Silver Alert
The Search for an Elder, Part I
This is about trans elders and their embodied wisdom. Much this in the lens of what I know best, tattooing and the body. For more context, know that I did not grow up with grandparents, aunts, or uncles, no elders to guide me outside of my two parents.
Our world wants to leave behind our elders, and the casual generational hate is a betrayal to them and to our future selves. The sentiment behind ‘Ok Boomer’ has long outlasted the popularity of its phrase. I have no issue with the resentment toward wealthy white men who occupy many seats of power. But even at the receiving end of our hate, the wealthier white still are afforded to be representative of a whole generation. Many of that generation do not fit the categorical mould however. Some of our grandparents are migrants who did not have the access to cheap housing, job abundance, and theft/destruction/colonization-induced generational wealth that we attribute to boomers. When we are stuck in the dismissal of elders as being unconcerned antagonists, and conflate a whole generation with those few resourced and wealthy elders who cling to power, we don’t acknowledge that our populous elders are utterly disposable to the state.
We live in a world that only values us for our working bodies- vessels to steal life from, and as our bodies succumb to age, the state will turn around and demand exorbitant payment from us for necessary medical care.
It’s a betrayal to them, and a betrayal to our future selves.
The necessity to mobilize against wealthy white elders is bound with the necessity to fulfill the needs of a generations’ worth of elders so they can live the last 20 or 30 years of their life being honored. I long for their stories, lessons, and care.
In a grief-walk I took with a friend recently, he shared with me some glimmers he’s experienced amidst some very extreme hardship. I sucked down a smoothie in Historic Filipinotown from a cafe that brings me beloved nostalgia of my agave nectar-sweetened early vegan days, sans white hippie. Tribal Cafe is owned and operated by Filipinos who have kept alive the 90s, warm-toned dream of a happy earth, and palpable punk political analyses and references built into the meal names. Some elements of which felt dated, but previous thinkers walked so we could fly. The smoothie was part of a pact we had among friends to consume calories in our grief-induced food aversion.
In describing a podcast series he’s been recording in Los Angeles, he told me that at 33, this is the first connection he’s truly made with our trans elders. For many of us, there are very few chances at having intimate discussion with trans elders. Our generation and younger has suffered so much by not getting to have abundant relationships with trans elders, and I for one have only found the inspirations in instagram infographics honoring the trans elders like Marsha P. Johnson who were forced to fight just to live.
I never got advice on how to handle the haters, what kind of binders and gaffs they used and how surprisingly considerate and accessible new products might in comparison, and to learn from their mistakes to save me some of my own on how to really, fully be myself.
Those conversations should be afforded the abundance that others are given about generations-long kitchen recipes. If only our people were allowed the safety to live bright, lengthy lives.
One of the few trans elders I had fleeting moments with was a woman I met at my first tattoo shop. I was an apprentice, which means I often tended to the needs of my mentor’s clients while he tended to himself.
I don’t even know her name. She was in her mid 50s and was some sort of higher-up at the video game company she worked at. I didn’t have any presumption that we were friends, but we had a level of comfortability that I could tell was just something she brought to most strangers.
I didn’t know that my moments with her would stay with me after 7 years, that’s a full cellular turnover of the body.
The older men I worked with at that shop have very serious and impactful shortcomings around the treatment of women and queer people. However, asking their clients to dress down past their level of comfort and past the level that is required to complete a tattoo was not one of those shortcomings.
If a woman was naked in the shop it was of their own volition, because they thought it would be easier to navigate getting tattooed, particularly when they were getting full body suits that included having their genitalia tattooed. In those cases, privacy screens were offered, but sometimes refused.
Being naked in the shop was by no means a daily occurrence, but it was commonplace enough in my shop where micro tattoos were rare, and large tattoo compositions flowed with the wearer’s body shapes. The people who came in during that time really wanted to be tattooed people, not people with tattoos, and that meant many sensitive parts of their bodies were no stranger to pigment.
So this trans woman I mentioned was getting angel wings on her back. She elected to go topless so that my mentor could have an easier time doing his work. They took a break from tattooing after I arrived back at the shop after going on a food run. I ordered them burgers from up the street. She stood with me at the front counter where I would draw while she ate her burger, topless.
Keep in mind that you can and should always assert your needs in getting tattooed. You can get nipple covers, you can keep the front part of yourself covered with a shirt, you can ask ahead of time what kind of privacy from others is offered, including using screens and asking your artist to schedule times when the shop is less populated. You can tell your artist that you feel uncomfortable at any point, you can even request to end the appointment early and finish at a later date if circumstance should make you feel uncomfortable.
I genuinely felt some of these moments were liberatory in the same way that I believe getting tattooed is liberatory: exercising autonomy over one’s own body. These moments and processes were imperfect, yes.
In hindsight, the biggest concern I have would have been to ask the comfort level of other clients in the shop, and a courtesy of hers would have been to check in with me, though she may very well have, I don’t remember, but I was not bothered. I do remember some of the men who were getting all parts of their bodies tattooed taking special care to cover themselves around me. I appreciated that, and I appreciated every person who consented to having me watch them get tattooed as part of my training.
I assure you, conversing with her while she ate topless was such a comfortable feeling experience for me. Bodies are just bodies, especially in the context of my work. They’re not to be sexualized in the tattoo shop.
Tattoo artists are a conduit to others accessing reclamation of their own bodies.
It felt like such a beautiful act of self-possession and safety.
She said with no words, I am here, I have every right to be here, and I will exercise my right to feel safety in this space no matter what.
She must have had to do that every day to be in the video game industry at her age and to have transitioned during that time. While being topless eating a burger and having connection with the one person likely felt more affinity toward in the shop was probably not an every day activity for her, the know the assertion of her comfort in sometimes hostile spaces must have been a regular practice.
At that time, I had already been an apprentice in the shop for a couple of years. I make no excuses for the isms that my coworkers and mentors have. I learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t to help change others’ attitudes and actions so that I could survive in that space and in hopes that client experiences in that shop were that much better. But truly, this isn’t about them and it certainly isn not for them. I have long since processed and healed from the unsavory experiences in that environment made up of an older generation of men who held beliefs contrary to my existence.
My apprenticeship, my future, was often under threat of being taken from me.
The spirit of this woman’s actions- something she did in the span of a quick meal- stayed with me. The assertion of her comfortability in potentially hostile space was the same assertion I had to make regularly in my tattoo training. I’m not sure if I need to say that my expression of such looked a lot different from hers, but the energy was the same, as it is the same for every trans person in a violently cisnormative world who chooses to shine bright.
This one of the few affirmations from trans elders that I have received.
I don’t need the elders in my life to be family members. I have always found grandparenting in small moments with people I didn’t know very well. A couple of short emails with my tagalog instructor in 2021 gave me a feeling of having a loving older uncle, without us having ever deepened the relationship beyond what he gave us in class: his unwavering belief that we could all do well.
I dream of a world where our elders are taken care of, a world where those of us in our youth can feel secure about our later days, should we be lucky to reach them. I long for our safety, not only for the gifts that trans elders can bring their subsequent generations, but because we all simply deserve a happy, healthy, long lives.
Mentally, I can allow the universe and natural circumstance to influence our fate, but I am unwilling to accept the ability of capitalism-induced transphobia to determine how long we get to live.
I’m 34 and the pains in my shoulder blades are induced by the physical stressors of tattooing. I work like this because I fear scarcity. I have been laid up for days in pain not being able to move my head. I work to the point of pain because I know that in my industry, tomorrow’s rent is not promised. It’s not a personal flaw, and I’m not special in my experience. It’s a common side effect from the illness of society that prioritizes profit and not people.
I’m 34 and I get insecure about the waning elasticity of my skin. I am not a woman, but I know that women statistically are more disposable at 36, by what measure? I am not sure.
I do not know what the statistics are for trans people, aside from knowing that trans people and especially trans women are treated as more disposable to the point of not making it to 36. It’s not right.
I know that we don’t know how disposability is measured for people like me who present more masculine but are still treated as though we are cis women, but I know it’s there.
In these moments where I am confronted with age and inevitable disability, I do my best to alchemize the fear into something I have more agency over. I ask myself to become a good elder.
Learning how to become a good elder is one of the few ways I can labor for myself and for my people, a type of work that cannot be stolen by capitalism.
I want to be a person that can gift future generations with these micro moments of parenting and grandparenting that I relish from my elders.
