Was Kurt Cobain A Trans Woman?

Trans women argue whether or not Kurt Cobain was a trans woman, _a lot_. Cis people, for the most part, don't really seem to know this is a thing. It is, in fact, a Thing.

Bigger than the argument, though, is the _meta-argument_, which is this: "Is it even OK to ask whether or not Kurt Cobain was a trans woman?" (Because if it _is_ OK to ask whether or not he was a trans woman, the answer is pretty fucking obviously "yes".)

Anyway I do think that whether or not it's _OK_ to ask it's kind of.. necessary to ask the question? And I wrote up a little thing sort of representing some of the things I've thought about and things I've seen other people say about the topic.

https://www.tumblr.com/waskurttrans

yes I'm sure of it

Increasingly plausible.

the link is great and includes thoughts I've had for a while which I've kept to myself for obvious reasons

No doubt at all. Kurt was a trans woman.

Great piece Kate, really resonated with me. I'm glad my comments in the other thread resonated with you too.

with almost anyone else I have major reservations about saying anything definitive but not here and I think the widespread recognition among people who recognise such things is telling in itself

I think Kate's piece really nails where Kurt was at in his journey, i.e. uncracked egg.

I still painfully remember that feeling of: "I'm different and nobody else could possibly feel like me. But I'm not a woman, I can't be trans - right?! Trans women are like, hookers and drag queens. I'm just a boy who feels like a girl. Like, a lesbian trapped in a man's body. Anyway, even if I am trans, I could never transition. That's just not an option for people like me."

That's probably as far as Kurt got too. Hard to say, but what is certain: Kurt was trans. Kate otm that you can see it in his eyes. That wounded dissociation...

It brings to mind the trans/egg dynamic in Imogen Binnie's incredible trans road novel Nevada. Would Kurt have realised if he'd met his own Maria? Or would he have taken the heroin and run?

"I'm not like them, but I can pretend" = stealth.

with almost anyone else I have major reservations about saying anything definitive but not here and I think the widespread recognition among people who recognise such things is telling in itself

― your original display name is still visible (Left)

100% here, with anybody else i might talk with my friends about... oh yeah i can definitely relate to _that_ as a trans woman, i get trans feels so hard from _that_, but at the end of the day it _is_ speculation, for the most part. kurt, though? like The Ghost Club said, "Kurt was fucking trans. No argument."

A couple of reasons I finally went ahead and posted it. First is something else The Ghost Club said when I started talking about it... paraphrasing, she said "I thought it was just me." I mean, isn't that just the absolute soul of the trans experience, right there? I can hear someone say that and remain silent. I can't.

The more immediate motivator was seeing what Tommy Craggs wrote about "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in Pitchfork. Writing about him as a "sensitive young man" who had "violent fantasies". Writing about him in that way is just so appallingly _wrong_ and _ignorant_. Did I _know_ Kurt Cobain? No. Do I understand his _soul_? Not particularly. Is there a certain _context_ to his life, work, and death that most people are _not fucking considering_? Absolutely, and I _will_ speak to that context. I do also wanna specifically thank Sund4r for quoting Craggs' blurb and Whiney for calling out Craggs on the absolute bullshit narrative he is peddling.

This thread is for the trans ones, the ones who have known for a long time about Kurt but were afraid to say anything, but also for the cis ones, the ones who had no idea, who have never considered the concept. Y'all need to know what gender dysphoria LOOKS LIKE, what it DOES to those of us who don't get gender affirming treatment, those of us who don't recognize that we _need_ gender affirming treatment. Y'all need to know the _cost_ of transphobia, what's at _stake_.

It brings to mind the trans/egg dynamic in Imogen Binnie's incredible trans road novel Nevada. Would Kurt have realised if he'd met his own Maria? Or would he have taken the heroin and run?

― The Ghost Club

lol, i guess it didn't make it into the final cut, but Binnie was another inspiration for the piece. have you heard about the second novel Binnie was working on? the one she mentions in her column for the last issue of maximum rock and roll?

https://www.maximumrocknroll.com/column/i-dont-think-that-i-need-to-sit-here-with-you-fucking-dildos-any-more-2/

"2013. That novel I wrote finally comes out. People like it. It’s humbling. I tour on it for a year. It opens a bunch of doors. I start on a second novel. It’s not done yet but I’m a bunch of drafts deep. Among other things, it’s about the inarguable fact that Kurt Cobain was trans."

we all know it. WE ALL FUCKING KNOW IT. we just need to fucking ADMIT IT.

"I'm not like them, but I can pretend" = stealth.

― The Ghost Club

that's the thing there's _so much more_ than i ever put in there, i know it. i didn't watch "about a boy", i didn't watch "montage of heck", kurt just fucking oozed yolk everywhere he went. please share more of this. i want to hear it all.

I feel a *little* weird about second-guessing someone else's decisions about their own life*, but Kurt also lived in a time when it was less possible to be trans, and it definitely feels plausible.

*I'm sure queer/trans communities have much more sophisticated discourse about this kind of thing

Similar issues came up around a recent novel (don't have the title handy) with a character in this same scene (early-90s PNW). The author talked in an interview about what pronoun to use for a character who now would identify as non-binary or trans but self-identified as a "tomboy" in that era with she/her pronouns. Ultimately the author went with that for the sake of historical accuracy vs. telling the story using current terms. Thought it was an interesting deliberation for the author to go through.

https://www.tumblr.com/waskurttrans

― Kate (rushomancy), Thursday, October 6, 2022 3:42 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

thanks for this

Ah. Yes. I could have just read the link in the first post in the thread.

Ah. Yes. I could have just read the link in the first post in the thread.

― death generator (lukas)

no worries, at least you read it _eventually_. i mean i'm not gonna say i've never given in to the temptation to Discourse about something i haven't read or heard or seen firsthand! :)

Similar issues came up around a recent novel (don't have the title handy) with a character in this same scene (early-90s PNW). The author talked in an interview about what pronoun to use for a character who now would identify as non-binary or trans but self-identified as a "tomboy" in that era with she/her pronouns. Ultimately the author went with that for the sake of historical accuracy vs. telling the story using current terms. Thought it was an interesting deliberation for the author to go through.

― The self-titled drags (Eazy)

yeah, i don't lampshade it but it does come up in the way i talk about cobain as well - i consistently use he/him pronouns for him, even while i'm saying that he was a woman. from an Advanced Trans perspective it's justifiable - pronouns aren't the same as gender identity, cobain as far as i know only ever used he/him pronouns, therefore it would be disrespectful to refer to him with any other pronouns, no matter _what_ his gender identity. in practical terms, i'm more doing it to foreground the essential incongruence between what i'm saying about him and the way we all think of him, foregrounding that _he never really believed he could actually be a woman_. i feel like it's important for me to recognize that.

Interesting question in light of Kurt's popularity with Gen Z, also.

i first heard the theory from gen z trans girls back in '19!

this dumb meme really did not need a thread

your objection is duly noted

Have any of the people who were close to him said anything about this?

i love this, kate

so do i.

same, very interesting thing to think about, definitely resonates w/me as someone who was "there" at the time more or less

FPed ufo

Have any of the people who were close to him said anything about this?

― frogbs

What would this add to the conversation? Unless he explicitly told them he was trans, I doubt it would add anything.

People are really good at ignoring the signs, even if they're really close to that person. It's amazing how much contradictory information people will simply ignore despite the congnitive dissonance. This goes for trans people before coming out, as much as those around them.

If you'd asked my family or friends 10 years ago if they thought I was trans, they would have dismissed it outright. I've asked them since if they ever saw the signs that to me, in retrospect, seem so obvious. None did.

this dumb meme really did not need a thread

― ufo

This is the kind of cisnormative energy that keeps people in the closet. Dumb meme, are you kidding me? Seriously, if you don't understand something, either seek to understand or shut up.

Yea I guess that goes for the trans people I know, in retrospect the signs were there but I just never gave any thought to them. Everyone I hung out with back in the day had some quirks I didn’t understand. Just wondering if anyone made a curious statement about Kurt that in retrospect could’ve been a major sign. This is the first I’ve ever heard of this but rush’s blogpost is pretty convincing!

This is interesting. Growing up as a cis guy, I had always assumed that many of the items in Rushomancy's List of Evidence were maybe due to a mixture of genuine earnest feminist/LGBT allyship with a healthy dose of "freaking out the squares". I think there was a discussion on ilx in the past couple years re: Perry Farrell or someone being styled in women's clothes and jewelry in the 1980s and cis fans being just like "that's just something people do" rather than interrogating what it might personally mean about the musician's gender identity. Therefore, as a high schooler in the early 1990s, I definitely wore dresses, jewelry, and makeup to school on more than one occasion. Anyway, in my case, I was definitely naive to what other people - like Kurt - might be going through that would lead them to wear a dress.

Also, just wanted to add, for completion's sake, that Cobain once spraypainted a bank with the phrase "HOMOSEXUAL SEX RULES".

And now, half in jest and half serious - what about the multiple-occasion-dress-wearing and frequently-frenching-each-other Chi-Peps?

i do not believe ufo is cisnormative

as a trans person i am pretty uncomfortable with projecting backward onto popular figures but that’s just me ppl can do whatever they want

brad is correct, i'm trans

i think it's weird to actually give this more serious thought than just making a few twitter jokes about it & i wouldn't have thought here is really the best place for it either

brad is correct, i'm trans

i think it's weird to actually give this more serious thought than just making a few twitter jokes about it & i wouldn't have thought here is really the best place for it either

― ufo

i'm not sure there really is a "good place" for this kind of thing! it's an uncomfortable topic that brings out strong emotions, including mine. it's really easy for people to make assumptions about it. i wasn't, honestly, _planning_ to post the piece here as some kind of a great rhetorical masterstroke. it came more out of the exhausted and cantankerous "fuck it, i'm just gonna do this" energy that motivated my transition in the first place.

i mean the truth is the greyrocking "your objection is duly noted" response is sincere, there's always a cost to speaking up, and we don't necessarily know ahead of time what the cost will be. the part of the cost i take most seriously is that it's primarily taking something that's a serious topic of contention among trans folks and making those rifts _visible_. it's not a topic it's _easy_ to have a civil disagreement on.

it's a large part of why i wrote "Kurt Cobain Will Have His Revenge on the Straights" the way i did. i'm not trying to represent, say, brad's discomfort in how i wrote chuck, chuck is sort of the voice of my _own_ discomfort. i have the really strong conviction i expressed upthread that talking publicly about this is something i _need_ to do, but do i think it's... _right_? i don't believe _i'm_ right, or wrong, about this, and i wish i could just not say it, but i just can't not say it.

and anything anybody says to me in response, the best i can do is try to accept that with equanimity and without judging anybody else for what they say but, at the same time, while trying not to take it like super personally.

it's a weird and random place for me to do it, but i feel like... there are worse places, you know? if i gotta say anything at all in public about it, which i guess i sort of do.

This is interesting. Growing up as a cis guy, I had always assumed that many of the items in Kate's List of Evidence were maybe due to a mixture of genuine earnest feminist/LGBT allyship with a healthy dose of "freaking out the squares".

― peace, man

i think one of the good points chuck makes is that we can't _really_ say that it _wasn't_ a combination of being a "really good ally" and anger, "violent fantasies" even, against bigoted and repressive conservatives. that's one of the things about transness in general, the way trans people interpret our own trans experiences in such a way to conform with cisnormative narratives, narratives that deny the _possibility_ of our own transness. that's why the real question at the heart of this isn't "is kurt cobain trans?" but "is it right to ask whether kurt cobain is trans?" by the time any of us get to a point where we feel like we can honestly _ask_ if we're trans, by the time any of us _allow_ ourselves to ask, the answer is pretty fucking obvious. "i'm just a really good ally" is one of the _more common_ excuses that so-called "eggs" use to avoid genuinely considering their own gender identity.

one of the things i'm challenging by arguing for the _necessity_ of asking whether kurt cobain is trans is the idea of "self-determination" as a solely individual act. it's a kind of scary line of thinking because individual self-determination is sort of an unfalsifiable defense. if i say i'm trans and dr. ray blanchard says i have a psychological disorder known as "autogynephilia", individual self-determination means i can say "look, who the fuck do you think knows more about who i am, me, or you?"

thing is, i could have said that just as easily 20 years ago, but nobody would have believed me. "individual self-determination", to me, is somewhat akin to the american myth of rugged individualism. i'm not a self-made woman. my gender identity only exists meaningfully within community. my right to self-determine didn't emerge out of a vacuum - it was the result of decades of prior _collective_ self-determination by radical trans communities. if we're going to argue as, for instance, serano does, against transness being defined as a "social contagion", well, why not take the next step and talk about how cisheteronormativity (_not_, i want to be clear, being cishet) is a contagion, is a plague that has afflicted us queer people for too long?

because, of course, the implication of the preceding is that we do, in fact, _need_ cishets to acknowledge us as legitimate. because cishets could just turn around and change their minds and go back to trying to stomp us into dust.

i trust y'all not to do that, but you know, maybe i'm being reckless and stupid and doing something that will have terrible consequences for all of us. i don't really _know_, do i?

Sorry for the assumption ufo. I just got hairtrigger defensive because this topic is really important to me. Like Kate, it brings up some pretty big feels for me. And I think it's an important conversation (esp for transfemmes of a certain age like me) and not just a dumb internet meme.

I get your objections and I really shouldn't have assumed. Guess I was being cisnormative in my response by assuming cisness. I mean 99 times out of a hundred I'd be right... No excuse I know but there it is.

Also I think ILM is as good a forum as any for this discussion. Trans people are often siloed and the vast majority of people don't even know these conversations exist.

I think it's fitting we're having this conversation on a music board, because the clues are all there in Kurt's music. His experience of gender - of not really understanding why he felt the way he did, his hatred of the jock worldview etc - is scattered throughout his creative output. I think it's fundamental to understanding why he wrote songs the way he did.

personally i have a healthy respect for memes. i mean, i spent a quarter century building up this six foot steel vault door of denial, the kind of thing it would take peter capaldi 700 billion years to punch through. then some 13 year old kid makes an anakin skywalker shitpost on egg_irl and turns it into shrapnel. i'm not sure it's _possible_ to take something like that too seriously.

What would this add to the conversation? Unless he explicitly told them he was trans, I doubt it would add anything.

People are really good at ignoring the signs, even if they're really close to that person. It's amazing how much contradictory information people will simply ignore despite the congnitive dissonance. This goes for trans people before coming out, as much as those around them.

― The Ghost Club

well, have folks here read what el sandifer wrote about dave carter? it's a really sad and complicated situation. i think what carter's partner tracy grammer has to say about carter's gender dysphoria adds a _great deal_ to the conversation. on the other hand, her insistence that it's _wrong_ to say that carter was a trans woman is... i won't say it _detracts_ from the conversation, but what it brings to the conversation is pain, and loss, and hurting. and not just grammer's. whether it adds anything to the conversation or not i think... it's a necessary thing for us to reckon with.

Hadn't read that before Kate. Fascinating read. Link if anyone's interested:
https://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/the-wasted-daughter-of-the-moon-the-trans-genius-of-dave-carter

I'm not sure how I feel about Sandifer's choice to use she/her pronouns. I'll have to sit with this a while longer.

I will say it was jarring for Sandifer to use the term 'preferred pronouns'. Pronouns are not a preference. They're integral to identity (even if not linked to gender) and dignity. Liking coffee black is a preference. Using the correct pronouns is not. It's just not fucking optional.

Ultimately we don't know what pronouns Carter would have used but whatever they were, they wouldn't be preferred. They'd be Carter's pronouns.

Derail I know, but 'preferred pronouns' is a bugbear of mine.

Just wanted to say that as a straight male, I appreciated the read and the deeper point, the oscillation between hypothesis and certainty, the two Matrix levels of reality, transness as a Schrödinger's cat. Was Kurt Cobain a Schrödinger's cat ?

That said, the sentence that jumped at me, and you will no doubt claim that it's incredibly cis of me, was "I just have a hard time thinking of a cis man who could write songs like that". That makes me uncomfortable, because I think that's also a projection / reduction of what being a man is, especially once you deduct all the interesting identities that are claimed / assumed (I'm not saying they're fake) and leave "man" behind as the least interesting and desirable of them. When I read about trans topics, I have somewhat accepted that this is a kind of necessary evil conclusion that helps drive the point home (the point being toxic masculinity, patriarchy, the basic tenants of feminism). I've never especially identified as a man, in the same sense that my spouse never identified as black growing up where she grew up. I have emotional experiences that give nuance and uniqueness to what being a man is. Instead of splitting identities away from conventional genders, again and again until we all have our own, I wish we could restore the sense of nuance and spectrum in the genders as they were known in 1994. Because they're constructs anyway. I say this as a wish, but it's not a wish, it's trying to say that it leads to the same point. And maybe then it becomes less important to "reclaim" someone like Kurt, because you can situate commonalities, understanding, in not just Kurt, it's not us VS them. Which is probably the point of Kate's "what if" scenario.

Anyway, I don't want to be too imposing by posting this in a thread where there's clearly a majority of trans people (or at least LGBTQ) who wish to exchange about their experience. But I occasionally think about gender too.

You make a good case there Kate

Also I think ILM is as good a forum as any for this discussion. Trans people are often siloed and the vast majority of people don't even know these conversations exist.

I think it's fitting we're having this conversation on a music board, because the clues are all there in Kurt's music. His experience of gender - of not really understanding why he felt the way he did, his hatred of the jock worldview etc - is scattered throughout his creative output. I think it's fundamental to understanding why he wrote songs the way he did.

― The Ghost Club, Friday, 7 October 2022 04:30 (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Great post! More trans chat on ILM please!

(Am also trans)

I'm not comfortable with this line of thinking because it aligns with the idea that people's identities are somehow observable on the outside or can be reduced into stereotypes.

It's been used now and forever to push people into conforming. Like saying that a flamboyant campy straight man is secretly gay, a person who doesn't fit into that mold isn't gay enough and bi people are straight if they mostly prefer the opposite gender, or that being trans is just some boxes to be checked without consulting the person in question.

As another cis hetero man, Nabozo's xxxp really resonates with me. Very open to learning and considering perspectives that are new and don't come natural to me, so it has been impactful considering the title question and reading everyone's thoughts about it, including Kate's post. But I also feel invested in expanding what is signified by being a cis hetero man so that it includes me and not just a picture of masculinity that I don't identify with.

Yes, I appreciate Nabozo's and braised cod's posts.

I sympathize with strongly desiring to expand or break the constricting norms of cis het masculinity (or other gendered identities), and Cobain did represent that possibility for me in adolescence. But he wasn't/isn't the only person to do so, so I don't ultimately think asking this question about one individual is too worrisome. If he'd lived and eventually came out as queer or transitioned that wouldn't have undermined his initial effect on my worldview; indeed, other prominent out queer people were important for also helping me deal with suffocating masc norms—you don't have to just look to cis het men for this.

way in over my head here but the dysphoria in cobain does strike me as the beginning of a trans journey.

Logorrhea alert! I had some coffee this morning and this is a topic I'm obviously passionate about.

I will say it was jarring for Sandifer to use the term 'preferred pronouns'. Pronouns are not a preference. They're integral to identity (even if not linked to gender) and dignity. Liking coffee black is a preference. Using the correct pronouns is not. It's just not fucking optional.

― The Ghost Club

The relationship between language and gender is a particular interest of mine. Experiencing transness for me was in large part about having the _language_ to describe it. You're looking at the phrase from a linguistically prescriptivist perspective. I've similarly seen people who transitioned when "transsexual" was the preferred term argue that "transgender" is inaccurate, because they didn't change their gender, and in prescriptivist terms they're correct! More important, though, is that the words we use to describe ourselves are shaped by the environment we're in. In 2019, when I started transition, the implication that "preferred pronouns" might be dismissive of trans identities just wasn't something people really _thought_ about. It's honestly not something I think about much today, though it's something I'm working on. You're right that "preferred pronouns" shouldn't be the preferred nomenclature, but it's often hard for me to keep up with the new ways we're understanding things. Three years doesn't seem like a long time, but in trans terms, it's an eternity. So much has _changed_ in the past three years.

To sort of add on to what I was saying yesterday... I think that Courtney Love's perspective on Kurt Cobain's gender identity in particular _does_ matter, a lot. More than what any other individual person might have to say about it. She knew Kurt as nobody alive today knows him, as nobody else will ever know him. She was the most important person in his life. And how has she been treated for it? Abused, ignored, mocked, dismissed as "crazy". Fucking... fucking _El Duce_ says she _killed_ her husband and people _listen_ to him, but they don't listen to her. Why? Why would anybody take seriously anything a shitstain like El Duce says? That's a rhetorical question. It is, of course, because El Duce is a _man_, and Courtney Love is a _woman_.

What Courtney Love says about Kurt Cobain matters, the same way what Tracy Grammer says about Dave Carter matters. If Courtney says "My husband wasn't a woman, and anybody who says he was is wrong", what she says should be listened to and taken seriously. She's completely justified in saying that. She has every right.

Of course, it's not really necessary or incumbent on her to say anything at all about her husband's gender identity. For more than thirty years now people have been spinning all sorts of ridiculous theories about him. He was a trans woman... why now? Because he _looked sad_?

I was having an interesting discussion with a friend yesterday over whether or not I'm promulgating a conspiracy theory. My belief is that I absolutely am. Cassie Labelle wrote this really interesting piece about the intersection of transness and conspiracy theories back in '19:

https://cassielabelle.medium.com/being-trans-is-like-believing-a-conspiracy-theory-about-yourself-7d8d12238bbf

This is the first time I've ever seen another person talk about this aspect of it, but it is something that really resonates with me. From a certain perspective, to say I'm trans is to make some pretty wild claims. So I'm a woman - OK, fair enough. But I didn't figure this out until I was _43_ years old? Why would this be again? Oh, yes. Ah. A conspiracy perpetrated by the medical establishment against trans people. They set up an arbitrary and false definition of "transness" that excluded pretty much all actual trans people, redefining our gender identities as a "sexual fetish" - or, in the case of transmasculine people, simply acting like _we didn't exist_. They ignored our protestations to the contrary, insisting that their biased beliefs were the truth and that our attempts to correct them were the delusional ravings of pathologically disordered people. They neglected, and in fact are _still neglecting_, to properly research and inform people of the life-saving effects of cheap, readily available drugs that can treat gender dysphoria, exaggerating the dangers of these drugs and falsely claiming that they are "dangerous" and cause "irreversible damage". They embarked on a propaganda campaign to frame these drugs not as the miracle treatment they are but as, for instance, "chemical castration". Why did they do this? For no other reason than to promote their own twisted agenda - The Cis Agenda. And then they claim that _we_ are the ones who have an "agenda", an "ideology".

Well, that's bad enough, but in fact the Cis Agenda is not something that was invented by these doctors. They were merely unwitting _agents_ of the Cis Agenda - a far vaster, more far-reaching conspiracy, one involving the entirety of "Western Culture" - capitalism, imperialism, Christianity. This sick, twisted agenda claims that there are only two genders, man and woman, and that these genders are determined by one's genitals, which it falsely alleges are always clear and unambiguous. It says that women are not just _different_ from men, but _categorically inferior_ to men. And this conspiracy has been so breathtakingly successful that it has conquered the world. For ages none dared question it, none dared call it... conspiracy.

I mean, this is what I actually believe. I'm a fucking trans truther. One of the things eggs think about, sometimes, is travelling back in time and trying to tell our past selves the truth. Look, I've been a deranged conspiracy theorist my whole life, but I can't see a timeline in which my 1996 past self wouldn't dismiss this story as the ravings of a deranged, though admittedly hot, lunatic. As long as I'm limiting what I'm saying in scope to myself, there's not really that much of an issue. But if I start saying it about one of the _biggest rock stars of the 1990s_...

It's all true, of course. Every word of it. But who will _listen_?

That said, the sentence that jumped at me, and you will no doubt claim that it's incredibly cis of me, was "I just have a hard time thinking of a cis man who could write songs like that". That makes me uncomfortable, because I think that's also a projection / reduction of what being a man is, especially once you deduct all the interesting identities that are claimed / assumed (I'm not saying they're fake) and leave "man" behind as the least interesting and desirable of them.

― Nabozo

Well, first off, I do want to acknowledge that my arguments _are_, well, _problematic_. That's the other thing that makes my saying Kurt Cobain was trans a conspiracy theory - it's an _unfalsifiable hypothesis_. The only person who convince me that Kurt Cobain wasn't trans is Cobain himself, and he's dead.

The problem here from the cis side of things is that when we think about gender, we do apply a biased standard. To say that Kurt Cobain was "cis" is both utterly anachronistic (I don't think the term "cisgender" even existed when Cobain died) and completely indefensible in evidentiary terms. I mean, what possible argument can you make for it? That's how The Null HypotheCis comes into things.

If you really take the Null HypotheCis seriously, well, the Cis Agenda has sort of hoisted itself on its own petard. They were the ones who made an arbitrary and false set of assumptions the _unquestionable norm_. They were the ones who defined transness as fundamentally disordered and pathological. Stripping away that bias leaves a double standard. My saying that I'm trans is supported by my having undergone significant effort, stigma, and sacrifice to challenge a dominant paradigm that seeks to erase me from existence. For someone to say that they're cis is, unavoidably, to _embrace_ that dominant paradigm, to conform to the tenets of that false belief system.

I mean it's not anybody's fucking _fault_ if they're cis. It's every bit as normal to be cis as it is to be trans. However, cisnormative bias means that a lot of us who are trans incorrectly believe ourselves, and tell others, that we are cis. The cis people all freak out about the remote possibility that someone claims they're trans but turn out not to be because of, you know, _social contagion_, but it's _far_ more likely, in practice, for someone to falsely believe themselves to be _cisgender_. Someone who genuinely believes themselves to be cisgender is in some sense trying to hit an impossibly high mark - an impossibly high mark that is the _inevitable result_ of the impossibly high mark the Cis Agenda has set for _transness_. It's really similar to the way misogyny hurts men. True equality and self-determination can only come when we dismantle institutional patriarchal cisnormativity. In the meantime, all I can say is - if somebody tells me they're cis, I believe them. No other evidence is possible or necessary.

And I'm applying a different standard to Cobain. This is a problem. I'm doing it for a couple reasons. First is that Cobain is dead, and second is that Cobain _never had the opportunity_ to make an informed decision about his own gender identity.

The third reason is, well, that he was _fucking trans_. It's the sunglasses from They Live. You put the sunglasses on, and you see it. If you're cis, you don't have any reason to put the sunglasses on, you don't have any reason to look at things from the perspective we look at it from. You don't have our _lived experience_. If someone tells me Kurt Cobain is cis, I'm not going to make a rational argument, I'm just gonna look at them and say "Come on, seriously? _Kurt Cobain_? Cis?" Like I just can't see that as a _credible_ statement, and I know that's _problematic_. I mean, it's _possible_ that I'm projecting, it's _possible_ that I'm seeing things that aren't there. It's possible that _all of us_, every one of us who independently came to this conclusion and never told each other, are seeing things that aren't there. It doesn't seem terribly _likely_ to me, but it's possible.

I don't think being a cis man is not _interesting_ or _desirable_! I just think that it's... an _unmarked status_. Again, cisheteronormative white supremacist patriarchy has made being a cishet white man equivalent to _default human_. If and (hopefully) when that stops being the case, nobody will have to correct for that built-in bias.

When I read about trans topics, I have somewhat accepted that this is a kind of necessary evil conclusion that helps drive the point home (the point being toxic masculinity, patriarchy, the basic tenants of feminism). I've never especially identified as a man, in the same sense that my spouse never identified as black growing up where she grew up. I have emotional experiences that give nuance and uniqueness to what being a man is. Instead of splitting identities away from conventional genders, again and again until we all have our own, I wish we could restore the sense of nuance and spectrum in the genders as they were known in 1994. Because they're constructs anyway. I say this as a wish, but it's not a wish, it's trying to say that it leads to the same point. And maybe then it becomes less important to "reclaim" someone like Kurt, because you can situate commonalities, understanding, in not just Kurt, it's not us VS them. Which is probably the point of Kate's "what if" scenario.

― Nabozo

Oh actually you just said this. That's what I get for writing before reading. Uh, yeah, so I agree with you for the most part. The "no gender"/"more genders" split is a common split in the trans community, most commonly expressed in that meme that shows the two represented by people who then make out, and that's sort of my position on the issue. Gender is real and gender is a social construct, why not both. Is my position on the issue. Not that queer people who disagree with each other should make out. I mean I'm not opposed, if they want to. I'm very much in favor honestly. But that's up to them.

I'm not comfortable with this line of thinking because it aligns with the idea that people's identities are somehow observable on the outside or can be reduced into stereotypes.

It's been used now and forever to push people into conforming. Like saying that a flamboyant campy straight man is secretly gay, a person who doesn't fit into that mold isn't gay enough and bi people are straight if they mostly prefer the opposite gender, or that being trans is just some boxes to be checked without consulting the person in question.

― braised cod

This is _possible_, this _does_ happen, and I'm opposed to it. Both in terms of genderqueer people who present as their AGAB being shat on for not being "queer" enough, and in terms of gender non-conforming cis people being told to "just transition already". Gender isn't presentation! To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a femboy is just a femboy.

At the same time, the pipeline is real, and I've been down it. Systemic anti-trans bias meant that when I was questioning, it was a lot easier for me to identify as "not cis" or "genderqueer". It was one of the _necessary preliminaries_ that had to happen before I could honestly consider the question of whether or not I was trans. It's really a fine line to negotiate - correcting for internalized transphobia versus trying to come up with some awful (and impossible) notion of "transnormativity". In the case of someone like Cobain, transphobia was arguably at its _apex_ during his late adolescence and adulthood, and so I think greater interpretive latitude can be attributed to his words and actions than I would feel comfortable with when talking about someone in 2022. I actually really _don't_ want to be presentist when talking about his experience!

Anyway, I don't want to be too imposing by posting this in a thread where there's clearly a majority of trans people (or at least LGBTQ) who wish to exchange about their experience. But I occasionally think about gender too.

― Nabozo

This thread is _very explicitly_ inclusive of cishet people. If I wanted this to be just a conversation held within queer communities, there are places I could talk about this that wouldn't include cishet people. You're not just welcome here, but it's _important_ that you be here. This affects you.

i like this idea and hope it's true for a couple reasons:

1. people being trans needs to be normalized.

2. the amount of goobers it will make mad and the intensity of that potential anger is fucking hilarious. xpost back to "kurt freakin out the squares" theory- somehow even more relevant in this context.

no other real big thoughts on this besides a special shout for kate: always articulate, always poignant, and always a pleasure to read you.

Vanilla Genexer vibechecking in with my 2 cents (male/cis/straight). I think this is a really cool topic but a year ago I probably would have scoffed or thought it cringe and a reach. First of all I have recently taken more seriously the idea that people like Little Richard and Prince could maybe be considered on some sort of gender identity spectrum that isn't 100% male, in spite of what they said during their lives, based on how they lived. And I didn't realize until recently this is quite different than saying "Little Richard was bi, traumatized by sexual abuse and his socialized religious beliefs, (etc.)" It's more like saying artists of the past who to a greater or lesser extent embraced the side of themselves that was the opposite of their assigned gender should not just be celebrated as rebellious and cool for doing so, but recognized as possibly having enormous internal pain dealing with what might be an uncompleted process, given the era they were living.

Not that you retcon them or confrontationally tell their fans "hey did you know Little Richard was probably trans" but as a listener, your experience of their music might be enriched by considering this perspective. Why "Frutti"(fruity) for a start. It's helped me enjoy Little Richard's ballads more to just sit with them as heartfelt and sometimes deeply pained love songs from a non-gender-conforming person. I think a few years ago I would have found that frame an imposition of ideology on the music that would obscure "what's really in the music" but it feels right to me now. So I'm comfortable with the idea of others listening to Cobain this way even if I can't really hear it.

Not to be reductive, but this discussion reminds me of how Shakespeare is sometimes (over)analyzed - he wrote love sonnets about a fair youth, he seemed to understand or be drawn to the need for people to not just cross dress but search for a new gender identity, he portrayed youthful hetero love as frivolous and changeable but male friendship bonds as love more enduring... etc... he must have been secretly gay... this can rub people the wrong way, to put it mildly. "You gays can't steal my hero!"

In Shakespeare's case, a lot of historical context might be needed to look at why what he wrote might not be, at the time, a sort of coded statement or clue to the man's true gender preference, but instead might be an insight into how love and friendship and identity were just different at the time. And I think some of that historical interrogation is what some of the people objecting to this view of Cobain are trying to offer in good faith.

This accords with ideas I embraced in my 2nd wave feminist youth but feel like I've forgotten about over the past 30 years as I tried to find my way as a somewhat fey dude in a man's man's world. I was ashamed of my softer voice, lack of athletic ability, lack of masculine charisma, even as I didn't find it too hard to be charismatic in other ways in the book-reading film-discussing crowd. I was ashamed to admit I was ashamed, too. I suppressed that fear of my own lack of 100% maleness. I hated the jocks just like Cobain did, but as I grew into my 20s I realized I wanted to be more masculine, not less, and wanted to get in shape, understand how to fit in with men, etc. Was I only 90% male then, and suppressing something female? I don't think I had any language to discuss such things. And nowadays as I approach 50 I'm perfectly comfortable just being a married dude about to have a kid and whatever, I'm not the most masculine dude but I think it would be ridiculous to tell people I'm nonbinary or something just because I'm not the mostly dudely dude.

Back to the topic at hand. I know Cobain like a lot of grunge artists was huge into the Frog's album "It's Only Right and Natural", which is so far as I know an album by straight guys who think making provocative gay jokes was positive, and then they made a similar album with provocative racial joke-songs that most everyone hated or didn't understand. It's gender-questioning in a crass and unserious way, reminiscent of all the UK punk bands flirting with nazi imagery in the 70s. Or was it empowering? It feels off now, anyway.

And there's not really anything else on Cobain's list of his favorite 50 records that even addresses gender identity, it's mostly classic weird punk and some female post punk, and Bowie's album where he wore a dress on the cover but didn't really say anything about gender identity either. He didn't pick Hunky Dory, is all I'm saying. My take, then: he wasn't trans, I don't see it, it's ok if you see it, after all I accept that many people don't want to consider Little Richard trans either. But I think you can say Cobain was maybe more gender nonconforming than your typical Genex rocker.

"Was Kurt Cobain the most gender nonconforming of his generation?"
"Kurt isn't even the most gender nonconforming in Nirvana!"

And nowadays as I approach 50 I'm perfectly comfortable just being a married dude about to have a kid and whatever, I'm not the most masculine dude but I think it would be ridiculous to tell people I'm nonbinary or something just because I'm not the mostly dudely dude.

i have often thought about this. i wish the option to do this had been around in my youth.

i think had been being NB been an option in previous decades, countless figures in music would have identified themselves as such.

Guys, it's never too late to start questioning your gender identity!

i think had been being NB been an option in previous decades, countless figures in music would have identified themselves as such.

You gotta think so. I wasn't aware it was an option until about maybe ten years ago

Guys, it's never too late to start questioning your gender identity!

― paolo

otm

There are two types of people: binary and non-binary.
Since I heard that joke I can't take it out of my head.

Reading through these posts and listening to Phoebe Bridgers and quietly sobbing. Thinking about trans stuff gets heavy sometimes in a way cis people can't ever understand.

Re Kurt I get how cis people can be like "yeah, I don't see it" but I think that's a function of cisnormativity. Unless you're trans, it's possible you can't ever see it. Whereas to a trans gal like me, it's so fucking obvious. It's all through his music, his statements, his clothes, the wounded look in his eyes. Kurt was undeniably trans and nobody can convince me otherwise.

Right, this shit is too heavy, back to sad transfemme enby sobbing... As you were....

I did also get some lols from ILMers saying some unintentionally very yolky things though. Thanks for the giggles.

Re Kurt I get how cis people can be like "yeah, I don't see it" but I think that's a function of cisnormativity. Unless you're trans, it's possible you can't ever see it. Whereas to a trans gal like me, it's so fucking obvious. It's all through his music, his statements, his clothes, the wounded look in his eyes. Kurt was undeniably trans and nobody can convince me otherwise.

Ah yes, only trans women get wounded looks in their eyes.

But as I said on the other thread, I find it problematic and wrong-headed to engage in retroactive declaration of gender identity. It seems much more about the will of those who want to believe that (said person) was trans than anything else—

I think about my own gender expression and relationality all the time, partly because I'm a queer guy who has dated and been in sexual relationships with both trans guys and trans women, but also because, well, it's an interesting topic. My partner and I are often read as trans gay guys, and I've been asked many multiple times if I'm a trans woman for many of the same reasons that kate and The Ghost Club mention in their justifications for deeming Kurt to be a trans woman.

I'm not trying to be aggressive, but just say that there is a distinct possibility that Kurt was trans, but also a distinct possibility that he was not, and not just because the traits, statements, and beliefs that are being related in order to bolster the "Kurt was trans" argument seem to be suffering from the fallacy of incomplete evidence.

In Kate's defense, the thread title does have a question mark on it

The reason I've gotten worked up is partly because the reduction of character attributes, virtues, belief systems, knowledge, and *looks* to gender identity seems extremely problematic to me. And as much as I am genuinely flattered when people think I'm trans, I just don't think I am based on my sexual experiences and related but non-sexual experiences.

This thread is edumacatin’ me

ya. Move to rescind ufo's fp

Sorry for the disruption, I haven't read much of the thread yet but after seeing Milton Nascimento last night I spen

t most of the trip home wondering if he might be a trans woman. Not that I would put much stock in my own thoughts about this, of course. Love it that he's using his final moment in the limelight to show support for trans and gnc artists (his support act was a trans woman, or at least presented as female, and he gas gnc members in his band).

Nascimento remembered how as a boy he had been obsessed with female singers and grew despondent when his voice began to break. Only after hearing a Ray Charles recording of Stella By Starlight age 13 did he grasp the beauty of the male voice. “He cured me that day,” he said.

<3 <3 <3

Love him so much

I love your Tumblr post, Kate!

I think a salient point here is that Kurt was likely less interested in "freaking out the squares" and more interested in "queering the x" where x is gender, sexuality, "rock music", etc.-- and his work (music, journal entries, graffiti, etc.) reflect this. Considering the possibility that Kurt might've been a trans woman (or some form of gender queer) is a fun exercise; more important (to me) is that his work was decidedly working to "queer" things, and could be considered "queer work", which I've always implicitly thought was the case

My preference toward anti-essentialism informs my belief that queer work can be created be folks of any stripe-- some of my favourite queer art is indeed made by "functionally straight people" who are interested in making queer art, just as some of the most heteronormative art I've encountered has been operating under the guise of "queerness" ("Call Me By Your Name" springs to mind; despite having been directed and screenplay'd by gay dudes, there is nothing queer about it, to me, at all; Luca's "I Am Love" functions far more as a work of Excellent Queer Art despite having a heterosexual couple at its centre).

Just as table has commented that he feels flattered by people asking if he's trans, I would anticipate that a living Kurt Cobain would be appreciative of Kate's explorations, here. I don't think there is any similarities to whatever it is that Mormons do to dead people, here

I find it problematic and wrong-headed to engage in retroactive declaration of gender identity. It seems much more about the will of those who want to believe that (said person) was trans than anything else—

definitely feel this, but i'm also way out of the conversation as basically a cis dude. still doesn't change the fact that if true -AND THAT'S A BIG IF- i would still think it's awesome. it would mean that trans people experience -GASP- universal human emotions.

(if it means anything, i identify asexual and have been "presumed" gay in the past because i guess i'm "flamboyant" at times? idk, who cares honestly)

(also i've jokingly said for years that there's no possibility of me being gay or trans because i'm not that cool. status quo boring vanilla nerd 4 life)

Good Tumblr post, and good thread.

Speaking as one of those cis men who are "not like other cis men": I never had an opinion about Kurt or Nirvana (before my time) but I understand that Kurt's example inspired many young men to do the whole "being a man" thing differently, in ways that felt more natural and less restrictive and more genuine and respectful and plural and solidaristic (?) And so the idea that these men, when their masculine ideals got reshaped by Kurt, were learning stuff about what kinds of men they wanted to be from someone who wasn't actually a man and wasn't happy trying to be one, I think is pretty cool.

mostly i'm kind of hanging back here because there's kind of a lot to process! it's a complicated topic.

i agree in particular with fgti pointing out that much of cobain's work consists of _queering_ normative culture, and that one does not need to actually _be_ queer in order to do this. i think his work in this regard is important and valuable, and i think he sets a positive role model for men regardless of...

ok, actually, there's a really good precedent here. the 2019 philosophy tube video "men. abuse. trauma." this is a truly excellent, powerful, and affecting video on how trauma and abuse affects men specifically, grounded in thorn's alleged lived experience as a cisgender man.

so _slight_ problem, it turns out that abigail thorn is _not_ a cisgender man after all. she is a transgender woman. so what? does this mean that her video is invalid, because the assumptions she went into it making turned out to be incorrect? does this mean that it's wrong for a cisgender man to be inspired by this video, to relate to this video?

like hell it does. in the same sense, whether or not kurt cobain was or wasn't a trans woman doesn't mean that he can't still be an inspirational figure to _everyone_. cobain can speak compellingly to masculinity without being a man, just as he can speak compellingly to femininity without being a woman.

that said i really _don't_ look at what i'm doing as a "what-if" exercise. for me it's more about how we choose to frame what actually happened, what lens we use to interpret the evidence available to us.

one way i would frame it is that while "transness" is not an illness, but a subjective self-determination of gender identity, _gender dysphoria_ can be much more closely analogized to other behavioral health issues, like, say, depression. for instance, it's anachronistic to say that abraham lincoln suffered from depression, but the symptoms he experienced are entirely consistent with our present-day understanding of it. the same way, even if we _can't_ say with objective certainty that kurt cobain was a trans woman, he clearly and openly displayed a number of behaviors and symptoms that are entirely consistent with what we now understand as gender dysphoria. are there other _possible_ explanations for each and every one of his behaviors and symptoms? absolutely. cobain is, however, i would say _exceptional_ in how well his behaviors and symptoms correspond with our current understanding of gender dysphoria.

the broader philosophical, moral, ethical, political issues are really interesting and are well worth exploring in detail, but without the strong, direct evidence that cobain suffered from gender dysphoria, such speculation would be idle. there is, i'd say, readily available and compelling evidence that cobain suffered negative effects from gender dysphoria, including heroin addiction and suicide, and compelling clinical evidence available _today_ to suggest that these outcomes could have been avoided if he'd had the opportunity to (1) understand the cause of his symptoms and (2) benefit from gender-affirming treatment, which is both safe and overwhelmingly effective. that aspect of it is pretty important to me.

now, that's an overly reductive way of looking at it, and god knows i'm not exactly overwhelmingly enthusiastic about anything even _remotely suggestive_ of transmedicalism, but i don't know how to take into account what happened to him _without_ reference to any sort of a clinical perspective.

lol this thread makes me so unhappy, i think i just need to bounce for a while

xxxp Austin I'm asexual too! High five! And cis people can absolutely take part in this conversation

i'd much rather have brad (who is one of the best posters here) around than this thread

"gender dysphoria" is not really a useful framework for transness & is a term from the medical establishment with a real mess of a history as a diagnosis. you see its inadequacy in the repeated community debate of "do you need gender dysphoria to be trans?" - those insisting 'yes' are generally terrible, those insisting 'no' are better but still falling into the trap of accepting it as a framework. a much better way to think about transness is that it's defined by transitioning, or a desire to. the concept of dysphoria is completely irrelevant to that.

cobain did not transition, or express a desire to as far as we know - therefore, he was not trans in any meaningful sense. you can note whatever traits he had that are considered common in closeted trans women, and go 'huh isn't that interesting' or make some silly twitter jokes about it, or speculate that maybe he would have transitioned given different circumstances, but there's not anything at all definitive. to be so insistent about it like you are here is genuinely very weird and presumptive. claiming him as 'one of us' is meaningless. going further and trying to attribute cobain's suicide and heroin addiction to his speculative transness is even weirder and really pretty gross honestly.

I've been asked many multiple times if I'm a trans woman for many of the same reasons that kate and The Ghost Club mention in their justifications for deeming Kurt to be a trans woman.

yeah i've known people to be weird about this stuff and it's never good for anyone. asking someone "are you trans" is never really a good question outside fairly particular contexts where it's somehow directly relevant.

cis people can absolutely take part in this conversation

please don't encourage cis people to speculate about the trans status of other people, they can get even weirder about it than we do

there is, i'd say, readily available and compelling evidence that cobain suffered negative effects from gender dysphoria, including heroin addiction and suicide, and compelling clinical evidence available _today_ to suggest that these outcomes could have been avoided if he'd had the opportunity to (1) understand the cause of his symptoms and (2) benefit from gender-affirming treatment, which is both safe and overwhelmingly effective. that aspect of it is pretty important to me.

i'd much rather have brad (who is one of the best posters here) around than this thread

― ufo

same! if i'm going to do "what-if" thinking, that's my "what-if" thinking. what if i could keep my damn mouth shut. what if i could not _say_ things that hurt people i care about. what if i could let go of these _irrational convictions_ i have. what if i could just not be _wrong_.

and the words i have to use, the words _we_ have to use, suck. they're poison. they're tainted. we deprecate and we reclaim and everything we have is inadequate. i mean, more than inadequate. all the words are g- ghastly.

i mean what is "gender dysphoria", really? is it some malady i was born with? not really. "gender dysphoria", the way i experience it, is that i feel bad when people treat me like shit. medicalizing that is stupid. dangerous, even. yesterday one of my friends was in wal-mart and a group of people started following her around, jeering at her, ridiculing her for being queer. she wants to die. is that _gender dysphoria_? is that a _clinical symptom_?

i mean, yes. that's how it's defined. that's what it is. and "gender affirming treatment", on the other hand, that doesn't require taking hormones, that doesn't require getting surgery. "gender affirming treatment" is when you can go shopping at a wal-mart, regardless of whether or not you "pass", and you don't have to _worry_ about something like that happening to you.

that's just what happened yesterday. today it will be something else. maybe somebody comes out to their parents and gets called a "groomer" and told they belong in a death camp. maybe today another one of my friends gets assaulted. maybe today somebody dies. two people in oregon in a week last month. i'd tell you their names but i've already forgotten them. too many for me to remember.

dangerous and ghastly. i mean, that's my life. that's the world i live in. i don't know how to not be affected by that. i don't know how not to be shaped by that. i don't know how to not _internalize_ that.

it's ok to be queer, i've learned, it's ok to be trans, as long as you are _never wrong_. that was... i learned that a long time ago, actually. that's why i didn't transition until i was 43. sure, the idea sounds appealing, but all of the shit you have to go through as a trans person, just to exist. what if i do all that, what if i go through all that... and i'm _wrong_?

so yeah, my thinking is dangerous and ghastly and i've driven off at least one of the best posters here, probably more, and other people i respect, not just me, wish i'd never opened my mouth in the first place, and at the same time other people, people i also respect, think highly of me and are glad i've said what i said. hi, it's 2022 and i'm a trans woman.

what the fuck do i _do_ with that? i have _choices_, except all of my options are shitty and painful and hurt people i care about. again, trans woman, 2022.

i believe in the stuff that's in that tumblr upthread. i don't believe it's _right_, i don't believe i have the right to _say_ it, but i believe in it. and people talked about it a little and said things and last night i said something that was not just "not right" but was WRONG and in Discourse that's something that's unforgivable, unpardonable.

but god, how can any of us do anything at all if we can't ever be _wrong_?

If anyone's interested. I do try to learn from my mistakes.

To say that Kurt Cobain was a trans woman is factually incorrect. That's a reductive way of viewing what is a _very complicated_ topic, but on a basic factual level, Kurt Cobain was not a trans woman.

To _ask_ whether Kurt Cobain is a trans woman is... an _interesting_ question. Ultimately unanswerable, but _interesting_. I don't think it's necessarily the _right_ question to ask.

The right question to ask is: Was Kurt Cobain a cisgender man? Which isn't as _interesting_ a question as whether he was a trans woman. It's also... not really an answerable question, but in some sense I think it's _more_ answerable than asking whether or not he was a transgender woman is. It's... really hard for me to think of any way to come up with an answer to that question that's not "no".

In both cases it's possible to _say_ "we can't possibly know that", and be fundamentally _correct_. The challenging thing is that one can say that without even _considering_ the question, allowing one to leave one's pre-existing biases about gender and gender identity comfortably in place.

"Was Kurt trans?" gives me the same sense that I get from egg memes - this sense of being a _koan_, a means wherein one can radically recenter one's perspective and approach to reality. The thing about egg memes is that they're, in some sense, t4t - they have limited scope and audience. "Was Kurt trans?" has a potential for shattering the cisnormative illusion not just in _trans_ people but in _everyone_, cis or trans. Shattering this illusion is, I strongly believe, both _good_ and _necessary_.

Thus, despite the danger and threat it poses to trans people, I think it's an important question to ask. In some sense there is a Schroedinger's Cat aspect to it, with the caveat that in this case the box is unopenable. What's in the box? What are the _likelihoods_ of what we _would_ find?

You could do this with anyone, but the thing is... to leave someone's dead body in a hermetically sealed box while you speculate on their gender identity is, well. Ghastly. It's not a _kind_ thing to do a person without their consent.

The fact that Kurt would, in all likelihood, been EXTREMELY ENTHUSIASTIC about having this done to him... doesn't change the fact that he didn't _consent_ to it, but it makes it _less_ ghastly. If we're going to do something like this to _anyone_, I can't think of anyone better to do it to than him.

Fwiw, I think and know that queer people can be wrong all the time, and that’s fine. I respect you, kate, but think that you are wrong here, and that’s where I take my leave of this thread.

Jesus Christ. Time to go outside people.

Personally, I'm glad we're having this conversation. It may be uncomfortable, and elements of it may even be unpalatable, but I'm so glad it exists.

Please, everyone, go easy on Kate with your criticism. Throwing out language like 'ghastly' and 'dangerous' is likely to make her feel terrible. Personally, I'd be spiralling if that criticism was directed at me. Remember, Kurt Cobain is dead, and anything we say can't hurt him, but Kate is very much alive. Trans people are experts at making themselves feel like shit - seriously, we don't need any help. So let's keep the language measured, because you may not know the impact your words have.

And Kate, please don't be too harsh on yourself. As I said, I'm glad this conversation exists, and I'm humbled and grateful for you voicing something that many have thought, but have been too afraid to say.

There's an element of double standards at work here. Trans people often talk about these kinds of topics - amongst ourselves, in memes etc. What seems to be the issue is that we're talking about it seriously in public. To which I'd say - why shouldn't we? Queer narratives have been suppressed and erased for so long. In that light, this conversation is an act of resistance. It speaks to the fact that there isn't one trans narrative, one trans worldview, and that there is significant discord within trans communities. It's important to bring this to light. We live in a world where 'the trans agenda' is thrown around as if trans people are a united, homogenous group with consistent beliefs and agreed goals for trans liberation. That couldn't be further from the truth.

There's also an element of respectability politics in play. As in, don't talk about this, because what would the cis people think? To which I say, fuck respectability politics. Queer folx have self-censored for too long, and it leads to the erasure of real discourse and ultimately, puts our shared histories into the shadows.

It strikes me that we wouldn't be having such a debate if we were talking about an historical figure like Joan of Arc. There's plenty of very public discussion on whether she was a trans man or non-binary, but little of the same backlash about even bringing it up. Sure, there are arguments over whether it's anachronistic to use modern terms to describe an historical figure - but that's different to saying we shouldn't be having the conversation at all. I think a lot of the backlash here is because Kurt is within living memory, and his friends and family are still alive. But does that mean we shouldn't have the conversation? Do we suppress it until enough time has passed? And if so, what relevance would the conversation have? Personally, I think this conversation is relevant and powerful because Kurt is within living memory. He touched a lot of lives, including mine. There has been so much speculation on the source of Kurt's pain - why is it only ghoulish when the conversation is around gender identity? Again, I sense double standards at play.

The fact is, many trans people have independently come to the same conclusion about Kurt. It matters that someone who so clearly struggled with gender identity suffered in our lifetimes. It's a cautionary tale, a cry to action that no trans person should have to suffer in the same way again. And I don't think the conversation should be suppressed. Sure, there have been unpalatable elements to the conversation - personally, I'm a little uncomfortable with medicalised language around gender dysphoria, or the suggestion that Kurt's pain may have been alleviated by gender-affirming healthcare. But that's no reason not to have the conversation at all.

So again, thank you Kate for bringing this to light. It's a necessary conversation, an act of resistance against the self-censorship that cisheteronormative white supremacist patriarchal capitalism continues to impose on queer folx.

this thread really didn't need to exist if you weren't prepared for criticism. no one is saying this is "unforgivable" and "unpardonable"

i mean what is "gender dysphoria", really?

it's the medical system's understanding of transness. more colloquially it just means "negative feelings caused by transness", but the baggage from the medical system means it's not a very useful framework. you can attribute whatever personal feelings you want to it, but the medical system isn't always going to agree and the baggage from that is an obstacle - you see people think "i can't be trans because i don't have dysphoria under ___ definition of it" regardless of how much sense that makes under whatever framework.

The right question to ask is: Was Kurt Cobain a cisgender man?

as far as we know the answer here is still yes though, as cis just means 'not trans'. the question 'would this have changed' is different and unanswerable though, but i don't think it's particularly meaningful. it's not helpful to define cisness as rigid conformity wrt gender, which is unfortunately a fairly common misunderstanding by cis people (sometimes even by trans people too).

"Was Kurt trans?" has a potential for shattering the cisnormative illusion not just in _trans_ people but in _everyone_, cis or trans. Shattering this illusion is, I strongly believe, both _good_ and _necessary_.

i don't think it's useful to insist that potential signs of transness are incontrovertible proof of it, this doesn't help anyone's understanding. there simply are not definitive signs and it's not helpful to give the impression that there are.

dangerous and ghastly

the thing the table is the table was specifically calling "dangerous and ghastly" was you going as far as to blame cobain's suicide & addiction on his speculative transness. i don't think that it's "dangerous" but i really object to it as a line of thinking here

In the interest of measured feedback, I suggest that you (Kate) reconsider the section where you matter-of-factly state that Cobain had an eating disorder (something that doesn't seem at all certain?), and then half-suggest that it may play into your thesis. This rubbed me the wrong way for specific reasons related to that subject, but it also may make it all the easier for readers to dismiss your essay (along the lines of - "Oh, this is about inventing diagnoses for symbolic or literary reasons, it's not to be taken seriously").

Frankly, The Ghost Club, you can frame this as whatever you want, but not everything a trans person says is an act of resistance, and “laying claim” to a deceased person’s bodily autonomy, even as a “what if” exercise, is also not an act if resistance, but an exercise in speculation.

Table otm

I do want to make something clear, by way of a narrative.

one of my best friends is a gay trans man who is a somewhat prominent figure in the trans world. He makes big badges that read “THE CAUSE OF THE MORAL PANIC IS ME,” and this is where my point comes in.

As a queer and as someone who loves many trans people, I am always in solidarity against those who try to bludgeon us into cis-heteronormativity. I see the bludgeon everywhere I go, living in a city where the Janus Society was founded and which remains a deeply homophobic and transphobic place.

But I’m also deeply uncomfortable with the lines of thought being made by certain posters in this thread. Despite this disagreement, know that I still care about you and am in solidarity with you— we can disagree. That’s fine.

i agree with the table

As in, don't talk about this, because what would the cis people think?

the claim was that this conversation is beneficial and necessary & cis people were encouraged to participate. i don't really care about cis people being made aware of the line of speculation or anything but i do not think it is beneficial or necessary to try to convince them that there are definite signs that cobain was or would have been trans, or to encourage them to participate in such speculation with whatever mediocre pop concept of transness that they may have

There has been so much speculation on the source of Kurt's pain - why is it only ghoulish when the conversation is around gender identity?

it's pretty easy in general for such speculation to cross the line into weird, presumptive and inappropriate and i feel pretty firmly that it did in this case.

It matters that someone who so clearly struggled with gender identity suffered in our lifetimes. It's a cautionary tale, a cry to action that no trans person should have to suffer in the same way again.

this is still heavily speculative and i object to the insistence. idle speculation and jokes are fine. seriously insisting on it being so definite is pretty weird and i dislike it - it's just not that deep, there's room for speculation but certainly not anything more definitive. kate going further and directly blaming his suicide on it is way out of line

ilx has never been the best place to discuss trans issues and at times has been seriously pretty bad which is why i would not have thought this is at all a good place to try to seriously discuss this.

I don't think it's come up in this thread, but there's currently a big opera running based on Last Days, with Titane star Agathe Russelle playing Cobain. Non-paywalled NY Times story on the opera here.

I am literally working my last shift for the season at the outdoor pop-up bar— and it is the trans march after-party. Beautiful vibes, just sayin’