Ok so, what were you saying about your book?
Why you're writing your book?
I'm writing my book because
for all of the things my parents got wrong, you know?
Drugs, being absent,
fucking there being no electricity sometimes,
not a lot of food involved,
show business's way more important than school,
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
The one thing that they always got unequivocally right
was that they accepted me for who I said that I was
and that gives a kid a sense of self-esteem
and self respect...
it equips you to survive anything.
I'm writing my book because of that.
To try to like sneak in via the drama door
and be like, "actually the real message is
to accept your children and accept your friends
and accept people for who they say that they are."
When I was six I decided than I want to be a boy.
We were in the park one day
and there were these kids playing soccer
a bunch of boys and I wanted to play with them and they
soccer, football...
and they wouldn't let me play
and they were like, "are you a boy or a girl?"
And I was like, "I'm a girl?"
And they were like, "nah you can't play,"
and I was basically like, "fuck that,
I'm a boy, can I play now...
cause' I can play better than you motherfucker?"
And I went with my dad and I just was like,
"hey I want to be a boy from now on,"
and then it kind of developed and started from there
and then I lived as a boy for eight years from six to 14.
Kind of everybody in my family was like,
"we didn't see you as a girl or a boy,
we just saw you as Io."
There was no notion of like gender dysmorphia or whatever.
I was born on 3rd Street and Bowery
and my parents were all up in the like
No Wave Movement and drag culture...
So everybody around them
was inventing their identities all the time.
The idea that their kid would invent
her identity wasn't strange to them.
Can you take off your gloves?
Yes.
It was a really, um, stressful experience
because there was the reality that I was living
and then there was all the navigation of
what that meant to other people.
Going to take a piss was a problem always.
I would only use the boys bathroom but
I would wait until people were out of it
so that in case somebody peaked
under the stall
they weren't gonna see my feet
or maybe they'd look through the one inch.
I was like real neurotic
at the same time as
totally breaking all of the rules so
I developed the skill of not every having to pee
and that is still something that I'm like,
"do I have to pee?"
I had library cards under boys’ names.
It was a full immersive experience.
What happened like in terms of peers?
I didn't have any friends.
I had one friend.
She was from the South Bronx.
When I was like 11
I went over to her house one night
and there was another girl there
who had a crush on me
and I had shaved head and like
presented fully as a boy...
I never thought about being gay.
I wasn't a sexual kid.
Like it wasn't about that at all.
It was my identity.
This girl was like,
"yo why aren't you hollering at me?
I wanna holler at you,
why aren't you trying to kick it to me?"
And I was like, "what?"
And she was like,
"why aren't you trying to kick it to me?"
And I was like,
"I'm not- oh, no- it's-
it's not like that,"
and I couldn't explain why
she didn't want to have a crush on me
because at the time the idea of
being gay was so far beyond
and then her discovering
that I actually had a vagina
was even further beyond
what an 11 year old mind can comprehend
and I was just like,
"you don't want to get involved with me,"
and she was like,
"I'm sleeping in the bunk bed above you,
I'ma get you later."
And I was like, "ah, no!"
What happened when you were 13?
Um, when I was 13 I moved to Germany
my dad lived there and
I went to this school for foreigners
that was like Albanian kids and Turkish kids
and this one Greek girl who was my first real crush.
These two Russian girls were like
the hot girls in class
and I was totally oblivious to them
and they also were like,
"yo why are you not- what's going on here?
Why are you not trying to holler at us
like every other boy in the class?"
And I just wasn't interested and then
they both had a crush on me because of that
and at that point I was like I'm sick of this.
I don't want to lie to people anymore.
Like, this sucks!
and so I switched schools and
when I switched schools the summer
that I was turning 14 I remember
I was biking down a street and
I saw my dad and I was like,
"hey I think I want to grow my hair out,
I think I want to be a girl."
And he was like, "ok,"
I had like a whole gender revelation
a couple of months ago where
I was like I think I'm a man on the inside.
Like I know what my body is and
I'm clear on what my genitalia is but
I'm also fairly clear on the fact that
if the distinction between gender bending
or rule breaking gender wise and
transgenderism is how you feel on the inside
then I'm transgender because
I feel like a man on the inside
but yet because of the way
that I was raised and never forced
into dresses and all of that shit
I don't have the narrative that apparently goes
with being transgender where you hate your body.
I don't hate my body at all.
So it's- I don't fit that box either, you know?
But I never fit any fucking box.
I'm like the ultimate fucking unicorn
and it's weird and lonely but...
I've been doing a project called
Self Evident Truths and I've been
traveling the United States
photographing anybody
who identifies as anything other
than 100% straight to humanize
what that community looks like
for people that think that
they don't know any gay people.
and then when I have 10,000 portraits
I'm gonna go to the Washington Monument
and lay them all out of the National Mall
and stage a big march on Washington
The aim of it is to create more empathy
via familiarity.
We're not some like marginalized freak show.
the most incredible by-product
of this thing that I'm passionate about
is having kids say I feel better about myself,
I feel more comfortable with myself.
Like it's the best feeling on Earth.
And I'm taking a break right now
to write my book but next summer
I'm gonna do the last 1,500 and
then hopefully the spring right before
the next presidential election will be
on the Washington Monument.
So 14, what happened at 14?
I switched to a new school
in this small town in Germany
and I looked like a boy.
So I came into class and they were like,
this is your new- well cause' in Germans it's-
there's schüler which is student, male student,
and or schülerin, which is female student
and they were like, "this is the new schülerin in class,"
and they were all like, "schüler,"
and she was like, "no, schülerin,"
and all the kids were just like, "what?"
So then it kind of-
that was me standing in front of the class
and everybody getting the full dunk right away.
And I was just like, "yeah I'm a girl,
what the fuck you wanna do about it?"
And then, I mean, what are you gonna say, you know?
I mean now, looking back, I wonder
if I switched genders back so that
I could have a normal social life
cause' coming out of such an extreme situation,
I wanted to have some sense of normalcy.
At the end of that year I got kicked out of that school and
so they found this boarding school for me
in England that was started by this
Indian philosopher Krishnamurti
and it was supposed to be about questioning
and openness and freedom and I thought, great
questioning means questioning the rules.
It's questioning yourself but I didn't figure that out
until I got in a lot of fights with a lot of teachers
I got sent to this place that was like
a fucking mansion on a hill in the middle of nowhere.
I had cornrows cause' my hair was grown out.
it was a challenge cause'
I looked like a boy but I was sleeping in the girls wing
obviously in the dorms of the school and
within two weeks my best friend who was-
she was 19 and she was like the hottest girl in school-
she became my best friend because
she was depressed that her boyfriend
was so far away and I was like,
"yo come on I'll charm you with my New Yorkness."
Like, "come on let's be friends,"
and I made her laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh
until we started telling each other stories
about our lives and we'd stay up all night
and like one day- she was German-
she was like, "Io, I think I know why
we cannot leave each other to go to class."
I was like, "why?" And she's like,
"because we are in love." I was like,
"you gotta be fucking kidding me."
Like I just switched back to being a girl
now I gotta be a gay girl- like, what?
I was like, "hold up, let me think about this- just kidding let's go."
And we were like stupid smacked in love.
She was the first person to show me what a shower was.
I was raised a feral child. I was fucking Mowgli.
Like she showed me how to shave my legs.
She showed me what deodorant was.
she showed my body, you know?
We had sex for the first time and
she was like, "you're beautiful,"
and I had never heard that also,
partially, because if you told me
I was beautiful as a little boy
I would've punched you in the nuts.
And we were together on and off for four years.
Yeah, I got kicked out of that school.
I went back to New York.
I don't know, people were tougher back then.
People are such pansies now
in their differentness cause'
they don't have to work for it.
Nobody has to fight anybody.
Nobody has to stand up for anything
so people are like- they want to be queer
and pansexual and demi-romantic and
whatever the fuck but
they don't want anybody to challenge them
or question them about it.
it's so complicated for me because
on the one hand everything that I'm fighting for
is that you accept people for who they say
that they are and you treat people with
dignity and respect. On the other hand
this whole culture of language policing
and like everything has to be P.C and
everything has to be homogenized
is sickening to me. Like everything about
gay culture that I love and everything about
New York that I love is built from people
having to push back against people
trying to oppress them.
When we refer to brainwashing or
we refer to the machine it's as if there is
this big spaceship filled with the people
pushing buttons and controlling things
and everybody else is the minions
but the truth of the matter is the machine
is perpetuated every day by every girl sitting
at a desk who turns around and looks at her
coworker and goes, "oh, what's that?"
"What are you wearing?"
"Why are you doing that?"
"Oh, go get your bush waxed"
"Oh, like do your eyebrows."
You're not just a sheep.
When you make other people feel less than
for not participating then you have become
the machine. I say do whatever you want
to make yourself feel good. If you feel like
you need that Birkin bag, get the Birkin bag.
You have your own voyage to discover
what makes you feel good and like whatever
that is that's your business but
when you put that shit on other people
then you become the machine.
Can you elaborate now on what you were saying
in the last six months that you feel more
you feel inside like a man.
What does that mean?
I was having this conversation with my
project manager for the project,
for Self Evident, and he's like 6'3 and broad
and hairy and always wears nail polish...
I was like, "What if I'm a man?"
He was like look, I mean, the difference is
I may wear nail polish, I can wear
makeup sometimes, I'll occasionally be known
to put on a dress but when I go to sleep at night,
I'm a man and I love being a man and
I'm in my body and I love that.
It's down to how you see yourself.
And I was like, "oh well then I'm a man."
The line for me is that I don't wanna change my mind.
My mental chemistry. I don't want to change
my emotionality and if hormones are
gonna do that then I don't want to do that.
if I could just snap my fingers and tomorrow
have a man's body I would do it.
I guess in my own head I've always thought
of transgenderism as like a physical in-between place
and I am really, really learning to understand
the emotional in-between place
But than that makes the whole question:
What is a man? And what is a woman?
How much of that is society's bullshit anyway?
So why do I have to change my body
to fit somebody else's, like, another norm?
None of the labels fit me. None.
When do you feel, um, the most vulnerable?
I used to feel the most vulnerable when
I had to go to the bathroom in public.
And now I'm kind of like whichever one's open
I'm gonna go in.
I go in the women's bathroom-
I'm like standing up straighter and more smiley
and more like girly and then
if I go in the men's bathroom
I'm sure as shit hunched over and
like trying to keep my head down
and be in and be out.
On the one hand everybody in there is just
trying to take a piss. This is not like a big
political theatre stage, you know?
Like I don't need to get into a big debate
with people about the politics of gender
in the bathroom every time I go to take a piss.
That being said, changing my behavior
to suit the system- I don't know.
There is no time of the day if I'm in public
where there isn't somebody trying to figure out
what I am and that's exhausting and
sometimes you have the energy to be gracious
about it when a kid goes, "Mommy, what is that?"
right in front of you and then sometimes
you just want to be like I'm a fucking girl
or I'm a fucking boy or like whatever, you know?
It's exhausting.
Pants.
Can you talk about
why in your body is good place to be?
I've always had a real rough and tumble
relationship with my body and I love that.
I love what my body is capable of.
I love that like there's nothing
that a boy can do that I can't do.
How do you feel?
Great.
So I'm gonna take... That was amazing!
Good, I'm glad.