First is that the central character herself is a highly ambiguous figure, gender-wise. Though Old Norse literature is often celebrated for its strong presence of "powerful female characters", many of those shieldmaidens and maiden-kings do not necessarily fall under the rubric of a "woman". Here is how Friðriksdóttir characterizes Þornbjörg from the Hrólfs saga Gautrekssonar:
Article:
Þornbjörg [is] the most striking representation of a maiden-king. She fully adopts a masculine role: "passing" or masquerading as a man, she demands and receives one-third of her father's kingdom, practices masculine íþróttir such as jousting and fencing, maintains a retinue, and rejects her feminine role in both name and deed. She is not satisfied with the traditional gender role open to her, marrying a promising young man of good fortune and lineage and becoming his queen (with the derivative and advisory power that this entails), and she prefers to gain and maintain official power as a prince would. The maiden-king calls "himself " by the masculine name Þórbergr, and in this part of the saga, the character is constantly referred to in the masculine, for example, hann and konungr. When Hrólfr arrives to propose, the scene becomes both comic and theatrical: he enters the hall under the silent scrutiny of all present and addresses Þórbergr with all the appropriate formal etiquette as herra "lord".
The standard interpretation of such behavior, as outlined by Carol Clover in the landmark essay Maiden Warriors and Other Sons, is that the Old Norse logic of gender allowed a provisional assumption of a male social role by women, but only as long as said women in turn accepted a mantle of masculinity coming with such a position.
Yeah, this reminds me of how Hatshepsut was depicted as a bearded Pharaoh cause that's just how kingship worked in ancient Egypt. This is reminding me of something I wrote once:
I said:
- I think ... that gender euphoria and gender dysphoria aren't exclusively trans people things, they're common human experiences, lots of cis people experience gender euphoria and gender dysphoria too (in cis people they're congruent with their ASAB), and this explains a lot about human society. E.g. when cis men say something is "emasculating," I think often part of what they're saying is "this makes me feel gender dysphoria," and I suspect part of the appeal of "pointlessly" gendered products is a lot of cis people feel gender euphoria when they buy, own, and use them.
- Gender as aesthetic is to gender as moral therapeutic deism is to religion. In a sense it represents a trivialized, watered-down, vestigial form of the thing, but before you see that as a bad thing you should take a moment to contemplate what the full potency version of the thing looked like.
For much (most?) of human history gender functioned primarily as something like a caste system. Its most important dimensions were that men and women had different entitlements and obligations in society; this was formally codified in law, and it had important economic dimensions. Your classic 1950s comfortably middle class family is a good example of this. The man in that family fulfilled the masculine gender role because he had a job and thereby earned the money to support his wife and children and also he was in the Army in WWII. The woman in that family fulfilled the feminine gender role by giving birth and staying home and doing the housework and tending to the children when they weren't in school. There were gender as aesthetic aspects to this performance, the man had to wear a suit and tie and the woman had to wear a dress and the man couldn't have gotten away with wearing a dress in public, but they were sort of window dressing on the division of labor. The pre-industrial gender caste system was different, but it also had this aspect that men and women had different entitlements and obligations in society. Your gender determined what jobs you did, what sort of life you'd live, what political and social rights you did and didn't have, and so on.
We've been weakening the caste aspects of gender. Gender as caste is the thing liberal feminism dedicated itself to destroying! Gender as caste is that "I am opposed to the women's lib; man is the master, and the woman's place is in the home!" sort of thing that everyone vaguely progressive now regards as almost cartoonishly reactionary! More-or-less destroying the institution of gender as caste in the First World is one of liberalism's greatest success stories, right up there with more-or-less destroying the institution of titled nobility! And I think that's one of the best things to ever happen to the human species! But it also means the caste aspects of gender aren't as available as a source of gender euphoria anymore. E.g. the less male-coded having a formal salary job becomes, the harder it becomes for a man to get gender euphoria from being formally employed. I suspect some significant fraction of the population has gender euphoria as a psychological need, and if they can't find it in anything that really matters, they'll turn increasingly to trying to get it from aesthetics. A man in 1955 might have gotten gender euphoria from working in a car factory and providing for his family economically and knowing he'd been in the Army in WWII and shot a few Nazis. His grandson in 2021 might be getting gender euphoria from having a well-groomed beard and having a lumberjack but classy sort of aesthetic and doing vaguely macho sports and being visibly muscular and conspicuously enjoying bacon and the right sorts of whiskey, coffee, and tobacco.
There are certainly non-mechanized ways to sexually stimulate women which are superior to a penis for purposes of overstimulation (dildos, cunnilingus, etc.). Not sure whether you'd consider them to count for this purpose.
There are certainly non-mechanized ways to sexually stimulate women which are superior to a penis for purposes of overstimulation (dildos, cunnilingus, etc.). Not sure whether you'd consider them to count for this purpose.
It's certainly an interesting reading. Dildoes, at least, are a prehistoric invention, so - in the manner of the trans woman who enthusiastically relates to the gallae - one must imagine the hunter-gatherer kinky.
If you'll permit me to get Freudian for a second, you could get a lot of mileage out of looking at the face instead of the vase here and zooming in on the experience of a masculinity as defined by the fear of castration and emasculation. It's always funny for me to see stereotypically cisguy anxieties being replicated in other circles, not just "am I really deficient compared to a vibrator?" but "is my strap-on deficient compared to a man's penis?" and so on. But it's kind of revealing, too.
I don't think there's such a thing as a phallus which a person can't be made insecure about, because the so-called machine for gender is a relational process, as opposed to a centrally defined ideology. The fucking machine operators probably compete with one another like boys buying bigger and bigger guns to take to the shooting range.
It's certainly an interesting reading. Dildoes, at least, are a prehistoric invention, so - in the manner of the trans woman who enthusiastically relates to the gallae - one must imagine the hunter-gatherer kinky.
Paul B. Preciado's first claim to fame, preceding by about a decade his memoir of testo junkiness, was the claim that the dildo precedes the bio-penis. It's a silly provocation until you start thinking about it more in-depth and it starts checking out; after all, it is nothing but a claim that there is no sex that is not already enmeshed in the technologies of its own practice. The bio-penis is a kind of a dildo, and not the other way around.
As for sex-machine operators, aside from the rather delightful mental image of the Heavy's monologue from Meet the Heavy being swapped from being about a gun to being about a piston-driven, hand-held super-stimulator, your comment does remind me of the way Arianne Cruz wrote about sex machines in her book on race and kink:
Article:
Tomcat, an openly transgender man who has been the director of fuckingmachines.com for eight years, was recently featured in a Village Voice article titled "The Man behind the Fucking Machine." He is responsible for casting machines and performers. Sometimes he allows performers to choose their machine partners, but most often he selects the machines himself. In his principal role as a performer at fuckingmachines.com, Tomcat prefers the Fucksall [the name of one of the site's fucking machines, adapted from a power tool] "because it's handheld and you can kind of work with the girl." [...] Tomcat says that the central goal of fuckingmachines.com is "to create a fetish experience that causes uncontrollable orgasms" for the female performers. His casting of machines is guided by the objective Techno-Kink of giving the female performers a techno-superior orgasm, "the best orgasm ever."
The idea of a dude spending half an hour in a shed full of fucking machines, nerding out about which one to pick for the best orgasmic performance is just marvellous.
So it seems like in both the tales of maiden kings, and the more modern narratives mentioned, masculinity is presented as a fragile state gained by happenstance, held on to through will and deed, and in need of constant defense from the peril of receptive sexuality. Meanwhile femininity is treated more of the stable "natural state" to which one falls upon forgoing any of the above requirements.
And that social definition of gender seemed to win out over the "natural" version even in the case of the prostate milking chair, where you seemed surprisingly close to accepting any implied feminization "as an accident of a binary gender logic".
Anyway, on a different note, you touched on something interesting regarding orgasms that might be apropos to the idea of marking them as a point of transition (of gender, sex, mind breaking, or anything else), when you mentioned them as making sex quantifiable. Sex being quantized implies a discontinuity in the orgasm, which I'll relate to the idea of orgasm as "la petite mort", the little death. A moment when one is neither still having sex the first time nor beginning to have sex a second time because there is briefly not enough consciousness taking place to be doing anything at all; an instant of that sought after mind breaking.
In that sense, the failure of both chairs' orgasmic subjects is not a failure to achieve their desired ultra-feminine mind broken natural state, but a failure to maintain it. Eventually the orgasms stop, the excitement subsides, "vital fluids" replenish themselves, they have a night's rest, and they're more or less back where they started. Perhaps they need better suited technology to make it last.
But on the other hand...
As countless nerds have argued in venues like this, if for a moment you do not exist, is the version of you appearing on the alien planet really the same person who disappeared on your starship's transporter pad?
Maybe in some small way we can substitute our need for advanced technological intervention to be reborn in a new world with a simple orgasm (or a good night's rest) .
inasmuch as this is true, it's because SV is nerds into anime and gatcha, generally, not because there's a (relative) lot of transfemme persons and content on SV.
Like tonally, it feels like you are blaming the lack of (welcome for) m/m on SV on the transfems and not on, y'know, nerd culture and a userbase that is predominantly Cis-Male.
I hope that's not what you mean but honestly, that's the immediate visceral feel I get from your post and it is uncomfortable.
Like I would really appreciate some elaboration on what exactly makes SV feel unwelcoming to m/m and transmasc. Because the contextual vibe I am getting is that it feels unwelcome because so many people here like F/f and support transfem. Like... I certainly hope there's something other than the notion that 'these are just automatically antithetical' at play here.
i really do think there are a lot of cis guys who are Like That on SV even if the broader relationship can be sorta messy, it's a real thing that is offputting, or at least it used to be once upon a time; dunno how it is nowadays
i really do think there are a lot of cis guys who are Like That on SV even if the broader relationship can be sorta messy, it's a real thing that is offputting, or at least it used to be once upon a time; dunno how it is nowadays
Yeah absolutely. I think it's not that bad anymore, but the cis guy fetishization of femininity, especially in the form of anime girl lesbians, absolutely used to be a regular problem. You don't have to be particularly woke under patriarchy's gaze to think two women are hot in a non-threatening way, after all. 🙃
You fr 'gently' accusing hya of transmisogyny here, in this absolutely wild accidentally gender essentialist essay thread has me coming out of lurking for the first time in forever to be a reply gal i guess.
Oh idk what could possibly make transmasc and m/m loving folks feel unwelcome here apart from there being masses of weird cis people who tend to respond super dourly to any m/m content that verges towards explicit, let alone say, a trans masculine character.
Like tonally, it feels like you are blaming the lack of (welcome for) m/m on SV on the transfems and not on, y'know, nerd culture and a userbase that is predominantly Cis-Male.
Oh idk what could possibly make transmasc and m/m loving folks feel unwelcome here apart from there being masses of weird cis people who tend to respond super dourly to any m/m content that verges towards explicit, let alone say, a trans masculine character.
I mean, you're saying that in a forum that's, while not conceived as an LGBTQ+ space, probably somewhere between 10-20% trans in its membership (with that being predominantly a mix of trans femme of one stripe or another and enby) in a thread, by a trans girl, meditating on gender and gender theory. Like, and this probably isn't your intent, but you feel like you're almost blaming the people here (again, near exclusively queer SVers and trans girls) for problems that people have had with the cishet majority on SV overall, and, like, that's kinda unpleasant?
But, like, the fact is that Hyacinthium isn't really talking about them primarily. He says that queer people bounce off SV, in an extremely queer thread, by a scholar of queerness who is a trans girl who's talked at length about how, for her, SV is one of the few spaces that isn't dominated by transmascs (and, like, my entire in person friend group leans much more trans masc as well), where most all the people responding are queer in one form or another. Hyacinthium's tone, intentionally or not, comes across as beligerant and judgemental, that is, frankly, pretty unpleasant to read as a trans girl who is very on SV.
I don't think that was the intent, I do think Hyacinthium made important and valid critiques, both of a portion of SV's culture and of the essay itself, in that the essay is focused on a very transfemme perspective (and that the radfem lens it adopts is, itself, much more suited to a specifically trans fem perspective and struggles to incorporate other visions of gender nonconformity, though obviously the second part that's been posted since is very different on that front) and SV does have an "odd problem."
But, like, while I can't speak beyond me, I would say that SV has a pretty profoundly different relationship to my trans experiences than it seems to have had for Hyacinthium in that SV is the place where I was able to find myself as trans, and it might be nicer if things were just softened a bit when telling us how apparently it is super unwelcoming and inhospitable to the real queers or what have you.
And yes, I get that that last isn't the intent; but that is how it read to me and at least a few who I've chatted with about the thread, and that can kinda hurt.
it might be nicer if things were just softened a bit when telling us how apparently it is super unwelcoming and inhospitable to the real queers or what have you.
And yes, I get that that last isn't the intent; but that is how it read to me and at least a few who I've chatted with about the thread, and that can kinda hurt.
And yes, I get that that last isn't the intent; but that is how it read to me and at least a few who I've chatted with about the thread, and that can kinda hurt.
Starting with the Love, Eradication sub-heading, this essay contains an extended quotation and analysis that includes graphic depictions of transphobic language and suggests of transphobic violence. Reader's discretion is advised, even moreso than in previous parts of this series.
Why do people transition?
If we are to reject the idea of transness as a kind of a personal tragedy that calls for a transition as the last resort if the dysphoria cannot be alleviated by any other means—which we clearly should—then what answer are we left with? Perhaps the one offered by Travis Alabanza: "When I say trans, I also mean escape. I mean choice. I mean autonomy. I mean wanting something greater than what you told me. Wanting more possibilities than the one you forced on me."
Once you strip those words, however powerful they are, of a poet's pathos, what remains is a simple notion: that people transition because it is a chance for a better life. There are countless ways to express this hope: from a recourse to the medicalised language of a cure for dysphoria, through radical political commitment to shattering the gender binary, all the way to transmaxxxers' hope that a skirt and an estrogen shot promise a way out of the mire of inceldom. What underpins them all, however, is a shared idea: that being trans is not a disorder, not maladjustment, and not a sorry state, but a desirable one. That trans is the promise of "something greater".
It is vital we do not give up on this notion. If the world is to become better for trans people, then we must teach it to desire our presence in it, which is to say that we must teach a desire for there being transness in the world. Without it, no form of tolerance or acceptance can exceed the sorry, patronizing view of the likes of John Money and Harry Benjamin who will refer you for hormones, but only if you can show that nothing else works.
But if transitioning is really a way for people to make their lives better, what do we do with the dreary statistics brought by yingchen and yingtong at the start of the Aromantic Manifesto?
Article:
A recent study of dating preferences of 960 people (942 cis) found that:
88% of respondents refused to date trans people;
89% of gay men refused to date trans men;
82% of gay women refused to date trans women;
63% of bisexual/queer people refused to date trans women; 51% refused to date trans men.
"The freedom to love": this is the title of the section of the essay where this data is presented. It reads thick with irony, because the implication is obvious. The freedom to love, yingchen and yingtong claim, that vaunted right to choose who and how you romance, is what deprives trans people of the chance to be loved. "Most trans people are excluded from romance based on their gender," they explain, "even within the queer community".
I want to provisionally accept this statement at a face value, for reasons I will explain in a moment. This then will hopefully lead to another question: what happens when our hopes for a better life invested in transitioning don't pan out? What if instead of feeling better, being trans leads you to feeling alone and unloveable?
Liquidate Romance (Until the Revolution)
But first, yingchen and yingtong, and their demand that romance needs to be abolished.
They make this call without compunction. The Aromantic Manifesto opens up on a declaration that "romance is inherently queerphobic", which is then followed up by a series of provocations like that the "organisation of queerness around the pursuit of romantic desires and pleasures reinforces queer oppression" and "queer liberation must abolish romance as its long-term goal".
Instead of being reflexively dismissive, I'd like to spend a moment on following the internal logic of the argument here, because it is less absurd than it may immediately appear. The key part is what I have already outlined before, and which yingchen and yingtong express as follows: "staunchly defending the idea that people 'can't help who they love' (or not), the queer movement has often inhibited an interrogation of the heteronormative power structures governing all desire"
The key, here, is what comes at the end: it is those heteronormative power structures which govern all desire. It doesn't matter if this desire belongs to a person who is gay or lesbian, trans or queer; because we are so hopelessly trapped within a cisheteronormative society, we can't help but desire in a cisheteronormative way. And so, the Aromantic Manifesto argues, if queer people find love at all, it is only through assimilation into patterns and logics that are fundamentally hostile to our existence.
The implications here are not fun at all. According to yingchen and yingtong's merciless logic, it doesn't matter if you also make a stand against cross-sex attraction. It doesn't matter if you deny monogamy. It doesn't matter that you refuse reproductivity. If you are looking for romance, you are submitting to all of that, because when it comes to love, associations with cisheteronormativity are not accidental, but foundational. And so the only ethical move is to tear the entire edifice down.
There is a clear resonance between the Aromantic Manifesto and radical feminists' demand for gender abolition. For them, as long as gender held power, there could be no escape from patriarchal violence; for yingchen and yingtong romantic love always leads us towards the regeneration of cisheteronormative dynamics. In fact, the parallels here run deep enough that I am tempted to ask if they are not actually the same argument.
There is a slippage in what yingchen and yingtong say that seems to suggest as much. Their manifesto takes as its starting point trans people who are structurally unloveable "based on their gender", but follows it up with a critique of heteronormativity of romantic desire. It is not entirely clear, then, if they are talking about sex, or gender.
Only it is obviously both.
If the machine for gender is a cultural mechanism by which bodies are assigned to the arbitrary categories of "male" and "female", it is also one which is meant to output cisness as its end product. The way this can work can be best shown with an example of another kind of a machine for gender, namely trans medicine at its most gate-kept.
For the longest time, trans people were advised to conceal their homosexuality before the doctors and psychiatrists in charge of their medical transition. It was assumed that a "real transsexual" will be exclusively heterosexual, and upon conclusion of their transition, they will marry and do their best to fade into the general public. This, obviously, was partially due to the systemic homophobia of establishment medicine, but that is hardly the full story.
For the pioneers of mainstream trans medicine—names like John Money, Harry Benjamin, or Robert Stoller come to mind—a transition was primarily a way of preventing visible transness from tearing at the social fabric too much. Therefore, a transitioning person was supposed to work towards a perfect reintegration into their "new" gender. The process could not restore cisness, but it was hoped it could at least produce a replica of it close enough to fool most observers and raise no suspicions. To pass for cis, a trans person had to be able to stay attractive, to appear normal, and to live a heterosexual life.
This is why, I think, yingchen and yingtong end up reasoning themselves into mirroring yet another idea from the radical feminist calls for gender abolition: that to desire being gendered under patriarchy is to reinforce the system. And so, the Aromantic Manifesto argues that romantic love distracts us from the task of dismantling mechanisms of social oppression that are the reason for the misery of feeling unlovable.
Article:
By peddling the illusion that romance can be made queer, heteronormative capitalism forces queer people to try solve their problems of undesirability and unhappiness privately by finding the 'right' partner, rather than directing their anger towards public action. (...) What queerness needs is a liberationist publics, not a private promise of liberation serving as a distraction from public queerphobia, structured around the violent fantasy of romance.
It is as in that old Communist song from the 1930s: "Let's liquidate love / Till the revolution / Until then love is / An un-bolshevik thing." Love can only be queer after the revolution, and gender desirable after the patriarchy. It is a merciless logic, but also an escapist one.
I am not actually unsympathetic to the Aromantic Manifesto, and especially not to the ugly, sad feeling underpinning it. But I do think that its authors are not being entirely honest with their readers—and themselves—about what the actual problem with romantic love is. Their concerns are an expression of something, but one which immediately attempts to efface its origin.
Let's return to their starting point: that there are many trans people whose transition leads not to a better life, but rather one that is filled with solitude and a sense of unlovability. In fact, it is a position from which the promise of love—that you can find fulfillment in other people—can feel like a rancid lie. But in the system that yingchen and yingtong build, this can never say anything about transness, as all the ugly feelings which accompany it are presumed to be extrinsic, and therefore possible to deal away with, without any loss. Love while trans can often feel awful and impossible? Well then, let's liquidate love! Because trans must not be allowed an association with negativity; trans must be celebratory and revolutionary, and what hurts about it is the world that we can refuse, and then remake.
Unfortunately, this is not a perspective from which you can theorize the trans girl's love affair with the fantasy of her own sexual obliteration. But it does, I think, point at a place from which you can.
Surviving Annihilation
My wager is that a no small part of the Aromantic Manifesto's sharp demand for the liquidation of romance comes from the assumption that transness must be shielded from negative associations. It seems that the idea that feeling bad can be considered a constitutive element of the trans experience is not to be allowed, lest it endanger the whole political project of trans flourishing. And there are, of course, good reasons to think that this is the case, not least of which is the fact that branding trans lives as unlivable pits of misery is one of the favorite tactics of transphobes. But the flipside of it is that this refusal of trans negativity often leads to a particularly cruel bind.
What if, let's say, I feel bad about being trans? Does it make me a bad trans? This is the question that motivates Cameron Awkward-Rich, the patron saint of this entire essay series, to observe that:
Article:
Rather, it seems to me that the move to excise maladjustment from transgender discourse has participated in exacerbating this situation in which the inevitable failure of affirmation, love, and legibility to fulfill their promises have made it increasingly difficult for individuals to bear their bad feelings, the residue of their own maladjustment to the narrow terms of the given.
This is to say: the more feeling trans is portrayed as that which has to be unequivocally equated with happiness and fulfillment, the more the failures of that happiness and fulfillment in trans people feel like personal defeats. Like getting a bad grade in transitioning. Like there is something wrong with you specifically. Like you are not going to make it.
Entertaining those feelings is often met with a degree of pushback. It's wallowing, and you should smile, do your hormones, and smash the state. This is an appealing programme, don't get me wrong. But it is possibly useful to name the worry that I think undergirds a lot of such attitudes: if transness won't save you, then what's the point?
This is where the Aromantic Manifesto's accidental theorisation of love as a type of a machine for gender comes in handy. Love when trans hurts, and yet the persistence of the desire for love does not diminish. Yingchen and yingtong therefore maintain we must abolish love, but I think there is a more useful question to ask here, one that paraphrases Awkward-Rich's challenge from the first part of this essay: "what might be made possible by regarding the explicitly annihilatory portrayals of love and saying, yes, that is me – so what?"
So what if love, or gender, feels like a threat? Like a potential catastrophe?
This is the key question that I have been alluding to time after time, and yet continuing to avoid all the same. You will recall that I opened up this series with a classified ad from a Polish publication, where a trans woman was openly asking for sexual violation. "Brutally raped", in her own words. I noted then my first reaction to reading those words, how I felt revolted and disturbed, how it seemed to me like courting suicide. Quickly, I passed those negative feelings off and proceeded to discuss the far more entertaining questions of desire. Now I would like, finally, to try to dwell on them a little.
To do so first requires acknowledging that the sense of danger is real, even if the threat itself will never fully materialize. This is analogous to the move that Awkward-Rich makes when discussing the relationship between transmasculinity and feminism. He asks us to try to accept the idea that trans people existing at all may feel like an apocalyptic danger to some feminists, without immediately proceeding to a refutation. This, in turn, extends into a consideration of whether there really is no conflict between "trans" and "feminist" that may be impossible to fully reconcile.
This is the provocation at the core of Trans, Feminism: Or, Reading like a Depressed Transsexual. What Awkward-Rich really sets his aim on is the idea—so foundational to much of trans thought—that there is a natural alignment between trans and feminism, and that trans-exclusionary stances are, in fact, anti-feminist without even realizing. This is what buttresses the hope that once we strip ourselves of wrong ideas, we will be able to arrive at an unified theory of feminism, which will link together—seamlessly—sex, transness, and anti-patriarchal action. The idea is often figured as a sort of a return to the roots: as Awkward-Rich puts it, it presumes that "lesbian separatists and trans communities are always already part of a group that is at risk of splintering". It is a great hope, which the persistence of terfism constantly derails.
But what if there was no originary group ruined by sexual splitters and gender wreckers? What if transness and feminism cannot be so easily reconciled? What if there can be no getting rid of the vague sense of threat generated by the tension between the hope for gender abolition and the desire for gender? And where does love even start to factor into that, or, for that matter, transfeminine fantasies of extreme sexual submission?
The connection may begin, unexpectedly, in the ugly feeling of loving while trans. Let's abandon for a moment the revolutionary hopes of the Aromantic Manifesto and take the romantic love that it presumes at its own terms: as that which can feel like annihilation, and yet we can't keep ourselves from wanting it. Isn't it also, then, the relationship of transness to feminism? That is at least the conclusion that Awkward-Rich reaches for while speculating on the possibilities of trans and feminism loving itself with the optimistic assumption of mutual completion.
And though love without optimism doesn't sound fun at all, it needs not to be approached as a problem. It may well pose itself as a solution. It is that latter possibility that appeals to me, for reasons which exceed the scope of Trans, Feminism. For, ultimately, isn't it also the question of the fantasy of being feminismed by an electrified dildo? That is to say: the question of a desire for a form of femininity which can't help but to carry an air of a threat to feminism?
Awkward-Rich theorizes from the point of a trans man at the edges of the lesbian world, and the deep ambivalence of his relationship to the world of feminism as a someone who no longer wants to be included in the category of "women". He notes the heartbreak surrounding the idea of giving upon the lesbian world. His writings suggest that the problem of the relationship of trans and feminism is therefore primarily a transmasculine one. But there is a specifically transfeminine version of it too, which has at its core the fantasies that I began with. I think is best expressed in the acerbic prose of another contemporary star trans author, Torrey Peters:
Article:
In old books she had read, Reese remembered women saying that if your husband doesn't beat you, he doesn't love you, a notion that horrified the feminist in Reese but fit with a perfect logic in one of the dark crevices of her heart. And yeah, liberal feminists—especially the trans-hating variety—would have a field day with her. She supposed that they would accuse her of misogyny, of being a secret man, a Trojan horse in slutty lingerie who sought to recapitulate under the guise of womanhood all the abusive tropes that they, in the second wave, had sought to put in the past. But you know what? She didn't make the rules of womanhood; like any other girl, she had inherited them. Why should the burden be on her to uphold impeccable feminist politics that barely served her? The New York Times regularly published op-eds by famous feminists who pointedly ruled her out as a woman. Let them. She'd be over here, getting knocked around, each blow a minor illustration of her place in a world that did its gendering work no matter what you called it. So yeah, Stanley, bring it on. Hit Reese. Show her what it means to be a lady.
If Awkward-Rich locates the threat of trans/feminism annihilation in the idea of trans men giving up on being subjects of feminism, then Peters instead sees it in the persistent worry that trans women will fail to be such subjects: as in, they will fail to be sufficiently critical of femininity.
There is a reason why angsting about one's relationship to feminism is a stereotypically transfeminine thing. For so many trans girls—at least of the kind I hang out with—the question of whether they are living sufficiently feminist lives looms large. The desire for femininity keeps running into the feminist mandate to oppose the forceful assignment of said femininity, a paradox that at times seems impossible to resolve. Often, it is nothing more than just a vague discomfort, maybe some idle thoughts about what dresses, bras, and pantyhose are supposed to mean. But when it comes to the transfeminine dreams of graphic sexual horror, the stakes tend to skyrocket and start to come across as existential: "can I exist that way"? To dwell on that question can itself be torturous. Just how many trans girls are out there, flogging themselves not with whips, but with the ceaseless doubting of whether their desires are valid or just sick?
And if you are hoping for an easy answer, both Awkward-Rich and Peters disappoint. In their own ways, they suggest that hoping for the resolution of this tension is not going to help. That if there is any way to deal with it, it will require—to use a fancy turn of phrase—living in the break. Which is all well and good when you say it, but what are the practical implications? Here, Awkward-Rich has some suggestions—but first of all, it is important to take stock of the starting position he assumes.
Article:
The depressed transsexual, then, might assess this situation and determine that the problem is not so much that (some) feminists would like him gone. Rather, the problem is that he is here, and now we all have to figure out how to live with that.
There are some substitutions you can make here without losing the overall meaning. Let's try this: "the problem is not so much that (some) feminists would require her to abandon her sexual fantasies. The problem is that she is having them, and now we all have to figure out how to live with that."
The same goes for love. The problem isn't that romance is just a coercive mechanism for heteronormativity. It frankly doesn't matter if that is the case or not. The problem is that so many of us want for it, and feel awful for its lack, and we have to find a way to deal with that. Which is why Awkward-Rich invokes it as a potential direction for a way forward. Contrary to yingchen and yingtong's dreams of abolition, he instead suggests that what love can provide is precisely that which makes it feel bad.
Article:
If love describes the persistent sense that trans(masculinity) and feminism were once one and will be again, it also will always defer this merge until one accepts the other's "fantasy/realism as the condition of their encounter" (...). Desire, that which causes us to reach for something outside of ourselves, always arises from a wound that we would like the object of our desire to heal. And although desire always exceeds the object, although the wound remains open, we remain attached both because the promise of closure is not broken, merely and perpetually deferred, but also and most importantly because something usable is produced by the attachment.
The two prongs of love that he identifies are, on one hand, a desire for another—feminism, in this case—and on the other, the fact that this desire will remain an open wound. Love will never be fulfilled in the way we would hope; but wanting is, in itself, a creative force. It sustains us, even if, especially if, it doesn't feel great.
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These relations, defined as they are by continual deferral, will likely leave no one feeling good, but isn't this, the depressed transsexual asks, a precondition for relating at all?
This is where the problem of trans negativity snaps back into full focus. Can we love it the same way we ought to love feminism, which is without optimism?
Which, finally, brings us to Tell Me I'm Worthless.
Love, Eradication
Towards the end of Alison Rumfitt's trans horror novel, Tell Me I'm Worthless, the lead characters finally land in a bed together. This is an unlikely event, as everything seems to separate them. One, Alice, is a trans woman, who we know is poorly passing and aggressively queer. The other, Ila, is a cis lesbian (at least at that point in the book), and a vociferous gender-critical activist. What's worse, they are exes. Once, they had ventured into a haunted house, and each left it convinced that the other had sexually abused them. They both carry the scars; it doesn't really matter if those memories are true or false when they feel so real and life-shattering.
And yet, they sleep with each other. They do so the night before they intend to get back into the haunted house to confront their past and the source of the blight that seems to be affecting all of Brighton. It is not entirely clear why they decide to fuck; probably it is a rote thing, one of the few ways of relating to each other they still remember. But it doesn't work. It feels awful.
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The two girls look at each other, saying nothing, both thinking the same thing: this was a mistake. Neither of them had orgasmed. Neither of them had even really enjoyed themselves. It just felt like they were supposed to fuck. It felt natural, but it was not something that either of them had really wanted. Alice had held out some vague hope that the years of hate between them might add an element of raw sexual energy to it, but it didn't. It felt like an apathetic repetition of something they used to do back in days where things didn't seem so complicated.
Whatever hope they might have had for returning to a better time dies in that moment; love can't overcome, and neither can desire. And so, they slide into the other familiar part of every relationship gone rancid: an argument that is more about bitter, personal recriminations than making any actual point. They just hate each other, but in that miserable way where this hate can't fully supplant whatever they used to feel. Because there is love between them, buried and mauled, but present. Its presence is just another haunting, however. Yet another ghost. They don't know what to do with it.
But as their shouting match reaches their crescendo, something breaks. And here, I would like to offer some minor context, just to soften the blow that is to come. Earlier in the novel, we witness Ila topping some other girl, and fantasizing some truly awful things as she rode her with a big, black strap. How awful?
Article:
"You fucking," she spoke with difficulty, between breaths, "you called me a… why the fuck would you even do that? You're sick."
"I don't know what I said!" Ila truly didn't. She didn't remember saying anything at all.
"You called me a tranny. What the fuck. I'm not even trans. What the fuck, Ila."
Also earlier in the novel, we had a chance to follow Alice on her idle trains of self-destructive transfeminine misery. It's not even that she doesn't pass; it's that she breaks under the sense of being profoundly unloveable. This is why she misses Ila, after all. This is why she misses the time when the bad feeling wasn't so immediate, and so pressing. But what used to be just a nagging thought has since metastasised. In short, Alice feels blighted.
Now, that said, let's return to their argument, after the bad fuck.
Article:
"Fuck you," says Alice.
"Fuck you," says Ila.
And they fuck again. This time, it isn't quite so boring. Alice lets Ila fuck her in the ass with the strap-on, and she feels something like peace. When Ila is inside her, Alice, with her legs up in the air, looks into her friend's eyes.
Already, something is different. But it is not just the question of who tops, but also of what this topping means. Is it love? Not really, but something akin—just without any of that pithy hope and useless optimism. And so, Alice makes a request.
Article:
"Call me it, please," she says.
"Call you what?"
"You know. You know you want to, as well."
She hesitates for a moment. But Alice is right. She does want to.
"You fucking tranny," Ila moans.
"God. Fuck. Please." The pleasure is nearly unbearable for Alice. "Do it again. Tell me what you think of me, what you really think of me. Tell me I'm nothing. Tell me I'm worthless."
"You," Ila grabs Alice's hair, "are a fucking worthless tranny."
"Yes."
"You are a fucking plague on this country. You convert helpless young girls into your sick cult. You make them mutilate their bodies, bind and cut off their breasts, until they are so gaslit into the trans ideology that they think they are happy. You are just a man, and even if you had a cunt between your legs, it wouldn't be real, it would just be an open wound that your body rejects." She slaps Alice in the face whilst fucking her. It leaves a scarlet mark on her cheek. "You're a threat to women. Everybody sees you and thinks you're disgusting. Everybody sees you and thinks, who the fuck is that man in a dress and makeup, trying to hide his bulge. Who the fuck does he think he is? Your dick's too big to hide. Your bulge when you wear a skirt looks so gross."
"Yes!" Alice is writhing beneath her.
"You aren't a woman, you're a deviant, you aren't a fucking woman!"
"What are you going to do to me?"
Ila leans down close and spits the words out. "I'm going to eradicate you."
Alice screams, "yes", she screams yes and she cums properly for the first time in months.
And you know what? This is how they survive.
I struggle when trying to describe or analyze this scene, but this much is undeniable: in the narrative of the book, this is how they survive. In that moment, in that barrage of slurs and ugly feeling, Alice and Ila both stand naked with each other, and honestly and truly desire that. Does it redeem those words? Does it redeem those actions? I am not convinced if this question interests me here. Certainly, Rumfitt doesn't care for it, either. She makes no excuses for what either of them said, only quietly accepts the fact that this is what it took for them to finally come, and come to terms with who they are.
Later, in the haunted house, the spirit inside reveals to Ila and Alice that they are both, in their hearts, awful people. But they know that already, and love each other with it, and through it. They leave the house alive, burn it down, and some time later Ila transitions and becomes Harry.
I tell this story to distract myself from the pressing horror of the words "I am going to eradicate you!" shouted by a terf to a trans woman she is currently fucking. Because what am I even to say to it? What am I even to say to this desire? It is certainly not redeemable, just like you can't really elevate the gutter-speak of an anonymous MtF asking to be "violently raped". But if you have been following what I said before about love, I think you can get that this is not the point.
What Tell Me I'm Worthless gets at more than any other book I have read—any other account of the dark side of trans sexuality—is that sometimes, you just want to just crash face-first into what's awful. Isn't that what Alice is asking for, after all? She wants Ila to repeat to her everything she already thinks about herself; she wants to come to those feelings to rebuke them or reject them, because if they can't be dealt away any other way, she may as well learn how to live in them. There is no optimism here. It is—and I am eternally grateful to @Subrosian_Smithy for this phrase—as if to believe in dukkha without the associated prospect of escape through enlightenment. But sometimes, it's all that feels possible. And that, too, needs tending to.
Or maybe to say that is also taking an easy way out of the conundrum.
Wanting In Retrograde
Why do we actually need to find a way to live with ugly trans feelings? To say 'because sometimes, they are all that feels possible and that too needs tending to' is an easy dodge, as it implies a degree of necessity. Sometimes, being trans feels bad; if this is a fact of life, then there is nothing to be done with it other than finding a way to accommodate it.
And sure—that is a big part of the answer. Sometimes, you just want someone to hold a mirror to your feelings of dysphoria, alienation, and estrangement to validate them as real and meaningful, instead of scolding you for failing to overcome them. Sometimes, promises of transition feel like a bitter joke and it's good to have someone laugh with you.
"It's okay to feel that way" is a crucial thing to hear when the weight of the world seems too much to bear. But repeated enough times, it starts to ring with a patronizing note. Especially if the only reason that ugly trans feelings are to be lived in with is because there is no other possible solution to them. Doesn't this logic strike you as familiar? "If there is nothing else that can be done about your dysphoria, we may as well prescribe you hormones…"
Have we accidentally stumbled back into the old transmedicalist script, just by trying to find a justification for ugly trans feelings?
In its own twisted, roundabout way, this brings us back to the question of what use there is left for the transfeminine desire to be violently sexually objectified. Just look at how one of the most avowedly anti-puritanical feminist writers of our times, Virgina Despantes—who is a self-described kinky slut and a pornographer—attempts to grapple with the persistence of her own ugly desires:
Article:
We aren't all alike, but I'm not the only one to have this fantasy. These rape fantasies, these fantasies of being taken by force in more or less violent situations, which have been present throughout my masturbatory life, didn't come to me out of the blue. It's a powerful and precise cultural mechanism that predestines female sexuality to climax from its own powerlessness – which is to say from the superiority of the other – and women to orgasm against their will, rather than as sluts who enjoy sex.
Isn't the conclusion here that those fantasies are only acceptable because patriarchal violence just can't help but to condition women towards masochism? It is remarkably close to the radical feminist position on sadomasochism, only leading instead to the conclusion that we must not judge what couldn't have been chosen. To a trans girl who doesn't have as easy of an excuse to protect the uncomfortable flows of her arousal, that's a strikingly poor consolation.
It seems that we have finally grasped at the throughline here. The same problem keeps recurring, fractal-like, as we shift from one layer of the analysis to another, returning in a series of guises, but fundamentally posing the same question, time after time: can trans desire be oriented towards something that is not greater? Can we want trans in the world without overloading it with optimistic attachments?
Let me unpack that, one last time.
The first step towards an answer to why people transition is that they want something better out of their life, and it works. But the first step does not make for the whole journey, and cannot be expected to tell its entire story. To focus on exclusively risks eliding the persistence of the trans feeling of failure; of the ugly sense that one's transition is going nowhere, is stuck at an impasse, that it is simply failing to live up to the hopes invested in it. What's worse, often the expectation is that those feelings should be transient; if transition is to be a politically viable mode of life, it must not be considered as fallible. If you are trans, you are supposed to feel good eventually. This is the logic that Awkward-Rich skewers in his work:
Article:
Almost tautologically, then, the affirmable trans subject is the affirmed subject, the one who has moved from bad feeling, self-occlusion, incongruity, and so on, into cheery forms of social life. In the same moment in which gender dysphoria replaces gender identity disorder in the DSM, in which transness becomes officially codified as unbearable feeling, the good trans subject is that one who can get over it. Either this or the trans subject has died precisely because they could not get over it and so can be recruited into this story anyway, a cautionary tale of value only after they are gone.
But this still leaves open the question of whether those ugly trans feelings are to be discussed only because they are unavoidable. Or, to restate it slightly: it doesn't say anything about whether there would be any transitions in a world where "trans" didn't figure as a symbol of escape from purgatory of coercive gender assignment.
Would anyone want to be trans without the promise of it feeling good?
What is uncomfortable about this question is not that the answer is no, but rather that it may well be yes. After all, there is at least Andrea Long Chu, who certainly doesn't believe in transitioning to feel better:
Article:
Desire implies deficiency; want implies want. To admit that what makes women like me transsexual is not identity but desire is to admit just how much of transition takes place in the waiting rooms of wanting things, to admit that your breasts may never come in, your voice may never pass, your parents may never call back.
And yet, she throws herself in all those things anyway, without optimism. And however far I am from lionizing her, I think this is the part of her work that speaks to me the most: not because of its putative bleakness, but rather because of its stubborn refusal to value trans desire only insofar as it can be imagined as redemptive.
I get the sense that the reason why this can feel like such a threatening proposal has much to do with the moral stigma which, whether we want it or not, still looms large over ugly feelings in general. There is a name for wanting loneliness, a personal sense of being unlovable, even disappointment or sadness: wallowing. Wallowing, which in popular discourse is often branded as a sign of emotional immaturity that ought to be overcome. It's okay to feel that way, but only if you had no choice. But, to paraphrase another of Awkward-Rich's provocations, what if we instead took them as facts of being embodied that are not necessarily loaded with moral weight? Could we desire them then, if they were no longer branded by an association with moral failing?
This is where Chu stumbles, because her fascination with trans disappointment can't help but to give way to a certain kind of aestheticization of failure as that cool thing:
Article:
The deposits of our desire run as deep and fine as any. The richness of our want is staggering. Perhaps this is why coming out can feel like crushing, why a first dress can feel like a first kiss, why dysphoria can feel like heartbreak. The other name for disappointment, after all, is love.
This is too optimistic. Too cutesy. Love, if we are to follow Awkward-Rich, and, after a fashion, yingchen and yingtong, is not the flipside of disappointment. It is just a disappointment. But this is also where, at the end of an ugly argument, Rumfit manages to pull through and shows a way to love retrograde transfeminine desires without expecting them to be good; without thinking them as necessary.
Immediately following her cataclysmic orgasm, Alice and Ila lie in bed together, and think of how differently their lives could have developed if they had not ventured into the haunted house in the first place. They come to an unlikely conclusion: that even without two years of heartbreak to imbue their relationship with the galvanic charge that only a proper hatefuck could safely dissipate, there still would be ugly feelings aplenty. To give just a sample:
Article:
[Back when they were together] Ila always hated going into public bathrooms with Alice, even though they'd fucked many times, it was more that she thought other women would see her with Alice and think that she, Ila, also had a dick, and judge her for that.
And yet, they persist together—not because they have no other choice, but because they want to anyway. This throughline is what recurs in all the works I have cited, in one way or another. It is Awkward-Rich's insistence of trans love for feminism, even as though the two could well part ways and develop their independent thought; it is Torrey Peters' ironic admission that Reese wants a boyfriend who will be bad to her, even though she knows it is a bad thing to want. It is even something that yingchen and yingtong accidentally confess to when after a long string of calls to liquidate romance they nonetheless concede that you should still strive to love your partner, even if in some nebulous queerer way which they, after all, think impossible.
But I put Tell Me I'm Worthless at the center here, because it is where the case for trans love for trans negativity—and trans love for problematic transfeminine fantasies—is made most openly and with the least unnecessary promises.
After all, what Ila offers to Alice (and what Alice offers, after a fashion, to Ila) is not really affirming. It doesn't have to be. What their play provides is a chance to lay bare those bad trans feelings, and have someone say "yes" to them. "Yes" without a continuation. No "yes, but", or "yes, therefore". Just "yes". A tacit acknowledgement that this is how it feels not followed by a demand that it should stop. And this is, perhaps, why Alice manages to finally come: she is at peace with her desires, which are also her sense of lack. Maybe even manages to love them, but without hoping that some day, she will get over them, and they will get better.
Which is not to say she won't. But in the moment, she doesn't have to. And that means the world. What Ila validates in her mounting transphobic slurs is not Alice's gender, but rather her feeling of her self; Ila brings to the surface the ugly, mute anger at disappointments of transition, then lets those disappointments become an object of desire, however abjectual. Ila wants Alice's gender, though that want may not protect anyone. But it is also what lets Ila finally come to terms with what the big black strap means, and to slowly acknowledge the trans desires lurking in his own heart.
They are both hurt by their mutual desires, because they touch on what they lack. And yet, in the moment, they manage to love it, or at least love through and with it. They both submit themselves to the machine for gender, and it does to them the one thing it can do: it assigns flesh to roles within a sex-caste system known as "gender". They do so because they recognize, at some level, that for all of its brutal logic, this mechanism does not care for the way they feel about its operation and its results. It does not bend to the fact that the gender it assigns hurts, as does the love that lubricates it, or the feminism that opposes it. But since it does not stop for pain, that also means it does not refuse it.
The script that Alice and Ila/Harry play out between themselves is one of a subterranean love that can't be taken for an answer to any gender hurt, but rather as a tentative suggestion on how to want it in the world without immediately obliterating it with a promise of getting better. If love is no longer figured as the redemptive force, then it can also encompass that which is hopelessly backwards and will never not be a problem.
And if being trans needs no justification other than there being the desire to be trans, then perhaps we don't need to justify trans desires either, which is the same as saying that we can desire the full extent of them. It may not satisfy, because it will not heal. But maybe that's the point. For, to quote Awkward-Rich one final time: "trans discourse that disavows bad feeling is insufficient to the task of learning how to live with, through, and despite it."
So here we are. I am not sure if this is the conclusion to the series (I have some further writing planned), but this is certainly the most dense and theoretical part of it, and the one that took the most effort. Which is why I am going to shamelessly repeat the call from the opening post: if you enjoy my writing, please consider donating to my ko-fi (here)! Every dollar helps, especially now as I am in the midst of the purgatory of academic job hunting. Writing this essay took several months, over a hundred hours of work, not even counting in research, and produced north of 30 thousand words of rejected drafts and scrapped iterations of this work. I am not sure if I am happy with the end result, but nonetheless, it is finally finished.
Some acknowledgments are necessary, as writing this was a struggle that I couldn't have endured without help. And so massive thanks to @Magery for helping me copy-edit this, and to @NemoMarx , @Omicron, @Chehrazad, and @NonSequtur for providing invaluable commentary during the writing process. Special thanks also to @Shadell for doing her best Reviewer 2 impression and helping me finally realize what the point of all of this was.
Damn, that's a stunningly concise breakdown! Hats off to you OP!
And somehow I am glad that Harry and Alice were able to be honest with each other and themselves about what they really want for themselves.
I apologize in advance that this post is going to end up like 60% memes and quotes by volume, but experience has shown that I basically cannot post about my experience of gender without offending someone so I am offloading as much as I can onto other people's expressions.
My immediate reaction to this essay is to analogize, because I think in analogy, and well, the thread I first thought of was:
That tension between the logic of our principles and our monkey-hindbrain desires, and how they often seem to pull in very different directions. It's certainly a thing.
And then I made myself stop and go back and reread the first post of the thread, and no, that's not what this is about, is it? Because that first post posits (as far as I can parse it): "If the praxis that feels right to us is at odds with the theory, maybe it's not the praxis that needs to be corrected. Maybe it's the theory."
Which brings me to:
It's a joke, but it does serve to provide a certain frame the issue. One cannot eat what is not there. Once can only eat what is available to eat. If the only language of affirmation one knows is the language shaped by the patriarchy, then that is where one must turn if one wants affirmation.
What I get from this frame is: Garg notes that certain people (e.g. radfem theorists), looking in from the outside, think that people seeking to find/experience/demonstrate femininity through the familiar trappings of femininity-as-object (trappings that have been generated by the patriarchy) are missing the point that we should destroy the patriarchy. Yet this moral imperative to destroy the patriarchy does not address/alleivate/sate people's desire/need/compulsion to express/put-on/gain femininity. Perhaps what is needed here is to build an alternative femininity. To steal a line from C.S. Lewis, perhaps the theorists need to spend a little time working "not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts" Maybe the way to 'destroy' an institution is by creating a better alternative that most people will prefer instead.
I've probably wandered off from the OP's point again, since the thread seems to be about exploring and understanding the experience of people who do find emotional connection/release/satisfaction in embracing the femininity-as-object. Maybe that previous paragraph is just offering an alternative "fix" to what doesn't need to be fixed.
What I get from this frame is: Garg notes that certain people (e.g. radfem theorists), looking in from the outside, think that people seeking to find/experience/demonstrate femininity through the familiar trappings of femininity-as-object (trappings that have been generated by the patriarchy) are missing the point that we should destroy the patriarchy. Yet this moral imperative to destroy the patriarchy does not address/alleivate/sate people's desire/need/compulsion to express/put-on/gain femininity. Perhaps what is needed here is to build an alternative femininity. To steal a line from C.S. Lewis, perhaps the theorists need to spend a little time working "not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts" Maybe the way to 'destroy' an institution is by creating a better alternative that most people will prefer instead.
I like this observation, and I think it is accurate, but what interests me the most is somewhat orthogonal. I remain fascinated by the difficult to admit tension within so much of trans culture, where on one hand we have some of the best perspective on the way that gender hurts, but also return time and time again to wanting gender in our lives so much, so bad.
There is a question to what degree can you extricate transgender as a category from gender itself; would you have trans people in a post-gender world? Would there be a trans femininity without patriarchy, which after all is what defines femininity as we understand it? None of those questions have easy answers, and I like to dwell in the ambivalence they engender - not to end up affirming political inaction, but rather to look to what drags on radical ideas, on what can be erotically appealing in things we ought to reject, and so on.
As ever, your essays are some of the best trans stuff I've seen.
It feels like it might be interesting to think on this along with the thesis presented in The Once and Future Sex: Going Medieval on Women's Roles in Society by Eleanor Janega. In an interview with the Podcast Trashfuture about her book, Janega sets out how practically every view we have on what feminity is has changed since the medieval period except one: That's it's bad.
So in the middle ages, for instance, because fornication was seen as bad and sinful, it was women who were seen as the horniest gender. Now it is men who are seen as obviously, biologically, the horniest gender. It is obvious to us that male desire is stronger than female desire because we regard not being horny enough as being inferior.
I don't 100% know where I'm going with this comparison except that I think it's hard to escape that feeling of inferiority, and as with Tell Me I'm Worthless's haunting fascism ghost, once it marks you, you can never really let go. Transpeople are marked by society as inferior people, and to some extent, our fantasies are marked as inferior as well.
Man, you'd think I'd be on board with something called the "Aromantic Manifesto", but I find it...lacking. Much like any anarchism, it seems to be an actual grievance turned into a diatribe against The Man. And seems to be lacking any practical way to implement their Great Idea. But i suppose that's why I never take anarchists (gender or otherwise) too seriously.
In related news, F1NN5TER got a temp ban on Twitch for female-presenting boobs, despite 1) not being female and 2) not actually having breasts. Another argument that the primary purpose of breasts under capitalism has become to sell things. Or that someone on the Twitch mod team is having uncomfortable thoughts...
That's a whole lot of dense essay, and it's giving me some interesting ideas, especially in terms of how it ties gendered desire intrinsically to lack and suffering in what your quote from @Subrosian_Smithy calls out as a framework reminiscent of some eastern philosophies.
While it's somewhat beside the point you seemed to be driving towards, when we saw Alice finding a kind of transient peace in the acknowledgement of that tie, I was left wondering if there isn't some unrealized hope for enlightenment there after all, even if what we see is still quite firmly tied to the sensual world, and not the right kind of self knowledge to lead to enlightenment (at least not the Buddhist version).
That makes me wonder if some aspects of Buddhist philosophy could be applied more broadly to the context of this queer interpretation of rad-fem views on gender.
I remain fascinated by the difficult to admit tension within so much of trans culture, where on one hand we have some of the best perspective on the way that gender hurts, but also return time and time again to wanting gender in our lives so much, so bad.
There is a question to what degree can you extricate transgender as a category from gender itself; would you have trans people in a post-gender world? Would there be a trans femininity without patriarchy, which after all is what defines femininity as we understand it? None of those questions have easy answers, and I like to dwell in the ambivalence they engender - not to end up affirming political inaction, but rather to look to what drags on radical ideas, on what can be erotically appealing in things we ought to reject, and so on.
I kind of suspect the idea of "mu" (aka "un-ask the question") might be useful in addressing questions like those you mention, when they're taken in their most radical senses and their inner contradictions show themselves.
The idea of escape from dukkha via enlightenment having more to do with a cessation of compatibility with samsara than finding an alternative might also be useful in exploring those topics. And becoming incompatible with an existing system seems like an area queerness might be imagined to leverage.
That said, work has thoroughly fried my brain, and I'm not having a lot of success in turning my scattered thoughts on this into anything worth posting despite a few aborted attempts, so I'm going to leave it at that for now.
I wonder how much my views on the subject(s) is affected by the fact that I have never had cause to care what was in a person's pants. That's an element of identity and personal relationships that I've only been tangentially aware of, but I wonder how deeply it affects how people feel about others. What happens when a worldview that says "it doesn't matter what's in your pants" runs into the one time when it very much DOES matter?
