Sometimes, a Washington Post reader might wonder if the newsroom staff is assembled and lectured “We don’t have enough transgender-affirmation in these pages! We need to beat the bushes and find every engaging gender-fluid American we can publicize!”
Friday’s positive transgender freakout came on the front of the Style section, simply titled “BARF BABES.” Music writer Chris Richards profiled Barf Troop, an “outsider ‘gender-fluid’ hop-hop group that formed on Tumblr” and its bi-racial leader, “Babeo Baggins.”
Richards began by setting the scene of this budding superstar, "assigned" the male gender at birth, working an aisle at the Urban Outfitters store in D.C.’s Chinatown:
Aspen knew it was probably time to quit after five consecutive shifts of hearing the same refrain from random teenage customers: “Oh, my God, you’re Babeo Baggins! Can I get a picture?”
Aspen is a 22-year-old from Leesburg, Va., who identifies as “a gender-fluid, non-binary person” and makes technicolor rap music under the name Babeo Baggins. The rapper’s last name can’t be printed — trolls and hackers have already been too vicious. “I love Tumblr,” Babeo says, “but it’s a breeding ground for so many positive things and so many bad things.”
....It’s where the rapper formed Barf Troop, the audacious four-person hip-hop collective that Babeo spearheads from behind the screen of an Apple MacBook in the exurban desolation of Loudoun County.
There’s never a real name used, because in identity politics, who really requires an ID? “Babeo” performs with Babe Simpson, Babe Field, and Babenstein, who apparently chat with each other constantly from different cities on Skype.
There is a certain freedom to the hyper-public quasi-anonymity of it all.
And you can hear it in Barf Troop's music - especially the lyrics, which often feel intimate and playful but sometimes dart off toward extremes. Babeo's verses run especially wild. A new mixtape, "Positive," zigzags between quirky sex boasts and heartsick vulnerability, while "Lookout," the first song Babeo ever posted online, is an X-rated murder-porn poem that doesn't wash off in the shower.
Readers are assured as this group prepares for a concert gig at Maryland’s Merriweather Post Pavilion, “When they do assemble in three dimensions, they dress loud and turn heads. The band has a thing for floral print, fake fur, kimonos, Halloween costumes, lingerie and athletic gear.”
“We get ridiculed because we’re not typical rappers,” Babeo says. “As someone who’s viewed as female, you’re expected to meet a super-high standard to be taken seriously. We’re not like that. We’re just ourselves. And every male rapper gets to be that. Why can’t we?...
“Having 14-year-olds say, ‘I’m gender-fluid, too! I didn’t know that was okay!’ — that is what I’m here for,” Babeo says. “We want to show black girls that you don’t have to be this or that to be a rapper. You don’t have to be hard like Lil’ Kim. You can be soft. You can be a nerd. You can have colorful hair. You can be yourself.”
Richard concluded that “when people get it, the connection feels exponentially affirming.” That would be a good slogan for the Washington Post on LGBT propaganda, “exponentially affirming.”
