First Alternate: A Lindy Hopper's Newsletter

Stop treating me and my partner like circus freaks: a Pride Month manifesto

It’s Pride month, and in trying to write something about it, I could only think about one thing: Being transgender in lindy hop is pretty much like being transgender anywhere.

There’s a type of lindy hop post you might be familiar with: the post-event wrap-up. The common refrain from dedicated competitors and teachers after a big event share a couple of key points: thanking organizers for their hard work, mentioning how much the dance has given them (often, a space to feel appreciated for being themselves), and often, something about what a unique community lindy hop is for its welcoming environment.   

People expressing these sentiments after events have one or more things in common: they are cisgender, they have the time and money to attend many events like these per year, they’re bought into the way the scene operates. They feel welcomed. As they should! It’s a community built around serving them.   

But here’s what I want to assert: for someone like me, Lindy Hop is not uniquely welcoming, it’s the same old shit, and I’m bored.

I am transgender, and sometimes I prefer the term transsexual, as I have performed quite a bit of medical and social intervention on myself to change the way I am perceived to the world. My fiancée Helen, who is also my dance partner, is as well. Both of us have been in the broader lindy hop scene for our entire adult lives, both of us transitioned several years into our Lindy Hop “career,” both of us are local instructors, both of us love this dance.

Over the years, we have experienced myriad overlapping and independent mistreatments by our community. These mistreatments are specific to each of our particular, hypervisible transness. We each of us pre-transition were not particularly good at playing our gendered roles, and in transitioning that treatment has become more obvious for what it is: garden-variety transphobia and ignorance.   

This is why I am bored. I am bored of the phenomenon that causes people in my home scene to refuse to pay attention to the fact that if my name is Maxwell and my pronouns are the ones you might expect from someone named Maxwell (he/him) and I’m wearing that name and those pronouns on my nametag even though I have been a regular teacher and a member of the community for years, and so I expect to be called by those pronouns, despite the fact that I am teaching and doing the woman part—sorry, I mean following, and that my partner, whose name is Helen and has the pronouns you might expect from someone named Helen (she/her) might want to be called those pronouns despite doing the guy part—I mean leading, sorry.   

It’s the same phenomenon that caused someone who appears to be a well-meaning queer dancer to misgender both me and my fiancée in an attempt to include me and exclude her in a “Hey, girl (me), is this Man (Helen) bothering you?” joke.

It’s the same thing that causes the awkward, indignant response when someone asks me to dance, and I say I only follow, and instead of accepting that, they ask me to switch, and I say again, no thank you, I only follow.   

That place is transphobia, or if I’m being charitable, it’s ignorance (which is not better and not an excuse): Well if I want to be a man so badly, shouldn’t I want to lead? OK, well, I’m doing the woman part, and I’m not a cisgender man, so shouldn’t I be performing what’s expected of me (being a girl)? Hey girl, I mean man, I mean thing, what’s your problem?

I’ll stick with this previous example, because it’s one of the most frequent instances I encounter. I’m bored with the rhetoric in this scene that anyone can lead and anyone can follow without repercussion, because it’s never been true and it still isn’t, even to the people who champion it. I see the lie of it reflected at me like a funhouse mirror when I just do what I’ve always been doing. It seems very hard for the average well-meaning person to accept that despite transitioning away from The Follower Gender, I might actually enjoy following, not enjoy leading as much, and expect other people to believe me when I say and do that. Watching the gears turn in someone’s brain at the most basic facts of my identity as a dancer gets old very quickly, especially when it just doesn’t happen in quite the same way to cisgender dancers.

Let’s call it what it is: transphobia. Everyone can lead and everyone can follow, as long as your gender is legible to who’s asking, as long as you’re willing to let your partner interpret your gender for you if it isn’t, as long as you’re willing to be humiliated. It’s boring. I’m bored of it and bored of pretending that’s not what it is.

This baldly transphobic experience is less common than what me and my partner agree is the most frequent instance of transphobia we face: we’re simply not asked to dance anymore. Our pool of people who ask us to dance is limited to people who knew us well before we transitioned, and/or who already know what role we like to do. Everyone else seems to be too intimidated by the prospect of doing what they might do for any other person—ask us to dance, and in what role, and accept an answer they don’t expect graciously—to ask us at all.

How are these experiences different from being carelessly misgendered by customers at a retail job, being deadnamed at the doctor’s office, or any of the other everyday indignities incurred by being transgender in the world? They aren’t, except no one claims the doctor’s office is the place that lets them be their most authentic selves.   

I’m speaking to my own experience, which I find necessary to say, because I anticipate a certain kind of response. When I or other marginalized friends speak up in this community, what follows is some iteration of “I’m sorry to hear that’s your experience, but it isn’t true [in my scene/for me, a cisgender queer person/for me, a cisgender straight person/for the trans dancers in my scene, who I’ve definitely asked and who definitely gave me an honest answer].” That’s great for you! But being in a community means caring about everyone who’s there, even if you don’t share their experience, even if you’re weirded out by them. What’s working really well for you, what is for you an escape, may for some people in your community be replicating things they experience everywhere else in their life, and you might be part of that! That doesn’t just apply to trans dancers, it applies to anyone marginalized in this scene.   

I don’t want to neglect the people who have been there for me and my partner since we’ve come out. A truism about transition is that people surprise you: aside from my close friends, many dancers I know across the country have kept up on my life in the casual way I’ve kept up on theirs. Their adjustment to me and my partner’s transition was graceful and seamless, and proved to me it was possible. Sometimes a dancer I meet for the first time will just get it, or will just ask me outright what my deal is, and I want to hug them for it. It’s people like that, in addition to the trans people I know in this dance, who keep me here.

But I want better, and I refuse to give an inch on this scene’s false claims to inclusivity as long as behavior like this toward trans people is so normal. Shit like this hurts everyone.   

In conducting research for another Lindy Hop project, I spoke with a dancer who organized here in San Francisco in the 1990s. He was adamant to me that people who had a problem with queer people being at their dance would be politely shown the door, and that he had done some of this bouncing himself. I do not believe that a single venue or event in the country would do that for me now, in part because many dances already feel they’re welcoming of queer people. I said this to him the way I feel about it: bored, defeated, over it.

That’s where I’m at, but he isn’t. I’m going to end this piece with some of what he said to me in response:

“Listen, I'm going to rant for just a second. It's not a fucking business. It's a fucking community and people in the community fucking back other people in the community. If they don't, they don't belong in the fucking community. They belong running their own business somewhere else, but we are together in this shit . . .  Who gave you that business? Do you know who gave you that business to begin with? Fucking Black people gave you that business to begin with. You didn't make it up. This is on the backs of thousands and thousands and thousands of oppressed Black people who got this shit together despite what everybody else told them. And you're going to tell me you're not going to support somebody who's othered in the community?”

In writing this I owe a great debt to Adel Stichweh, whose reels about their experience as a nonbinary dancer reminded me I have a voice and can say this shit. I owe a lot to Grey Armstrong and his long-running blog Obsidian Tea for similar reasons. Special thanks to Hank and Mattie and Rosemary and my perennial first reader and collaborator, Helen <3

As we used to say back in the day: welcome to my blog! This is my first foray into publishing something on a platform like this, but it won’t be my last. I have a history project I’m really excited about coming out this fall, and another I’m hoping to work on next year, and there will probably be some previews and related content in between. Subscribe if you feel like seeing more of the inside of my brain, I guess.