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?
Kurt Cobain. Rock musician. He was in a band called Nirvana.
I’m familiar with him, yes.
I mean, he wasn’t. It’s like asking why he wasn’t an astronaut.
He wasn’t an astronaut because he never went to space. Why wasn’t he a trans woman?
Because he didn’t transition. I mean, he didn’t ever say he was a woman, didn’t ever say he was trans. So no. Kurt Cobain wasn’t a trans woman.
So someone is trans if they say they’re trans. Self-determination.
That’s what you’ve told me. Is that wrong?
No, that’s right. We know ourselves better than anybody else can know us. If we say we’re trans, nobody can say we aren’t.
And Kurt Cobain never said he was trans.
Yes, but if you’d asked me in 1994, I would have told you “no”.
So if I tell you I’m trans, I’m trans…
But if I tell you I’m cis, I might still be trans?
If you tell me you’re cis, I believe you.
That’s not the same thing as “I’m cis”.
That’s a really good point. This is sort of what some queer people are getting at when they say “gender is a construct”.
Well, you’re cisgender, right?
You hedged. “As far as I know” isn’t the same thing as “yes”. “As far as I know” opens up the possibility that you could be trans and not know it.
It doesn’t seem terribly likely.
That’s 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 couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that it would be me.
Do you think this is why you’re on this whole “Kurt Cobain was a trans woman” kick?
Hey now, I’m just asking questions. You know. Like J.K. Rowling is “just asking questions”.
Kate, you are literally wearing a T-shirt that says “KURT COBAIN WAS A TRANS WOMAN” on it right now.
Am I? Oh, shit. I thought I was wearing my “Skip school, take hormones, kill God” T-shirt. To your question, though - yeah, I do think that’s 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 didn’t have any role models. I didn’t 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 you…
I need someone like that. I need to not be the first of my kind.
Of course you’re 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 it’s not just about him being trans, but specifically his being a trans woman who didn’t know he was a trans woman.
Why Kurt Cobain, anyway? What’s so special about him that you’re trying to induct him into the Egg Hall of Fame?
He knew things. Things cis guys don’t know. Things I didn’t know until after I started transition. He understood women, what we’re like, what we experience. “Pennyroyal Tea”. “Rape Me”. I just have a hard time thinking of a cis man who could write songs like that.
It wouldn’t be the only way in which he was exceptional.
True. Ahhh. I don’t know. I mean, I know, I can give you all the reasons, but there’s something in his eyes.
All the pictures of him. No matter what he’s doing. If he’s grinning, or sad, whatever he’s 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 you’re doing is pretty much the textbook definition of projection, right?
Maybe. Chuck, do you think I’m happier?
Of course. Absolutely. Night and day.
Everyone says that, and honestly, I see it. Even in pictures, you know? I see it. You’ve seen some of my transition timelines, right?
You do look really different.
It’s 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 don’t understand how anybody can hate us.
I don’t 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, doesn’t matter. There’s something trapped wanting to get out. Every picture I’ve ever seen of Kurt Cobain looks like the “before” picture on a transition timeline. It’s just that with him, there aren’t any after pictures.
And it’s not just the eyes, either. The way he dressed, the whole “grunge look”. It’s just literally egg fashion. We dress with total disregard for our appearance or how we look because no matter what we do it’s wrong.
“Egg fashion”, egg this, egg that… isn’t 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 didn’t I come out as trans in 1994? Because I didn’t 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? “I 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.” That’s what he said.
Really. September 14, 1991.
Hold on, let me look that up. Oh, yeah, I see it. Look, if you look at the full quote he’s just saying he’s not a jock. Like he didn’t fit in with the jocks.
Well, what about the dresses?
Kurt Cobain wore a lot of dresses. Like, a lot, both onstage and off. On MTV in 1991, he said “It’s ‘Headbanger’s Ball’ so I thought I’d wear a gown.” He said in a 1993 interview, “I personally like to wear dresses. I wear them around the house sometimes.” This is not some shameful secret he kept hidden from the world. He was open about this. He was proud about this.
Yeah, but… it’s just clothes.
Except it’s not just clothes. Listen to his songs. Listen to his lyrics. “Should have been a son”. “I’m a lady, can you save me?” “Everyone is gay.” The original lyrics to “All Apologies” from his journals – “Boys write songs for girls. Let me grow some breasts.”
I mean they’re song lyrics. There are all kinds of ways to interpret song lyrics.
Sure. All kinds of ways. You ever read Michael Azerrad’s biography of Cobain, Come As You Are?
Azerrad spent weeks talking to Cobain. He was Cobain’s 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 it’s about dicks. “To paraphrase Dr. Freud,” he says, “sometimes a gun is just a gun. But not this time.” He talks about “Come As You Are”, where Kurt keeps singing “I swear I don’t have a gun.” That’s not my interpretation. That’s never been my interpretation. That’s what this cis man says. More than one cis man. Kurt says Dave Grohl’s dad, he said the same thing. Yeah. There are all kinds of ways to interpret lyrics.
“By this time,” Azerrad wrote, “one begins to wonder how Kurt rationalizes being a man at all. His first response is revealing. ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘Castration.’” I don’t wonder how Kurt rationalizes being a man. I rationalized “being a man” 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.
Kurt’s songs have meanings. The lyrics to “In Bloom”, Kurt was pretty explicit about that. The lyrics he wrote have meanings. “Heart-Shaped Box”. You know what that refers to? When Courtney Love was flirting with Kurt, Michael Azerrad says in Come As You Are, “She gave Dave (Grohl) a package to give to Kurt – little sea shells and miniature teacups and a tiny doll, all packed into a small heart-shaped box.” 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 “Courtney had a bag of lingerie with her for some reason and Kurt ended up modeling the contents.” And then they went to Kurt’s hotel room and they fucked.
Maybe it was. Because you look at that and you think that if it was like that, it was perverted and wrong, because that’s what you were told, that it’s a sick fetish thing, and I look at it and it isn’t. To me, that’s normal. That Kurt Cobain was sexually aroused while wearing Courtney Love’s lingerie, that’s 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 man’s desk! You think that was some kind of sex thing?
Sexuality is part of being a woman. Part. Rage – and Kurt Cobain had a lot of rage inside him – that’s another part. Am I interpreting, am I looking at things from my perspective as a trans woman? Yes, certainly, just like you’re interpreting, looking at it from your perspective as a cis man. When cis people interpret things, their conclusion is never “they were trans”. Never.
Ed Wood wasn’t a trans woman. He was just a transvestite. He was a man.
Pete Burns from Dead or Alive wasn’t 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 “Halley’s Comet”, 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 didn’t 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 isn’t 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 don’t 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. They’re still legitimate.
I thought we were talking about Kurt Cobain.
And the only way to do that is to talk about him in isolation. There’s no larger context to consider, no bigger picture. I can’t really know. I can’t really judge.
I mean, everybody else does. I guess I can’t 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 – none of that makes him a girl.
Sure. And nothing can make him a girl. Because he’s 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 – gender dysphoria. Do you have a book deal yet?
Working on it. And yes, people say a lot of stupid things about Cobain’s death, like it’s this big shock that this guy who hated himself and wanted to die killed himself.
Right. He was pretty well-known for being a heroin addict, which isn’t exactly something that improves one’s quality of life.
Sure, but why did he start heroin?
I don’t know. Why does anybody start heroin?
To help him cope with his eating disorder.
Wait, what? Eating disorder?
You don’t 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 wouldn’t 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. “It was my choice,” he told Azerrad. “I don’t regret it at all because it was such a relief from not having stomach pain every day.” I know, though. Lots of cis guys have eating disorders. Doesn’t mean anything.
Kate there’s a lot of interpreting going on here.
Yeah, I guess there is. Is that necessarily a bad thing, though? Is that necessarily wrong? Like. You’ve seen The Matrix, right?
Yeah, that’s fine. So you know how important The Matrix is to a lot of trans women, right?
Yes, but I’m not really sure why. Just seems like a retelling of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” with extra fight scenes.
It’s pretty trans, though, right?
Clearly. It was directed by two trans women.
And trans women who watch it – eggs or otherwise – find their own lives and experiences reflected in it in ways that cis people, like you, don’t.
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 isn’t a trans film?
Well, no, because it’s 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 can’t prove it. We can’t possibly prove it, and nobody is going to just believe us when we say it’s a trans movie, that the Wachowskis were trans women, because they didn’t say it, they didn’t 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 didn’t respect his self-determination.
“Pennyroyal Tea”. Cobain told Azerrad “It's a cleansing theme where I’m trying to get all my bad evil spirits out of me and drinking Pennyroyal tea would cleanse that away.” Pennyroyal is an abortifacient – but, Azerrad notes, only in lethal doses.
Hell, not just that song. The whole album. In Utero. The collage on the back cover, the one Cobain described to Azerrad as “Sex and woman and In Utero and vaginas and birth and death". The occult symbols surrounding it, taken from Barbara G. Walker’s 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. That’s 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:
“All I could think was: ‘Oh god, I don’t want to die a boy.’”2
I felt the same way, came out for the same reason. I figured no matter what I did, I was dead. I didn’t do it live, but to at least have an honest death. I genuinely believed transition would kill me.
It didn’t, though! You’re alive and you’re beautiful and I’m so, so glad for that. It didn’t kill you.
It could have. Still could. Transition has helped, has made it easier for me, but it’s not that way with everyone. People have been kind to me, in ways that they aren’t kind to other trans women. Others of us… aren’t so lucky.
Who are we respecting, exactly, by remaining silent about our shared experiences, our shared perspectives, things we see that you fucking don’t, that you can’t see? Of course I can’t prove it. I can’t prove that I’m trans. You can’t prove that you’re 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 didn’t exist when Cobain died. Have you ever heard the word “agnotology”?
It means making a false claim to ignorance. Claiming that we don’t know something that we do. That we can’t 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 don’t. We still pretend. We pretend suicide is an individual act, even when we know it’s 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 don’t, Chuck. We’re still dying, still dying for the same reasons Kurt Cobain did. It’s not just that we aren’t allowed to recognize ourselves. We aren’t allowed to recognize each other. Individual choice or social contagion. Those are the options we’re given. And neither of them are right. Neither of them are who we are.
Kurt Cobain wrote, thought, talked, died like eggs do. I don’t 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 we’re alive, we do choose, and that means we can choose ignorance. What I think, what I want, for someone else, for us, it doesn’t matter. I do that, I follow that code, for the benefit of one person – 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! I’m supposed to listen to people who say this shit? I’m supposed to take them seriously when they say well, actually, calling Dickinson a “lesbian” is historically anachronistic, we can’t 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 isn’t “respect”. It’s 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 can’t, as an individual, say that. I don’t 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 don’t like that, you can go fuck yourself.
OK, well. I’m, uh. Gonna go to the other room. You should, uh. Drink some water. Stay hydrated. Love you, Kate.
Love you too, Chuck. Sorry.
Shhh. It’s OK, Kate. It’s OK.
1 Diane Purkiss criticizes the occult nature of Walker’s encyclopedia in "Women's Rewriting of Myth", in Carolyne Larrington (ed), The Feminist Companion to Mythology, London, 1992, p. 444: “In Donna Haraway's influential terms, these women may wish to be goddesses, but they are cyborgs all the same”. The work she’s referencing is Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto”. Haraway was, it happens, an academic advisor to the trans woman Sandy Stone, and her “Cyborg Manifesto” was a pivotal influence on Stone’s “The Empire Strikes Back: A Post-Transsexual Manifesto”, one of the foundational works of transgender theory.
