Fish In the Afternoon

Magnolia

January 20th, 2025

Shhhh. – the wind

When I die, bury me at Petit Jean. Fill my lungs with fresh-tilled earth and let the Arkansas rush through my ribs. I am a flower, strong and frail, a gardener tending to the soil of my heart. When I return from Hades, my soul will sprout again, blooming among the magnolias.

When I live, set me sail along the Buffalo. Lay me down, head towards the sky, and let me drift among the sunken trees. I am a manger made of wooden flesh, a carpenter tending to the desert of my palms. When I return from Galilee, my fingers will be butter and jam, a picnic among the mulberries.

When I dream, sing my song at Mt. Sequoia. Keep low and barely hum, where only the whippoorwills can hear. I am a poet, made of sugar and vinegar, an artisan tending to the glass of my tongue. When I return from America, my voice will be a banjo and fiddle, a prayer in the hollers of Ozarkia.

Listen. – the river.

Image: Magnolias by John Singer Sargent (1912)

Butchfemme

January 8th, 2025

There is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love. – Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider

There is no such thing as gender. There are genderings. To gender, as a verb. One genders by echoing a history, intending futures and expressing pasts in attending to the present. Genderings are performances of intending-attending-expressing suspended between past-present-future, the full significance of which is only found in the interconnection between them. One attends to the world as the gender they unfold, but this attending is incarnated from an en-habiting of a past-present-future relation. This en-habiting is en-worlding; every gendering reveals a world.

One is not a woman but womans. When I woman, I attend to myself and others by en-habiting a world that echoes a past of womanings and intends a future womaning. (Think of this as Trinitarian: creating-begetting-proceeding is perichoretic, her personhood only revealed in the indwelling relations of the three. This perichoresis is also kenotic, in that each self-empties into the others. The doings of the Trinity, her energeia, are en-homed actions, the whole of the doma unveiling creation as One-in-Many and Many-in-One. Such too is intending-attending-expressing and past-present-future. Intending-attending-expressing is perichoretically kenotic, each doing only signifying as its self through the interpenetration of the three, which empties each into the others. That is, it is not only that when one intends they also attend and express, but that what it means to intend is only sensible through what it means to attend and express simultaneously. Each is empty-of-self but full-of-others. Meaning is gifting. Likewise with past-present-future. The past is not only kenotically revealed through dwelling in the present while being oriented towards certain futures, but it also perichoretically unfolds from the present and future. The echoic history pasts by presenting and futuring.)

Lesbians lesbian in their womaning. Desiring emerges from intending-attending-expressing. One desires another and unveils their desiring intentions by attending to the desired-one and, in doing so, expressing the hoped-for future of one’s desires. Thus, sexual orientation: I lean in my desires to the desired-one. A sexual or romantic orientation is a meta-category of desirings that groups them according to a family resemblance. One is a lesbian because she desires those who woman (or unfold ways of en-habiting the world that emerge in relationship with womaning), and she unveils this desire by attending to those she desires and expressing a future with them, whether for hours, months, years, or forever. Likewise, one is heterosexual because they desire those who conventionally gender in ways opposite to them (where this opposition is highly culturally-bound), unveiling their desire by attending to those they desire and expressing a future with them. As with intending-attending-expressing and past-present-future more broadly, these desirings are perichoretic and kenotic: when one lesbians, she simultaneously intends, attends to, and expresses her lesbianing across a relationship of past-present-future.

However, these desirings are not reducible solely to those that are conventionally sexual or romantic in nature (however difficult it would be to determine that in the first place). These desirings are also genderings. One lesbians not solely by sexually or romantically desiring another, but through patterning these desires as a quilt woven from the lesbianing of others. How one lesbians is informed by how one genders and how one genders is informed by how one lesbians. This quilt is as detailed as the Uniques that compose it, each lesbianing in their uniquing and togethering, ultimately patterning into constellations of gender roles and gender expressions — that is, into a queer cosmos. Within this cosmos there are gardens of well-cultivated genders, two of which are butch and femme, togethering with one another as butchfemme. Butchfemme is a form-of-life that lesbian togethers form over time within their echoic history. This form-of-life generates a dance of intertwined patterns of activity, ways of gendering as femme and butch. This disco of unfolding souls unravels a shared lesbian placetime, where one’s genderings occur in echoic resonance with the genderings of others. Echoic resonance orients the togethering of these genderings towards the common heart of the community; in fact, it is this echoic resonance and the intertwining of Unique genderings in the together of butchfemme that marks it as a community. However, echoic resonance is not reducible to a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. There is no set definition to femme or butch, because there are no gender definitions at all. What it is to be femme or butch is determined by one’s gendering and lesbianing within an echoic history. Butchfemme expresses an ocean of different resonant frequencies, each repeating and transforming one another in forming a lesbian pluricosmos, a Sapphic chorus.

Gender is not a thing but a doing, an en-habiting and en-worlding. When I woman, I playfully self-create, using the womanings of others as the echoic content of that play. Likewise, in womaning, I reveal a world and en-habit it, my womaning also a dwelling arising from the en-habited echoic resonance of the womanly forms-of-life that I sprout from. In then womaning as a lesbian, I intend, attend to, and express my desires, the ways my womaning is interwoven with those of who I desire and the communities of desiring that I echo in my activity. All our lives form a great orchestra and within this orchestra are an infinite range of improvisations, each emerging from a ground of harmonies that gift meaning to our play. In bouncing off of the patterned echoes of butchfemme life, I locate myself as a world, within a world, among other worlds — in a solar system of the ever-unfolding cosmos of genderings within which I dwell. From the history of queer life I creatively re-constitute myself again-and-again, a melody in the symphony of life.

Our categories are important. We cannot organize a social life, a political movement, or our individual identities and desires without them. The fact that categories invariably leak and can never contain all the relevant ‘existing things’ does not render them useless, only limited. Categories like ‘woman,’ ‘butch,’ ‘lesbian,’ or ‘transsexual’ are all imperfect, historical, temporary, and arbitrary. We use them, and they use us. We use them to construct meaningful lives, and they mold us into historically specific forms of personhood. Instead of fighting for immaculate classifications and impenetrable boundaries, let us strive to maintain a community that understands diversity as a gift, sees anomalies as precious, and treats all basic principles with a hefty dose of skepticism. – Gayle Rubin, Thinking Sex

Image: Le Bal élégant, La Danse à la campagne by Marie Laurencin (1913)
Transitions #8

December 30th, 2024
In trans women’s eyes, I see a wisdom that can only come from having to fight for your right to be recognised as female, a raw strength that only comes from unabashedly asserting your right to be feminine in an inhospitable world.
In a trans woman’s eyes, I see someone who understands that, in a culture that’s seemingly fuelled on male homophobic hysteria, choosing to be female and openly expressing one’s femininity is not a sign of frivolousness, weakness or passivity, it is a fucking badge of courage. – Julia Serano, Whipping Girl

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 herself 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 become public indecency, drag performances become sex work, 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 herself 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. Cross-dressing or similar actions or identities are therefore used as both a bridge and a smokescreen. However, this move is only at the surface. What drives the transmisogynistic argument is an internal affirmation that trans women are women without an external or public affirmation. Trans women are oppressed as women, but part of this oppression is to 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.
```
Let me listen to me and not to them
May I be very well and happy
May I be whichever they can thrive
Or just may they not.
They do not think not only only
But always with prefer
And therefore I like what is mine
For which not only willing but willingly
Because which it matters. They find it one in union.
In union there is strength.
- Gertrude Stein, Stanzas in Meditation
```
Image: Man and Woman I by Edvard Munch (1905)
Transitions #7

December 5th, 2024

In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change. – Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider

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, matterings layering on the architecture of my dwelling so that each part appears as-something and for-something. 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 is 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, much less is it inherently valenced. Our being-enfleshed is not an original sin. Instead, ontological injustice generates ontological harm. Ontological injustice: when the intersubjective co-constitution of the world itself 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 my experience of my body 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-valenced 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.

This is one reason even cis people experience gender dysphoria. 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 valence 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, 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, of patriarchy, of ableism, of fatphobia, of capitalism, and of imperialism. Each of these forms of oppression intertwine 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 the world itself. The world-picture of Leviathan is one that spiders out to being-itself, and in order to free ourselves from injustice we must also smash that picture. Liberation is iconoclasm.

I didn’t regret the decision to take hormones. I
wouldn’t have survived much longer without passing. And the surgery was a gift to myself, a coming home to my body. But I wanted more than to just barely exist, a stranger always trying not to get involved. I wanted to find out who I was, to define myself. Whoever I was, I wanted to deal with it, I wanted to live it again. I wanted to be able to explain my life, how the world looked from behind my eyes. – Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

Image: Nocturnal Voyage by Ivan Aivazovsky (19th c.)
Transitions #6

November 12th, 2024

You want them to notice the ragged hem of your summer dress. You want them to see you like they see every other girl. But they just see a faggot. They hold their breath not to catch the sick. – Laura Jane Grace, Transgender Dysphoria Blues

Content note: transphobic slurs

Gaze. The quiet (loud) quiet looking. The other-orienting, the other-negating. The allos.

Staring. What does it mean to be stared at by an entire country? Where is the gaze of America drawn, where does the eye of its machinic libido fall? Trump. They keep using “storm” language. Hurricanes emerging, tornadoes swarming. Some dick on the internet says a storm is coming and suddenly NY Times columnists think they’re clever. As if the mob wasn’t already storming. Swarming, storming. Staring.

Do you know what it feels like to be dragged into the public sphere, to become an image of gender-terror screamed out by fascists — at the end, Trump spews a paroxysm of transphobia, gumming-up the radiowaves with psychosexual imaginaries of men-in-dresses, criminal men-in-dresses, groomers, traps, trannies. What is the left’s response? Harris calls hypocrisy and says Trump also gave healthcare to the transgendereds (we share the shame!) while the official opposition, the Green Party Nobody, gurgles something about men-in-women’s sports.

Are we nothing to you? Am I nothing to you?
America, what is it? Do you want me or not?

Do you want to kill me or fuck me? If it makes you sick to know we exist why do you keep saturating the world with your fantasies of us? We just want to exist and you call our existence a fetish – the fact that we breathe becomes a pornographic fact, and going out in public becomes a sex crime. Yet! We didn’t pornography ourselves, we were pornographied — we just want to live, but for you our lives are a psychosexual haunting. We don’t get a choice in the matter. We are the limit of freedom, a reminder that all of this is contingent. And that both entices and inflicts fear. And you don’t know. If you want to fuck us. Or kill us. Or be us.

All you know is you need Father to keep you safe.
And that maybe if there weren’t so many trans people we wouldn’t have these problems.
And the world wouldn’t feel so scary.
And everything would be normal again.
And they wouldn’t have to think anymore.
About whether they want to fuck us.
Or kill us.
Or be us.

Cause at the end of the day, Father decides.

You never completely have your rights, one person, until you all have your rights. – Marsha P. Johnson

Image: Stormy Sea by Peter Balke (1870)

Magnolia

Butchfemme

Transitions #8

Transitions #7

Transitions #6