- HAVE
YOU FELT - SEEN
- ERASED
- CONNECTED
- DIFFERENT(LY)
HAVE YOU FELT ERASED?
Share a story about a moment in which you felt your experiences were revised, erased, mischaracterized, or misunderstood, and share how you would correct the record.
Share a story about a moment in which you felt your experiences were revised, erased, mischaracterized, or misunderstood, and share how you would correct the record.
TRANSCRIPT
In the work that I do, I think there's a lot of conversation about burnout, and what that means and what it looks like to be paid for organizing work in a system that seeks to deplete us and extract from us. And while we're fighting that system, that we are recreating those systems within our own collectives in our nonprofits and collective spaces. And I'm framing that because I think that I have bought into thinking about burnout in a very particular way that has been unhelpful to me. And I bought into talking about my schedule and talking about my life in this like very busy manner. Like I'm so busy, I'm so exhausted. And when like, the reality is that I have a lot of fucking fun in my life. And because I'm in deep relationships with people who are disabled, who are poor, who are working class, who don't have the this like social justice framework that has been developed from what I think is like particularly privileged organizers, I've been able to really check myself to say okay, like I — yes I do have like a full plate, and I'm somebody who has a lot of — I have a lot of capacity to have a full plate. Am I also putting on my plate like time to rest, time to create relationships and meaning, time to create things with my hands? Am I cooking for myself, Am I like working out? Like the things that I want to be doing are those also on my plate? And they are, and that's why my plate is full, right? Like my plate is full because I choose to organize, I choose to rest, I choose to do all of these different things. So when like I just blatantly across the board say I'm busy, or that I'm exhausted all the time, I think it comes off in my — it soaks and absorbs into my body, as if like that's the only thing that I'm experiencing and feeling. So I've been erasing that I am a well balanced person, but I just don't allow myself to actually like think that. I think I'm portrayed, and I probably just allow people to portray me as like a super busy person who's doing a lot of different things wearing a lot of different hats, and I think it also erases my contributions as like being intentional that I do step into space intentionally, I do say no to things. Not all the time. I'm not very good at saying no, but I do say no to things. And so I've been erasing myself a lot around that. And that like that is a muscle that I've been growing, but I don't allow myself to just say it. Because I think it's just easier for me to be like, oh, yeah, I'm fucking tired. You know, like, of course. Of course, I'm tired. But I'm also all these other things.
- Janhavi
HAVE YOU FELT SEEN?
Share a story about a moment in which you felt seen, visible, understood, surveilled or watched.
Share a story about a moment in which you felt seen, visible, understood, surveilled or watched.
TRANSCRIPT
Me being, identifying as genderqueer was not an easy process for me like, because I, I don't know in person, anyone who identifies as me in the first place, and I don't know a lot of people who identify as me. And I felt like I was alone in this for a lot of times and being able to see few of my friends later on, who are actually identifying as genderqueer makes me feel like I belong there. You know, make me feel like this person is doing this. I can also do this. I guess I found that representation somehow. And I looked up for it, like I just stop, not looking back.
- Dorababu
HAVE YOU FELT ERASED?
Share a story about a moment in which you felt your experiences were revised, erased, mischaracterized, or misunderstood, and share how you would correct the record.
Share a story about a moment in which you felt your experiences were revised, erased, mischaracterized, or misunderstood, and share how you would correct the record.
TRANSCRIPT
In my early years when I wasn't out. Well, I didn't even know I was trans, but when I was experimenting with different identities and looks, and I just felt invisible really. And I was grasping, at ways of marking myself as an individual. And I think all of those things felt very artificial in retrospect. And I never really saw myself. I couldn't even see myself for who I was. So I sort of self-erased. I think that erasure started to become erased itself the more I matured, and I'm happy to say, you know, after half a century, it's nice to feel some kind of confidence, some kind of stability in who I am. It took a long time, but yeah, those early years were certainly ones that felt a little blank in terms of my formation or my experiences coalescing into a stable sense of — of my — of who I am.
- Bishakh
HAVE YOU FELT CONNECTED?
Share a story about a space, object, memory, person, body or community with which you have formed a meaningful connection.
Share a story about a space, object, memory, person, body or community with which you have formed a meaningful connection.
TRANSCRIPT
There was this time after we moved our — my parents back to India, after my mom got sick, when my cousins and their mother came to visit. These were cousins on my mom's side. My aunt came to visit. These were cousins that I loved a lot, and I loved my aunt a lot too, that specific aunt. And every time she would come to visit, you know, as the years went by, this became more and more intense, and this is during the time when my mom was sick. She would say to me, she would look at me very intensely through these coke bottle glasses that she had, and stare at me, and sort of squeeze my face, and she seemed very kind of taken with something, and eventually she would say ‘You look so much like your mother,’ which is kind of great. It made me feel connection not only to her, but also to my mom who you know is not all for this world. It gave me a sense that I was part of this family, and that part of my mom would live on in me. And I guess and in some respects that, you know, I don't know if my aunt would sort of recognize this or not, but I think she was recognizing the femininity and transness in me, or else, I would like to think so.
- Bishakh
HAVE YOU FELT ERASED?
Share a story about a moment in which you felt your experiences were revised, erased, mischaracterized, or misunderstood, and share how you would correct the record.
Share a story about a moment in which you felt your experiences were revised, erased, mischaracterized, or misunderstood, and share how you would correct the record.
TRANSCRIPT
I mean, so many. I mean, so many. I mean, I think mostly they are with my mother, where I think that she's unconsciously gaslit me. But a small memory is a recent memory. Like I think that — I mean it's not a recent memory, but like a recent confrontation with my mother. I remember that as a kid what happened was that my birthday was always in the middle of the summer, in the middle of August, and all the schools would be shut and nobody to call. I remember that my mother was teaching me something, and she left me with, like, cutout cardboards to draw on, cards to invite friends. She said, I'm going to be back, don't come down. Now I know that probably there was something happening downstairs where my grandparents or my family was having some kind of fight that my mother was part of. And obviously, my mother never said anything. But she obviously had to kind of put up with all of this kind of tension in the house. So by the time she came back, I had stopped studying, and I had been distracted by the cards, and I drew on all of them. Messy, like, things, blah, blah, you know, whatever. And she came back and she's like, ‘Oh, my God, you've drawn on all of them. You've ruined them. Now we can’t invite your friends,’ and I never had my birthday party. But I think that looking back, I think that something happened downstairs. And because there was so much tension that she just felt like she can't ask to organize my birthday. So she instead of telling me that, you know, that there’s like, we can't have it or whatever, she just blamed it on me.
And let me feel bad that somehow I had done bad drawing. And I must always do good drawing. And all of these kind of things happen. So I confronted her like, I think two days ago, that what happened then? Like a random memory, and I'm like you did this, and you came back, and you said this. Did my grandparents say something to you? She's like, no, it is a self created memory. I'm like, it's not! I remember this memory. She's like, you always self-create memories. None of this happened. Like blah, blah. I don't even remember. And like, that's it — you don't remember, but I remember. So I have many conversations with my mother where I think she deliberately blanks out not only my memories, but her own memories, and her own sense of trauma. So that's, I mean, I think I recognize that. Which makes it easy to kind of work with. But I'm pretty certain that my memory of this incident is not self created.
- Abdullah
HAVE YOU FELT SEEN?
Share a story about a moment in which you felt seen, visible, understood, surveilled or watched.
Share a story about a moment in which you felt seen, visible, understood, surveilled or watched.
TRANSCRIPT
So, trigger warning. I'm going to mention childhood sexual abuse. Very recently, it's been in the last year that I've been more vocal about being a survivor of CSA and have connected with people around that. And it was an experience in my life that I felt like I had to really do a lot of like, isolated, individual healing around. And I think, turning 30, I realized that that was so unhelpful. And it feels — it felt like something that I really, really needed to do. And so I promised myself that as I turned 30, I was going to do that work. And so, I had been reaching out to folks in my personal life to ask for resources, and me and a friend who are both survivors had been talking about looking for community or looking for people who are visibly talking about that specifically, like queer and trans survivors. And I stepped into a space called mirror memoirs that Amita Swadhin does, in terms of doing oral histories, actually, of survivors of CSA. And they led a workshop in Boston. And the space itself was not where I felt seen, but like the concept of people who are survivors being able to connect to each other, I think made me feel really seen and especially as, like living in a queer, nonbinary body — it's been really interesting to navigate what that conversation looks like, both publicly and interpersonally. It was just a really cool experience to be like, okay, like I'm a survivor, and I'm in this space, and I get to talk to other queer and trans survivors about this who are people of color. That felt really important to me. I was kind of like, who gets access to our stories? And who is listening to our stories, and who gets to weaponize our stories? And I was like, don't you feel like collecting these oral histories of CSA survivors could be used against us? And I think that comes from a place of fear that I've always felt about sharing my story. Because it is inter-community, because a lot of pain and hurt that we may experience through interpersonal harm and violence and sexual harm is across — sometimes across racial lines, sometimes inter-racial lines, it feels like talk being able to talk about it is really difficult because of who's extracting that information and who's going to use that as a motivating factor for more racism or homophobia or transphobia. So yeah, it just felt really important to be connecting with people who are brave. Who are not just brave and courageous in sharing their story, but actually saying like, no this story, these stories are for us, and we get to tell them the way that we want them. And we're not only doing it to visibilize pain, but we're doing it to visibilize the ways that we can strategize around violence and harm, and that the strategy isn't always about and shouldn't always be about like creating the perfect victim or the perfect survivor who knows exactly what to do, knows exactly what their healing could look like, knows exactly how to not be punitive — like knows all these things, right? Is like liberatory-minded is justice-oriented, but that like survivors are just people, and that we and many of us are also — have also become in some ways toxic or have harmed also, right? Like that these are just really complicated layers, and I feel like we can't unpack that in a space that — where white supremacist culture and white supremacist values exist. So it felt really important for me to be connecting specifically with queer and trans folks who have that analysis, specifically folks of color who have that analysis, and folks of color who are just willing to be complicated and messy in understanding what it means to be a survivor, be an advocate and then also be organizing actively in community around violence.
- Janhavi
HAVE YOU FELT ERASED?
Share a story about a moment in which you felt your experiences were revised, erased, mischaracterized, or misunderstood, and share how you would correct the record.
Share a story about a moment in which you felt your experiences were revised, erased, mischaracterized, or misunderstood, and share how you would correct the record.
TRANSCRIPT
I don't really approach life through this idea of regrets. I have one regret in life, and that's not going to an Emily Sandé concert because my sister decided not to go and that's mainly less about not going to her concert before she sort of like blew up as this famous person, but it has more to do with like the rationale of — I was in a moment where I was still too fearful of doing things on my own, even though I was well within the age of doing things on my own, and my parents did not have an issue with me going off. So it was one of those moments where I silenced myself. But that's not the story I want to tell. The point being, I don't think about life through regret, even things that I've done terribly — like moments of misogynoir or homophobia, or anti transness in my past experiences — those are part of what makes sure that I don't recreate it, that I don't do it again, right? What I want to talk about sort of correcting the record is this idea that — so I have not told my parents or disclosed to my parents about my English pronoun uses. My parents are aware that I express clothing — like express myself through clothing that they may consider from like to be appropriate for women and not for boys. And I've explained to them that I do not see these divisions in clothing. I do not see these divisions in society, about men and women being different in this sense of like, you know, gender expressions and whatnot. Obviously, there is sexism, there's misogyny, there's all — all that is real, so that those differences exist. But those structures create the differences that we see. So I have not told them about this. And I remember when I first started sort of disclosing my pronouns to folks, and really, it, I knew that that was how I wanted to be referred to in English, and I still do, and I likely will, for the foreseeable future. I always thought that I was eventually going to tell my parents, right? And that sort of intention disappeared over time. And not because I think my parents are incapable of it. But there's something about — and this is why I said my pronouns in English. There's something about the way that my parents refer to me in he and there's something about the way you know, the Punjabi language conjugates into what folks consider in romance languages, masculine and feminine, right, based off of the gender of the person that you're referring or the gender of the ascribed gender of the object in place. Which to me — if a human and an object can both be described arbitrarily by gender, clearly, this is just maybe, maybe it's not masculine and feminine, maybe it should be one and two — the idea of imposing a gender onto it, because we use that binary to differentiate between human identities. Maybe that's — maybe there's a flaw there linguistically, but to correct the record, I don't feel the need anymore to have my parents refer to me as they. I personally, when I speak Punjabi, conjugate my verbs in a third person sort of way, in the same sense that I would use they. And I don't really have a desire to sort of like change the language to, as you see in some other languages around Latinx and the controversies around that — I don’t really think or feel the desire to do that similar sort of process to Punjabi. Because we do have the third person sense, that applies to me just fine, and I think will apply to others. And I look forward to people who disagree, suggesting otherwise. But for me, what I started realizing was that my pronouns in English, and my pronouns in Punjabi are the same, and they can be different. So when my parents refer to me through he, or they conjugate in such a way that one would read me as he, I don't take pain from it anymore. And I think part of that is because they have communicated to me an understanding of — to me about how I understand my gender. So the example is, my sister told me that when my dad was catching up with someone. My sister — we're both sort of, we've done things that we're not supposed to do, quote unquote, within, like our community. Like I'm queer, I, I do gender things, I'm trans in that way, and my sister has/is going through a divorce and will be divorced soon. And those are both sort of like taboo things within the community. But my dad was talking and catching up with his friend on the phone, and I think unprompted, you know, they generally asked, you know, how are the kids? My dad openly told his friend about my sister's divorce, and then described me and said, ‘prabh, you know, is doing well. Still over there at school. prabh does not think of himself as a boy or girl. And, you know, it is what it is.’ And like I didn't know what to do with that information. I had a deadline, or I had like a destination of my parents using they them pronouns for me. And on the flip side, now, I never had the expectation that my dad would say something like that. So for me, it's sort of highlighted that I created a destination for this sort of nominal, representational, symbolic act, when really I should have been focused on thinking, do they understand why it is that I asked — would have asked for that. So to hear my dad say that showed me that his understanding of me transcended what the English language was able to communicate. I have a whole tirade against the English language. But for me, the fact that my dad understood the sense behind that — the underbelly of that desire that I have in my otherwise professional life, it sort of like took away this desire. It meant that my dad and my mom both understood what it meant to me. And this idea of the pronoun, and the conjugation of the word was just secondary. It had no more meaning for me anymore, you know, and to me, that, like that's my way of like correcting the record is this sense of like current discourses make it seem like our, our pronouns need to be stable, and not in flux in all contexts we're in, and that we need to fight and demand that we be treated the same in every single space. And for people who need that, I will fight day and night to make that happen. Do not get me wrong. I am not using my experiences or my own personal comfort in order to invalidate the needs of others. That is not what I'm trying to say here. What I'm saying here is that for me, personally, I have noticed that I got more than I wanted from my parents, and it helped me see that I'm allowed to vary within spaces. And this idea of the pronoun needing to be fixed and stable, was itself coming from an understanding that misunderstood my being. So that's sort of the — this the record that I like to correct is this idea that in some way, I am less authentic or less whole, because I ask my professional world people to refer to me in a particular way, and then I allow my parents to not, or I, you know, some would say it's an exception I make for my parents. I don't see it as an exception. Actually, I think my parents understand it more than a lot of people who sort of notionally well hand wave and refer to me as they, because they just think of it as a checkbox that needs to be done within the professional world. Or maybe they'll get sued for something who knows, you know? So for me, that's the record that I’d like to correct.
- prabhdeep
HAVE YOU FELT CONNECTED?
Share a story about a space, object, memory, person, body or community with which you have formed a meaningful connection.
Share a story about a space, object, memory, person, body or community with which you have formed a meaningful connection.
TRANSCRIPT
I think that I've always felt connected with visions, if that makes sense. Like I think from a very young age, I had dreams and one of the earliest dreams I had was of the Prophet. And I think I was 10. At the time, it might have been even younger. And that kind of presence has somehow anchored me to survive as well. Those kind of visions have kind of helped me be connected to something else, beyond this world that's kind of helped me carry through.
- Abdullah
HAVE YOU FELT ERASED?
Share a story about a moment in which you felt your experiences were revised, erased, mischaracterized, or misunderstood, and share how you would correct the record.
Share a story about a moment in which you felt your experiences were revised, erased, mischaracterized, or misunderstood, and share how you would correct the record.
TRANSCRIPT
Gaze into my stormy eyes
And stay awhile
Build a shelter with my inner child
If you're scared and lost at sea
Sing a long with me
Let me hear that harmony
That's the chorus of my song Wanderer. You can listen to it anywhere you listen to music.
This song is for my fellow queer and trans lovers out there.
I think like many queer South Asians and trans South Asians - I a gender fluid, queer South Asian person carry hurt from childhood. I experienced violence and betrayal from those I thought I could trust. And I tried to live up to expectations of a narrow vision on how to live a life, one that, it turns out, does not align with my values. I was tasked with carrying caretakers' and ancestors' emotional baggage and caring for family members who did not want to or could not care for themselves. I managed my environment and the gazes of judgmental, repressive, and cruel South Asian and white peers and adults, while attempting to root myself and find belonging in an unforgiving terrain of social and systemic hierarchies.
But now, I try to make my own way. I have found myself.
For now, I am no longer lost. For now, I am no longer wandering.
- Uliya
HAVE YOU FELT SEEN?
Share a story about a moment in which you felt seen, visible, understood, surveilled or watched.
Share a story about a moment in which you felt seen, visible, understood, surveilled or watched.
TRANSCRIPT
I sat with this one a little bit longer. Not because I think that this idea of being seen or being understood — of resonating, I'm going to use resonating because I don't want to use the language of seen to uplift this idea of sightedness being inherently good. But the moment that I felt resonance with someone else or something else. It's — it happens throughout life. So they're not rare occurrences, but I think I haven't always been able to understand those resonances and identify them as resonances. So the one that comes to mind, actually was just about a month or so ago. I think when you talk to a lot of queer and trans folks of color, particularly if they're not from this sort of cultural heritage of the US. Like myself, I come from a South Asian Punjabi specifically background, and a sikh Punjabi background at that. What you sort of see is that we don't really have a lot of moments of finding someone else who you're intimately romantically attracted to. So it's been this thing, that over the past two years now, as I’ve become more whole in my expression, as I share the more whole version of myself with the world that has huge issues or brings up huge issues in other people, when it comes to intimacy. It's no surprise, sort of the rhetoric you hear around, you know, no fats, no femmes, no Asians, you know? And that extends even other to other racial identities or racial backgrounds, I should say, when you complicate it with anti blackness, when you complicate it with xenophobia and all, all that stuff. So, it had been a while since I felt that someone had understood me on my terms. And recently what happened was, it was just a colleague in another department. We had vaguely engaged with each other through like an organizing for a conference for scholars of color doing minoritized research in the academy. And so they sort of knew about me because they were good friends with one of my close friends. I knew about them just through sort of, like, social — there's only so many of us of color at my institution. So you kind of know the other people, and you know the other people who are queer, especially, so I knew of them. We finally got a chance recently to sort of hang out or sort of just interact in a social setting. And, you know, in the moment that we first started talking, they kept on acknowledging, you know, I see you, you know, using your language and their language. They said, I see you, I see what you've done, I've seen your impact. And I want you to know, that, you know, it's helped me. That like, it wasn't for not the things that I went through. They did not just end up being things that I went through to have no later implication to protect other people from going through those same things, right? And like, it's not that my friends and my colleagues and my close people don't appreciate me. It's not like I have a lacking of affirmation. Affirmation is my love language. So, you know, there's always going to be a gap in terms of what I want and what I need, and what I get. But this was something different. This was someone who was, you know, very tangentially related to me. Very not regularly in my circle, really had nothing, they really had nothing to gain by telling me this. And I think that's the thing. They had nothing to gain other than perhaps, the opportunity for a resonance with someone else. And at first, I was just shocked, not in the sense of like, Oh my gosh, how could you say that, but like, I did not know what to do with this information. So I kept on doing sort of the whole knee-jerk reaction of oh my gosh, please stop. It's like, you know, I did it for us. I did it because if I didn't who else would? I'm not doing this for affirmation. I'm not doing this for recognition. I just did it because another person should not have to have the same conversation around misgendering on pointless forms that I did. It's both good for the staff. It's good for me. It's good for the person down the road, right? There are ways to just institutionally make things inclusive that had nothing to do with people adopting the ideology or understanding what it means to be me. They just need to understand that the structures need to be supportive of everyone, and they should not inherently exclude folks. So this was someone who was literally telling me that the work that I had done, struggled through, suffered through was meaningful. And then they went further to even say, like, you know, I, their words, I see you on campus, just walking around from time to time and like, just being yourself. And like they said, “That helps me. That makes me feel stronger. That makes me take up more space.” And like, to me, that's always what it's been about, right? Like I've said, this isn’t—this has not been about getting recognition or support. It's been about enabling other people to find their own wholeness. And for me, that comes from a Sikh perspective. So this isn't even me trying to say other people need to be Sikhs. This is me saying, this is a way in which my faith has truly helped me come into my whole. Because if me coming into my whole is helping someone else come into their whole, that is the point. That is why I do this. That is to me just like philosophically the point of coming into your wholeness is to enable other folks. This is what they say about role models within the academy, you know—if you can't see someone like yourself in a position, you have a hard time envisioning yourself in that position.
And that's great. Representational politics tends to like extract that from its full meaning and just turn it into like sign postings and colorful posts, just color everywhere. And that's fine, you know, that has a symbolic benefit for folks, and obviously it's had a symbolic benefit for me throughout the years. But this was something different. This is someone saying, “You help me be more me.” And that to me, is what, you know, this idea that the question of a story of you felt seen, or my words: you felt resonance with someone else.
And like I hung out with them a second time before I had to leave for the holidays, and they reiterated it. And in this moment, you know, it was very cute. They were just like, “Would it be okay if I kissed you?” And like, in the back of my mind, I was like this is a bit of an odd request, but also, like, my queer sexual politics acknowledge the value of intimate non-sexual kisses. And that's not like some high theory. It's like, you see it all around the world, like parents will kiss their kids on the lips for a little while, you know, and then we age into it, and we think it's weird. But there's something about queerness in which that sort of judgment of quote-unquote “growing out of that sort of innocence,” that we can't be human in those intimate moments, we can't be youthful, we can't be free to just have like a—have a kiss, to sort of mark the moment of that resonance. And it was just cute because like, we didn’t—nothing sexual happened afterwards. You know, we had more conversations, and I was able to open up about things that I usually only open up to myself about, which I think is the magic of this. It’s that if you actively try to find or enact or free the wholeness of your being, and it helps someone else see the wholeness of their being, that then circles back to you to help you sort of see more of your whole self and share in that. That was a really powerful moment for me, and I'm really thankful that it was so recent.
- prabhdeep
HAVE YOU FELT ERASED?
Share a story about a moment in which you felt your experiences were revised, erased, mischaracterized, or misunderstood, and share how you would correct the record.
Share a story about a moment in which you felt your experiences were revised, erased, mischaracterized, or misunderstood, and share how you would correct the record.
TRANSCRIPT
I think being Arab, South Asian, Muslim — because I'm all those things — my mother is Lebanese, father Pakistani, born and raised a Muslim, I am a practicing Muslim. There is a constant process of erasure that we're going through. A consistent process of erasure. In fact, an insistent process of erasure that we go through. And I remember especially in the drag community in San Francisco, the sort of mainstream drag community, because of course, there are many different ways and kinds of drag that exist within the Bay Area. There was always an assumption that was pegged on me that one, I must want to get a green card to lead to a citizenship, I must have rejected my home country because that place oppressed me. Being interviewed or being asked to even in casual conversation, there was this assumption that was that was there. And I remember being on a panel about drag and faith. And someone said, well, you must be very happy to be in diverse San Francisco, and whatever escaping oppression from Pakistan, blah, blah, blah. And of course, I don't want to negate the experiences of those who have faced oppression in Pakistan, but also I think it's important that people know that when you migrate somewhere, there's a huge chunk of you that's missing. You're not a full person. You're not at all a full person. You've left so much of yourself behind. You've left so — you can’t actually be your full self. You can be gay. You know, you can do a lot of gay things. But I think there's so much that people don't realize that we lose in the migrant experience. The migrant experience, I think is a very lonely experience. It's a very isolating experience. It's full of anxiety, of not knowing how to be, not knowing how to move, not knowing how to code-switch, not knowing how to be a part of. In terms of being — I've been mischaracterized and misunderstood as well. In terms of being I think mischaracterized is, I think queer people also struggle to not to be taken seriously and not be seen as a sensation. I was once sort of, was it fish hooked? I don't know the word but basically I was told by this person that I would — they were going to interview me for a New Yorker article about my practice, about my art. And this was right after a video of me in drag kind of went viral. It's actually a video with a really nice interview of my whole practice. But there was about a 10 second clip of me in drag and that went viral. And I was very much avoiding the press. And after a really long time, I agreed to this interview, right? And I verified who this person was etc. And I said, I didn't want to talk about drag, and then I started embarking on a new project called Tomorrow We Inherit the Earth, and my drag character evolved from, you know, this drag queen that occasionally did stand up to this sort of post apocalyptic zombie sort of soothsayer, who sort of replicates histories of revolution and guerrilla warfare and performs them through queer lens. And I had just started on that project. I was like, well, this is my opportunity to talk about it. So I did eventually unveil, talk about drag. Fast forward — The New Yorker article becomes a New York Times article. And sadly, none of it was actually about my work. None of it was actually about my art. It was about how someone from a famous Pakistani family had come out and how that was a sensation. And the article was deeply homophobic and deeply fetishistic of queer and trans people in general, and sort of equating drag with being trans and being a khwaja sira and being a hijra, and misrepresenting me, you know. And because they had interviewed me, and I had spoken only about my practice and not my family. And she had promised not to talk about my family. Of course, I was very naive at the time, and I got my photos taken. So everybody thought I just wanted attention, but really I struggled to be — to obviously not take myself too seriously. But I do take my practice seriously and I do. I value merit a great deal.
And I think I was deeply misunderstood in that moment and mischaracterized, actually. So I would like to correct the record, which is be careful of heterosexual journalists. There is a desire to sensationalize the queer experience to make it into a sob story. And I think this is precisely what representation is about. It's not just so we get in there and get represented in media. It's so that the right story, and the right narrative gets represented. It's so that the right — it's so that we can get seen for the merit of our work, and how much more effort queer people have had to put in their practices and their work in how they present themselves and in the world because they fear being sensationalized and they fear being fetishized.
- Zulfikar
HAVE YOU FELT CONNECTED?
Share a story about a space, object, memory, person, body or community with which you have formed a meaningful connection.
Share a story about a space, object, memory, person, body or community with which you have formed a meaningful connection.
TRANSCRIPT
I think since moving to the Bay Area, this has been quite a struggle as to — What is community? And who, who makes that community? And who makes you feel truly welcomed and heard and seen? And I've definitely gone in and out of a lot, you know, the sort of more general drag community, white-dominated drag community, the more POC-dominated drag community, the queer, you know, rave, punk, South Asian scene here, the performance scene, the visual art scene. I've been able to slip in and out of these spaces in these communities, because my practices is as broad as those communities can be. Just in terms of being able to do performance and textile and video work. But I have to say, just generally, the Bay Area, the community in the Bay Area, has been a real blessing. You know, there's an old adage, which is if you want to be famous go to New York or LA. But if you want to be weird and experimental, go to the Bay Area. And I think what the bay area has done is that it's created a deeply supportive and also low risk environment for the kind of work that I've wanted to do. It's a space where you can receive support for doing work that may be totally out of the ordinary, out of the box, or that has or that no one's seen yet. And yet, you still get support. And it's also a place where you can fail and not fail permanently. And I think for me, this is very important. I struggle a lot with this idea of failure and making and creating as an artist and what works and what doesn't work. And if something doesn't work, have I failed. And if I've failed, where do I have left to go? And I think failure is deeply important and it helps us learn and it helps us grow. You know, failure is like, you know, it's making mistakes. It's a big word, but really, I think it relates to making mistakes, it relates to, you know, sometimes being a bit too big-headed and coming back round. So the communities of the Bay Area, be it the South Asian community, be it the arts community, the performance community, be it the drag community. You know, I've had moments with all of these communities that are not necessarily positive, but overall, I think the support that we've lent each other has been deeply moving and inspiring and generative.
- Zulfikar
HAVE YOU FELT CONNECTED?
Share a story about a space, object, memory, person, body or community with which you have formed a meaningful connection.
Share a story about a space, object, memory, person, body or community with which you have formed a meaningful connection.
TRANSCRIPT
I was thinking about this for a little while. And at first, it was a little hard, nothing was coming to mind. And then what I realized is that the thing that has been the most meaningful for me is a sense. It's — there are people who support me, there are communities who support me. There have been objects in space, you know, that have been incredibly meaningful to me over the years. But I think for me, what really was the foundation that held all those interrelated pieces together, really had to do with the fact that — I don't know where I got this idea when I was younger, but I kind of just could not believe that I was fallible. And I don't mean that in an egotistical way. For me, I'm Sikh. The faith of Sikhi, and unlike a lot of other faiths that have kind of become popularized throughout the West and even throughout the East, there's this idea within those other faith traditions, that the human is making up for mistakes that emerged at the beginning of time. Right? This whole idea of original sin, and being a Sikh who was born and raised in the United States and specifically Southern California, I mean, Christian thought is embedded throughout every institution, our holidays, our school days, our school schedule, our federal holidays. They're all organized around Christian assumptions of life, and within Sikhi, no such thought sort of existed. We weren't at fault for existing. We have flaws, we are imperfect beings, but in our essence, we are not flawed beings. We are not inherently flawed, and that kind of flies in the face of, you know, I don't know if the true religious understanding of original sin is accurate or whether it's Christian supremacist, imperialist propaganda to make everyone else feel terrible to justify the evangelizing that has sort of marked the history of Christianity throughout the ages, but that never resonated with me. So what's been most meaningful for me throughout all this time has actually been this idea that I am a person of faith, the Lord created me, I make mistakes, I have things to work on to become a better person, become a better human, or better said — to honor truly the humanity that we were endowed with. And for me, that sort of meant that when people started actually acknowledging my queerness, or my gender, things of that sort, I couldn't internalize this idea that I was fully at fault, like that I was made destructively, that I was made flawed. And to me, I always tell people that I only realized that I was queer or gay at that time, or bisexual for a little while I thought (though bisexuality is not a transitional identity). For me, it was the language that I grasped with. So that was sort of my own issues to untangle with sort of like biphobic thought and practice, but when people told me that I was queer, when they acknowledged my queerness, I didn't internalize that as a negative thing. I just — it was like someone put a label on something that I already knew and already had assumed was normal and natural, an inherent part of our humanity. Didn't mean that we all were queer, though, you know, I have my own queer theory thoughts around that. But it meant sort of in the sense that when people told me you can't be with a boy, you can't you know, you can only be with certain girls, you can identify this way, you couldn't express yourself this way. For me, it always came back to this sense of Am I doing this from a place of what I think as authentic? Am I doing this from a place of trying to share the wholeness of my being? And, you know, I've held on to that. And that really has been sort of the guiding light, the most meaningful sort of sense. And that's what I meant by this. That's been sort of the most meaningful understanding of my being that has held on to me. And no matter what sort of like, experience I go through, whether it's racism mixed with anti-queerness, anti-transness, anti-Sikhness, xenophobia, whatever it is, you know, xenophobia, whatever form of othering that is applied onto me, because of sort of that sense of I was created whole, and the journey of my life is to understand that wholeness, that meaning has really held on. That's been the grounding. That's been the most meaningful sense that I've organized my way through the world.
- prabhdeep
HAVE YOU FELT DIFFERENT(LY)?
Share a story about any other feeling that has been central to your experience as a trans and/or queer South Asian person.
Share a story about any other feeling that has been central to your experience as a trans and/or queer South Asian person.
TRANSCRIPT
Definitely a very particular feeling of: Oh, South Asia is pretty queer. South Asia is a queer Mecca, lol. South Asia is…Urooj Arshad, really wonderful queer activist, Pakistani called Pakistan Blingistan once, and I agree it is Blingistan. Of course it comes with its problems, but hey queerness isn't perfect either. Or the parameters of queerness are not perfect, maybe. Yeah, I think the feeling of the fact that where I am from, who I am, is inherently a queer position. Queerness is not about who you fuck, but the systems you fuck up. it's a political identity. It's an aesthetic identity. It's a social identity, and it's always outside of the norm. And I feel like South Asia is so strange and weird and so diverse, and embracing in many ways — or has a history of maybe I should say — embracing its weirdness, its funkiness, its diversity. And the more and more homogenous it becomes, the further and further away from queerness it gets, it becomes more like Europe, becomes more like America, these homogenous, segregated zones, these non-queer zones, these normalized zones.
- Zulfikar
HAVE YOU FELT DIFFERENT(LY)?
Share a story about any other feeling that has been central to your experience as a trans and/or queer South Asian person.
Share a story about any other feeling that has been central to your experience as a trans and/or queer South Asian person.
TRANSCRIPT
Nepalis I meet here — most of them at least, have received my queer identity quite well. I haven't received too much backlash here. And, you know, I am also inspired and proud of all the work queer activists in Kathmandu are doing, and I'm proud of Nepalis who are receiving that work positively. So I want spaces for this kind of experience too, you know? And I want space for not so pleasant stories from my part of the world that don't always look like Indian or Pakistani narratives. I want marginalized voices such as Dalits, and Muslims and indigenous folks to be prioritized. And I also want regional hierarchy to be added in this mix, make room for those voices that are from outside India. You know, I love being queer, and I love being South Asian. And there's so much to be celebrated in both of those identities. And I want to be able to do that. I want to feel belonging to South Asian spaces and dream about our collective liberation here and back in the home continent.
- Neha
HAVE YOU FELT SEEN?
Share a story about a moment in which you felt seen, visible, understood, surveilled or watched.
Share a story about a moment in which you felt seen, visible, understood, surveilled or watched.
TRANSCRIPT
There was this time when my partner, and I went to India to visit. It was her first time there, my nth time there after my parents had died. So we were there as tourists for lack of a better way to put it. Anyway, we were in Calcutta, which is where my folks are from, where I consider myself to be from. And this is after I came out as trans, but I wasn't really out to my family in India. And so I was like, fretting a lot about how I would be perceived there. And I thought the best strategy before we left on this trip was to dumb it down and to be as neutral as possible. Not to play up any kind of ideas about how femme I was or anything, but just I was wearing like cargo shorts or pants and t-shirts and stuff. Just being as kind of gray or kind of middle of the road as I thought I was being. I guess that didn't really work because I was gendered as female a lot there. in fact, all of the time. So and I was really happy about that. But I think the one moment that made me feel the most seen was when we were walking towards the Victoria Memorial in Kolkata. And I saw a group of three trans women from the hijra or kinar community. I saw them from afar, and I was so excited to see them. As we walked up closer and closer, they saw me, but they didn't really take any notice. But I gave them a traditional namaste or namaskar in Bengali. And I don't remember exactly what I said, but I think it was something like, you know, I'm one of you. And I said it in Bengali, and that's when they realized, you know — that I was trans, and they started talking to me in Bengali, and my eyes lit up, and I think their eyes lit up a bit too. Because they kind of clocked me — not as trans, but as a foreigner in a way, because I guess my clothes gave me away or my hat something you know, as a tourist, but an Indian of Indian origin. But once they realized I was trans, they just started like, you know, talking to me rapidfire in Bengali, and they told me I should come with them to like a puja or something. And I kind of demurred because I didn't know. I couldn't bring my partner into this. I was I was a little wary myself for, you know, just putting myself out there. And I said, No, I said, Thank you. Yeah, I kind of balked at that, which I don't know, I wish I maybe had thought about it a little more at the time. But anyway, that was a really nice moment of being seen.
- Bishakh
HAVE YOU FELT DIFFERENT(LY)?
Share a story about any other feeling that has been central to your experience as a trans and/or queer South Asian person.
Share a story about any other feeling that has been central to your experience as a trans and/or queer South Asian person.
TRANSCRIPT
My coming out to my family & community was difficult to say the least. Unfortunately, that is a resounding statement amongst the LGBTQIA+ community. When I came out to my family & community everything changed from their perspective. I was no longer the woman they knew me as. My faith, my accolades, my character, everything was impacted because (in their minds), I was ‘now’ gay.
Instead of me defending my faith to them or my relationship with my wife, I wish I can tell them that I have not changed. I am the same person. Yes, I am gay, but that does not impact who I am and who my character is. Despite not agreeing with my sexuality and the belief that my sexuality and my faith cannot coexist; I am still the daughter you raised. I am still the cousin that you joked around with. I am still a woman. Lastly, I still love you. I understand that we might never see eye-to-eye, but I love you. Period.
- Aveena
HAVE YOU FELT SEEN?
Share a story about a moment in which you felt seen, visible, understood, surveilled or watched.
Share a story about a moment in which you felt seen, visible, understood, surveilled or watched.
TRANSCRIPT
I usually feel visible when I am around immigrants from Yemen, Ethiopia, Haiti, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Peru, Sudan, Guyana. Countries like that —like Nepal, that are often overshadowed by bigger nations in their regions, or countries that have been hit with colonization in similar ways to Nepal. In my 12 years of being in the US, I have found out that we have many cultural and political similarities. I'm still figuring out why and how, but it feels easier, safer being around folks from these backgrounds, I feel heard and seen.
- Neha
HAVE YOU FELT CONNECTED?
Share a story about a space, object, memory, person, body or community with which you have formed a meaningful connection.
Share a story about a space, object, memory, person, body or community with which you have formed a meaningful connection.
TRANSCRIPT
Have you felt connected? I have, I do, a lot of times and in many ways. At gas stations and Indian restaurants and Dunkin Donuts where most of the workers are Nepalese. I usually tell them, I am Nepali too. And even if it's just for a minute, we talk — usually, Nepal ma ghar kaha?, which is where is your home in Nepal, and we are automatically inducted into this group. It's like a camaraderie that we don't even need to work for. It's just there. Maybe we will exchange numbers, Facebook accounts, or not and never see one another again. But for those brief moments, we have spent time in Nepal together. I am in love with these moments. They ground me.
- Neha
HAVE YOU FELT SEEN?
Share a story about a moment in which you felt seen, visible, understood, surveilled or watched.
Share a story about a moment in which you felt seen, visible, understood, surveilled or watched.
TRANSCRIPT
It's actually a sexual encounter. It was in Turkey. And I remember it was on this small island. It was a touristy Island. And it was on Grindr. It was like someone who could barely speak — was clearly using Google Translate and asked me to come to the Princess Hotel. And I was so excited. I’m like, I'm going to the Princess Hotel. And then we go to the Princess Hotel. We take the local bus where people are already looking at me because as a tourist I was standing out. And so, I took this local bus to the Princess Hotel with this person. And then he takes me to the back of the Princess Hotel, and basically was a living quarters. And again, I was going to this community where again, I was like, dressed as a tourist in my short shorts, and I was standing out like a sore thumb. Anyway, I go in and we do the deed. And what was remarkable was that even with the lack of language, and clearly different social class, he cared about me, and he kind of was interested in my pleasure. And until that point, I don't think that I had been either open to or presented with an opportunity where the other person cared about my pleasure. And of course, it made me so uncomfortable. I was like, Oh, no, like, no I don't care about my pleasure. Like, I felt like you know, but later on, it felt wonderful. I think that was the first incident that started opening up my own sense of worth in these experiences, and not simply being there as something for someone else's pleasure. So I think that was the moment I think that I felt seen and noticed. I'm sure there were other incidents before that. It's just that I was never open to them before.
- Abdullah
HAVE YOU FELT CONNECTED?
Share a story about a space, object, memory, person, body or community with which you have formed a meaningful connection.
Share a story about a space, object, memory, person, body or community with which you have formed a meaningful connection.
TRANSCRIPT
I've been on a really cool journey with plants and plant medicine. And I think I've been deepening that journey over the last couple years. And I feel thrilled, thrilled to have plant friends in my life, and to be around people who are really like, dedicated, committed and driven by reciprocal relationship with Earth and plants. And it's wild to me to, you know, be living in Dorchester, in an actively gentrifying neighborhood, on Wampanoag land, in the United States in 2020. Like all of those things feel wild to me. And so it feels actually like, in terms of base knowledge, and things that I consider to be like super grounding, is to grapple with all of those layers and complexities through medicine that comes from the earth. And I don't even like just saying medicine because it's not just medicine. Plants are so much more than just medicine. They're like fully-living beings, sentient beings, I feel like. I have this tarot deck, this herbal tarot deck that my friend gifted me, and I love it because it tells me all the things that I need to be thinking about. But the one thing — I did a 12 Deck spread on New Year's Eve, for this upcoming year and one of the cards that I pulled was oat straw. And the oat plant itself has been a plant that I've been connecting a lot with. Because as I sit in what it looks like for me to connect with plants on this land, I've been thinking so much about how I've already exotified what plant medicine means in my head, you know that it's like some faraway plant from a faraway land, that it needs to come through some sort of ritual and medicine, like all of these things that are untrue of even the kitchen medicine that I grew up with. That is now being actively, you know, commodified in marketplaces like turmeric and cinnamon and clove and garlic. I think it's been really helpful to to specifically connect with oat and oatstraw. That card itself said ‘do not take for granted the power of like your daily cup of tea.’ And that's what my ritual looks like. Ritual does not have to be this long form, super traditional thing. It could literally be you brewing a cup of tea every day and sitting with it and having intention with your cup of tea. And oatstraw is my choice because oat straw has been this incredible nervine that I've connected with. But yeah, I think my connection to plant medicine feels like a lifelong partnership and lifelong friendship that I'm really really excited to dive into and understand better like how I can be in reciprocal relationship with Earth and land and the people of earth and land and not in this like like weird savior-y, like commodified exotified way.
- Janhavi
HAVE YOU FELT DIFFERENT(LY)?
Share a story about any other feeling that has been central to your experience as a trans and/or queer South Asian person.
Share a story about any other feeling that has been central to your experience as a trans and/or queer South Asian person.
TRANSCRIPT
I have felt really expansive in my friendships, and my familyships. I was just sharing with a dear friend yesterday, growing up my dad's job made us move a lot. He was a contracted software engineer in the 90s and 2000s. And with the visa status that he had, he was oftentimes pulled from place to place because of short term contracts, and so we were moving a lot. Sometimes three times a year. And so, as a child, I had reframed in my brain that mobile — like being that mobile was a good thing. Because that's just how I had — what I needed to do to survive. And when I would go to a new school every year, people would be like, how do you do it? Like that, that's so wild. But I would always be like, it's the most fun thing to like, pick up your life and go somewhere else and recreate an entire community from scratch. And it was really cool also, because I think I got to reinvent myself a lot too, which was refreshing as a child who had survived trauma and like had a wild imagination. I was reflecting on that piece with my friend because I think that that's actually created so much spaciousness for me to like deepen friendships and relationships wherever I go. In the last few years, I've really been trying to dig into, like, What does community mean to me? And what did my friendships and relationships look like? And what am I investing in my relationships? And that question just seems like the most pertinent and has really come into view for me in the last year as I've been in deep care work and deep support work. And yeah, I feel like my relationships are a site of liberation, like the things that I've been doing with my family, the the work that we each have put in around our communication around talking about systems of oppression and talking about our positionality in the world as a middle upper middle class, caste privileged Brahmins to be actively supporting like two disabled
people in my family who have been in the system and are — one is currently in the system. And yeah, to like go through all of these things together and deepen our relationships through that, to know that like to have you know, unity and to listen and care and love each other is actually what we need. And not like, financial stability is really, really important, but like, amassing wealth and success in the broad sense are not going to be fulfilling in the long term, right? Like these immigrant values that I had grown up with. So yeah, the most expansive I’ve felt is in my relationships. And it's been really cool to be in friendships that have nurtured and cared for me when I can be closed off to care and to push me and challenge me to fix my own shit and fix it with me, like not as an individual — like work on myself so I can be my better, my best self, but actually like in community, how can we grow and evolve together? That's felt like a lot of openness. For me, it’s felt like where I can be my whole self and where I can start to piece together or make sense of what's happening. I have like this dream of living in a house somewhere on the East Coast with all of my friends and my family members. And I've been actively planting seeds with my friends. I have a lot of friends who don't live in Boston. And then I have dear friends who live in Boston. And I think we all have different commitments to the places that we're going to be, right? Like some of us are saying, we're gonna be committed to Boston forever. Like our families are here. Some of us are saying our families aren't from here. But I want to be close to my family. So like, Where do I live? Some of us are getting pushed out of Boston. So like, we don't have a choice, right? So, and then there's folks that live all around the United States, and I've been planting seeds with them. And they've been planting seeds with me about how we can coalesce in in one place in the next five years and live in a house together and like, raise kids together, if we would like and invite our family members to that. Like, if we're really talking about getting to a place of liberation for all of us, and like we're bringing our families along and the complicated messes that they are. So like, what would it look like for me to live in a house with five of my best friends and my family, you know? That's just wild and their families like that, that would — that's a wild concept. But I have, I've been having these conversations and like imagining and dreaming what it would look like with people. And it just it's fucking wild and funny and also super exciting to even talk about it, and I think materializing it and actually making it happen in those ways may not be possible in our lifetime. But just to imagine that that could be true is just really fun. And it brings me a lot of joy.
- Janhavi
HAVE YOU FELT SEEN?
Share a story about a moment in which you felt seen, visible, understood, surveilled or watched.
Share a story about a moment in which you felt seen, visible, understood, surveilled or watched.
TRANSCRIPT
I think the most painful but also validating aspect of visibility for me has been with my family. South Asian communities are so collectivist, so when you feel like you might lose those familial ties because of an aspect of yourself, for me my queerness and my non binary-ness... I felt like I was losing my culture, my home, my community, myself. Embracing my identities was liberating for me, but it was scary. My mom is the only family member I am out to, and she's always made me feel seen. She told me that it didn't matter how I identified, she loved me regardless. One day in particular, she was telling me about two women who got married in the Gurdwara. For me, that was the only time I've felt seen to that extent. I felt like a queer future for me was not only possible, but accessible. Marriage has always been a tough topic for me because I didn't know how to envision a big Brown wedding for myself when I was only out to my mom. Visibility is empowering, but it's also scary and it's vulnerable. Opening up yourself to be seen opens space for both positive and negative forms of attention, and sometimes the potential for negative forms of attention feel more overwhelming for me. But this moment with my mom helped me see a future where I could desire and have visibility without being in fear of the consequences.
HAVE YOU FELT ERASED?
Share a story about a moment in which you felt your experiences were revised, erased, mischaracterized, or misunderstood, and share how you would correct the record.
Share a story about a moment in which you felt your experiences were revised, erased, mischaracterized, or misunderstood, and share how you would correct the record.
TRANSCRIPT
I feel erased almost every time I am in, quote, unquote, South Asian spaces. Here, everything is about India and the Indian partition, as if other South Asian countries that were never part of India don't exist, as if we don't have our own histories and politics and cultures to celebrate and mess to clean up. You know, there are things I can relate to with India such as Bollywood, or some food we share, and then there are a lot of things I can’t relate to, but feel forced to, because there is no space for marginalized nations and our narratives. And because in the US most political conversations revolve around race there is rarely any analysis around regional colonizations and current imperialism of India in South Asia and how that dynamic is reflected in South Asian spaces here as well. You know, how do I correct that record? I make noise. I always make a lot of noise.
- Neha
HAVE YOU FELT DIFFERENT(LY)?
Share a story about any other feeling that has been central to your experience as a trans and/or queer South Asian person.
Share a story about any other feeling that has been central to your experience as a trans and/or queer South Asian person.
TRANSCRIPT
There was this one time, when it was it was quite hot. I remember I was wearing a salwaar kameez, and I had my hair in a long braid. At this point. I was feeling pretty confident about going out like this, right, looking pretty femme. I remember going to one of the Indian food stores in the mid 20s on the East Side of Manhattan. I walked into this one place called Foods of India. I'd been there quite a bit. I don't know if the guys there knew me or not, but they greeted me very warmly. And I was like, Okay, this is gonna go fine. And you know, I bought a whole bunch of stuff. Like, you know, groceries, spices, lentils and whatnot. And I got up to the counter and the guy — a Sardarji at the counter — looks at me, and I think to myself, Oh no, he's gonna be like, you know, questioning my gender or like calling me out on something, right? And he's looking at me. I'm like, Oh shit, right? And he's like, Oh, are you Pakistani, and I was like, really taken aback. And then there, his friend next to him is like, kind of looking at me too. And I'm like, No, I’m Bengali. And they — they just, they were so surprised. They're like Bengali! And they're just so shocked. And I'm like, I didn't know how to react. So I was like, Yeah, yeah, you know, my parents were from Calcutta and stuff and, and they're like, Oh, we wouldn't have guessed. And I walked away from that experience thinking whoah, that was like getting kind of clocked for being something completely different than what I thought I was gonna get clocked as. So I don't know. Maybe, maybe there's a little — I should like explore my own Pakistaniness.
- Bishakh