I’m So Trans When I Turn On My Lamp

Today I woke up, walked my pitbull, made some coffee, sat at my desk, and turned on my transgender lamp.

You see, simply everything I do is transgender, because I am transgender. My lamp may look normal to any cis demons reading this essay, but it is in fact a trans lamp, not because it is one of those bendy architecture lamps (she’s queering being upright), but because I, a trans person, turn it on and off daily.

Don’t you know? Everything can be trans now! At least that’s the impression I’ve gotten from social media, which for me, like for many trans and queer people, is my primary method of interacting with fellow Alphabet Mafia Members — especially lately.

I have not been to a gay bar in over a year, have not seen a drag show in eons, have not protested with my sisters in the streets since... well, I can’t even remember the last time I went to a trans protest. (2018, maybe?)

In the meantime, Twitter has been keeping me notified of all the things that are queer and trans now, but it’s been hard to keep up. Iced coffee is extremely gay, obviously. There’s an entire grown man with an entire TikTok account dedicated to explaining how everything — driving badly, being annoying, loving plants — is gay, as if these very common traits were the exclusive province of a single sexual orientation. (Seemingly everything is gay except two men having sex).

“Many people don't know this, but the Pinch from Ocean's Eleven is a lesbian,” a since-deleted tweet from a large corporation reads, referring to a fictional gadget that interferes with nearby circuitry. “The Pinch is a silent, stealthy, sly bitch that, when activated, cuts the electricity in all of Las Vegas for 30 seconds. Her power. Her mind.” What?...

Also, lemon bars are bisexual.

And then there’s bisexual lighting—which one person at a very fancy news website called the BBC decided was “an empowering visual device.” I have yet to meet a bisexual who feels empowered by this lighting, but I’m sure they exist. And of course there is T4T representation, which is not T4T at all, but mostly about people (including myself) tweeting about how any short man and tall woman or short object and tall object is a trans couple (see here, here, here, here, here).

I’m just having fun, I tell myself, as I follow these social trends. The people making these generalizations are just playing around, don't roll your eyes, I think as I watch tweet after tweet scroll past. Except that it’s all started to make me incredibly sad.

I have fallen victim to this impulse to call anything I relate to queer or trans, but I have decided, as of today, to declare a personal moratorium. My lamp is no longer transgender, she simply… wait… it simply is a lamp. Because when we call everything trans and queer, we ignore the sad fact that really nothing we’re doing is T4T, or queer, or even plain old gay. We’re sitting in our houses, miserable, isolated from each other, attempting to survive a pandemic, and watching LGBTQ+ culture, politics, and everything else become increasingly corporatized, homogenized, and hollow. If everything is trans, nothing is.

This problem has been exacerbated by the ever-increasing abstractness of our existence — we’re more online and less in-person than ever — but it is not new. Ever since the invention of gender studies, academics have been insisting that inanimate objects and ways of being are inherently queer.

Perhaps most famously (and infamously), Jack Halberstam’s 2011 book The Queer Art of Failure posited that the very concept of failure was anti-heteronormative, and proposed that we could free ourselves from the strictures of patriarchal expectations of success by embracing failure instead.

In Halberstam’s view, anything from Spongebob Squarepants to Little Miss Sunshine represents the joy found through spurning of traditional conventions. While it may be true that you can find joy in failure, I’m not sure there’s much inherently queer about the concept; and Halberstam likely could’ve chosen anything to prove his point.

I’m not sure there’s much inherently queer about anything, come to think of it. We, as queer people, get to decide what is queer, and get to decide what is not queer. So why, then, have we decided that so many things that do not materially support our cultures are queer or trans or gay?

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Queer culture has always meant more than having gay sex — there have always been movies, songs, and forms of dancing associated with being LGBTQ+. But, until recently, those pieces of culture were accoutrements to a physical culture. We existed on the streets, in ballrooms, in bars. We saw each other. Now it seems the accoutrements are all we have.

Gatekeeping has gotten a rap as of late; people feel as if we do not allow anything and everything to identify or be identified as queer or trans that we are doing a disservice to our community members. But I would like to posit that some forms of gatekeeping are good, if they keep materiality at the forefront of our queerness and transness.

Without gatekeeping, too many things breach our gates: mediocre television shows and corny Instagrammers and the idea of failure are now part of the queer community. Perhaps it is time to ask them to leave.

I’m not the first to point out this worrying trend. In January, Nour Abi Nakhoul, a trans Canadian writer, documented a phenomenon of social media users saying “they’re lesbians” about countless celebrities, animals, and inanimate objects. While Abi Nakhoul thought the trend was mostly harmless fun, she also pointed out that it’s happening at a time when representation of actual lesbians barely exists. We retroactively decide that movie and television characters are lesbians because so few are expressly labeled as such. We create the representation that corporate culture has failed to create for us.

Alex V. Green, another trans Canadian writer, lamented in 2019 that Gucci’s use of hollow “nonbinary” aesthetics for a “universal” perfume showed just how detached queer cultures have become from any materiality.

“The label ‘non-binary,’ and the political demands that such a label ought to entail, have become so watered down and stripped of their material resonance that cisgender designers have managed to eloquently capture its contemporary meaninglessness,” Green wrote.

By detaching transness and queerness from politics, from in-person community, from physical touch, from the things we produce when we are together, and attaching it instead to things that were produced without us in mind — like blockbuster movies and coffee with ice cubes in it — we invite the exploitation of our identities and our communities for profit.

We have pushed for representation, but mostly what we’ve gotten are Pride parades sponsored by missile companies and predatory lenders.

But, as Abi Nakhoul noted, perhaps none of this even matters: by claiming everything as lesbian, or queer, or trans, maybe we’re simply discarding with the notion that representation is at all liberatory. Perhaps there’s a layer of self-awareness behind the tweets that’s actually worthwhile.

Maybe we’re all in on the joke.

“We know that it isn’t in any way a serious pastime to look at the world around us trying to recognize parts of ourselves in it,” Abi Nakhoul wrote. “It doesn’t mean anything for the bigger picture — it won’t help us to eliminate the way our world is structured to discriminate against women and those who aren’t heterosexual. But it’s fun.”

I think she’s half right: This kind of superficial representation doesn’t really matter at the end of the day. But I think we have reached a fever pitch of describing everything as queer, trans, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and all the rest because we have so little that is actually queer in our lives.

Gay bars have been closing for decades, sex (which, lest we forget, is an integral part of being gay), has been on the decline. Our Pride parades have become corporate monstrosities that function more as vehicles to sell us vodka and airline tickets than as opportunities to push for liberation.

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The pandemic did not create these conditions, it simply exacerbated them. We now live in an exponentially bleaker environment where near-constant isolation is the norm. This loneliness is compounded by the fact that trans and queer people, especially young trans and queer people, must constantly push to find communities that have been hidden from them.

In a world where social media platforms ban LGBTQ+ content, where schools refuse to teach kids about queer history or queer sex, where you must often leave your home and hometown simply to find friends, it makes sense that queer people, especially young queers, would latch onto anything that could possibly be claimed as queer.

It’s the same reason so many people online call everything an ADHD symptom, and why images of common objects like backyard chairs go viral: we are all starving for actual community, for materiality in our lives, to be able to relate to each other across this vast, alienating expanse of the internet.

It’s a perfectly understandable impulse, but it distracts us from our need for friends, lovers, and community, leaving us to rely on with cheap and unfulfilling knockoffs of queer culture instead.

I will not lambaste anyone for participating in these trends, as I have done it, too. But I think we can allow ourselves to hold two thoughts in our heads at once: it’s okay to find solace in banal and trivial things while we get through this bleak period, but we also need to push for more.

From now on, every time I have the impulse to call something T4T, or to call an inanimate object trans, I will simply ask myself the following question: Wouldn’t I be better off spending this energy finding someone to have sex with? Isn’t that the queerest thing of all?

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