“In the 1970s, scientists realized that humpback whales sing structured songs. Strangely, even if they’re coming from thousands of miles apart, males converging on mating grounds all sing the same song. Humpback song is composed of about ten different consecutive themes, each made of repeated phrases of about ten different notes requiring about fifteen seconds to sing. The song lasts about ten minutes. Then the whale repeats it. For hours in the ocean, in their season of courtship, the whales sing. Each ocean’s song is different, and over months and years it changes in the same way for the thousands of whales in each ocean, the song somehow a continual work in progress, fully shared. Sometimes the change is sudden and radical. In the year 2000, researchers announced that humpbacks’ song off Australia’s east coast was “replaced rapidly and completely” by the song Indian Ocean humpbacks off Australia’s west coast had been singing. It seems that a few “foreigners” made the trek west to east, and their song became such an instant hit with the easterners that everybody had to sing it. The researchers wrote, “Such a revolutionary change is unprecedented in animal cultural vocal traditions.” And once a phrase in the song disappears, it has never again been heard, despite over twenty years of eavesdropping. What do the songs mean? Researcher Peter Tyack says, “We may have to thank the evolving aesthetic sensibilities of generations of female humpbacks for the musical features of the males’ songs.” Songs of humpback whales, by the way, have sold millions of recordings. We share that aesthetic. That might be both the biggest mystery and the best evidence of like-mindedness.”
This omnipresent cult of the body Is extraordinary. It Is the only object on which everyone Is made to concentrate, not as a source of pleasure, but as an object of frantic concern, in the obsessive fear or failure or substandard performance, a sign and an anticipation of death, that death to which no one can any longer give a meaning, but which everyone knows has at all times to be prevented. The body is cherished in the perverse certainty of its uselessness, in the total certainty of its non-resurrection. Now, pleasure Is an effect of the resurrection of the body, by which It exceeds that hormonal, vascular and dietetic equilibrium in which we seek to imprison It, that esorcism by fitness and hygiene. So the body has to be made to forget pleasure as present grace, to forget its possible metamorphosis into other forms of appearance and become dedicated to the utopian preservation of a youth that Is, in any case, already lost. For the body which doubts its own existence Is already half-dead, and the current semi-yogic, semi ecstatic cult of the body Is a morbid preoccupation. The care taken of the body while It Is alive prefigures the way It will be made up in the funeral home, where It will be given a smile that Is really "into" death. This "into" Is the key to everything. The point Is not to be nor even to have a body, but to be in your own body. Into your sexuality, into your own desire.
Ballet, like opera, is wonderful because it is monstrous, the hyper-development of skills nobody needs, a twisting of human bodies and souls into impossible positions, the purchase of light with blood.
Irina Dumitrescu, "Swan, Late: The unexpected joys of adult beginner ballet."
oh boyish girl. I hope that one day we share enough words that I can tell you exactly what I see.
bruise child let me love you. your skin doesn't have to go purple or green unremarked. I can't really tell you how much I mean it when I say you can turn up at my door any old day or way.
I want to cook you shitty food that tastes like homes you only ever stayed the night in. I want to take a warm wash cloth to you and I won't get mad when you stiffen up scared.
tender tones that promise to be patient. I made cacio e pepe, it's like buttered noodles but fancy. you don't have to explain yourself so much.
I'll do my best not to tell you how many times I cried for the sheer hurt of knowing that you must have been out there. it hurt the whole time I cried for you.
I don't have answers but I do have a space on the couch between my wife and I. I dont care if we fuck, I want to soften the blow that's still hitting you
real quick question, we do have our own opinions on this but were really curious as to yours: if, regarding someone whos plural, a headmate would normally be considered tme is in a tma system, would they also be considered tma?
unless I'm missing some important element, I would absolutely say yes. maybe said headmate would not have personally internalized transmisogyny as something that refers to what they are, but in every other way I think they would be bound by the structures of transmisogyny by mere virtue of being in a body classed as transfeminine. I don't think power tends to honor or understand plurality, and so I don't think it cares to distinguish between headmates. just my singlet-ass take though
Hi @galaxydotwav, I've spent a lot of time thinking about plurality from a Marxist (dialectical materialist) and transfeminist standpoint, and although I've yet to properly write anything beyond a post here or there, like this one, I've had a number of ideas brewing for a materialist "manifesto" of sorts on plurality -- something I feel is heavily lacking from the space. I also am a trans woman who has a headmate who arguably isn't. I am very confident in fielding this kind of question.
This will be an exceptionally in depth answer with footnotes to explain things that would otherwise require a significant detour, plus my sources, so I've kept the everything other than the TDLR under a read more.
To answer your question in brief, @mousidy is correct. Plurality is completely illegible to power, except for in the context of psychiatry and sanism. Generally, the internal model of one's system should be excluded or significantly limited from considerations about their interactions with power. This is because plurality lands squarely in the realm of the ideal¹, and until it manifests into the realm of the material¹ it does not matter what one alter identifies as compared to another. This goes the same for an individual's personal gender, as I explain under the read more.
To put it another way, if a Black person is plural and has a white alter, is that alter exempt from racism? Regardless of who is fronting, no. The same goes for transmisogyny. If an individual is marked² as transfeminine in one way or another, they are acceptable targets for transmisogyny.
For a far more in depth explanation of why we should limit the inclusion of plurality and personal gender identity in our analysis of the structures of Gender as a system...
Plurality is a model that serves to explain an individuals³ personal experience of themselves and of the world. It is broad enough to encompass any and all experiences of personal "multitude", from the system with an official medical diagnosis of DID with rigid and consistent dissociative amnesia, to the average blurry median system with some dissociative amnesia, to the individual who has conversations with internal voices, to tulpamancy, and beyond.
This model is best understood as analogous to being transgender. An individuals personal gender identity is shaped by every single social interaction they've ever had since birth to the day they die, complicated by factors like class, race, age, culture, their upbringing, their sex -- and if you ascribe to this portion of Serano's theory, their subconscious sex -- and innumerable more. There are no two individuals with identical gender identities, in just the same way that no two systems could possibly be identical.
An individual's gender and an individual's system are alike in this way: neither are a physical thing that can be held. They can only be made manifest in the world through the actions of the individual. They, in only the way an idea can exist within one's consciousness, are changing constantly, at the speed of thought, and through nearly untraceable paths as the individual interacts the world around them and their own thoughts.
The problem with the idealist¹ conception of gender is that it conflates an individual's personal gender -- this impossibly nuanced and ever changing concept -- with their position within Gender as a system. Gender as a system is the structure of transmisogyny, the social categories of Man and Woman, the pay gap, and conversion therapy. The terminology TMA and TME refers to material social relations⁴ that dictate the way you move through society, not an individual's gender identity.
This is why we say that the category TMA is created by transmisogyny. Nobody is "born" TMA or TME, it is through the structures of transmisogyny that this category is created -- composed of those who transmisogyny is "designed" to punish. It is a specific fail state of Gender that consists primarily of transgender women and transfeminine people.
I say primarily because of the exact question you pose. If a system is composed of one trans woman and one man, the question of "is this system TMA" would only consider the individual's relationship to Gender, not their specific gender identity/identities.
This is the utility of the TMA/TME distinction: it allows analysis of Gender as a structure to near completely ignore the considerations of personal identity -- almost always a fruitless task -- and focus exclusively on the material social relations that dictate our lives.
Personally though, I actually find the TMA/TME distinction to be a bit limited in scope. Although it has its utility, I find a much better answer to this question and others like it in the Gender Ternary analysis by @egregore-engine. The ternary between Power, Not Power, and the Subaltern is more effective at explaining this specific nuance as it completely sidesteps the question of personal gender identity. However, both models can be used to come to the same conclusion:
Regardless of an individuals personal gender identity, when they are marked as transfeminine (or more broadly, as in the Gender Ternary, subaltern) in one way or another, they are acceptable targets for violence.
Footnotes
1. When I say "the ideal" and "the material", I am referring to the philosophical concepts in dialectical materialism.
For a very quick and significantly simplified primer, the "ideal" refers to ideas, and in dialectical materialism is considered as part of "consciousness", whereas the "material" refers to material conditions (actual things, including social relations, and the relationships you have to those things) and is referred to as matter. Dialectical materialism holds that:
The relationship between matter and consciousness is dialectical [note: dialectical simply means "in a relationship, mutually impacting each other]. In this relationship, matter comes first, and matter is the source of consciousness; it decides consciousness. However, consciousness is not totally passive, it can impact back to matter through the practical activities of human beings.
(Nguyen, 2023)
2. For a brief introduction to the concept of markedness, I think @strawhatsufi's post on the concept is a good starting place. In this context I am taking the linguist concept and expanding it to physical markers (I am not the first to do this, I am sure). The most salient example of this in the imperial core is race, to state the obvious, dark skin is racially marked. There is no inherent meaning to the colour of one's skin, but there is a exceptionally strong social meaning. This goes true for gender as well; everything has a gendered marking, from clothes like skirts and pants, to physical characteristics like stubble and breasts, to legal concepts like ASAB and partners in marriage ("man and wife"). However many of these gendered markings is accessible in that context is how society sorts you within Gender in that moment and determines what violence is acceptable to perform against you.
3. I want to be clear about my use of "individual" in this context. Although we might be tempted to use the term to delineate between different alters, it is much more useful for an "individual" to refer to the single social unit of a "person" -- a single body. This is not to dismiss the individuality of alters, but instead to recognize that a system only has one body to interact with the world. Alters may choose to use the body in different, contradictory ways, but a single body can only act a single way in a single moment.
4. Although to some it may sound contradictory, social relations are material in nature. Your lease is a social relation that is soundly material, just the same way your position within Gender is a material social relation. But as a reminder, a lease can end, and your position within Gender can change.
Sources
Nguyen, L. (2023). Chapter 1, Part II, Section 3: The Relationship Between Matter and Consciousness. In The Worldview and Philosophical Methodology of Marxism-Leninism (pp. 88, 92). essay, Banyan House.
On the other hand, the family is where most of the rape happens on this earth, and most of the murder. No one is likelier to rob, bully, blackmail, manipulate, or hit you, or inflict unwanted touch, than family. Logically, announcing an intention to “treat you like family” (as so many airlines, restaurants, banks, retailers, and workplaces do) ought to register as a horrible threat. Instead, to be metaphorically “family” in someone’s eyes makes-believe that one has something quite … unfamilial. Namely: acceptance, solidarity, an open promise of help, welcome, and care.
— Sophie Lewis, Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation
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