When I began planning this blog series in January 2022, I started by imagining the kinds of people I hoped might contribute to the series. From the infancy of this project, I knew that I wanted to talk to Mardi. Mardi Pieronek, known as @mardipantz on TikTok, the social media and video hosting platform, began her “teen transsexual experience” in 1977 at 15 years old.
Novel, I know.
People often say that all of our trans elders of a certain age are dead. And sure, that’s true a lot of the time. But Mardi is alive and well, living in British Columbia and making TikTok videos. In these TikTok videos, Mardi narrates to an audience of 140,000 queer and trans folks curious about Mardi’s life history, as well as their own history as queer and trans people.
As an oral historian, I’ve thought a lot about how to curate the wealth of knowledge that we have of the queer and trans past through oral history interviews. Queer and trans people ought to know about their history, and let’s be real, asking the average person to watch hours of oral history interviews to gain some knowledge about the past is asinine. So is the idea of taking such vibrant stories from a collection of interviews and reducing them to an academic paper. How do we get these stories out to people in a way that they can access? Just ask Mardi.
Her intro is so captivating:
Hey, it’s Ms. Mardi, a woman of a teen’s trans experience that started in 1977 when I was 15…
If you’re curious about the queer and trans past, you’re hooked. I would know, I started following Mardi online what feels like forever ago. She goes on to tell her audience about some aspect of her life as a trans woman, organizing her TikTok videos around any theme, place, or time she desires.
In this TikTok (right), you can see the present-day Mardi standing in front of a photo of her from the night she performed at the LUV-A-FAIR night club in Vancouver in 1986. In just a minute, Mardi gives her followers a snapshot of what the punk scene and trans scenes were like in the mid-80s.
Other times, Mardi rides the wave of a trending video to get her story and her perspective out into the world. Using the TikTok platform’s ‘stich’ feature, which allows a TikTok user to combine another video on TikTok with one they’re creating, Mardi responded to a viral video with 913,000 likes, 67,800 comments, and over 6500 shares created by a young trans creator. With Mardi’s response video stitched to the already viral one, Mardi joined a debate (amassing 50,400 likes, 427 comments, and 256 shares on her video) about the politics of post-operative disclosure for trans women. In her video, Mardi uses her past experiences and former inability to disclose her transsexuality as a tool to explain the historical context that underpins contemporary trans politics around disclosure. She even posts a follow up video, linked to a question from a viewer, providing more details about her experiences with (non)disclosure in sex work. And these kinds of video reply chains, linked to people’s questions about her life, are scattered all over her profile.
Outside of the time constraints of an hour and a half interview runtime and the niche scope of most oral history project topics, Mardi gets to participate in a never-ending oral history experiment for as long as she wants to. I say experimental in the way that Mardi shares authority with her audiences, who often serve as the interviewer in their back-and-forth, question-and-reply video chains online; the lack of a project end date; and the different dynamics of power that structure the relationships between oral history’s interviewer and narrator versus TikTok’s creator and follower. Nevertheless, Mardi confronts many of the same challenges as oral historians do: the pressure to make her narratives conform to the perceived desires of the audience/algorithm (researcher); the influence of the passage of time and the present on the ways that she has made meaning of her experiences; the trauma she confronts in the process of remembering and recounting her past.
Mardi epitomizes Traversing Temporalities. She self-directs her own open-access oral history project on the world’s hottest social media and video sharing app, and in the process, grapples with the lifelong exercise of making meaning of the past. Not just her past, the trans past. Not just the trans past, but hers. I think the gravity of that pursuit changes depending on where you’re sitting. For Mardi, it’s been one of the most transformative experiences of her life. Isn’t that what queer and trans oral history should do?
Leave testimony and trans every boundary.
Listen to the conversation I had with Mardi about trans history, her story, what she’s learned, and what she thinks about her TikTok fame.
Growing up Trans in the late 1970s, Mardi Pieronek was a Performance Artist, Drag Performer and Sex Worker. In 1991, Mardi came into 12-step recovery from all her dis-eases of more. That is when her inner work began. It is her hope that sharing her “ESH”, (experience strength and hope), will help others. Mardi lives on beautiful Vancouver Island with her husband and their 2 fur Babies.
Elio Colavito is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Toronto, specializing in Sexual Diversity Studies. As a trans non-binary researcher, Elio’s passion lies in archiving and re-telling queer histories in Canada. Currently, Elio serves as the Co-Oral Historian for the Collaboratory’s Pussy Palace Oral History Project.