speaker-1 (00:14.466)
Hey y'all, you're tuned into Assigned Sex, Unarchived. I'm your non-binary cousin, Shawn Dawson, and this is a safe space where we're honest about what it means to show up as Black, trans, and genderqueer. Today is just you and me. I want to talk about how Assigned Sex started, how watching Paris Is Burning inspired it, and why it matters to document our lives while we're still here. So this episode is part origin story and part love letter. It's a reminder that Assigned Sex is not just a podcast, it’s my way of saying our lives are worth being recorded in our own words. Let's get into it.

speaker-1 (00:51.65)
When Assigned Sex came out in 2019, I was a first time director. I had just got out of film school and I was focused on making a film. Now I say I'm more concerned with whether my work actually cares for the people that it centers.

speaker-4 (01:13.346)
My name is Angel. I grew up in a Christian non-denominational household. Both of my parents are extremely religious. They specialize in street ministry. All my life, I felt like I never identified with my body. Everyone who surrounded me kept trying to fix me because I never identified with the culture of what it means to be a man.

speaker-1 (01:35.586)
The short did a festival run, won some awards, got screened on a couple college campuses and all of that was very affirming. But it also made me really aware of how vulnerable it is to be a be a black genderqueer person in the spotlight. I feel like all of our stories are so different and I don't like when people flatten that and act like my story is everyone else's or try to position me as the spokesperson for all black trans and genderqueer people. That's not me. I don't feel like that's any of us. We're all very complex. I'm just one person figuring my stuff out.

speaker-4 (02:13.134)
When I was in fifth grade, I knew I wanted to be a girl. I was like, I want breasts. I want to wear bikinis. I want to be one of the WWF models. I want to look like Beyonce. I knew that from the fifth grade. So from fifth grade on, I kind of struggled with building up to make the final decision to actually pursue transitioning.

speaker-2 (02:37.784)
So Assigned Sex taught me that you have to have money to make money in the film world. So I had to get my money up. So for the past eight years I've been in tech, working as an engineer, getting caught up in capitalism, going to work, paying bills, waking up next day, do it all over again. And I wouldn't say that I'm more financially stable, but I have more skills and I can hustle now, like inside and outside of film. So I'm circling back as a Black non-binary storyteller with some tools, more questions, and a clearer sense that the art has to serve the community and not just my career.

speaker-1 (03:23.15)
Shoutout to all the trannies out there. That's crazy. Transgenders! That ain't a girl, I met a boy. That mean I met a boy.

speaker-1 (03:31.906)
Say you met a girl and she said she told you she was transgender.

speaker-2 (03:33.55)
We have to teach gender because people think just because you're born with a penis you're a man and that's not true.

speaker-5 (03:40.982)
You may see me as a female, but that's not what it is. And I can't get you to understand this because you don't understand what's going on inside.

speaker-2 (03:53.184)
You're not going to tell me that this girl...was born this way. That's all I'm gonna say like you're not gonna tell me that.

speaker-5 (03:54.158)
You gonna be ruined. Can't no black man stand up and say, oh, you know my whole life. I Felt like a woman, you know what I'm saying, but I was just holding it down for my lil my my kids and my bitch You know what I'm saying, we say that shit. We gonna get assassinated bruh. You know saying, by us!

speaker-6 (04:18.178)
We have done what the slave master did to us. Dehumanize us, degrade us, demonize us but then use them for our advantage!

speaker-2 (04:27.174)
The original Assigned Sex came out of just being raised in Black church questioning gender roles and kind of just seeing how trans and genderqueer people are talked about in church, home, in the community. And those conversations were happening all around me, but I don't feel like they ever showed up real, like honest.

speaker-2 (04:52.31)
The original Assigned Sex film, follows Angel, who's a 23 year old preacher's kid, assigned male at birth. And it puts her story in a conversation where both trans and cis people of color bring some uncomfortable beliefs about gender and faith and hyper masculinity in Black communities to the surface. So my idea with Assigned Sex was to stop pretending like those conversations weren't happening anyway, and to just bring it all to light.

I would say what really like sparked it was watching a documentary called Paris is Burning for the first time. When I first watched it, I was in the military and there was someone around me who was thinking about transitioning, but I don't think they really felt safe talking about it with me. So I did what a lot, like what a lot of Black genderqueer, anyone questioning their gender , or wanting to know more about trans people, were doing at the time, which was YouTube and Tumblr. And then when I finally saw Paris is Burning, something kind of clicked, and I was like, okay. So now I see why these stories matter, because that doc kind of like surfaced that. People who couldn't really say out loud how they were feeling. They could see themselves reflected in it. And I thought that was super dope. So that film kind of gave me language and visuals for a world that I didn't have any access to in my day-to-day life. And it made me want to make something like Assigned Sex to reflect what the lives of Black trans and genderqueer people look like 20 plus years after Paris is burning.

speaker-1 (06:52.502)
Okay, so it's time for a little Black trans and gender core history. Today we're centering the story of Octavia St. Laurent.

speaker-6 (07:00.6)
This is me. You understand? No, I'm not a woman. No, I am not a man. I am Octavia.

speaker-1 (07:08.622)
Octavia was a Brooklyn girl. She was born on March 16th, 1964 into a family she said loved her even when they didn't fully get her. She used to say Louis Armstrong was an uncle and her mom sang in a group called Sweetheart and the Crystals. So in her mind, the bar was already set. As a kid, people would look at Octavia and assume she was a little girl. Her mother would step in and tell them "no baby, this is just a pretty little boy." The whole time Octavia was already slipping out of that whole boy girl box. Later she described herself as intersex and talked about having wonderful parents who supported her, even while schools, cops, and strangers tried to control how she dressed, how she walked, and who she was allowed to be. I kind of feel like that gap between a home that loved her and a world that kept trying to fix her is what pushed a lot of Black queer and trans kids in her generation into ballroom.

speaker-1 (08:10.818)
By 1982, Octavia was still a teenager, but she had found the place where everything made sense. New York City's Black and Latino ballroom scene. Picture it. A young Black trans girl, raised on jazz stories and girl group harmonies, walking into a Harlem ballroom with Diana Ross's "Swept Away." She joined houses like St. Laurent and later Mizrahi, and she ran the categories built for the girls who knew they was fine. Like Face and Model's Effect. Every time she hit that floor, she was pushing back against a world that already told her loud and clear that she was not suppose to exist.

Even with all that love in the ballroom, Octavia's dream was bigger than trophies. Ballroom was home but she wanted high fashion. She wanted the runways, the campaigns, the covers. She believed her face could be her ticket out of poverty and out of everyone else's idea who she was allowed to be.

speaker-6 (09:09.646)
Sometimes I sit and look at a magazine, I try to imagine myself in the front cover or even inside. I want so much more. I want my name to be a household product. I want everybody to look at me and say, there goes Octavia.

speaker-1 (09:30.606)
So when Jenny Livingston started filming Paris is Burning in the late 1980s, let's be clear that Octavia was already that girl in ballroom.

speaker-6 (09:38.286)
This is my idol, Paulina. Someday I hope to be up there with her. If that could be me, I think I would be the happiest person in the world just knowing that I can compare to Paulina to stand next to her and to take pictures with her.

speaker-1 (09:53.888)
On camera, she talked about wanting to be in high fashion and how hard that was for a dark-skinned Black trans woman in that era.

speaker-1 (10:01.706)
It's real important that y'all remember that at this time the fashion world was locked down. Real white. Real cis and narrow.

speaker-1 (10:08.866)
So she built her own stage. In the ballroom she was already a legend. Once Paris's burning came out. She became a symbol too. That documentary gave people all over the world their first real look at Black and Latinx queer and trans life in New York. Honestly, I feel like Octavia's face and voice are a big part of what makes that doc unforgettable. After that, she kept working. She showed up in the 1993 film, The Saint of Fort Washington, became the subject of the short documentary Queen of the Underground and appeared in How Do I Look, which is a 2006 film that picked up where Paris is Burning left off. In all of these, she wasn't there just to look pretty. She was talking about desire, about violence and about the men who were obsessed with trans women in the dark and disrespected them in the light.

speaker-6 (11:02.73)
Our whole fucking world is being run by perverted undercover fags that run around talking about how straight they are. You got big time celebrities that go around in their cars picking up transvestites, having sex with them and then getting on national TV making fun of them.

speaker-1 (11:22.818)
Off camera, her life followed the same crisis that hit her community. Octavia was diagnosed HIV positive. She turned her status into a way to educate and use her story to talk about AIDS, stigma, and survival. She spoke honestly about sex work, addiction, and the cost of staying alive as a Black trans woman, offering herself as both a warning and a kind of hope to younger girls who were walking the same path.

speaker-6 (11:48.366)
Now there are very little third genders because half of them have already died from AIDS. Because of their lack of education, because of their lack of family values, because of their lack of morals and principles and family and friend support, these people had no knowledge of anything and anything they had to learn, they had to learn themselves and some of them had to die learning it. Even when her body started to give up, she refused to disappear. In 2008, after being diagnosed with cancer on top of living with HIV, she moved to Syracuse to live with her sister. Instead of retiring quietly, she started a one-woman show at a local gay bar called Spirits. The stage was smaller, the crowd more local, but the mission stayed the same. Tell the truth, be seen, stay glamorous. On May 17th, 2009, at just 45 years old, Octavia St. Laurent died, she was laid to rest in Queens. So when we say her name now, we're not just remembering a pretty face. We're talking about a Brooklyn born, black trans woman from a musical family who turned every hard thing life threw at her into performance, testimony and beauty. She modeled, she educated, she testified, she mothered. And in all of that, she carved out a space for Black, queer, and trans people to see themselves as worthy of the close-up.

speaker-6 (13:09.312)
Everything you do in life is like a boomerang. When you throw it, it eventually comes back. Don't fuck with me.

speaker-2 (13:26.094)
I'm revisiting Assigned Sex as a podcast because I archived the documentary for a long long time...out of just like my I think everything has to be perfect and I didn't want anyone to see it because I was like it's not perfect. So the podcast was a way to unbury the project, expand it and I feel like with films they like capture moments. With a podcast it's an ongoing conversation where we can talk about everything that's changed since 2019. And a lot has changed. A lot hasn't changed. But this podcast is a way to keep the conversation going.

speaker-7 (14:10.932)
Under a new executive order, the federal government will only recognize two sexes, male and female, which are determined at conception.

speaker-8 (14:18.936)
The 19-year-old pleaded guilty in November to killing 36-year-old Asia Davis, a transgender woman of color, in her room at the Woodward Inn in Highland Park on June 1st. But first, the Trump administration's latest move. It is now issuing a new policy aimed at ending transgender-related care for inmates in federal prisons.

speaker-7 (14:42.348)
The Trump administration today took its most significant moves yet in a wide-ranging effort to restrict gender-affirming medical care for minors.

speaker-2 (14:51.798)
I'm hoping the Assigned Sex Unarchived project kinda addresses the things that I saw wrong in Paris is Burning a little bit now. Every time I've watched the film maybe like 20 times and now when I look at it and now that I've done a little bit more research and the people behind it, it can be a little problematic. So like on one hand it was like a a way to document Black and Latinx queer and trans ballroom culture in an educated generations and inspired things like "Pose." But then there's a lot of critique out there about who got paid, how a white director framed poor Black and brown trans women. Some people might look at it as trauma porn, and there's a lot of that out there right now. And I don't think it was bad, but I think it shows how easy trans and gender nonconforming people can be turned into a spectacle, even in the projects that claim to love us. So that's the tension that sits under Assigned Sex. And I'm trying to honor the lineage of films like Paris is Burning, but also correct what they did wrong and making sure that Black and trans, genderqueer people are centered, respected, and can tell our own stories.

speaker-1 (16:13.73)
There's a writing component to the podcast that I'm really proud of. It's a recurring Black, trans, and genderqueer segment. It's always just a few minutes and I just talk about a Black, trans, or genderqueer icon and I treat them like a little altar inside the show where we can pause the conversation and really just honor someone else's life and work. And I built that because trans and genderqueer history is either being erased, distorted, or only told through the lens of tragedy. And I don't want that to be the only record of us to be like in headlines and obituaries. So taking the time to write those tiny little segments means I'm actively documenting us in real time when people are trying to scrub us from public memory. There's also a Substack.
that lives beside the podcast where I expand on each episode and I share those same history pieces and short essays. So this is a little shameless plug. Subscribe to assignsex.substack.com and give me some money because I need to pay the people working behind the scenes to make the project possible.

My Black genderqueer and trans heroes. I have a lot of them. But a few of them are...I like Big Freedia. I think she's really changed like mainstream music and she real country, she loud, like, and she don't water herself down for anybody. Someone else would be Angelica Ross and I like her because she's not just doing just one thing. She's in tech, she organizes, she acts, and she's constantly just shifting what Black trans women can do. Who else? I mean, I learned a lot about Octavia St. Laraunt. I just like the way she talked about beauty. She was really into like... I don't think it was shallow at all about how, like, she was so into, bitch, I'm hot, I'm fine. I think it shows that she was, like, deeply human. And I feel like she was also very much herself and always very comfortable in her skin and knew exactly who she was. And I always admire people like that. They know who they are and you can't tell them nothing else. And let me think of a Black...trans masculine person. Yance Ford. I haven't heard about him in a minute actually, but he's a filmmaker. He's Black, he's trans, and he was behind the film Strong Island.

speaker-1 (19:41.422)
If this episode dragged you a little bit, or if it hugged you a little bit, please share it with someone you love. You can find me, your non-binary cousin, Shaun Dawson, on all platforms @iamsdawson. Ya'll be safe out there.