(In standard-issue antifa windbreaker, latex black pants, pink mask covering face and head:)
My lovely siblings, I’m so sorry my voice is hard to hear. The police took our microphones. Today, you see, is not only TDoR but also Totensonntag, which is a mandatory silent observance. The cops make our dead speak softly, so as not to bother the Christian dead.
I have ten comments for you, and I will shout.
1: Nation.
In 2022, Brazil was the country with the most trans murders. By a large margin. For the 13th time. Trans Day of Remembrance feels nostalgic to me because it’s the only situation when I hear Germans pronounce so many Brazilian names. (beat.) (smiling:) That was the joke. Ba-dum-tss. We read 95 names this year; 95 siblings back home lynched, shot, dismembered. Most of them girls, most of them young, most of them sex workers, most of them Black.
Half my country is now celebrating a razor-thin electoral victim over a proud and open fascist; the other half is begging the military for a dictatorship. But the travesti is working the streets either way, and she remembers that her sisters were lynched under the Worker’s Party too; on her bare skin she can feel that all governments will burn her, stone her, lock her in labour camps, and—worst of all!—will cover her legs with pants. For the sexualness of the travesti by itself refutes the logic of ownership; her desire is like Nature herself, easy, abundant, with no walls, no gates. The Latina travesti knows that no government has ever, or will ever, tolerate the ever-transgressive gender-sexual desire which is the life and soul of queer folk; for every government is made of coercion and every queerness, of defiance. The Latina travesti knows from collective experience that all cops are bastards, including Communist cops; she knows that kicks /
to the ribs /
hurt the same /
if you paint the boots red.
2: Immigration.
I managed to escape to Germany in my thirties—and, finally: transition. So when I read the news of more and more anti-queer attacks in here, within the progressive liberal walls of Fortress Europe, when I watch the genocidal rhetoric from the U.S. and U.K. now being pronounced in Hochdeutsch, when I add names like Malte and Ella Nik Bayan to my usual Latina mourning—I feel an emotion that’s distinctly migra:
I feel that this trans life / that I carved here / is being taken away, that I will be thrown back into that world again, afraid of holding hands, downright terrified of having anything / on my body / the colour of pink. And I cannot go back to that. I will not (beat. look.) go back to that.
And so it is that,
when I’m swinging my juicy, visibly-trans ass on the streets of Germany,
and I pass by jerkwads wearing Iron Cross tattoos,
and ugly Burzum jackets clashing with camo cargos,
and like totally démodé Reichsflagge T-shirts,
I feel an emotion that’s distinctly girly:
I get violent.
3: Tactics.
Violence is often non-tactical. Like, (finger on lips), mmm, (waves hand) sex is non-tactical. Violence is counterproductive, like talking back to a catcall is counterproductive. Violence can be anti-strategic, (beat) like dressing fem when you don’t pass as cis. Violence is (thetrically sarcastic) lifestylist, like kissing your friends in a bar you know will throw you out, and then you kiss all of them anyway.
I am not young, and I am sooo over the logic of productivity in activist spaces.
I’m writing this on the year when American politicians started openly inciting their followers to the violent mass execution of trans people, “whatever the law says”. I’m writing this on the day when Erdoǧan started the aerial bombardment of Kobanê, exploding hospitals, playgrounds and all in it. I’m writing this the night after I hugged a stranger, an Ukrainian war refugee who came ask me for a cigarette, to calm down because she had been randomly punched by some dude on the street, only to be further humiliated when she called the cops. Why do we cling to this illusion of normalcy, this utopic fantasy that the liberal order can protect us if we don’t rock the boat? The cops won’t go light on you because you were a well-behaved girl who only protested within the correct Anmeldung, the government won’t spare you because you blurred all your photos; I’m speaking from experience here.
No matter how strategic you think you are, none of us can make this boring dystopia stop being a dystopia. But we sure can make it stop being boring. A century ago the Wild-Frei gay hiker vagabond youth wandered these mountains, cosplaying in fantasy outfits, camping, whoring, robbing, fucking everyone and with everything, picking up fights with the Hitler Youth—during full-blown Nazi occupation. Ungovernable. Look at their photos: happy.
What do you got to lose, your jobs? Because you treasure this way of life so much? How’s it going for you?
4: Coming out.
Like my sexuality, like my femininity, the violence in me asserted itself first, without a theory, without a framework, without a project. I see nazis parading on the streets and everyone acting like that’s a totally normal thing and I know I should do the same because they’re bigger and younger and better armed and they’re inside the police, and I can be easily deported and they will never be deported from anywhere, and it’s more logical and tactical and and… (side head shake of frustration, hand dismissal:) but I can only stop to think these things after I made the nazis run away tail between legs, I can only stop for wordthoughts after it’s all over. The violence in me is irresistible, /
unconcerned with justifications, /
whole in itself: /
it is, in a word, holy.
5: Fire.
My Kurdish friends call this “the fire in the heart”. My crystal girl horoscope bimbo perspective on this is that the fire is there for a reason. We feel drawn to the fire, because there’s a whole lot that needs burning.
6: Love.
I love queer people. I love, love, love queer people, you all are so cool and hot and sweet and spicy and real and transcendent, I love all my many lovers achingly, deeply, desperately, I feel like I’m going to explode with love too big for single body, the world is ending and I never knew I could be so happy, I didn’t know what happiness was, I fall in love with almost every trans person I meet instantly, I love all my exes, I want to be the perfect loving girlfriend to each and every one of you, all of you did enough, you did enough, you went through enough, you deserve good gay lives, you deserve to be free now and forever.
Then when you rest your head on my shoulders in bed at night, you tell me about what your parents did to you, you tell me about your bosses and coworkers and your (emphatic beat) doctors, you tell me what your childhood was like, you tell me about your week and the slow everyday normalised violence that is living domesticated lives in domesticated bodies under the violent rule of the State, you tell me of your hopelessness, of your nihilism, of your suicidal thoughts.
And then I go out and some skinhead wanker is sporting 1488 tattoos in the tram.
I can’t resist it but sister, even if I could, sister I don’t want to, sister I burn, I burn.
7: Call.
(Putting papers down, addressing the audience directly:)
Either people are scared of going out wearing hate symbols, or they are scared of going out holding hands. It’s one of the two. You can’t have both.
Fascists should feel uncomfortable coming out as fascists.
Someone gotta do the,, uncomforting.
8: Opsec.
In my untermensch noncitizen standing, should I be here making this call? When I can be deported by these words alone, shouldn’t I submit an anonymous indymedia communiqué, shouldn’t I stay home and leave it for the German citizen black bloc, shouldn’t I hide my identity better?
(While undressing from mask and windbreaker and jacket and cardi, throwing gloves and bags and all on the wet floor dramatically, until down to pink lacy cami, shaking in the November rain and the wind, though not of cold:)
O.P.sec (beat) is -sec for an O.P. It’s not a religion, it only makes sense as a tactic for a given goal. Look, hon, I’m a Brazilian travesti, I’m not built for baggy gender-neutral clothes I was made to pour glittery goo over my bouncy tits, I hid my identity for 30 years to protect myself from repression and every one of those years was hell, I look too hot in a Mob Action #ootd not to be on camera, what’s even the point of going on without the camera zooming into the body I built with my blood and my life when I come here to tell you: “don’t let them normalise this, don’t just swallow this, don’t wait for them to take power, crew up, bash back, bash first”——
This right here (countours her exposed shapes with her hands) is my O.P., my propaganda of the thicc.
9: Essence.
Living as a boy who looked like a little girl, I was bullied every day, beaten. Living as a man, I was gay-bashed, humiliated, often.
I never fought back. I was paralysed with fear, every time, veadinha-deer on the headlights. Only after I embodied my femininity, only after I changed hormones and lost muscles for curves and went out wearing the skirts I had been hiding all my life, only after I learned how to love and how to let myself be loved and how to cry and how to care and how to be soft and gentle, only when I had something I stand to lose, namely my life with all of you that I love so much, only then—did I become someone who bashes back, who cannot help but bash back, someone who goes out of her way to actively hostilise the enemy.
(sweetly) Only after I could finally become the woman that I always was, only then I could find myself. Only after transition I could open my heart, I could get in touch with my own emotions.
(long beat.) Turns out rage is an emotion.
And they tell me that the fetishisation of violence is toxic masculinity. Sister, masc is what the cis wanted me to be, masculinity is what all that abuse was for, when they beat me into a terrified little pudge unable to lift a hand, the goal was to make me act masculine. Sister, if guns are a boy thing, consider where that line of thinking will leave the femmes.
I look at travesti ancestor Cintura Fina, fighting the cops with her legendary razor blade, her body crisscrossed with scars because she would never accept a single insult, and I get it, I get her, it’s not self-destruction it’s the opposite of suicidality, it’s the fashos who want me dead, I want to live to 108 and set up merry kinky orgies to piss on their graves and laugh and dance, only I don’t want to live reduced to a shadow of myself, yes I want system change revolutionary victory tactics yes but—I need a life worth living right now, in the year of our coloniser 2022, it’s either a fem body full of scars or the closet, it’s either self-hatred or hostility towards the enemy, resistance is life, resistance is life and to be tame /
in the face of oppression /
is death /
before death.
10. Escalation.
There’s a category of queer, often immigrants, who upon seeing the violence in me don’t get scared, don’t call it masc problematic, don’t try to convince me to keep it cool play it safe, but look at me with eyes that say, (slow nod, side glance). For everyone else, all I can say is, look at these hashtag-TDoR numbers, look around, wander the cruise spots at night ask around, ask our folk: You might be against escalation, but the fascists aren’t.
(Performed 20 Nov 2022.)
(Immediately after presenting this text, news hit of the anti-queer right-wing attack in Colorado, killing 5 people in a nightclub and injuring 25. The shooter was only stopped because clubbers fought and subdued the enemy.)
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