Let’s Talk About Boxes

We’re continuing our spotlight on trans creatives today with author and game designer Sian Ingham, another insightful guest from our LGBTQ+ Horror Podcast.

My partner had arranged for her to share our room at the meetup, and so quite reasonably, I thought, I'll drop her a message and meet up for a cup of tea, because I'm weird like that. She thought I was hitting on her and this young trans woman immediately went into date negotiation mode. Now you have to understand, I'm poly and I'm generally into trans people, and my main partner wasn't just OK with it, he was positively encouraging, but, just, no. Although comfortably deep into her 20s, she's still twenty years younger than me, and That's Just Gross, and more importantly, she had her boxes mixed up.

Inside You Are Two Wolves Boxes

OK, I need to pull back and explain that. It seems to me that people keep our gender identities and sexualities roughly in two boxes, and I'm going to ask you to imagine them as, conceptually at least, marked Safe For Work, and Not Safe for Work.

And what I mean is that in everyday discourse, the way we communicate these parts of ourselves varies depending on who we're with, the casual acquaintances we might meet with in a professional workspace that someone might bring their kids to, as opposed to the sort of things you'd say in private conversation with your close friends, and lovers, or in a space where you're supposed to be talking about sex.

Like you might be trans, and gay, and those should in any reasonable world be things you're comfortable with bringing to your imaginary work. You might talk openly about your partner. You might have a photo of the two of you on your imaginary desk. You'd explain who you were frankly to your colleagues' kids. It's all SFW.

But let's say that in the bedroom you've got your kinks. I don't know, maybe you're into something pretty tame, like, oh, I don't know, sploshing. There's nothing morally wrong with getting aroused by being hit by custard pies during your sexytimes. I mean, it's literally the most vanilla kink imaginable (because that's usually the flavour of the custard). But you don't tell it to the folx you have to work with, right? It's NSFW.

The problem is that we don't always get to be as SFW as we want to be. So my friend for example, turned out to be living with her mum and dad and had a fairly decently paying job, and she wasn't out in either of those spaces. She was only out, in fact, on Saturday nights, when she was trawling Grindr for chasers. And she'd hit a point where she was literally only comfortable expressing her identity as a trans woman in kink venues. And that denial of yourself, of putting the things you should be able to show the entire world without shame or fear, this erodes you.

Cishet Disconnect

And it's relevant to us in the place we are right now because cishet people have a weird relationship with their boxes. Many cishet people don't consider themselves to have a gender, they work on the assumption that they are a gender. Often, the same people don't think of themselves as having a sexuality at all – there's just sex. Consider you're in that imaginary office and an imaginary cishet colleague, back from an imaginary honeymoon, shows you their imaginary wedding photos. Imagine how confused they are when you comment approvingly on how open they are about their sexuality with you, and praise the happy couple's gender presentation.

And this is part of the disconnect that all the various varieties of phobe have – they can't imagine sexualities and gender identities other than their imagined cultural default existing outside the realms of NSFW because they can't imagine sexuality or different genders as a thing apart from sex. They can't conceive of a person being gay without having sex with someone of the same gender, because to them homosexuality is a thing you do. It's why they're so viscerally disgusted when for instance they hear about a kid's book where a kid has two dads, or when a drag queen goes to a library and reads stories to kids. They think it's grooming.

An explanation isn't an excuse. Their lack of empathy and understanding has led to a systemic failing of human decency, and you get the horrors that are happening right now in Florida, and which may well be just around the corner here in the UK. Right now we need to be braver than we have ever been. We need to show solidarity and display courage. And we need to be clear about the boxes we keep our selves in.

Sian’s latest book, “We Don’t Go Back: A Watcher’s Guide to Folk Horror” is available on Amazon.