One of my favorite pieces of trans theory I've read is Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity by C. Riley Snorton.
The title of this book is a reference to the 1999 Mos Def album, and specifically the track "Mathematics."
The song focuses on how structural racism (particularly antiblackness) functions in the United States through citing different stats and numbers-- how much money is spent on the US military, how many Americans own cell phones being surveilled, how many people have AIDS, three strikes laws, minimum wage, unemployment rates, budget cuts being funneled into more police, rates of incarceration and probation, health & economic outcomes sorted by zip codes, and so on.
The specific lines from "Mathematics" that Snorton references explicitly in Black on Both Sides are:
"Numbers is hardly real and they never have feelings
But you push too hard, even numbers got limits"
The book's beating heart is concerned with the necropolitics of Black trans life, and how Black trans people are discussed, known, constructed as death statistics. How many Black trans women are murdered, how many Black trans people kill themselves.
Since reading that book, I've been listening to the song a lot. I've been thinking about how another song I listen to a lot probably took direct inspiration from "Mathematics"-- a song called "Strange Arithmetic" by The Coup.
In "Strange Arithmetic" the lyrics focus on the ways in which public education functions to socially reproduce racial capitalism to ensure submission and funnel people into (acceptance of) powerlessness. It opens with the verse:
"History has taught me some strange arithmetic
Using swords, prison bars, and pistol grips.
English is the art of bombing towns
While assuring that you really only blessed the ground.
Science is that honorable, useful study
Where you contort the molecules and then you make that money.
In mathematics, dead children don't get added
But they count the cost of bullets comin' out the automatic."
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, especially writing fundraisers for friends in Gaza. Last week, I wrote a post for a teenager named Ahmed. Two weeks ago the Israeli military bombed a sewage line to destroy access to potable water in his area.
I googled "Gaza water news" and I saw articles discussing how often this exact tactic is used. I read analysis by a Palestinian activist, Ahmad Abushawish, titled "In Gaza, water kills too" where he outlines how the Israeli army targets Gaza's water infrastructure, blocks entry of materials for repair, and kills anyone working in the water sector.
I wrote that week about the struggle for water globally, and how control over water systems is so central to settler-colonialism. When I drink water, it is impossible for me to not think about Gaza, and Flint Michigan, and Standing Rock, and the fight over the pipeline expansion in Canada.
After months of starvation, famine in Gaza was officially declared. I read the news. The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations says 98.5% of cropland in the Gaza strip is destroyed or inaccessible in militarized zones. The World Health Organization says that 100% of people in Gaza now suffer acute levels of food insecurity.
Israel mobilizes to occupy the remainder of Gaza. Al-Jazeera reports that 86% of the Gaza strip is now either a militarized zone, under forced evacuation, or both at once. This is where Ahmed is living. This is where his family's damaged tent is.
Ahmed messages me. He tells me, "the army is approaching our area, there are sounds of bombing, and we feel hungry."
Everything is statistics. Everything is deeply, viscerally personal. Everyone is a number.
being nonbinary in and of itself does not imply any proximity to manhood relative to women.
nonbinary people, whether TMA or TME, are not “closer to” being men than women are by virtue of being nonbinary.
some might be, but the default is not some combination/in-between of man and woman. many are pretty much classed alongside women, and many are classed (with all other marginalizations, including being affected by transmisogyny without the ability to exempt oneself from its structural forms, being equal) below women. nonbinary encompasses infinite relationships to sexgender systems.
being nonbinary is not “trans men who won’t fully let go of womanhood” or “trans women who won’t fully let go of manhood.”
there’s a vibe a lot of people bring to discourses on nonbinary subjectivity that implies we are duplicitous and attempting to game the system by playing both sides or something. There is a cynical assumption that nonbinary people are not accurately describing our lives and social realities, and are instead trying to manipulate others with our (claimed, implicitly false) identities.
after building up a certain degree of self respect, being in transphobic environments (most environments) just burns through your lifetime supply of patience so quickly
In high school and early college, I used to read a couple webcomics consistently, including XKCD and SMBC.
My abusive boyfriend (who I was "officially dating" from age 17 through age 21, though he'd been grooming me since I was 15) was really into both of them, and so it was a safe thing to read. The relationship with him was sort of like the interpersonal abuse version of conversion therapy/corrective rape, and he had a lot of control over how I looked, who I spoke to, and what websites I visited on the internet.
I remember seeing an SMBC comic where there were two gay men as characters and their being gay was not the joke in and of itself, and I remember this registering as a deep comfort to me. That's how starved I was. An absence of blatant homophobia while depicting gay people was a relief.
In 2012, SMBC published this comic:
[ID: SMBC comic. The comic starts with the text "How It Looked." Following this text are images of a girl growing up throughout her life, in four versions: child, teen, middle-aged, and elderly. All of these versions are facing straight forward.
Next, text reads, "How It Felt." Following this text shows from the side. The first image of the girl is the same as above, just from the side profile. However, following this, each subsequent age depicts the same little girl holding up and puppeting grown-up versions of herself. She looks distressed, and is holding up these hollow adult bodies with a stick in the back of their heads.]
This comic really stuck with me.
Just as a text, it really speaks to the idea of adults still feeling like little kids, not having all the answers, feeling like impostors, still being the same internal person as their bodies change.
However, it also stuck with me on another level. Something about this visual of a little kid just puppeting around this adult woman's body. Long before I had access to words like "dissociation" or "gender dysphoria" I recognized this sensation. This idea that my body was not me. My body was this heavy hunk of flesh, this physically tangible illusion that I had to dress up and maneuver around to interface with the world. When people interacted with me, they saw this body.
I was responsible for the continuous work of taking care of it, bathing it, dressing it up like a doll, allowing my boyfriend to masturbate with it. I could make it look pretty so people would say nice things to it, but on some level none of these nice things were for me, because no one actually saw me. I wasn't inside of it, I was hidden behind it. Eventually I got so lost in the trauma and isolation that I wasn't even sure I existed anymore and there was just this thing.
I often wished I could be replaced with a robot that would just do everything, all of my responsibilities, but without needing to be conscious. Puppeting around this body was so exhausting. I wished I could just die and that my body could keep going since that was the thing everyone actually wanted from me. They wanted my body to do work, and to look at, and to show up to places. I was suicidal but killing myself seemed selfish because it would destroy this thing.
Anyway, needless to say the visual metaphor of trying to hold up a hollowed out woman's body with a stick to interface with the world was a kind of cognitive shorthand for my brain to reach when trying to articulate this gnawing dissonance between my sense of self and my body and the persona it represented to everyone.
Yadda yadda, I eventually got out of abusive living situations, and figured out I was trans, and (this part shockingly recently all things considered) finally tried HRT.
Suddenly I did not feel this way anymore! My body was just me. There was no separation. People could touch my body and I could feel through it. It was a profound shift. That difference in how I related to my body was way more vast than any externally visible physical changes.
Recently I was talking with my wife about how my mom has this idea of me that she talks to instead of talking to me. All the misgendering and the failure to process anything I'm saying when it relates to sexgender feels like she is holding up this thing, this Daughter-Woman-Girl, in front of me. I'm like constantly trying to wave at her to get her attention, like, Mom, I'm right here!! Behind this thing you keep bringing around to hold up in front of me so you don't have to see me.
And then it struck me. I set down this puppet thing years ago, but my mom is keeping it around!
Like most people in my life have either 1) understood this was a fake thing and have long since been getting to know me, or 2) never even knew about the thing.
I showed one of my friends a photo of this "puppet" (i.e. pre-transition, closeted era) and his response was "what the fuck." Like to most people it's kinda creepy, even if hegemonically considered aesthetically pleasing. Once you understand it was hollow on the inside and I was just moving it around with a stick in the back of the head, it's just a little unsettling to look at.
But my mom finds it more comforting to look at this dead puppet than me! It's absolutely wild.
Anyway, here is my transsexual riff on the old SMBC Comic
Handdrawn art (pen on paper, scanned, color adjusted to eliminate discoloration).
Text: "How It Looked."
Images of four versions of myself in outfits that made me feel "confident" in various ways.
(Not pictured in this comic is the pre-puppet version of little-kid me. Running around in jeans and big dinosaur t-shirts. With a bowl cut my dad gave me using an attachment on the vacuum cleaner, plus the skinniest, longest little braid ever in the back, to make my mom happy. I've got buck teeth with a gap so huge between them I later needed surgery on the roof of my mouth (long story, another day)).
1. is a pre-teen. Hair has a middle part and is really long, like almost to my waist, but pulled back in a very tired ponytail. I'm wearing a short-sleeve shirt that is form fitting and a knee-length skirt but the bottom half is translucent, and the opaque jean part is only to my mid-thigh. Represents the era of my life from after I was bullied into compulsory femininity to... let's say just before I started experiencing sexual abuse
2. is the cusp of late teens and young adult. Hair is shorter, above the shoulders, and kind of swooshy because I was experimenting with hair gel. I'm wearing this ridiculous "Halloween Costume" that was my excuse to walk around in 7 inch thigh-high pleather boots over skin tight pleather pants with a skin tight black tank under a cheap black corset. You know I overdid it in those boots and couldn't walk anymore for a scary amount of hours. You know this was right after I got away from my abuser because the only thing he valued was my body and I was gloating that I owned it and not him. I could make it as sexy as I wanted and just walk around in public and he couldn't stop me. I did a lot of things in the years following, just because I hadn't been "allowed" to do them while trapped in that relationship. It was like "well if it makes that asshole so mad, let's try it. find out why he didn't want me to experience it." Fun Fact: One of those things was joining tumblr cause he had forbid me from this website!
3. is, like, twenties. Got some kinda version of my current haircut. Very baby-butch vibes. I'm in a ton of layers-- binder, button up, waistcoat, bow-tie, pants with a belt, and dress shoes. for why? I was a grad student, but I took any excuse to dress like this and when I did I felt like a thousand bucks. Represents me in that early "she/they" era of just being overjoyed to get a chance to dress up as myself. and some other dykes were into that?? this being myself thing might be pretty cool actually.
4. right now! this is just me with this same haircut but more of it's buzzed further up in the back cause I wear masks (kN95 baby. keep your comrades safe from covid & state surveillance <3) and so I shave up to where the top mask strap goes so it's not pulling on longer hair. I'm wearing a DIY croptop tank and just some comfy shorts and that's it, got my hairy legs & belly & pits out, waving to get your attention.
Text: "How It Felt"
(1) pre-teen Keys is a hollow girl-form being puppeted via a long stick connecting to the back of its head.
There is a vague Keys-shape holding the stick and moving the puppet. This shape is very close to the puppet, even holding one of its arms with theirs, trying to feel through it, and receive love through it.
The world had given me this hollow shell as the assigned space to grow my life inside. I was supposed to fill it out completely if possible, and to weed everything that didn't fit inside.
I thought if I tried my best, I could do it! It didn't even sound that unreasonable at the time. I was like alright, let's see what this hollow puppet thing is all about. Let's get as close to this as I can, so when people love it, if they love it enough, I can feel love through it.
(2) late-teen/young adult Keys is a hollow woman-form being puppeted via a long stick connecting to the back of its head.
There is a defined Keys holding the stick and moving the puppet. This increasingly self-aware Keys is at a distance from the puppet body, holding the stick with both hands.
I had learned dissociation* as a survival mechanism from sexual abuse, and I was very practiced at creating an internal perception that "I" was something entirely distinct from "my body."
*(Dissociation allowed me to hold the belief "he is not raping me, he is only raping my body" a previously nonsensical belief made forcibly coherent by my brain because if I did not hold that belief, I would have become completely dysfunctional. How can you.. start to react to years of continuous trauma you have not yet reacted to? You know some soul-destroyingly horrible feeling is on the other side of acknowledging it, and how long do those last? months? years? I needed to keep it together in order to get through college and maintain a friendship with another human being outside of him at the same time.)
Can't change the physical reality so the psychological reality graciously offers to bend instead of breaking. Who am I to turn that down?
(3) twenties Keys is kneeling beside an empty puppet deflated on the floor, with hands still outreached as if they'd set down it down mere moments ago.
This Keys has made the decision to walk away from this puppet/persona and to just live directly, and they are on the cusp of starting the process of doing so. But in this moment, while they are not touching it, they are very close, closer than they'd been in years.
I had realized what was going on, and I was ready to live more directly as myself, but I also held an appreciation and affection for this persona I'd made, this little life I'd built inside the allotted shell. I felt like I was hugging her goodbye, even though it was just a puppet I'd made, completely hollow now that I wasn't filling it out.
(4) right-now Keys is just a little doodle of myself right now. There's no hollow puppet anywhere. I'm facing straight forward and am waving.
It's basically identical to the "How It Looks" right-now Keys, because what you see is what you get.
was going to reply to a (good) post with this in the tags, but the tags got too long & I'm not trying to make op deal with an essay in her notes so I'm just gonna place them here under the cut <3
original post was by a trans woman, tentatively discussing the marginalization of trans women who are not straight, in comparison to straight trans women.
(I say tentatively because she included forms of modest hedging and disclaimers. I'm choosing to not link her post directly here, because I think she was probably afraid of bad faith readings and pushback, and I'm about to support her point in a much more direct way, because I have the privilege to do so without similar social threat.)
her example of why this came to mind was that it is, historically and today, common for trans women to be denied access to HRT and other gender affirming care if she does not perform attraction to men.
I wanted to add my two-cents in support of this analysis, just as someone who has been reading a lot of theory the past year and a half to better understand how sexgender structures are functioning and how to explain this structure--
in my current view: to deny that lesbian (& bi) trans women are uniquely marginalized would be to deny homophobia as a structural oppression which intersects with misogyny & transphobia. it would be to deny sexuality as an intrinsic part of the sexgender hierarchy.
I think it's honestly very well evidenced that the intersection of homophobia & misogyny & transphobia is one of heightened social targeting and disposablity.
If you look at transmisogynistic propaganda, the political caricature of transfeminized people that's used to justify structural transmisogyny is, importantly, a trans woman who is attracted to other women.
the lesbian transfem is the center of the target.
consider a scenario of bathroom policing.
I, as a gender-ambiguous tme person, can leverage my AGAB to deescalate transmisogynistic attention on an interpersonal level. If someone accuses me of being a "man sneaking into the women's bathroom to look at women" I could leverage my assigned sex.
similarly (though obviously not to the same degree), a straight trans woman could deescalate some forms of homo-transmisogyny by leveraging the fact of her not being attracted to women. the accusation of transition as motivated by sexual desire for women is not as effective against someone who is (believed to be) not attracted to women.
I think, too, gender nonconformity also plays a role and is not always functionally distinct in people's minds from lesbianism.
hegemonic, cisnormative femininity is a particular socially naturalized form, which can be veered from in nonconforming ways in multiple directions.
many transfeminist writers (e.g. Serano, Gill-Peterson) discuss the kind of nonconformity in which one's femininity is perceived as "too much" or a kind of excess femininity. This is a performance of femininity where the labor and time and money involved in the performance is both visible and not hidden--an unashamed, unnaturalized femininity, which makes visible the time, labor, and money that goes into maintaining all femininity. this sort of gender nonconforming femininity, and the marginalization of it, is often visible in the derogatory descriptions of sex workers, femme lesbians, poor urban Black women, and others who are notably feminized populations but viewed as "incorrectly" feminine.
there are also similar consequences for transfems who are gender nonconforming in the other direction. butch dykes, nonbinary transfems, and so on. this is a kind of gender nonconformity I really would like to write my own theory on (because right now most theory on it is dominated by those who range from uninvested to completely antagonistic to transfeminism, with the notable exception of Da'Shaun Harrison who is a Black nonbinary transfem, and maybe a little bit touched on in Bhatt's work, who is notably a lesbian and writing from a lesbian transfeminist perspective).
but in short, I describe this kind of gender nonconformity as a kind of ''unauthorized masculinity'' which is not necessarily claimed or recognized by the subject as masculine. instead this is "masculinity" in the sense of masculinity being a category of everything that "belongs to" men (whether body parts and traits or hobbies and interests or forms of sexual desire). this kind of masculinity is not the same as the masculinity that is a social reward for correctly performed manhood. instead, this is a target, a way of communicating socially that someone who is not a man has gotten possession of something that doesn't belong to them and now constitutes a danger who must be collectively attacked, subdued, and stripped of whatever the group has decided only men are supposed to have.
when racialized groups are hypermasculinized, when transfeminized populations are called "masculine," when lesbians are called "masculine," etc., in ways that are threatening and communicate an intent to treat them as dangerous and punish them into submission, this is the mechanism of what's happening. (some of my analysis here comes from Orisanmi Burton's work on how racialized sexgender functions within prisons, which I can explain more later).
anyway this is super long, but in short, op of that post, if you happen to follow me, I hope you take this as support for your intuition about this. there is a lot of evidence and theoretical grounding in the idea that trans women who are not straight (or are otherwise gender nonconforming in ways that are racialized and/or constructed as sexually deviant) are further marginalized by transmisogyny in a similar way that lesbian and bisexual (or otherwise gender nonconforming) cis women are further marginalized by misogyny.
for everyone else: hold solidarity with the lesbian & bi transfems in your community today! especially the gender nonconforming ones. <3
what if I turned all my drafts of emails to my mom into raw material to chop up and rearrange as some kinda creative nonfiction piece? that'd be a cool way to use all those pages of writing & process all those versions (different discarded attempts to get her to understand me, the person, instead of the symbolic "Daughter" in her head) that I'd spent months writing.
[ID: screenshot of a tumblr comment reading: "When I was in my Pharma training, we did get drilled to be super careful when administering certain medications that were highly prescribed for certain emergency procedures at the time at the time because they could cause a miscarriage. I recall my teacher calling it a 'men only' medicine." End ID]
gonna be real, the fact that any number of people are being trained to not administer emergency medications to people who "might be pregnant" is ghoulish misogyny no matter how you slice it. who fucking cares if it has some percent chance of inducing a miscarriage if the person in front of you is dying?
this whole lesson is predicated on a string of assumptions:
- that someone who "looks like" a "woman" has the capacity for pregnancy
- that someone with the theoretical capacity for pregnancy is actually currently pregnant (people who are capable of pregnancy are not pregnant for the majority if not the entirety of their lives. being pregnant is not the default state, it is a tiny percentage of someone's life, if any percentage at all)
- that someone who is pregnant wants to be pregnant or cares one way or the other
- that someone who is pregnant and wants to be pregnant would decide to risk their life rather than risk a miscarriage
- that someone who is pregnant and wants to be pregnant and would risk their life over it would prefer to not be asked to specify this preference and to just have this decision made for them without their knowledge or their ability to consent to it
there is literally zero way this behavior is not misogynist. even if it worked out for one person who somehow met this string of unlikely assumptions, it's still misogynistic.
just tell the person what the medication does and that it can induce miscarriage, and ask if they want it. do that no matter what the person looks like. that's informed consent.
and if the person is so close to death they're fucking unconscious and can't give consent, then why would a pregnancy fucking matter? get out of here with this shit.
I have been thinking a lot about my impact and how to best use the capacity I have. I am aware that, because many people follow my blog, my actions matter a lot in terms of who gets attention and donations.
I hear from many families requesting that I write for them, and I must tell them that I can reblog their posts but cannot write for them. For many, I cannot even respond and check in with actual conversation, just due to the vast numbers of messages I receive every single day. It is the best compromise I know, because if I take on writing for more than a few people I would not be able to sustain this, and then I could not be a resource to anyone. It is not enough, but it is the best I can do.
I have been evaluating how I am making the decision of who to write for. Up until now, it has been as simple as writing for the first people who asked. But I see the extent of poverty and starvation in Gaza, and realize I need to take more responsibility for how I am impacting the flow of donations.
Going forward, I am going to work with people to write weekly posts until they have reached €50,000, and then I will start working with someone who has less.
That does not mean that I will cut contact with anyone. I understand that everyone still desperately needs donations to survive, and that €50,000 is a very small amount, especially with high commission rates and high prices of food and supplies in Gaza. I will still share posts and encourage others to donate for those who have raised over this amount.
However, I will use my energy for writing weekly posts for those who have less. Once everyone who has reached out to me has raised over €50,000, then I will extend to €100,000 and circle back to others I have worked with, and so on.
This is not a perfect solution. I am still only able to consistently work with three people at a time. But this is the best way I know to handle the power I have at this moment. Thank you for understanding.
