Mattilda aka Matt Bernstein Sycamore is not trying to pass.  In fact, the genderqueer female-identified activist is trying not to pass.  Rather than hoping to gain acceptance as member of her preferred gender, Sycamore uses a name that denotes not only her femme identity and but her clearly “male” given name.

The author of novels  Pulling Taffy and So Many Ways to Sleep Badly, Sycamore has also edited a number of critically acclaimed anthologies: That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, Dangerous Families: Queer Writing on Surviving, Tricks and Treats: Sex Workers Write About Their Clients, and ,  and his latest, Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity.

Sycamore identifies as a “genderqueer faggot and a queen,” meaning that she falls “on the trans continuum, in the genderblur, gender-bending section.” By seventh grade, Sycamore says she’d decided “all penetrative sex was rape.” This didn’t keep her from dating men, but clearly influenced her Jewish feminist politics.  Over the last 15 years, Sycamore (www.mattbernsteinsycamore.com) has deeply been involved in activist challenges to “forms of social control.”

In Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity, contributors examine different kinds of passings and intersections of identity and community.  The anthology includes a handful of trans writers, and despite the title, many pieces describe passing:  persons of color passing as white, queers passing as straight, etc.

Passing, says Sycamore, is “fitting into the standard of a particular identity group or culture in order to be accepted as legitimate.” Rather than accepting that passing is “progress,” she says, “I wanted to explore the passing violence that leads towards assimilation.”

When she was 18, Sycamore moved to San Francisco, where she says she was “completely terrified by the conformity, hyper-masculinity, and blind consumerism of the legendary gay Castro district.” That experience eventually led Sycamore to join the radical activist group Gay Shame to “expose the hypocrisy of Gay Pride as a consumerist spectacle.”  The group now uses direct action organization to “expose hypocrisy.”

Concerned that the gay movement is focused on obtaining straight privilege rather than challenging power, Sycamore argues that queers should fight for universal access to the services that marriage helps procure: housing, healthcare, citizenship, tax breaks, and inheritance rights.  

In San Francisco, Gay Shame is focused on real estate profiteering of the Polk Street neighborhood, which Sycamore says has historically welcomed marginalized queers, trans people, and disabled people; even if they are homeless. Business owners are moving into the low rent neighborhood in droves. Once there, she says, they complain,  “What are these people doing in my neighborhood, these homeless people and hookers and trannys?”

Sycamore believes childhood abuse contributed to the onset of her fibromyalgia, a disabling inflammatory disease that she suffers from.  
The anti-capitalist believes that organizations like the Transgender Law Center (TLC) fail to address the real problems of trans people and instead offer normative capitalistic solutions.  Last year a TLC conducted survey of San Francisco’s trans community revealed (among other things) that 60 percent of trans respondents earn below the poverty level. “I remember when that study came out,” Sycamore recollects. 

“People were like, ‘But now we have a job fair.’  That doesn’t do anything to address structural problems of immigration or of homelessness, and being kicked out of your families of origin or even your countries of origin for being trans.”

The root of economic problems for trans people, Sycamore argues, is “trans phobia and the violence of that hatred.” Still, Sycamore argues that the potential for real structural, system-wide change can be found in trans communities. “Looking now at trans, genderqueer, and gender defiant cultures and communities there’s such an incredible potential for really questioning all of the different systems of power and hierarchy. It’s really threatening to mainstream gay people who want to assimilate.”

Sycamore accuses mainstream gay and lesbians of participating in their own “cultural erasure,” depriving the movement of potential because of their “consumer mentality.”

“Being outside of that is where there’s incredible potential for actually creating some transformative identity.”
For the next few months Sycamore will be on tour for Nobody Passes.  She continues to blog about the anthology’s perspective on passing at NobodyPasses@blogspot.com.  

Trans writer Jacob Anderson-Minshall can be reached at jake@trans-nation.org.