Sites of trans memories
How we remember the past is as important to us as the lives we live in the moment. Who we choose to memorialise, lionise, hate, despise, mourn, and ultimately celebrate comes down to a wide array of factors. For trans people often it is who was the first to do something, first to achieve something, or a tragic death. Indeed, to be trans in the world is to be reflections of how those people are remembered, as often we are trans alone in our communities. Society sees us as mirrors of those lives, which is particularly tragic when all the trans lives shown in the media are portrayed as criminals or predators in waiting. Our current sites of trans memories are the outliers, the brigands, those who excel yet are treated as pariahs. To be trans is to be a perpetual site of cultural memory as much as it is to remember those who came before us.
A central issue with this is that trans people themselves always seek out those trans people who fit a particular image of what it is to be trans. Beautiful trans women are exemplars because they are seen as emblematic of what it is to be a woman, goals to be achieved rather than actual lives being led. Inspiration is laudable, yet every trans person held up in the spotlight is just that, a person. No-one is a saint, just and no-one is complete sinner, so when we memorialise famous trans people are we simply creating paragons, or are we creating a personal image of…
