The Wachowski Effect

“We’re literally intersectionality in a family”-- an interview with my trans sis

Syd Gill joins your resident Sad Brown Girl as her biological trans sister to talk kinship, birth order, transitioning during COVID, being a zellenial, and butch trans girls on TikTok.

Follow Syd on Twitter (@sydddgp) and TikTok (@sydneedy) for more!

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Jules G.-P.: When we talk about the Wachowski sisters, a lot of people are surprised to learn that they are not twins (and apparently some people are also surprised to learn that they are trans). But what they don't know is that you and I are also sisters that are also trans but aren't twins! And I just think it’s important, to like, honor the amazing work of the Wachowskis and add to it by saying there are other trans sisters in the world that are also biological and brilliant.

And there's something kind of hilarious and strange, but very interesting about growing up in the same family and both being trans, but also being of different ages, no?

Syd G.: Yes, biological and brilliant, agreed. It was so interesting when I was first coming out. I was like, what are the chances? I have a very logical mind and wondered: what are the chances someone's trans? What are the chances that siblings are trans? And everything that I was researching was talking about twins and whatever weird scientific arguments they were trying to make about trans as genetic, which is not important to me.

It makes total sense now. Like, it would be weirder if we weren't both trans, you know what I mean?

Jules: Yes!

Syd: We have such different experiences. Our six-and-a-half or seven-year age gap, for one.

And we haven't lived in the same city for, I don't know, 12 years or something. So, we've gone through transitioning in such different ways and grew up in such different households. But obviously we also have many similarities because we are related by being trans, not just kinship.

Jules: I love that you thought of it in terms of probabilities and statistics. I also share the feeling of “well, of course we're both trans, it'd be weird if we weren't.” And I don't really know how else to explain that. But it’s sort of striking what you’re saying: because of age difference and the fact that I moved away when I was 17, at which point you were like—

Syd: A baby.

Jules: 11? We had separate adolescences is in some sense.

Sometimes I think like the reason that it makes sense that we're both trans is because we have come to share similar values out of our life experience, but also independently, as separate people. I think a lot about how we use family metaphors in queer and trans community. Not just chosen family, but how the dolls call each other “sis” and things like that.

Syd: Yeah.

Jules: And our relationship also feels like that to me. Like we chose to be sisters in a certain way, that there's an intentionality behind it because we both also had to choose to transition. That feels more interesting than a biological claim to similarity. Sure, we share some of the same genetics and that makes talking about hormones and transition really fun and interesting and probably confusing for our female relatives, but then at the same time it's also like, in the same way that I enjoy calling myself a biological female I am also down to say “yes, my biological trans sister,” but not because it's different than the way that other trans girls call each other sisters.

Syd: I think the fact that we didn't live in the same city and haven't been around each other as long—the fact that we have gotten closer as time has gone on—makes it all very intentional. It’s not a familial relationship where you're meant to be close because of sheer proximity. It’s been very important for the both of us through any life changes to stay connected and find communication.

And especially when I was coming out! At first it was a little intimidating because I didn't have a lot of trans people around me, but I had you to fall back on, which was the most helpful thing in the world, especially because of the one area where biology is itself helpful. The way we're experiencing transition physically has been very similar, so I can kind of ask you questions about what it was like for you at each stage. So, there is a very practical helpfulness to it as well that I feel very lucky to have.

Jules: Likewise. I think there's two ways that siblinghood gets talked about that I find both interesting and incompatible. And one is the idea that I've seen in different feminist and queer theories of kinship, or relationships, where siblinghood is important because it's horizontal instead of hierarchical, or vertical. But then on the other hand, in a vein more akin to astrology, I find birth order theory interesting. And in birth order theory there are clearly social hierarchies between siblings.

One thing I want to think through is being an older and a younger sibling. How does that mirror or not mirror generational conflicts or age-stratified conflicts in trans community between older girls and eggs, or people who just started transitioning and people past that two- or four-year mark where you stop thinking about it as much? One thing I've thought about myself is that I surely was a very intimidating older sibling to have because I was so loud and brash and queer and femme, and long before I was a girl I was a fag and gay and also just so much older and having so many more life experiences and being given so much more autonomy than you would have been at your age. It's one of these weird ways that the experience inside like a family unit doesn't quite map onto the wider social world and yet, it's hard to think one without the other.

Do you have any thoughts as the proverbial younger sibling?

Syd: I think there is a truth to the birth order theory because you were obviously this very femme child, and you were very smart and it was like, “Jules will do her own thing and she’s gonna be fine. She's different than everyone but that's, you know, whatever.” Well, there's a second child now and they seem to be more like what we expect from a child within a family: growing up like a boy, embodying more traditional gender roles. I always felt the expectation of my role, especially as the younger one. My role was to be on brand for a child, be a boy and do all the things people expected. I obviously always looked up to you and learned so much and got so excited from hearing about your life and the things you were up to, but it was hard to actually connect with you on those actual levels until recently.

Jules: We've talked before about what that has to do with the kind of social expectations that are put on kids without their consent or even awareness. And I think that one of the interpretations you and I have come to about how our childhoods overlapped—and we were raised in a really big extended brown diasporic family, so I'm not just talking about a small familial household—well, because I was so out there and so queer or loud, but also overachieving and easy to contain through certain metrics of respectability, there was an implicit backlash against you as the younger one. A group need to overvalue you as normal in contrast to me, in part as a form of exceptionalism that is often the caveat through which family acceptance of trans people happens. “We could have one,” sure, but the non-normativity of our smaller family unit within our extended family is that we're all really disobedient and unrespectable, so, probably more than anyone that pressure landed on you because people felt like, “well at least like one person to come out of that smaller group is kind of normal.”

And I think that's a vicious kind of side effect of a liberal inclusion model for transness. Because we're Canadian I can almost hear the Canadian liberal pundit class applauding our immigrant, Punjabi, religious, working class family for having room for queer and trans people, but that actual process of incorporation was predicated on its own punishments and exclusions. This pressure to put trans people back in the family, which a new pressure that hasn't existed for a very long time, really has a cost to it. One of the ways that that manifested for me and my experience of our relationship over the years was that I saw you as someone who was preternaturally wise beyond your years, so ahead of me in terms of emotional competency and the ability to voice your feelings and opinions, and I was so confused by why other people didn't see that.

Within this structure that meant to box us both we both experienced our own excess. But we didn’t have the language to see it or communicate it because we were precisely raised not to see that. Does that make sense?

Syd: Yes. I always thought of myself as coming from the family where, you know, our mom is a brown immigrant who breaks all of her quote-unquote “cultural norms” and that's really exhausting, and she has to deal with sexism and racism. And then you were the queer one and then our dad struggles with mental health and can't work. There were all these different identities and problems. I always felt the pressure to be the redeeming one, raised as the straight male who was very white passing. And I think that's why I learned to be very good at putting out fires. Like, oh shit, when our family comes in, we're already like fucking up space, we're hitting all the different buttons at once—we're literally intersectionality in a family—and so, what if there was one more? Absolutely not!

That experience informed me in how to navigate the world by not giving too much of myself up to anyone. Until it came crashing down and I realized, oh fuck it, I'm actually just a queer and trans woman of color. Still, for a long time it was inescapable because people reinforce the idea that you are stable and healthy because you are what they expect from you.

Jules: Part of what’s so moving to me about that as an arc—even if you can only assign an arc retrospectively—is that you take the biggest W. You swoop in at the end are like “fuck this bullshit, I'm gonna be the one who is able to, or is the least afraid in the end, of embracing queerness, transness, and brownness for myself.” There's a way that being suppressed the most like lets you also laugh back in the face of it—maybe this leads me to another question.

According to a certain definition, I am an “elder millennial” and you are a younger millennial. I don't know if you identify as like, Zoomer cusp—

Syd: Zellenial!

Jules: Zellenial! That’s up to you and I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I am curious. Do you do you feel like there are generationally specific aspects to coming into your transness that you imagine weren't the case for me?

Syd: This is something I think about so often because when I moved out on my own to university, I had a lot of older friends. And they were all queer and trans, but they were 20 to 25 and I was 18 at the time. They were all coming into their identities and for me that was an interesting space to be in. But coming out now at 20-uh…am I 26? 25? Whatever. A lot of the people I met who are at the same point in their identity are Zoomers. They’re all 20 to 23. And there's so much similarity because we're going through similar journeys but there's also so many cultural differences that make me feel like “holy shit I'm not a Zoomer, I'm definitely a millennial.” So much of my information and my journey came from the internet and growing up as a very online person as a teenager. That was so much of my social interaction because it was the safest way to access communities that I couldn't find IRL life, which I feel like was probably a little different for you. Once you got more online you were already an adult.

And even now so much of the interaction I have with other queer and trans people is still online, like watching transtok (trans TikTok). I couldn't imagine my life without those things.

Jules: And a lot of people's genders underwent huge transformations during COVID, or during more locked down parts. You and I already experienced this as discordant because I was locked down in the US and you were in Canada, which have had wildly different pandemics, but I can imagine that making decisions to transition and come out to people during a period of social distancing both magnified the value of the internet, but probably also led to a feeling of imposter syndrome—or maybe a feeling of “social dissociation?”

I feel very lucky that my life is primarily based around other trans people and so is my professional work. But there can be a shadow to that where I think “holy fuck, the rest of the world is just full of people that aren't like that, and are a lot of them have it out for me (at least implicitly)?” Does any of that resonate with like your experience of the last year and a half?

Syd: It was so weird coming out during lockdowns because the amount of times I came out to people on Zoom was comical.

[Jules laughs]

 Syd: It’s hilarious now, but so much of my life felt completely insular because I was working from home, I wasn't seeing a lot of people, and I was starting to have these conversations, but none of it was about being out in the world, which is so much of what gender is. It felt like I was doing a lot of the legwork of telling people and factually getting it out there, but I wasn't having the fun experiences right away that I was craving. It was like me sitting in front of the computer all the time, which was good because there was also a protection in the early stages of transition where I was very sensitive—the world scared me and I didn't have to interact with it. But it really crept up in a way where thought “oh my god, I want to go be a girl, you know? I just want to go do funny girl things in the world.”

And now I'm able to do that more by being vaccinated. And that shit is so fun!

Jules: That makes a lot of sense.

As a last question, I want to draw on your expertise. To return to the Wachowski metaphor, I don’t know which of us is Lilly and which one is Lana. Apologies, because only one of them follows me on Twitter and I don't want to cause an accidental discourse here by staking a claim to one, so: to call on your expertise as the other Wachowski in this scenario, what's one trans girl thing that you think is really interesting right now in the culture?

Syd: It relates back to transtok, because I've become very addicted to TikTok. As much as the content of transtok is mostly white girls, or white nonbinary people, which is kind of boring, I’m starting to meet more people who are trans butch girls—which I think we were talking about last time I saw you.

And I love it. I think they always come across as the perfect friend for me because they're on their shit, they have no problem telling people off, and I get a lot of joy hearing how they navigate the world and in watching their stories on TikTok.

You and I are much more on the femme end, I think you would agree?

Jules: MMHMMM.

Syd: Butch trans girls are something I didn't even know about. Obviously, conceptually I could think that possibility existed, but I didn't know anyone. So yeah, half my videos on TikTok are all the trans butch girls that I follow doing thirst traps, and I love it.

Jules: It’s a very brave discourse and we heard it here first, folks: trans femmes admire trans butch girls! We’re going there and we’re echoing the greats: the Leslie Feinbergs of the day, the Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold of it all; the working-class, butch-femme fabulous situations.

I've been binge watching the UK makeup competition show Glow Up and one of the judges, Val Garland, well, I love the way that she heaps praise on the contestants because it's always like she's only just discovering how to talk and she's learning words as she speaks them. She’ll be like “That…is…ABSOLUTELY..MAH-VEL-OUS. Marvelous!!!” And she always goes “ding dong!” for things, so DING DONG, butch trans girls. We’re loving the work that you’re doing. And we appreciate you because it’s a lot of work being femme and sometimes we need good butches and mascs to, you know, pick up some of that slack with a certain enthusiasm that only you can. So, right there with you, even though I’m an old and am not on TikTok—which is my brave confession of this interview.

Syd: I don’t think you need to be on TikTok; I think it would be too much discourse for you to handle. I don't think your brain needs any more platforms.

Jules: Right. I mean my doctor has put me on a really strict discourse diet. So, you know, I gotta protect the integrity of my rotting brain.

Syd: That was the most academic millennial joke I've ever heard.

Jules: Yeah, I'm sorry, it's a serious problem.

Syd, thank you so much for joining me on Sad Brown Girl, I love you so much. Thanks for being so smart and my sister.

Syd: Thanks for having me, I love you too. Thank you for also being smart and also being my sister!