Life is a series of transitions and Laura Becker has been through a few. She is an individual and her story is her own. She refuses to be labeled. In fact, it was her early attempts to find a label for her unique and funkadelic self, without the guidance of caring mental health practitioners that brought her into the surgery room to start her female to male transition.
On the day of the surgery, she told the surgeon she was suicidal. She was crying out for help for years of unearthed trauma, all into an empty void.
We are hell-bent on labeling each other and stuffing our individuality into neat and tidy boxes for appropriate social categorization. Didn’t we learn in kindergarten what happens when you try to force a square peg into a round hole?
If Laura gives herself a label, it is as a post-post-modernist artist. This classification makes her laugh. If post-modernism is deconstructing everything, then she is in the defiant act of deconstructing the deconstruction.
As part of her journey, her transition and de-transition, she has not only reached a level of self-actualization, but she has also turned a critical lens to the social paradigms that influenced her and many others into either/or categories to feed the machine of identification and the resulting identity politics.
A machine that has us grappling in the dark without boundaries and parameters to guide us into the light of our authentic, funkadelic and individual selves.
Laura has decided to rage against the machine and in so doing has embarked on a new journey of healing and radical self-acceptance.
In the Hold my Drink — navigating culture with a chaser of civility, and Counterweight podcast, Episode 58, we speak with Laura Becker on her journey through transition and de-transition. On this path she not only found radical self-acceptance, but also came to realize that the chaos of both our post-modernist and online culture is exacerbating a mental health exigency among our youth. At this crossroads we have seen a rise in identity crises that distances us from each other and from our own authenticity. All discussed with a chaser of civility, of course, and a Stella Artois, scotch, and spiked watermelon seltzer.
Hold my Drink welcomes all people with all kinds of beverages to join us as we explore the truths of a chaotic and beautiful world, together.
Find us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or watch the conversation unfold on YouTube, and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
What Laura is Watching:
Rats. Just in general. I'm watching them.
What Jen is Reading:
Why is courage so hard? Non-Zero Newsletter
Racial Newspeak Comes to the Classroom, Minding the Campus, Joe Nalven
Don’t Label Me, Irshad Manji
Laura Becker, artist name Funk God, is a visual artist, writer, and mental health advocate. She is co-hosting and producing the humanist podcast TransPsyche, working with detransvoices.org to co-host the Detrans Voices Podcast, and writes a weekly Substack called funklife. She offers consultations with parents who have gender questioning children, advising them on gender issues from a detrans perspective, and speaks in the media about detransition concerns. When not doing art or advocacy, Laura does digital music production to create funky jams under the name Funk God, practices psychedelic photography, and spends time with her 4 pet rats. You can find her on Twitter @ratfunk and on Instagram @funkgodartist.
Ep. 58: Transition & De-Transition | Laura Becker