By Meredith Talusan | 22 June 2017
VICE — Jacob Tobia and Alok Vaid-Menon are femme nonbinary icons. But that won’t get them dates, and the reasons why speak volumes about our discomfort with those who exist between genders.
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.
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.
But if you think all that would land them a date, you’d be wrong. And nobody is more puzzled than me as to why such obvious catches are having dating problems when so many clamor for their attention. […]
What a cartoon world these freaks live in. Do they think guilt tripping will overcome tens of thousands of years of biological selection?
Economy must be doing well if you can make a living as a poet still. Most people do that on the side of their real job.