Had a video call with my brother Chuck the other day. Things got heavy:
KATE: Was Kurt Cobain a trans woman?
CHUCK: What?
Kurt Cobain. Rock musician. He was in a band called Nirvana.
I’m familiar with him, yes.
Was he a trans woman?
Um. No?
OK. Why not?
I mean, he wasn’t. It’s like asking why he wasn’t an astronaut.
He wasn’t an astronaut because he never went to space. Why wasn’t he a trans woman?
Because he didn’t transition. I mean, he didn’t ever say he was a woman, didn’t ever say he was trans. So no. Kurt Cobain wasn’t a trans woman.
So someone is trans if they say they’re trans. Self-determination.
That’s what you’ve told me. Is that wrong?
No, that’s right. We know ourselves better than anybody else can know us. If we say we’re trans, nobody can say we aren’t.
And Kurt Cobain never said he was trans.
So was I trans in 1994?
I don’t know, were you?
Yes, but if you’d asked me in 1994, I would have told you “no”.
So if I tell you I’m trans, I’m trans…
Right.
But if I tell you I’m cis, I might still be trans?
If you tell me you’re cis, I believe you.
That’s not the same thing as “I’m cis”.
That’s a really good point. This is sort of what some queer people are getting at when they say “gender is a construct”.
Come again?
Well, you’re cisgender, right?
As far as I know, yes.
Aha.
Hmmm?
You hedged. “As far as I know” isn’t the same thing as “yes”. “As far as I know” opens up the possibility that you could be trans and not know it.
It doesn’t seem terribly likely.
That’s an interesting statement. Early on in transition one of the biggest problems I had was dealing with the sheer unlikelihood of my being trans. I mean, I knew trans people existed. I knew somebody had to be trans. I just couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that it would be me.
Do you think this is why you’re on this whole “Kurt Cobain was a trans woman” kick?
Hey now, I’m just asking questions. You know. Like J.K. Rowling is “just asking questions”.
Kate, you are literally wearing a T-shirt that says “KURT COBAIN WAS A TRANS WOMAN” on it right now.
Am I? Oh, shit. I thought I was wearing my “Skip school, take hormones, kill God” T-shirt. To your question, though - yeah, I do think that’s part of it. Honestly, the hardest thing about growing up trans was believing that nobody in the world had ever experienced what I was experiencing. I didn’t have any role models. I didn’t wonder if I was the only one. I was convinced of it.
So being able to say that this incredibly gifted songwriter, the voice of a generation, was a trans woman like you…
I need someone like that. I need to not be the first of my kind.
Of course you’re not the first trans woman. No, but before a couple of years ago almost every trans woman would tell you they always knew, unquestionably and innately, that they were women.
So it’s not just about him being trans, but specifically his being a trans woman who didn’t know he was a trans woman.
An egg. Right.
Why Kurt Cobain, anyway? What’s so special about him that you’re trying to induct him into the Egg Hall of Fame?
He knew things. Things cis guys don’t know. Things I didn’t know until after I started transition. He understood women, what we’re like, what we experience. “Pennyroyal Tea”. “Rape Me”. I just have a hard time thinking of a cis man who could write songs like that.
It wouldn’t be the only way in which he was exceptional.
True. Ahhh. I don’t know. I mean, I know, I can give you all the reasons, but there’s something in his eyes.
Something in his eyes.
All the pictures of him. No matter what he’s doing. If he’s grinning, or sad, whatever he’s doing, you can see something trapped there. Trapped and in pain, wanting to get out but not quite knowing how.
Huh. You, uh, know that what you’re doing is pretty much the textbook definition of projection, right?
Maybe. Chuck, do you think I’m happier?
Since you transitioned?
Yeah.
Of course. Absolutely. Night and day.
Everyone says that, and honestly, I see it. Even in pictures, you know? I see it. You’ve seen some of my transition timelines, right?
You do look really different.
It’s not just me. Every single person who transitions looks like that. We look so much happier, so much more alive, so much more us. I don’t understand how anybody can hate us.
I don’t get it either, Kate.
And when I look at any timelines, I look at the before photos… and I see something in their eyes. Transmasc, transfem, doesn’t matter. There’s something trapped wanting to get out. Every picture I’ve ever seen of Kurt Cobain looks like the “before” picture on a transition timeline. It’s just that with him, there aren’t any after pictures.
And it’s not just the eyes, either. The way he dressed, the whole “grunge look”. It’s just literally egg fashion. We dress with total disregard for our appearance or how we look because no matter what we do it’s wrong.
“Egg fashion”, egg this, egg that… isn’t it a little bit anachronistic, judging him by 2022 standards, 2022 values?
Is it? Chuck, I was alive in 1994. I was an 18 year old egg. I know what that feels like. I know what that looks like. I lived that. Why didn’t I come out as trans in 1994? Because I didn’t have the opportunity. Because self-determination needs to be informed, and none of us were. None of us. Look. You know what he said to Melody Maker in 1991? “I knew I was different. I thought that I might be gay or something because I couldn't identify with any of the guys at all.” That’s what he said.
Holy shit. Really?
Really. September 14, 1991.
Hold on, let me look that up. Oh, yeah, I see it. Look, if you look at the full quote he’s just saying he’s not a jock. Like he didn’t fit in with the jocks.
Well, what about the dresses?
What dresses?
Kurt Cobain wore a lot of dresses. Like, a lot, both onstage and off. On MTV in 1991, he said “It’s ‘Headbanger’s Ball’ so I thought I’d wear a gown.” He said in a 1993 interview, “I personally like to wear dresses. I wear them around the house sometimes.” This is not some shameful secret he kept hidden from the world. He was open about this. He was proud about this.
Yeah, but… it’s just clothes.
Except it’s not just clothes. Listen to his songs. Listen to his lyrics. “Should have been a son”. “I’m a lady, can you save me?” “Everyone is gay.” The original lyrics to “All Apologies” from his journals – “Boys write songs for girls. Let me grow some breasts.”
I mean they’re song lyrics. There are all kinds of ways to interpret song lyrics.
Sure. All kinds of ways. You ever read Michael Azerrad’s biography of Cobain, Come As You Are?
Nope.
Azerrad spent weeks talking to Cobain. He was Cobain’s biographer, but also his friend. And he has his own interpretation of the lyrics. For instance, Azerrad talks about all the lyrics about guns, and to me, now, I look at that, and I think of how he died, but Azerrad, when Kurt was alive, he looked at it another way. He thought it’s about dicks. “To paraphrase Dr. Freud,” he says, “sometimes a gun is just a gun. But not this time.” He talks about “Come As You Are”, where Kurt keeps singing “I swear I don’t have a gun.” That’s not my interpretation. That’s never been my interpretation. That’s what this cis man says. More than one cis man. Kurt says Dave Grohl’s dad, he said the same thing. Yeah. There are all kinds of ways to interpret lyrics.
“By this time,” Azerrad wrote, “one begins to wonder how Kurt rationalizes being a man at all. His first response is revealing. ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘Castration.’” I don’t wonder how Kurt rationalizes being a man. I rationalized “being a man” in all kinds of ways. What strikes me is that he needed to rationalize being a man. Had to come up with some kind of excuse. It just strikes me kind of funny.
Kurt’s songs have meanings. The lyrics to “In Bloom”, Kurt was pretty explicit about that. The lyrics he wrote have meanings. “Heart-Shaped Box”. You know what that refers to? When Courtney Love was flirting with Kurt, Michael Azerrad says in Come As You Are, “She gave Dave (Grohl) a package to give to Kurt – little sea shells and miniature teacups and a tiny doll, all packed into a small heart-shaped box.” A tiny doll locked away inside a box shaped like a heart. That was what I felt like before I came out. A tiny phantom doll. Kurt and Courtney first kissed after a show at the Cabaret Metro in Chicago. Rumor was that they fucked against the bar, but they denied it. What actually happened, Azerrad says, is that “Courtney had a bag of lingerie with her for some reason and Kurt ended up modeling the contents.” And then they went to Kurt’s hotel room and they fucked.
You’re making it sound…
Maybe it was. Because you look at that and you think that if it was like that, it was perverted and wrong, because that’s what you were told, that it’s a sick fetish thing, and I look at it and it isn’t. To me, that’s normal. That Kurt Cobain was sexually aroused while wearing Courtney Love’s lingerie, that’s normal.
Kate, he was a punk! He hated jocks, and wearing a dress pissed off jocks, so he wore dresses. He talked about wanting to wear a dress and piss on a redneck A&R man’s desk! You think that was some kind of sex thing?
Sexuality is part of being a woman. Part. Rage – and Kurt Cobain had a lot of rage inside him – that’s another part. Am I interpreting, am I looking at things from my perspective as a trans woman? Yes, certainly, just like you’re interpreting, looking at it from your perspective as a cis man. When cis people interpret things, their conclusion is never “they were trans”. Never.
Ed Wood wasn’t a trans woman. He was just a transvestite. He was a man.
Pete Burns from Dead or Alive wasn’t a trans woman. Sure, he got all sorts of feminizing surgeries, but he never said he was a woman. Man.
Prince Nelson adopted a female persona, feminized his voice, and recorded a song about wanting to be a woman's girlfriend, but he was also a Christian and believed that being queer was wicked and sinful, and that's the identity of his we need to respect. Man.
Richard Wright, who wrote the Phish song “Halley’s Comet”, spent most of the 1980s telling everyone he knew he was a transsexual lesbian named Nancy, but after being consistently treated like shit changed his mind about that, so none of that counts for anything. Man.
Dave Carter was on HRT when he died, but he was just questioning. He didn’t tell anybody for sure that he was a woman. Man.
Quentin Crisp said just before he died that if he was younger, he absolutely would have transitioned, but wanting to transition isn’t the same as actually transitioning. Man.
All men. Always, always men, whatever they do, whatever they say. I know how that works. I was told all these same things about myself for decades, all these same reasons, and now, I don’t know, I guess people will make a personal exception for me, but for everybody else, the same old assumptions, the same old arguments, they still apply. They’re still legitimate.
I thought we were talking about Kurt Cobain.
And the only way to do that is to talk about him in isolation. There’s no larger context to consider, no bigger picture. I can’t really know. I can’t really judge.
I mean, everybody else does. I guess I can’t tell you not to. But all of this circumstantial evidence, all of the dresses and the lyrics that you I guess know the real meaning of – none of that makes him a girl.
Sure. And nothing can make him a girl. Because he’s dead. Because he killed himself.
Oh, here we go. After thirty years and countless speculation, you have at last uncovered the real reason Kurt Cobain killed himself – gender dysphoria. Do you have a book deal yet?
Working on it. And yes, people say a lot of stupid things about Cobain’s death, like it’s this big shock that this guy who hated himself and wanted to die killed himself.
Right. He was pretty well-known for being a heroin addict, which isn’t exactly something that improves one’s quality of life.
Sure, but why did he start heroin?
I don’t know. Why does anybody start heroin?
To help him cope with his eating disorder.
Wait, what? Eating disorder?
You don’t know about that? He had stomach problems, for a long, long time. He could only eat certain kinds of food, certain kinds of food that wouldn’t make his stomach hurt. Doctors looked but they could never find any organic cause for it. Nobody took it seriously. So he self-medicated with heroin. “It was my choice,” he told Azerrad. “I don’t regret it at all because it was such a relief from not having stomach pain every day.” I know, though. Lots of cis guys have eating disorders. Doesn’t mean anything.
Kate there’s a lot of interpreting going on here.
Yeah, I guess there is. Is that necessarily a bad thing, though? Is that necessarily wrong? Like. You’ve seen The Matrix, right?
Only the first one.
Yeah, that’s fine. So you know how important The Matrix is to a lot of trans women, right?
Yes, but I’m not really sure why. Just seems like a retelling of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” with extra fight scenes.
It’s pretty trans, though, right?
Clearly. It was directed by two trans women.
And trans women who watch it – eggs or otherwise – find their own lives and experiences reflected in it in ways that cis people, like you, don’t.
I guess, but the fact that it was actually made by two trans women carries a little more weight with me.
OK, but what if the Wachowskis had died in 2000? In, like… a car crash or something? Does that mean The Matrix isn’t a trans film?
Well, no, because it’s still a film made by two trans women.
A film made by two trans women that speaks to the trans experience, and that is recognized by living trans women as speaking specifically to the trans experience. The only difference is that, in this scenario, nobody knows the Wachowski Sisters are trans women. And we can’t prove it. We can’t possibly prove it, and nobody is going to just believe us when we say it’s a trans movie, that the Wachowskis were trans women, because they didn’t say it, they didn’t say the special magic words. Self-determination. You know what self-determination meant to Kurt Cobain? I remember seeing Courtney Love on television reading his note, I remember her interrupting to say that he was an asshole, that what he was saying was bullshit. She didn’t respect his self-determination.
Um…
“Pennyroyal Tea”. Cobain told Azerrad “It's a cleansing theme where I’m trying to get all my bad evil spirits out of me and drinking Pennyroyal tea would cleanse that away.” Pennyroyal is an abortifacient – but, Azerrad notes, only in lethal doses.
Hell, not just that song. The whole album. In Utero. The collage on the back cover, the one Cobain described to Azerrad as “Sex and woman and In Utero and vaginas and birth and death". The occult symbols surrounding it, taken from Barbara G. Walker’s The Woman's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects1. There was something inside Kurt Cobain, something inside him waiting to be born, but he was told, over and over, that it was a monster, so he killed it, the only way he could. By killing himself.
That could have been me. That could so easily have been me. I was told all the same things he was. We all were. When I was 27? When I was 27, I was addicted to benzos, benzos they prescribed me because I was trying to bury, trying to kill this thing, this thing I had inside of me. I was a zombie. Walking dead. When I quit, I quit cold turkey. Nobody told me about the withdrawal syndrome. Nobody told me it could have killed me. And if it had, everybody would remember me, everybody would think of me, as a cis man. Forever. They would perpetuate the Lie. That’s why I transitioned, why I chose to go through all the shit I went through. The writer and musician Margaret Killjoy, in 2017 she talked about what she went through the day before she came out:
“All I could think was: ‘Oh god, I don’t want to die a boy.’”2
I felt the same way, came out for the same reason. I figured no matter what I did, I was dead. I didn’t do it live, but to at least have an honest death. I genuinely believed transition would kill me.
It didn’t, though! You’re alive and you’re beautiful and I’m so, so glad for that. It didn’t kill you.
It could have. Still could. Transition has helped, has made it easier for me, but it’s not that way with everyone. People have been kind to me, in ways that they aren’t kind to other trans women. Others of us… aren’t so lucky.
Who are we respecting, exactly, by remaining silent about our shared experiences, our shared perspectives, things we see that you fucking don’t, that you can’t see? Of course I can’t prove it. I can’t prove that I’m trans. You can’t prove that you’re cis. Cis people, though, cis people never have to prove anything. Their prejudices are the null hypothesis3. If I was to go out there and say that Kurt Cobain was a cisgender man, would anybody say I was wrong? Would anybody object or complain? Even though my saying that is an anachronism, is meaningless. The word, the concept, it literally didn’t exist when Cobain died. Have you ever heard the word “agnotology”?
No?
It means making a false claim to ignorance. Claiming that we don’t know something that we do. That we can’t know something that we can. We know things now, Chuck. We know what the symptoms of gender dysphoria are. We know what it does to people. How eggs think. How eggs act. How eggs die. But we pretend we don’t. We still pretend. We pretend suicide is an individual act, even when we know it’s not, that the reasons for it are wholly personal. We pretend that when someone dies by suicide, their reasons for doing so die with them. And they don’t, Chuck. We’re still dying, still dying for the same reasons Kurt Cobain did. It’s not just that we aren’t allowed to recognize ourselves. We aren’t allowed to recognize each other. Individual choice or social contagion. Those are the options we’re given. And neither of them are right. Neither of them are who we are.
Kurt Cobain wrote, thought, talked, died like eggs do. I don’t care if he never said the magic fucking words. We know our own. We recognize each other. And if someone is alive? If someone is alive I will go my whole life without ever breathing a word. Because as long as we’re alive, we do choose, and that means we can choose ignorance. What I think, what I want, for someone else, for us, it doesn’t matter. I do that, I follow that code, for the benefit of one person – the egg themselves. Once they die, all bets are off. Omerta no longer applies. Kayfabe no longer applies.
To be queer is to be erased, to experience erasure. I still hear straight men arguing, as if they have any right to argue, as if they know, that Emily Dickinson was not a lesbian. Emily Dickinson! I’m supposed to listen to people who say this shit? I’m supposed to take them seriously when they say well, actually, calling Dickinson a “lesbian” is historically anachronistic, we can’t apply the standards of the present to the past, and Jesus fuck have you read her letters? She liked girls. She really liked girls. Kurt Cobain was a trans woman. Kurt Cobain was every bit as much a trans woman as Emily Dickinson was a lesbian. Refusing to say it isn’t “respect”. It’s perpetuating the crime perpetrated against Cobain, against every other trans woman who ever killed herself because of the lies we were told about ourselves. No more. Kurt Cobain was a trans woman. I can’t, as an individual, say that. I don’t have the right. No trans woman can say that, individually. But collectively? All of us together? The things we see in each other, we see those things in him too. Not all of them, and not all of us. Absolutely not all of us. But enough of us. Enough that we have the right. We have the right, and I will fucking say it, and if you don’t like that, you can go fuck yourself.
Kate, are you ok?
I’m fine.
Do you want a hug?
Fuck you, Chuck.
OK, well. I’m, uh. Gonna go to the other room. You should, uh. Drink some water. Stay hydrated. Love you, Kate.
Love you too, Chuck. Sorry.
Shhh. It’s OK, Kate. It’s OK.
1 Diane Purkiss criticizes the occult nature of Walker’s encyclopedia in "Women's Rewriting of Myth", in Carolyne Larrington (ed), The Feminist Companion to Mythology, London, 1992, p. 444: “In Donna Haraway's influential terms, these women may wish to be goddesses, but they are cyborgs all the same”. The work she’s referencing is Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto”. Haraway was, it happens, an academic advisor to the trans woman Sandy Stone, and her “Cyborg Manifesto” was a pivotal influence on Stone’s “The Empire Strikes Back: A Post-Transsexual Manifesto”, one of the foundational works of transgender theory.
2 Margaret Killjoy, https://birdsbeforethestorm.net/2017/06/im-not-even-going-to-try-to-pass/
3 Natalie Reed, https://freethoughtblogs.com/nataliereed/2012/04/17/the-null-hypothecis/
i don't know that i agree with everything here, but it's a piece of writing that hit me like few others have. incredibly thought provoking and i wanted to share it. the section on how high the bar is to get a historical figure declared queer really hit me
regularly scheduled fun posts will be back shortly, but if you have any thoughts on this please share because this really got me and i'd love to know what other people here think
also if you notice anything else in this that needs a content warning lmk and i will add that as soon as i see it
This hit me really hard tbqh
And I'm thinking about how this ties into modern egg joke discourse, because I'm very online. Lot of discourse on twitter and tumblr about how joking that someone might be an egg, even in a way they won't see and exclusively to other transfems, is this awful thing. Get people talking about it enough and it becomes pretty clear that a pretty significant part of it comes down to like "how dare you see yourself in this person and how dare you ever suggest they could be a worthless transfem". Like they treat it as a deep insult in a way that's really revealing.
And like, there are shitty egg jokes, don't get me wrong. But I feel like there's a part of them that is like "god, I wish someone had recognized these behaviors of mine that were in retrospect a cry for help. I wish people had seen me for who I really was and told me and saved me." And I feel like looking at someone like Cobain this way serves a similar purpose.
Beyond the fact that there is legitimately some really compelling evidence and beyond the idea of breaking the cisnormative assumption that anyone who didn't explicitly say they're trans must be cis, this kind of thing feels like "I see my experiences in him and I wish we could have saved him" more than anything, to me. Like, I wish he could have been in transfem communities as they existed at the time and I wish he'd had someone to tell him it wasn't shameful, because honestly if I'd been that age at that time I might have gone a similar way
yeah. it's the same thing as whenever anyone says they see themself in a fictional character in some trans ways. cis people (and some trans people!) get incredibly mad at the suggestion that anyone who did not explicitly declare themselves trans might not be cis
i mean some cis people get mad even when they did declare themselves such, but that is a separate type of transphobia
Cobain was trans. I suspect Michael Jackson was too, but I'm iffier on that one.
Joan of Arc? Trans. Elagabulus: Trans, obviously. J Edgar Hoover: Trans. Ugh. Dennis Rodman? I think maybe he's straight, despite everything. But it's a big maybe! If he's not trans, he can be honorary.
*Points at seagull* Trans.
Source: Vibes.
I read about j Edgar hoover and iirc the cross dressing evidence comes only from like one person and it was very reasonable to read as that person trying to slander j Edgar hoover with allegations of being a transsexual
the thing is you're probably right about hoover, though i really wish you weren't
These are the real painful cases, the ones were the only outlet for all the repressed dysphoria and internalized transphobia was violence. Forcing people into the closet has always led to some people harming others instead of having to harm themselves. It's part of why fascists want people to repress as much as possible, it makes it easier to turn them into tools for murder.
I'm sure that there's some repressors who are watching Andrew Tate today to stop "failing" at man-ness. The "queer people are just giving into temptation" narrative can't be 100% fabrication. That's basically the ideal endpoint for a queer person according to fascist ideology.
was known as a transvestite, but apparently that was probably just a malicious rumor
Eh, kinda weak sauce. I was thinking it’s something similar to the Cobain thing. Granted, we’re all pretty biased on this issue
the rumor was he was a repeated crossdresser. pretty weak evidence, but not nothing. but as mentioned, this was probably not true
There's a bit in Nixon's tapes where he's talking to IIRC Kissinger and McNamara and says "all men imagine themselves as women, right?" and is very distressed when they say no.
But uh, let's not claim Nixon please
It was made up by someone on twitter, sorry to ruin things for you.
We need to more clearly label historical satire here maybe lol
pedo
I don't know. He was accused and settled out of court. People argued about this then and argue about it now
“It” lol. Abbey’s a leftist journalist and commentator. Famous for Palestine and 9/11 truth. A bit of a centrist geopolitically. A bit doomer but interesting and knowledgeable on various things and this came up at some point on Media Roots Radio.
I’m aware. I thought from my perspective it was funny to imply that Abbey’s at the center of a Micheal Jackson scandal.
Same here. I don’t agree with everything in here, but this is a powerful piece. Thank you for sharing! I hope there are more like this in the future in addition to the fun posts.
i have a few other things in the tank, but i need to space them out. time for at least a few days of just good times trans memes!
And it’s not just the eyes, either. The way he dressed, the whole “grunge look”. It’s just literally egg fashion. We dress with total disregard for our appearance or how we look because no matter what we do it’s wrong.
Please don't doxx me like this.
This is making me reassess the learned guideline of "actually we shouldn't speculate about and project onto people where there can never be a conclusive answer." Because obviously it's unfalsifiable, and I know from experience that it's easy to fall into a mindset of "when all you have is a hammer, every historic case of untreatable depression looks like undiagnosed gender dysphoria" after going over one's own life with a fine toothed comb looking for signs either in search of evidence or as a simple matter of self reflection, but maybe it doesn't matter if it's literally correct or not. Maybe an overcorrection like that is necessary to plant seeds of doubt in the cishet-by-default orthodoxy.
Also fuck, the section about how you can see it, how there's something ineffable to the look and bearing of eggs, that drags me back to how long before I had any context or understanding of any of this I would often pick out something in certain people that set them apart in a way I couldn't articulate or understand. Two in particular stand out from college: one in my chemistry class, and another that was in both my polisci classes and one of my anthropology classes; never got to know either of them, but the former I'd swear I saw in a transition timeline some 5-6 years later, and the other did an assignment and presentation on trans people in a way that in retrospect was definitely somewhere along the chaser-to-egg spectrum.
"when all you have is a hammer, every historic case of untreatable depression looks like undiagnosed gender dysphoria"
Sure. But when that case also involves crossdressing, genital hate and artistic works that are incredibly blunt when put in this context I think it stops being a stretch.
yeah. it's obviously impossible to say with 100% certainty that cobain was a trans woman. if he was alive today he might have been some flavor of nonbinary genderqueer or a cisgender person who crossdresses sometimes. but it's also impossible to say that he was cis, and as a trans person looking at it all i definitely think there's more evidence pointing towards the cisgender theory being untrue. and as mentioned, calling him cisgender is arguably even more ahistorical than calling him trans.
and crucially, this is more about the way people will reflexively deny the possibility someone might have been queer even in the face of huge amounts of evidence. i do that sometimes! but i exist, and other queer people exist and have always existed, so it's possible. and it's important to leave that possibility space open in the past so people today see it as a possibility for their future
You don’t know about that? He had stomach problems, for a long, long time. He could only eat certain kinds of food, certain kinds of food that wouldn’t make his stomach hurt. Doctors looked but they could never find any organic cause for it. Nobody took it seriously. So he self-medicated with heroin. “It was my choice,” he told Azerrad. “I don’t regret it at all because it was such a relief from not having stomach pain every day.” I know, though. Lots of cis guys have eating disorders. Doesn’t mean anything.
Of everything in this article this hits me so fucking hard because I KNOW KURT I KNOW HOW YOU FELT I KNOW WHY YOU DID THIS.
this whole piece is extremely compelling and moving as someone whos a big fan of Kurt, can I ask why this part particularly moved you?
Anyone with bowel disorders would get this part. I have pretty much the same thing going on, had to completely avoid various foods because they incapacitate me with agony for days otherwise.
In general, I do not feel comfortable with people assigning a definite gender identity to other people, especially people who are dead, without the live input of the other person. There's a difference between saying Kurt was an egg and Kurt had a specific gender identity of a binary trans woman. Kurt doesn't seem cis at all and we can safely rule out some enbie identities like demimale and agender (since a demimale/agender AMAB doesn't have the same trajectory as Kurt). But could anyone say with confidence Kurt was a binary trans woman instead of a femme enbie or a demifemale? I don't believe you can because that requires a degree of fidelity that can't be reached by analyzing song lyrics or reading diary entries. Unless he had a diary entry that straight up said, "I am 100% a woman with not a trace of man in me," the lines that demarcate Kurt's particular gender identity will always be fuzzy. To get to this level of specificity, Kurt has to actually be around and know enough about binary trans women/femme enbies/demifemales to actually pick which gender identity fits best.
sure, i agree. we can't know. but that's not really what this is about. she doesn't she/her kurt, this piece is much more about how society at large is unwilling to acknowledge that kurt cobain (or anyone else) could possibly be anything other than cis. i think it's important that this goes for a direct concrete argument because of this, i think it would weaken it rhetorically if it had to keep throwing in caveats
i do think you're totally right though, it's a little fucked to say with confidence kurt cobain was a completely binary trans woman. i just don't think that's as big a problem as society at large saying he was certainly cis
That makes sense. Kurt was definitely not cis. There are dude ways of wearing a dress and Kurt was not wearing the dress like a dude.
when i first heard kurt cobain wore women's clothes i figured he did it once or twice at a concert or something as a joke, i didn't realize how often he did it. he did photoshoots in dresses, wore them everywhere. it might be harder to find pictures of him in men's clothes than women's
Just commenting here saying this piece and this comment really, really helped me think through things and I really appreciate it 💜
i'm glad! it really helped me process some stuff and i'm so glad it seems to have had an impact on the people here who i shared it with, that was my goal
"Please, God, don't let me die a boy", and isn't that just how it feels. Thank God I let myself be a removed, thank God I learned to break the unwritten rules.
i'm glad you let yourself be a removed too. and i'm glad i let myself be one. and reading this piece made my heart break for everyone out there who couldn't take that step, because god knows i understand how terrifying that is
I've been secretly wondering this same thing for the last 6 months or so.
i'd seen posts about it before this but never really thought about it, and this really convinced me
actually the first time i thought about it was a few days ago when i saw a post about how "i'm not gay but i wish i was" is the most transbian egg thing imaginable and described the thought process behind it being about how being gay would be a way to distance yourself from being a standard man. i wish i could find it again, i think it was pretty recent but i can't find it anywhere on tumblr
reading unironically made myself understand so much about how pre egg me used to act, its weird
the eating, the "please god dont let me die as a boy", the grunge look, and so much more. unironically feel kind of targeted
same. you aren't alone. i remember spending years dressing intentionally trashy and whenever anyone asked why i couldn't explain myself
not inclined to try to divine anything at all about the unspoken interior lives of dead ppl (or really even of anyone currently living not of my personal acquaintance) but I would think the whole "being a famous person with a public image" aspect would or should add to not reduce the difficulty/complexity level (see: star studies)
What really pushed me to transition was the idea of growing old and looking like, my grandad or dad or something. I hated that idea so much that I considered death a better alternative
what did it for me was an experience i had that made me actually confront my own mortality for the first time and i had to think about how i'd be perceived by others at the funeral
Yeah I had some NDEs too. That and a slightly receded hairline (like it was just like 3mm of thinning) made me go insane and realize that I couldn't just fuck around
Fuck me this hits close to home. Lots of words here I could never put together myself, thank you for sharing this.
same. i read this the other day and was just sitting there like "how am i supposed to go about the rest of my day like this" because it just struck at something in my core.
There is and this doesn't go into some of the more obvious clues. He wrote some extremely revealing things in his diaries
And like this person said, I see a LOT of my own pre-transition experiences in him
I see the same signs, as does the author of the piece, and thousands of other trans people out there. It's honestly grating to read this shit under an article going to such lengths to explain why cis people need to shut up with denying other peoples' transness, none of you have the tiniest understanding of these issues. You just lack the experiences we're talking about here. Your ignorance of this, your insistence to be able to judge who is trans enough is part of decades of cis people policing our identities and our right to live as our authentic selfs, to access life-saving medical treatment, to simply exist. Your mindset has destroyed thousands of our siblings, it has taken years or even decades away from all of us that we could have spent as ourselves instead of trying to survive and prove ourselves worthy to people like you. It's disgusting to have to read this in a safe space for trans people, disgusting and infuriating.
So yeah, as the other person said, learn to read and go fuck yourself.
The absolute audacity to come into a trans space, on a topic about the validity of a trans experiences and a (kind of?) trans gaze, and go at it with "well have you though about maybe you're seeing things wrong?" F on reading comprehension (of the room and the article), F- on being a halfway decent person.
Literally the first rule of this community/space is that it's "an anti-capitalist meme community for transgender and gender diverse people." Which is exactly why I don't comment or post on here. (Except for this.)
The idiot that got their comments removed, and rightfully so, couldn't even do that.
Can't speak for anyone else, but I'd be ikay with you speaking up. So few cis people are curious about gender and I welcome good faith engagement.
Maybe someday it wont have to be like this evergreen meme:
Show
yeah, cis people are allowed to participate here as long as they stay respectful and are engaging in good faith
Kurt Cobain was a trans woman. I can’t, as an individual, say that. I don’t have the right. No trans woman can say that, individually. But collectively? All of us together? The things we see in each other, we see those things in him too. Not all of them, and not all of us. Absolutely not all of us. But enough of us. Enough that we have the right. We have the right, and I will fucking say it, and if you don’t like that, you can go fuck yourself.
learn to read, also go fuck yourself
stay winning, girl!
