Playwright and actor Temi Wilkey talks about the way trans people have helped her embrace authenticity
BY TEMI WILKEY, IMAGES BY JADE ANG JACKMAN
Compliments from trans women hit different. I was at a theatre bar in South West London one night, in a pattern clash of pinks – pink houndstooth crop top, pink boucle cardigan, a white shirt to break it up and a structured pink pastel skirt. I felt fun! It was dopamine dressing. But it was nothing compared to the rush I got from the compliments I received that night, specifically from the trans femmes in the room. I realised, when I got home, that their words of affirmation thrill me like no-other. I had to ask myself… why?
Is it because their compliments are so creative? Taking one look at my outfit and telling me “It’s giving Pink Pony Professor Umbridge” is obviously going to spark joy! Is it because every one of the trans femmes who affirmed me that night was so deeply chic themselves? Danielle’s gorgeous brown bob & cat eyeglasses perfectly framing and accenting her face to Alexa’s heavenly black backless top and wet look hair. To be admiring someone’s style from afar and for them to come up to you and tell you they love your look. That’s powerful. It’s like encountering a celebrity who somehow knows who you are!
The answer is all of the above, as well as a deeper reason their compliments mean so much. As a dark-skinned Black woman who, due to white supremacy, grew up divorced from the perception of my own beauty – I never believed I could be feminine. Femininity was the preserve of white women. I think trans feminine beauty like dark-skinned beauty is much socially maligned. For differing but occasionally intersecting reasons (particularly, of course, if you’re a dark-skinned trans-feminine person) our beauty is dismissed, disregarded and deemed as inauthentic – therefore completely erased. So femininity becomes something that you have to work hard to reclaim. I can’t pinpoint when that reclamation began for me – the reclamation of my femininity. But since thinking about it, I’ve realised it was definitely formed alongside my friendships with trans femmes.
In recent years I’ve embraced, not just my femininity, but my hyper-femininity. The bubblegum pops of colour that call to mind cinematic figures like Glinda and Barbie. I love to dress like a doll! I don’t mean… a doll – the word trans women affectionately use to refer to one another. I’m not saying I attempt to dress like trans femmes or that there’s even one singular trans feminine aesthetic I could attempt to recreate – though, rest assured, on the rare occasions I’m mistaken for a trans woman I, naturally, take it as a compliment! What I mean is, I love dressing like a life-size doll. Think of Tyra Banks’ iconic turn in the 2000 film Life Size. Where Tyra, Lindsay Lohan’s doll, is magically brought to life. Dressing like that has made me feel more like me. This hyper-femininity is a longing burlesque of all that lay beyond my reach in my Black girlhood within a white world. That innocence, the sweetness, the beauty.
The relationship I have with femininity now, through my hyper-femininity, is playful, ironic – it’s camp. I wrote at length about the reclamation of my femininity in a previous article for DIVA: Notes on Femme Camp. I loved writing that but, on reflection, something I failed to mention in it is how so much of this reclamation I owe to my trans femme friendships. This isn’t to say that trans-femininity has any inherent relationship to campness. The femininity of campness is arch, it relishes in artifice – and I’d hate to make the even vague suggestion that the default relationship that trans women have to their own femininity is artificial. No. Not at all. Campness is not the default. But what I’ve observed in anecdotal experience with many of my trans femme friends is a deep and pleasurable relationship with camp. A pop of the shoulder here, an arch of an eyebrow there – the sudden, suggestive and steep drop in the pitch of one’s voice. We relish in it together.
I think we do this as Black femmes and trans femmes and the gorgeous individuals who are both, I think we do this because we’ve been routinely dispossessed of our femininity. So to pick it up lightly, to don it with a smile, to play with it – that feels powerful. Because the power of play is that it matters but also… it doesn’t matter. When you played imaginary games in the playground it was life or death but you could also drop it when the school bell rang or simply drop it to do… something else. Play is both everything and nothing. Being playful with your femininity – being camp, acknowledging the playful artifice of it, I think it both empowers and disempowers its significance. It complexifies it. Which makes our relationship to our own femininity, not the femininity itself, become the thing that matters most. The fact that this relationship to femininity is chosen rather than assumed or, worse still, enforced. When it is chosen, so much so that one can even play with it, that’s when it can feel truly owned. No matter what anyone says.
So I think that’s why compliments from trans women hit different. Because my friendships with them have inspired me to be more me – to be more feminine, more playful. The way I talk, the way I dress, the way I’ve stepped into my Main Character Energy over the years – which has, ultimately, led to me creating a show of the very same name. Main Character Energy – a flamboyant parody of the one woman show written by and starring me in the most campy & self-indulgent way imaginable. I’m not sure if it would have come about without my friendship with trans femmes. They are the source. The source of my sauce. And, I’d be willing to wager, they’re the source of yours too.
So much of queer culture, nay – culture itself has been informed by, nay – created by trans people. We only have to think of Ballroom and the ways that the culture of that Black trans-led scene has permeated our language, our dance moves and our ways of being as queer people and as a society at large. A space created for people who’ve been most marginalised by society – to be seen, to walk, to “serve face”, to revel in one’s own beauty, a beauty that has been hard to see for one’s self, hard to own, a beauty that’s been hard-won. This defiant celebration of self, despite our wider society, has inspired so many queer people – whether we’re aware of it or not. Trans people inspire us to live beyond the presupposed possibilities of our conditioning which liberates us all.
I’m not saying that this is why the trans community are worthy of our persistent support. Trans people don’t deserve our care and political allyship because they are inspiring – because of their utility as role models, their usefulness to cis people. They deserve it because of the simple and inherent value of their humanity. But I think the wider acknowledgement of their impact on all queer people’s lives might inspire it further. In the face of this government’s cruel puberty blocker ban on trans children, the astronomical personal cost of trans healthcare and the increasingly emboldened transphobic cult a certain children’s book author is spearheading – we should be fighting for trans people more than ever. Our support for the trans community should be as ferocious and as vocal as the bigoted mob that’s been whipped up against them.
The trans people in my life have inspired me to be my most authentic self in ways that have made my life richer, more beautiful and more worth living. And, as a wider culture, whether we acknowledge it or not, they inspire us all. We should act like it. Because the harder we fight for them the closer we all get to a society worth living in – one where we invest more in community than in maintaining a wealthy one percent who routinely scapegoat marginalised minorities in order to cling to their own destructive power. Hopefully, in this hard-won but potently possible coming society, all my trans friends will be carried around on plush chaise longues, as they’re fed grapes and showered with copious and creative compliments. It’s the least they deserve.
You can see Main Character Energy until 15 March at the Soho Theatre. Find out more here: sohotheatre.com/events/main-character-energy/
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