στι γὰρ ἥμιν
σήμαθ', ἃ δὴ καὶ νῶϊ κεκρυμμένα ἴδμεν ἀπ' ἄλλων. - Odyssey, Homer: XXIII.109-110
Adapted from a paper for an experiential diversity course. This work is composed of both old and new writings.
Table of Contents
- Table of Contents
- Prolegomenon
- Some Important Concepts
- Dysphoria I: Womaning
- Dysphoria II: Disjunction
- Dysphoria III: Apophasis
- Dysphoria IV: (Trans)Misogyny
- Interlude: Adult Human Female
- Euphoria I: Primrose
- Euphoria II: Odysseus
- Euphoria III: Cataphasis
- Euphoria IV: Penelope
- Bibliography
- Endnotes
Prolegomenon
At the beginning of a journey, I pray. To the One who is closer to me than my own breath. To the Many that carry me closer to myself.
Hello, my name is Penelope — Pēnélops, πηνέλοψ, πήνη-ὤψ – a duck, a threaded face, a weaver, the ever-faithful wife of Ὀδυσσεύς, the-loyal-one. Previously, I went by Ashton – a grove of ash trees, an ash-dwelling – and ash – what remains after a fire, the mark of wilderness and coming Easter. Though I did not choose Ashton, I freely chose ash and Penelope, each situating me in a world, as a world, among other worlds. Even without that choosing, ‘Ashton’ did that already: in naming me, my parents told the world: this human is this, this is the world they inhabit. In doing so, they called upon certain pasts and had certain futures in their intending. Likewise, in taking up the names ash and Penelope, I weave myself into a genealogy of namings, each with their own significance born from a complex causal network stretched across history. In calling upon this history, I then signify the futures I hold in my intending, those worlds my activity is oriented towards. Finally, I disclose the present, how I find myself caught between these pasts and futures, an agent acting in the here and now.
In this paper, I will name myself. But – I will not do so through an individual speech act (‘my name is Penelope’) but through constructing an echogia. Echo (ἠχώ) refers, in both English and Greek, to a sound that has been reflected by a surface. In echophenomena, a term from psychiatry and cognitive science, echo- refers to the repetitive nature of automatic movements, such as sound (echolalia), bodily motions (echopraxia), and tracings (echoplasia).[1] Borrowing from this genealogy, I use echo- to refer to the repetition and transformation of a unit of information. Any expression repeats expressions that came before it and transforms them to suit a new context. What any expression signifies is determined by its position in a pattern (or history) of echoes, forming what Jacques Derrida refers to as ‘iterations.’[2] An echo is not the same as a locution[3], however, as the significance of an echo is not necessarily linguistic (that is, language-like in structure) but inferential, meaning that they fit into a pattern of uses.[4] Any repetitive or potentially repetitive motion can be echoic. An echogia, then, is derived from joining echo- to –gia (-διά), a preposition referring to the medium or channel through which an action occurs over time. An echogia is a medium by which a history of echoes is carried and allowed to signify all at once.[5] In the case of this essay, it acts as an artifact that signifies a history of echoes resolving in my self-naming as ‘Penelope’. The final echo of naming myself is a result of the echoic chorus formed by the essay, an expression of the inferential network that underlies the naming.
Though many styles of writing may be considered echogias, this one is expressed in a poetic style tied closely to my self-experience as an echoic agent operating as a world, in a world, among other worlds. The echogic form reflects the history by which I have come to name myself ‘Penelope’. The aim of this essay, therefore, is not conceptual analysis or a clear reporting of my experiences, but to invoke the echoic history that gives rise to the naming.[6] Poetry and resonance[7] are thus more valued than clarity or rigor. To do this, I will synthesize both new writing and revised writing from my blog, Fish in the Afternoon.[8] In this blog, I have cataloged my journey forming a self-image reflected in my self-naming, articulating the echoic history that has brought me to this point. It has also been the mode this semester (Fall 2024) by which I have contemplated my transition, both ‘medically’ and ‘socially,’ through the series Transitions. Though this blog does not have a wide audience, it is significant to me and reflects my self-understanding over the past few years.
The blog began in 2022. I started it at the end of one journey and the beginning of another, the summer before entering Georgetown and after a long struggle to survive. I named it based on a turn of phrase used by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The German Ideology:
For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic and must remain so if he does not wish to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.”[9]
Here, Marx and Engels distinguish between life under capital, where human activity is quantified and split into units of consumption, requiring the subsumption of human life into the division of labor, and life after capital, in what Marx in Critique of the Gotha Program calls the Gemeinwesen, or the human community.[10] In the Geimenwesen, life is not subsumed to the division of labor but instead our activity flows out of our lived reality, allowing us to inhabit many different identities and forms of life in our actualization as individuals and communities.[11] In more recent writings, I connect this to what I call the common-soul, which is the ever-unfolding[12] common life of both the human species and those organisms and ecosystems we dwell with and in. In this conception, the goal is not only the abolition of capital and the division of labor but the reorganization of human life based on our common dwelling and in pursuit of both individual and collective flourishing. In both the Gemeinwesen and the common-soul, what remains is an emphasis on human life as a project of playful self-creation that is never subsumed into our activities but is instead its overarching impetus.
What is the connection between my blog and the Gemeinwesen/common-soul? It is that my writings are a project of re-membering[13]: collecting the scattered parts of my self-identity and re-organizing them into a new self-narration, or orientation to my own unfolding life. In re-membering, we echo, or repeat the pasts that came before us and transform them into new ways of dwelling in the present and leaning into the future. At the heart of both the Gemeinwesen and the common-soul beats this echoic re-membering, taking apart the quantification and alienation of human life and rebuilding both ourselves as individuals and as a part of the cosmos. We re-member in being ourselves and in making “… it possible for [us] to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.”[14] I am the I that I am and that I is Penelope, a re-membering of the ashes of Ashton. In becoming Penelope, I make it possible to live into a new future, one where I am not subsumed into the (re)productive division of labor that grounds the cis dyad and which denies the possibility of transformation, creativity, and play.
So, take this essay as an echogia that fits into the history of echoing and self-naming that I am always-already a part of, the impetus of which is to re-member myself as myself and to playfully self-articulate what it means to be that self.[15] To put perhaps too fine a point on it, this is a project of experiential diversity as it is supposed to reflect and signify a process of contemplation and self-creation grounded in my own perspective and arising out of my own life history, community history, and sensory orientation. This echogia names me because it articulates, however obliquely, the position from which that naming occurs. Here I am, a world in a world among worlds. Here I am, a creative nothing singing absence into presence. Here I am, Penelope.
Some Important Concepts
Before I begin, there are a few concepts that are important to clarify, as they centrally feature in my writing. I have already discussed echoing and re-membering, but a few more that are important include:
- Unique/Uniquing – That which is itself-in-itself and irreplaceable by any other. This is partly borrowed from the Einzige of Max Stirner, or the creative nothing, the “…nothing out of which I as creator create everything.”[16] However, as Stirner’s view of the Einzige is human-centric and tied to an implicitly racist developmental history, I do not wish to tie the Unique too heavily to his model. Instead, I borrow from later anarchist conceptions of the Unique[17] and from a monadic metaphysics[18] that allows for each entity to be its self-creative world-in-a-world. As a corollary to this, I call the self-articulation of the Unique Uniquing, since, as noted by Alejandro de Acosta, the Unique is not the individual per se, but the process of eternal self-articulation of what we may call the individual but is not reducible to it.[19] Therefore, in this view, the Unique and Uniquing are identical. The Unique is that which is itself-in-itself and irreplaceable by any other, and Uniquing is the process by which that Unique is articulated.
- Together/Togethering – Stirner argues that the Einzige join into a Union of Egoists, or temporary coalition between Uniques operating out of their self-interest.[20] However, I believe that this concept not only de-values the many groupings and common experiences that the Unique participates in but misunderstands what the Unique itself is. The Unique both does not and cannot exist by itself. There is no Unique alone, as Uniquing can only occur in a world, as a world, among other worlds. That is, there must be an arena within which Uniquing occurs. And this arena is itself part of a pattern of different Uniquings. Whenever these Uniquings overlap in interdependent patterns, they form what I call togethers, collections of Uniques that depend upon one another. In our experienced life as human beings, these togethers include the ecosystems we dwell in, the societies we participate in, and the many different forms of relationships we are intertwined with, including family, friends, lovers, neighbors, etc. However, togethers are formed throughout many human and more-than-human worlds. Each Unique must be understood in the context of the many togethers that they interweave with, even as these togethers are only articulable through the Uniques that compose them.
- Dwelling/Inhabiting/En-habiting – To emphasize the co-constitutive and processional nature of the Unique, I discuss how it dwells, inhabits, and en-habits. Dwelling and inhabiting here are synonymous, referring to how the Unique unfolds as a world in a world among other worlds, where the ‘in a world’ is as important as ‘as a world’ (Uniquing) and ‘among other worlds’ (Togethering). The Unique always-and-already finds itself[21] within the overlapping commons of Uniquings and Togetherings that constitute the past-present-future of the cosmos. This cosmos is not contentless but is revealed in placetime, or the experienced-common-world that unfolds in the intersection of the many Uniquings and Togetherings in spacetime.[22] This dwelling/inhabiting, though, is also an en-habiting: one experiences placetime through the history of echoes that one finds oneself always already dwelling in, making inhabiting habitual. How the world unfolds to us depends on how we have been habituated into an echoic history that we co-constitute but which we only form one part of. The world as it appears in our habituation is therefore constitutive of our lived experience of dwelling/inhabiting.
- Womaning – I use the term ‘womaning’ to distinguish my view of gender categories from the conventional identity-like uses of ‘woman’ and ‘man.’ The view I advocate for is iterative, processional, performative, and historical.[23] That is, to be a ‘woman’ is (1) to repeat and transform (echo) the expressions of ‘womanhood’ that came before, (2) to unfold one’s life or a portion of one’s life through the persistent integration of this echoic history into one’s life, (3) to unfold this echoic history through its integration into our activity (that is, to perform this echoic history), and (4) to call upon certain pasts and intend certain futures in presenting one’s echoic womanhood. All these dimensions interrelate to define womanhood as womaning or the act of inhabiting womanhood. One womans whenever she unfolds her lived activity within an echoic history of womanly performances. There is no ‘womanhood’ per se but only the repetition and transformation of this history in our Uniquing and Togethering.
- Creating-Begetting-Proceeding – I belong to the Christian mystic tradition, and this appears in the use of Trinitarian language. Though the traditional Trinitarian formula is Father-Son-Holy Spirit, this personal language conceals the content of the Trinity: that the divinity is Many-in-One and One-in-Many, and that the facets of this One/Many are persons distinguished by their relation to one another. In the traditional formula, the Son is begotten of the Father and the Spirit proceeds from the Father (and maybe the Son, if you subscribe to the filioque).[24] However, I believe what matters is the relations themselves, not the symbology that is layered on them. So, I refer to the Trinity as Creating-Begetting-Proceeding. Further, I believe that the Trinity is subsumed into creation itself in the creative act, such that the nature of the cosmos mirrors that of the Trinity. This is reflected in the relationship between Uniquing, Togethering, and inhabiting/dwelling, in that each is consubstantial with one another and cannot be differentiated except by their relations. This is further understood through perichoretic kenosis, or the substantial interpenetration of the persons of the Trinity and their self-emptying in creation.[25] I believe this is the part of my thought least likely to translate outside of my world experience, but it is an important part of that experience, so it is worth noting.
With these concepts in mind, I now echo.
Dysphoria I: Womaning
Do you feel the earth beneath your feet? Roll, (gentle) roll around and touch the contours of place – what does here feel like? – Bumps and grooves and textures, roots digging tender into the sense between bone and home.
How do you attend to your body? Do you? Do you attend to yourself or attend to others? Neither? Both? What does your skin feel like? What does your heartbeat sound like? What body do you inhabit? How do I move when I echo myself, en-fleshing the I that I intend? What histories do I repeat and what futures do I move towards in my transition? Where does my body lean? How is it directed?
I am (a) Unique, myself-in-myself, and irreplaceable by any other. As (a) Unique, I narrate my self-unfolding. To Unique is to unfold one’s own life across time and space – to be a world, in a world, among other worlds. Thirty years of growing in placetime, the loom of life swaddles my spirit inside self-image, welcoming experience into the void. I travel, a world-between-worlds. Past-present-future. Creating-begetting-proceeding. Love-loving-love.[26] Who I was, who I am, who I will be. “The three are testifying— the Spirit, the water, and the blood—and the three are united in agreement.”[27] The persons share the same essence; they differ only by their relation. {Ashton, ash, Penelope}. Past-present-future. Creating-begetting-proceeding. Love-loving-love.
Transitioning is re-membering, bringing together the shattered parts of the Unique. Suspended between the pendulum of euphoria and dysphoria, I find myself spread across time. I was: Ashton. I am: Penelope. I will be: myself. In transitioning, I Unique as that-which-I-am, dis-membering and re-membering myself, searching for pasts and futures through which to articulate my present. First, we attend to the body. What do you feel when you hum? Mmmm. Hear your bones echo like a cave. Where is your pain? Where is your pleasure? Your body is a landscape; what are the features you wish to travel? We wander ourselves and encounter the becoming of the matter we are, matter mattering matter. Feel the texture of gravity as it tosses you to-and-fro, moving-stillness, the ever-wobbling. How do you want to move? What do you want to be? Where does your body lean?
Next, we attend to the world. How do you want to move your hands? Your mouth? Your feet? Your hips? How do you want to animate? What motioning are you drawn towards, where do you encounter yourself? Transitioning is a doing; even to remain or to refuse is an action. All doing is a patterning, an echoing – repetition and transformation. What do you want to repeat? How do you want to transform? In being oriented, being directed, where do you want to go?[28] We world, us dwellers, animas in animation balleting the possible. The I points; it describes a looking – a here, here! Who? A Me: the here that never leaves. There is no center, but there is always a somewhere and somewhen, the pre-condition of ensouled life, consciousness-across-time. We are doings that do and meanings that mean, aggregates of en-minded matter collaborating in action. In saying I am, I en-world my presence in time. Always entangled, this presence appears as placetime, a flow of Uniques en-worlding together. Agency is the transformation of placetime, dancing mattering – we do, and in this doing, we shape and re-shape our dwelling, mattering as act and medium. Self-creation is an artistic act; to act is to paint with motion as brush and substance as paint. I art; therefore, I am. I am; therefore, I inhabit.
There is no such thing as a woman or a man. There is woman-ing and man-ing, two kinds of mattering in the world. But each of these matterings is a tree of infinite branches, ways of woman-ing and man-ing as Unique as the Uniques that compose it. And outside these trees lie many other groves, many other ways of gender-ing. In en-fleshing the gender I am, I repeat certain histories and attend to my transforming with certain futures in my intending. Intention is orientation and direction.[29] Attention and intention are paired; one intends to attend and attends to intend. Gender is reproduced through intention-bearing attention, through motion. Gender orients us, directs us, and moves us to attend and intend in certain ways. To be a gender is to gender, to perform the activity of [gender]-ing. To be a woman is to woman; to be a man is to man. Yet, each of these genders is not an imaginary duad surrounded by an infinite cosmos of gender-ings but are themselves galaxies formed from a history of associated gender-ings. I woman not as Woman, but as a woman: in a time, in a place, as me. I woman because I dwell in the many histories of womaning, repeating pasts, and transforming futures in inhabiting the present. We ensoul our lives already here, in history. Animating, we wander the other-thinkers, the them that measure and quantify, the imagined One. This One has never existed, but emerges in our patterning, the psychic residue of the struggle of history, the agon where matterings clash. The Leviathan is an imagined One; an unspoken Father that reimagines creation in its own image and barks out this image to the world. We are in the wilds following a dead king. We are free.
Dysphoria II: Disjunction
I am a world, in a world, among other worlds. In my unfolding, I dwell in the placetime that grows in the commons, neither mine nor theirs. This placetime appears to me already value-laden, with matterings layering on the architecture of my dwelling so that each part appears as-something and for-something.[30] This is a chair, and it is for sitting. This is a fork, and it is for eating. This is a man… no, wait, a woman… no, wait… That… thing… is disjoint: out-of-place, catawampus, crooked, flawed, failed, an object of suspicion and irritation and intervention. Matterings are not solely a projection of myself onto the world, but the projections of others onto me. Matterings co-constitute the world we inhabit, creating the grammar by which we make sense of ourselves and our activity. We appear to ourselves as a mattering that is both self-created and projected by others, and which may then appear as either a site of liberation or a prison. I am a woman, they see me as a man; I am both self-creating and disjoint, both an artwork and a failure.
Dysphoria. Dys-pherein. To-carry-suffering, to-bear-affliction, to-dwell-in-pain. Dysphoria is the experience that one’s own body as the origin and vessel of suffering, an ontological harm borne from ontological injustice. Ontological harm: suffering located in things-in-themselves, the elements that are constitutive of the world or a part of the world. I experience my body not only as a site of harm, but as the harm itself: my body is the pain that I endure, and this pain seems constitutive of what it means for me to inhabit my body in the first place. Importantly, this rests on a mistake: ‘the body’ does not exist[31], much less is it inherently valanced. Our being enfleshed is not an original sin. Instead, ontological injustice generates ontological harm. Ontological injustice: when the intersubjective co-constitution of the world produces unjust relationships and harm that seem inherent to things-in-themselves.
The experience of my body as ontologically harmful is generated from the ways that this experience has been co-constituted by the system of matterings I dwell in, matterings that are themselves racialized, classed, gendered, and which project a parochial world-picture onto the cosmos as a whole. Why do I experience my body this way? Because through this world picture, (1) my internal mapping of my body is disjoint from the map provided for me as a male-assigned person, (2) this internal map seems to be generated from the body-itself (the call is coming from inside the house!) such that not only is my map disjoint but so is my body, (3) such disjoint gender-experiences are not neutral in the external map but are negatively-valanced and associated with abjectivity and monstrousness, so that (4) I experience my body as abject and monstrous and my desires as a pathological or alien corruption, an infection rooted in the thing-in-itself. Kristeva here is illustrative: abjection emerges from the exclusion of those that lie outside the norms and rituals of the social order, and is experienced as a trauma, as a schism or separation from the world that marks one off as monstrous.[32]
This is one reason even cis people experience gender dysphoria.[33] The gender-forms that we aim at are not real patterns of embodiment, but a projection onto those patterns. The world-picture we receive pictures women and men not as they appear in the world but as they are expected to appear, creating a negative valance in any appearance or experience of the body that is disjoint from the specter we aim at. The ontological injustice of the world-picture aims at trans people because we operate outside the cis dyad that beats at the heart of the picture. However, trans oppression is one manifestation of the Leviathanic system that regiments gender and embodiment in general. We are the monsters[34], but every person sees a monster in themselves whenever they do not fit the picture: being disjoint becomes experienced as an alienating infection that separates each of us from who we’re supposed to be. Except that no one has ever met those standards. No one’s body fully accords with the forms imaged in the world-picture. Everyone has some monster in them.
The promise of trans liberation is not only that we will be freed from our oppression and be able to live and flourish as we are and as we desire to be. It is that, and that is what must be centered in our struggle. But — trans liberation also means breaking apart the world picture that ensnares everyone in gender oppression. It means uprooting the system of ontological injustice that alienates us from our bodies. It means the systematic abolition of dysphoria. That is why trans liberation must also be for the abolition of white supremacy, patriarchy, ableism, fatphobia, capitalism, and imperialism. Each of these forms of oppression intertwines in the world picture of what our bodies should look like, what they should do, and what we should do with them. Abolishing the world picture won’t set the world right, but it will set on fire the system of ontological injustice that causes us to locate harm in ourselves, in our bodies and minds, and in the world itself. The world picture of Leviathan spiders out to being itself, and to free ourselves from injustice we must also smash that picture. Liberation is iconoclasm.
Dysphoria III: Apophasis
The cis soul denies, moving away from the dawn that beckons in the dark night.[35] The problem they face is an allic[36] problem: because they witness themselves as standard, they can’t recognize themselves as one-in-many / many-in-one. The cis soul is one pattern in the cosmos of gender, one echoic history in an endless sea. But it cannot see itself as one-among-others because its ontology rests on sovereignty. It is Leviathanic: that whose power is assumed, whose power grounds the many in one structure of authority. The cis soul can go so far as to say there are deviations from itself, but it cannot say the gender they dwell in is not a privileged standard.
Uniquing as a woman and Uniquing as a man are not reducible to Uniquing as cis – to center cisness in one’s womaning and maning. The contradiction at the heart of the cis soul is that in sewing one’s cisness so close to the soul as to be inseparable, this cis identity clouds one’s gendering. In grounding their activity in their cisness, the cis soul must guard against any rupture to its sovereignty, any indication that the duadic form of cis gender lives is one-among-many. One can only be a woman so far as one’s womaning fits with the duadic form of the cis soul; one can only man as a reflection of that form. The mistake here is the same that pervades civilization: to make real the form at the expense of forgetting that that form is grounded in those who form.[37] Commodity fetishism[38] is one form of a greater idolatry, one that appears again in the contradiction of the cis soul. The fundamental move of Uniquing as cis is to forget[39] one’s womaning and maning and to instead identify with the duadic form of cis men and cis women – to relocate their activity to an idol that they created.
None of this is to say that the categories of cis and trans are empty. One can meaningfully identify as a cis woman or a trans woman because it identifies one in the social background within which one womans. However, there is a difference between identifying with one’s womanhood as a woman who has already been socially identified as a woman (that is, being a cis woman) and identifying with one’s place within the cis duad rather than one’s own womaning. The question is where the activity lies: does one woman as the woman they are, or do they woman according to the system that womans them? Breaking away from the cis soul, even while remaining cis, requires uprooting the sovereignty of cisness and relocating it in themselves, in others, and the world. It requires anamnesis: re-membering oneself as the one who forms to escape the prison of the form.[40]
The sad thing about Plato is he never did get out of that cave.
Dysphoria IV: (Trans)Misogyny
This is a common transmisogynistic pattern of thought:
P1: Women’s bodies are inherently sexual. That is: to be a woman is to be a sex object.
P2: Men only dress and act like women as part of a sex act - because they desire to be a sex object.
P3: Trans women are men who dress and act like women.
C: Trans women are engaging in a public sex act, the content of which is to present themselves as a sex object.
P1 is generally unspoken, while P2-3 may be explicitly affirmed in defending C. This pattern leads to a wide range of injustices, including public bathroom laws, three articles laws, bans on drag performances, bans on gender-affirming care, and the “trans panic defense” as a justification for murder. Since we (trans women) are, according to this line of thought, engaging in a public sex act, we can be regulated and punished. Using a public restroom becomes sexual harassment, wearing women’s clothing becomes public indecency, drag performances become sex work[41], gender-affirming care for minors becomes grooming, and murder is justified because trans sexuality is a form of coercive trickery. There is a clear line from trans women being sex objects to the everyday activity of trans women being a sex act, to violence and oppression and deprivation.
Notably, there are some redundancies in the reasoning and it can consistently be presented as such:
P1: Women’s bodies are inherently sexual. That is: to be a woman is to be a sex object.
P2: Trans women are women.
C: Trans women are engaging in a public sex act, the content of which is to present themselves as a sex object.
P2 and 3 in the original argument are sometimes presented as justifications for the connection between P1 and C. This is because the person who engages in this pattern of thought does not typically affirm that trans women are women, and so must explain why they still fit the sexual object role.[42] Cross-dressing or similar actions or identities are therefore used as both a bridge and a smokescreen.[43] However, this move is only at the surface. What drives the transmisogynistic argument is an internal affirmation[44] that trans women are women without an external or public affirmation. Trans women are oppressed as women, but part of this oppression is for our identity as women to be denied. However, the denial of our womanhood only works because we are women.
Many of the forms of oppression trans women face are variations on women’s oppression more broadly. If you are a woman, it is safer to use public restrooms in a group. If you are a woman, you must self-monitor your appearance to avoid dangerous interactions and a loss of social status. If you are a woman, anything you create will be interpreted according to your perceived sexual value. If you are a woman, changing or expressing or valuing your body is an impurity and invitation to unwanted sexual behavior. And, if you are a woman and you are assaulted or even murdered, it is justified because all women want it and all women are temptresses. In all of these cases, we, as both trans and cis women, are reduced to sex objects, are denied our autonomy, self-ownership, and safety, and are subject to the property(object)-owning authority of men.
Misogyny is the pervasive dehumanization of women, and it takes different shapes depending on how our womanhood is perceived. All women are criminals for the misogynist, but what the crime is may differ. The crime of the trans woman is to be assigned a different sex at birth and to transition, but it is only a crime because we are women. The denial of the transmisogynist is self-defeating, because their accusations only work with the presumption of affirmation. Transmisogyny is misogyny and the liberation of women generally and of trans women in particular is biconditional. To abolish transmisogyny we must abolish misogyny and to abolish misogyny we must abolish transmisogyny. Trans liberation is a necessary path in defeating patriarchy.
Interlude: Adult Human Female
For Penelope. For hope.
How much time do I have to free you, scared little girl? How much time did you sleep in that dark closet, buried under histories barely whispered, barely spoken? How much did it hurt to hide? Drifting alone in the hull of Noah’s ark, sailing away, and waking up again, not you. How much time have you been here inside me? Is it warm or cold? Light or dark? Are you retreating or arriving? Adult human female.[45] How did you survive? Please reach out to me, I’ll offer you a hand. Please, I need your help.
I see you, I glimpse you, for the first time. Adrift in the sea of 2024, I see you. Through the soft guidance of another, I see you. Through gritted teeth, I see you. Through the mirror of my flesh, I see you. And you’re scared. And you’re trying to see the light. And the darkness from the cave continues to creep in. Little girl, who never got to be a little girl. Little girl, who bubbled up in play, who rolled in the grass and collected bugs in the dirt and scraped her knee on the asphalt. Little girl, who made up worlds that she could explore and escape in, where she was free. Little girl, unable to breathe and forced to shove-down memories until you get sick. Little girl, who hid in her cage barely living, shivering in her enclosure. Little girl.
Adult human female. I see you. I’m here for you. I am you. Penelope, hold on. The deep dark has been here all along and you know what lies down there. But the spirit that keeps thumping restlessly in your heart is there too. The spirit that hums love whenever Katie[46] is around. The spirit that dances freedom whenever jazz is on the radio. The spirit that smiles equality surrounded by trees and singing birds. The spirit that was ever-ever-womaning, even when my body was not. The spirit that is me, even when I feel so far away. Glimpsing you, (barely, barely) through the porthole of dysphoria, of dissociation and depersonalization and fear, I see you.
And I’m here. And I’ve got you.
Euphoria I: Primrose
What joy impresses my soul,
morrowmemory bells the primrose.
I tend, waves, here-and-there to-and-fro,
the lighthouse of your spirit sunrises the starrysnow.
O, softwelcoming gentle-one, I work for you;
my paradise, earth-soul that earths my earth-soul.
I unfold.
You thou me, my fairy love. Impish time flowers into intimacy,
the rocking-rocking-rocking of dwelling-with-you.
Feel my breath rock in you; I impress my heart with you.
Worlds upon worlds sway with every footstep,
I clockwork the many in dancing slow, a 1 a 2 a.
Smooth drips the jamlight cognac of being-here.
We mellow.
Caramel, this time-between.
Motion is entelechy (in the kitchen we sugar ontologies).
This is the best of all possible worlds. (I met you.)
This is the best of all possible futures. (Everyday, I meet you.)
I womb our garden in my futuring, intending-attending-meaning-dreaming.
Our souls unfold together like a forest. There is so much life in us.
There is so much life to come.
Euphoria II: Odysseus
For Odysseus, who showed me Ithaca was possible.
We poetry. In motion, we sway meaning, significance. Significant. To matter to. Language is a map of the interior[47], mirrored me-and-yous that echo out to form landscapes of meaning, intertwined matterings growing in the wilds of our shared placetime. Communication begins with perichoretic subject-objects, past-present-futures expressing the interior by creating a world-with-others, the interpenetration of being-here, -now, -with-you. First, we listen; heartbeats and unknown speech and gentle swaying songs. Then, we sing — our vocal cords warble and strain, setting sail across the cosmos to be taken-up again by another. Clutching close, we soon sing as two, patty-cake patty-cake a baker’s man, Simon says, I see you. From the two the many erupts, joining in chorus and choir – gathering, hunting, eating, loving, fighting, worshipping, celebrating, lamenting. And it is in this many we find the one again, the echoic universe of the many allowing us to signify ourselves to the world. I am here, ghost-in-flesh mattering being. You are here, angel-in-presence emerging a new mattering. Meeting you, I inhabit a new world, a landscape that stretches between us, a time-ing of our memory, forming-together the history of us. I kneel in the soil of our love; I tend to you. Love is attending to the unfolding of another.[48] To attend is to tend-to. To tend-to is to en-home our activity, to relinquish our power[49] and to instead unfold mutually, equally, souls togethering without possession or direction.
Transitioning is wandering. My body is one place; my body becomes another. What is it about me that shifts as I travel transition? Hormones flow and shift, cycles dis-membering and re-membering again. My skin softens, my fat travels, my body takes on a new form. In these shifts, I dwell more comfortably in my womanhood, seeing for the first time the woman-that-I-am. HRT does not make me a woman, but it helps me wipe away the clouds that obscure my womaning, that keep me separated from my body, my womanhood. Still, so much more remains — I want to be a woman with you, I want to woman with you. You cannot know by knowing alone. You can only know together, by togethering.[50] I love because my life testifies to it – no poem will ever express the whole of love, because its significance is found not in language, but the world itself – in the act of loving. I am a woman because my life testifies to it – no theory will ever capture womanhood, because what it is to be a woman is to woman – the act of womaning. And here I sit, dwelling in these mysteries and moving through them, loving and womaning. And my soul aches. Because what I want is to love and woman with you. To sit on our back porch, swaddled in blankets watching the dogs wrestle in the soft grass.
My sunshine, my soil, the garden who gardens me. She jazzes. Ballets kindness, pinks wisdom, flowers beauty. I was a mountain when I met you. Honeyapple shoe-tapping the awaiting, I wait. Seeing you, my breath repeats and hums hallelujah, heart-skipping Seraphim my angel graces. Time appears when two or more are gathered, re-membering our being-here; being-here with you I intend and attend-to a new future. Gently, we unwrap our placetime in the hills, two autos[51] in solar orbiting, roller-skating into our unfolding togethering. Rejoice, join, rejoin, rejoice. Holding one another, we dream the coming Ark, climbing Ararat and descending into bed a reincarnation. Spirit-matter blends and joins in Alalia[52], the ocean of possibility that life drips eternally back into. Raindrops of animation, time hovers still as our lives touch and combine, souling creaturely the currents of becoming. The all is repeated and transformed, waves of knowing wyrded[53] into the future, every act an act of fate. Odysseus journeys to Penelope again-and-again, eternal return[54] mything every moment. The myth we carry together carries our carrying-together. Placetime rhythms the echoing Unique, the breathing-heartbeat of intertwined anima. I love it when you give me flowers. I love it when you you. I love you.
My Odysseus.
Euphoria III: Cataphasis
Uniques join together in patterns of inhabiting, unfolding over one another in love. Love orients our attention, allowing another to disclose themselves to us. Knowing is echopraxy, en-mattering one’s meaning in their rhythmic activity. Praxis tics meaning-in-time, the origami of the soul. Every locution is a world-between, you-and-I unfolding into doing, an illocution that bubbles up the perlocutionary wave, the echoic ocean of meaning-in-motion.[55] The world is a disco, the space-between-us swaying with significance, poetic rhythms of here-and-there, now-and-then. Intention waits in silence.[56] Wait. Listen. The the, the the, the the. The the, the the, the the. Do you hear that? The heart illocutes being. To live is to sense; to know is to feel. (Facts care deeply about your feelings. Write them a letter sometime.) “Unsheathe your dagger definitions. Horseness is the whatness of allhorse.”[57] I cannot speak what I mean, I mean in intended-attending, in en-worlding. The space-between flutters potentia into recognition; “I see you” is hidden at the start of every definition.
Ask: Whose past will you appear in? Who are you the future of? Sometimes you are the future of a child you’ve never seen and dwell in the past of an ancestor you will never know. Meaning is the same thing as history, v. to-history. We who history. Our species-being is across-time and without-time, the many-pasts and many-futures of human beings in mutual shaping, the form-of-life of the human Unique. We talk the same world that we think and think the same matter in our listening. Walking. Kneeling. Rocking back-and-forth. Consciousness bubbles up from bodies-in-placetime, the circulation of attention. To mean is to matter-with-another, to matter another, to matter-to, to matter-to-you. To understand is to apocalypse[58], to reveal the already-here. We are the universe creating itself through its own imagination, the world disclosing itself-to-itself through the infinite articulation of the Unique. We are the Unique in the Unique which makes the Unique Unique. We Unique the world in doing. Matter matters and the Unique Uniques.
Why can’t you see me? Sit a second and listen. To the thump of my heart, to the whistle of my breath, to the groan of my ribcage. What part of me does not speak? We cocoon the world in our head and forget we are the caterpillar. All there is around us is us, and in this forgotten womb you cannot see me. The pilgrims forget their cocoon and mistake the glint of money for divinity, as if the pneuma moves in metal rather than spirit. TERFs forget their cocoon and mistake the security of identity for liberation, as if womanhood moves in genes and genitals rather than sisterhood and solidarity. I woman afraid of the woman you are, but I woman more freely than you ever will. The Sapphic cosmos echoes the intertwined becoming of many worlds, the body of God held, kissed, and loved, the eros of creation.[59] The Milky Way is a woman; I am a woman. I woman by mattering matter; I lesbian by dwelling with others. The Buffalo rivers the plateau; I granny-to-be[60], a woman-soul wandering Ozarkia. Womaning womans a world.
Transitioning is re-membering. To re-member is to bring-back-together, to re-shape the origami of the soul. I am a sculpture I art.
I am.
Euphoria IV: Penelope
Heartbeats rapid the memory, a souling needle sewing spirit in stone. Matter threading mattering into matter; anima motions time.
John the Madman swallows locusts in the wilderness, living on manna and stardust. Into the water and into the pneuma, I give myself to God, to the world. The earth-souls inhabit breath and breathe the Spirit, telling stories under the lamplight of the constellations. Timegrooves the melancholy joy of unraveling, enminded togethers tethering close the universe. Baptism in milk and ecstasy in honey. We are born again into resurrected flesh, dwelling in the imago Dei of the Unique. Alaliallelujah.
I hope. I breathe. I decay. I resurrect. Fireflies rock lovingly the hallowed dirt. A thimble of memory holds eternity. Please hold me. Wash my feet before we commune, this body of mine. Take, eat. Most of the time I am afraid. Gaia dresses windowless the cosmopsyche.[61] I hope I’m a good person. Who am I, this nowhere between notime? The gates of Ahura Mazda[62] stand solid as stone, but its walls are as permeable as smoke. I was Ashton and I hold him dear. I was ash and I cherish their bravery. I am Penelope and I love myself.
The all weeps wilderness, the wilderness weeps will. In the original dwelling, the One was whole but lonely; in loneliness, it created something outside of itself – creation.[63] This creation was loving-shattering, the potential for recognition folding out of the otherness of the two, the three, the many. The One heals itself by dis-membering and re-membering, by taking apart the hurting nothing and putting it back together as whole. In the beginning, the hurt One; in the end, the healed One. God becomes human as a wounded healer.[64]m She weeps and turns her tears into wine. She dies, descends to Tartarus, and is born again.
A human being is matter mattering. And sometimes it hurts. And sometimes it heals. Everything hurts. Everything heals. All I am is time unraveling. All I am is matter mattering.
Everything matters so much.
Οἴκοι βέλτερον εἶναι. – Hesiod, Works and Days
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Endnotes
[1] Christos Ganos, et al. “The Pathophysiology of Echopraxia/Echolalia: Relevance to Gilles de la Tourette Syndrome,” Movement Disorders, 27 (1 September 2012), vol. 10: 1222-1229.
[2] Derrida, Jacques. Limited, Inc. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988).
[3] This clarification is made to distinguish this theory from conventional speech act theory, exemplified by J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1975).
[4] This view is influenced by Robert Brandom, Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
[5] cf. The inferential agency of art objects in Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1998).
[6] This approach is influenced by James Joyce’s use of language in Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake, where the disruption of linguistic convention is supposed to invoke experience (wakeful experience in Ulysses and dreaming in FW). It is also influenced by the combination of narrative and philosophy in Vladimir Nabokov’s later texts, such as Pale Fire and Ada or Ardor, along with William Burrough’s late texts such as The Soft Machine and Nova Express.
[7] ‘Resonance’ and the poetic orientation of philosophy here is borrowed from Jan Zwicky, Lyric Philosophy (Edmonton, Alb.: Brush Education, 2014).
[8] Blog url: fishintheafternoon.com.
[9] Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, found in Robert Tucker (ed.) The Marx-Engels Reader (New York City: Norton, 1972): 160.
[10] Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program, found in Robert Tucker (ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader: 525-541. See also: Karl Marx, Grundrisse in Robert Tucker (ed.), The Marx Engels Reader: 221-293.
[11] This interpretation of the Gemeinwesen is influenced by the post-Marxist/anarcho-primitivist writer Jacques Camatte, particularly in Jacques Camatte, Capital and Community (Sheffield, UK: Pattern Books, 2020). For a short overview of this perspective see: https://illwill.com/the-gemeinwesen-has-always-been-here-an-engagement-with-the-ideas-of-jacques-camatte.
[12] I define a ’soul’ broadly as the fully unfolded life of a Unique stretched across space and time, understood in this totality. The ’soul’ is not any time-slice of the Unique’s unfolding, but the whole that each slice constitutes.
[13] This term is borrowed from narrative therapy, such as Martin Payne, Narrative Therapy (London, UK: SAGE Publications, 2006).
[14] Marx & Engels, The German Ideology.
[15] I do not mean to imply any particular view of the self here. I do not believe that self-naming and self-articulating of this type requires a static entity that corresponds to the ‘self.’
[16] Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), 5.
[17] Renzo Novatore, The Revolt of the Unique & Towards the Creative Nothing (Sheffield, UK: Pattern Books, 2020.)
[18] Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz & the Baroque (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1992).
[19] Alejandro de Acosta, ”How the Stirner Eats God,” in Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed 67 (Berkeley, CA: C.A.L. Press, 2009).
[20] Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, 161.
[21] This term is borrowed from Martin Heidegger, and specifically from Katherine Withy’s use of the term in Katherine Withy, Heidegger on Being Affected (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2024).
[22] The distinction here between placetime and spacetime is important. Spacetime refers to the dimensional nature of being-in-time (that is, Minkowski spacetime, Einsteinian relativity, and their descendants). However, placetime refers to how we experience being in this spacetime with others – it is not the real (whatever that means) but the world of appearances that we experience our lives within. I intentionally want to imply that this world of appearances is not secondary to the real, but is actually primary in how we dwell in the world.
[23] As reflected in the use of ’performative’ and ’iterative,’ this view of gender is highly influenced by Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London, UK: Routledge Press, 2006).
[24] cf. William Rusch (ed.). The Trinitarian Controversy (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1980).
[25] St. Gregory of Nazianzus, On God and Christ (Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002).
[26] cf. St. Augustine, On the Trinity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
[27] 1 John 5.7-8 CEB
[28] cf. Maria Lugones, ”Playfulness, ’World-Travelling,‘ and Loving-Perception” Hypatia 2 (Summer 1987), no. 2: 3-19.
[29] cf. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
[30] This is influenced by the Kantian tradition. Specifically, Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
[31] By this, I mean that ’the body’ is not a distinct entity separated from the rest of the world. I am implying anti-dualism, not idealism.
[32] Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror (New York City, NY: Columbia University Press, 1982).
[33] This is not commonly discussed but is true. Gender dysphoria does not refer to solely to the desire to present as a gender other than that assigned at birth, but to any discomfort with one’s gendered expression. Though trans feelings certainly fall in that category, so do experiences such as body dysmorphia or negative self-image.
[34] Paul Preciado, Can the Monster Speak? (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2021).
[35] cf. St. John of the Cross, The Dark Night of the Soul (London, UK: Dover Press, 2003).
[36] This is a reference to allism, or those who are not autistic. Since allism is taken as the standard neurotype, I use it as a metaphor for presumed but illusory unitary standards for diverse categories.
[37] This is an inversion of Plato’s theory of forms, as articulated in The Republic.
[38] Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 in Robert Tucker (ed.), Marx-Engels Reader: 294-438.
[39] This ’forgetting’ calls back to both the forgetting of the knowledge of the soul in rebirth as articulated by Plato in the Phaedo and to the ignorance produced by commodity fetishism in Marx’s Capital.
[40] Plato, Phaedo (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1977).
[41] Sex work itself diverges from the cis dyad in being a deviant form of gendered expression. In a way, sex work many times does operate as a drag performance, but not in the way implied by the above propositions. Instead, sex work is drag insofar as it is a divergent and suppressed performance of gender markers. Much more work needs to be done on this connection, however.
[42] Again, the object-role of women as sex objects is not generally explicitly affirmed (except in the case of vociferous misogynists). However, it is an implied antecedent to why the oppression of trans women is justified and so must be implicitly reinforced.
[43] This is not to imply that transmisogynists are right about cross-dressing. Cross-dressing is also not an inherently sexual act (nor is there necessarily something wrong in the case where it is sexual). However, transmisogyny bundles trans womanhood and cross-dressing together for the sake of enforcing oppressive gender relations.
[44] Internal not in the sense that they secretly believe it, but in the sense that their actions only make sense in the context where it is assumed.
[45] See: Alex Byrne, ”Are Women Adult Human Females?” Philosophical Studies 177 (2020), no. 12: 3783-3803.
[46] Katie is my partner. At times in this work I will also poetically refer to her as Odysseus.
[47] This is not to imply that there is an interior distinguished from the exterior. I agree with Wittgenstein that ”there is no such thing as a private language“ as stated in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (London, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). The interior here refers to the flow of experience that presents itself as thought, which are a type of patterned motion within the exterior, even as they are only accessible from one perspective.
[48] This definition of love is influenced by Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London, UK: Routledge Press, 2001).
[49] This is partly influenced by a footnote in Heidegger’s Being and Time, where he references two theologians (St. Augustine and Blaise Pascal) in definining love as partaking in the joy of the Dasein of another. In the context of Heidegger, it is hypothetized to be equivalent to boredom in creating the conditions for philosophical thought, though this line of argument is never fully articulated by Heidegger. For a discussion of this footnote and its implications see Giorgio Agamben, ”The Passion of Facticity,” in Potentialities (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999): 185-204.
[50] I mean this literally. Uniquing has no content without its interconnection in a network of Togetherings, and knowing is only possible in this interrelation. The Unique knows nothing alone, nor does it even exist.
[51] Autos = autistics.
[52] Alalia is the cosmos understood as an echoic ocean. It is a reference to echolalia, or the repetition of sound.
[53] This refers to the Norse/Germanic pagan notion of wyrd, or fate. Reference to this concept can be found in the Eddas.
[54] This concept is borrowed from Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
[55] I used to do speech act theory, and it shows. I am not certain if I will keep this terminology in later writings.
[56] This is both a Wittgenstein reference and an appeal to a contentless understanding of intention. I do not believe it is accurate to describe intention as a held proposition or plan of action, but instead as a leaning, or orienting of one’s activity. This is influenced by Sara Ahmed in Queer Phenomenology.
[57] Joyce, Ulysses, 178.
[58] From the Greek apokalyptein, meaning to reveal or disclose. Though the term has come to mean the end of the world, it is more accurately the unveiling of a truth. In apocalyptic literature, this is poetically understood through the dissolution of one world and the appearing of another. See: The Revelation of John.
[59] This language is influenced by Blessed Julian of Norwich, Showings (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1977) and Marcella Althaus-Reid, The Queer God (London, UK: Routledge Press, 2003).
[60] This is a reference to Granny Magic, a tradition endemic to mostly white communities in the Ozarks and Appalachia. It is a syncretic tradition born from Celtic paganism, Protestant and Catholic Christianity, and indigenous and African diaspora practices. It exists in parallel to Black magical traditions in the same area, such as Hoodoo.
[61] Gaia is the goddess of earth in Greek cosmogony, as seen in Hesiod’s Theogony. ’Cosmopsyche’ is another way to say Anima Mundi, or the world-mind or world-spirit.
[62] Ahura Mazda is the supreme deity in Zoroastrianism. The moral dualism of Zoroastrianism (exemplified by both a good and evil deity) was later integrated into Christianity in the divisions between human/divine, grace/sin, heaven/hell, and angel/devil.
[63] Though this narrative appears many times in the Christian tradition, this interpretation is primarily influenced by that of Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (Winnipeg, MB: Bison Books, 1997).
[64] Henri Nouwen, The Wounded Healer (New York City, NY: Image, 1979).
Image: Penelope Unraveling Her Web by Joseph Wright (1783-1784)
Fish In the Afternoon 