Sure, let’s do that.
So I’ve had a couple days to think about it and it definitely has stuck with me. Also, had a friend tell me yesterday “There’s this thing on Netflix that you have to see!”
For context, I’m queer and very visibly so. Specifically, I’m a trans woman in my 30’s almost nine months into medical transitioning. Having been in hard denial about my gender for 15 years before I finally came out to myself, I did my best to do the straight cis male thing (wife, kids, mortgage, etc). I’m extremely fortunate in a number of ways. Coming out to my wife and starting transitioning has revealed the fact that she is fairly enthusiastically bi. I live in a fairly accepting area and apparently chose my friends well. So far, of the important people in my life, the vast majority have been affirming or at the least reasonably accepting with the exception of my parents (and like Gadsby, I still need to tell my grandparents).
Here are some of the reasons why Nanette really resonated with me:
Most importantly, the emphasis on telling one’s story honestly and completely. In my experience, coming out is hard. The environment is thankfully so different from how it was 20 years ago when I knew more or less what was wrong, but had no representation to see myself, and no available resources to move forward. And yet, coming out as trans is still extremely fraught, because people have a lot of opinions, and few facts. You gotta come out, and then you gotta educate. Or at least, I feel like I do, because I have a lot of privilege and want to do what I can to forward the transgenda (by which I mean, make things just a tiny bit easier for the teenage trans girl at our church when she’s ready to come out).
The bit about internalized shame. That was the part where I just started weeping. My parents have expressed sadness that I’ve had to deal with dysphoria, but I don’t think they understand that my conservative Christian upbringing caused me to hate myself. The reason a lot of cishet people don’t understand LGBT pride is because they don’t understand the shame that was forced on us.
“I identify as tired.” I too am one of the quiet gays. And yet, being queer can be hard work. Right now, I can either dress to minimize things and I look like a kinda feminine dude wearing a baggy shirt and I feel really uncomfortable, or I can dress the way I want and wonder what people are thinking and how they’re going to treat me. That’s the visible part, which is honestly mostly in my head, as I do live in an accepting area and have not actually been harassed, but I’ve heard enough stories that I still feel like I need to stay alert and ready. The less visible part is working through everything that transitioning means for my family, trying to figure out better ways of explaining stuff to people (because LGBT inclusion is a very hot-button topic in our denomination at the moment) and just working through all the accumulated crap of a lifetime of hiding and squashing my identity.
The whole bit about how jokes relate to growth. I think humor is often a vital part of coping with stuff (and there’s the potential for a lot of very dark humor that happens when trans people start talking), but the way that she had to sanitize and repackage her own pain for public consumption was just heart-wrenching.
The cohesiveness of the entire set. I don’t watch a lot of standup, but I was both surprised and impressed at the multiple layers and how things kind of wrapped back around. I need to watch it again to really understand how she was doing stuff because I was too caught up the first time in what she was doing.
“My mum used to call me madam when I was in trouble…for opening a brothel.” “Pull your socks up!” “But cubism!” Some bits stuck with me because they were funny, some because they were funny and meant something more.
Is that enough content to make an actual discussion happen?
