Queer Intentions

by Amelia Abraham

  ‘You mean “Timimie”? Is that a chosen name?’

  ‘Yes, that’s a chosen name. He was first to say it and it’s weird because even my big sister had been asking me like, “OK, so you’re dating a guy who is trans, what is he like naked?” I said: “You can’t ask that, that’s weird. You’re dating a cis man and it’s not fair to ask if he’s big or not. It’s actually quite rude, but if you want to weigh that up for this that’s actually an easier conversation because that is a cis male person. I wouldn’t want anyone to ask what are your tits like when you aren’t dressed. It’s just rude.” I tried to talk to my mother about it but she said, “You have to understand that people are wondering,” and I was like, “No, you don’t! What would you do if my dad had conversations about your pussy with his friends?”’

  ‘Wow. What did she say to that?’

  ‘Well, she has a way of being like, “Well, OK, right . . .” She’s very good at acting like she’s offended; then she can come back six months later and been studying everything . . .’

  ‘That’s good?’

  ‘Yeah. But it’s also a very Sami way, I think: “I don’t want you to rub it in my face that I don’t know about this.” We had a conversation about the guy I was dating and how when he came out as trans to his mum she was like, “I don’t want to have lost my daughter! You’ll always be a ‘her’ to me!” And he was really upset. I was talking to my mother about how it’s hard for the one giving birth to see a child and be like, “This is a girl, this is my daughter and your name is . . .” And twenty years later, someone goes, “Yeah, OK, no.” But what I don’t understand is the rage and the need to push your sorrow onto someone who is already having a really difficult time coming out as themselves.’

  I thought about the rage and the hatred and the lack of understanding I’d heard about from LaLa. I thought of all the strangers that go around meddling in other people’s genders; the self-appointed gender police. ‘Why do people get so upset?’ I said, thinking out loud. ‘About something that’s not even affecting them?’

  ‘Nobody wants to be the stupid one, the one to get it wrong. If you do something to me and I come and be like, “I don’t like that,” you can be like, “Shit, I messed up, I made this person uncomfortable.” But you don’t want to be the bad guy. Everybody wants to be the good ally or the underdog . . .’

  Timimie seemed to be saying that people were embarrassed, or defensive. I didn’t agree; I felt that people just really hated change, or hated seeing something in other people that they weren’t free enough to express themselves. But before I could say this, Timimie carried on.

  ‘So anyway, I was talking to my mum about it and she was like, “I would feel weird if my kids were like, I want to be this or want to be that,” and I suddenly realized that my whole life she had never realized something about me . . . that I can be a both or a nothing, that sometimes it changes, that sometimes I feel absolutely man and sometimes I don’t know. So I said to her, “What about me? That is neither?”’ Timimie let this sink in.

  ‘Then what happened?’

  ‘Then we had a long argument about it. She was flipping chairs over and being like, “I have not been giving birth to a them,” and my whole body was like somebody put claws inside of me.’

  ‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘It’s interesting you say that cause a lot of people think being non-binary is a political stance or, you know, just people trying to be difficult, while you’re saying that it’s emotional, that it’s deeply connected to how you feel . . .’

  ‘Yes,’ Timimie said, continuing even faster, ‘and after that we didn’t speak for like one and a half years, and that messed me up, that privately I didn’t have a family to speak to, that I couldn’t call my mum up, but also from a Sami perspective where you are your family, having to pretend that everything is fine to the rest of Sapmi, trying to hold yourself together and at the same time do the struggle of, “OK, this is me, I’m trans, I need this.” People go, “OK, what does your family think about this?” And I’m like, “I will never be able to talk about this in Sapmi without putting my family name in filth!”’

  ‘I think my parents would find it hard to grasp,’ I said, wanting Timimie to feel better.

  ‘Yes, and I think it’s the same thing as discussing not having borders at all, or veganism . . . it demands so much of a person. Saying we have gender roles but there’s no such thing as gender, saying we shouldn’t exploit animals or anyone’s body to eat, saying there’s no borders because everybody should be able to go and live anywhere: it fucks up people’s heads in a way that coming out as homosexual did just ten or twenty years ago. It’s not easier to be gay, it’s just worse to be more than gay.’

  ‘And to be poly, too, I guess . . .’

  ‘I’ve tried to be in monogamous situations since I was sixteen and it never worked, not because I am not able to be faithful – although I think that’s a weird term because it sounds so religious – but all of the time I was in monogamous relationships people have been cheating and then devastated that I’m not devastated. I’m like, “If being a blacksmith makes you happy, travelling the world or reading books makes you happy, I don’t mind as long as you want to be here and share some time with me.” But if you call me up and say, “I want to be a librarian and never have time to see you ever,” then I would be sad. It’s the lies that get me, not the being with someone else.’

  ‘Does being non-binary relate to your sexual identity as poly and queer?’

  Timimie finally stopped and thought for a second. ‘If I’m open as a non-binary Sami trans poly weird little shit, maybe my sister’s little kid will grow up and be whoever they want to be. And be able to sunbathe without a shirt, without it being a thing. And not have to come out. And not have to be on the barricades fighting for their everyday life.’

  ‘You use the terms “trans” and “non-binary” interchangeably. How come?’

  ‘I think because, for me personally, I identify with both, and since I want people to understand what I am saying I think maybe they will identify with it if I use both words. I don’t want there to be a gap between the two because both are just people. We will find similarities in our differences.’

  ‘So what are the similarities between trans and non-binary?’

  This time Timimie did not need to pause for thought. ‘Seeing beyond what is given to us.’

  We left Kafé 44 and walked through the snow to Madde’s apartment, Timimie kindly carrying my bags despite my insistence otherwise. They told me more about Sapmi, about the winters, about the traditional dress, about the wooden houses. Back at Madde’s house, she and I lay in bed together – I had not specified the sleeping arrangement to Emily, but it didn’t feel like a big deal – and talked about my meeting with Timimie. We talked about how they linked the colonization of Sami culture to the colonization of queer culture. How the corporatization of Pride was like going onto Sami land and mining their resources. We wondered aloud whether anything was sacred. Whether, if we ever even got a queer utopia, we’d just ruin it anyway.

  Madde suggested one last person for me to meet while I was in Stockholm, so the next day I got on the metro towards where they lived. All I knew was that their name was Zafire, and they had a kid that they raised with two other people. Despite not really knowing any queer parents in my private life or in my professional life until Patty, I had written before about the difficulties same-sex parents face: how expensive the process of conceiving can be, dealing with the assumption from the rest of the world that you’re friends and not a couple, and the heartbreaking biological fact that, no matter how in love with your same-sex partner you are, you cannot physically conceive a child together. I had written about individuals who had asked a sibling to donate sperm or eggs to their partner in order to create a baby that was related to them biologically, as Patty and Christina had done. I had written about parents trying to raise their kids gender neutral, be it with unisex clothes and toys or a gender-neutral name and pron
ouns. But I had never met anybody raising their kids in a queer, genderless, three-parent commune before.

  I got off the subway near Zafire’s house and found them waiting for me in the station. I realized, as they stood up to greet me wearing incredible red tartan punk trousers, with wavy blue hair and a septum piercing, that my brain immediately tried to place their gender somewhere within the binary. Or maybe it had already done this before I came to meet them, and now it was correcting itself. I wondered how long it would take to decondition myself from doing this entirely, to decolonize the room in my brain. Whether it was even possible.

  We made our way to their apartment together, the snow thicker under foot now that we were outside the centre of Stockholm. We chatted – the usual pre-interview preamble. Zafire told me they identified as queer and either anti-gender or non-binary – meaning that they didn’t have a gender, or identify with any gender. Pronoun-wise, they used ‘Zafire’. ‘It’s a great name. I’m happy if you can use that as a pronoun,’ they said, telling me that otherwise I could use ‘they’ in English and hen in Swedish. For them, hen was a way not only to de-gender the language but also to create a de-gendered position as a person. They believed that it had opened up ‘non-binary’ as a term in Sweden: ‘Language is incredibly powerful. When I came out, a little bit more than twenty years ago, I first came out as gay because I didn’t know about trans or non-binary.’

  ‘I hear this a lot, that people first come out as gay, then trans or non-binary,’ I said, thinking of Paris, and then of Amrou, respectively, ‘and as the language improves, people find even more accurate ways to self-describe.’

  We let ourselves into their building, a giant block of apartments in an even more giant complex. They were made of a metallic light blue material and seemed to dissolve into the sky. Zafire told me about their career as an artist and a sex educator. Though they were based in Stockholm they worked all over Sweden and internationally, teaching teenagers and grown-ups with disabilities, or the professionals who worked with them, how to approach intimacy, creating possibilities for people to go on a date, have sex, flirt, or have a relationship. Zafire even made a TV show on the topic that aired on Swedish national television in 2013, hosted by Zafire and students with learning difficulties. The work was all user-led, so for the TV show, for example, they solicited hundreds of questions from students and tried to answer as many as possible: How do you know if someone wants to have sex? Where do I find friends? What do you do on the first date? After the show, they created a free app that could be used by people with special learning needs to access information – they conveyed this information in multiple languages; spoken word, images, photos, films, role plays, anything that could embody the knowledge somehow or make it more accessible than someone just explaining it verbally.

  ‘The other thing I’m doing is more trans-centred sex education, not just “trans inclusive”,’ said Zafire, pouring me a cup of coffee. ‘Sex education is usually very focused on men and women, and in Sweden traditionally very gender separate, and I think this is just strengthening the binary system and reproducing gender roles and sexist stereotypes. So instead of focusing on men and women and trying to be trans inclusive, I would centre on trans and the similarities between everybody, because our bodies are super similar, regardless of what our genitals look like, and whether we obtain them through hormones or surgery, or if it’s something we were born with.’

  ‘You could say we’re all similar, or you could say each individual is so different, what’s the point of splitting everything in two,’ I said, thinking of how I had tried to gender Zafire, and why that was always the first thing our brain sought to do.

  ‘Sure. There’s a bigger difference sometimes within the same sex. And when you look at the anatomy of how the body works, they look different but they function in a similar way when they are stimulated or aroused. So I’m also developing sex education that focuses on the similarities and does not use a gendered language. We’ve had mandatory sex education here since the 1950s and yet special schools got their first material that was targeting teenagers and students with disabilities just a few years ago. That was from my TV show. So before then students didn’t get sex education, or they got sex education that wasn’t accessible because it was some other material not specifically for them, or just created by the teachers at the school, something they thought was suitable. Which is better than nothing but doesn’t guarantee a quality.’

  ‘My school didn’t teach us about same-sex relationships, but it would have been invaluable if they had,’ I said. ‘Where did your passion come from? How did you end up in this job?’

  ‘I’m very interested in accessibility as a way to make the world better. I think sexual rights is such an important part of human rights. I work in special schools because I think it’s incredibly nasty that a large group of people in Sweden are kept like children even when they grow up and are like grown-ups in so many areas of their lives. The system tries to give them independence and the right to choose for themselves, but when it comes to relationships there is so little service. But it’s not me there going, “Hmm, maybe this target group is asking these questions, and maybe this could be a good answer.” I haven’t guessed anything. I’ve worked together with them to get the right approach. They’re the experts, I’m just someone who can facilitate.’

  ‘And personally – is there anything in your own life?’

  ‘And me . . . like a lot of people who are queer or trans, I’ve never had sex education that was meant for me or people like me. All the sex education I’ve learned . . . or how I’ve learned how to integrate sex into my life, that’s something I had to learn by myself. But of course, later on when I found my queer and trans community, it’s something we had to learn together.’

  ‘At CRS?’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Zafire.

  One of the things I had come to discuss with Zafire was the Centre for Radical Sexuality. I’d heard a little from Madde, but asked Zafire to tell me its story. It was a place in Stockholm (a secret location only known to its guests) that Zafire started with their partners Cal and Mina in 2016. They described it as a centre for queer and trans and non-binary people who want to explore what radical sexuality could be. Occasionally they allowed some straight or cis people to attend, although that wasn’t really who it was aimed at. The centre was about openness, so they were open to the idea that only being separatist may not be radical. Basically, everything was up for discussion.

  The work they did in the centre sat at the intersection between ‘sexuality, trans, BDSM and spirituality’, Zafire explained. ‘So we try to explore the spiritual side of sex and the spiritual side of BDSM and the potential that BDSM could bring to us as queer and trans people. It’s a delicious mix of things. It’s a play space, it’s a space for workshops and trying things, and we focus on practice rather than theory.’

  This was the important part, Zafire explained, and the part that linked back to their other work as a sex educator for differently abled people. There was a gap in Sweden, they believed, between theory and practice. ‘Sweden has a reputation of being super gender equal, for example,’ they said. ‘Yes, the legislation makes it equal, but when it comes to the practice of what it looks like we have the same shitty patriarchy that’s everywhere anyway. We also have one of the most progressive anti-discrimination laws in the world, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have discrimination. To have something in theory and to have it in practice are not the same thing.’ On this point, they echoed Timimie’s sentiment: ‘And yet Sweden has a self-image of being like, “Oh, we’re free from racism, from sexism, it’s the world’s most equal country,” and yeah, on paper we have laws protecting people, but if they’re not used or respected . . .’

  The way that the centre approached this gap, then, was not just to talk about sex but to practise it too. They ran workshops on topics like consent, negotiations or impact play, and encouraged people to try these things out through exercises. When I
asked for an example of consent, Zafire explained the theory: that it’s important to negotiate and make sure that if you have sex with someone, everybody wants to.

  ‘A theory that, unfortunately, a lot of people don’t observe,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, like if this should be a given, how come so many women and trans and non-binary people have faced sexual violence? It’s not practised. So we ask: “How can we practise it?”’

  Zafire explained how an exercise would safely and gently explore where people’s limits lay, what their boundaries were, and how you could read someone else’s boundaries. Zafire did the same thing in their schools for people with learning difficulties: ‘Like, how close can I stand to someone else before it gets too close? That boundary is constantly moving and it depends who it is – if I like them they can stand closer; if I don’t know them we need more distance. It’s incredibly basic, but one thing is to talk about it and the other is to practise it.’

  ‘Why is this relevant for queer people though?’ I asked.

  ‘Queer and trans people have had to define sex for ourselves or use different types of rules or role plays and images to embody sexual energy or desire or horniness. How do I negotiate those boundaries when things might not be super clear to someone else about how I’m feeling or how I want to be touched or what I want people to think when they touch a certain body part? So it’s a kind of somatic sex education that we do in the centre.’

  ‘And for my mum, who probably thinks BDSM is the last taboo, why is BDSM relevant?’