I Don’t Want to Talk about Joanne
…but I’ve been storming around my house, ranting about her inflammatory, ignorant bullshit for so long that my marital euphemism finally said, “Maybe you should write a newsletter about it.”
If you don’t know what I’m talking about… I’m ambivalent about introducing you to the years-long, escalatingly terrible shitshow but… here’s a three and a half hour video explanation of basically everything; and another one and a half hour video explanation that explains the transphobic dog whistles and the experience of being “cancelled;” and here’s a 58 minute video response that emphasizes the empirical and logical errors. (If you click on all three, your YouTube timeline is gonna be full of even more.) Here’s a piece for people looking at British feminism and going, “What the hell is going on over there?” (That’s the one I want Eddie Izzard to read.) Here are various timelines on CNN, on yahoo news and The Independent, an explainer on Vox (they are not all equally good). If you want more… I mean, look, consume the internet you want to consume and also practice some self-care. Friends don’t let friends disappear down rabbit holes of inflammatory, ignorant bullshit.
If you do know what I’m talking about and who I mean by Joanne… you know. It’s infuriating that someone with so much of literally everything would choose to use their everything to make life more difficult for some of the most vulnerable people in her own country and in mine.
So. I’m still figuring out what my role is in the public discourse, but here in the newsletter I just want to say two things, about how I, a cisgender sex educator type human, attempt not to be a Joanne.
First: In my earliest formal training around how to work with and for the trans community, I sat quietly and took copious notes and, like a good counseling student, nodded my head and went, “Mh-hm.” It was a simple Trans 101 in the summer of 2000. Our leader taught us about the diagnostic criteria but also the lived experience of trans people, and she described the discrimination, harassment, and violence faced by trans people who dared to be trans in public or even in their personal relationships.
And at the end of all this, Carol said, “What questions do you have?”
I raised my hand.
“Yes?”
“I’m just wondering… what is it that could cause anyone to hate a trans person or feel threatened by them? It seems like it would be challenging enough for a trans person, just realizing they’re trans and going through the process of transitioning; why would anyone make their life harder than it has to be?”
(It was 2000, I had never had a chance to ask questions before, and the training had been very much focused on struggles, without much about the joy.)
Carol smiled at me, this soft, head-tilted smile that I will never forget. She said, “How do you feel about your gender?”
I thought about it. (Notice the cis privilege—I had just turned 23 and this was the first time I ever considered how I felt about my gender.) I remembered a rehearsal for a high school play, when Mr. Smith, the drama teacher and director, pointed at me and said to another student, “When you say your line, she’ll move across and down.” I remember the little flutter of pleasure I felt at being called “she.”
With a smile and a shrug, I said to Carol, “Pretty good.”
And Carol changed my life. She said, “People who aren’t comfortable with trans people often don’t feel very confident about their own gender. They can’t tolerate the idea that maybe they didn’t have to fight so hard to be the person they were told they should be, the person they were punished for failing to be. And here’s a trans person, living a different way, being freer than they ever felt they could be. They have to believe the trans person doesn’t belong, in order to assure themselves that they do.”
I said, “Thanks,” while my brain exploded and I realized that hateful people often hate themselves, often because they were treated as if they were themselves hateful. A handy life lesson, lemmee tell you.
Moral of the story: My way of avoiding being a Joanne is to remind myself that somebody who can’t create space for trans folks feels trapped, and their fear of trans people really derives from their panic about how trapped they feel, in the face of other people who dare to live as though they are already free.
Joanne feels trapped by gender—and no wonder. Her gender has been used as a weapon against her, to the point that she can’t even write a book under a woman’s name, or even under a nonbinary name like “Jo.” She longs for freedom from her gender and is terrified of people who actively live as though they’re already free. I’m not saying she’s trans, I’m saying she lives in the same patriarchal misogyny we all live in, she has been punished for her assigned gender—both for being a woman and failing to be a sufficiently ideal woman— and she has the scars to prove it. I wish her healing. I wish her peace and ease. I wish her love and compassion.
I also wish she would keep her massively amplified mouth quiet until then because she’s making the world worse.
Second: Something Joanne said recently is that she doesn’t think about her legacy. “I do not walk around my house, thinking about my legacy. You know, what a pompous way to live your life walking around thinking, ‘What will my legacy be?’” Whatever, I’ll be dead. I care about now. I care about the living.”
Cool cool cool. But.
I want you all to know that I think about my legacy all the fucking time. I do walk around my house (NB: not my castle) considering what I’ll leave behind me, how my impact will echo from human to human, how my books will seem to readers a generation or two from now. I think about it all. the. time.
See, I’ve read a lot of vintage and antique sex advice books, and they are laughably entrenched in the patriarchal, misogynist binary. And I know the world is slowly (and nonlinearly) growing more inclusive. A generation from now, I want Come As You Are to be wildly, laughably out of date, a mere historical document.
But as a historical document, I want it to be evidence of a gradual pressure toward inclusion. “Here is an author who was working toward something different.” It will sit next to Lucie Fielding’s work and Kai Cheng Thom’s work and Kate Bornstein’s work and Tourmaline’s work, as a milquetoast, mainstream compromise of a book, still depending on wrong-headed science and barely managing to change any aspect of the mainstream narrative, and it doesn’t even start to dismantle the oppressive patriarchal gender binary. Let my gravestone read, “White Cis Lady Who Tried.” 🪦
I don’t even know if I’ll succeed at this moderate goal (which, to be clear, takes all the doing I can do), but I’ll keep working on it. Why? Because I care about the living, and some of the living are in mortal danger. I feel impelled to do what I can to make the world safer for people in the future, because that is part of how the world gets better for people now.
I have an infinitesimal fraction of a fraction of a percent of Joanne’s audience. Even with that comparatively miniscule potential to have an impact on the world, I think about my legacy every single day. Caring about my impact across time is another part of how I avoid being a Joanne.
To conclude: I avoid being a Joanne by remembering that people feel trapped by gender. And I pay attention to my potential impact today and tomorrow and after I’m dead, and I try to live in a way that some potential future grand-niece would not be embarrassed about.
And I just want you to know these things about me, while I try to find effective ways to talk about this in public.
Questions or comments? Please email my very tiny team at unrulywellness@gmail.com
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Signed copies of Come As You Are can be obtained from my amazing local bookseller, Book Moon Books.
Stay safe and see you next time.
