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Excerpts from The Dawn of the Bad Trans Women: Stories, Fragments, and Lives of My Transgender Generation

2019; Duke University Press; Volume: 6; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/23289252-7253566

2328-9260

Porpora Marcasciano,

Race, History, and American Society

In June 2018, a long-awaited (re)translation of Mario Mieli's classic Elementi di critica omosessuale—a queer pushback against the seventies straight Left—came out for the Anglo-American market with the title Towards a Gay Communism. In February of the same year, italophone queer counter-publics had excitedly greeted the publication of Porpora Marcasciano's L'aurora delle trans cattive (The Dawn of the Bad Trans Women), a radical critique of contemporary assimilationist trans politics. In the 1970s, Marcasciano and Mieli were two key figures of the Gay Liberation movement, a theoretically sophisticated and lively chapter of the Italian radical Students and Workers movement that has been virtually ignored by historians of LGBT movements and twentieth-century Italy alike. After she came out as transgender in the 1980s, Marcasciano went on to become a tireless campaigner for trans rights and one of today's most beloved queer public intellectuals. Mieli's and Marcasciano's books have a lot in common in spite of the forty-one years that separate them: they both intersperse accounts of their own lives with social, cultural, and political analysis; they both humorously deploy a rhetoricity that borrows from underground queer slang to put forward a lucid political critique; and, most important, they are both motivated by a radical vision of queer politics as an alternative way of structuring society.But the two books are also different in some important ways. First, Marcasciano's story of the transformations that have invested national life in the past fifty years is told from the perspective of a trans woman and stems from a deliberate political choice to recover trans lives, placing them at the very center of our idea of social history. Second, as the book's subtitle suggests, this is as much one person's life as it is the biography of a transgender generation—the story of a marginal subculture and of its idea of society. Third, and perhaps most important, Marcasciano's book relates the past to the present: in an era of supposed transgender liberation through the attainment of legal rights and media visibility, the narrator addresses us directly, explicitly asking us to not forgo the legacy of the “bad trans women” who have built the movement. I chose to translate excerpts of The Dawn of the Bad Trans Women for TSQ to give anglophone readers a sense of the integral role that trans women have played in the queer movement in Italy from the very start, but also to help tell another story of transgender liberation and bypass the anglo-normativity of LGBTQ publishing, which typically leaves little room for queer texts in translation.( . . . )The first time I saw a trans woman—two, actually—was toward the end of the 1960s. I remember when it was that I met these two strange characters because it was during a family trip to Naples, when my family were shopping for my older sister's wedding, which took place in 1969. In the old Upim department store—a top shopping and cruising destination—I met them for the first time. And it was from up close. I was standing in line at the checkout with my family when one of the heavy doors opened—suddenly and lightly—as if it weighed nothing at all. The door was being delicately and gently pushed open by two peculiar maidens, who greeted the shoppers and shrieked: “Good morning. . . . Here we come, the variety show stars!” Slender, totally blonde, extra tight pants, heels so high they could reach the stars—the same stars they knew they were. Then my sister pulled me toward her and whispered in my ear, in a knowing tone, “They are men, they are men!” The girls heard and, as they passed us, they turned to my sister and said in Neapolitan dialect: “Ue' ue' peccere, que r'e . . . nun te fai capace! (“Hey, little one . . . what's wrong? Are you not down with it?”). And it was hard to “be down with it,” when we just had no tools to make sense of those two. According to common sense, they just didn't make any sense. They defied social logics entirely and did not fit within any given cultural model.( . . . )Pino had been talking to me about the femminielli and their rituals for a while, but I was fairly indifferent to his stories. One night he came to pick me up, announcing that we had been invited to a wedding between femminielli. I was not there for the ceremony itself, but I did go to the flamboyant banquet that followed it. The celebration was attended by about thirty people, many of whom were transvestites. Pino and I were some of the first people to get to the pizzeria, which meant I had the honor of being there for the entire ritual. Guests arrived, handed over their gifts and greeted the bride profusely and theatrically, who was wearing a striking white dress. When we arrived, she greeted Pino loudly: “The Professor is here! Good evening Professor, it is our pleasure!” Then she turned to me: “Little one, pass me the glass. Oh Virgin Mary! She is so beautiful this little one, she really is a woman, a little woman, ‘a femminiella!”The only thing I remember about that night was how impatient I was. I wanted to run away from that strange scene, a hilarious yet foreign spectacle. Once again, the deeper meaning of what I had witnessed was hard for me to capture and comprehend. Clearly, like in all beautiful tales, my relationship with the femminielli was only starting then. A few years after, my relationship with Valerie and Antonella—‘a Merdaiola—gave me the instruments I needed to better understand something within me that I was struggling to bring into focus. The Merdaiola (I am using the nickname with which she was best known in the femminielli community, because it is the one that suited her best and because it was the most beautiful) introduced me to the wonderful world of the femminielli, which had already started changing then. It was transforming into something else. The little, contained, ancient world of the femminielli was already being replaced by another world—an oversized, postmodern world. You could say that replacement was a move away from the femminiella to the category of the trans woman—but also, I guess, from the femminiella to the cis gay man.I let that world seduce me. I immersed myself in it. I let myself travel toward that new world like Alice in my own Wonderland. Initially, I was afraid of upsetting an ancient reorder of things, so I tiptoed my way into that world, holding a lantern and observing in silence. Just like all the other “worlds apart” (the worlds of those who were excluded from society and separated off from reality), it was not so much other people who pushed the femminielle out; it was they who consciously separated from the mainstream world. The reason for that is obvious, really: the walls and borders between our world and mainstream society were defensive; we raised those walls to protect our territory—the only place where we could survive and not break. I then started getting to know, respect, share the codes and rules of that world. I was starting to grasp its structure and interpret the gestures of its inhabitants. I slowly started to communicate with their language, a slang made out of words, sayings, gestures, rhymes that normal people would not understand. All the inhabitants of that fairyland had their own nicknames, which made them unique. Nonetheless, they'd all rather celebrate their name day than their birthday. On their name day, they would all celebrate the saint whose name was on their birth certificate and on their ID: Ciro, Gennaro, Antonio, Giuseppe, Raffaele. To this day, femminielli communities continue to keep their code unaltered, referring to themselves with male pronouns in certain situations and female pronouns in others.I can still remember the day I was “baptized.” It was a true initiation ritual, spontaneously put together and orchestrated by my new housemate, Merdaiola, who moved in with me and stayed for two years. Those two years turned out to be an essential school of life for me. About ten Neapolitan femminielli who lived in Rome were invited to our home for coffee, which in Naples is a symbol for friendship. The ceremony, which began in the early afternoon, went on until late at night and ended with an opulent ragout-based dinner. During the long, languid afternoon, the baptism ceremony attendees talked about me as the new arrival—making comments and sharing impressions, advice, and recommendations as to what aesthetic and surgical transformations I may need. Throughout the afternoon, Sasà, also known as Messalina, slowly combed my hair and did my makeup. This routine took hours, as we kept drinking coffee—a lot of coffee—as if it was water. Every so often, Messalina would take a few steps back to take a good look at me. Really, she was looking at her work of art, as she was sipping coffee and smoking cigarettes.I must confess that the result was amazing, I hardly recognized myself in that fabulous reflection I saw in the mirror. . . . O' miracolo! I was amused and fascinated as I looked at that new version of me, so much more similar to what I always was in my dreams. In those moments, I felt for the first time that my trans/formation was not just possible but, likely, doable. I moved, in a clumsily self-conscious way, among those ladies whose trans/formation was much farther along than mine.The attendees to my initiation ceremony were not sure about one thing: my name. It didn't work, it just didn't work, according to them. So they transformed it into more accessible versions: Porpa, Porpitiello, Polverina or Spolverina. I was center stage, and on the sides they were all chatting and gossiping. We spent that afternoon talking about the trans women we knew at a point in time when we were setting out to conquer the world. At that point, our world was finally coming in from the cold and we were excited. That pushed us to think, speak and act, and it felt like time was never enough for all the ideas we had.In that smoky room where the air was thick with hair spray and the scent of caffeine, we told each other stories, legends really, about the women in our community. There was that story about Saionara, who went to Florence to Dr. Luccioli to get a nose job, but it didn't turn out as well as Miss Seven Evenings's, because Saionara had had it done twenty times already, and at that point there was nothing left for the doctor to work with. Because Miss Seven Evenings was a lot younger, her face looked like Carrara marble yet to be sculpted, which was why we all looked up to her. Another one, Muscella, had had so much work done that it became a financial investment of sorts. She was much cleverer than all of us and went to London to the best gender-reassignment doctor in Europe, but she'd had to take out a loan from a loan shark. Another story was about La Scatulara, who, two months after her op in Casablanca, opened her window one morning and began shouting that she had finally reached an orgasm with her newly acquired vagina: “You can come with it! You can come with it! I came so hard, my cunt is the best!” She was so excited that her girlfriends thought she was going mad and, kindly and understandingly, called up an ambulance for her. Messalina, who had her op done in England, was far more composed and, with no yelling, showed her vagina by appointment to all her acquaintances. All she asked of her attentive observers was that they go and spread the gospel—that is, tell everyone how perfect her “cunt to die for” was. I remember very well when she came over to ours for a visit with her mum and her handsome brother. She was lying on my bed showing off her catheters and vaginal dilatators, as she explained what it would all look like eventually, much to everyone's excitement. Messalina's mum was waxing lyrical about her daughter while frequently inviting her son, who was trying to feel us girls up, to leave the room because this was “a woman thing.” La Pechinese had even organized a huge party that would culminate in a public viewing of her new vagina, with hundreds of invitees. Those were extravagant but ancient rituals that brought the community together and held our world together. Barbara—poor girl!—had no time to enjoy her new vagina, because soon after her op she was killed. Some say by a lover who went mad because of the huge physical transformation of his favorite girl. Others say it was a burglary.In order to understand and interpret that fantastic world (its language, codes and rituals) that ran parallel to that of normal people, you needed the right tools. I had found a secret passage in and I was delving deeper each day, learning new tricks with much joy and excitement. Gradually, I was learning the vocabulary, the turns of phrase, the gestures, the numeric codes and all the other ways with which the femminielli endowed that fabulous parallel world with meaning.Twenty-one was what we called ourselves, because in the Neapolitian tombola it stands for “woman,” while seventy-one, also known as totore, meant “man.” In our jargon, butch lesbians were a' totore. People who were a bit slow and didn't quite get it were twenty-three. Forty-four was jail, and you could you use it for people who were inside. Fourteen was the drunkard and sixteen was the ass (’o vascio), while twenty-nine stood for the phallus.( . . . )For years we'd say “I do trans” to mean “I do sex work.” Prostitution was so enmeshed and entrenched in the trans experience that just mentioning the word would automatically make you think of sex work, and the other way around. So the exact meaning of I do trans was “all that we were allowed to do and be”; it implicitly referred to what was reserved for us—and yet not provided for nor given to us—for our survival and our resistance. Prostitution was the foundation of our existence; everything else about the trans experience revolved around it. Prostitution was work, vocation, theater and drama, the means and the end, a ritual, a rule, our mark. It was our identifying mark. For us, prostitution was a place and it became the way we organized time, even though it remained a non-place entrenched in unofficial time. For a trans woman, living without selling sex was unthinkable. This was true in Italy as it was in many other parts of the world. Few of us recognized how crucial and useful prostitution was. Trans women more frequently thought of it as an irreversible sentence—an ancient imperative that you could only accept. Nonetheless and in spite of it all, the fabulous ladies had transformed that sentence into an opportunity for an extraordinary performance. And with that performance, they were able to convey their own pride at being trans.We need to remember that there never had been trans visibility before trans sex work, at least if we understand visibility in a collective sense, as a commons. Understood as a collective experience, visibility can transform a marginal identity into a recognizable and intelligible category of human experience. Those were the years when the trans female experience and prostitution became intertwined for the first time—through new forms and new modes. It may seem ridiculous today—unacceptable even—but then trans recognition happened through and because of prostitution. People understood—and unfortunately assumed—that the place and the time to meet trans women was the night, under the proverbial lamppost. Because at the start they were few, those few were a novelty, and they became legendary right away. You'd go to see them as you would the Winged Victory of Samothrace or the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, with admiring excitement. But by day, that feeling would be repressed, turning into contempt. In the years of their debut in Italian society, trans sex workers were nestled in the cityscape like beautiful monuments—completely at one with the dramatic scenery. In Rome, in Via Veneto, Porta Pia, Caracalla; in Florence, on the Arno riverbank; on the belvedere in Corso Vittorio, in Naples; in Sempione park in Milan and in Turin, by the Valentino palace and off the main street, Via Po.'As I drew nearer to them and my heart started to beat faster, I would see the figures of those wonderful creatures take shape from afar. That was the world where I met many girlfriends with whom I would later euphorically bond. ( . . . )All many of us did during the day was wait for the night so we could go to that place—the “corner” or “the lounge” as we called it. For all of us, the street was the most familiar environment, the most comfortable, the place where we felt we truly belonged. Even though it was outdoors and public, it felt like the most private and personal place. Between the girls there was closeness, intimacy, and solidarity. And it could not be any other way, because our world existed outside social impositions and rules. None of us would even dream of crossing the fence that had been built all around us to separate us from the rest of the world. As one of the characters in Priscilla says: “I don't know if that ugly wall has been put there to stop us getting out and isolate us, or to stop them getting in so that we stay safe.” Our world may have been walled off from the rest of society, but within those narrow confines we could find far more solidarity, political consciousness, and sense of belonging than is available to trans people today. Today's extreme individualism encourages people to place one's own transition at the center of the universe, while obsessively remarking how entirely normal transitioning is. The world of trans women as we knew it was miles apart. It was something of a commons.The first meetings of the Movimento Italiano Transessuali were rather eccentric and dominated by the elder trans women. These women were matriarchs who seemed to be entitled to whatever they wanted and could get away with pretty much anything. They practiced “the honest profession” whenever and wherever they wanted, without having to account to anyone. ( . . . ) Antonellona “the Buildress” was always around. She was a former boxer and usually wore a tight (pink or pastel blue, her favorite colors) top that highlighted her massive build. She was infamous for her brute force, which would explode unexpectedly, abruptly—a way for her to exercise her power in the community. Those outbursts of anger were Antonellona's trademark. She was one of the first trans women I remember who was a parent. She had a daughter who would boast to her classmates: “My dad has tits, my dad has tits!” For that reason, one day the Buildress was called in by the School's Board of Trustees, who wanted to find out exactly what was going on.It was the Buildress who got me signed up for the MIT steering committee. That meeting was, as always, loud and charged, the air full of cigarette smoke. I was sitting quietly in my corner with Marilina, Antonia, Fabiola, and Lucrezia, my closest girlfriends. I remember that at one point I very shyly intervened in the discussion: I spoke instinctively and I kept it short. I hadn't even quite finished my sentence when the Buildress came up to me and faced me, with her hands on her hips, looking like a sugar pot, and staring at me intensely. I was suddenly overwhelmed by the fear that she would slap me right in my face, and my stomach churned. Instead, in a decisive and authoritative tone she asked all the other girls to be quiet: “You girls all shut up now, I like how this young lady talks. What's your name? Porpora! What the fuck is that? She's called Porpora, check her out! Let me hear you talk some more!” I wanted to disappear, I'd turned red and orange out of embarrassment. I did not know what to say anymore, I had suddenly forgotten what I had said earlier on, too. The Buildress kept shouting in my face: “Come on, talk!” Then she turned to Roberta Franciolini, who was then the Chair of MIT in the Lazio region: “Robè, this girl knows how to talk, we have to give her a role in MIT.” Roberta did not have to hear that twice and, before I had even had a chance to say what I thought, she had my life all planned out for the next few months.( . . . )Another time Manuela “the Pussy,” who had recently had a boob job done, wanted to show it to everyone, show it off even. She started walking up and down the room excitedly, with the straps of her dress purposely loosened and her sexy body on display. She moved past the other girls, acting full of herself and cocky. The third time that Claudia Schiffer look-alike walked up, Big Deborah, who was sitting with the girls for the meeting, punched her in the face from her seat. She punched her with such force that the Pussy landed on the other side of the room. After the punch, Big Deborah rubbed her hands together and said: “Will she please just fuck off now, I have had tits for fifteen years!”Our meetings went on, rowdy, loud and smoke filled as they were. A recurrent topic of discussion was our relationship to lawyers who had to defend us in court. Today, lawyers who work with transgender people deal with legally changing names, filing for new documents or with the recognitions of similar rights. Back then, lawyers who dealt with trans issues mostly worked on releasing a trans woman from jail who had been arrested for obscenity or for insulting a public official. The latter was the most frequent trans crime, even if it was rarely actually committed.( . . . )Not much is left now of the first years of MIT: a few worn-out documents, manifestos, meeting minutes, and many memories of the witnesses who survived up to now. Our life was hard and ruthless; the effects were visible both in our bodies and in our minds. Few of us managed to dodge the bigger obstacles and get to today in one piece. The “black wave” of heroin and AIDS took a devastating toll among trans women and other minorities. In the mid-eighties, more and more of my girlfriends had that absent look that spells out addiction. We no longer focused on our body, we focused on destroying it. Because of drug addiction, tricks, deals, and scams became the defining traits of our spaces. The circulation through underground markets of large heroin consignments (which I maintain was a planned political maneuver) hit the vulnerable and the dreamers among us, bringing the cultural and sexual revolution of the previous years to a sudden halt.