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Nerds, Catgirls, and Other Trans Potentialities
now revised
It's 2017, and I'm playing Fallout: New Vegas.now revised
My character is a clean-shaved woman wearing a skintight catsuit. At a certain point during the story, she gets abducted and has a chunky steel collar clasped around the neck. I unlock the camera and take in the sight. According to certain influential theories of spectatorship, this means I want to possess her. But – though I am not yet aware of it – I just mostly want to be her, and especially with the collar.
It's 2022, and the popular YouTube personality Abigail Thorn (aka The Philosophy Tube), a certified high profile trans woman tweets this out:
Let's keep that image of a rubber-encased catgirl in mind.
1.
The gender ratio among settlers, migrants, and fortune seekers who, in the middle of the 19th century, made their way to the boomtown of San Francisco, was heavily skewed – to put it mildly. More than 95% of them were men – and young men at that. Bluntly, those people were affected by a bad shortage of women. Thankfully, at least in some regards, they found ways of making do:
Article: In early 1849 a young man named George Dornin left his home in New York to travel by ship to San Francisco, seeking his fortunes in the newly discovered gold mines of northern California. The journey was long, and Dornin later recalled how the ship's passengers celebrated the Fourth of July: they read the Declaration of Independence, flew the U.S. flag, prayed, held a thirty-gun salute, and enjoyed an evening of cross-dressing and same-sex dance where "the lack of lady dance partners . . . [was] made up by the substitution of the younger, and smoother-faced gentlemen, in calico gowns." As one of the ship's "patriotic Americans," Dornin happily participated in the evening's festivities: "Thanks to Mrs. Longley, I was made presentable as a young lady, and though I could not dance I could manage to walk through the figures and was, in consequence, in active demand." Dornin later served as a Republican member of the California state legislature, and his cross dressing recollections appear in his published memoirs.
This is a pattern that recurs throughout social history. When, among men, no women can be found, sometimes some boy has to put on a dress (more or less metaphorical) and be a substitute, often with the tacit, if not explicit, permission of his peers. Famous examples range from the use of crossdressed actors when women were not permitted on theater stages, through the justifications for the homosexual cultures in highly homosocial environments such as boarding schools, all the way to the popularity of drag shows put on by the US Navy servicemen during the Second World War.
Anyway, have you noticed that there are a lot of trans women on SV?
2.
The catgirl as a cultural figure holds a strong association with what came to be variously known as the "geek" or "nerd" culture. In fact, the linkage is so close that the image of the catgirl – presumed immature, oversexualized, and very clearly a male fantasy – is often wielded like a blunt weapon by those seeking to ridicule what they perceive to be common psychosexual hangups of the putatively masculine geek world.
It's interesting to compare this outlook to the argument raised by the popular YouTuber Sarah Z in her recent essay on the rise and fall of geek culture. The primary claim she makes in it should be familiar: that the geeks have won. What was once relegated to the proverbial comic book stores, basements, and an odd anime convention now isn't merely well-represented in popular culture. It is popular culture. However, geek culture itself (as much as it still exists as a discrete thing) is yet to catch up with its own victory and the fact that it is no longer, by any means, marginal. The experiences of cultural ridicule, of the "mainstream" viewing things like sci-fi/fantasy literature, comic books, or role-playing games as, at best, distractions for the children and the immature and at worst as an active threat to the society, have been too foundational for geekdom. Even in the times of their ascendancy, geeks still struggle to see themselves as anything but outsiders, if not victims.
In this account, the titular fall of geek culture is rooted in a kind of a subcultural refusal to grow up; an immature clinging to an untenable position. And certainly, Sarah Z is more right than wrong in this regard – but there is a question she does not pose in her essay, and which I think is key. Does the word "nerd" still have bite? Does it still function as an insult? And what when one is also accused of liking catgirl hentais?
Sarah Z commits much of her essay to discussing one of the key stereotypes about geeks (and one of the key pieces of the geek martyrology that has long since turned toxic): that they are men – or boys, rather – that do not get girls. It's an idea according to which there is nothing as geeky as being invisible to women, as not knowing how to communicate with them, as failing to "get laid". I'm sure that most of us, reading this on SV, are familiar with this notion one way or another. What is important here is that while Sarah Z is correct in her criticism of a kind of a self-pitying misogyny that emerges from the internalization of this stereotype, she doesn't go in depth into what it means for the gender of geeks themselves. It's no accident, after all, that the canonical opposite of the "nerd" is the "jock", who stands for brash, virile masculinity. His opposite, however, is hardly feminine. "Nerd" as an insult, at its most cruel and vicious, indexes something far more reprehensible than femininity: it describes a failure to become a man.
The cultural scholar and artist Paul B. Preciado has convincingly argued in his book Pornotopia that, in the 1950s and 60s, the Playboy magazine played a role of providing men with a way of living a domestic life that shored up, rather than threatened, their masculinity. In a way, what the Marvel Cinematic Universe does today is not too different: it offers a way of consuming geek culture without having to be tainted by association with the stink of a nerd's basement. Because those basements remain, and remain just as ever associated with gender failure.
The stereotypical nerds who populate them today are, however, worse. They are geek culture as its most noxious: the basement dweller of today doesn't just collect action figures and compulsively onanize himself to anime girls, some of which certainly do have cat ears. He is also probably some kind of a GamerGate misogynist, if not an incel terrorist in the budding stages. Any kind of social inclusion of the sort that geek culture benefited from has its left-behinds, those who have to be disavowed in order to earn acceptance for the rest. I want to be clear here: I say that not because I particularly empathize with virulently anti-feminist men who think that the SJWs are ruining culture and who want a governemnt-issued Asian girlfriend; I say that because I empathize with feeling like a failure of a man.
I will, however, quote from a famous controversialist and fellow trans woman Andrea Long Chu, who in her famous provocative essay Females expresses an idea we all come across from time to time, namely that the line between an incel and an egg is just a few millimeters of political consciousness:
Article: There's something to this. Taken seriously, it suggests that the manosphere red-piller's resentment of immigrants, black people, and queers is a sadistic expression of his own gender dysphoria. In this reading, he is an abortive man, a beta trapped in an alpha's body, consumed with the desire to be female and desperately trying to repress it. His desire to increase his manhood is not primary, but a second-tier defense mechanism. Those around him assume he is a leader, a provider, a president; but his greatest fear is that they are mistaken. He radicalizes—shoots up a school, builds a wall—in order to avoid transitioning, the way some closeted trans women join the military in order to get the girl beaten out of them.
The word "nerd" doesn't appear in the text of Females – and neither does "catgirl". That's unfortunate, because if Chu is right about incels, then her argument carries some interesting implications for the association between being a nerd, and being a catgirl.
3.
I originally started writing this essay over half a year ago, intending it to be a response to, or a commentary on, Mia Mulder's video essay on trans history, Was Elagabalus Of Rome Transgender? In it, Mulder tries to approach one of the most vexing questions of trans history: who do we get to call trans, in history. She does this in a rather simplistic fashion (the queer theorist in me, that is the bitch in me, wants to say: like a good historian), shoring up the available sources and, based on them, coming to a conclusion regarding two historical figures. The Roman emperor Elagabalus was a trans woman; Queen Kristina of Sweden was not a trans man.
This is trans history understood through the logic of the closet; the point of it is to get the record straight about who was and was not trans in history or, to be less condescending, to undo the historical violence of closeting that renders the trans identity of certain historical figures hidden from history. Now, I have a lot of respect for Mulder, so I am going to assume she chose this simplistic framework not because she is a particular adherent to it, but rather because it was what made her entire argument work – the argument being that we should be careful with who we call trans in history, especially on thin and speculative evidence. We have solid grounds to call Elagabalus that, and quite a lot of support in the sources – but for Kristina we have at best intangible speculation and our political hopes.
It sounds quite reasonable and common-sense, and God knows that ever so often, we all come across a queer history take on Twitter or Tumbler that is so galaxy brain that we all wish people would stop trying to justify their own existance by digging through the bones of long dead folk. However, that annoyance aside, I do actually disagree with Mulder's conclusions – or rather, with the way she formulates the question.
The issue isn't even the ostensibly obvious problem of whether labels such as transgender are applicable outside of the historical contexts that gave birth to them; the debate about that has been going on for as long as gay and lesbian history has been a thing, and I have no intention in trying to resolve it here. No, my issue is not with the word "transgender", but with the word "was".
The answers that Mulder's question returns trend towards the binary of "yes" or "no". This is how it gets resolved; of course, we can settle on some kind of a "we don't know" or "we can't say for certain", but inherent in those is the assumption that perhaps someday we will know and will be able to say for certain. Possibly somewhere stuck between the pages of some Swedish register there is a confession from Queen Katrina in which she says "but I am a man!"? The issue, however, is that as neat as it would be to find a way to prove that there once was a trans-masc on the throne of Sweden, it's not really revealing anything that we don't already know. Trans people have existed throughout history; the binary gender system is a product of a particular Western epistemology, propagated throughout the world through imperialism and settler colonialism. Whether this or that individual was really trans or not is secondary to that.
There is a different question, however, which I feel is more interesting and politically salient: how could Emperor Elagabalus or Queen Kristina have been trans? What potential did they have for living a trans life?
The salience of this question has to do with how densely trans history is populated by ghosts. By that, I don't only mean the usual kinds of hauntings, though there are plenty of them too. I am thinking more of the fact that to immerse oneself in trans history is to come across a great number of things, lives, and stories that could have been, but didn't necessarily happen – and which yet stay with us all the same. If that sounds too poetic to you, let me give you a concrete example. It's the one I started with, George Dornin. His memoir records a brief moment of cross-dressing pleasure which, of course, was not atypical for his time. What justifies it is that it was a matter of necessity, of a want of women, of special circumstances; that is what made it permissible for him to wear the dress, to receive the attention of fellow men, and to later recall this event as a silly anecdote from the rough times in the frontier. But this memoir also records an absence – the absence of Georgia Dornin, who put on the dress and felt more at home in it than she could have expected; of Georgia Dornin who didn't go on to become a Republican legislator but rather went to join San Francisco's budding demi-monde, who went on to live a rich and beautiful trans life among others like her.
But such a Georgia would be far less likely to leave with us a memoir like that; we would sooner learn about her from the police chronicle and the records of the court charging her with the 'public indecency' that is crossdressing (which became a crime in San Francisco soon after the boomtown period was over). More likely, however, we would not have learned about her at all; helped by her whiteness, she would stand a good chance of living her life as a woman, and leaving no testimony to the contrary. Absent, of course, an archeologist digging up a woman's grave to report that there are "man's" bones inside.
Still, this is just speculation. We don't have Georgia; we have George.
Or do we? We have no guarantee – other than the stifling cisgenderism ruling over our understanding of history – that George Dornin didn't spend the rest of his life thinking back to that night, to that time wearing the dress and awkwardly moving through the first steps of the dance, of that aborted transition. Of course, he couldn't have gone further along its track: he had a life to live, and a life he was loath to abandon. What makes a society transphobic is not only individual acts of violence targeted against trans people, but also the way that the very foundations of that society are built so as to prevent trans lives from being lived. George had to know – even if he was not necessarily conscious of it – that there were consequences to staying in the dress; it's not difficult to imagine the rational, sad choice of putting it down, and living the rest of his heartbroken over what he was not allowed to become.
Or maybe that is just what Georgia wanted us to think, and the memoir is just one part of the larger ruse of a canny trans woman looking to avoid suspicion as she lived a double life of a Republican politician and a famed stage queen? It's hard to imagine, but it is not impossible: it is a part of the larger trans potential of history.
Then again, even if someday someone will unearth a photo album from a San Francisco cabaret, c. 1870, where Dornin performs as the queen of the night, it won't resolve the question one way or another. Maybe he wasn't trans; maybe he didn't think of himself as a woman; maybe he just liked the dress that much.
The point is this: he could have been a she, even if he wasn't. And I am personally haunted by Georgia Dornin, and the materials she'd have woven her trans femininity from.
4.
Gender is not a hydraulic system. When I say that there are many trans women on SV, I don't mean to imply that it is because the nerd culture is so male dominated it needs to trans parts of itself to remain in the state of an equilibrium.
(Well, okay, I am looking to imply it so as to hook a potential reader and get them to read the rest of the essay; if you've made it this far, it means it has probably worked!)
What I do mean, however, is that gender is not an individual thing, some transcendental quality we come to possess in isolation from the world around us. No, we assemble our genders from the materials at our disposal; we make do with the potentials made available to us. And this implies that maybe there really is something about nerd culture which makes it easier to become trans in it, or through it. Furthermore, I'd like to propose, pace Sarah Z, that this something has not necessarily translated to the ascendant geek culture, that it rather belongs to its refuse, to the nerd's basement – misogyny and all.
Hold! Don't shoot! Have a dank meme!
This is very funny, but should also be at least somewhat disturbing. After all, it suggests that there is something shared between being a trans girl and a white supremacist; and that this shared root goes back precisely to one of those parts of the nerd culture that has been deemed far too cringe-worthy to ever become a part of the new geek ascendancy.
So, about catgirls.
It's a common knowledge in certain parts of the internet, and especially among those trans women who are not terminally online, that a Twitter account with a picrew avatar depicting a catgirl on a trans flag background is to be avoided like a plague. The twitter trans girl is the ugly sister of both the successful post-Transgender Tipping Point trans woman, as well as of the politically active street trans organizer. She represents everything that is immature about trans women, every bit of bad taste (in anime, in pornography, and in fashion), every bad trans take, and generally the failure of certain segments of the trans population to go outside and touch grass. Though she is invariably a member of some elaborate trans-Atlantic polycule, she has probably not gotten laid in years, and her views on sex are unrealistic and deeply problematic. No one says that out loud, but many quietly agree that she knows very little about actually being a woman. She mistakes a fantasy of a womanhood for the real thing, and badly needs to grow up and learn what the real world's like.
In short, a trans catgirl on Twitter dot com is a huge nerd.
5.
What materials would Georgia Dornin have at her disposal to make her gender from, in the boomtown of San Francisco? What ideas of femininity and representations of it would be available and desirable to her there? The calico gown she wore – the one I am speculating to be the catalyst of a potential, if unlived, trans life – was a part of a very masculine game, of a carnivalesque reversal, one made permissible by the frontier conditions and remoteness from prying eyes of ordinary society. Vice laws, among them those prohibiting crossdressing, were implemented in San Francisco when it moved away from being a seedy den of prospectors, fortune seekers, and other element, towards being a city of workers and bourgeoisie, a city of high society and good morals.
It's likely, then, that her femininity would carry a mark of the conditions of its emergence. What was at hand to her would lend itself less to embodying the respectable, Victorian-era angel of the house, and more to living in the world of cabarets, cheap theaters, and red light districts. It is where, after all, she would have had the most access not just to opportunities for living a trans life, but also for enjoying that which she had enjoyed the first time she put on the calico gown: the desiring looks of men.
Article: During the nineteenth century the vaudeville stage successfully contained gender transgressions, providing a space for gender-normative audiences to gain pleasure from beautiful men in stunning gowns and handsome women in dashing suits, while blissfully
ignoring the plight of gender-variant people in the city around them.
There is a hitch here. If this is how we choose to imagine Georgia's trans life, then it also starts to invite the old charge fielded by transphobic currents of feminism against the practice of drag. It's a simple argument, coming down to the idea that drag is a cruel parody of femininity (likened to blackface) that has nothing to do with the reality of women's lives, and that it constitutes a fundamentally misogynist form of amusement created by men, and for men.
It's an obviously hateful position, and an ignorant one at that, but it does brush against a hint of something crucial. It reminds us of the fact that the stuff that high femme glam is made of didn't necessarily come from cis women, and that there are styles of femme life that have emerged without having to base themselves on some narrowly understood notion of what makes a person a woman – and more than just emerged, but also grown up to be an object of desire, or more than desire: of identification.
6.
The history of trans hauntings is a history of trans disavowals. They happen to the side of their more familiar relative, trans erasures, those conscious attempts at suppressing the trans potential present within history. Disavowals operate on a different level: they are the act of refusing to see yourself as sharing a root with a different group of trans folk. The classic example would be the rise of the transsexual woman from the 1950s, who emerged by disavowing the campy transvestite, all in order to convince the medical and legal gatekeepers that she could pass into a kind of a faux cisheteronormativity. Though I don't think Christine Jorgensen (the media phenomenon, not the person to whom it was pinned) ever said "I am not like those fairies", she certainly would be smart to not publicize any drag shows she might have participated in the army, as a GI.
Or, to look somewhere closer to our time, Kristin Beck, that face of trans veterans, claiming that she has nothing in common with Chelsea Manning. Her statement is worth quoting at length, because it is so telling:
Article: We are right at a point in history were many people are beginning to understand who we are as Transgender, diverse, and that we are just like everyone else. We are one. Now Manning just dirtied the hope of a truly free America. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.['s] "I have a Dream" speech was 50 years ago (...) I am still hoping for his dream of equality for all. America to be a beacon of Freedom and equality (...) Manning is a tarnish on my dream, he [sic] is a tarnish on Dr. King[']s Dream.
What Beck does here is an attempt to render Chelsa Manning not a trans woman; to make her herness a ghost. Of course, this can only lead to further hauntings, because no matter how much Manning's supposed "treachery" is disavowed, it will remain within the ambit of transness as we know it. But Beck needs to, must, convince others that she is not like Chelsea Manning: that she is a good soldier, a good citizen, a good woman.
I don't know what Beck's opinion on trans catgirls is, but given their preponderance towards communism, I am reasonably sure it tends towards the negative. Which means that a lot of trans women in general have a lot in common with Kristin Beck. I am reasonably sure that a lot of trans catgirls fall under that rubric too. Which shouldn't be surprising – self loathing is a part of the brand.
Here are two tweets, excellent jokes the both of them:
View: https://twitter.com/24bit_princess/status/1530290022607425537
View: https://twitter.com/24bit_princess/status/1530291405528223747
The punchline is "sex kitten", while the author herself a "degenerate furry".
7.
The nasty thing about trans histories is that they are made out of history. The skewed gender ratio that enabled the cross-dressing party as a point of departure for the speculative life of Georgia Darnin is impossible to disassociate from the realities of settler colonialism. The fact that he/she got to wear a dress in a way that was seen as play, and not a social threat, is bound up in the gendered nature of white hegemony. The list goes on.
Sexism, too, figures somewhere on it. The radical feminist idea that there is no non-violent way of perceiving a woman while under the conditions of patriarchy is not far off the cuff. The stuff of femininity and the stuff of misogyny are melded together so closely that to cleave the two apart is impossible: one is made of the other. The scandal of it – and I use this word not to invoke a moral judgment, but in the dry, academic sense going back to the Church Latin scandalum literally meaning a "stumbling block" – is that it is also a no small part of what makes femininity so enticing. For men, and for women, and for everyone else.
This what Jules Gill-Peterson forcefully argues for, trying to finally move past the smoke-and-mirrors of the question "is sex good, or bad", saying that "whatever position we take, whatever take we defend, our desires will inevitably betray us".
It's not hard to imagine – if one only accepts it as a possibility – a trans life for George Darnin. But it is impossible to picture one in which Georgia Darnin assembles her femininity without incorporating into it stuff that can rightly be seen as – to use an overused word – "problematic", and often very badly so. And we shouldn't hope that this incorporation would serve as an alchemical process by which the misogynistic, racist mire of the frontier culture is purified into cleanliness. To acknowledge that wouldn't make her invalid, but rather would be necessary to even begin to reckon with the ghosts of our trans history she could (but didn't, but maybe someday will) represent.
8.
So, here is a question: have you ever seen a trans woman assure people that she is not like the other geeky trans girls? I do it from time to time, tongue-in-cheek. It's only a joke, isn't it?
But let's go back to nerds for a moment. Let's go back to those incels that Andrea Long Chu sees as being on the cusp of transitioning. And let's go back to Sarah Z's video essay. After all, she devotes a significant part of it to discussing the well-known problem of the exclusion of women from the geek culture, and of the ambient misogyny present in it. We are, I think, all familiar with those critiques from elsewhere; we now know that much of the geek aesthetic and its representation of women is to one degree or another sexist, defined by the male gaze, and written by men, for men.
Only some of those men later turned out to not have been men at all. And this returns us to the issue of potential, and of disavowal. Why is the "furry degenerate" and the "sex kitten" something one is mortally afraid of being clocked at, even in front of a voice therapist – someone clearly aware that their client is trans? Why do I like my joke about not being like other trans girls so much?
I am going to make a wager that we are yet to reckon with trans catgirls – and I do use this term expansively. After all, structurally, trans catgirls, doggirls, robot girls, demon girls, and latex drones belong roughly to the same category, even if their internal divisions become flattened and erased in the eyes of exasperated, mature trans women that try to disidentify from them.
Yet to reckon: yet to provide an account of trans potentials that are latent within the dregs of nerd culture. Yet to create a good language for describing the trans culture that emerges from them, without cringing at them, and without whitewashing them. Yet to find a way to talk about geek misogyny that also becomes a feedstock for the love of women.
What we do have instead are practices of persistent evasion and insistent disavowal. In the broader trans discourse – the one that is public-faced, present within "high-brow" press, popular media, or academic trans theory – trans catgirls do not substantially exist. At best, they are jokes; at worst they are the problem. Seldom, if ever, they are a life that can be led.
9.
There is a very famous passage in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's equally classic 1991 essay "How To Bring Your Kids Up Gay: The War On Effemine Boys". It's a text devoted to defending the sissy boy from what would later be termed the "new homonormativity", that is the provisional tolerance extended to gayness on the condition it sheds its associations with the queer, the pansy, the tranny. She writes:
Article: What the books I have been discussing, and the institutions to which they are attached, demonstrate is that the wish for the dignified treatment of already-gay people is necessarily destined to turn into either trivializing apologetics or, much worse, a silkily camouflaged complicity in oppression—in the
absence of a strong, explicit, erotically invested affirmation of some people's felt desire or need that there be gay people in the immediate world.
In the decades since the publication of this essay, there has been a significant intellectual work done on the sissy boy, reclaiming him from the purview of social deviancy and failed masculinity, and letting the queer and trans potentials present in his life speak for themselves. In the process, it of course turned out that not all sissy boys are boys, and that some of them grow up into glam women. This, obviously, wasn't news to anyone who had ever paid even a modicum of attention to the worlds of drag and gay camp. What changed was not an increase of knowledge, but an insistence on the demand that we approach the cross-dressing gay sissy not as a failure of both heterosexual development and homosexual masculinity, but as something to be strongly, explicitly, and erotically invested with desire, desire for it to be in the immediate world.
I hope that that makes it clearer, dear reader, why George Darnier is relevant to trans catgirls.
10.
One doesn't have to have a diploma in women's studies to dissect the screenshot posted by Abigail Thorn as at least somewhat sexist. It's the kind of comic book pinup (rendered with the fastidious work of Fallout: New Vegas modders) that we've spent decades deconstructing and criticizing as representations of unrealistic visions of women's bodies and their incessant sexualisation. Yet, Thorn recontextualizes it into a prehistory of her own transness. It serves as a proof – only legible in hindsight – of her womanhood.
Risking reading too much into a single post and a single screenshot – though trans history is often forced to deal with such limited material – I'd suggest that this post posits trans catgirlhood as a kind of trans immaturity. After all, Thorn's media persona is definitely not a catgirl. She staged her coming out through references to the classics of feminist thought and to elaborate theatricality, showing both her mastery of the medium of a video essay as well as that of her femininity. She definitely didn't wear her cat ears on that stage.
In this schema, the catgirl is something like immaturity: it is a fantasy that is yet to become flesh. It is the epitome of eggness, representing an unrealized potential for being trans, but one that will come into its own through transformation into a more grounded, realistic form. It is Dornin's willing, but inept dance, a possible first step that can never be the end goal in itself. This is not something that could have fit into her coming out video – or if it could have, at most as a joke.
But a joke, all too often, is also kind of a disavowal. The gesture of laughing your latex catgirl off as an evidence of "being an egg", or of being mortified at the prospect of being clocked as a trans "sex kitten" point us at a certain problem. Today, we have so many histories of transness, that lead through the familiar fields of gay love, clubbing, and secret life of crossdressing. In literature and in theory, and in all the essays scattered across the n+1s of the world, we are increasingly coming to terms with what's transfemme about taking it up the ass, doing ketamine off your best friend's breasts, or having a predilection for sissy hypno. But we still lack, and painfully so, a robust account of the trajectories of trans life that lead instead through cRPGs, comic books, My Little Pony, and bad cartoon porn. We are yet to map out the routes that trans lives take through the rejecta of geekdom.
This won't be accomplished through the approach that Thorn defaults to, if not outright suggests, that is of trying to sift out trans meaning from this cultural detritus of nerd stuff. This still settles for treating the trans catgirl as only ever an egg stage, a receptacle holding something more valuable and beautiful instead. All that is problematic about it, its twee sexism and all the other awful associations it holds, become merely a kind of a cishet nerd muck from which we save nuggets of clean transness. But transitioning is not a redemption, even if it can sometimes save a life.
No more will we be helped by refusal. The routes won't be plotted out as a simple teleology of trans maturation, where unrealistic dreams of catgirl femininity have to give way to a more proper kind of womanhood. Of course catgirls are an unrealistic fantasy – but the desire for them, and the desire to be them means so much more than a naive belief in anime. It speaks to something vital, lively and beautiful, to the potential for transness that is bound up in even the most prurient and problematic aspects of geek culture. The persistent desire for and continuous disavowal of trans catgirlhood attests to that. It is precisely what is desirable about it that is also why we so often also feel compelled to refuse it. And reckoning with that means approaching sexy Fallout: New Vegas mods, chunky collars, and wanting to meow at your voice therapist as something more than just funny asides to trans life, but rather as the very stuff it can be made of.
As I was working on this essay, a friend posted this tweet to a Discord group I'm in:
Let's keep it in mind.
***
The gender ratio among settlers, migrants, and fortune seekers who, in the middle of the 19th century, made their way to the boomtown of San Francisco, was heavily skewed – to put it mildly. More than 95% of them were men – and young men at that. Bluntly, those people were affected by a bad shortage of women. Thankfully, at least in some regards, they found ways of making do:
This is a pattern that recurs throughout social history. When, among men, no women can be found, sometimes some boy has to put on a dress (more or less metaphorical) and be a substitute, often with the tacit, if not explicit, permission of his peers. Famous examples range from the use of crossdressed actors when women were not permitted on theater stages, through the justifications for the homosexual cultures in highly homosocial environments such as boarding schools, all the way to the popularity of drag shows put on by the US Navy servicemen during the Second World War.
Anyway, have you noticed that there are a lot of trans women on SV?
***
In her recent video essay, the popular YouTuber Sarah Z tried to reckon with the rise and fall of geek culture. Her primary argument should be familiar: the geeks have won. What was once relegated to the proverbial comic book stores, basements, and an odd anime convention now isn't merely well-represented in popular culture. It is popular culture. However, geek culture itself (as much as it still exists as a discrete thing) is yet to catch up with its own victory and the fact that it is no longer, by any means, marginal. The experiences of cultural ridicule, of the "mainstream" viewing things like sci-fi/fantasy literature, comic books, or role-playing games as, at best, distractions for the children and the immature and at worst as an active threat to the society, have been too foundational for geekdom. Even in the times of their ascendancy, geeks still struggle to see themselves as anything but outsiders, if not victims.
In this account, the titular fall of geek culture is rooted in a kind of a subcultural refusal to grow up; an immature clinging to an untenable position. And certainly, Sarah Z is more right than wrong in this regard – but there is a question she does not pose in her essay, and which I think is key. Does the word "nerd" still have bite? Does it still function as an insult?
Sarah Z commits much of her essay to discussing one of the key stereotypes about geeks (and one of the key pieces of the geek martyrology that has long since turned toxic): that they are men – or boys, rather – that do not get girls. It's an idea according to which there is nothing as geeky as being invisible to women, as not knowing how to communicate with them, as failing to "get laid". I'm sure that most of us, reading this on SV, are familiar with this notion one way or another. What is important here is that while Sarah Z is correct in her criticism of a kind of a self-pitying misogyny that emerges from the internalization of this stereotype, she doesn't go in depth into what it means for the gender of geeks themselves. It's no accident, after all, that the canonical opposite of the "nerd" is the "jock", who stands for brash, virile masculinity. His opposite, however, is hardly feminine. "Nerd" as an insult, at its most cruel and vicious, indexes something far more reprehensible than femininity: it describes a failure to become a man.
The cultural scholar and artist Paul B. Preciado has convincingly argued in his book Pornotopia that, in the 1950s and 60s, the Playboy magazine played a role of providing men with a way of living a domestic life that shored up, rather than threatened, their masculinity. In a way, what the Marvel Cinematic Universe does today is not too different: it offers a way of consuming geek culture without having to be tainted by association with the stink of a nerd's basement. Because those basements remain, and remain just as ever associated with gender failure.
The stereotypical nerds who populate them today are, however, worse. They are geek culture as its most noxious: the basement dweller of today doesn't just collect action figures and compulsively onanize himself to anime girls. He is also probably some kind of a GamerGate misogynist, if not an incel terrorist in the budding stages. Any kind of social inclusion of the sort that geek culture benefited from has its left-behinds, those who have to be disavowed in order to earn acceptance for the rest. I want to be clear here: I say that not because I particularly empathize with virulently anti-feminist men who think that the SJWs are ruining culture and who want a governemnt-issued Asian girlfriend; I say that because I empathize with feeling like a failure of a man.
I will, however, quote from a famous controversialist and fellow trans woman Andrea Long Chu, who in her famous provocative essay Females expresses an idea we all come across from time to time, namely that the line between an incel and an egg is just a few millimeters of political consciousness:
***
I originally started writing this essay over half a year ago, intending it to be a response to, or a commentary on, Mia Mulder's video essay on trans history, Was Elagabalus Of Rome Transgender? In it, Mulder tries to approach one of the most vexing questions of trans history: who do we get to call trans, in history. She does this in a rather simplistic fashion (the queer theorist in me, that is the bitch in me, wants to say: like a good historian), shoring up the available sources and, based on them, coming to a conclusion regarding two historical figures. The Roman emperor Elagabalus was a trans woman; Queen Kristina of Sweden was not a trans man.
This is trans history understood through the logic of the closet; the point of it is to get the record straight about who was and was not trans in history or, to be less condescending, to undo the historical violence of closeting that renders the trans identity of certain historical figures hidden from history. Now, I have a lot of respect for Mulder, so I am going to assume she chose this simplistic framework not because she is a particular adherent to it, but rather because it was what made her entire argument work – the argument being that we should be careful with who we call trans in history, especially on thin and speculative evidence. We have solid grounds to call Elagabalus that, and quite a lot of support in the sources – but for Kristina we have at best intangible speculation and our political hopes.
It sounds quite reasonable and common-sense, and God knows that ever so often, we all come across a queer history take on Twitter or Tumbler that is so galaxy brain that we all wish people would stop trying to justify their own existance by digging through the bones of long dead folk. However, that annoyance aside, I do actually disagree with Mulder's conclusions – or rather, with the way she formulates the question.
The issue isn't even the ostensibly obvious problem of whether labels such as transgender are applicable outside of the historical contexts that gave birth to them; the debate about that has been going on for as long as gay and lesbian history has been a thing, and I have no intention in trying to resolve it here. No, my issue is not with the word "transgender", but with the word "was".
The answers that Mulder's question returns trend towards the binary of "yes" or "no". This is how it gets resolved; of course, we can settle on some kind of a "we don't know" or "we can't say for certain", but inherent in those is the assumption that perhaps someday we will know and will be able to say for certain. Possibly somewhere stuck between the pages of some Swedish register there is a confession from Queen Katrina in which she says "but I am a man!"? The issue, however, is that as neat as it would be to find a way to prove that there once was a trans-masc on the throne of Sweden, it's not really revealing anything that we don't already know. Trans people have existed throughout history; the binary gender system is a product of a particular Western epistemology, propagated throughout the world through imperialism and settler colonialism. Whether this or that individual was really trans or not is secondary to that.
There is a different question, however, which I feel is more interesting and politically salient: how could Emperor Elagabalus or Queen Kristina have been trans? What potential did they have for living a trans life?
***
Trans history is populated by ghosts. By that, I don't only mean the usual kinds of hauntings, though there are plenty of them too. I am thinking more of the fact that to immerse oneself in trans history is to come across a great number of things, lives, and stories that could have been, but didn't necessarily happen – and which yet stay with us all the same. If that sounds too poetic to you, let me give you a concrete example. It's the one I started with, George Dornin. His memoir records a brief moment of cross-dressing pleasure which, of course, was not atypical for his time. What justifies it is that it was a matter of necessity, of a want of women, of special circumstances; that is what made it permissible for him to wear the dress, to receive the attention of fellow men, and to later recall this event as a silly anecdote from the rough times in the frontier. But this memoir also records an absence – the absence of Georgia Dornin, who put on the dress and felt more at home in it than she could have expected; of Georgia Dornin who didn't go on to become a Republican legislator but rather went to join San Francisco's budding demi-monde, who went on to live a rich and beautiful trans life among others like her.
But such a Georgia would be far less likely to leave with us a memoir like that; we would sooner learn about her from the police chronicle and the records of the court charging her with the 'public indecency' that is crossdressing (which became a crime in San Francisco soon after the boomtown period was over). More likely, however, we would not have learned about her at all; helped by her whiteness, she would stand a good chance of living her life as a woman, and leaving no testimony to the contrary. Absent, of course, an archeologist digging up a woman's grave to report that there are "man's" bones inside.
Still, this is just speculation. We don't have Georgia; we have George.
Or do we? We have no guarantee – other than the stifling cisgenderism ruling over our understanding of history – that George Dornin didn't spend the rest of his life thinking back to that night, to that time wearing the dress and awkwardly moving through the first steps of the dance, of that aborted transition. Of course, he couldn't have gone further along its track: he had a life to live, and a life he was loath to abandon. What makes a society transphobic is not only individual acts of violence targeted against trans people, but also the way that the very foundations of that society are built so as to prevent trans lives from being lived. George had to know – even if he was not necessarily conscious of it – that there were consequences to staying in the dress; it's not difficult to imagine the rational, sad choice of putting it down, and living the rest of his heartbroken over what he was not allowed to become.
Or maybe that is just what Georgia wanted us to think, and the memoir is just one part of the larger ruse of a canny trans woman looking to avoid suspicion as she lived a double life of a Republican politician and a famed stage queen? It's hard to imagine, but it is not impossible: it is a part of the larger trans potential of history.
Then again, even if someday someone will unearth a photo album from a San Francisco cabaret, c. 1870, where Dornin performs as the queen of the night, it won't resolve the question one way or another. Maybe he wasn't trans; maybe he didn't think of himself as a woman; maybe he just liked the dress that much.
The point is this: he could have been a she, even if he wasn't. And I am personally haunted by Georgia Dornin.
***
Gender is not a hydraulic system. When I say that there are many trans women on SV, I don't mean to imply that it is because the nerd culture is so male dominated it needs to trans parts of itself to remain in the state of an equilibrium.
(Well, okay, I am looking to imply it so as to hook a potential reader and get them to read the rest of the essay; if you've made it this far, it means it has probably worked!)
What I do mean, however, is that gender is not an individual thing, some transcendental quality we come to possess in isolation from the world around us. No, we assemble our genders from the materials at our disposal; we make do with the potentials made available to us. And this implies that maybe there really is something about nerd culture which makes it easier to become trans in it, or through it. Furthermore, I'd like to propose, pace Sarah Z, that this something has not necessarily translated to the ascendant geek culture, that it rather belongs to its refuse, to the nerd's basement – misogyny and all.
Hold! Don't shoot! Have a dank meme!
This is very funny, but should also be at least somewhat disturbing. After all, it suggests that there is something shared between being a trans girl and a white supremacist; and that this shared root goes back precisely to one of those parts of the nerd culture that has been deemed far too cringe-worthy to ever become a part of the new geek ascendancy.
It's a common knowledge in certain parts of the internet, and especially among those trans women who are not terminally online, that a Twitter account with a picrew avatar depicting a catgirl on a trans flag background is to be avoided like a plague. The twitter trans girl is the ugly sister of both the successful post-Transgender Tipping Point trans woman, as well as of the politically active street trans organizer. She represents everything that is immature about trans women, every bit of bad taste (in anime, in pornography, and in fashion), every bad trans take, and generally the failure of certain segments of the trans population to go outside and touch grass. Though she is invariably a member of some elaborate trans-Atlantic polycule, she has probably not gotten laid in years, and her views on sex are unrealistic and deeply problematic. No one says that out loud, but many quietly agree that she knows very little about actually being a woman. She mistakes a fantasy of a womanhood for the real thing, and badly needs to grow up and learn what the real world's like.
In short, a trans catgirl on Twitter dot com is a huge nerd.
***
Have you ever seen a trans woman assure people that she is not like the other geeky trans girls?
The history of trans hauntings is a history of trans disavowals. They happen to the side of their more familiar relative, trans erasures, those conscious attempts at suppressing the trans potential present within history. Disavowals operate on a different level: they are the act of refusing to see yourself as sharing a root with a different group of trans folk. The classic example would be the rise of the transsexual woman from the 1950s, who emerged by disavowing the campy transvestite, all in order to convince the medical and legal gatekeepers that she could pass into a kind of a faux cisheteronormativity. Though I don't think Christine Jorgensen (the media phenomenon, not the person to whom it was pinned) ever said "I am not like those fairies", she certainly had to convince the world that she was definitely not one.
Or, to look somewhere closer to our time, Kristin Beck, that face of trans veterans, claiming that she has nothing in common with Chelsea Manning. Her statement is worth quoting at length, because it is so telling:
What Beck does here is an attempt to render Chelsa Manning not a trans woman; to make her herness a ghost. Of course, this can only lead to further hauntings, because no matter how much Manning's supposed "treachery" is disavowed, it will remain within the ambit of transness as we know it. But Beck needs to, must, convince others that she is not like Chelsea Manning: that she is a good soldier, a good citizen, a good woman.
I don't know what Beck's opinion on trans catgirls is, but given their preponderance towards communism, I am reasonably sure it tends towards the negative. Which means that a lot of trans women in general have a lot in common with Kristin Beck. I am reasonably sure that a lot of trans catgirls fall under that rubric too. Which shouldn't be surprising – self loathing is a part of the brand.
***
One of the nasty things about trans histories is that they happen in history. Let's go back to George Dornin for a moment. The fact that he got to wear a dress, have good fun in it, and then put it down can't be disentangled from a whole bunch of less-than-pleasant contexts that lurk in the background. The skewed gender ratio which enabled the cross-dressing party was due to the practicalities of settler colonialism; the fact that his wearing of a dress was probably perceived mostly as a kind of a joke and not a social threat can't be separated from his status as a white man. The list goes on.
None of those contexts would disappear in the potential, if unlived, life of Georgia Dornin. In fact, they would be constitutive of her transness, providing an unavoidable background and foundation for it. To acknowledge that wouldn't make her invalid, but rather would be necessary to even begin to reckon with the ghosts of our trans history she could (but didn't, but maybe someday will) represent.
Let's go back to nerds for a moment. Let's go back to those incels that Andrea Long Chu sees as being on the cusp of transitioning. And let's go back to Sarah Z's video essay. After all, she devotes a significant part of it to discussing the well-known problem of the exclusion of women from the geek culture, and of the ambient misogyny present in it. We are, I think, all familiar with those critiques from elsewhere; we now know that much of the geek aesthetic and its representation of women is to one degree or another sexist, defined by the male gaze, and written by men, for men.
Only some of those men later turned out to not have been men at all. And this returns us to the issue of potential, and disavowal.
What sort of trans potentials are latent within the dregs of nerd culture? What kind of a trans culture can emerge from it, and how can we account for it without cringing at it, but also without whitewashing it? How can we talk about misogyny that becomes a feedstock for the love of women?
There are many trans women on SV, and there are many trans women in other highly focused nerd spaces. Those trans women have developed their unique culture which, as all cultures, is as beautiful as it is problematic, as tiring as it is enticing, which is no less trite than it is profound. However, what we still lack is a good way of accounting for it, in no small part because so much of it is being disavowed, both to establish oneself as a mature trans woman as well as to cut oneself from the associations with everything that's noxious about nerd culture. Neither of these will do.
***
One doesn't have to have a diploma in women's studies to dissect the screenshot posted by Abigail Thorn as at least somewhat sexist. It's the kind of comic book pinup (rendered with the fastidious work of Fallout: New Vegas modders) that we've spent decades deconstructing and criticizing as representations of unrealistic visions of women's bodies and their incessant sexualisation. Yet, Thorn recontextualizes it into a prehistory of her own transness. It serves as a proof – only legible in hindsight – of her womanhood.
Risking reading too much into a single post and a single screenshot – though trans history is often forced to deal with such limited material – I'd suggest that this post posits trans catgirlhood as a kind of trans immaturity. After all, Thorn's media persona is definitely not a catgirl. She staged her coming out through references to the classics of feminist thought and to elaborate theatricality, showing both her mastery of the medium of a video essay as well as that of her femininity.
In this schema, the catgirl is not substantial: it is a fantasy that is yet to become flesh. It represents an unrealized potential, but one that can come into its own through a transformation into a more grounded, realistic form. It is Dornin's willing, but inept dance, a possible first step that can never be the end goal in itself. This is not something that could have fit into her coming out video – or if it could have, at most as a joke.
But could it be taken seriously? How can we account for trans stories that don't lead us through the familiar fields of gay love, clubbing, and secret life of crossdressing, but rather through cRPGs, comic books, My Little Pony, and bad cartoon porn? How do we map out routes that trans lives take through the rejecta of geekdom?
One approach – and I think this is the one Thorn defaults to, if not outright suggests – would be to try to sift out trans meaning from this cultural detritus. In this view, the trans catgirl in her egg stage is merely a receptacle holding something more valuable and beautiful instead. All that is problematic about it, its twee sexism and all the other awful associations it holds, become merely a kind of a cishet nerd muck from which we save nuggets of clean transness.
Or we could instead – and I think we should – refuse to hold to this separation. Instead, we may try to think of how transness is a potential bound up in even the most prurient and problematic aspects of geek culture. The persistent appeal and continuous disavowal of trans catgirlhood attests to that. It is precisely what is desirable about it that is also why we so often feel compelled to refuse it.
The question, after all, is not really about whether trans catgirls are valid, and to what exact degree is this or that aspect of nerd culture "eggy", but rather how the former is assembled from the latter. And if we can answer that, we can begin to talk about trans catgirls as neither neither the backdrop to identify against, nor a developmental stage to move through, but a viable and substantial mode of trans life, one no less beautiful, no less productive, and no less entangled in the boundless messiness of sex, gender, and desire than any other kind of it.
Let's keep it in mind.
***
The gender ratio among settlers, migrants, and fortune seekers who, in the middle of the 19th century, made their way to the boomtown of San Francisco, was heavily skewed – to put it mildly. More than 95% of them were men – and young men at that. Bluntly, those people were affected by a bad shortage of women. Thankfully, at least in some regards, they found ways of making do:
Article: In early 1849 a young man named George Dornin left his home in New York to travel by ship to San Francisco, seeking his fortunes in the newly discovered gold mines of northern California. The journey was long, and Dornin later recalled how the ship's passengers celebrated the Fourth of July: they read the Declaration of Independence, flew the U.S. flag, prayed, held a thirty-gun salute, and enjoyed an evening of cross-dressing and same-sex dance where "the lack of lady dance partners . . . [was] made up by the substitution of the younger, and smoother-faced gentlemen, in calico gowns." As one of the ship's "patriotic Americans," Dornin happily participated in the evening's festivities: "Thanks to Mrs. Longley, I was made presentable as a young lady, and though I could not dance I could manage to walk through the figures and was, in consequence, in active demand." Dornin later served as a Republican member of the California state legislature, and his cross dressing recollections appear in his published memoirs.
This is a pattern that recurs throughout social history. When, among men, no women can be found, sometimes some boy has to put on a dress (more or less metaphorical) and be a substitute, often with the tacit, if not explicit, permission of his peers. Famous examples range from the use of crossdressed actors when women were not permitted on theater stages, through the justifications for the homosexual cultures in highly homosocial environments such as boarding schools, all the way to the popularity of drag shows put on by the US Navy servicemen during the Second World War.
Anyway, have you noticed that there are a lot of trans women on SV?
***
In her recent video essay, the popular YouTuber Sarah Z tried to reckon with the rise and fall of geek culture. Her primary argument should be familiar: the geeks have won. What was once relegated to the proverbial comic book stores, basements, and an odd anime convention now isn't merely well-represented in popular culture. It is popular culture. However, geek culture itself (as much as it still exists as a discrete thing) is yet to catch up with its own victory and the fact that it is no longer, by any means, marginal. The experiences of cultural ridicule, of the "mainstream" viewing things like sci-fi/fantasy literature, comic books, or role-playing games as, at best, distractions for the children and the immature and at worst as an active threat to the society, have been too foundational for geekdom. Even in the times of their ascendancy, geeks still struggle to see themselves as anything but outsiders, if not victims.
In this account, the titular fall of geek culture is rooted in a kind of a subcultural refusal to grow up; an immature clinging to an untenable position. And certainly, Sarah Z is more right than wrong in this regard – but there is a question she does not pose in her essay, and which I think is key. Does the word "nerd" still have bite? Does it still function as an insult?
Sarah Z commits much of her essay to discussing one of the key stereotypes about geeks (and one of the key pieces of the geek martyrology that has long since turned toxic): that they are men – or boys, rather – that do not get girls. It's an idea according to which there is nothing as geeky as being invisible to women, as not knowing how to communicate with them, as failing to "get laid". I'm sure that most of us, reading this on SV, are familiar with this notion one way or another. What is important here is that while Sarah Z is correct in her criticism of a kind of a self-pitying misogyny that emerges from the internalization of this stereotype, she doesn't go in depth into what it means for the gender of geeks themselves. It's no accident, after all, that the canonical opposite of the "nerd" is the "jock", who stands for brash, virile masculinity. His opposite, however, is hardly feminine. "Nerd" as an insult, at its most cruel and vicious, indexes something far more reprehensible than femininity: it describes a failure to become a man.
The cultural scholar and artist Paul B. Preciado has convincingly argued in his book Pornotopia that, in the 1950s and 60s, the Playboy magazine played a role of providing men with a way of living a domestic life that shored up, rather than threatened, their masculinity. In a way, what the Marvel Cinematic Universe does today is not too different: it offers a way of consuming geek culture without having to be tainted by association with the stink of a nerd's basement. Because those basements remain, and remain just as ever associated with gender failure.
The stereotypical nerds who populate them today are, however, worse. They are geek culture as its most noxious: the basement dweller of today doesn't just collect action figures and compulsively onanize himself to anime girls. He is also probably some kind of a GamerGate misogynist, if not an incel terrorist in the budding stages. Any kind of social inclusion of the sort that geek culture benefited from has its left-behinds, those who have to be disavowed in order to earn acceptance for the rest. I want to be clear here: I say that not because I particularly empathize with virulently anti-feminist men who think that the SJWs are ruining culture and who want a governemnt-issued Asian girlfriend; I say that because I empathize with feeling like a failure of a man.
I will, however, quote from a famous controversialist and fellow trans woman Andrea Long Chu, who in her famous provocative essay Females expresses an idea we all come across from time to time, namely that the line between an incel and an egg is just a few millimeters of political consciousness:
Article: There's something to this. Taken seriously, it suggests that the manosphere red-piller's resentment of immigrants, black people, and queers is a sadistic expression of his own gender dysphoria. In this reading, he is an abortive man, a beta trapped in an alpha's body, consumed with the desire to be female and desperately trying to repress it. His desire to increase his manhood is not primary, but a second-tier defense mechanism. Those around him assume he is a leader, a provider, a president; but his greatest fear is that they are mistaken. He radicalizes—shoots up a school, builds a wall—in order to avoid transitioning, the way some closeted trans women join the military in order to get the girl beaten out of them.
***
I originally started writing this essay over half a year ago, intending it to be a response to, or a commentary on, Mia Mulder's video essay on trans history, Was Elagabalus Of Rome Transgender? In it, Mulder tries to approach one of the most vexing questions of trans history: who do we get to call trans, in history. She does this in a rather simplistic fashion (the queer theorist in me, that is the bitch in me, wants to say: like a good historian), shoring up the available sources and, based on them, coming to a conclusion regarding two historical figures. The Roman emperor Elagabalus was a trans woman; Queen Kristina of Sweden was not a trans man.
This is trans history understood through the logic of the closet; the point of it is to get the record straight about who was and was not trans in history or, to be less condescending, to undo the historical violence of closeting that renders the trans identity of certain historical figures hidden from history. Now, I have a lot of respect for Mulder, so I am going to assume she chose this simplistic framework not because she is a particular adherent to it, but rather because it was what made her entire argument work – the argument being that we should be careful with who we call trans in history, especially on thin and speculative evidence. We have solid grounds to call Elagabalus that, and quite a lot of support in the sources – but for Kristina we have at best intangible speculation and our political hopes.
It sounds quite reasonable and common-sense, and God knows that ever so often, we all come across a queer history take on Twitter or Tumbler that is so galaxy brain that we all wish people would stop trying to justify their own existance by digging through the bones of long dead folk. However, that annoyance aside, I do actually disagree with Mulder's conclusions – or rather, with the way she formulates the question.
The issue isn't even the ostensibly obvious problem of whether labels such as transgender are applicable outside of the historical contexts that gave birth to them; the debate about that has been going on for as long as gay and lesbian history has been a thing, and I have no intention in trying to resolve it here. No, my issue is not with the word "transgender", but with the word "was".
The answers that Mulder's question returns trend towards the binary of "yes" or "no". This is how it gets resolved; of course, we can settle on some kind of a "we don't know" or "we can't say for certain", but inherent in those is the assumption that perhaps someday we will know and will be able to say for certain. Possibly somewhere stuck between the pages of some Swedish register there is a confession from Queen Katrina in which she says "but I am a man!"? The issue, however, is that as neat as it would be to find a way to prove that there once was a trans-masc on the throne of Sweden, it's not really revealing anything that we don't already know. Trans people have existed throughout history; the binary gender system is a product of a particular Western epistemology, propagated throughout the world through imperialism and settler colonialism. Whether this or that individual was really trans or not is secondary to that.
There is a different question, however, which I feel is more interesting and politically salient: how could Emperor Elagabalus or Queen Kristina have been trans? What potential did they have for living a trans life?
***
Trans history is populated by ghosts. By that, I don't only mean the usual kinds of hauntings, though there are plenty of them too. I am thinking more of the fact that to immerse oneself in trans history is to come across a great number of things, lives, and stories that could have been, but didn't necessarily happen – and which yet stay with us all the same. If that sounds too poetic to you, let me give you a concrete example. It's the one I started with, George Dornin. His memoir records a brief moment of cross-dressing pleasure which, of course, was not atypical for his time. What justifies it is that it was a matter of necessity, of a want of women, of special circumstances; that is what made it permissible for him to wear the dress, to receive the attention of fellow men, and to later recall this event as a silly anecdote from the rough times in the frontier. But this memoir also records an absence – the absence of Georgia Dornin, who put on the dress and felt more at home in it than she could have expected; of Georgia Dornin who didn't go on to become a Republican legislator but rather went to join San Francisco's budding demi-monde, who went on to live a rich and beautiful trans life among others like her.
But such a Georgia would be far less likely to leave with us a memoir like that; we would sooner learn about her from the police chronicle and the records of the court charging her with the 'public indecency' that is crossdressing (which became a crime in San Francisco soon after the boomtown period was over). More likely, however, we would not have learned about her at all; helped by her whiteness, she would stand a good chance of living her life as a woman, and leaving no testimony to the contrary. Absent, of course, an archeologist digging up a woman's grave to report that there are "man's" bones inside.
Still, this is just speculation. We don't have Georgia; we have George.
Or do we? We have no guarantee – other than the stifling cisgenderism ruling over our understanding of history – that George Dornin didn't spend the rest of his life thinking back to that night, to that time wearing the dress and awkwardly moving through the first steps of the dance, of that aborted transition. Of course, he couldn't have gone further along its track: he had a life to live, and a life he was loath to abandon. What makes a society transphobic is not only individual acts of violence targeted against trans people, but also the way that the very foundations of that society are built so as to prevent trans lives from being lived. George had to know – even if he was not necessarily conscious of it – that there were consequences to staying in the dress; it's not difficult to imagine the rational, sad choice of putting it down, and living the rest of his heartbroken over what he was not allowed to become.
Or maybe that is just what Georgia wanted us to think, and the memoir is just one part of the larger ruse of a canny trans woman looking to avoid suspicion as she lived a double life of a Republican politician and a famed stage queen? It's hard to imagine, but it is not impossible: it is a part of the larger trans potential of history.
Then again, even if someday someone will unearth a photo album from a San Francisco cabaret, c. 1870, where Dornin performs as the queen of the night, it won't resolve the question one way or another. Maybe he wasn't trans; maybe he didn't think of himself as a woman; maybe he just liked the dress that much.
The point is this: he could have been a she, even if he wasn't. And I am personally haunted by Georgia Dornin.
***
Gender is not a hydraulic system. When I say that there are many trans women on SV, I don't mean to imply that it is because the nerd culture is so male dominated it needs to trans parts of itself to remain in the state of an equilibrium.
(Well, okay, I am looking to imply it so as to hook a potential reader and get them to read the rest of the essay; if you've made it this far, it means it has probably worked!)
What I do mean, however, is that gender is not an individual thing, some transcendental quality we come to possess in isolation from the world around us. No, we assemble our genders from the materials at our disposal; we make do with the potentials made available to us. And this implies that maybe there really is something about nerd culture which makes it easier to become trans in it, or through it. Furthermore, I'd like to propose, pace Sarah Z, that this something has not necessarily translated to the ascendant geek culture, that it rather belongs to its refuse, to the nerd's basement – misogyny and all.
Hold! Don't shoot! Have a dank meme!
This is very funny, but should also be at least somewhat disturbing. After all, it suggests that there is something shared between being a trans girl and a white supremacist; and that this shared root goes back precisely to one of those parts of the nerd culture that has been deemed far too cringe-worthy to ever become a part of the new geek ascendancy.
It's a common knowledge in certain parts of the internet, and especially among those trans women who are not terminally online, that a Twitter account with a picrew avatar depicting a catgirl on a trans flag background is to be avoided like a plague. The twitter trans girl is the ugly sister of both the successful post-Transgender Tipping Point trans woman, as well as of the politically active street trans organizer. She represents everything that is immature about trans women, every bit of bad taste (in anime, in pornography, and in fashion), every bad trans take, and generally the failure of certain segments of the trans population to go outside and touch grass. Though she is invariably a member of some elaborate trans-Atlantic polycule, she has probably not gotten laid in years, and her views on sex are unrealistic and deeply problematic. No one says that out loud, but many quietly agree that she knows very little about actually being a woman. She mistakes a fantasy of a womanhood for the real thing, and badly needs to grow up and learn what the real world's like.
In short, a trans catgirl on Twitter dot com is a huge nerd.
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Have you ever seen a trans woman assure people that she is not like the other geeky trans girls?
The history of trans hauntings is a history of trans disavowals. They happen to the side of their more familiar relative, trans erasures, those conscious attempts at suppressing the trans potential present within history. Disavowals operate on a different level: they are the act of refusing to see yourself as sharing a root with a different group of trans folk. The classic example would be the rise of the transsexual woman from the 1950s, who emerged by disavowing the campy transvestite, all in order to convince the medical and legal gatekeepers that she could pass into a kind of a faux cisheteronormativity. Though I don't think Christine Jorgensen (the media phenomenon, not the person to whom it was pinned) ever said "I am not like those fairies", she certainly had to convince the world that she was definitely not one.
Or, to look somewhere closer to our time, Kristin Beck, that face of trans veterans, claiming that she has nothing in common with Chelsea Manning. Her statement is worth quoting at length, because it is so telling:
Article: We are right at a point in history were many people are beginning to understand who we are as Transgender, diverse, and that we are just like everyone else. We are one. Now Manning just dirtied the hope of a truly free America. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.['s] "I have a Dream" speech was 50 years ago (...) I am still hoping for his dream of equality for all. America to be a beacon of Freedom and equality (...) Manning is a tarnish on my dream, he [sic] is a tarnish on Dr. King[']s Dream.
What Beck does here is an attempt to render Chelsa Manning not a trans woman; to make her herness a ghost. Of course, this can only lead to further hauntings, because no matter how much Manning's supposed "treachery" is disavowed, it will remain within the ambit of transness as we know it. But Beck needs to, must, convince others that she is not like Chelsea Manning: that she is a good soldier, a good citizen, a good woman.
I don't know what Beck's opinion on trans catgirls is, but given their preponderance towards communism, I am reasonably sure it tends towards the negative. Which means that a lot of trans women in general have a lot in common with Kristin Beck. I am reasonably sure that a lot of trans catgirls fall under that rubric too. Which shouldn't be surprising – self loathing is a part of the brand.
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One of the nasty things about trans histories is that they happen in history. Let's go back to George Dornin for a moment. The fact that he got to wear a dress, have good fun in it, and then put it down can't be disentangled from a whole bunch of less-than-pleasant contexts that lurk in the background. The skewed gender ratio which enabled the cross-dressing party was due to the practicalities of settler colonialism; the fact that his wearing of a dress was probably perceived mostly as a kind of a joke and not a social threat can't be separated from his status as a white man. The list goes on.
None of those contexts would disappear in the potential, if unlived, life of Georgia Dornin. In fact, they would be constitutive of her transness, providing an unavoidable background and foundation for it. To acknowledge that wouldn't make her invalid, but rather would be necessary to even begin to reckon with the ghosts of our trans history she could (but didn't, but maybe someday will) represent.
Let's go back to nerds for a moment. Let's go back to those incels that Andrea Long Chu sees as being on the cusp of transitioning. And let's go back to Sarah Z's video essay. After all, she devotes a significant part of it to discussing the well-known problem of the exclusion of women from the geek culture, and of the ambient misogyny present in it. We are, I think, all familiar with those critiques from elsewhere; we now know that much of the geek aesthetic and its representation of women is to one degree or another sexist, defined by the male gaze, and written by men, for men.
Only some of those men later turned out to not have been men at all. And this returns us to the issue of potential, and disavowal.
What sort of trans potentials are latent within the dregs of nerd culture? What kind of a trans culture can emerge from it, and how can we account for it without cringing at it, but also without whitewashing it? How can we talk about misogyny that becomes a feedstock for the love of women?
There are many trans women on SV, and there are many trans women in other highly focused nerd spaces. Those trans women have developed their unique culture which, as all cultures, is as beautiful as it is problematic, as tiring as it is enticing, which is no less trite than it is profound. However, what we still lack is a good way of accounting for it, in no small part because so much of it is being disavowed, both to establish oneself as a mature trans woman as well as to cut oneself from the associations with everything that's noxious about nerd culture. Neither of these will do.
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One doesn't have to have a diploma in women's studies to dissect the screenshot posted by Abigail Thorn as at least somewhat sexist. It's the kind of comic book pinup (rendered with the fastidious work of Fallout: New Vegas modders) that we've spent decades deconstructing and criticizing as representations of unrealistic visions of women's bodies and their incessant sexualisation. Yet, Thorn recontextualizes it into a prehistory of her own transness. It serves as a proof – only legible in hindsight – of her womanhood.
Risking reading too much into a single post and a single screenshot – though trans history is often forced to deal with such limited material – I'd suggest that this post posits trans catgirlhood as a kind of trans immaturity. After all, Thorn's media persona is definitely not a catgirl. She staged her coming out through references to the classics of feminist thought and to elaborate theatricality, showing both her mastery of the medium of a video essay as well as that of her femininity.
In this schema, the catgirl is not substantial: it is a fantasy that is yet to become flesh. It represents an unrealized potential, but one that can come into its own through a transformation into a more grounded, realistic form. It is Dornin's willing, but inept dance, a possible first step that can never be the end goal in itself. This is not something that could have fit into her coming out video – or if it could have, at most as a joke.
But could it be taken seriously? How can we account for trans stories that don't lead us through the familiar fields of gay love, clubbing, and secret life of crossdressing, but rather through cRPGs, comic books, My Little Pony, and bad cartoon porn? How do we map out routes that trans lives take through the rejecta of geekdom?
One approach – and I think this is the one Thorn defaults to, if not outright suggests – would be to try to sift out trans meaning from this cultural detritus. In this view, the trans catgirl in her egg stage is merely a receptacle holding something more valuable and beautiful instead. All that is problematic about it, its twee sexism and all the other awful associations it holds, become merely a kind of a cishet nerd muck from which we save nuggets of clean transness.
Or we could instead – and I think we should – refuse to hold to this separation. Instead, we may try to think of how transness is a potential bound up in even the most prurient and problematic aspects of geek culture. The persistent appeal and continuous disavowal of trans catgirlhood attests to that. It is precisely what is desirable about it that is also why we so often feel compelled to refuse it.
The question, after all, is not really about whether trans catgirls are valid, and to what exact degree is this or that aspect of nerd culture "eggy", but rather how the former is assembled from the latter. And if we can answer that, we can begin to talk about trans catgirls as neither neither the backdrop to identify against, nor a developmental stage to move through, but a viable and substantial mode of trans life, one no less beautiful, no less productive, and no less entangled in the boundless messiness of sex, gender, and desire than any other kind of it.
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