Sissy

by Jacob Tobia

  I hope that you will discuss this incident with your players and remind them that they should respect not just their fellow team members, but all Duke students, regardless of gender expression or perceived sexual orientation. Also, I have CC’d Janie Long, the director of the Duke Center for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Life in this e-mail as well as Amy Cleckler and Erin Stephens, both of whom work at the Women’s Center.

  Regards,

  Jacob Tobia

  Janie replied the next morning:

  I’m very sorry you were harassed. I will definitely follow-up with administrators in Athletics. Let’s talk more in the Center.

  Amy chimed in, too.

  you are very brave to voice your feelings and to address this directly. please let me know how i can be of help to you, and feel free to stop by and discuss this further.

  So did Erin:

  i think it’s awesome that you are speaking up about this. Certainly and unfortunately such harassment happens to other students on campus and speaking up about it is the first step for these students being accountable for their actions and changing.

  Over the next two weeks, I took each of them up on their offer to talk in person. I stopped by either the Women’s Center or the LGBT Center pretty much every single day of my undergraduate career. Those spaces, and the incredible people who worked there, were the only way that I made it through college.

  After speaking with Janie, I decided to file a formal Bias Incident Report Form, meaning that the incident would be reported to more senior-level administrators. I heard back from someone in the Dean’s Office; I was assured that they would address it.

  I never got a written response from the coaches. In a classic form employed by abusive institutions, they were smart enough to cover their tracks and never leave an official paper trail that acknowledged misdoing. Instead, a few days later I got a phone call out of the blue from a number I didn’t recognize. It was an assistant coach on the team. Unfortunately, the call caught me off guard and I didn’t have the wisdom to record it. All I can attest to is my imperfect emotional memory of the conversation:

  “Hello, is this Jacob?”

  “Yes, who is this?”

  “Hi, I’m Coach Paulson, an assistant coach on the football team. I’ve received a copy of your report from the Dean’s Office, but I need more information in order to address it properly.”

  A beat.

  “Do you remember what the player who made the comments looked like? Can you identify who he was?”

  “I don’t remember too much about him other than what he said to me. I don’t know players’ names or faces, really.”

  “Okay, well, do you remember what he looked like?”

  “I don’t think I could pick him out of a crowd or anything, but I don’t see how that’s relevant to—”

  “Well, without more information about him, we can’t do very much. But I assure you this incident will be addressed.”

  “But what do you mean by ‘addressed’? Will you be doing a training with the team or something? Will you be reaching out to the LGBT Center to set up an Ally training or whatever? Will the player face consequences? I just don’t understand what—”

  “We already have a training for players about this, so they already cover that when new players arrive on campus. We’ll take care of it, don’t worry.”

  I hesitated, unsure of what to say. What did he mean? How would they take care of it? This was a devastatingly shitty apology, if that’s what he was going for. Realizing that this was going nowhere, I resigned. I gave in. I stopped pushing.

  “Okay, thanks for calling.”

  “No problem, have a good day.”

  *click*

  That was it. That was all the apology I was ever going to get. The student never had to speak with me directly, never had to take any accountability for his actions, never even had to interact with me again. I spent the rest of the school year dodging football players, unsure what had happened, what conversations the team had had without my knowledge, feeling like even more of a target than before. In their eyes, I wasn’t just a fag anymore. I was a fag who’d called their coaches, a fag who’d snitched, a tattletale sissy.

  At the end of the week, the Dean’s Office reached out to check in about what had happened.

  Rereading my response to them today, it’s devastating. Though I was furious, though I never really got over the incident or received a proper apology, I’d resigned myself to the fact that nothing was going to happen. Made to feel ashamed for reporting what had happened to me, made more of a target for reporting it, I just wanted it to go away. And the easiest way to make it go away was to pretend that I was no longer angry, to put on a smile and tell them that I was okay:

  Yes, I got a phone call from Coach Paulson yesterday and he told me that they were going to address the issue very soon. I’m not sure exactly what that means, but it sounds good. I also talked to him about how this incident may indicate some sort of need for more involved trainings or workshops about LGBT issues, but he reassured me that the football program conducts such training in-house. I’m not sure what that training looks like exactly, but I’d be curious to find out.

  At any rate, it seems that the situation has been addressed; I guess I was just looking for some more substantial discussion of the systemic factors that lead to the incident, which didn’t seem to be what Coach Paulson was focusing on. That being said, my expectations may not be entirely realistic.

  Thanks so much for all of your help in this,

  Jacob :D

  I even ended my email with a smiley face. A smiley face. My whole world had been shaken and somehow I ended up apologizing, via a smiley face, for being upset.

  After that email, I hardly mentioned the incident to anyone else. I gave up. I’d learned the lesson loud and clear, one that has been re-taught to me and so many other women and femmes who have been targets of harassment and abuse: The world owes you nothing. If you are so brave as to express your gender in public, you will be harassed, you will be hurt, you may even be assaulted, and no one will have to apologize for how they treated you. They will get away with it every single time. They will make you feel ashamed of feeling hurt. They will make you feel like you are just whining.

  And speaking up will only make it worse. Watching people who love you—who support you and want the best for you—try to take on the world and fight for you, only to lose, will only make it hurt more. So you stop talking about what you’re facing. You stop talking about how much you’re hurting. You stop telling people how shitty the world is to you because you are gender nonconforming. You end an email with a smile, take the abuse, and pretend it doesn’t hurt you. You learn you have no real power, that the only power you do have is the power not to flinch when you are punched, not to cry when you are stung, not to acknowledge that abuse leads to injury.

  I didn’t realize how deeply I’d buried the incident until I sat down to write this chapter. Sitting in a café with my best friend Alex, from high school, I talked through my outline in a casual way.

  “—then I’m going to write about the time when I wore lipstick for the first time on campus,” I said matter-of-factly, “and that football player harassed me in the dining hall.”

  “Wait, what?”

  “I definitely told you about that,” I replied. “You know this story.”

  “I most certainly don’t,” he responded. “You never told me about that. I would’ve remembered that story, Jacob.”

  “Oh, I wonder why I never told you?”

  Now that I’ve written it down, the reason for my silence is all too clear to me: The only thing scarier than feeling powerless to fight your bullies is the knowledge that your friends are powerless to fight them, too. The only thing worse than being hurt is being made to feel ashamed for being hurt.

  * * *

 
—

  Packing up my dorm room at the end of freshman year, I marveled at how much my wardrobe had changed in spite of everything. My grandmother’s clip-on earrings and brooches were no longer alone; they were now accompanied by tubes of dollar store lipstick, vials of flashy nail polish, lacy, drapey feminine tops, and three pairs of heels: the $20 pair I’d bought in high school, the $35 pair I’d purchased for the drag show, and a $150 pair of Jeffrey Campbell LITAs that I’d purchased for myself after making straight A’s all year. A trashy, flashy, beautifully curated collection of feminine silhouettes, colors, and fabrics, my wardrobe was beginning to align less with what the world had prescribed, and more with my own vision for who I wanted to be.

  When I returned to my parents’ house and unpacked everything for the summer, I didn’t attempt to hide who I’d become. My heels were out in the middle of my bedroom alongside other shoes. My lipstick and nail polish sat unabashedly on the bathroom counter, in open air, an array of pigment and shade. I wasn’t trying to hide this anymore; not from my parents, not from my friends, not from myself.

  Two weeks after returning home, I began packing for a two-month trip to small-town South Carolina where I’d spend the summer doing an oral history project. I looked all over the bathroom for my lipstick and nail polish, but couldn’t find them anywhere. I searched in my bedroom. The bathroom downstairs. My brother’s old room. They were nowhere to be found. Where had they gone? I certainly hadn’t moved them. Interesting.

  Thankfully, I had some fairly serious indigestion that night.* Seeking gastric relief, I went upstairs to the linen closet where we keep the Pepto-Bismol. When I reached inside to grab the pink bottle, I noticed my lipstick and nail polish collection tucked away around the corner, almost out of sight.

  Huh.

  I certainly hadn’t put them there. To this day, I don’t know with complete certainty who did.

  But the most likely explanation is that my dad had attempted to hide my lipstick and nail polish from me. He knew he couldn’t get away with outright throwing them away, but hiding them in an innocuous-yet-undiscoverable place gave him the ability to stifle my gender while maintaining “plausible” deniability. As if that really even made sense. “Oh, I wasn’t trying to hide them—I just put them in the linen closet. You know, where every family keeps their lipstick and nail polish.”

  I threw back some Pepto-Bismol, praying that my intestines would calm down, and quietly returned my makeup to a harder-to-find place in the bathroom.

  The next day, I didn’t say anything to my dad about recovering my stash. I didn’t confront him or ask if he’d hidden it. I didn’t yell or scream or get upset. Instead, I did him one better.

  In classic, passive-aggressive Southern fashion, I didn’t say a word about it; I simply wore lipstick to dinner the next night.

  Chapter 7

  Beloved Token

  In a flash, my sophomore year was beginning. But this time, I didn’t come back to Duke expecting structural affirmation. I came back to Duke ready for battle—armor bedazzled; perfectly manicured nails sharpened to talons; heels spiky, long, and lethal.

  I found myself slipping into an old, bad habit, one that any person of difference knows. In the absence of authentic affirmation, I let myself become a token.

  Over the remaining years of college, tokenization was my curse and my saving grace. It felt like protection, a way I could be loved and supported by those around me, a way I could be included, if only as an interesting accessory. It was the easiest way to trick other people—and therefore myself—into believing that I was happy.

  If you’re not familiar with tokenization as survival strategy, here’s how it works: When people of difference find ourselves in an institution, company, culture, or society where we are the only person like us, we become representative of all of us. You can be the token anything—the token black kid, the token disabled kid, the token woman, the token Jew, the token immigrant, the token queer. Your role is to be the interesting scarf, the chunky bracelet, the shawl draped on top of the model, but never the gown itself.

  The whole point of being a token is that you exchange your rage at inequality for the respect and admiration of your peers. You trade in your right to be angry, to be dissatisfied, for the right to be hugged and affirmed by those around you. You stop pointing out the ways in which people are hurting you or making your identity feel impossible, and unless it is self-serving, you stop pointing out the fact that you are the only one like you.

  You take the fact that there is only one of you (or, in my case, that there are very few like you), and instead of treating that fact as what it is—damning evidence of exclusion and discrimination—you treat it as evidence that you are special. You tell yourself that you aren’t the only trans person in student leadership because Duke excludes trans people and creates a culture that is hostile toward trans success; you tell yourself that you’re the only trans person because you are that much more talented than the rest of trans people, because you are better than the rest of your community.

  To sincerely adopt the psychology of tokenism, you have to sell your community out. That’s the dark underbelly of the thing. Instead of blaming the institutions, rules, and social attitudes of those around you for the absence of other people like you, you blame your own community. You accept that you are one of the “special ones” who “made it” through the power of their “hard work.” It wasn’t that Duke made it virtually impossible for trans students to live happy, self-actualized lives on campus. It’s that most trans and gender nonconforming people simply weren’t bright enough to make it into Duke in the first place. I was one of the special ones, the exception to the rule, the single shining star in a vacuum of trans/queer brilliance—or so the ideation of tokenization would have me believe.

  The moment you adopt this psychology, the moment you give in to this strategy, you’re showered in recognition. You get diversity award after diversity award after diversity award. You are heralded as a shining example of the Duke community. You are featured in the campus newspaper, in Duke Magazine, your existence proclaimed as evidence that Duke is great for people like you. The hard part is that some of this praise is real. Some of this recognition is deserved. But an equal part of it is toxic, insidious. Your very identity is mobilized as cover-up, the concealer hiding the blemish.

  You become the evidence that contradicts your own experience. They say things like, “If Jacob can succeed here, Duke must be creating a supportive environment for trans students,” when the only reason you are succeeding in the first place is because you have so dissociated from your own emotions that you no longer feel the sting of daily hostility. They will use your story to prove to themselves that they don’t need to change anymore. They will use your success against your own best interest and the interests of your community. “If Jacob has managed to be happy here, then how badly do we really need campus-wide gender-neutral housing?”

  They claim you as a success in part because they care about you, but mostly because they care about themselves more. The I’m proud of you is always accompanied by the I’m proud of myself for being magnanimous enough to support someone like you.

  Over time, this strategy is devastating to your sense of self-esteem, self-love, and community. Even if only subconsciously, you have trouble spending time with your own community because you feel guilty for selling them out. You mask your anguish, your struggle, your daily pain, in order to put on a constant smile. You dissociate from your own feelings, your own heart, in order to belong.

  And you work your fucking ass off. You run twice as fast and lift twice as much weight just to keep up with your peers. And if you want to outrun or outlift your peers, you triple it.

  You embrace respectability, being well-regarded, as all that you have. There is a reason that I have never made a B in my entire life. There is a reason that I have never had a GPA lower than a perfect 4.0 throughout all of
high school and college. There is a reason that I was always a student leader, always took on twelve different community and artistic activities at a given time. There’s a reason why I did not one, but two honors thesis projects.

  Without this validation, I was afraid that everyone would abandon me.

  So while many of my friends in college were alternating late-night study sessions with dating, raucous social schedules, and sex lives, I threw myself almost wholly into work, only partying on occasion to keep up appearances. Though none of my peers really knew it, I lost the ability to party, the ability to drink frequently, by my sophomore year. Alcohol was dangerous, because when I drank, that’s when the feelings of otherness, of rage and alienation, would catch up with me. My fellow students drank and got horny. I drank and spiraled into self-loathing and despair.

  Looking around and seeing no one else like me, I realized how high a pedestal I was dancing on. It was a blessing, sure, but in retrospect it feels more like height for height’s sake; empty elevation. And it came with a threat: When you’re on a pedestal all alone, you’re the only person you have. And if you trip, if you take a misstep, there’s no one there to catch you. And you can fall oh so far.

  To say I was loved on campus throughout my sophomore and junior years would be an understatement. I was adored. I was ubiquitous. I was everywhere and uncontainable, a voice for the marginalized, a clarion call for a better world. I was quoted in the campus newspaper so often it became an inside joke. I was given positions of power and prestige, accolades and recognition. By almost everyone who held power, I was beloved. By a significant portion of the student body, I was beloved. By almost all my professors, I was beloved. In all its contradictory weight, I was a beloved token.

  But I knew the dirty truth: As a token, much of the love I received was conditional. The moment you say you hate fraternities and wish them abolished, the love evaporates. The moment you say Duke Basketball feels like a patriarchal tool, the kindness vanishes. The moment you stop being chill about pronouns and correct an administrator in front of their superior, the affection is gone. The moment you stop being hyper-successful and just try to be a normal student instead of collecting accolades for the university, the enthusiasm fizzles. The moment you say the final episode of The Office felt a bit too heteronormative to you, the support disappears.