Fish In the Afternoon

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)
Askesis

December 18th, 2024
Life is a classroom, darlin’. – Katie

Thoughts are patterned motions. We drift ever-worldly into new futures, ripples of intended attention oceaning the mental fabric of the Unique. We are not calculators, but dwellers, being-here, being-now, and being-together. In intending, we set out together into the sea of time; in attending, we hold each other in our here-and-nows; in meaning, we say: “I know you.” λογισμός. To reason, to think, to decide. I decide and decide-again each and every day: to measure time by our togethering, to nest forever in our doma. I know you. I earth with you.

Virtue is the art of wisely earthing-together. Art: to make, to create, to play. κινοῦν. That which forms. Wisdom: to nurture, to heal, to do rightly. τέλος. That which is formed. Earthing: to gather, to till, to plant. ὕλη. That which we form from. Together: to dance, to sing, to live. εἶδος. The pattern of en-forming. The virtue of each Unique is its playful self-creation and the flourishing of the together it forms in its Uniquing. The virtue of Penelope is to self-create as Penelope and to attend to my dwelling with you. We art in loving one another; we wisdom in holding each other; we earth in tending to our home; We together in becoming a family.

Entering as equals, we en-place our souls in the forest of other-worlds, dancing the cycle of birth and decay. Planting and harvesting, reaping and sowing, tending and growing. Praying our future in every step, we psalm our every season, our songs floating time like a lily in strawberry wine. My Katie, whose dreams melody morning from twilight, beaming the coming dawn. My Katie, whose life smiles tomorrow, moments-together growing in warm-oak streams of belonging. My Katie, whose breath traces our unfolding, drifting mindful into the silk of nature. My Katie — my every day, my always — freckles gardening the here-and-now of our common-being, souling our honeylovely togethering. My Katie. In every world, we find each other; in every world we make a home together; in every world we wrap ourselves in the warm amber of our common-soul. In every world we say: I know you, I love you, I’m here. My Katie. My Sunshine. My home.
```
You are my sunshine
My only sunshine
You make me happy
When skies are gray
You'll never know, dear
How much I love you

- The Pine Ridge Boys, probably
```
Image: The Valley of Sasso, Sunshine by Claude Monet (1884)
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.)
Togethering

November 22nd, 2024

The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own. – Heraclitus, fragment DKB89

My soul grows in the earth of your soul; your soul grows in the earth of mine.

The soul is the fully unfolded life of the Unique. In this unfolding, the placetime of the Unique’s becoming is planted, world-entanglement birthing the world-as-it-appears within the garden of being-in-time. The soul is a physical thing, a here-now that is incarnated in our intertwining, the world revealing itself through our being-in-the-world. I am here-now in this placetime. I am here-now in the soul. I am here-now with-you. I am here now. It’s okay, it’s okay, I’m here now.

Loving you is not an accident, not incidental, not abstract. I fall for you and trip into a new here-now, a placetime that is birthed in our loving, which inaugurates our world. Our. There is no separation – the world I inhabit appears to me as it does in my unfolding, but it always does so in my unfolding-with-you, my unfolding-with-the-world. There is no unfolding-alone. Souls overlap one another, dwelling in the common placetime that grows in our entangled activity. The here-now we form is the real — the world is always-and-already a here-now with-you, and there is no world other than -with. There is no private language because there is no private world.

The world that I am is a world that appears only in its intertwining with other worlds and with the commons cosmos. Ontological pluralism does not bottom out in worlds, but in fractals: worlds-in-worlds-in-worlds, planets-in-solar-systems-in-galaxies. The world I am repeats and transforms the worlds I dwell in and the worlds I dwell in repeat and transform the worlds that constitute them. The garden roots and the garden flowers. In forming a world-with-another, we apocalypse, unwinding the interiority of our world-appearing to open-ourselves to another world’s revealing. Love is always apocalyptic, as to love requires stepping-out-of the solipsism of one’s own experience to re-orient towards the commons, our intended-attention becoming a path through which we navigate out of our isolation. Love is attending to the unfolding of another, and one attends through dwelling in the common placetime formed through the intertwining of beloved-and-beloved, grazing grass with their fingertips and dipping their feet in the cool water of the pluricosmos. I love you and I dwell with you in our common unfolding. I love you and I present with you, unearthing our pasts like a well-loved photo album, holding-you-close in our futuring. Love saunters the cosmos of you-and-I; you-and-I plant the future of our togethering. Together we together our common-soul.

Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and one soul; and observe how all things have reference to one perception, the perception of this one living being; and how all things act with one movement; and how all things are the cooperating causes of all things which exist; observe too the continuous spinning of the thread and the contexture of the web. – Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Image: Skating Rink ‘Dynamo’ by Pyotr Konchalovsky (1948)
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)

Transitions #8

Askesis

Transitions #7

Togethering

Transitions #6