Why songs like GRAV3 by DAMAG3 matter?

In the past 6 months, I’ve shown GRAV3 by DAMAG3 to two different cishet reactors, because the song means so much to me personally. And even though neither of them fully got the lyrics the way the artist intended them, I still think songs about gender dysphoria and what coming out feels like, among other trans experiences, are tremendously important and need to be shared.

Such a significant portion of the world’s hatred stems from a lack of understanding, and hatred often spills into discrimination and physical violence.
    Despite biological and psychological research stating otherwise, some people don’t believe trans people exist. They’ve perhaps never met a trans person or if they have, they don’t understand what they’re going through. Explaining it, i.e. via a song, will hopefully change some other their minds.
    Despite the effort to make them understand, some people don’t. Globally, 1 in 12 trans people are murdered. 40% of trans people living in the US have attempted suicide (compared to 4,6% of the general population), often stating denial of gender-affirming care, discrimination and family rejection as their reason. Even if the message only reaches and gets through to one ex-transphobe, one lawmaker or one family member, that message could very literally save a person’s life.

Every trans person’s experience with their transness is different, so sharing as many of these messages that potentially reach someone as possible is important, both for the quality and also the quantity of messages being put out there. You never know if your story is the one that gets through to someone.
    DAMAG3 described being in the closet, not openly presenting as her true self as being in a grave, where she dug herself out of. For me, it felt like… like I was physically alive, but not really living. Like I had this outer shell that looked like a girl and that everyone talked to like it’s a girl, but inside, that girl didn’t exist. I guess it’s similar to how a random person starts talking to you irl and you’re confused because they talk to you like they know you, but then after a while you realize they think you’re someone else. Except it’s everyone, including your parents and closest friends. They all talk to you like you’re this other person they think you are, and you stand there, trying to not be bothered by that and instead focus on what they want to say to this other person you’re not.
    For me, coming out felt - and still feels like - taking off that shell and hoping the other person doesn’t start treating me differently. That their perception of me isn’t so tied to the gender they assumed I have that they can’t see me as the same person anymore. I haven’t been pretending to be anything I’m not. I’m just correcting a misunderstanding they had about me.

The world needs both binary and nonbinary trans representation, albeit for different reasons (IMO). We need masculine trans men confronting Ben Shapiro and explicitly explaining to him why he (the trans man) needs access to reproductive health care, even if it only makes him stop and listen for a few minutes. We need people like Elliot Page, who wrote in his autobiography that as a confused little trans boy (~4yo), he was impatiently waiting for the day he’d grow a penis, because apparently all boys have penises and he is a boy, so the reason he doesn’t have a penis must be because it just hasn’t grown yet. Seeing and reading explanations and stories like theirs are especially important so that the cishet majority understands us better.
    Nonbinary and androgynous trans representation are more important for people in the trans community to accept themselves as they are than for the cishets to understand us. DAMAG3 was assigned male at birth, doesn’t identify as one (I believe she used the words ”mostly woman” to describe her identity), but is seemingly very comfortable and confident about her masculine side – of having masculine aspects in her personal style and demeanour, and being pre-op.

As a child I did my best to try and communicate to adults how I was feeling, in hopes that they’d get it and explained it to me, because I didn’t get it. I didn’t have the words to explain my gender identity to them, or even myself. Like I wrote earlier, they were talking to this girl, but every time they did, for as long as I can remember, that felt confusing, because I knew I wasn’t a girl. But I wasn’t a boy either. ”And how is that possible?? Please, adults, someone! Listen to what I say and how I refuse the label ”girl” and explain to me what I am! Tell me why I’m feeling this way!” They’d say things like ”girls love pink” or ”every girl has a favorite Disney princess” and I’d declare my favorite color is blue and that since I must choose one (they insisted), my favorite Disney princess is Pocahontas (because she’s the chief’s daughter, not a princess). At some point I gave up, the adults didn’t seem to get or accept what was going on.
    I quietly and subconsciously separated my mind, my true self, from my body and who other people thought I was and played into the social role of ”being a girl” because it was easier than to keep resisting, let alone for a reason I didn’t even understand myself. I just knew it made me pissed when others called me ”a girl”, even when it wasn’t in a derogatory way.
    It wasn’t until this one night when I was 22 (~2014) that I started actively thinking about my gender again. I realized smart phones and broadband internet are a thing now and started googling ”not feeling like a girl or a boy” and found a bunch of teenagers on Tumblr with similar experiences, but nothing else. So, this was a thing, I wasn’t the only person in the world experiencing this. But since there were no professional opinions or sources out there at the time, there was no proof this was a ”real” thing (in other people’s and science’s eyes, that is), and therefore I decided to explore this thing further, but stay in the closet, for now.
    In the next six years, I explored my gender identity and experimented with my expression. The world progressed as well, to a point where the majority of psychologists now agree that nonbinary identities do exist and are valid. I was scared of how people would take me coming out, but when the lockdown hit, I saw that as an opportunity. I changed all my social media profiles and everything I could think of to say my gender is ”other” or ”genderqueer”. A huge announcement kinda coming out like they do in the movies just didn’t feel right for me. And, at least for now, I prefer my life as it is. A life where I’m technically out of the closet, but I don’t have to talk about my gender with anyone if I don’t want to. Because it’s so personal and hard to describe. Writing about it online – in random comments here and there and in this blog – is different, because I can take as much time as I want to explain everything (choosing my words and formulating my sentences carefully to convey my points as accurately as I can), and also, because I tend to be so long-winded – in a conversation, the person would be stuck there, but here, they can just click away if they’re not interested.
    But, because I came out in such a lowkey manner, cishets don’t always clock me as trans, or even as any flavor of queer. I am as straight as a corkscrew, there’s no cishet bone in my body.
    Remember how I said that I rejected everything girly, like pink and Disney princesses? Well, that sort of never went away. Even after I conformed to pretend like I am a girl, I still tried to hide and even deny myself anything that was too girly or feminine. I couldn’t tell people I liked chick lit or romcoms, because that’d ”remind them that I’m a girl”.
    Over the years, I’ve started to allow myself to like girly and feminine things. Getting in touch with my feminine side, if you will. It’s a process, I’m still working on accepting that I do have feminine qualities. And DAMAG3 and how confident she is with her masculinity despite being trans is truly inspiring and healing for me. I need that confident energy and that swagger and that attitude in my life. She makes me feel less alone. I’m not suicidal anymore and my attempts were not because of my queer identity, at least not directly, so saying that she saved my life would be an overstatement, but… Her existance and the way she presents herself make me feel more alive.

For the cishet people that already are not transphobes, seeing nonbinary and androgynous representation is valuable as well, though. Gender is a spectrum, and yet in their day-to-day lives, they might not see that much representation of people outside the binary extremes of men and women. Despite knowing and accepting that gender is a spectrum. It’s different knowing something is true and actually seeing it with their own eyes.
    I feel like many of them, and many queer people as well, like labels and boxes. To some extent, I like labels and boxes, why do you think I became a librarian, lol? Labels and boxes can be useful in the sense that they are essentially words that describe something, in this instance aspects of a person’s queer identity. But labels and boxes can feel very very limiting if nothing fully captures your personal experience. If you’re a cis man for example, imagine everything about you that some idiots out there would use as ”a point” to try and make you feel like less of a man – maybe you like Taylor Swift or the color pink or planning romantic surprises for your wife. Those things are you not conforming to the very rigid box of ”A Man”. It doesn’t mean you’re any less of a man, it just means there’s a very limiting box to fit in to be the most masculine man ever. And that’s why ”gender is a spectrum” and abolishing the labels and boxes is such a big deal for so many trans people. We don’t come out and abandon one box just to be shoved into another. DAMAG3 doesn’t, I don’t and neither does anyone else have to fit into a certain box of a ”transwoman” or ”genderqueer person”.

My childhood and teenage years would have been tremendously easier if the representation existed back then. Binary trans people were present in media, but that wasn’t my identity, so it didn’t help. And so, songs and blog posts about our experiences, and all the other representation we’ve been getting lately, where ”everyone on tv is gay now”… (It’s 11-12% of characters, which is quantity-wise an accurate presentation of reality. There’s still work to do in the quality of characters, though.) They ARE needed. The more voices and examples, real or fictional, there are about trans people, the better.