Tiktok As Incomplete Memoir 1.0 (Transcript)
An unwieldy experiment from someone who used to watch a lot of vlogs on Youtube
I guess it shouldn't feel weird anymore that people flirt with me. But it still does. I forget myself, how I appear from the outside. When I look at candid photographs it’s like meeting an old friend.
I could only see his eyes, the black Berkeley Bowl hat and mask covering every inch of his face. But I saw how they darted across me, how tenderly he placed rubber bands around my carton of eggs. He seemed genuinely flustered, glancing again and again with the desperate gaze of someone hungry to look, even if it risked exposure. As I walked out the door, we each spoke over each other. Our goodbye, mine cordial and playfully coy, his effusive and generous, melted into “Hope you have a have a good evening rest of your night.”
On the drive home I listened to Nymphowars, a podcast hosted by two trans women. In season 1, they spoke about pop culture with a stunning irreverence, asking if Ariana Grande was more of a fag than Troye Sivan. This current season is an extended radio play, where they’re acting like they have a radio show exclusively for long haul truckers, and actively denounce the “coastal elite”. In the episode I listened to, they performed as both two fictional truckers seeking to hookup with trans women, as well as two trans women the truckers met off Grindr. They called back to a joke made earlier in the season, stating how, if trans women could easily have biological children, they’d leave them in hot cars to go hookup with a stranger.
The embodiment of the trucker persona, their playing with identity, has been helpful in my own thinking about the rigid way trans women are expected to stay within their roles. To me, cis perception acts as if we’ve already made the singular performed choice of our life - anything more, whether it be drag, or comedy, or writing - is obviously about us, even when it’s explicitly not.
I’ve been listening to Nymphowars, since I first moved to the Bay Area and met A in 2018. I remember hazy walks around Lake Merritt with them, during a dusky 7 pm in May, followed by an interminably long bus ride home filled with the laughter of the two women who host the podcast in my ears. I would arrive back to the cold house I was renting a room at in the hills, paid for with tech money. The money came from a company that owned the building I worked, my food service job literally beneath the glass & steel mass that loomed over Market Street. Warmth was found through the twitter presence of Macy, and Theda, and A. I don’t have access to them anymore, having unsuccessfully reinvented myself online so many times.
I’m not sure I’ve been through Ashby or Berkeley Bart since I stopped spending time with A. Maybe once, meeting up with someone after the weekend flea market. But I don’t have a reason to come this far north anymore at least by transit, not since they left.
Link to the video: