Brick Pride

or: I'm happy to be what I am

Everyone hates a brick until it’s time to build a house or throw things at cops.

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In the sub-sub-culture I live in, as a trans anarchist punk, there’s a word that gets thrown around to describe trans women who don’t pass very well. “Brick.”

It comes from ballroom culture, best as I’m able to tell, from the 70s and 80s in New York City, from the street queens who built a dance culture the likes of which the world had never seen. It’s rare enough slang that it hasn’t even hit urban dictionary, but it’s common enough in my life.

A brick is “clocky.” We can be clocked. People look at us and they know we were assigned male at birth. Maybe we’ve got broad shoulders, maybe we’re tall. Maybe we haven’t voice-trained. Maybe we can’t afford electrolysis. Maybe we don’t take hormones. Maybe we’ve done all the work and we’re still clocky. Maybe we’re just thick as a brick.

It’s not a nice word, not originally. It’s not a word you say to be polite. I haven’t seen stickers or shirts that say “arm the bricks” or “protect the bricks.” (We’re already armed, and we protect ourselves.)

Maybe I don’t want to build a dichotomy between the dolls (who pass, or come closer to it) and the bricks (who don’t, and maybe never will). Maybe we all get to be “dolls” too. I don’t know. But in that micro, micro scene I’m in, the dichotomy is already there. No one has ever called me a doll.

And you know what? That’s fine.

I’m a brick. I’m made of earth. I’m heavy, rarely decorated, strong, and useful.

You can build a wall with bricks and protect everything that you love. You can build a house with bricks and withstand centuries of abuse from wind and rain. Modern LGBT pride started when police raided the Stonewall Inn in New York City and (the details are likely apocryphal here) a trans woman threw the first brick at the cops.

The two most commonly nominated contenders for “threw the first brick” are Marsha P. Johnson, a Black woman, and Sylvia Rivera, who was Puerto Rican. I don’t want to go back in time and apply our modern versions of slang to them. I don’t want to classify them one way or the other. But modern pride began when someone threw a brick at the cops. How could I possibly take “brick” as an insult?

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The standards of beauty for women don’t do anyone, cis or trans, any good. No matter what shape you are, what size you are, you’re never going to be doing it right.

I’m lucky to come from a lineage of punk girls and women who both reveled in and revolted against beauty standards. From people who never shaved. From people who wore cutoffs that showed off their stretchmarks and bellies. From rebels who both wore makeup and didn’t, but who screamed into a mic with the best of them and threw bottles at Nazis.

The first trans women I knew were gangly and tall and non-passing and beautiful. Tattoos seemed to be as much a part of their transitions as any surgeries they did or didn’t have or hormones they did or didn’t take. They were anarchists, traveling the country by thumb and freight train, living outside, organizing and protesting and rioting and shoplifting and partying and living wild queer lives. They called themselves trannies, and no one else is allowed to call them that but they sure as shit were and are allowed to call themselves that.

They sang with loud voices. They shouted down police with loud voices. They didn’t make themselves small. Neither did the cis women in our scene (a scene that didn’t yet know the word cis). Whether femme or butch (a dichotomy that hadn’t yet torn its way through us), the anarchist punk women I knew and know didn’t make themselves small. They didn’t take a back seat in anything.

They were, and are, beautiful. Everyone knew it and knows it.

I couldn’t tell you what it means to be a woman, but I can tell you that it doesn’t mean forcing yourself into some box, some cage, that’s been built for us.

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I was always afraid of becoming a trans woman, ever since I was a kid. I was terrified of my own femininity and I was terrified of winding up one of the sad women in the 90s freak show documentaries. None of the women in those shows passed for shit and they were objects of derision. They weren’t shown as women, they were shown as men dressed as women. They were shown as ugly. The fictional movies were even worse: we weren’t just ugly, we were monstrous.

If I became a trans woman, I’d become ugly. Maybe even monstrous.

People told me that explicitly. One friend, who thought he was doing me a favor, told me “you shouldn’t come out, because you’re a hot guy but you’d make an ugly woman.”

I came out anyway, after the Ghost Ship fire in Oakland, where a trans woman named Feral lost her life alongside 35 other people. I was across the country, but that was my scene. It could have been me in that fire, and I could have died a man. I would rather be remembered as a monster than as a man.

I came out anyway, and I told myself I wasn’t even going to try to pass and I’ve stuck to it. I’d been a punk for fifteen years by that point, and like hell was I going to start hiding just for my safety. There is no shame in being “clocked” as a trans woman, because that is what I am. If people think I’m ugly, that’s their fault, their problem.

I owe a lot to the women who let themselves be visible in those documentaries, who were so unashamed that they let the whole world laugh at them. They were beautiful, and I’m embarrassed it took me so long to realize that. Let us all live so honestly and without shame.

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I’m afraid I’m reifying some dichotomy between bricks and dolls, between butch and femme. I don’t mean to. All of us navigate the world with our own gender experiences, our own bodies, our ways of trying to stay safe and trying (if we’d like) to become the most beautiful versions of ourselves we can.

There’s not, really, some dividing line here. There’s not one way to be trans femme. Brick pride is not brick supremacy, and it sure as fuck better not be femmephobia.

But society tells me I should be ashamed to be who I am, and I am not. I’m a brick. Dolled up or dressed down, I’m still a brick.

I lean into it, these days. Lifting weights feels just as gender affirming as a dress and a shawl. If I wear a crop top, I’m going to look more like a 1980s gay man than a 1990s raver girl, and that’s fine. I know who I am. If there’s a more focused label that fits me (and I’m skeptical), it’s long-haired butch. I like my truck. I like fixing things. I like keeping people safe. I also like my long hair.

I’ve got nothing to prove to anyone.

To the bricks who came before me, to the bricks who come after me, I say: let’s build a wall together. Let’s build a house.

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Plus, our admirers can claim to be in the bricklayer’s union, and that’s cool too.