When family members started calling me a ghost person, they may have been making fun of my physical appearance (white face, kohled eyes and red lips) and my pre-nineties channelling of goth in the eighties. At least they noticed my failure to perform gender and used the word “person”. It may also have been my penchant for disappearing into experiencing city life, free from the confines of my small town in the hope of seeing someone like me.
When I look at the photos now, it occurs to me how absurd it was that my family signalled me out, and that it is even a subject of conversation today… Oh! the enduring power and umbrage of the gender police!
Hey, I was just experimenting with kabuki theatre, which I had magpied as a queer shiny object to bejewel my closet nest. Perhaps this an appropriation, however in the late eighties you took what proof of queer existence you could get – wherever its haunt. If fact, spotting queer apparitions was my way of sqewing the dominant discourse via uniting multiple queer voices proclaiming my existence.
Kabuku means to lean or to act or dress in a queer manner and became the noun Kabuki, naming a form of classical Japanese theatre (Isaka, 2016). As a trans person, I was attracted to the spectre of men playing women wearing stylized masks, as I felt I was also a man wearing a female mask for the benefit of my family. The ghost and its magical ability to transform is a common kabuki apparition, and this appealed to my need to transform, as well as my feeling of haunting my own life. Back then, trans was invisible and unknowable and my trans self seemed implacable poltergeist creating gender disturbances at the most het norm high holy days (like at, say, my grandparent’s 50th wedding anniversary as pictured here).
In the face of meeting extended family, family members who openly felt they had a right to critique my appearance based on the happenstance of being born with a vulva, I was seized with the urge to confront my cousins by materializing the female mask in their faces. I did not even have a name for myself, but I did know that there was something that made me feel haunted and hollow. My cousins coming up with the term ghost person to describe my face unconsciously were replicating the rendering invisible of trans persons that cisgender norming culture was trying its hardest to accomplish back then. And if they can’t assign trans folk to the unseen today, as was easily done then, they will cry ghost at every chance by continually reminding the trans person of their gender, all the while enjoying the fact that cisgenderism allows their gender to go invisible in unquestioning normalcy.
Poor Carol Anne cried out, “They’re here!” in the movie Poltergeist, and the nineties saw that they were here, they were queer, and you had better get used to it. Alas, cis folk today still aren’t getting used to it despite being sucked into the queer wave much like beloved Carol Anne got sucked back into her closet. Both poltergeists, real and trans hauntings, are triggered by puberty and their presence is called out in some way. No matter how Carol Anne warned us, the nice normal tree transitioned, grabbed brother Robbie, the dead rolled in their graves and ghosts ruined the charming pool for all the cishet suburban kiddos.
Much like trans people are doing today, especially the part about the pool, as a cousin pointed out her child could get hurt swimming with a trans woman athlete. I picture her bravely fighting off the swimming trannies in the pool just like Diane Freeling did. In fact, if you check this clip on youtube, I am pretty sure this is what will happen when ghost/ trans people are allowed in the pool and therefore they should be exorcized from exercising. I’ll grant that Diane just seems to be freaking out a bit much as the dead just seem to be bobbing around, but they are generally gross and she probably should call the pool boy and get a skim, stat.
Why oh why can’t these trans/ghosts lie quietly in their graves? What do they want? Based on the expert testimony of the movie Poltergeist, they want to communicate and get some respect cause someone built their house on top of them. Sounds like the boring old dominant culture once again colonizing by burying and then building upon the backs of queers. When cis het suburbia is built over the ghosts, and hence covers their existence, you get pissy trans ghost people. Likewise, ghost persons like me exist because in 1992 there was no collective understanding of trans experience. I was haunted because I tried to build my female-gendered house over the grave of my trans self.
The inability to voice or even make sense of my experience is labelled as a hermeneutical injustice by Miranda Friker (2007). The powerlessness of trans persons, or other minorities, translates into an inability to make meaning because minorities are made invisible in the social meaning-making area. Trans lived experience, or other minority-lived experience, is therefore portrayed as intelligible to others and to oneself (Fricker, 2007). I was therefore a true ghost person, haunted by experience whose meaning was daily murdered by those closest to me in life. Undermining a person as the knower of their own experience is an ontological violation that results in an impact so profound that even small, inconsequential injustices carry a fraught symbolic weight (Friker, 2007). This explains why microaggressions, such as misgendering and ignoring my gender are so deeply upsetting to me as to trigger PTSD.
As a therapist in training, addressing hermeneutic injustice requires understanding that a person may be trying to give words to an experience that they themselves may not yet comprehend (Friker, 2007). Probably because the ground for understanding has been buried and built over by the dominant culture like Poltergeist’s burbs. I often experience that people do not get what I am saying and when they do, a light dawns. For example, a City of Hamilton social worker told me that gender did not matter and was not relevant to daily life in response to my being dead named. I asked her to ignore gender in her public toileting and dating life. I mentioned that white people also felt that race did not exist because the system creates whiteness as the invisible norm and the others as simply invisible. Go to the light! She thanked me and learned something, while I did not get the care I called her for, but got to educate about myself instead.
Friker (2007) notes that when therapists fail to hear culturally relevant experiences, the client is burdened with the extra responsibility of educating them. Like the poltergeists, who at first were kinda playful and fun but then ruined TV for everyone, a trans person must get more and more unpleasant and extreme in their manifestations in the face of those who resolutely believe in the invisible ghost narrative.
The trans ghost person narrative means that trans people should be invisible and not considered in daily life. This means reinforcing the gender binary and the idea that there are only two genders. This means misgendering and gender policing people who don’t fit into whatever arbitrary rules the culture is currently applying to male and female gender performances. This also means acting as if trans people were a social surprise and emergency every time they appear, perhaps to the point of not believing it is an issue that they appear.
If rendering trans ghosts unseen does not work, the opposite is warning that they are here (gosh darn it Carol Anne!). Since gender privilege, like race privilege, is the norm, invisible and beyond reproach, spotlighting the ghosts is recommended. Tell the ghost you have other ghost friends, always mention they are ghosts and not real people like yourself, and continually focus on their creepy ghost body and appearance, especially what is in their ghost pants (or in the spirit of the late eighties, what’s up that tube skirt). Or you could go to the light and see that trans people are just as real as you are and equally entitled to the same shared social experiences in life as you.
The goal is not to exorcise but to bring trans ghost people back to life and this blog is an effort on my part to do so. To put into words and perhaps bring to the light the yet unspooked experiences of being trans, and avoiding sucking any more children into the closet, morphing into terrifying trees, wrecking kids’ pools, appropriating Japanese culture and upsetting cousins at a 60th wedding anniversary.
Fricker, M. (2007).Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing.Oxford University Press.https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198237907.001.0001
Isaka.M. (2017). Onnagata: A labyrinth of gendering in Kabuki Theater. Univ of Washington Press.