BODIES (Part 1 - Dr. Shakina Nayfack)

In the first of a two-part episode, I have a conversation with actress, dancer, and social activist Dr. Shakina Nayfack about understanding, loving, and advocating for our bodies. And about giving children freedom and language at early ages to feel safe expressing themselves without shame.
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Transcript

Dr. Shakina Nayfack: Hi. That was so...I don't know why it didn't even ring, I just got a notification that it was missed. But here we are. Hi!

Jeremy: Here we are.

S.N.: Nice to see you.

Jeremy: Yeah, you too. It's been a solid minute since we've seen each other.

S.N.: Yeah. Many, many minutes. The last time was like, I ran into you briefly on Ninth Avenue or something, you know?

Jeremy: Yes, I remember. 

S.N.: Before we all... 

Jeremy: We talked for like 40 seconds and departed.

S.N.: And who knew, you know, what was in store?

You're listening to "The Talk", a podcast where we explore the possibility of creating a radical new communication environment between parents and children.  An environment that's open, honest and candid. And where nothing is off limits.

Jeremy: Hi, everyone, it's Jeremy. This episode of "The Talk", entitled BODIES, is occurring in two parts. This is part one, where you'll be hearing a conversation between me and Dr. Shakina Nayfack, and in part two we'll be chatting with parents and other folks about reasons for and practical ways of communicating with our kids about bodily autonomy, boundaries, exploration and affirmation. Dr. Nayfack—Shakina—is an actress, educator, director, dancer, singer, producer, and social activist who can be seen on Marvel's Jessica Jones, the TBS comedy The Detour, as Lola in Hulu's cult comedy series Difficult People, and maybe most notably as Ava in Amazon's Transparent, A Musical Finale. Ava is a drug dealer and actress who winds up in a rehearsal room portraying and serving as psycho-proxy for the show's deceased eponymonikous Maura, played for four seasons by Jeffrey Tambor. Currently, you can see Shakina in a lead role on the NBC comedy Connecting. Dr. Nayfack has contributed massively and in countless ways to the visibility and empowerment of the transgender community, both through her career and in her personal life. In 2016 she embarked on her "Rebel Tour" of North Carolina, performing in protest of the anti-trans law HB2, known colloquially as "the bathroom bill," which removed LGBTQ people from the state's nondiscrimination policy and forced transgender people to use public restrooms that correspond with the gender marker they were assigned at birth. I'm hoping that this conversation with Dr. Nayfack will encourage reflection and critical thought about the ways we see and experience our bodies, will encourage us to listen to our children and empower them to understand, explore and communicate about their bodies, and will convey the very real dangers of body shaming messages that come at our children from all angles as they grow up and move through the world.

S.N.: What prompted you to make this podcast? Just like quarantine, like, figuring out what to do to keep yourself sane kind of thing?

Jeremy: Well, that's part of it. That's absolutely part of it. Kind of the impetus was like, noticing over the past six years of raising kids, that other parents seem to be a little surprised sometimes at the way that we talk to our kids. At like the level of sort of candor that we try to have with our kids, and they'll overhear saying things and...things that are often seen as like, "oh, that's an adult conversation. Oh, you don't need to know about that at your age." That kind of thing, you know?

S.N.: Right. You know, it's funny because my brother and sister-in-law have also taken a very candid approach to their parenting conversations and I've always sort of been blown away by, like, the ease at which they discuss certain topics. But then also when they hit things they don't know how to navigate, it's really interesting to see them kind of falter and sort of revert back to like, "oh, when you're older..." You know, like certain things, like about about my transition was like really big for my nephew and stuff. So anyway, if that comes up, we can talk about it.

Jeremy: I first met Shakina in 2012 when she was directing a developmental production of the Swedish band Brainpool's rock opera Junk, that I was playing drums for. I remember my first impressions of her in rehearsal as a gentle, collaborative, and somehow very powerful person, all qualities that have proven to be true in ways and to an extent that I never could have imagined. Coincidentally, or perhaps not, when we spoke last month, she was in residence at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut, teaching and planning development for another production of that same show.

Jeremy: Mostly I've just been like capturing people's FaceTime or Zoom audio and it's always like workable...but this is a treat for you to be doing this for me.

S.N.: Oh, I'm going to get you something nicer than that. Yeah, for sure. So here it goes... Ok, recording!

Jeremy: It's official! I think I mentioned to you that this episode is entitled "BODIES", and so I've been talking to a few different people and I'm trying to explore things like boundaries and body ownership and body exploration and respect for our own bodies and for other people's bodies and like, how can we communicate these things in healthy ways to our young kids as they grow up?

S.N.: Sure.

Jeremy: So that we don't create taboos, so that we don't make an environment where they feel unhealthy or unsafe about their own bodies, about their own perspectives on their bodies.

S.N.: Right.

Jeremy: You have had a body journey that I think has caused you to probably be a little more or a lot more reflective about your body and your relationship with your body than many people have the opportunity to become.

S.N.: Yeah, that's probably so.

Jeremy: Yeah, that's what I would imagine. I'm glad you agree with the supposition that's the complete basis for me talking to you. But I also am really interested because you're an actress and you're firmly and constantly in touch with and entrenched in a business where the ways that bodies are looked at and approached and presented are hugely problematic.

S.N.: Yeah, for sure.

Jeremy: I would love to just hear your thoughts on, like, how people can learn to love their bodies and how that can be nurtured from young ages, and how we can push back against the culture around us that shames and bases its existence on the idea that our bodies are not worthy of our own love.

S.N.: Yeah, not good enough. Constantly. Yeah. Well, you know, I think for me to understand how I came to embrace my body, I have to reflect on the times in which I learned to feel ashamed of my body first, you know? And that had a lot to do with my gender journey, my exploration of my genitals when I was a kid, and also of clothing and how my body fit or didn't fit and what I was allowed to wear and not allowed to wear. I received a lot of messaging from a really early age that whatever relationship I was trying to pursue with my body was out of alignment with everybody else's expectations. And so I knew I was doing something wrong, like, from the jump, you know? And I remember my mom brought home this anatomy book from the public library when I was a kid and we were, you know, having the talk about the difference between boys and girls. And I was so interested in that book because I just didn't understand why I was a boy, you know? And I looked at this other anatomy, and I thought that seems like...so much better. Like that seems where I...that's like what I imagine myself becoming. And I was really obsessed, I would look at these pictures all the time and they were just diagrams, you know? And it was for children. It was like "anatomy for young people." So I had this disconnect, and we talk about body dysphoria or gender dysphoria as like a clinical term that a lot of trans people experience. But when you're a young person and you don't have that language, I think all you really know is that something's wrong. And if no one else can see or understand that, then I think the assumption is that something's wrong with you. You know, that it's your fault. At least that's what I sort of adopted as an attitude about myself from a really early age, and then so much of my life has been about refuting that and resisting that inner monologue that society reinforces all the time and then reclaiming some kind of love for my body and some kind of empowerment with my body.

Jeremy: The experience of discrimination and violence that those in the transgender community endure at the hands of our society's ignorance and bias is extremely damaging and often deadly. I hope that without diminishing that experience, we can learn that listening to and believing our children when they tell us things about themselves is a crucial part of allowing them to grow up empowered and confident that they alone are the owners and decision makers when it comes to their physical and emotional selves, and that the risks of not doing so are far more dangerous than we might imagine.

S.N.: You know, I think, like, the first thing that comes to mind is...I wonder how to allow children and young people the freedom to explore their bodies without shame and ask questions about their bodies without shame, and to give them the language to communicate the experience of being in their bodies. In my dance work I learned a lot about proprioception, which is one's ability to drop inside and sense the experience of being embodied from like a phenomenological point of view, you know? Like the phenomenon of existing and being constantly aware of the information and the feedback that's coming at you from your own mind and your own sense of self in the world, your weight and your balance, but also your sort of emotional reality and how that manifests physically. And I remember as a kid, I would just cry and I didn't know why I was so sad and I didn't know why...I didn't have, of course, the language to talk about depression. But I would like make up stories. And my mom would ask me why I was crying and I would have to lie because I didn't have the key to unlock, you know, what was wrong. And I think learning how to talk about what you're feeling, what you're sensing, what you're experiencing, you know, that sort of language to articulate your physical experience is really a gift. And for young people and for children to grow up with the permission to give voice to the experience of being in their bodies, I think would be really groundbreaking.

Jeremy: You mentioned the constant kind of messaging that you got as a child. But I wonder, was there a point in your childhood where you started noticing that messaging becoming explicit?

S.N.: Yeah, the messaging started really soon. I mean, my stepfather was raised a conservative Southern Baptist, and so I was being critiqued about my girly behavior from maybe fourth grade. And then by friends, you know, or, not friends, but by other kids at school, even earlier. I think I was probably being called gay by third grade. And that's all...I mean no one is having sex with anyone in third grade, you know? That's not about sexuality, that's about gender performance, and how I existed in my body.

Jeremy: What was your frame of reference for homosexuality, for "gayness" when that term would be thrown around? What was your frame of reference for that at that time?

S.N.: Well, I grew up in Laguna Beach, California, which was a really gay area in the '80s and '90s. And it was also the dawning and then the peak of AIDS in America. And so "gay" meant deadly and diseased to me when I was young, and to most people. It was something to be feared and admonished. But I also knew that I liked boys and I just didn't understand why the boys didn't see me as like a pretty little girl. And then as I hit puberty and secondary sex characteristics started to develop, it was so painful because I was growing in the wrong direction, you know? I was becoming more of the thing I didn't want to be and getting farther away from the thing that was possible. When my voice changed, that was really heartbreaking for me as a singer. When I started growing body hair it was so weird because I didn't have any, and I still really don't have any hair on my legs. And in, like, sixth grade all the kids used to tease me about shaving my legs and I would walk down the halls and people would grope me all the time, just reach over and grab my legs and make fun of me for having no leg hair. And then when I hit high school and I started to develop like chest hair and back hair, and it was just...it was terrifying, you know, my body was growing against me. 

Jeremy: To hear you say that you felt like your body was growing against you, that's powerful.

S.N.: Yeah.

Jeremy: And at the same time, to feel like all the, or a lot of the people around you were also attacking or against you in a way, like, that is not... 

S.N.: It was a battlefield. It was absolutely a battlefield. Interior and out in the world for sure.

Jeremy: Were there things that you did like about your body at that time? Were there things that you could find if you reflected on it?

S.N.: When I was in junior high and high school and I discovered makeup, I really fell in love with my face. And I used to, like, sort of pride myself on my facial features, the shape of my lips and my cheekbones. And I think that it allowed me to be pretty in a way that I didn't feel like I had any other ways to be pretty. But it also created this really almost neck down disconnect where everything going on with the rest of my body was sort of like, I didn't want to look at it or think about it or anything. And then, you know, I could, like, put on some great eye makeup and go to school and face the world. And I could deal with people, you know, harassing me, because I felt bold and beautiful. But I had really cut myself off from. Any sort of relationship with my body. I also self harmed a lot in junior high and high school, and so I think that reinforced that disconnect in a lot of ways. I don't really think I learned to enjoy my body until I was in my 30s, probably. I danced through most of my 20s and that was even still...a resistance, I was trying to dance my way out of my body, you know, in the kind of avant garde work that I was doing.

We'll be back to talk more with Dr. Shakina Nayfack in a moment. But first, I want to say a quick thanks for listening to "The Talk". If you're interested in supporting us, you can do so by visiting thetalkthepodcast.com/donate. "The Talk" is a labor of love, and so your support will go directly to hosting and distribution expenses, technical equipment and software costs, design and marketing, and all the other things that are required to allow "The Talk" to continue unencumbered.

We're working currently on an episode about death. This is a topic that is not just difficult for us to talk to kids about, but often difficult to even think about ourselves. I'd love to hear about your relationship to the concept and reality of death as a child and as an adult, and about the healthy ways you try to talk to your kids about it without instilling unnecessary anxiety or fear. So I'd like to invite you to send me a brief voice memo or a note that you'd be willing to share with our listeners. You can send your voice memo to me at thetalk@thetalkthepodcast.com. I look forward to hearing from you.

Jeremy: When you were a teenager, what did you envision the rest of your life being like?

Shakina Nayfack: Well, I didn't think that I would live past 30. That was just a sort of like, I remember being very convinced of that.

Jeremy: That was a conscious thought you had.

S.N.: Yeah, in high school. You know, I just didn't think that I would have much of a life expectancy to begin with. And so I behaved really fatalistically, you know? I got myself into unsafe sexual situations when I was really too young to understand what was going on because I kind of had a death wish. And as a young queer teen, the ways of acting out were really dangerous. But they were also the only ways that I had. And if I think about like, gosh, what would have kept me from going down those roads, you know, in terms of, like parental advice or whatever, I just think that...you know, no one ever told me that...that I was fine just the way I was. And even that can be tricky because sometimes as a trans person you hear that and you just want to be like, "fuck you! I don't want to be this way. I want you to be fine with the way I want to be."

Jeremy: Do you remember when the time in your life was when you first were able to hear that and were able to say to yourself? 

S.N.: Yeah, you know, I came out as trans when I was 18, I think that’s when I realized I learned the word "transgender" and I was like, "oh, that's probably who I am." But I still felt like everything was wrong with me. And, you know, I was really fortunate, at that point I was going to school at UC Santa Cruz in a really open minded, nurturing community. And I was fortunate enough to have some queer role models and some spiritual role models who helped me kind of find my own path in that. And there were people even, you know, my friends growing up in high school and stuff who wished for me to be happy in my form and wanted to, you know, support what however I manifested. But at that point, the internalized shame had taken such a deep root that there was literally nothing that anyone could say that would actually make me love myself. But I knew I had a lot of power in my being. And so I expected that there was something I was supposed to do with that.

Jeremy: Over the past several years, that power has been evident in Shakina's work as a television actress. She has broken a number of longstanding exclusionary ceilings in the industry, including becoming the first transgender person to appear in a lead role in a sitcom as Ellis in NBC's Connecting.

Jeremy: I think that you are doing a lot in terms of visibility work for people who have bodies and experiences like yours.

S.N.: Right.

Jeremy: I mean, obviously there's been a vacuum of that, but I'm curious, what made you feel like that was...that entertainment was a place...or did you go to entertainment partly because you felt like it was a place where you could start to change visibility, representation, perception?

S.N.: You know, I always loved...I mean, I was doing theater from...third grade was when I did my first play! So I've always been passionate about performing arts, but I think when I was 18, my first year of college, I did my first, like performance piece where I sort of created a...basically what was like a drag number with an ensemble. But I did this drag performance to the Korn song "Faggot", and I was in dominatrix drag with these eight straight guys in like football jerseys and jockstraps and fishnets. And I was whipping them with a cat of nine tails on stage. And that's the kind of thing you could do at UC Santa Cruz in the '90s. As a "boy," quote/unquote, male bodied. I was ashamed of my size and shape and being overweight and everything. But once I was dressed up, you know, once I was like fully manifest, I would show a lot of skin. And I loved the shape that my body made. So I realized about my self-consciousness then that I should step fully into it and put it on stage anyway, because if I could challenge my body image issues in a public way, then I could maybe convince other people to challenge theirs. And that really became a kind of guiding light for me, for, I mean, the last 20 years.

Jeremy: I'm curious about, when you are navigating auditions, job offers, that kind of thing, what do you feel like your role is in terms of educating the people who are hiring you?

S.N.: Sometimes I think just showing up is educational in my case. You know, one thing is like when I get auditions—and nowadays they're all self tapes, of course. You know, my agents and the casting directors, they don't know if they're going to get back Shakina with hair or Shakina bald. And it's really like, I'll read the script and I'll make my best judgment on what my interpretation of the character is and then, you know, make that choice. And so I'm definitely keeping people on their toes, you know, in regards to that. And also, even with the kind of groundswell of visibility for trans people in media right now, there's still a really limited range of the kind of trans person that is really getting a platform. And it's most often the hyper-femme trans woman who meets and/or exceeds the capitalist expectation of female beauty already. And so I feel like, as you know, a bigger bodied person, as a trans woman with alopecia, I think I just kind of shatter that a little bit, which makes the platform a little broader. And I think that's really important too. I don't have a lot of conversations that are strictly educational. You know, usually I'm like, "oh, who's your consultant?" Because I want to make sure that there's someone else taking care of that work. But I have gotten really good at advocating for myself, whether it's talking to costume designers or talking to the writers or director about, you know, what I think I need to feel comfortable, and also what I think is going to send the best message or put me in the best light for, you know, creating the kind of trans representation that I care about.

Jeremy: Speaking of advocating for oneself, obviously that's something that is really crucial for us to teach kids to do. And you mentioned giving them language at early ages. But there are a lot of parents, myself included, who struggle with what that really looks like on a practical, kind of day-to-day basis. And growing up in our generation, a lot of us didn't have that modeled for us. So we may not have ever learned what those language skills look like for ourselves. And I know that you don't have kids yourself, but as human people who are struggling to unlearn and replace a lot of trained techniques and behaviors, is there anything that you would say to parents about things to look out for as we're aspiring to teach our kids, you know, things that we never learned?

S.N.: Right. The one thing that I want to say is like—and I know this gets a lot of talk— but to just normalize children playing with themselves, and I don't just mean like touching their genitals. I mean like giving them the freedom to fully express and explore the totality of who they are and who they're becoming. Whether that's playing dress up, whether that's, you know, understanding every part of their body in the bathtub. I just think that knowing that there's no shame, and understanding then, you know, how to have healthy and respectful boundaries around that. Those early messages could be so transformative to the soul and the self-confidence of a young person.

Jeremy: I want to ask what your reaction is to the body neutrality trend that's kind of gaining strength over the past couple of years. I've been listening to the actress Jameela Jamil, who's been talking for a while and who's been popularizing that phrase. She didn't come up with the phrase, but she's kind of bringing it into the lexicon in a bigger way. And my take is that body neutrality is a way of shifting from body positivity, which might say "I choose to love my body even though it doesn't look like X, Y, Z, beauty standard" and shifting the perspective more to what our bodies can do for us, if that makes sense. Like in contrast to that body neutrality might say, "I love my body because it holds my children or it can help me provide for my family." Do you have a feeling about whether that kind of perspective shift might be useful or valuable to our relationship with our bodies?

S.N.: Sometimes I understand things linguistically differently than most people do or the way they're intended, like, for example, most people think of trans and transgender being from one to the other. And I think of it as beyond. Both are fitting definitions of the prefix trans. So when I think of body positivity, I definitely  get the sort of like the ways that that plays into...well listen, capitalism will commodify anything and make it part of its exploitative project. So body positivity could have been a purely reclamatory movement that now has Dove commercials, you know? And that's fine. But when I think of body positivity, I don't think of it as an "in spite of", I think of it simply as a choice to center positive messaging around our bodies. And body neutrality, to me, suggests just giving less concern to physical form. And as, like, a Buddhist, I would say, you know, physical form is fleeting and we would all benefit from attaching less investment to some sort of ideal that our bodies should be achieving. Where I get tripped up on the idea of body neutrality focusing less on what we look like and more on what we can do is that it rubs up against ableism in a way that makes me kind of uncomfortable. Because there are a lot of things that are privileged about what bodies can do. And I don't think that's neutral because, for example, there are people who can't hold their children, where I think body positivity would give them a frame of reference to cultivate an empowered relationship with their physical form. I feel like relying on ability to create a neutral relationship presupposes a fact that that ability exists in everybody and they don't. So that's just my gut reaction and my hot take. 

Jeremy: The idea of it is intriguing to me for the first reason you mentioned. But my sort of wonder about it is, if we aspire to get to a place of body celebration and to a place of celebrating our own and all bodies, then does body neutrality take us a little bit away from that? Does that make any sense? Or in a different direction from that.

S.N.: Well, but I think there's also value to not celebrating our bodies, because that leads us to the attachment of a thing that's eventually going to decay and betray us. And so, like, unless we can be celebrating the entire journey, you know, from birth to decomposition, then that seems really great, and kind of implies a sort of spiritual neutrality at least. But that's something, you know, that I'm sort of trying to figure out with myself because I'm just about to turn 40 and I transitioned, or started my transition—I feel like transitions never end—but I began mine seven years ago. So on one hand, I'm approaching a place where society would tell me I'm in mid-life. And in another hand I feel like I'm just beginning the journey of this body.

Jeremy: You're seven years old.

S.N.: Yeah. So yeah, having enough detachment to remain neutral and still cultivating a positive relationship with your body seems like maybe the happy place between both of those movements.

Jeremy: I love that. I love that take on that.

S.N.: OK, good. Yeah.

Jeremy: I'm going to let you go. Shakina, thank you so much for chatting with me.

S.N.: For sure! I'll just email you this track. But so great to see you my friend.

Jeremy: You too.

S.N.: Have a good night.

Jeremy: All right.

S.N.: Ciao. 

Jeremy: Bye bye.

S.N.: Bye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of "The Talk". Thanks to Dr. Shakina Nayfack for sharing her experience and wisdom with us, and be sure to keep an eye out for part two of our BODIES episode, which will be coming out soon. You can find "The Talk" on Instagram and Facebook at @thetalkthepodcast, and if you're interested in helping to support us, you can do so at thetalkthepodcast.com/donate. Dana Gertz designed all of the show's original artwork, and a special thanks goes to my wife Jenny and to our kids, who I test out material on daily and who have ultimately given me the fundamental reason for creating this podcast. Goodbye.