Intersectionality Is A Term Coined By A Black Woman

The Divine Black Trans Feminine: A Conversation with Alán Palaez Lopez

by Jessica Hoppe

The first time I heard Alán Pelaez Lopez, a trans-AfroIndígena writer, and multimedia artist, recite one of their poems in person was a night I won’t soon forget. It was late February, the weather was bitter cold. The word “Corona” was still a surname, a beer label. The concept of a pandemic was purely theoretical. I’d heard a rumor of a distant virus—something about a bat. But that night we were still blissfully unaware of the upheaval that lay ahead and this was the book launch of the year! 

It would be my last night out in New York City. 

The presentation held at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division was called “Papers Will Not Protect Us: Fugitive Alien Voices” and featured some of the most evocative and avant-garde artists I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing. Alán’s book sold out before the show closed and the line to say ‘hello’ afterward snaked around the hall. We waited. I even got a selfie. 

When I made arrangements last month to speak with Alán, my plan was for this interview to celebrate Pride, and to discuss the challenges and nuances of their existence outside of and within the Queer community. But what occurred between then and now was unprecedented even by pandemic standards. 

The fight for justice in the murder of George Floyd produced arrests and charges almost immediately. Meanwhile, the officers who shot Breonna Taylor eight times as she slept in her bed remained employed, uncharged, and virtually undisturbed—releasing a nearly blank incident report last week. The 19-year-old Black Lives Matter activist Oluwatoyin “Toyin” Salau vanished on June 6 in Tallahassee, Florida, after detailing her sexual assault online. She was found dead on June 15, with reports claiming little action was taken by police to locate her. The assault on and blatant disregard for Black feminine life made clear this formidable movement needed an equally armed objective defending the lives of Black women. All Black womxn.  

Black transfeminine people and or Black people who identify as transgender experience violence—whether it be interpersonal or at the hands of police—at alarmingly higher rates than their non-Black counterparts. These incidents are often misreported, if at all. According to the Human Rights Campaign, 14 lives have already been lost this year—two last week: Riah Milton in Liberty Township, Ohio, and Dominique "Rem'mie" Fells in Philadelphia. Their deaths alongside those of Nina Pop and Tony McDade made clear the disproportionately dangerous existence of Black transgender people in America and all over the world. 

“I feel that the biggest attack on my body has not been being undocumented. It has not been being trans. It is not being seen as a person,” Alán shared with me via Zoom. Two days later, on the four-year anniversary of the Pulse night club massacre, transgender civil rights protections in health and human services were rescinded. According to the ACLU 1 in 5 trans people reported being denied the health care that they needed. The new rule would seek to bar trans people from legal claims of sex discrimination; provisions granted by the Affordable Care Act in 2016.

Last year reproductive rights came under attack in several states—particularly in Alabama, where Governor Kay Ivey signed a draconian abortion bill into law which included victims of rape and incest, and punishing doctors who performed them with life in prison. The news sent the feminist community into an uproar. Politicians, activists—even celebrities rallied to fight the bill, warning that Roe v Wade was vulnerable if contested in the US Supreme Court. The legacy of reproductive freedom and equal rights were and still are in serious jeopardy and yet this recent attack on the femme community did not provoke nearly the equivalent ire. 

It’s clear that just as we’ve been programmed to judge human-ness on the basis of race, we have likewise been conditioned to biologically qualify gender at birth, harmfully excluding our transgender sisters—labeling them less feminine—at our rallies, at the doctor’s office, and in our courtrooms. 

@ miss jk rowling

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On Sunday, June 14, approximately 35,000 people across two major US cities marched for Black trans lives, chanting #BlackTransLivesMatter. The next day SCOTUS ruled that the landmark civil rights law, Title VII, protects gay and transgender employees from workplace discrimination. 

Still, continued progress seems uncertain as we approach a perilous election during public health and social equity crises. Spending time in Alán’s ethereal orbit, where they are thriving at the intersection of all of our ‘isms, gave me hope. Alán is from the future, so take notes. 

Sad Girls Club: Thank you so much for chatting with me. I’ve been following your work for awhile and I was thinking, gosh, you must be exhausted! You’ve been leading this conversation for so long. This must feel really heavy for you. 

Alán Pelaez Lopez: Yeah. It's been heavy. Particularly because for a lot of people it's new, you know? I definitely have stopped answering emails. I think that in the last two weeks, I’ve responded to less than 10% of the emails that came in. And once my commitments are over I'm thinking about deactivating my social media for about two weeks. So I'm looking forward to that. 

Sad Girls Club: That sounds like a wonderful idea. Well-deserved. You have been an activist for years, most recently serving on committees for Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement and the Black LGBT Migrant Project (BLMP). You’ve also been super active on social, assisting with resources and information for those demonstrating in Oakland, particularly the undocumented. For those of us wanting to get involved—how would you describe “doing the work”?

Alán Pelaez Lopez: Well, I’ve had to start asking myself: If, while I'm doing the work, I feel less and less like a person each time, is that the work?

For me ‘doing the work’ means: How do I develop a toolkit where we can talk about when our personhood was taken from us? That for me makes a lot more sense than like digitally organizing for people not to get arrested, which is super important and necessary. But that also doesn't address their personhood which explains why they could get arrested. Like you're going to be arrested because you're not a person. So for me, it's like, okay, I'm a writer. One thing I'm good at is language. Let me develop a toolkit of language.

The workshop series that Ariana Brown and I are doing is actually the work I want to be doing. This week we’ll address internalized shame. We're going to be asking people: What is the first memory you have of shame? Followed by: What is the first memory you have with trial? I want them to think about how far in their timeline those two memories are and which one goes farther—in order to really begin thinking about personhood. I feel that the biggest attack on my body has not been being undocumented. It has not been being trans. It is not being seen as a person.

Sad Girls Club: Do you have a self-care practice? What brings you joy?

Alán Pelaez Lopez: Yeah, I do. I mean, for me, cooking is lifesaving, literally. I used to struggle a lot with depression and it's not that I don't anymore, but I think that being able to cook every day has reduced the amount of anxiety and the amount of stress and sadness that I feel since quarantine started. 

If you ask me: what are your most joyful memories? I think all of my joyful memories since quarantine have been cooking. Before I used to cook maybe three, four times a week, but now I'm cooking every day. And honestly, I feel so calm, cooking and washing dishes. It has always been this thing that I do, if I'm stressed out, I literally walk into the kitchen and wash dishes. I'm not sure if it's because my mom was always in the kitchen and that reminds me of her. It's something that I remember since I was a child, right. She was always in the kitchen. She was a domestic worker and a live-in nanny at one point. 

So, I do that to take care of myself. Cooking every day and listening to music. I never listen to new music. The music that I know is my mom’s. She has a CD collection with about 140 CDs. And maybe three years ago, I still had a laptop that you could put a CD in. So I downloaded, I mean, I burned maybe half of the collection into my laptop. 

Every day I just listen to a couple of songs from her collection and it brings me back to my childhood. It literally feels like a form of mobility, a form of time traveling. That is real, that is not made up! And even though I have a pretty shitty past, music was always what made my mom smile. Whenever I listen to any song that my mom listened to when I was growing up, all I can see is her dancing and her best friend smoking a cigar in our living room. The memory will carry me through the day. 

Sad Girls Club: I recall at the reading you would often say “Ok guys, disclaimer, this one is heavy trauma” with a laugh. Those are my favorite by the way but do you find that people will comment on it? That they become uncomfortable with heavy material or “trauma talk” as I’ve been told?

Alán Pelaez Lopez: Yeah, I do. It's comments like, “Oh, it seems like this was really hard to write,” or “all of this is really sad, but it's also really good.” And I’m like, you're not adding anything. Is that a compliment? And I think a lot of the times these comments come from people who are not artists. There’s a reason why we create, right? We don't just create because we're good at it. We create because we care; because we are invested—there are stakes. And all of that is labor. Artists are so taken for granted because we're not seen as laborers. But yeah, I often remind people art is [somewhat] like the most laborious thing that you'll ever encounter. And we do it in moments of deep rage and moments of deeper joy and moments of deep sorrow. 

But at the end of the day, when we create something, it's because we wanted it. Like maybe our body has refused it, but we still created it. Like we're finding our own selves. And if I create an object, and you take away the joy from the creation process, it's like, you're not even seeing me as an artist. You're seeing me as an avatar that produces like a robot that produces. 

Sad Girls Club: You seem so perfect are you ever petty? (hahaha) What I mean to ask is what is something you’re consistently working to improve?  Something you keep coming back to you? 

Alán Pelaez Lopez: I love dark humor. Like with my close friends, because I know all their traumas, I'll always like to bring them up with jokes. And I think for me, that's just something that my family would do to each other. 

When I wrote Intergalactic Travels, it was really me. But I think before, up until very recently, all I was...was my trauma. And, it's been an everyday commitment to be like, “Okay, I'm not that.” Maybe two or three days ago I was lying in bed and I felt like this—just in my feelings. And I realized it's fine to feel this way. I was just sad because I was thinking about my past— feeling like, “Oh, I’ve lived such a hard life.” But then I was like, “What is this? How is this helping?” I got out of bed and I went to my kitchen and I felt better. Getting out of bed really helps. 

There are still things that come back from childhood. I’m very, I don't know if “shy” is the word, but, it's very hard for me to trust people. And it's very hard for me to follow-up with people if I've met them once. Most of my friendships came about because they've reached out and they put in the work. And I think that's all my inner child that doesn't know how to see myself as worthy of friendships. And because of that, I don't really pursue them. Every day I question: how do I open myself up to accept care, to assess trust, intimacy. 

Sad Girls Club: You once wrote that when Trayvon Martin was murdered what got you through was talking to your Black friends. And when you were unable to return home to Oaxaca while undocumented you found the most solace in your Mexican community. Do you feel the safest or most connected to the queer community as well? 

Alán Pelaez Lopez: When I lived on the East coast, I felt more of a connection to the queer community. And I think part of it was because New York, Massachusetts, like those states are a little bit more upfront and I love clarity. And because people are so blunt, I always kind of knew where they were at. But I do feel the most kinship in trans spaces. The most like I can be, and kind of let my guard down. I came out when I was probably eight or nine to my friends. I came out to my family when I was 15. And then I started to explore gender outside of masculinity, probably when I was like 18.

But in my community, we have five genders and those genders are binary in a sense. There are people who are born with penises who perform as women and that's a binary gender in my village. There are people who are born with vaginas who would take on all the responsibilities of men and that's a binary gender. There are people who are born with penises and take both kinds of roles. So, for me, when I talk about ambiguous identity, I say transgender or gender-nonconforming, but back home, we have particular words for our genders. 

When I'm in the US I do find the most affinity with trans groups. And what I really love about trans people of color is that a lot of us know that—like the piece that I'm writing right now is on the intersections of blackness, indigeneity and transness. And that we know that the reason why we are murdered is because the end goal is the total elimination of trans people. And because people who are trans and of color in the US know elimination is the goal, we're kinder to each other. 

Like if I am in a trans space, I am usually the only person with a bachelor's degree. And we all know the stakes and how difficult the world is that we don't really care for that or how we say things. We care about how we're surviving and how we can help each other continue to survive. And that's not something that I've ever seen in solely Black spaces or in solely Latinx spaces or something I've seen ever. Maybe in disabled and fat spaces, but it’s rare. For example in predominantly Black spaces, a lot of the Black radicals that we see and look up to, most of them come from middle-class backgrounds. Most of them have pretty hefty degrees as I do. Classism plays such a big role. 

Last year the American Medical Association called violence against the trans community "an epidemic" - we need to talk about it.

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And then the trans of color spaces I have been in, our number one goal is assuring each other that each other’s daily needs are met, and helping each other move through the world. Like when George Floyd was murdered, I didn’t leave my house for like five days in a row. I didn't leave my apartment. And it wasn't just because I’m Black. I've always known that I'm very light-skinned and that my proximity to whiteness makes white people feel more comfortable around me than most Black people in my community. But I was scared to leave the house because I was feminine and trans. 

And what really gets me upset about cis women is that they don't know how to talk about femicide. Even though that is the thing that is deteriorating their fucking every single day. And it's like, femicide affect anybody who has a proximity to femininity. And when I see cis women reject aligning themselves with trans, gender-nonconforming, nonbinary people, it's like, literally these are the people who are as affected by patriarchy as you, because of their proximity to femininity.

One thing that I have learned from people in the community, has been this idea that we can never assume that we've arrived at a politic of liberation. And I think that's what's really hard with movements and with identities—claiming something like I am pro-Black. It's like, even for me, if I say I am pro-black, I'm like, okay, but I still benefit from colorism. How are you going to betray that which you benefit from, right?

I think that we create narratives about ourselves rooted in identities and our identities are always accessing power and also are always being cut off from power, but we assume that our identity is stable. And what hurts the most is when we enter spaces, assuming that we are the most marginalized. If we're entering a space, assuming that then we most likely should not be in that space.

And that's how a lot of media outlets work, particularly indie media. Whether they be podcasts or magazines, or clothing stores, they always assume that they are the most marginalized and therefore, that's why they're important. As opposed to saying: I want liberation to look like this, and therefore that's more important. That's a big shift. And I feel like if cis women were like, I want liberation free of patriarchy, I want a world free of patriarchy. Then by default, they would already be pro-trans. But because the entry point for a lot of outlets who are based around this idea of womanhood, where people with vaginas are the most prized in the world, that's still confining a person who has a vagina to a place of catastrophic violence and hopelessness. That is not empowering. What's empowering is what is the vision and how many people who don't look like you can get on board with your vision? And if you can do that, that means you're doing work that is substantial. That is going to change the world. 

the sad girlsJessica HoppeAlan Palaez Lopez, trans right, black women, Black Lives Matter, black trans lives matter, feminism, say their names, say her name3 Comments