There Will Be Some Introspection — On The Road with Amanda Palmer
By: Jack Nicholls
Tags: Amanda Palmer, Politics, Music, Transgender, Refugees

Concert halls are huge operations, with an endlessly changing cast. We wore all-access passes, but as an experiment, I put mine in my pocket and continued to stroll past idling security guards. Nobody bothered me, assuming I belonged. We are taught who is “us” and who is ”them” from birth in a thousand subconscious ways.

Amanda is also someone who goes where she pleases. It is not true to say that she strides through places like she owns them, because she is not proprietorial. She just strides through spaces like she has every right to be there, which sounds unexceptional until you think of how many people do not. Especially women.

Amanda headed to the stage in Glasgow

At the venues and behind-the-scenes, this was an extremely woman-centric tour. I am not experienced with international rock tours, but everyone stressed to me how unusual this was. Aside from Dirk the driver and “Merch Queen” Alex, everyone aboard the bus was a woman. All of them would have stories for me over the next two weeks; of unwanted touches, of uncomfortable situations, of disrespect. As one of our crew said, “These men join the lifestyle thinking it’s going to be Motley Crue in 1987, and it’s not, and they take it out on everyone because they don’t have the partying they think they were promised.”

Subul on the bus in Limerick

This crew was a conscious choice by Amanda, who wanted to foster a more “female and empathic environment” for a show very centred on women’s experiences. If there was ever a song that passed the Bechdel Test, it was “Voicemail for Jill.” A woman, speaking to another woman about abortion, in a song written to be played by people going through one of their most vulnerable moments. Amanda told me that her audience had always leaned female in the Dresden Dolls days, and since going solo it had become more so. I was self-conscious about where I fit into this group.

In Vienna, Amanda had mentioned that “Voicemail For Jill” was her favourite song on her new record. Breezily, I said I preferred “The Ride,” Amanda’s bittersweet paean to life that closes her show.

“That’s because you haven’t had an abortion,” Amanda said.

She didn’t mean it unkindly, but I recoiled terribly. And this might be a time to back up and explain that I had spent the tour so far presenting as female.

Jack in the bus parking lot in Antwerp

Growing up trans in Australia at the turn of the millennium felt a little like having the plague five years before the discovery of penicillin. Given there was virtually no social media community for trans people online, I feel sure that my life would have turned out very differently if I was born ten years later. Instead, I was asked “are you revolted by your body?” by septuagenarian psychologists, and when I admitted that I wasn’t revolted as such, they pursed their lips and shook their heads. For better or worse, I was discouraged from transitioning in 2002. In the last few years as — somewhat bewilderingly to me — my private pain became the most talked about social issue of the decade, I retreated from the whole debate and ended up claiming some sort of non-binary space for myself.

In a world of climate change and economic inequality, gender is not the fight I want to have, and I am happy for people to use whatever pronouns for me they want. But suddenly I had been dropped into a tour about abortion and motherhood, and it stressed me out to be taking a role that perhaps should be done by a someone with a woman’s experiences. I was suffering from imposter syndrome and my old friend, gender dysphoria.

Alex and Cal in Cork

But one thing that had always helped me on the gender front was Amanda herself. “Half Jack,” for obvious reasons, has been a favorite of mine for a long time. As someone who has known Amanda Palmer for a long time, I can confidently state that she is not transphobic. On the contrary, in the taxonomy of humanity it is clear that she welcomes trans people as a part of her team of beautiful outcasts.

And yet transphobia is one of the most frequent of the many attacks made on Amanda, usually stemming from the Dresden Dolls’ 2006 song “Sex Changes,” which contains confronting lines such as:

You get your choice of an aesthetic

Ah we need to chop your clock off tick tock, tick tock, tick tock, tick tock

It might not be what you expected

There is no money back once you’ve been ripped off, ripped off, ripped off

Like most Dresden Dolls songs, it is self-consciously macabre and theatrical, and it appears ambivalent at best about sexual reassignment surgery. Perhaps understandably, as Amanda was in a relationship with someone due for such a procedure at the time, and surgery can be confronting both for loved ones and some trans people ourselves. But it infuriates Amanda to have her poetry reduced to a simplistic “message.”

“That song is a quadruple entendre. It’s reductive to say that it’s just about sexual reassignment, it’s also applicable to childbirth, abortion and loss of virginity. To reduce it to sexual transition pisses me off; it’s always pissed me off. The song is a Rorschach test, and it’s like that for a reason. Don’t tell me what I meant.”

Of course, an artist cannot control how their art is perceived. In There Will Be No Intermission, Amanda is very consciously using her personal life to make a political statement. In “Sex Changes,” she was exploring aspects of her personal life. When you are sometimes making political statements and sometimes riffing on your emotions, is it a bit much to expect your audience to keep track of which is which?

Amanda in her dressing room at De Roma, Antwerp

All the more in a world where anti-trans rhetoric has become a cheap form of virtue-signalling (vice-signalling?) among reactionaries, such as Australia’s empty-vessel Prime Minister Scott Morrison recently burbling that he was going to “sort out” gender-neutral bathrooms in Parliament because they were “political correctness over the top.” It’s again dividing the world into an Us and a Them — the oldest and deepest split in humanity. For some people (mostly women, mostly over 40), a refusal to allow trans women into the tribe of cis women is a significant part of their political philosophy.

Trans-exclusionary feminism is interesting to me because it is one of the few political issues which cleaves across the Left, whereas usually everyone in “the tribe” falls into line on the same side of an issue. If I am told someone supports Bernie Sanders — or even just likes a show like Broad City — I can infer an awful lot of correlations in aesthetic and political tastes. But I cannot be sure about their opinions on who has the right to piss where.

Still, there was no split among the crew. From Amanda on down, everyone was strictly in the pro-trans camp. “Trans women are women,” said Subul emphatically. They were Us, and Amanda had been clear that she wanted gender-neutral bathrooms at every event.