The sorrows of young famous nonbinary femmes

Brilliant piece in Vice titled Why Can’t My Famous Gender Nonconforming Friends Get Laid? Oooooh gosh I don’t know – is it because they’re famous for smelling funny? Because they’re so frantically busy being famous no one can volunteer to get them laid? Because being famous isn’t automatically the same thing as being sexually alluring?

It’s a cool Saturday night in my East Village apartment, and Alok Vaid-Menon has just created a Tinder account for me, while Jacob Tobia bats their eyelashes in the background.

Poor Jacob, no takers for the batted eyelashes in the background.

Alok and Jacob are two of the most publicly visible gender nonconforming femmes I know. As a performance poet, Alok has just gone solo after touring in dozens of cities in the US and abroad as one half of the poetry duo Darkmatter. Jacob was named to 2016’s OUT 100, has made a web series for NBC, and been the subject of a GLAAD-nominated episode of MTV’s True Life. Both are trans-identified, but belong somewhere in between genders, and they’ve amassed huge social media followings as gender nonbinary, femme, and fabulous human beings. They’ve become celebrities in their own right, with Jacob regularly walking down the red carpet at LGBTQ galas and Alok featuring in the Janet Mock–narrated HBO documentary The Trans List.

That’s totally celebrity. Absolutely. It puts them right up there with Alec Baldwin and Beyonce. They are so so so famous. And yet nobody wants to date them.

It’s a reliable source of ennui in our group chats, and as the elder among my nonbinary pals, I’ve been giving Jacob and Alok dating advice for weeks.

And yet, even with the ennui, they still can’t get anyone to knock boots with them.

[W]hat I learned during the social experiment that followed is that Jacob and Alok, like many gender nonconforming femmes, live in a world where admirers applaud them for their radical politics on social media, and people they’re attracted to associate with them because of their slayworthiness and social capital, but refuse to make love to them, or at least fuck them well.

Thus for the first time in human history we are confronted with people who cannot persuade anyone to have sex with them. This is unheard of! It’s unnatural!! People should be forced to have sex with them!

This piece will make them even more famous, so maybe that will do the trick.

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