Kurt Cobain Will Have His Revenge on the Straights
Had a video call with my brother Chuck the other day. Things got heavy:
KATE: Was Kurt Cobain a trans woman?
CHUCK: What?
Kurt Cobain. Rock musician. He was in a band called Nirvana.
Iâm familiar with him, yes.
Was he a trans woman?
Um. No?
OK. Why not?
I mean, he wasnât. Itâs like asking why he wasnât an astronaut.
He wasnât an astronaut because he never went to space. Why wasnât he a trans woman?
Because he didnât transition. I mean, he didnât ever say he was a woman, didnât ever say he was trans. So no. Kurt Cobain wasnât a trans woman.
So someone is trans if they say theyâre trans. Self-determination.
Thatâs what youâve told me. Is that wrong?
No, thatâs right. We know ourselves better than anybody else can know us. If we say weâre trans, nobody can say we arenât.
And Kurt Cobain never said he was trans.
So was I trans in 1994?
I donât know, were you?
Yes, but if youâd asked me in 1994, I would have told you ânoâ.
So if I tell you Iâm trans, Iâm transâŚ
Right.
But if I tell you Iâm cis, I might still be trans?
If you tell me youâre cis, I believe you.
Thatâs not the same thing as âIâm cisâ.
Thatâs a really good point. This is sort of what some queer people are getting at when they say âgender is a constructâ.
Come again?
Well, youâre cisgender, right?
As far as I know, yes.
Aha.
Hmmm?
You hedged. âAs far as I knowâ isnât the same thing as âyesâ. âAs far as I knowâ opens up the possibility that you could be trans and not know it.
It doesnât seem terribly likely.
Thatâs an interesting statement. Early on in transition one of the biggest problems I had was dealing with the sheer unlikelihood of my being trans. I mean, I knew trans people existed. I knew somebody had to be trans. I just couldnât wrap my head around the idea that it would be me.
Do you think this is why youâre on this whole âKurt Cobain was a trans womanâ kick?
Hey now, Iâm just asking questions. You know. Like J.K. Rowling is âjust asking questionsâ.
Kate, you are literally wearing a T-shirt that says âKURT COBAIN WAS A TRANS WOMANâ on it right now.
Am I? Oh, shit. I thought I was wearing my âSkip school, take hormones, kill Godâ T-shirt. To your question, though - yeah, I do think thatâs part of it. Honestly, the hardest thing about growing up trans was believing that nobody in the world had ever experienced what I was experiencing. I didnât have any role models. I didnât wonder if I was the only one. I was convinced of it.
So being able to say that this incredibly gifted songwriter, the voice of a generation, was a trans woman like youâŚ
I need someone like that. I need to not be the first of my kind.
Of course youâre not the first trans woman.
No, but before a couple of years ago almost every trans woman would tell you they always knew, unquestionably and innately, that they were women.
So itâs not just about him being trans, but specifically his being a trans woman who didnât know he was a trans woman.
An egg. Right.
Why Kurt Cobain, anyway? Whatâs so special about him that youâre trying to induct him into the Egg Hall of Fame?
He knew things. Things cis guys donât know. Things I didnât know until after I started transition. He understood women, what weâre like, what we experience. âPennyroyal Teaâ. âRape Meâ. I just have a hard time thinking of a cis man who could write songs like that.
It wouldnât be the only way in which he was exceptional.
True. Ahhh. I donât know. I mean, I know, I can give you all the reasons, but thereâs something in his eyes.
Something in his eyes.
All the pictures of him. No matter what heâs doing. If heâs grinning, or sad, whatever heâs doing, you can see something trapped there. Trapped and in pain, wanting to get out but not quite knowing how.
Huh. You, uh, know that what youâre doing is pretty much the textbook definition of projection, right?
Maybe. Chuck, do you think Iâm happier?
Since you transitioned?
Yeah.
Of course. Absolutely. Night and day.
Everyone says that, and honestly, I see it. Even in pictures, you know? I see it. Youâve seen some of my transition timelines, right?
You do look really different.
Itâs not just me. Every single person who transitions looks like that. We look so much happier, so much more alive, so much more us. I donât understand how anybody can hate us.
I donât get it either, Kate.
And when I look at any timelines, I look at the before photos⌠and I see something in their eyes. Transmasc, transfem, doesnât matter. Thereâs something trapped wanting to get out. Every picture Iâve ever seen of Kurt Cobain looks like the âbeforeâ picture on a transition timeline. Itâs just that with him, there arenât any after pictures.
And itâs not just the eyes, either. The way he dressed, the whole âgrunge lookâ. Itâs just literally egg fashion. We dress with total disregard for our appearance or how we look because no matter what we do itâs wrong.
âEgg fashionâ, egg this, egg that⌠isnât it a little bit anachronistic, judging him by 2022 standards, 2022 values?
Is it? Chuck, I was alive in 1994. I was an 18 year old egg. I know what that feels like. I know what that looks like. I lived that. Why didnât I come out as trans in 1994? Because I didnât have the opportunity. Because self-determination needs to be informed, and none of us were. None of us. Look. You know what he said to Melody Maker in 1991? âI knew I was different. I thought that I might be gay or something because I couldn't identify with any of the guys at all.â Thatâs what he said.
Holy shit. Really?
Really. September 14, 1991.
Hold on, let me look that up. Oh, yeah, I see it. Look, if you look at the full quote heâs just saying heâs not a jock. Like he didnât fit in with the jocks.Â
Well, what about the dresses?
What dresses?
Kurt Cobain wore a lot of dresses. Like, a lot, both onstage and off. On MTV in 1991, he said âItâs âHeadbangerâs Ballâ so I thought Iâd wear a gown.â He said in a 1993 interview, âI personally like to wear dresses. I wear them around the house sometimes.â This is not some shameful secret he kept hidden from the world. He was open about this. He was proud about this.
Yeah, but⌠itâs just clothes.
Except itâs not just clothes. Listen to his songs. Listen to his lyrics. âShould have been a sonâ. âIâm a lady, can you save me?â âEveryone is gay.â The original lyrics to âAll Apologiesâ from his journals â âBoys write songs for girls. Let me grow some breasts.â
I mean theyâre song lyrics. There are all kinds of ways to interpret song lyrics.
Sure. All kinds of ways. You ever read Michael Azerradâs biography of Cobain, Come As You Are?
Nope.
Azerrad spent weeks talking to Cobain. He was Cobainâs biographer, but also his friend. And he has his own interpretation of the lyrics. For instance, Azerrad talks about all the lyrics about guns, and to me, now, I look at that, and I think of how he died, but Azerrad, when Kurt was alive, he looked at it another way. He thought itâs about dicks. âTo paraphrase Dr. Freud,â he says, âsometimes a gun is just a gun. But not this time.â He talks about âCome As You Areâ, where Kurt keeps singing âI swear I donât have a gun.â Thatâs not my interpretation. Thatâs never been my interpretation. Thatâs what this cis man says. More than one cis man. Kurt says Dave Grohlâs dad, he said the same thing. Yeah. There are all kinds of ways to interpret lyrics.
âBy this time,â Azerrad wrote, âone begins to wonder how Kurt rationalizes being a man at all. His first response is revealing. âI donât know,â he says. âCastration.ââ I donât wonder how Kurt rationalizes being a man. I rationalized âbeing a manâ in all kinds of ways. What strikes me is that he needed to rationalize being a man. Had to come up with some kind of excuse. It just strikes me kind of funny.
Kurtâs songs have meanings.  The lyrics to âIn Bloomâ, Kurt was pretty explicit about that. The lyrics he wrote have meanings. âHeart-Shaped Boxâ. You know what that refers to? When Courtney Love was flirting with Kurt, Michael Azerrad says in Come As You Are, âShe gave Dave (Grohl) a package to give to Kurt â little sea shells and miniature teacups and a tiny doll, all packed into a small heart-shaped box.â A tiny doll locked away inside a box shaped like a heart. That was what I felt like before I came out. A tiny phantom doll. Kurt and Courtney first kissed after a show at the Cabaret Metro in Chicago. Rumor was that they fucked against the bar, but they denied it. What actually happened, Azerrad says, is that âCourtney had a bag of lingerie with her for some reason and Kurt ended up modeling the contents.â And then they went to Kurtâs hotel room and they fucked.
Youâre making it soundâŚ
Maybe it was. Because you look at that and you think that if it was like that, it was perverted and wrong, because thatâs what you were told, that itâs a sick fetish thing, and I look at it and it isnât. To me, thatâs normal. That Kurt Cobain was sexually aroused while wearing Courtney Loveâs lingerie, thatâs normal.
Kate, he was a punk! He hated jocks, and wearing a dress pissed off jocks, so he wore dresses. He talked about wanting to wear a dress and piss on a redneck A&R manâs desk! You think that was some kind of sex thing?
Sexuality is part of being a woman. Part. Rage â and Kurt Cobain had a lot of rage inside him â thatâs another part. Am I interpreting, am I looking at things from my perspective as a trans woman? Yes, certainly, just like youâre interpreting, looking at it from your perspective as a cis man. When cis people interpret things, their conclusion is never âthey were transâ. Never.
Ed Wood wasnât a trans woman. He was just a transvestite. He was a man.
Pete Burns from Dead or Alive wasnât a trans woman. Sure, he got all sorts of feminizing surgeries, but he never said he was a woman. Man.
Prince Nelson adopted a female persona, feminized his voice, and recorded a song about wanting to be a woman's girlfriend, but he was also a Christian and believed that being queer was wicked and sinful, and that's the identity of his we need to respect. Man.
Richard Wright, who wrote the Phish song âHalleyâs Cometâ, spent most of the 1980s telling everyone he knew he was a transsexual lesbian named Nancy, but after being consistently treated like shit changed his mind about that, so none of that counts for anything. Man.
Dave Carter was on HRT when he died, but he was just questioning. He didnât tell anybody for sure that he was a woman. Man.
Quentin Crisp said just before he died that if he was younger, he absolutely would have transitioned, but wanting to transition isnât the same as actually transitioning. Man.
All men. Always, always men, whatever they do, whatever they say. I know how that works. I was told all these same things about myself for decades, all these same reasons, and now, I donât know, I guess people will make a personal exception for me, but for everybody else, the same old assumptions, the same old arguments, they still apply. Theyâre still legitimate.
I thought we were talking about Kurt Cobain.
And the only way to do that is to talk about him in isolation. Thereâs no larger context to consider, no bigger picture. I canât really know. I canât really judge.
I mean, everybody else does. I guess I canât tell you not to. But all of this circumstantial evidence, all of the dresses and the lyrics that you I guess know the real meaning of â none of that makes him a girl.
Sure. And nothing can make him a girl. Because heâs dead. Because he killed himself.
Oh, here we go. After thirty years and countless speculation, you have at last uncovered the real reason Kurt Cobain killed himself â gender dysphoria. Do you have a book deal yet?
Working on it. And yes, people say a lot of stupid things about Cobainâs death, like itâs this big shock that this guy who hated himself and wanted to die killed himself.
Right. Â He was pretty well-known for being a heroin addict, which isnât exactly something that improves oneâs quality of life.
Sure, but why did he start heroin?
I donât know. Why does anybody start heroin?
To help him cope with his eating disorder.
Wait, what? Eating disorder?
You donât know about that? He had stomach problems, for a long, long time. He could only eat certain kinds of food, certain kinds of food that wouldnât make his stomach hurt. Doctors looked but they could never find any organic cause for it. Nobody took it seriously. So he self-medicated with heroin. âIt was my choice,â he told Azerrad. âI donât regret it at all because it was such a relief from not having stomach pain every day.â I know, though. Lots of cis guys have eating disorders. Doesnât mean anything.
Kate thereâs a lot of interpreting going on here.
Yeah, I guess there is. Is that necessarily a bad thing, though? Is that necessarily wrong? Like. Youâve seen The Matrix, right?
Only the first one.
Yeah, thatâs fine. So you know how important The Matrix is to a lot of trans women, right?
Yes, but Iâm not really sure why. Just seems like a retelling of Platoâs âAllegory of the Caveâ with extra fight scenes.
Itâs pretty trans, though, right?
Clearly. It was directed by two trans women.
And trans women who watch it â eggs or otherwise â find their own lives and experiences reflected in it in ways that cis people, like you, donât.
I guess, but the fact that it was actually made by two trans women carries a little more weight with me.
OK, but what if the Wachowskis had died in 2000? In, like⌠a car crash or something? Does that mean The Matrix isnât a trans film?
Well, no, because itâs still a film made by two trans women.
A film made by two trans women that speaks to the trans experience, and that is recognized by living trans women as speaking specifically to the trans experience. The only difference is that, in this scenario, nobody knows the Wachowski Sisters are trans women. And we canât prove it. We canât possibly prove it, and nobody is going to just believe us when we say itâs a trans movie, that the Wachowskis were trans women, because they didnât say it, they didnât say the special magic words. Self-determination. You know what self-determination meant to Kurt Cobain? I remember seeing Courtney Love on television reading his note, I remember her interrupting to say that he was an asshole, that what he was saying was bullshit. She didnât respect his self-determination.
UmâŚ
âPennyroyal Teaâ. Cobain told Azerrad âIt's a cleansing theme where Iâm trying to get all my bad evil spirits out of me and drinking Pennyroyal tea would cleanse that away.â Pennyroyal is an abortifacient â but, Azerrad notes, only in lethal doses.Â
Hell, not just that song. The whole album. In Utero. The collage on the back cover, the one Cobain described to Azerrad as âSex and woman and In Utero and vaginas and birth and death". The occult symbols surrounding it, taken from Barbara G. Walkerâs The Woman's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects1. There was something inside Kurt Cobain, something inside him waiting to be born, but he was told, over and over, that it was a monster, so he killed it, the only way he could. By killing himself.
That could have been me. That could so easily have been me. I was told all the same things he was. We all were. When I was 27? When I was 27, I was addicted to benzos, benzos they prescribed me because I was trying to bury, trying to kill this thing, this thing I had inside of me. I was a zombie. Walking dead. When I quit, I quit cold turkey. Nobody told me about the withdrawal syndrome. Nobody told me it could have killed me. And if it had, everybody would remember me, everybody would think of me, as a cis man. Forever. They would perpetuate the Lie. Thatâs why I transitioned, why I chose to go through all the shit I went through. The writer and musician Margaret Killjoy, in 2017 she talked about what she went through the day before she came out:
âAll I could think was: âOh god, I donât want to die a boy.ââ2
I felt the same way, came out for the same reason. I figured no matter what I did, I was dead. I didnât do it live, but to at least have an honest death. I genuinely believed transition would kill me.
It didnât, though! Youâre alive and youâre beautiful and Iâm so, so glad for that. It didnât kill you.
It could have. Still could. Transition has helped, has made it easier for me, but itâs not that way with everyone. People have been kind to me, in ways that they arenât kind to other trans women. Others of us⌠arenât so lucky.
Who are we respecting, exactly, by remaining silent about our shared experiences, our shared perspectives, things we see that you fucking donât, that you canât see? Of course I canât prove it. I canât prove that Iâm trans. You canât prove that youâre cis. Cis people, though, cis people never have to prove anything. Their prejudices are the null hypothesis3. If I was to go out there and say that Kurt Cobain was a cisgender man, would anybody say I was wrong? Would anybody object or complain? Even though my saying that is an anachronism, is meaningless. The word, the concept, it literally didnât exist when Cobain died. Have you ever heard the word âagnotologyâ?
No?
It means making a false claim to ignorance. Claiming that we donât know something that we do. That we canât know something that we can. We know things now, Chuck. We know what the symptoms of gender dysphoria are. We know what it does to people. How eggs think. How eggs act. How eggs die. But we pretend we donât. We still pretend. We pretend suicide is an individual act, even when we know itâs not, that the reasons for it are wholly personal. We pretend that when someone dies by suicide, their reasons for doing so die with them. And they donât, Chuck. Weâre still dying, still dying for the same reasons Kurt Cobain did. Itâs not just that we arenât allowed to recognize ourselves. We arenât allowed to recognize each other. Individual choice or social contagion. Those are the options weâre given. And neither of them are right. Neither of them are who we are.
Kurt Cobain wrote, thought, talked, died like eggs do. I donât care if he never said the magic fucking words. We know our own. We recognize each other. And if someone is alive? If someone is alive I will go my whole life without ever breathing a word. Because as long as weâre alive, we do choose, and that means we can choose ignorance. What I think, what I want, for someone else, for us, it doesnât matter. I do that, I follow that code, for the benefit of one person â the egg themselves. Once they die, all bets are off. Omerta no longer applies. Kayfabe no longer applies.
To be queer is to be erased, to experience erasure. I still hear straight men arguing, as if they have any right to argue, as if they know, that Emily Dickinson was not a lesbian. Emily Dickinson! Iâm supposed to listen to people who say this shit? Iâm supposed to take them seriously when they say well, actually, calling Dickinson a âlesbianâ is historically anachronistic, we canât apply the standards of the present to the past, and Jesus fuck have you read her letters? She liked girls. She really liked girls. Kurt Cobain was a trans woman. Kurt Cobain was every bit as much a trans woman as Emily Dickinson was a lesbian. Refusing to say it isnât ârespectâ. Itâs perpetuating the crime perpetrated against Cobain, against every other trans woman who ever killed herself because of the lies we were told about ourselves. No more. Kurt Cobain was a trans woman. I canât, as an individual, say that. I donât have the right. No trans woman can say that, individually. But collectively? All of us together? The things we see in each other, we see those things in him too. Not all of them, and not all of us. Absolutely not all of us. But enough of us. Enough that we have the right. We have the right, and I will fucking say it, and if you donât like that, you can go fuck yourself.
Kate, are you ok?
Iâm fine.
Do you want a hug?
Fuck you, Chuck.
OK, well. Iâm, uh. Gonna go to the other room. You should, uh. Drink some water. Stay hydrated. Love you, Kate.
Love you too, Chuck. Sorry.
Shhh. Itâs OK, Kate. Itâs OK.
1 Diane Purkiss criticizes the occult nature of Walkerâs encyclopedia in "Women's Rewriting of Myth", in Carolyne Larrington (ed), The Feminist Companion to Mythology, London, 1992, p. 444: âIn Donna Haraway's influential terms, these women may wish to be goddesses, but they are cyborgs all the sameâ. The work sheâs referencing is Harawayâs âA Cyborg Manifestoâ. Haraway was, it happens, an academic advisor to the trans woman Sandy Stone, and her âCyborg Manifestoâ was a pivotal influence on Stoneâs âThe Empire Strikes Back: A Post-Transsexual Manifestoâ, one of the foundational works of transgender theory.
2 Margaret Killjoy, https://birdsbeforethestorm.net/2017/06/im-not-even-going-to-try-to-pass/
3 Natalie Reed, https://freethoughtblogs.com/nataliereed/2012/04/17/the-null-hypothecis/