Transgender Underground - Claudia Andrei

Nowadays we think of our history as progressive – everything getting better or worse and mainly as a result of what we or others have done. But here’s a book from 20 years ago which seems to prove that some parts of our shared lives are cyclical. Things come back into focus. When a sense of imminent catastrophe dominates things it’s strange to read that things are generally OK, that public disdain towards trans is infrequent and manageable, that the trans community is very diverse and hard to categorize, and that being determined to have a good time will overcome most negativity. That is the overall message from Claudia Andrei’s book. Granted it focuses on London where, as in many capital cities, trans can find a role and an identity in many social and sexual settings. Granted also that the year of its publication, 2002, was a moment when trans as a social and media phenomenon was gaining momentum for its phenomenal ascent to the status of Big Issue. Grant all that, and then consider that the ascent effectively polarized discussions around binary notions of identity for a long time – in terms of wide public awareness we were pre-non-binary, pre-fluidity and pre-intersectional – and you may feel that a circling back to individual diversities and choice and affirmation is no bad thing, if only to defuse some of the toxic conflictions which beset us as a community from without and within. Even more than her photographs the stories Claudia Andrei collected from her subjects open up the very many ways in which we may become trans. Also bear in mind that the starting point for all this questioning and testimony is transvestism or cross-dressing. There has been for a long time an attitude, often within the community, which says that transvestism is a cheap superficial analogy to the real business of medical transitioning and the risky adventures of genderqueer, that a cross-dresser is a lowly half-cousin of “out” drag queens and committed sex-workers, almost one of the “untouchables” of the trans world. What comes over here, though, is the idea that dressing is only one possible component in the assumption of a satisfying gender identity sharing that function with, for example, surgery, activism and upbringing. Transitioning can be seen from many angles, including dressing, and “Transgender Underground” offers most of them. The cast of characters doesn’t include any trans of colour and the author admits that they didn’t aim to include transmen in the project. What you do get is a set of very straightforward self-portraits, with all the local detail and low-level honesties of lives lived in real-time and place. Sometimes the matter-of-fact tone feels strange to a later period when everything, not just gender, seems to be in crisis and endangered, and sometimes it is amusing, like a deadpan joke from a comedian. In fact 2002 acquits itself well enough. The Introductions from Jeremy Reed and Claudia Andrei herself are also useful by showcasing a “third sex” in deflecting the requirement that all trans have to have a fully-formed “identity” and that there is one way of being trans. I suppose the key word is “underground”. The transwomen in this book almost all felt themselves to be outsiders. Now that trans has surfaced in society we might get a little nostalgic for what we shed along the way, might we?