After I watched Sticks and Stones and The Closer, I wrote something about Dave Chappelle and the transgender community. On the basis of his content I couldn’t quite understand all the furor.

It’s very much peak enlightened centrist, but I think it still holds up. I did a Clubhouse room on it with a friend who happened to know Dave.

I found out, years later, that Dave Chappelle had listened to that room via his publicist and liked what I said and what I wrote. It was one of those bucket list items you didn’t know you had, until you checked it off.

I watched every one of his specials afterwards, and just finished watching The Dreamer. There’s a subtle kind of wisdom in his comedy: Here’s what he taught me about being transgender.

The Slap

In Dreamer, Dave talks about Chris Rock getting slapped by Will Smith. He stretches that event to cover the controversy over his jokes about transgender people by the end of the special.

Paraphrasing, he says that sometimes you have to be able to take having the shit slapped out of you and maintain your composure, so you don’t fuck anything up.

That’s largely what he did, and I’ve come to admire his particular brand of perseverance. The media seemed to operate with clairvoyance and extrapolate intentions which weren’t there.

I wish Will Smith had slapped Chris Rock years earlier than he did, because I could have used that advice much earlier. I wonder if other trans people could have too.

Peak Trans

My coming out experience has been one of extremes: Social progress isn’t linear. It’s more of a sine wave, and I’ve gone through its peaks and valleys.

I came out during the first months of the pandemic, and overall I think we were still in peak trans territory. That time when a trans person couldn’t take a breath or a step without being called stunning and brave.

I loved it. Being a regulatory affairs executive in Canada’s burgeoning cannabis industry, I had that experience of peak trans that only public figures do. I did media in psychedelic magazines. I did media in weed magazines. I did an interview with the Canadian Securities Exchange.

Life was really good, but in retrospect, that artificial environment gave me vastly inflated expectations on what it’s really like to be trans.

I started finding out in 2022. It began with one or two dirty looks at Hereticon, and peaked at physical assault at FWBFest in 2023.

Also in in 2022, I started writing about my various adventures. Having come across Michelle Lhooq’s Rave New World blog, I really wanted to emulate her brand of party journalism.

I think that Hereticon was the only one I really maintained composure over; the rest always had some element of Ivy has a bad time at a party. Maybe, if Will Smith had slapped Chris Rock just prior to the pandemic, my writings wouldn’t have landed me in so much trouble.

Composure

That composure is just something you have to have, now. I don’t think it was during peak trans. You could tell your story, and there was some greater societal counterweight that seemed to be acting in your favour. The death of that counterweight mirrored the death of rainbow capitalism.

So I told my stories. Composureless, emotional, and sometimes filled with anger. None of it unjustified, I think, but still a gigantic faux pas. In the same way, I think, that Dave Chappelle going off on an extended rant against trans people would have been received.

I occupied a really awful liminal space during those times. Something in-between event organizers are right to be upset if you run to blog about what happened before talking to them first and human beings that go through traumatic experiences seldom react rationally.

Dave taught me, a little too late, that living your truth or similarly phrased progressive bullshit is not the move.

People, in general, no longer want to hear about the plight of the noble trans woman. I suspect some never did, and it was that giant societal counterweight that made it seem otherwise.

There’s an element of bimbo feminism to trans rights discourse. too. Spamming #transwomenarewomen worked, to a degree, at one time. Now it’s just a remnant of peak trans.

The move, now, is maintaining composure. Not doing so did fuck some things up for me. Generally speaking I found out an unwritten requirement to a lot of spaces, even on top of explicit invites, is composure.

You Can Learn Something, Too

There are still lessons in Dave’s comedy for other trans people, too. It’s likely that some permutation of Chappelle’s material has run through the heads of people in spaces they inhabit.

They might have thought of your experience of womanhood as being equivalent to Jim Carrey pretending to be Andy Kaufman. They might, as Dave has, used an analogy to products like Beyond Meat to refer to post-bottom surgery genitalia.

It sucks, is not fair, and all other it is what it is-isms that trans people have to maintain that composure in the face of those things, but they do. There’s another form of it, when women have to maintain that composure in the face of sexual harassment and violence.

There is no great cosmic ear listening to right those wrongs, whether you’re transgender or a cis woman. Deirdre moved to Europe after telling her story, and said she’s not sure if it was worth it. Some women in corporate life I know have told me that they think MeToo went too far.

I certainly regret not maintaining composure. Not doing so throws you into some very dire no-win scenarios. Ones you can’t moralize your way out of it because The Narrative cares mostly about who maintains composure and who doesn’t.

Some people view Dave Chappelle as some kind of transphobic asshole who loves punching down, but if you actually listen to him, that’s not the truth. That’s the problem with trying to fight those no-win scenarios; no one listens to you.

He could have done endless amounts of media about what his material actually was, how much hyperbole was flooding out about him, but he was smart enough to know that was a no-win scenario. Even as employees at Netflix were walking out over his special, he maintained composure.

I understand that few trans people find Dave funny, and many find him hurtful. Valid reflections on his comedy, but if you are trans and reading this, I still implore you to consider his message: Maintain composure.