I acknowledge that I am a plural entity. I am the daughter of my deceased psychotic father. I am also the mourner of my dead love. I am, alternatively, one of the tribe of skinny people. I am, additionally or contrariwise, a scholar. I am, equally, dark-haired. I have these views and not those views. I can define myself in many different ways. This is what I am not: I am not one thing. I contain multitudes. Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. To be plural, to be multiform, is a singular thing, rich, unusual, and myself. To be forced into narrow definitions is a falsehood. To be told, if you are not one thing then you are nothing, is to be told a lie.
The Museum of Identity is too engaged with that lie. I can’t work in it anymore.
Or,
I suspect that identity in the modern sense—national, racial, sexual, politicized, embattled—has become a series of systems of thought some of which helped drive D Golden to his/her death. The truth is that our identities are unclear to us and maybe it’s better that they remain that way, that the self goes on being a jumble and a mess, contradictory and irreconcilable. Maybe after all D was just a man with some female feelings and [he] should have been allowed to remain in that place and not pushed toward transition by people like me. Not pushed into a femaleness [he] could neither wholly reject nor, ultimately, bear. Pushed toward [his] death by people like me, who allowed a new idea of the real to be stronger than the oldest idea of all: our love.
D told me a story about a hijra in Bombay who dressed as a man at home and in fact was a man for his/her mother and father and then changed her clothes and became a woman when she left the house. That should be all right. Flexibility should be all right. Love should dominate, not dogmas of the self.
I was ready to go with D through all [his] changes and stay with [him] when they were done. I was [his] lover when [he] was a man and I was ready to remain her lover through transition and into her new self. What does this tell me about me, about human beings, about the reality that is beyond dogma? It tells me that love is stronger than gender, stronger than definitions, stronger than the self. This is what I have learned. Identity—specifically, gender identity theory—is a narrowing of humanity, and love shows us how broad we can be. To honor my dead lover I reject the politics of identity and embrace the politics of love.
This was what the philosopher Bertrand Russell replied when asked what advice he would pass on to future generations. He said: “Love is wise.” But I understand that these are contentious times. If battle there must be, let it commence.
ACTUAL LETTER
Dear Orlando,
As I told you just now in your office, I have to resign my position. It’s hard for me to explain why and it is a tough decision and I’m ready to sit down with you and talk it through some more if you so desire. Maybe, as you say, I’m suffering an extreme grief reaction and my thoughts are therefore confused and I will think better of it when I’ve had time to mourn and process what has happened, and it was kind of you to suggest counseling and a leave of absence, but I think it’s better I just go. Thanks for everything. All the best.
Riya.
The storm blew up on her social media at once. (To someone as out of step as myself with his generation and the one immediately following, the thought can’t help but occur: Why put this stuff out there in the first place? Why tell a crowd of strangers that you are going through a painful and deeply personal reevaluation of your thinking? But I understand that this is no longer even a question.) From every side the invisible army of the electronic universe laid into her. Anonymous individuals with pure hearts and no sense of the hypocritical defended their certainties about identity while cloaking themselves in the disguises of false names. “So how’d you feel now about white women dressing up as Pocahontas on Halloween? What’s your position on blackface? Are those okay with you?” “Are you a SWERF now as well as a TERF? Maybe you aren’t even an RF anymore. What are you? Are you anyone?” And much bad language. And, repeatedly, Delete your account. The disapproval came from friends as well as strangers, it came from the highly assertive gender-political circles in which she had moved so comfortably for so long and which now accused her of betrayal, but also from the indie-fashionista world in which she had been something of a rising star, and from several of her erstwhile colleagues at the Museum of Identity, the thing about your new position isn’t so much that it’s wrong, or that’s it’s so regressive, it’s that it’s so poorly thought out. It’s so stupid. And we thought you were the smart one.
Across the Atlantic, in another theater of the identity wars, the British prime minister was narrowing the definition of Britishness to exclude multiplicity, internationalism, the world as the location of the self. Only little England would do to define the English. In that distant argument about the identity of the nation there were loud voices pushing back against the prime minister’s grunting narrowness. But here in America, in the language of gender, the only words that didn’t exist, Riya thought, the only unspeakable words, were “I’m not sure about any of this. I’m having second thoughts.” That kind of talk could get you de-platformed.
Ivy understood, Ivy Manuel who had always resisted being pigeonholed. “Fuck ’em if they don’t get it,” she said. “Come on over and let’s go for a fucking run by the river and let’s have a fucking drink and let’s sing a fucking improper song together. ‘My Boy Lollipop’ or some shit like that.”
One more encounter with the hobo Kinski before his big scene, which I will get to in due order, should have warned me that he was gearing up for something. But such is our desire to believe in the ordinariness of ordinary life, the normality of our dailiness, that I didn’t get it. He was skulking about outside the Red Fish, the music place on Bleecker, inside which a Faroese singer was scheduled to perform a suite of confessional songs inspired by YouTube videos—in English, not Faroese, luckily for the audience. What was Kinski’s interest in any of this, YouTube, the Faroe Islands, music? But there he was, skulking. Hey, anybody got a spare ticket, a ticket you don’t need and could maybe donate to a good cause? Him being the good cause he had in mind. I was there because the Faroese singer’s American collaborator was a friend, and Kinski, seeing a familiar face, lit up and became high energy.