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.
Though this decision is not purely an internally motivated one, I don't consider myself an egg, or a trans person in the closet, even though it's entirely possible and maybe even likely that in some other world - one with fantastical magic or technology, different notions of gender, or simply a minor change to my personal history - that I would not be as I am. I live in the world as I live in it, and I think counterfactuals can only inform how I think of myself so much before they become meaningless. In some other world I would be a woman, or a man, or something else, or a tremendously lethal robot. Maybe even a catgirl. It doesn't have to matter. (Maybe it didn't matter to George Dornin, either.)
2.III Source: It Came To Me In A Dream
Because I'm bored and releasing my skepticism inhibitors a little bit and seeing what things bubble up when I accept posting stuff whose justification might as well be I Made It The Fuck Up dot mp4 is as fun as it is
intellectually unsound uh,
interesting, I'm going to write another essay. What is it that makes us want to be something? What is it that lets us obtain it? These are not, unfortunately, trivial questions. Similar questions motivate entire fields of research, like economics. But the economics of gender - and desire, and reproduction, and so many other social
things, because they're entangled though not identical - are, at least below the graduate level, either farcical or very basic. I'll try and not be the former, though I don't think I can avoid the latter, because lmao, I am barely qualified for any of this
at best and half of what I'm going to say is supposition and the other half is opinion.
2.III.a Cooking the Egg
Social goods do not make up a hydraulic system for an undifferentiated commodity below a certain, and possibly useless, level of abstraction. They are not water. Though, it's worth saying that they are not stone. Not always. Systemic pressures shape our gender and shape our
choices about gender. The language of the closet and the egg, where sexuality and gender are some hidden variable, effectively immovable, are extremely useful for conveying the pain that making the choice to not live a trans life, a gay life, a queer life has upon some. Agency and choice are so often flattened, and with the particular dynamic of the free choice being the most valid target for restriction and recrimination, while the unfree choice needs to be accommodated - which, so framed, seems almost ironic even though I know the logic behind it - a painful, excruciating choice often has to be described as no choice at all for that pain to find relief from the larger system.
But this is philosophy, where someone can be free even in their cell, even under threat of death and pain. It's also more personally true to me - I don't see myself as trans, closeted or in an egg or otherwise. I have also seriously considered, at points, living a trans life. I may well do so in the future. I don't reflect on those considerations as being idle thoughts or mere dalliances, and in a nearby universe I might be contextualizing moments from my childhood, the entertainment I consume and my creative endeavours as being part of a trans journey. Those moments still exist, could still be contextualized in such a way. I wore dresses as a child, did drag and wore tights on stage, made female characters in RPGs, consumed specific genres of porn. I wear my hair long, I still dance when standing idly, I enjoy the length and thinness of my fingers. And given an arbitrary choice of bodies, it's unlikely I'd make one exactly like what I have, in
any respect. That's not nothing. But it doesn't have to be something. It doesn't have to hurt me.
Now, to be clear, this is privilege. Not quite white or patriarchal privilege, per se, though I benefit from both and those benefits factor into my decisions, but the privilege of being born into a life where I am, if not free of want, if not living as my most ideal self, close enough to a local maxima of contentedness that my choice
feels like a choice. My want does not drag me onward and outward, through rough terrain and economic slopes, to something difficult or even impossible to fully grasp. I won't claim that this is possible for everyone, or any moral superiority to me or those who made me. It just is what it is. I could live a trans life; I don't feel an egg.
One of the issues with breaking away from egg/closet frame is that it can simultaneously feel like letting society off the hook for everything it does and being the libertine who will drag the movement down by promoting bestiality or sex with minors at Pride. In the broadest sense, it's inevitable that the structures of society will shape what sorts of lives are seen as possible. Does that mean a society which makes trans lives difficult, painful and short should be left off the hook? This is an awful conclusion for anyone, but particularly for someone who doesn't feel the eggshell cutting into them, to argue for. Does it mean all modes of living should be supported? Leaving aside the moral smears which I'm sure we're all familiar with, let's once again make things personal. If I want to be a multi-billion dollar human-shaped war-machine - and no, that's not an attack helicopter joke, it's me saying
A Stranger I Remain is a trans anthem - and I'm not living in a society with the approximate resources of God, it's hard for me to say that this want should be satisfied. On the other hand, lower the budget and this becomes a transphobic
bon mot about access to care.
For the people who most need advocacy, who most want to live queer lives, the closet and the egg are useful frameworks, and definitely useful
tools to short-circuit the complexities that can blunt the real moral urgency of changing the status quo. I'm privileged, I don't need such advocacy, I've found an equilibrium - my gender is hydraulic. Other people have genders of stone. Solidity is a function of pressure.
2.III.b Gender Volcanism
Right around when Joe Biden was elected President of the United States, there was a... meme, for lack of a better word, going around, that the President-Elect was going to round up the masculine/right-wing/unvaccinated and
forcefem them. Many jokes were had, at least among those I hang out with, about signing up for the feminization camps, or how (unintentionally?) eager some of the fear-mongering seemed. Of course, it didn't actually happen. Unless, of course, you want to consider the entire structure of present (WASP) society a system to forcefem those assigned female at birth and forcemasc those assigned male at birth, plus whichever intersex people get caught in the gears. This isn't yet opposed to the logic of the egg, where people have a hidden variable saying what they are, but it does make me think - if our present world is a forcing system, and presumably the world of Joe Biden's Forcefem Camps is too (for most people), let us try to imagine the liberated system, where every hidden variable comes to light.
It's... pretty difficult to do. When do systems of incentive and disincentive turn coercive, or make people inauthentic to who they 'really are'? Someone like George Dornin, for a night, could be cajoled, bribed or (maybe) even tempted into stepping into the role of a woman. If stepping into that role for a lifetime, perhaps in a place dominated by men (but perhaps not), meant being esteemed, or cared for, or desired, (or simply paid) in ways one would not as a man, is that a mechanism which pushes people into a new closet, the way the risk of losing those things - the love of a family, the acceptance of a community - keeps people in their current ones? The philosopher in me says there might not be a difference in any way that matters.
He also says the difference is pain. It doesn't have to matter, under this view, whether the shape you're in is you in a transcendental sense. Just whether it hurts to hold, that you feel yourself like a rock lodged in your heart, when you want to be fluid, to flow to a new equilibrium. This... only kind of solves our problem. Pain can be treated in many ways; cry into stacks of money, great social esteem for successfully struggling against your desires, drugging it down... okay maybe not the last one. Anyway, a society which offers those as solutions over transitioning might have dealt with the pain, but uh, possibly in an unsatisfactory manner. It's not making trans lives possible. But if pain is the point, then that's only an issue if it's causing a surfeit of pain. Thanks for nothing, philosopher.
Further, how much pain, and of what sort, needs to be accounted for? If it
can be accounted for, as interior as the experience of it is. Look too hard for measures of pain and you reach ghoulish arguments which say transitioning ought to be painful - after all, if pain is incommensurable, then it can only be measured against itself. Let those and only those whose lives hurt them more than tedious, infuriating searches for medical opinions, cruel bureaucracy and transphobia transition; that they're willing to suffer all that proves they are escaping a pain which is
great enough. Their gender is a hot, sharp stone in their chest. It is volcanic, ready to liquefy.
It's here to explode. Give them some hormones.
2.III.c Everything You Want Is On The Other Side Of HRT
Let's try and circle back; meeting literary theory half-way or not, I do like theses. What makes a gender desirable? Does it even make sense to want
gender, like it's a single thing? In my previous post I considered the mode of trans living where all I did was work to be referred to by a different set of a pronouns. Specifically online, but in this case the context is less important than the want. In the actual world, pronouns aren't simply short placeholder words, even in English's rather stripped out grammar. Refer to someone as 'she' and things are connoted, associations are pulled. There's almost certainly an interesting study about how people react differently to a story just by swapping those little words around, I wouldn't know, I'm a philosopher, sources are for other people. Imagine instead that they were merely words. How satisfying would gaining their use be, if it didn't come with other people thinking some things about you, or associating with you differently? We see this pulled as a transphobic tactic, even, whenever somebody gets it into their head to abandon their trenches at 'man' and 'woman' and try to move everything over to some other term like 'double-x chromosome haver' or whatever. Sure, you can have those terms - but only stripped of all meaning.
It never works, but the impulse is there, and so is the anger at the impulse. The anger is to an extent about just what the act demonstrates about the priorities and opinions of those attempting it, but also, I think, because the act itself is a cause for anger. An attempt, however futile, of taking away of more than pronouns and the word 'woman', but all the - imagine me gesturing vaguely and broadly -
stuff associated with it. Being 'her' is not enough, the want is to be
her (or him, or them, or etc.)
, the imaginary person who lives in... the brain? The heart? The gut? I don't know. But let's consider that person: who they are, how they live, how people treat them. They aren't just a pronoun and a word, are they - I know mine isn't. How do the feelings about that person change if you change their environment - a world with no people, a world with accepting people, a world with hateful people, a world with worshipful people, with people like them or unlike them? A transphobic world which, just as that person becomes who you see in the mirror, decides to take their ball and go home; everyone's welcome at Ladies' Night and all the bathrooms are unisex. Does that person change? Do they move nearer or further away? Is it even right to talk about just
one inner person?
If George Dornin's settler ballroom had never ended, would a Georgia have been found, in the heart and gut under that calico dress?
2.III.d oh i guess this is the crash part of this writing style
Wow I hated writing that section, and I hate reading it. Good lord where is the point?
Ugh.
I suppose all of this essay is to say the logic of the egg and the closet frames society as, essentially, an antagonistic actor. It makes shit worse. It fucks you up. It boxes you in. Which is... true, yeah. Two word summary: society bad. Frankly I don't know, if you were describing queer lives to an alien, how many words your summary would be before it'd stop being 100% negative about society. But if we talk about the society
to be created, which might be created in miniature, here and there and everywhere, or even just the
selves to be created, past that moment of volcanism and into shaping the flowing rock, I don't think the egg and the closet remain helpful. The neutral ground does not exist: the potentiality for lives isn't something that can just be opened up to reveal something true and transcendental. Society can't stop shaping the forms of what we want.
Is that a good enough thesis? Ugh. Feels a bit pedestrian after some of those turns of phrase. Anyway, just to repeat that basically all of this is opinion, however florid the prose, and if you say 'that's not my experience' I will 100% absolutely not argue with you.
God, let me never write another essay in this style, I'll take misuse of set theory over this any day of the week.
