Detoxifying Gender
“Somebody said my face ain’t right. Half assed boy by day, but fish at night. There’s a big ass scar up on my forehead. It will fade with time is what the doctor said (sure). F**k that, I’ll make myself flawless. And not just with some cosmetically. I’m in a backroom falling on needles.” -Lyrics from the song parody Silicone, featuring Detox Icunt, William Bell and Vicky Vox
Detox Icunt is an actor and performance artist who originally made a name for herself as a drag artist in Southern California. She has appeared in music videos with Ke$ha, Rhianna, and Lady Gaga, and is part of Dreamgirls Revue, the longestrunning female-impersonation show out of California. Not to mention she has a handful of her own cover hits, including; That Boy Is A Bottom, This Is How We Jew It, and Silicone, which is a pop anthem glorifying her many silicone surgeries and injections.
No stranger to plastic surgery, in 2009 she was in a car accident and had to have her forehead reconstructed. “It’s a constant part of my life, it taught me to be petrified of everything. I’m in constant fear of death, but not in a bad way as it made me appreciate the gift that life is. It’s why I try to fully live and be in the moment”, she divulges.
Some argue that learning to love ourselves the way we were born is a more realistic ideal, but it negates the reality that who we are is largely self determined. So having a hand in shaping how we look makes a bold statement within a culture that vilifies silicon injections and Botox pick-me-ups, yet dedicates billions of dollars to enhance our butter appearance in much subtler ways.
Detox has publicly boasted about having silicon injected into almost every part of her body, so when I asked if there was anything she would have done differently, she replied with a\ definitive “Nothing.” That earns her role model status for owning her choices despite what some of her harshest critics have said. It takes a whole lot of moral courage to stand up to a world by redefining the boundaries for yourself despite what is acceptable or normal by societies standards.
Just like Toronto’s legendary Nina Arsenault, Detox has turned her body into a living canvas and is the manifestation of our war over gender. While everyone argues about who gets to use which washroom, the larger cultural shift is that we are just waking up to the fallacies we’ve been perpetuating about gender. It’s been harmful to our psyches and that of each new generation of kids
“It’s still strange, and will always be strange to me, the impact I (and we) have on people. I love it so much. For as much as I am to people, they’re just as significant to me. Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought I’d make as big of an impact on people just by being myself. Be unique. Be different. Be unabashedly YOU. If no one gets it, then it’s not for them to get.”
Consider the damage that can be caused by just saying this seemingly harmless declaration – blue is for boys and pink is for girls. While it may be a cute way to categorize kids, the expectations that come with being a “boy” or a “girl” can feed a lifetime of anxiety and pain for a boy who wants to wear a pink dress to school. Our society treats gender non-conformists as something that is deviating from normal, when they are in fact closer to normal than most of will ever come. It takes guts, moral courage and a whole lot of self-determination to live in the moment as the full expression of yourself.
Now more than ever we need people like Detox, because they challenge and are a reminder that our fight has never been to convince society at large to accept LGBT people and to change others, but we can change ourselves and set an example for how we can all live our lives with more pride, conviction, and self-determination, not just at Pride but all year long!
Detox recently played RuPaul’s Battle of the Seasons After- Party at Fly 2.0 in Toronto with DJ’s Mark Falco and Kris Steeves, along with the legendary Thorgy Thor plus Toronto’s own Donnarama.
Originally published in theBUZZ Magazine, June 2016