Melb Trans Muso Goes Global With Honest Essay About 'Passing'

Melbourne singer and electronic percussionist, Simona Kapitolina, has scribed a touching essay on Vice about trans visibility, 'passing' and the normativity that cover stories of Caitlyn Jenner and Laverne Cox have brought to mainstream attention.

She notes that while Jenner and Cox have brought issues of trans visibility to the forefront, it still showcases what people expect trans people to look like — the act of "passing", which is "to be perceived as the gender with which you identify. But our increasing obsession with it is a dehumanizing social construct, as it hinges on other people's idea of what trans women are expected to look like."

Making note of the transphobic attack of Stephanie McCarthy in Sydney recently, Kapitolina describes her experiences attracting puzzled stares from children on the bus, being laughed at in Las Vegas while she was transitioning and having her appearance criticised by ex-partners and ex-friends.

"Some of the most harmful things said to me pre-transition by ex-partners and former friends were observations of my masculine features that in their minds rendered me unable to pass. My eyes were too deep-set, my neck too thick, my nose was big, my chin pronounced, I was too tall. They assured me I'd make a much better-looking man than I ever would a woman, so why would I want to wreck that?" she writes.

She urges that cover stories of the glamourous, airbrushed, affluent trans women you see in the form of Jenner and Cox are "not the real trans experience". 

"There is nothing glamorous about the erasure, poverty, and murder that define our experiences and permeate our communities. This is what annoys trans folks about our much-talked-about visibility, this tipping point — it's so edited."

Kapitolina's essay has received positive feedback and exposure around the US and Europe. 

Kapitolina is the creator of queer pop label Girls Who Smoke Poke and also runs a gender-diverse club called The Shock Of The New. She's also released two albums — 2013's Trouble In Utopia and 2014's Exotic Ladies of Birobidzhan.

Check out Kapitolina's new cut, No Allegiance, below; it was released earlier this week.