barely feel the strand of silk as it breaks across our faces. For others, we must take conscious measures to minimize our risk of entanglement. For queer and trans and gender-nonconforming people, this might mean consciously raising or lowering the pitch of our voices, omitting certain facts about ourselves in casual conversation, or putting something on our bodies that just feels wrong. Sometimes, the risk of getting caught feels worth it. Other times, we just want to get from point A to point B.
Our mental calculations vary depending on how we enter the world and how we are received, and if you ask to see our work, no two chalkboard scribbles will look the same. Before entering a public space, Lily Kulp, an artist and “filthy communist” from Philadelphia, who is a white-passing, indigenous, nonbinary trans woman, always asks herself: How will I present? “I try to avoid looking overtly feminine, because I know I will be harassed more. Though when I’m more butch, I can get clocked, triggering dysphoria.” She feels pressured to pass and perform her femininity “correctly” in work environments in order to be validated by those around her. She does her best to vet every new situation beforehand to see if it’s safe enough for her to work there, although she notes that “there are no actually safe work spaces for trans women,” so she makes do with what she can. She often shrinks herself in public, but she says she can “beat some ass” if she has to, especially if someone fucks with the people she loves. “I would die to protect any of my friends,” she tells me.
Chris, a cis Black bisexual man who asks that I use only his first name in this article, says he is used to having to “heavily police” the way that he moves and talks in order to “cover up” his queerness. Lately, as he has started to come out to some of his close friends as bi, he has noticed himself loosening up somewhat. “I’m not so much concerned about physical safety right now,” he says, but he is concerned about how that might change as he starts to present and express himself in a more legible fashion. “Even while presenting straight, people challenge me and contest my body in subtle ways, like frequent shoulder checks on city sidewalks or people moving across the street when I start walking up. I feel, like, to keep myself safe, I have to tone down the threats that my body seems to make to those afraid of Black people or those afraid of visibly queer folks.”
A fear creeps over Alex, a white nonbinary trans fem, when she considers expressing her femininity in a more broadly recognizable way. “It’s easier to trust in your own safety when you’re not being immediately marked as gender-nonconforming,” she says. “I mean that in the sense of being clocked, but also, like, just getting noticed as being a little too feminine for someone’s liking.” She gets called “faggot” a lot on the street. She says it’s scarier at night, perhaps because, in part, it’s a time when she feels more empowered to present the way she wants to. Her current job situation doesn’t give her that freedom, but a past one did. “There were a number of times I walked to work presenting fem,” she says. “It was actually scary. The stares were a lot. You feel very visible and unprotected.”
If femininity leaves us visible and unprotected, masculinity does the opposite, cloaking us so that we may more easily go about our days. Rumi is a nonbinary Black and mixed-race student whom people tend to read as masc. When they’re walking through their neighborhood, they’ll heighten their “fairly successful gestalt of masculinity,” as they call it. Perhaps they’ll pitch their voice down or maybe add a “my man” to the end of their sentences. “I get what’s twisted about that,” they say. “But, as far as moving through an urban landscape, I need that for my mental health right now.”
If you can successfully pull off a masculine presentation, you just might be able to navigate the world unscathed. The same can’t be said for succeeding at a feminine presentation, much less failing at any gender presentation, whether intentionally or not. Suzy Salamy, the senior manager of clinical and advocacy programs at the New York City Anti-Violence Project, a nonprofit organization that provides crisis support and other services to LGBTQ+ survivors, says that the reason for this “links back to ‘toxic masculinity,’” a phrase she finds helpful, if a bit “overused” lately. “The farther away you are from the cis, white, straight ideal of masculinity, the less value you have in society and the more susceptible you are to being targeted and to be seen as deserving of that violence.”
Along with their support services, the AVP and the larger National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs track reports of hate violence throughout the country. According to the NCAVP’s 2016 report, there were 77 homicides stemming from LGBTQ+ and HIV-affected hate violence last year, 49 of which occurred at the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. 28 other people were killed last year, most of whom were Black and Latinx. Nearly three-quarters of them were trans and gender-nonconforming, and more than half of them were trans women of color. The NCAVP also tracked more than one thousand incidents of hate violence in 2016. Gay men and trans women showed up disproportionately among the survivors. People of color, as well as undocumented people, disabled people, and people living with HIV were disproportionately impacted as well. Not counting the Pulse massacre, this year has been even worse. At least 41 hate-violence homicides have been reported in 2017. The majority of victims have been Black and of color, and at least 26 were trans or gender-nonconforming.
Through her work, Salamy has come to understand the victims and survivors of such hate violence as existing along a spectrum of vulnerability; their position determined by their proximity to a racialized, ethno-national masculine ideal. Queer people, trans people, and gender-nonconforming people of all types fall somewhere on that spectrum, she tells me, noting that assailants, like police and local media, don’t always differentiate between these very different groups of people. “Obviously, trans women are not men,” she says. “But transphobic people might see them as men dressed as women,” a perception that might trigger the same kind of “homophobic rage” that may boil up inside of them whenever they see a cis man in a feminine top or with some visible hints of sparkly eyeshadow.
The NCAVP’s annual hate-violence reports, as well as its annual reports on intimate partner violence, are incredibly valuable tools. They quantify violence against queer and trans people in a legible way: one that can and has been used to shift policy and resources to help the individuals most impacted by this violence. As Alok Vaid-Menon, a gender-nonconforming artist and educator, tells me: “[These reports] give evidence that anti-LGBTQ+ violence is pervasive, widespread, and escalating, and that this violence is concentrated among people who are already disenfranchised by other aspects of their identity: Black people, migrants, poor people, sex workers, and trans and gender-nonconforming people.”
Still, the reports fail to capture the full scope of this violence, particularly when it comes to how it uniquely impacts gender-nonconforming people and other individuals who live beyond the binary. “What these reports do not tell us is the actual amount of harassment, violence, and discrimination that take place,” Vaid-Menon says, citing the inherent shortcomings of any system that relies on reporting and disclosure to document something. “When gender-nonconforming and nonbinary people are harassed or attacked, we are almost always misgendered in the coverage of the event. This is due to a combination of factors, including the lack of education about nonbinary and gender-nonconforming experiences at all levels, such that people just list us as ‘female’ or ‘male,’ even though there is more going on.”
A more ideal report would account for all these factors that have, thus far, proven to be hard to account for. But such a report may always be out of reach because of the slippery nature of queer and trans identity, and the mismatch between how LGBTQ+ people perceive themselves versus how the rest of the world perceives them. What we do have for now is concrete proof that flouting the rules of a society that upholds cisgender, heterosexual, and patriarchal values carries with it a clear risk to the lives of those who do so, even if the exact act of their treason goes unnamed. The punishment is often violence, and that violence extends beyond the physical.
“You can’t just look at how many people were physically assaulted because they were trans... You have to look at the entire social-cultural background that we as transgender people inhabit, that creates this high level of violence against transgender people and trans women of color,” says Jillian T. Weiss, executive director of the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund. For Weiss, the recent Department of Justice decision to assist in the potential hate crimes prosecution of 16-year-old Kedarie Johnson highlights the government’s lack of understanding when it comes to the systems that lead to trans violence.
“Some view that as a big plus for transgender people, but as Vanita Gupta, who is currently the head of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, put it, it’s important for Jeff Sessions to ‘connect the dots’ between all those policies he recently rescinded that provided protections for transgender citizens and [hate violence],” Weiss says. “When you’re restricted from employment and housing, your life is radically altered. You’re marginalized in a way that makes you much more subjected to violence.”
Trans and gender-nonconforming people experience violence at disproportionately high rates, but there are other factors at play. I know firsthand the comfort that results from having housing and employment options that are not only stable but affirming and nourishing. I’m familiar with the protections that come from whiteness and all the spaces it affords me access to. I know how unlikely it is that I’ll experience the kind of violence Weiss describes above. But I still live, every day, in the shadow of this violence, much of which is rained down upon “men” in dresses, a category I find myself being assigned to by others despite my own intentions. I feel the weight of something much greater when I’m out in public, even when the only thing a stranger has laid on me are his eyes.
Harron Walker is a freelance journalist based out of New York. Her work has appeared on Vice, BuzzFeed, Teen Vogue, Vulture, Into, Mask, and elsewhere.
