Sissy

by Jacob Tobia

  The next great defeat came in the form of a student-body-wide election for a position called Young Trustee. Each year, one Duke senior is elected to serve a three-year term as a full voting member of the board of trustees when they graduate. It is a seriously powerful position. I mean, Tim Fucking Cook, the CEO of Apple, is on the Duke board. So are Lisa Borders, the president of the WNBA, and Adam Silver, the commissioner of the NBA.

  It’s a big deal because, as a voting member, you have the chance to shape Duke on a core, structural level. You have the ability to tell the university president that he’s not doing a good enough job. You have the ability to supervise and demand that millions—with a capital M—more dollars need to be spent on efforts to reform Duke’s culture.

  It was real power, serious power, and I stood a shot at it. All I had to do was convince the student body to vote for a guy in a dress instead of a frat boy. Easy, right?

  Running for elected office, if only on a college campus, it felt like I was putting my gender identity on public trial. On some level, I was facing what all women and femmes face when they run for office; being made to curate a “proper” femininity, trapped in the double bind of being either “too uptight” or “too provocative,” while the masculine candidate receives no scrutiny for his gender presentation whatsoever.

  But in this case, the double bind was more about “authenticity” versus “relatability.” If I presented as too feminine, if I let loose and truly queened out, I would alienate so many students that I’d never stand a chance. But if I didn’t present as feminine, or if I put away my high heels and makeup altogether, people would be equally turned off: I’d lose votes because I wasn’t being “real.” Trapped between being seen as a weirdo or as a fake, I floundered, trying to figure out how to best present my gender in order to get in the door.

  In the end, I opted to play what I thought was the most palatable version of myself in my campaign ads and posters. I wore a tie, a blazer—albeit with cuffed sleeves—and one small clip-on earring: a gold rosette from my grandmother’s collection.

  I felt naked. My main opponent had fraternity cronyism and the power of Pi Kappa Phi—the fraternity to which the previous year’s Young Trustee belonged—behind him. As a South Asian frat guy in a historically white fraternity, I’m sure that he had his own baggage to deal with. But he also maintained the cultural power and the mainstream “big man on campus” status that came with being in the most politically powerful fraternity.

  While he was campaigning to prove that he would be an effective trustee, I had to campaign twice as hard: I had to prove both that I would be an effective trustee and that I was normal enough to represent Duke students. It was a public referendum not only on my qualifications and my leadership, both of which were at that point unassailable, but also on my normality. Was I really someone capable of representing the student body on the board? Did I really share in their experiences?

  My opponent didn’t have to work very hard to imply that I wasn’t. Each candidate received a profile in the Chronicle, our campus newspaper, and his headline read simply, “Candidate Emphasizes Breadth of Experience in Young Trustee Race.” In the article, he was quoted as saying “The Young Trustee should be a representative of the entire student body, and I think that it’s particularly dangerous if you have a candidate who understands one part of the school too well. Fortunately, I have a wide swath of experiences.”

  To this day, I’m not sure if he knew exactly what he was doing. But when I read that headline, when I saw a frat boy saying, “I have the greatest breadth of experience,” in comparison to a gender nonconforming candidate like me; when I saw a cisgender, heterosexual man saying that it was “particularly dangerous” for someone to understand “only one part” of the school (i.e., the queer part, the activist part, the non-fraternity part) the implications rattled me:

  I have the greatest breadth of experience.

  I.e., I’m a fraternity man, I can represent the average Duke student. A gender nonconforming activist who spends too much time hanging out with other activists and queers couldn’t possibly do that.

  I.e., Jacob’s identity makes them niche. I’m the true populist.

  I.e., You should vote for me because I’m the most traditional.

  I.e., Don’t vote for Jacob because they’re a freak.

  Whether my opponent intended these implications mattered very little to my tender heart. Either way, they were out there, bouncing around, jabbing my self-esteem, taunting me during the day, ringing in my ears at night. I felt them everywhere, and I fought them hard.

  I campaigned incredibly and received the most endorsements from student organizations. I was the candidate-of-choice according to the Duke Partnership for Community Service, the Black Student Alliance, the LGBT Student Alliance, the South Asian Student Association, the Latinx Student Association, Duke Democrats, and even the representative body for all sororities on campus, the Panhellenic Council. My opponent received only one endorsement, tellingly from the Interfraternity Council.

  I could go on and on about the hours and days I spent talking to first years at the dining hall, about the thousands of flyers I handed out, about the countless meetings I canvassed, but nothing speaks louder than the endorsements. Over four years of kicking ass and taking names in the interest of marginalized students on campus, almost every student organization representing a diverse community wanted me to be their representative on the board.

  And only the whitest, most homogenous, most sexist organization on campus wanted my opponent.

  The night of the election, my campaign team set up what we hoped would be a victory party. For our venue, we chose the Duke Coffeehouse. A bastion of support in my undergraduate life, the one true place on campus where freaks and weirdos were the majority, the Duke Coffeehouse was the closest thing I had to a safe space. Where most of Duke was sleek and modern, the Coffeehouse was grungy. Where most of Duke was neat and curated, the Coffeehouse was covered in murals of aliens and demons and cartoon coffee cups and David Bowie–esque starmen. It was my respite from many terrible moments, and I hoped it could be my launchpad to victory.

  By eight p.m., online polling had closed, and by nine, I was gathered at the Coffeehouse with thirty of my closest friends to await the results.

  If you’ve never run for elected office, it’s hard to describe how it feels. People think they know what it’s like. They watch Veep or Parks and Recreation and feel like they get it. But it’s nothing like on TV. On TV, even when Leslie Knope loses, it’s still a comedy. Sure, maybe Leslie will eat one too many waffles after her loss, but she won’t spiral into a three-year-long depression or lose her self-esteem because of it. She will always, invariably, have things work out for her. In a real-life election, you don’t have that same guarantee.

  All this results in a frenetic, anxious, terrible state of mind. The Coffeehouse swirling with anticipation around me, I sipped on a chocolate espresso milk shake to stay awake.

  At ten forty-five, my cell phone rang. As discreetly as I could, I stepped outside; only my best friend Sunny came with me while I took the call.

  “Hey, Jacob, it’s the attorney general. I wanted to let you know that the election results are in.”

  “Okay,” I said, bracing myself against a signpost.

  “It was a very close race—the closest that we’ve ever seen, actually—but unfortunately, you have not been chosen by the student body to serve as the Undergraduate Young Trustee.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “We had a very high turnout this race. A total of 3,420 students—about 53 percent of the student body—voted. And after eliminating the third-place candidate and doing an instant runoff between you and your opponent, it came down to twelve votes. Your opponent received 1,716 votes, and you received 1,704.”

  “Okay,” I repeated, catatonic. It seemed to be the only word I knew.

 
“We wanted to thank you and your team for running a smooth, clean, by-the-books campaign, and while we know you must be disappointed, we hope you’ll still feel proud of a job well done. It was very close.”

  “Okay, thanks. Do you need anything else from me?”

  “No, we’re all set. Have a great night.”

  Hands shaking, I placed my phone in my pocket, then dropped to the curb.

  The tears were instant; the rebuke felt immediate.

  “Oh, Taco,” Sunny said, invoking my playful college nickname. She rubbed my back gingerly, encouraging me to take deep breaths.

  “This hurts so much more than I thought it would,” I managed to shudder between sobs. “How can I face everyone now? How can I go back in that room? It feels like my entire senior year’s been ruined.”

  “I know, I know,” she murmured, hand still rubbing circles on my back. “It’s going to be okay, just maybe not right now.”

  We sat in silence for another moment, my chest rising and falling, breath returning back to normal.

  “Do you want me to go in and let folks know so you don’t have to?”

  “No, it’s okay,” I said, wiping the tears from my cheeks, rubbing my eyes in hopes that they’d seem less puffy. “I need to break the news to everyone myself.”

  After another deep breath, I stood up, briefly reminding my body how to connect muscle to tendon, tendon to bone. I held my head up as high as I could, pulled the last bucket of strength from my well, and headed back inside.

  * * *

  —

  Let me be very clear about something: My opponent was not a bad person. He’s actually pretty sweet. I like him and count him as a friend, so I hope it doesn’t seem like I’m shitting all over him. He didn’t even really do anything wrong.

  Which is why, when I lost, I wasn’t angry at him specifically; I was angry at the mechanics of the election process itself, at the power dynamics of the entire campus. I didn’t hate the player; but I loathed the game, the structure in which we were forced to compete, the fact that I had to carry so much more baggage while running the same race.

  That’s exactly the point: when the playing field is uneven to begin with, you don’t have to be “a bad person” to benefit from nasty institutions or unwarranted privilege. You don’t have to be a bad person or even have bad intentions to personally profit from sexism, homophobia, or transphobia. You don’t have to do anything. As a heterosexual, cisgender masculine guy, you simply have to throw your name in the ring against someone like me and automatically you have those forces on your side. All you really have to do is say nothing against them. All you really have to do is keep quiet, remain “neutral” in the face of fucked up power structures, and those fucked up power structures will go on to do what they do best: walk all over people of difference.

  But just barely. What tortured me for months and years to come was just how close the election was. Twelve votes. Twelve measly votes. Twelve out of thirty-four hundred. My opponent won by a mere 0.18 percent. Less than one-fifth of 1 percent. That margin haunted me, if only because of the truth it made apparent: If my gender were even a fraction more palatable, if I were just a hair less queer, I would’ve easily won. It only took twelve people to rob me of something so important, to cause an identity crisis the likes of which I’d never faced before. The only thing worse than winning by the skin of your teeth is losing by it.

  While I cannot say exactly why I lost the election; while I can’t concretely explain why I didn’t so much as receive an interview for the Rhodes; and while I can’t say why, a few months later, I would be a finalist for but not chosen as my class’s commencement speaker, I can say this: These losses had to do with my gender. They were inexorably related to the fact that I wasn’t a “guy’s guy” on a campus that deeply valued that behavior, to the fact that I wasn’t the “right type” of man to study at Oxford, to the fact that my identity was “a bit too niche” for parents to tolerate at commencement.

  And, because I know you’re thinking it, let me be clear about something: I am proudly a sore loser. I did not lose these things with grace, and I still have not made peace with losing. Telling me to make peace with the fact that I lost the Young Trustee election, for example—one that I rightfully deserved to win—is like telling me to “just forget about” the fact that people like me face discrimination.

  I do not have to make peace with my loss to a frat boy. I will never make peace with the fact that he beat me in part because of sexism and transphobia. And unlike Shirley Chisholm or Hillary Clinton or Carol Moseley Braun, I refuse to be classy about my loss. I am committed to being a bratty, snobby, bossy, terrible, awful, no-good, very bad, sore loser. I am committed to being the sorest loser you have ever seen. And while I may not still think about the fact that I lost an election in college—I’m much too busy these days thinking about what op-ed I need to pitch the New York Times, what outfit I’m going to wear on a red carpet, or what strategy I should use to beat Los Angeles traffic—I will never get over it.

  Because the imperative to get over it is the imperative to erase yourself, to take your beating, fallible human heart and crush it. To take your pulsating, bedazzled, gorgeous identity and betray it. To take your glittering, shimmering, divine trauma and throw it in the trash. I will never get over what has been denied to me because of my gender identity. I will never get over the fact that people have been terrible to me because of who I am. I will never get over the fact that gender nonconforming people have been the target of incredible violence, marginalization, isolation, and neglect throughout much of the past century. I will never get over it because it is my history, and those who don’t know their history are doomed to repeat it.

  And I won’t forget it because I, along with every other oppressed person on the planet, am owed. Society has a debt to me—to all of us—one they will likely never repay. I want the things that have been taken from me. I want them back. I want to have won that election and gone on to serve three groundbreaking years on the board. I want to have won a Rhodes Scholarship and attended Oxford and met Harry Potter and married him. I want to have had a happy childhood, one where I played with the toys I wanted to play with, drew the things I wanted to draw, wore the things I wanted to wear. I want to have been given the opportunity to succeed without abandoning my feminine spirit. I want to have been treated with sweetness instead of scorn when my femininity first revealed itself to the world. And for the love of God, I want a fucking partner/boyfriend for once in my life.

  I will not get over these things. I will never be quiet about them. I will go down screaming, wailing, and shaking my cane to the very last breath. A goddess never forgets. She rages and thrashes and storms as loudly and as often as she can bear until she and all of her other goddess friends get what they deserve.

  I will not get over it because I refuse to sabotage my childhood self. I refuse to sabotage the other living, breathing baby Jacobs out there who are trying with all their four-year-old might to hold on to a gender that is slipping through their fingers. I refuse to look my adolescent self in the face and tell them they simply need to make peace with the fact that they deserve less. I refuse.

  And if acknowledging, loudly and without shame, all the ways the world has been cruel to me and to so many others makes me a sore loser, then so be it. I’ll be the most glamorous, well-adorned sore loser you’ve ever seen. I will run up onstage like an asshole, take the mic from Taylor Swift, and cry out, for the world to hear, “We all deserved this award!” (even though I love the song “You Belong with Me”). I will do it all if that means my sense of integrity, emotional honesty, and self-love can remain intact.

  And if I don’t always have the courage or audacity to do that in my daily life, I will, at least, for the love of Goddess, do so in my own fucking book.

  * * *

  —

  The day after the election, devastation coursing
through my veins, I was filled with doubt. What did this mean for my intended career as a policymaker? If I was too queer to win an election on a college campus, could I ever expect to win one in the real world? Could I ever succeed in the political arena? Was politics even a realistic path for me?

  I needed a symbolic gesture to show myself and the rest of campus that while I may have lost, I hadn’t been defeated. When I finished my shower and looked through my closet, the answer was apparent. I needed to wear something killer. Having worn a suit and tie for much of the last two weeks in order to seem more electable, it was time to burst free in a big way.

  Instead of dressing in the typical clothes associated with moping and loss—sweatpants, sneakers, a hoodie—I made the opposite choice. I debuted the vintage all-black Tadashi Shoji that Dr. Malouf had given me, paired it with my signature military-grade black leather combat boots, and stomped around campus that day in all black, smiling radiantly at everyone I passed.

  As if to say, “You haven’t crushed me—not by a long shot. If anything, you’ve set me free.”

  As if to say, “The days of mitigating my gender for you motherfuckers are over.”

  As if to say, “She’s baaaaaaaaack!”

  My power was once again expanding, my self-esteem and self-love blossoming after a long winter. It propelled me into my final months of college and onto a bus bound for a retreat called Common Ground.

  In a nutshell, Common Ground is a student-led diversity retreat that helps undergrads come to understand how power, privilege, and identity work. It’s also notoriously hard to get into. You have to complete a lengthy application, disclose your darkest secrets, and sacrifice your firstborn to the diversity goddess in order to get a slot. Despite being one of the most visible activists on campus, I was only extended an invitation to attend the second semester of my senior year.

  It’s also kind of a cult. It’s the sort of thing where, when you ask people who’ve been what it’s like, they look deeply into your eyes and say something to the effect of, “It’s like nothing else I’ve ever experienced” or “It was the most powerful weekend of my life” or “How can I put it into words? You just have to go to fully understand what it’s like.”