Paranoia as a Trans Style

The Situation Comedy of Trans Life

pretending.

that SOPHIE song,

the sound of the emergency

in my head.

Cecilia Gentili, The Knife Cuts Both Ways (image via Dixon Place)

Two axioms for a bimbo theory of trans humor:

1.     What is a more absurdly comedic situation than being trans in the world?

2.     The real tragedy is trans humorlessness.

I have this joke that I think is pretty good. It’s probably my best trans joke. But like a lot of things in my life, I could only get so close to telling it before it all fell apart.

I had planned to teach a course this semester called “The Situation of Trans Comedy.” My motive was capitulation. Teaching trans studies to trans students is the best thing I do, but it also makes me cry myself to sleep three times a week. Trans studies is depressing, we all know it. Sensing that 2021 was angling to be a worse version of 2020, I thought a course on trans humor might be the kind of refreshing palette cleanser my students and I needed. But as fate would have it, just as I got close to discovering the rules of the trans situation comedy my body and brain tried to kill me and I had to go on medical leave. Class canceled.

Isn’t that kind of hilarious? 

Let me tell you the joke, which I have long sworn never to tell in public because it’s so excessively inappropriate. Until now, the only person who has heard it is Emmett Harsin Drager (@trans_historic), who was also present for its birth. Emmett and I used to have this beautiful plan to go on the road with a trans standup show, all shticky with masc-femme repartee. But we decided we’d never be able to do it because no one would be willing to laugh at us. 

Case in point: the joke in question concerns my statistically likely exposure to premature death. It goes something like this:

Yes, transition is great and all, and I totally love being a girl, for sure. But you can’t tell me that I won’t transition again in five years. Frankly, you should expect me to transition to a trans man after I’ve finished getting bottom surgery and everything to make me female…It’s the only way a trans woman of color can live past thirty-five! 

Isn’t that funny?

*

I think there are two genres through which we can broadly assess the experience of contemporary trans life: paranoia and the situation comedy. I want to make a case for the latter because I find the former rather dreary, not to mention a bit racist.

I won’t bore you with the millionth recital of Eve Sedgwick’s essay on paranoid and reparative reading. Besides, I’m psychoanalytically at my best in my literal (or is it figurative?) psyche, not so much in my writing.

The paranoid style as trans genre is also less an individual psychic dynamic than a collective problem. It’s like the following paradigmatic scene of me and my therapist, where there isn’t enough space in the room for the whole of the world to squeeze in and join us:

Me: Describes something that a cis and/or white person did to me that was a little fucked up and how I want to kill myself over it.

Therapist: I’m not sure that person was acting with the malicious intent you’re ascribing to them in your reaction. You might be projecting the actions of your childhood abuser onto them and conflating past and present feelings. What if this person in the present isn’t being abusive?

Me: This whole conversation makes me want to kill myself.

Or, that old adage: “I’m not paranoid if everyone really is out to get me!” The thing is, my therapist is right, but my paranoid self is also right. 

But there’s another side to this coin, trans paranoia as an in-house genre. What I mean is, we who call ourselves trans are given to paranoid readings of ourselves, our lives, and each other, and these readings circulate so intensely that they often block more sophisticated thinking. This dynamic is highly racialized. I think it more or less governs the way trans women of color are seen and talked about.

Paranoia, you might recall, is invested in predictive truths: it avoids surprises by being right about everything before it happens. That’s why it’s so useful for critique. But think about how embarrassingly flat the state of so much “radical” or “political” trans discourse is today, in academia for sure, but also broadly on the internet or in progressive circles. The genre goes something like this:

Trans women of color are being MURDERED! They are THE MOST OPPRESSED, so we have to CENTER them. But they are also SO STRONG AND RESILIENT, every breath they take is A REVOLUTION. Smash the gender binary!

If you’ll forgive my attitude, as I am a trans woman of color myself and, therefore, believe that I have a right of reply: what the fuck kind of knowledge is this? We haven’t learned a single thing about me, the trans women of color, we’ve merely proclaimed that I am simultaneously the motive for other people’s political action and the guarantor of their activism’s righteousness—or critical analysis, or cultural capital.

The whole enterprise is paranoid in that it offers a hermetic, fully knowable account of violence and its inevitable, dialectical resolution. Truly, a predictive control freak is at hand because according to this, we are always already overcoming the worst violence that we also have to recognize because it’s so structurally ineradicable...??? So, the only way out of the paranoia is a macro dose of idealization (make the trans woman of color a goddess on earth), which is toxic shit, believe me. I have said this before but I’ll repeat it: I have yet to see any evidence that mainstream culture, academic trans studies, or mainstream trans political discourse have any real interest in what trans women of color know, do, want, and feel. They are collectively far more invested in using paranoid and idealized modes to traffic in us as political and cultural signifiers. No joke.

*

The situation comedy, on the other hand, describes a rich and multifaceted genre, where “genre” means something like what Lauren Berlant defines it as in The Female Complaint: “an aesthetic structure of affective expectation.” If genres can be understood as emotional styles and structures of expectation about how a situation should unfold in the world, well, comedy is a particularly interesting situation for people whose lives structurally suck. Berlant and Sianne Ngai’s 2017 special issue of Critical Inquiry on comedy is chock-full of nuggets on this subject. The two of them gloss something important here:

“One worry comedy engages is formal or technical in a way that leads to the social: the problem of figuring out distinctions between things, including people, whose relation is mutually disruptive of definition”

Rather than adhering to a convention—say, by being paranoid about and then idealizing the trans woman of color to domesticate them—the situation comedian knows how to play with conventionality, often by recontextualizing a character, moving them from one situation to another, which can be hilarious. The situation comedian understands that the social enmeshment of people uncomfortably—and humorously—makes it impossible to separate them, despite the violence done every day as if those differences are ordained. (“You are the MOST OPPRESSED I must CENTER you!”) Such a comedic attitude precludes the predictive control that is the hallmark of paranoia for the much messier and potentially more pleasurable terrain of perverse laughter.

I think trans people are really fucking funny, especially when we are being bimbos. Trans women are the best situation comedians I have ever met. Especially if they are supercharged with the frisson of other comedic traditions, like camp, being Jewish, or being brown. I loathe the intense sincerity of much trans political speech today and the moral frameworks used to enforce it. But the mechanics of how trans people are funny are only half of what interests me. The question of why is maybe even more important.

Consider Cecilia Gentili here as a true genius. You probably know her best for being a trans woman of color activist based in New York City, doing incredibly important work. What you might not know as well is her hilarious performance art. In The Knife Cuts Both Ways, a 2018 show I am completely obsessed with, Gentili takes the paranoid readings of her trauma and turns them, perversely, into a situation comedy that she subjects her white and cis audiences to.  

Having spent a year going through the excruciating asylum process for residency in the US, Gentili, exhausted by having to recite the most intimate and violent, traumatic experiences of her life over and over for the state to deem her worthy, decided to convert the whole thing into a one woman show. Part unauthorized autobiography, part triumphant bimbo ode to the pleasures of brown trans women’s sex lives, The Knife Cuts Both Ways dares to do the thing no one else will: convert the most paranoid, brutal situations of trans femme of color life into a situation comedy. She swaps the usual context and makes her audience consider why they want sincere, tear-jerkers from brown trans women who have to have been beaten, battered, and raped, before they’re willing to see them as human. The audience is left with a chilling question: are they really any better than the immigration officers of the state?

It’s hysterically funny and kind of terrifying to laugh along to. And that’s why it’s so important.

I was DM-ing with Charlie (@BerlantBro) the other day on the subject of “why trans people aren’t allowed to age” and we divined that the trans social contract imposed on us by the powers that be goes something like this:

“Behave, young trans, and kill yourselves by thirty. We really don’t want you around but would rather not have to do the job ourselves.”

A few manage to get hall passes if they piously (and strategically) recite the litany of violences done to them to garner sympathy. We also admitted that this contract had been slightly updated by a recent Executive Order of the President. There is now a second clause—a loophole, if you will:

“Don’t kill yourself, kill civilians in Iraq!”

I guess what I’m saying is, in such a situation of trans life, instead of the paranoid business as usual, I’d rather do some more bimbo theory. I’m with Cecilia.

*

If there’s a succinct trans woman’s statement on the value of comedy to living on in this world, I humbly submit that it comes in a pivotal moment in the criminally underrecognized 1988 masterpiece Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (Reader: I watched my VHS copy of this film until it fucking disintegrated.) Eddie Valentine, our misanthropic, alcoholic P.I. and protagonist with a heart of gold, is making a quick getaway with Jessica Rabbit, the transsexual bombshell married to the titular neurosis-incarnate Roger. They’re a t4t couple if there ever was one: a manic, Jewish hare in red suspenders, perhaps literally madly in love with an at-least-six-foot-tall femme fatale who has eyes for no one else and yet still routinely brings all men to their knees, without a second thought because she’s just that hot.

The toons (trans?) of late 1940s LA live in a situation of dangerous hypervisibility. Desired for their entertainment value and the arrogant presumption, by non-animated people, that they can’t be harmed, their lives are threatened by an emergent conspiracy of corporate capital. Toon Town is slated to be demolished through nothing less than a genocidal attack by Cloverleaf Industries, a mysterious firm that has just bought LA’s streetcar public transit system only to shut it down. It turns out that Cloverleaf needs the segregated land occupied by the toons to hold LA’s first freeway. The violent imposition of a post-WWII landscape needing the added force of law, the local magistrate Judge Doom (who also is majority owner of Cloverleaf) has taken to summary trials and executions of toons for any non-normative behavior, enforced by a gang of corrupt hyena cops.

In short, shit is bad for our beloved toons, no matter how resilient and unflappable they seem by nature. There are plots lurking around every corner, a paranoiac’s hellish paradise. 

As they’re fleeing the Judge and his cronies, Eddie turns to Jessica, who is worrying yet again about where her husband might be.

“Seriously, what do you see in the guy?” asks Eddie.

Jessica replies simply and definitively: “He makes me laugh.”

I get that. There is a soundtrack that plays quietly and constantly to the emergency in my head, the bloody impression left behind in my synapses and serotonin by the worlds claws on me since I was little. It sounds a lot like that SOPHIE song, “Pretend.” I’ve been listening to it all week on repeat, inconsolable.

Sometimes I just want to be allowed to laugh instead.