It’s taken my entire life to find the nerve and vocabulary to articulate what being gay, trans, and biracial have meant for me. I felt like I’ve always lived in those hard-to-relate-to in-between places. I have always struggled with black and white, circular thinking which made holding nuance really uncomfortable for me, especially as a teenager. I’ve found that navigating the intersections that I do has a unique set of challenges that very few people have understood when I’ve tried to seek support. And sometimes, I’ve been met with outright hostility and silencing in response to my desire to connect. As a method of protection, I stopped talking about them all together in most cases. It didn’t feel safe for a long time. Over the last three years, though, I’ve started to find people who navigate the world the way that I do, and we all seem to be struggling with the same things. I want to give voice to those things, despite how scary it is and how often these perspectives are intentionally suppressed.
Though I knew I was trans at a formative age, I didn’t tell anyone about it because I was raised in a household that vocally demonized men. They are dangerous, they are the enemy, and we will only be cared for by other women. I know that this ideology came from the violence and suffering that women have suffered from under patriarchy, but I internalized the idea that men are biologically predisposed to harm. It made me believe that the worst thing I could ever be was a man. So, I didn’t tell anyone until the dissonance was too painful to endure any longer. Once I freed myself, I felt a sense of alignment so profound that I grieved the years I deprived myself of it. Manhood is a gift, to me. And not just manhood, but transexual manhood. And a manhood that allows me to love other men. I love being a gay man.
When I first came out and was desperately seeking community, I thought that entering into queer and trans spaces would be enough to finally feel at home. I quickly found myself bumping up against the same disdain for masculinity. Sometimes it was latent, but sometimes it was vitriolic. I was receiving the same message: the worst thing you can be is a man. I found that I was either 1. an enemy of the movement by joining the side of the oppressor and if I want to be treated like a man I should accept divine feminine wrath, or 2. I’m not like those men, so I can still be “one of the girls” as long as I don’t take up too much space and I constantly acknowledge my newfound proximity to patriarchy. I was expected to smile and laugh along while those around me flippantly proclaimed “Men are trash, even you Von.” As though as soon as I came out, I suddenly had the secret key to all the power and privilege that cis men had in our world.
So, I tried to find a home in cis men’s spaces. That didn’t really work for me either, because I didn’t have a lot of shared experiences with them. I will say, some of the most affirming and healing experiences I’ve had have been with cis men, but I didn’t feel like I could really be vulnerable with them. Cis men’s spaces is where I learned just how suffocating patriarchy is for masculine-of-center people. It’s where I also learned that I am not considered “one of the guys” either, more of a spectator than a participant.
Then, I tried spaces advertised specifically for trans men and was still met with the same disdain for masculinity. There was so much internalized hatred, and self-deprecation. I regularly heard my fellow trans men say “Of all the genders, I had to be a man, ugh!; I’m a man, unfortunately; Being a man is so gross and stinky.” I did not feel at home with people who felt they had to self-flagellate to be taken seriously by other queer people. I also found that most of them were attracted to women, and were more aligned with lesbian communities prior to coming out. I didn’t share that alignment, as someone who has always been attracted to and dated men. It felt like a club that I was supposed to be a member of, but had somehow missed orientation day.
Similarly, in queer spaces, I encountered what I can identify as socially acceptable homophobia. It’s a borderline expectation in queer spaces to be misandrist, to the point that attraction to men is akin to a disease. You know, the same way that patriarchy and white supremacy pathologized it up until the 1990s? The way the alt-right is attempting to do so again, right now? I’ve had queer non-men say to my face: “You’re attracted to men? Get well soon.” This is so commonplace, that the trope of the bisexual woman who hates men and loves women is considered an accepted in-community joke. Being attracted to men, dating men, loving men, as a man saved my life.
Why have we normalized this treatment of masculine people in our communities? The foundation of queerness is to free ourselves of the bioessentialist expectations of the gender binary that are rooted in white supremacy, but it seems that only applies to those who embrace “divine femininity.” I’m speaking from my own experiences for this particular piece, but the misappropriation of divine femininity is also very often used to exclude/erase transgender women from womanhood. Assigning expectations of emotional bankruptcy to masculine-of-center people is still TERF rhetoric. It is the same rhetoric that says transgender women will never be “real” women, because they are born predisposed to violence. Modern queer politic has lost the plot in so many ways, and a lot of queer people need to revisit bell hooks and Leslie Feinberg.
To complicate things further, my racial identity has always been hard for me to feel settled in. I now mostly identify as biracial, but I don’t feel like this captures my lived experience as a mixed Filipino-American. I’m still looking for a word that makes sense for me, and exploring what feels good and right. It’s been challenging for me to share about being bi/multiracial in any context, because I am either “too white” and therefore do not experience racism, or “too brown” to be treated equitably in society. I’ve experienced anti-Asian racism at every stage of my life, and I find it hard to talk about even with my own family members because not all of them see me as Asian — on both sides of my family. I’ve been on the receiving end of “No fats, no fems, no Asians” on Grindr. I’ve been on the receiving end of “What are you?” questions from kids in my college classes. I’ve been on the receiving end of “Do y’all really eat dogs?” I’ve been held to the impossible standards of the model minority myth at work and in school.
In my experience, trying to talk about what it’s like to be part-Asian in white, Asian, and non-Asian POC communities has been met with resistance and comparison. I’m not accepted in my complexity in Asian spaces, I’m racialized and microaggressed in white spaces, and I’m not racialized enough for other communities targeted toward people of color. Similarly, in queer and trans communities, where folks self-proclaim they are committed to an intersectional approach to liberation, I found (particularly white) queer people policing my racial identity. White queers, doing their best to be anti-racist and find ways to reconcile their own proximity to privilege often felt empowered to tell me how to navigate being biracial. These same white queers could never imagine that a part-Asian person might not be Wasian. That our community does, in fact, include people mixed with Asian and other non-white people. That, no, Asian people don’t only co-exist with white people.
And while I know that all of this intra community policing stems from a good-faith attempt to build anti-oppressive spaces, the message I have received over the last 10 years of trying to find community is that I have to perform my masculinity, whiteness, Asianness, and sexuality in a way that is palatable in order to be welcomed in. So, where can I exist freely? My point is not to debate the influence of patriarchy, or to say that I don’t benefit from my proximity to whiteness. My point is that sometimes, I want to share my lived experiences and feel understood. I want there to be space for biracial people to discuss the unique ways that we move through the world, without having to perform the “right” way of talking about it. I want the people in my community to witness me, and be witnessed by me in return.
Living in the gray can be so fucking lonely. It can feel like no one on earth understands you, and they don’t care to learn. It can feel like you’re either too much or never enough. Not enough of a man for the world, but yet too oppressive for gender-expansive spaces. Too Asian for White America, but not authentic enough for the Asian support groups. We deserve to have a place somewhere. We deserve to show up fully in our truth and be received in love. We deserve to have support systems that celebrate all of our complexity. As I’ve started to talk about this more openly, I’ve started to find more people like me who struggle with the same questions. And what I’ve realized is that we just don’t have spaces to connect. It doesn’t have to be this way. We can be that light for us, to guide us home to each other.
When I was much younger and more insecure, I also used to ingratiate myself to anyone who would listen, putting myself down for being a man, leading with my whiteness so that I immediately acknowledge my privilege, apologize for it, and don’t take up too much space. And you know what? It doesn’t actually make people like you to grovel and self-deprecate. Further, the goal really shouldn’t be to make people like you. The goal should be to live your truth, and find the people who want to live it with you. You don’t have to be all things to all people. The reality is, racial dynamics, gender equity, and sexuality are complicated. No matter what intersections you navigate, your lived experience is complex and systemic power dynamics are never a 1:1 comparison on the individual level. Now, as an almost-30-something, I’m beginning to feel more self-assured and I keep coming back to this question: Aren’t we tired of trying to reinvent the boxes white cisheteropatriarchy puts us in anyway to keep us from unifying against it?
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Previously Published on Medium
photo of Von, taken by his fiancé Otto