CHELSEA: But getting back to Janice Raymond. You look at the first wave of that lesbian feminist crap. Robin Morgan used to hang out and smoke pot with Abbie Hoffman and me. She was part of all that. But then she went on to that “the new left is sexist” stuff. Eventually they [lesbian feminists] started to write history like ground zero was 1974, which I believe was the year that they reached critical mass and their dogma was canonized. It was coming together before that, but that was when they had their version of the Nicene Council to do the official canon. This is where the basic tenets of the faith were agreed upon. So they took ’74 as the cutoff point and if it happened before 1974 it didn’t happen.
The second wave of feminism was happening at the same time as the Black Power movement. Certainly there was an extreme in the Black Power movement, and the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival and that whole mentality was the feminist version of the same thing.
You know what opened my eyes? I had finally figured out that I was transsexual. I had started taking hormones and started living as a woman. I figured out that I am bisexual too. Of course that’s a problematic word because it implies that there are only two genders, but you know what I mean. I figured out a lot of things about myself. But one of the things it took me a long time to figure out, trying to find myself, was that a large percentage of the so-called lesbian feminists were political lesbians, lesbians for political reasons, but not because they were sexually attracted to other women.
There’s a stereotype that I question that’s been around since the fifties, that lesbians must hate men. In my experience lesbians tend not to want to sleep with men, but they tend not to hate men. After all, if you look at the traditional lesbian things—trucks and hot rod cars and guitars are cool. The lesbians weren’t saying, “We hate men because they do those things;” they were saying, “We want to play with those toys too.” A reasonable point of view.
Q: That brings up a broader question, of course. What is gender anyway? Is there anything to gender?
CHELSEA: Is there anything to race? You saw the movie Bulworth? Bill Bradley said the biggest problem in the United States, hands down, is race. I think that was true in 1776,1876,1976, and I think that it’s true now. America is uniquely fucked up because of race. The peculiar institution of racially based slavery is essentially an American phenomenon. So, can you ignore race? Is there anything to race? Does race exist? Yes, obviously, some people have dark skin, some people have light skin, and social constructs have been built around that. Is the transgender movement basically all about bathrooms and who is going to piss where? Yes, but go back to Martin Luther King and before, what was the civil rights movement about? Getting rid of the whites-only and coloreds-only bathrooms, and everybody pisses in the same place.
So, as far as “is there anything to gender?” Let’s say that originally there weren’t very many Homo sapiens on this planet, and it was important that the reproduction rate be really high because of high infant mortality rates, medicine doesn’t exist, people are being trampled to death, et cetera. It’s that kind of world. I’m trying to make this funny, but I’m serious too. Now we’re in a world that’s overpopulated. There are too many people. Naturally, there’s going to be more homosexuality.
Are we [transgendered people] more of a percentage of the population? I don’t know. Are there more people with a propensity to gender variance? I don’t know. Are more people manifesting it? Yes!
I belong to all kinds of e-mail groups, conspiracy theorists, UFO [abductees], whatever. I’m no better than the rest of the nuts, but at least I have a sense of humor. But I also belong to something called the climate concern group. I’m one of the few non-Ph.D.s on that group. It’s a different thing from the UFOs and the “Lone Gunman” [theorists] and the other stuff, though that stuff is more fun. Anyway, actual scientific fact: there are more hermaphroditic polar bears than there used to be. There is a rise in hermaphroditism among arctic polar bears. I wasn’t looking for transgender stuff but I just happened to run into it. The same is true of several species offish in the Amazon River. There are all kinds of [transgendered and intersexual] animals. Maybe there are more transgender people because it was one of the unexpected results [of the scientific revolution]. Instead of the bombing of Hiroshima giving us Godzilla, it gave us me. Something is definitely happening. We can theorize about it, and I wish to hell that people would start theorizing about the scientific message, rather than [viewing transpeople as] signs of the end of the world foretold in the Bible.
I’m into science. I’m an avid science fiction fan. Something I’ve discovered … there’s only one thing that the trans community agrees on. We all love Star Trek. It sounds like a joke, but it’s true. Among MTFs anyway. I think that the two professions that have the most transsexuals in them, in no particular order, are prostitution and computer geeks. There are two basic groups of transsexuals, the prostitutes and the computer geeks. And most of us are people like me who have been both. If they wanted to make Star Trek more realistic, one of the captains would say, “Damn it, the computer system is on the fritz again. Where’s the transsexual?” Am I right?
RUSTY: If they had really evolved, they wouldn’t say, “Where’s the transsexual?” They would’ve just had the transsexual come in and fix the computer. Star Trek is so popular with transpeople because they accept, without even thinking about it, all these weird-looking people. This total variation, no question asked.
Q: That’s also true of certain kinds of rock and roll, isn’t it? You can be any thing you want to be onstage, and no one bats an eye.
CHELSEA: I want to say something about music, because it’s something that gets ignored. Music helped me come out. Lou Reed’s Transformer album, okay, helped immensely. [iVngs] “Holly came from Miami FLA / Hitchhiked her way across the U.S.A. / Plucked her eyebrows on the way / shaved her legs and then he was a she.” Later on, I actually met Holly Woodlawn, after I was out.
The New York Dolls helped me come out. David Bowie helped me come out. Iggy Pop helped me come out. I wrote Iggy Pop because a couple of albums ago he put his address on the back of the album and said, “Any fan wants to write me a letter, I’ll answer it.” So I sat down and I wrote a letter and said, “Ig, I’m a transsexual. I grew up in a conservative Christian home out in the boondocks and I would have had a much harder time figuring out who and what I am and what to do with my life if it hadn’t been for you.” He wrote me a beautiful reply—a beautiful, loving, supportive, un—Iggy Pop—like, loving answer— which I still have around here.
I know tons of transsexuals that were influenced by Jayne County, Man Enough to Be a Woman. Before Hedwig, before Rocky Horror, she was a transsexual that was playing with The Ramones at CBGB. Rocky Horror was one of the things that saved my life. That song, “Don’t Dream It, Be It.” Every time my transition got scary, every time I was physically assaulted, raped, everything that happened to me, that phrase from the Rocky Horror Picture Show, “Don’t Dream It, Be It,” kept me going.
Q: So you’re saying that cultural influences affected your choices, or at least helped you deal with the choices that you’ve made?”