I was maybe fifteen or so the first time I saw the punk movie musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and though I would lack the words to describe myself for at least another decade, I felt deep kinship with the gender-bending lead character, Hedwig. Hedwig, played by the film’s writer and director John Cameron Mitchell, starts her life as Hansel, an imaginative boy in communist East Berlin before undergoing a botched gender reassignment surgery that leaves her as Hedwig, a bitter woman touring middle America with her band. In the end, she ends up finding a peace in-between the masculine and feminine, embracing both Hansel and Hedwig within herself, becoming whole.
In order to marry an American soldier named Luther (Maurice Dean Wint), Hansel is forced to have the surgery that leaves him feeling trapped between genders and worlds. On the cast and crew reunion for the Criterion release of the film, Mitchell explains that Hedwig is performative, that she’s a mask for the person beneath, a person that’s really neither a woman or a man. In the film’s wild climax, she rips off the trappings of femininity and embraces the in-between. It would take me years to understand exactly why that moment felt so revelatory because I was still in the thick of it, but Hedwig really mirrored me in surprising ways.
I spent most of my childhood furious that when the universe doled out bodies, I wasn’t given a male one. Thankfully the differences between “boy” and “girl” are pretty slim in those early years, and I was able to live pretty authentically and happily outside of the occasional frilly Easter dress. Then puberty hit like a freight train and it felt like I was suddenly a woman overnight and against my will. Like Hedwig, I took on femininity as a mask and a kind of armor. I basically intentionally became a manic pixie dream girl, trying desperately to perform gender the only way I knew how. Just as Hedwig pulled parts of her femme identity from pop culture icons, I was similarly a “patchwork person” created from pieces of the women I admired. Desperation to fit into womanhood led me to some truly awful relationships with controlling men, much like Luther forcing Hansel to become Hedwig and Tommy Gnosis refusing to love her in full. It also made me lash out when the mask didn’t fit, much like Hedwig passing her own pain onto her second husband, Yitzhak.
Yitzhak was a revelation I understood even at fifteen, as he’s played by cisgender woman Miriam Shor and longs to be feminine. (It’s pretty likely that Yitzhak is trans, unlike Hedwig, who only accepted femininity because she was forced into it.) At the end of the movie, Hedwig finally allows Yitzhak to be the woman she’s meant to be, and Yitzhak undergoes a stunning transformation. It’s always complicated when cis actors play trans roles, but with Yitzhak it felt subversive, forcing me to think about gender beyond the binary. It helped me stop trying so darn hard to fit in, though eventually I would realize that I was not Yitzhak at all, but Hedwig.
In the song “Tear Me Down,” Hedwig compares herself to the Berlin Wall, this horrible piece of iconography that had a very real impact on her life. “There’s not much of a difference between a bridge and a wall,” she sings, because she is both bridge and wall, separating and connecting two disparate worlds — masculine and feminine, capitalist and communist, punk rock and pure glamour. There’s a wall inside of her in the idea of binary gender and that she has to fit into womanhood because Luther told her as much and her body doesn’t fit into the typical standards of manhood. She even believes that she requires romantic love in order to be whole, basing her sense of self around a story from Plato’s Symposium where everyone was once two people that got split down the middle and we’re forever searching for our other half. So much of her view of the world is gendered and trapped within the rigid confines of binary thinking, and it’s only when she lets go of these ideas that she actually, finally feels whole.
The next line in “Tear Me Down” has become something I hold close to my heart, a rallying cry for people who fall outside of the binary everywhere: “Without me right in the middle, babe, you would be nothing at all.” Masculinity and femininity are defined by their opposites, and in the same way gender is truly defined by those who exist outside of it. After all, without people like Hedwig to challenge our ideas of what it is to be a man or a woman, how would anyone know that there was something other than the culturally accepted norms? For me, being non-binary is like being both the bridge and the wall, existing between binary gender and also outside of it. Hedwig went from being a confusing inspiration in my teens to a kindred spirit in adulthood, a boy who became a disaster of a woman who finally found gender euphoria by being neither — and both.
