It’s been a hot minute and my chances of ever being a widely read trans author have probably expired — not that this was ever my goal. But I keep telling myself I cannot write unless it is my dissertation or an article, which means I just don’t write.

The last month has been harrowing for me — though probably less so than for many in the US and elsewhere. Nevertheless, as a terminally online trans PhD, I need to absorb and sift through all the bad in the world (this is probably another reason why I haven’t been working on my dissertation). I can still feel the sickly after-affect of the first Trump administration looming behind dark COVID-19 traumas. After the election, these anxieties rush back into the forefront of my mind and multiply. At first, I felt numb, then I felt defiant, but mostly I feel deeply scared. In the interregnum, between administrations, I grimly watched Project 2025 before anyone cared or knew about it. Because I was watching, I knew what was coming, but now that it’s here, fulfilled premonitions are cold comfort. I’m starting to hate my sagaciousness. Perhaps here I am wearing the mantel of Cassandra whom I am currently writing and researching about in the capacity of a prophet portending a transgender eugenics, which brings me to my morning musings.

I woke up to a prominent — and thoroughly lovely — trans femme adorning the top of my Insta feed, ready to greet me with evidence of her fabulous activism, or glamorousness. It was the latter, a tryptic image of her face before and after two respective rounds of facial feminisation surgery (FFS). At first, I looked at her enviously. Even a decade into this process, where I now consider myself to be somewhat butch and genderqueer, the drive to conform to a more feminine aesthetic and body is intense — and ironically deeply gender-affirming in the sense that this is a common aspect of being a woman. Her post was subtended by text proclaiming the necessity of trans joy: specifically, the trans joy of gender euphoria and expressing one’s “true self” through surgical interventions. To be fair, she was more careful in her framing of this sentiment, I believe she wrote something about the irony of not recognising her face at first, but also recognising herself more — “more” to me implies a similar sentiment (expressing an internal essence or true self). To be even more fair, she was mostly making a point about how important these surgeries are and how they save lives. This is true, but FFS is rarely covered by many insurance plans (globally). Thus, this trans euphoria is somewhat limited (even if it shouldn’t be, which is the author’s point).

My wider point though is that when we celebrate trans beauty, it is often in the sense of trans feminine women who conform to the most traditional cisgender beauty standards — this is undoubtedly gender affirmation for many, but it is also often the only kind publicly celebrated. I am thinking of Carmen Carrera or Adore Delano. Even the protean and mysterious Jinkx Monsoon, got her face done: all trans femmes/women with large audiences. This makes sense in the context of wider social and economic norms — but the cost of accessing these interventions is extra difficult for trans feminine persons who are more likely to experience poverty and a general lack of access to medical resources (which the Instagram poster acknowledges and seeks to redress). In a sense, trans women conforming to these standards is radical — in that it challenges the notion that we are “men in dresses” — like Josh Seiter or Ollie London — that we are artificial. This is, again, ironic affirmation seeing how this is also something that many cis women are accused of through cosmetics and surgery. However, the threat of this “fishy” performance, by the Insta poster and others — that is performing and enacting cis female beauty standards — causes our detractors to retreat to a position of biomateriality: where you cannot cut down deep enough, thus returning to men in dresses, just hot ones — “traps” to use an old internet meme.

It is an impossible game to win, we are attacked for not being feminine enough, and then when we achieve this, the goalpost is always moved out of our reach. As the political climate is so quickly eroding the tepid and limited rights trans people were able to accrue during the 2010s, the desire to be able to go stealth — or at least revel in cisgender verisimilitude — becomes more important. Obviously, these bodies are valid. And this poster is very public and frequently savagely attacked for her openness — her cisgender verisimilitude provides little armour. And I want to point out, that publicly facing trans feminine people who are out — no matter how much they pass — are rebellious, as knowledge of their transness will always invalidate their perceived gender “realness” — they will in essence be read. From a gender theory perspective, this is important, as it highlights the variability and constructed nature of gender. Though, it does little to highlight the same thing about sex. I suppose I am just lingering on FFS and conforming to cis beauty standards as a kind of Stockholm syndrome. We are seduced by the culture and norms which attempt to erase and foreclose our existence.

Under the dark clouds forming at the nearest fringes of the future is a regime of anti-transgender eugenics. Increasingly, we — and though this “we” includes masculine-identified people, it is largely femmes — are being excluded from public life. The effects of the search for a bio-essence of gender and sex excludes trans feminine people from the toilet, sports, and single-sex healthcare spaces. As inconsequential as sports are to the functioning of society and reality, exclusion from them is a grave sign that points towards a form of transvestigation which seeks to look at our molecules — defying the logic of sex science and legal standards in the process. Which, to wear my Cassandra hat for a moment, is also a grim portend for all women falling outside the strict boundaries of white bourgeois femininity. The politics of the toilet and locker room are going to become the politics of a silent genocide, the not-so-slow attrition of the possibility of existing as trans femmes in public (i.e. life). Like Orwell’s New Speak, our rebelliousness is erased from the possibility of being uttered or performed. To resist this, we need to build a transgender politics of the body, to espouse the truth we know and live — that sex is multiple and not fixed: to challenge bioessentialism. We also need, in addition to the fishy trans girls, some trans femme butches. Who better to challenge the hegemony of beauty and gender norms?

“For transsexuality is always narrative work, a transformation of the body that requires the remolding of the life into a particular narrative shape.”

— J. Prosser

*This was originally posted elsewhere, but I’m moving it here.

Balanced above an oily green tripod, the Oracle — a young girl, ankles visible under sweaty robes, bare-shouldered — sways to convulsions from the deep. Drenched in sulphurous vapours, she intones with a voice exceeding the timbre of her vocal range, “Know thy self.” The proclamation vibrates throughout the Delphic cave, a chthonic resonance, through time and space.

Admittedly, I don’t think that my education in Classics has amounted to more than a pile of obscure references. But I often think of the Oracle’s command, inscribed above Apollo’s chamber: “γνῶθι σεαυτόν.” Plato also tells us that the Oracle had “certainty brings ruin” secondarily inscribed here. In this last case, I do not claim to know much for certain — myself perhaps least of all. For me, being trans is about this quest for self-knowledge. A lot of digital ink is rendered on this topic, with endless blogs, comments, and threads. Trans autobiography is a trope. And if I’m being honest, it’s also a little nauseating and tedious to read. Sometimes I think that trans autobiography misses the point: narrative incoherence, coherence is boring. Some psychoanalytic theory suggests that the subject is structured through narration. Some suggest that we are not young scientists as children, but storytellers and sharers. Certainly, in our current long moment, stories are epistemically supreme — everyone has a story.

In the 90s, Jay Prosser wrote about transsexual (I will just use “trans” moving forward) autobiography in his seminal Second Skins. This is not a unique object of study, as in the late 80s, Donna Haraway’s trans disciple, Sandy Stone, initiated trans scholarship with a focus on how trans experience is constrained, codified, authorized, and annihilated, within the framework of certain narrative formations. Her manifesto ends with a call for authentic trans heteroglossia (multiple narrations). This heterodoxy was meant to counter the medical and feminist accounts of trans experience — which were bent into either celebration of modern techno-medical science, or patriarchy (or both). The voice of the trans was lost, unable to speak.

Jay Prosser’s work attempts to heal the ruptured trans body by retroactively aligning and ordering experience into a progress narrative about the present and future. This is certainly what I see in the writing of many trans authors on Medium. Prosser — whom I haven’t reread in a hot moment — ultimately deals with the postmodern atomic fuzz of post-Butlerean gender performativity by doubling down on the narrative’s cohesive effect on trans subjectivity. And yet, in the ensuing decades, other authors have pointed out how this gesture toward teleology and coherence is inauthentic vis-à-vis trans experience — at least as heteroglossia (see Currah 2014). In the same way that I am often drawn to the Oracle’s smoky, muted words, I too am fascinated by the decomposition of the narrative threads of my life. But I also cannot help but try to wind them into something approaching legibility (though I admit, I am an awful seamstress).

Story: When I first decided to medically transition, I went on a long walk — for 12 days. I am hardly as ascetic as that makes me sound. But on that walk, I poured hundreds of data points about my gender into a small green notebook: “I did this when I was ten…I remember this at five…and this at 15.” It cohered a sense of self I desperately needed to validate — a timeline and a road trip, classic genre tropes. I am not sure if this was an innate desire, as many other trans autobiographers have had, or me bending into an established form. Whose biography is in that little green hipster Moleskine notebook that I dragged through the dusty high Himalayas performing self-reflection in the most cliched way? Sartre, de Beauvoir, Yak cheese skins, sadhus, and unseasonal desert rain.

Recently I have re-encountered someone from a very specific moment in my life (my early 20s). I think it is pretty normal to feel nostalgia for being young at the end of one’s 30s. But this was a special moment for me. I cannot speak from her perspective, but that moment in time together felt queer. If not, then our reacquaintance — more than a decade and a half later — seems to inflect the past with more than a tinge of queerness. And here, I am pointing toward the breakdown in a linear narrative. What was at a minimum a session of drag — makeup, bra, roommate’s top, sweaty short hair, and fumbling — was pregnant with the future incongruence of later crossings. Perhaps this is a moment of narrative cohesion, or maybe it is the present changing the past. I don’t know. But I find these things more interesting than the standard narrative fare on offer; I am moving backwards.

My spectre returned in the flesh is a ghost in the sense that she has a “seething” presence in the stories of my life. She fits into a carefully arrange story arc about my sexuality, transness, and development. Confronting this virtual presence has unravelled some of those threads. I am not who or what I necessarily told myself I was. Re-encountering her and her impressions and stories of me help in my reformulation of self, which I have been recently scrutinizing for evidence of someone else’s writing. Through her I am intermediate, nonlinear, (un)gendered, and I am confronted by the past — dyschronic. Through meeting her, the past is changed, renewed, and reformed; the future abounds with a million possibilities. The tapestry’s warp and weft are freed.

Perhaps the auger’s maxim cannot be heeded. The more I try to map the stories of my life, the more they seem to be uncoiling. Or maybe by looking, all that appears solid — through narrative plot — is unbound, like the space between atoms when you look too closely.

I wrote the following around the Day of Transgender Remembrance. Lo and behold, I didn’t know what to do with it. I want to give Mandy (the subject of the article) good exposure, but I never found the right place. Hopefully, that is here. Now that we are on the Day of Transgender Visibility, which is supposed to be the less sombre of the dyad of transgender days, I think it is the right time, as there is not a lot to celebrate these days, but there is a lot that is worth making visible.

About a girl: I remember the first time I met Mandy Blåhaj (pseudonym) in 2017. I had just arrived in Holland, and I wanted to make trans friends. I had been camping out in east Asia for some time and the queer scene, especially the trans one, was very underground there — Seoul’s queer cultural festival (pride) was attracting more protestors than attendees (when it was allowed to organize at all). I was certain that moving to Europe would entail legions of transfeminine friends. But when I arrived in Utrecht, there was a paucity of potential acquaintances — at least of the trans femme feather. I tried to go to a meet-up hosted by the COC or some other LGBTI+ NGO, but it was not a very social event. The denizens at the meet were akin to awkward Grade 8 students at their first co-ed dance. People shuffled about looking at their feet and mostly talked about surgeries they wanted. But I wanted a “trans revolution” and to subvert such pedestrian cisnormativity concerns. I was just as naïve and seemingly lost, but I knew I had not found companionship.

My second attempt at mediated socialisation was at a meet-up for queer/trans/nonbinary folks — the aesthetic of the advertisement for the support group included a unicorn puking a rainbow — neoclubkid-kitch. The group was hosted in a local bookshop after 19:00 midweek. Having been in the Netherlands for little more than two months, as a freshly out trans, I was terrified. The support group meet-up was full of nonbinary zoomers and young millennials, but no one looked like me. I — a xenial — cut my teeth on grunge and could remember the aftermath of the AIDS crisis; I didn’t seem to fit here either. More than age, culture, and demographics, there were no trans women at the meeting — other than the host (who still was not fully out). I remembered the Toronto gay scene of the 00s when I came of age. I had come out in the anxious post-millennial climate of the financial collapse. I had then ditched the scene and moved east to engage in nearly a decade of orientalism and hedonic beach combing. I was only peripherally aware of what nonbinary was. I felt out of place, in this group of nonbinary trans mascs. But everyone was welcoming, and I came back for the second round of panopticonic group therapy.

Mandy was at one of these early meetings. She was young, vibrant, earnest, and welcoming. We became friends quickly. While I was not interested in making physical friendships, I was drawn to her physicality and youth. I was a haggard 32 at the time, having medically transitioned around 30. She was 23, or something, and this seemed inconceivable to me. I remember floating through our initial conversations together intoxicated by the heady possibilities that she represented. I am not, like so many trans women are, obsessed with having wasted my youth by transitioning outside my 20s. I came out early to myself and a few others around 2000, but I had not yet heard the word “transgender.” I was still too affected by Buffalo Bill’s cathode-ray presence in my parent’s living room. But I was initially captivated by the possibility of this counterfactual reality Mandy represented.

Mandy and I have been friends these past six years or so — with lapsed moments. Sometimes, trans femmes can demand a lot because of the world, and I am not always able to give. As I got to know her better, I learned about her life and situation. First at an art deco bar drowning in dark wood that first October. There she let her life spill effortlessly from her mouth. I didn’t know at the time, but this was in part an aspect of her autism. A characteristic she speaks about openly. I first noticed the way she easily interacted with everyone with a sense of laudable abandon at a queer party in Rotterdam where she changed naked amongst a throng of onlookers, tucking expertly, as if she was in her own WC taking her time at home. I bring up this diagnosis because it is important to the narrative I am relating here. In many ways, Mandy Blåhaj’s life should have been a good one. She is young, Dutch, white, and the child of middle-class Dutch parents; she grew up in Holland, Germany, and Norway. But her autism was ignored throughout her childhood — which is not uncommon in the Netherlands — and she was unsupported by her parents — at least not emotionally. Left to fend for her social development, she found university and living away from home hard. When she transitioned, her relationship with her parents was not improved. And she was forced to plod along through the Dutch healthcare system on her own without much support.

While this is hardly the most harrowing trans story I have encountered, the implications of it are not to be underestimated. Autistic, and indeed, recently diagnoses with fibromyalgia, which leaves the body feeling exhausted and in pain, she was on her own. The VuMC’s Kennis en zorgcentrum genderdysforie, Dutch for centre for gender dysphoria, is infamous for its conservative and highly gender normative care (this is a feeling that stems from first-hand experience and the community more broadly). Mandy, a nonbinary trans femme, felt out of place and had to suffer through years of conservative hormone therapy which limited her oestrogen levels to a minimum. She also felt deeply out of place in an environment she felts was trying to railroad her into a specific form of transgender.

Mandy quickly began to struggle more and more, slipping into a spiralling state of despondency, driven by mental health crises, a transphobic society, inadequate healthcare, and marginalisation as a neurodivergent person. Because of these intersecting issues, Mandy has a hard time working, finishing school, or maintaining satisfying social relationships. But over the last few years, she has found housing and some assistance once leaving her parents. Thankfully, in the Netherlands, access to social housing is more accessible than in other places.

Again, not so bad — as far as trans stories go — and I wish it ended here. However, despite the Netherlands’ gleaming reputation as a liberal state par excellence, it is unfortunately a neoliberal paradise. The welfare system was long ago executed by the long-incumbent centre-right conservative party under Mark Rutte. Free-market privatization and pro-business ethos have gutted many of the country’s social benefits: leaving it less than welcoming to those who are different or struggling financially. Nevertheless, this is not the dominant perspective of the Netherlands, both from within and without. In the village where I live(d), there is a statue of the concept of tolerance — tolerantie in Dutch. However, in my experience, the evidence for tolerance is thin in the Netherlands, at least in the ways where tolerance stops being performative or superficial and transforms into acceptance. Like many Western countries, there is increasing mistrust of foreigners, most alarmingly, brown Muslim ones. With regard to gender politics, the UN has cited the Dutch policy of gender neutrality as a problem, because it ignores how the majority of gender-based violence targets women and girls (UN CEDAW and Althoff et al. 2019).

The main evidence for the myth of tolerance seems to be found in their early — not insignificant — adoption of gay marriage. But Dutch people, when polled, are not particularly accepting of LGBTQ+ people, they just don’t care if they exist, so long as they steer clear and behave like everyone else. This last sentiment is captured by professor Dr John de Wit in an article about pride published by Utrecht University in 2018. Despite some human rights organisations, like the UCLA William’s Institute in the States ranking the Netherlands high on their list of acceptance for LGBTI groups, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights 2019 survey data — titled “EU LGBTI survey II” — paints a more muddled picture. In line with this, I know queer couples, who are largely normatively codded, save for same-sex attraction, who have been heckled on the street. Again, not so bad, as far as these things go, but hardly tolerant in a meaningful way.

Furthermore, the Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau (SCP) just released data suggesting that trans acceptance lags behind general gay and bi acceptance substantially (I read an English summary, take that as a caveat). As such, the prospects for a trans feminine person, who is neurodivergent and crippled, are slim. To be fair, this is not a uniquely Dutch problem. There are not many better options out there — but I am only trying to be fair, and not complacent with mediocrity. I find sometimes we like to avoid criticising the best or worst option because the alternative is far worse.

The reason why I am profiling Mandy is her experience with the life options she is left with. Dutch society thinks that disability is nonsense and that she should work. This is a common neoliberal attitude, rugged individualism. However, Mandy is prepared to work at the only job left open to her, sex work. Sex work, or a pistol to the head (or equivalent), are often the only options for trans femmes — the chances of this increase with the more ways she is marginalized. Mandy stacks at least three axes of marginalization — trans femme/nonbinary, crippled, and neurodivergent. As an outside observer of Dutch society — and as a Canadian — I am supposedly witnessing some of the best environments to be trans and a sex worker in. Canada and the Netherlands have reputations as international bastions of human rights. While both Canada and the Netherlands have legal mechanisms for transgender individuals to access trans healthcare and legal technologies to change their registered/assigned sex/gender, they only promote trans people who otherwise can stand on their own two feet, as it were. Other bodies, the ones who cannot pass or work, are left to languish and perish. Nowhere is this perhaps more explicit in how Mandy is foiled from doing sex work.

Mandy receives a paltry welfare payment each month. As in other Western countries, there is a strong, Reaganesque, aversion to the welfare queen in the Netherlands. I remember a few years ago there was a national scandal because a disabled woman was forced to pay her disability allotment back because her mother was helping her with her groceries. This is a country with a royal family that receives millions of euros a year in stipends from the taxpayer. Mandy’s 1000 euros a month income is subjected to regular income reporting by the government to ensure she has no other income. She is also limited to 28 days each year when she is allowed to leave the country — which is counter to the ethos of the EU and Schengen Zone. The only reasons for these draconian surveillance measures are punitive. Regardless of FOSTA-SESTA decimation of electronic platforms to autonomously host sex work, Mandy would be unable to access the few remaining platforms. She cannot use Onlyfans because any income would be checked.

While the Netherlands has a reputation for its progressive attitude toward sex workers, this is also false — or again, excelling as the best worst option. In the last decade, sex workers have been kicked out of safer facilities and onto the street on trumped-up trafficking laws. As a result of this assault on sex work and redlight districts, sex workers are terrified of reporting the rampant abuse that happens inside legal brothels, because they will be shut down. The workers who remain legitimate are forced to create their own companies and hire accounting services to pay their taxes — which Mandy cannot do as a disabled person receiving welfare.

In Mandy’s city, which is one of the more progressive in the country (not Amsterdam), there is a monitored sex workspace, where workers can access security even when working without the above-mentioned business apparatus. However, Mandy was denied working here — which still requires a permit — because she did not have a record of working illegally on the street or being assaulted/raped. Because of this, she has had to pursue sex work, when she has the energy, in neighbouring Belgium, where she has made contacts and has a community. However, working over the border, and getting paid in cash, is problematic, because if she is found out, she will lose her state welfare payment and could incur hefty fines.

With increasing inflation and the general climate around trans people, plus this level of precarity, what chance is there for Mandy to not be heavily stressed and burnt out? A high allostatic load is all but a given which intern contributes to more degradation and hardship via chronic illness and marginalization.

Recently, Mandy attended a meeting to be designated by the state as “fully disabled.” This would mean a little more income as well as some relaxation of travel and income caps. However, she was denied, as she reports the intake assessment determined she could work for up to an hour a day — based on her attending the mandatory meeting. More shockingly, she was told by the occupational therapist they suspected that being trans was causing her too much stress and that she should detransition! When I responded to this remark suggesting that she should take action against this clear transphobia, Mandy admitted that it was a common attitude she found in state care and psychiatric services — “besides” she said, “with what energy?” Fair enough, advocating for oneself as a trans person is itself a full-time job, but this statement, coming causally from a healthcare provider, is shocking. I think if you polled most trans people, detrasitioning — despite what TERFs might say — would be a death sentence.

Recounting this story brings me back to the youthful face I met over half a decade ago. I have not seen Mandy’s face in person since before the pandemic, but I assume that some of that exuberance have been rubbed out. I certainly hear this in her voice. The bubbles have flattened. How is this nominally privileged — white, Dutch, middle-class origin story — girl supposed to survive? I recently responded to an Instagram repost of Transgender Europe’s (TGEU) comment on trans violence for the Day of Transgender Remembrance. The NGO posted the grim statistics for this year’s abysmal trans murder rates. I noted that this type of framing perpetuates the narrative that trans violence only happens between individual actors and erases its systemic nature — tragic as murder rates are. I believe I asked, “when was the last time you heard of tranny dying of old age?” I rankled TGEU into responding. Their response — which is truthful — is that those statistics would be too hard to get: death by systemic oppression across European states. Nevertheless, NGOs like this are invested in reproducing the aesthetic of combating oppression. If the narrative is cast as “some bad actors,” true bigots, then the hate crime laws they advocate for can ameliorate the issue — punishing the bad outliers in a society otherwise full of diversity and justice. But what good is that for Mandy?

I’m interested in who is omitted by this ritual, the Day of Transgender Remembrance, when it is framed this way. Who doesn’t get their soul exercised by the séance? The transfeminine, transmasculine, and genderqueer folks who die through attrition or by their own hands (as proxies for state murder). This mass of uncounted numbers is crushed under the constant torrent of media criticism, social ostracism, and gatekeeping via public policy amendments that we experience to our detriment every day. I can imagine a woman like Mandy, a spectre omitted from this type of framing when her likely limited life span comes to the end of its coil — forgotten. Leaving aside the maelstrom of transphobia, specifically transmisogyny, which trans people find themselves the hypervisible focal point of, the experiences of Mandy Blåhaj, which are by no means unique, represent a form of the banality of evil — death by Kafkaesque bureaucracy and gatekeeping.

This potential for state-caused murder is what I always find absent from the numbers posted each year on the Day of Transgender Remembrance. I don’t know how to resolve this grim paradigm when a state service provider can so causally, and seemingly inconsequentially say, “maybe you should detransition,” as if that wasn’t anything but a death sentence. It might not be rape and murder on the street, but the alienation and damage of this type of ubiquitous attitude accumulate over a (shorter)lifetime, and is often, just as deadly — if not a little bit slow.

*The above has been approved for publication by Mandy. She gave a detailed overview of her experiences during several phone calls during October and November 2022.

An Injustice!

About Mandy was originally published in An Injustice! on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Vaush, a reasonably prominent left-tuber, recently covered the David Pakman’s Show’s take on his assertion that current policies and attitudes toward the transgender population constitute genocide. Now, I generally agree with many of Vaush’s takes, at least the ones I hear, I’m not a regular listener, and I know some progressives dislike various deployments of his vocabulary that I will not discuss here. Suffice it to say, I don’t need allies to be pure and totally aligned with my own politics to engage with them. I don’t even really care about the content of Vaush’s reaction to Pakman (whom I have never heard of before). But, the word “genocide” has been on my mind lately, after I called out Transgender Europe’s (TGEU) performative “rest in power” coverage of dead trans folk this past year during the Day of Transgender Remembrance (DoTR). I rankled them into responding by perhaps inappropriately targeting the inadequacy of their advocacy on another trans org’s social media — which I apologize for.

To paraphrase, TGEU posted the usual “x trans people have died as a result of abhorrent murder this year!” To which I wrote, “while the x dead trans persons in question are undoubtedly tragic, if the Day of Transgender Remembrance is to mean anything, we must also remember the uncounted masses of trans people whose lives were snuffed out by state-sponsored violence and hypervisibility. Reducing the DoTR to this handful of brutal murders only reifies the idea that trans murder is a case of singular violence perpetrated by some bad actors, which can be addressed by hate crime legislation and reform, instead of a systemic problem.” This was on Instagram, so it got wordy. They replied something like, “that would be too much work to collect the data.” I disingenuously thanked them for their work. I make posts like this almost every year, but it pissed someone off this time. But my point is valid. The IGO and NGO sectors operate within this type of framework to facilitate their cooperative professional operations lobbying for various forms of LGBTQ+ protections that do little to address material conditions for poor trans and queer people, but rather bolster their own industry which has a stake in perpetuating this type of violence. Note that I am not saying all of these organizations are bad — or even TGEU. But when your response is that doing the thing that needs to be done is “too hard,” then what are you seriously doing to address this type of violence? Advocating for legal protections is great, but ineffective as a primary strategy for ending trans violence because the attacks are not the primary cause of harm — the system is, and that system is the one in which said organisations exist in.

The word “genocide” is a minefield with very specific political and cultural denotations. And while personally, I think there is a case for it — and if we were at a pub drinking I might make it while wagging my finger around at you dramatically — it is too loaded for me. I think Vaush says something similar, that there will always be a chancer in the crowd dismissing a substantial argument for recognizing this type of systemic violence because the technical Geneva convention definition of the word says “this.” But if we look at 1, the deluge of anti-trans legislation in the States and in Europe; 2, combine that with the deafening and constant anti-trans mongering of the media; 3, and then look at trans suicide rates, which are an outcome of these socio-cultural formations, then it becomes clear that there is a political and cultural campaign of marginalization and death being directed at trans folks. Here are some statistics to substantiate this: “data indicate that 82% of transgender individuals have considered killing themselves and 40% have attempted suicide, with suicidality highest among transgender youth” (Austin et al. 2022). Many would have you believe that this is evidence alone that negates tolerating trans people, but these suicide rates are not a quality of trans people, but a symptom of the context they find themselves in. Combine these numbers with a population estimate of 1–5% present of the population (which depends on where you are looking and with which discursive lens), you have a big group of people very intentionally being marked for death by the cruel biopolitical calculus of neoliberal modernity. This is to say nothing of the many other forms of marginalization, especially material and carceral, which foreshorten transgender lives. But I’m not calling this genocide. I do have a few words I feel more comfortable calling it.

“Eugenics” is the first word which springs to my mind. It essentially is a means of controlling who lives and dies based off a set of arbitrary biological markers. It’s what we do to dogs to cultivate breed standards. It is prompting certain desirable populations and suppressing undesirable ones. This term has a long history. It is often attributed to American efforts in the field which were taken up by the Nazis — but never forgotten in America. However, Enlightenment era Europeans started it by introducing the field of anthropometrics (which gave us modern eugenics, and other pseudo-sciences like phrenology). The word etymologically comes from the Greek for “human” + “measure.” There are all sorts of modern sciences derived from this concept besides eugenics, such as BMI, biometrics, and IQ — all of which were, or still are, employed by eugenic programmes (though not all intentionally so). BMI for instance is used to deny trans people surgery and access to HRT as a matter of protocol; this is despite being at best, a minorly useful medical marker — one of many — or more probably, at worst, scientifically bunk. The concept was adopted and pushed by insurance companies which modelled their data on very specific socioeconomic and racial categories that were not representative of the broader masses of humanity. Now, this arbitrary marker is used to deny trans folks access to medical care — which is proven in medical literature to place them at the highest risk of suicide, degradation, and marginalization. Why? Probably just general transphobia, but initially only transsexual women with a specific body type, which sexologists thought were analogues for cis women, were allowed to transition; this meant, skinny and more normatively female in appearance. Beyond this gatekeeping, until very recently in Western Europe — last ten years — and other places around the world, to transition, transgender people must be sterilized. I have friends that have had this procedure — relatively young ones. It was made part of standard practice to access trans healthcare in the 1970s based on the Swedish model. But this is all old news, having taken place up to 2017 — unless you are in one of the many countries that still require this procedure to transition, or cannot access transitioning resources period.

Currently, eugenics flourishes under slightly more covert methods — if only marginally so. In the US, and other countries, such as the UK, anti-trans legislation is at a fever pitch. I can’t help but hear almost every week of a new legislative initiative that seeks to ban access to medical interventions for children outright, sometimes with the threat of jail time to the healthcare provider and/or guardians. In other places, such essential healthcare access is made functionally unattainable. Such legal interventions have scaled in tandem with reproductive rights, despite the myopic blinkered vision of some single-issue abortion rights groups which chose to ignore attacks on trans rights — as if they were not attached. Just as insidiously, these restrictions are also implemented with a bevvy of anti-trans restrictions to children’s sports and access to single-sex use facilities under the guise of fair play and protecting women. Neither of these contexts is a genuine concern, and in general, there are only ever a handful of non-elite trans athletes participating openly in youth sports. There are no risks of assault in single-sex spaces, by trans people (though trans people are very likely to be assaulted in the toilet by cis persons). These causes for concern are all fearmongering designed to stoke culture war fears. One UK study is oft-cited, but it neglects to mention that it is based on violent trans men in women’s prisons, who are unable to access trans medical resources. Usually, when this evidence is published, it is done in a misleading manner so that the audience assumes they are talking about medically transitioned trans women.

So why the fuss and how do children’s sports relate to eugenics? The furore around these non-issues is aimed at so thoroughly marginalizing trans people that they are effectively prevented from accessing regular “life chances” — which is defined by Dean Spade as access to medical care, housing, employment, etc, i.e., the necessities of life. In other words, to snuff out their future and exterminate them; to foreclose the horizon of possibility for these maligned groups via disingenuous overtures of protecting children that no one really gives a damn about, at least not the people proclaiming to be their advocates. As a rule of thumb, always look suspiciously at people who are “just thinking about the children.” Extrapolating from the US and UK context, a global network of well-funded IGOs and NGOs are set up with help from major right-wing reactionary transnational organizations and the Catholic church to implement similar policies of marginalisation and death.

In conjunction with this kaleidoscopic slurry of anti-trans legislative initiatives is the media. One only needs to look at the recent NYT — not a left-leaning paper despite conservative positioning — op-ed this past week. Is J.K. Rowling really a transphobe the news announcers endlessly intone? Yes! You could only see her as anything but if you are a bigot, or in the way that David Duke might claim to not be a racist, he just wants a country exclusively for white people. But the endless parade of hypervisibility reshapes the narrative through repetition and iteration. The recipient of said media is left with the impression that questioning the humanity, validity, and rights of trans people is somehow not only the moral thing to do, but it is also the rational thing to do. In this way, trans people often occupy one of the lowest rungs of the ladder, because open transphobia — or barely concealed dog whistling — is the accepted norm. Trans voices are largely left out of the narrative unless they are privileged, usually toeing the neoliberal self-actualisation narrative. But even this type of pandering to diversity has seemed to evaporate into open hostility in media circles. The effect of this is an unending and blaring cycle of transphobia which further marginalizes and depresses the trans population.

I want to end with the late Lauren Berlant’s definition of a concept she coined called slow death. She writes, “slow death refers to the physical wearing out of a population in a way that points to its deterioration as a defining condition of its experience and historical existence” (Berlant 2011). To be transgender, and I mean this in the broadest sense, is to experience this type of deterioration as a defining condition of existence, except in exceptional circumstances. In 2023, when scientific and cultural knowledge should allow for the wide adoption of healthy and vibrant transgender modalities and imaginaries, we stand at the very edge of the sword pressed to the jugular. To even step a little out of place can mean instant disaster, and the ground is unstable. Returning to Vaush’s rebuttal, which I haven’t watched more than a minute of, I am only using it as an inspiration to discuss my thoughts on the topic, are we experiencing genocide? I don’t think this word is useful or worth quibbling over, and I love semantics. What I know to be the case is that we, the transgender population — and LGBTQ+ people more broadly — are experiencing increased structural and cultural acts of violence. For some of us, mostly BIPOC trans women whose lives are violently exterminated, death is all too quick. But for most of us, it is a slow painful snuffing out of our lives.

“In many countries Pride is a time when people of all sexualities and genders are celebrated…” but not in China! “In the past,” the narrator drones on, “Pride used to be stamped out in the West, and in some countries it still is.” Ominous music swells behind these words. The effect of this is China=bad. But the journalistic use of the past tense when discussing Western repression of “pride” combined with the mention of current celebration heavily implies Western superiority vis-à-vis the mention of Chinese suppression and the accompanying dark musical turn. But this comparison is intellectually dishonest — or blind. It misrepresents the current situation in the so-called West.

First, what the heck is the West? We should ask this more often. As a Canadian (white) scholar working in Europe, Europe seems like a logical place to start (all those old buildings!). But when looking here, it becomes complicated fast. Who counts as a Western European is not always a matter of simple geography. In the LGBTQIA+ space, it gets even more complicated. When Hungary went full anti-trans at the beginning of this decade, the West, which Hungary is only provisionally a member of, vehemently denounced these moves as anti-European/Western (all the leaders tweeted about it). From this, one could infer that LGBTQIA+ rights are at the core of Western European values — at least if you read Mark Rutte’s tweets (Dutch PM). But before we even point to the caveat of current political projects and climates, is this the case? Some European countries indeed protect gender identity and sexual orientation (SOGI rights in human rights parlance). But the EU does not protect them comprehensively. My arrival on this continent for living — recolonization — barely proceeds a ban on mandatory sterilization. Yuck! This was cutting edge when Sweden proposed it in the 70s.

And then there is the Anglo-side of the West. In 2011 Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton went full, “gay rights are human rights in a speech given in Geneva. The speech foregrounds the West’s moral superiority. But ten years later that looks like little more than homonationalism — i.e. using gay rights as an excuse to invade another, supposedly less advanced, country (Afghanistan for example). This type of nationalism has been pointed out by queer theorists since at least the turn of this century. And then there’s the US’ current crimes against LGBTQIA+ people. Even in Canada, Pride is receiving extra security this year because of increased attacks on LGBTQIA+ activism.

So, what is with the finger-pointing at China? Sure, the situation in China should be highlighted, but only in the context of the mountain of anti- LGBTQIA+ laws and acts of violence piling up in Western societies. Sure, the crackdown on niang pao, or “sissy boys” is bad. But it is part of a global phenomenon that is deeply entwined with a return to reactionary politics and the rise of traditionalism and nationalism. Fascism, and there are many ways to be a proto-fascist, is tied to definitions of the masculine body. Look no further than Tucker Carlson’s weird “End of Men” (2022) docuseries. I would argue that this form of pointing at the other, here orientalised as the barbarian society without respect for rights, is what the West does best when it comes to LGBTQIA+. Protecting and caring for us is a different matter.

This isn’t surprising as the media is also complicit in this behaviour. One needs only look to The Economist itself. Which has gleefully platformed TERF philosopher Kathleen Stock — among others — thus participating in the UK’s current orgy of transphobia. Its peers, the BBC and Guardian, are renowned at this point for their anti-trans agendas. So why do they get to tell us, queer people, about Pride? Maybe it is because Pride is a white middle-class event where the only most admissible gays, usually white men, are permitted to temporarily shrug off the shackles of heteronormativity in a controlled manner (now with more security checks in Toronto). This includes bilking this spectacle for billions of dollars in endorsements and advertising. Thus, Pride is often viewed as being for LGB persons, and the T, Q, and I can easily be left out. But the LGBs included here are not part of a core demographic beloved and protected by Western modernity. But rather, as Clinton reveals, symbols the West can mobilize to further its various agendas — like preserving its cultural and military hegemony over China. Or blowing up Muslims — but look, Israel has a trans soldier! In the end, you can’t exclude the T, and largely forget about the I, in the morning and expect them not to come for your rights in the afternoon. And of course, despite all the hand wringing over Roe, and how this will affect us queers, it’s clear. This was always going to happen. Gender, sexuality, and repo rights are tied together. Exclude one at your peril.

I cannot speak in totality about the intentions of those who fight for civil rights. We often have the US’s struggle with racism in our minds when we think of this enterprise. Or the more global turn toward enfranchisement of women. But gay rights, and later trans rights (intersex rights are only beginning to see the attention they deserve), were extended (sometimes only considered) in a particular politico-economic environment: neoliberalism. They began radically enough in the 60s-70s, but they quickly shifted to being agenda points forwarded by large civil society and NGO organisations, like ILGA, PFLAG, GLAD, GLAAD, COC, EGALE, etc. These organisations are run as corporate entities by a managerial class of queers who want to privatize being queer — in line with the general neoliberal turn. The problem is, that being queer/trans cannot be so simply reduced to fungible consumer demographics. We face incredible systemic barriers which are not erased through nebulous human rights laws or marriage equalization. This is what we are celebrating at Pride — or at least The Economist is. This is to say nothing of how queer people are being vilified by the right because of how we have been so performatively taken up by these forces. As if we ever got to set an agenda.

This podcast was released on the eve of the Roe opinion. But it so expertly captures what corporate entities (media included) plug into when they do Pride content. They operationalize queer and trans narratives as part of a wider ideological narrative about superior and progressive Western values — the kind you can’t find in China or Palestine. That is incredibly deaf considering the expected overturning of Roe in the States which is only the tip of the global iceberg when it comes to the turn toward reactionary conservative politics. In this regard, this type of progressive posturing has done almost nothing to insulate LGBTQIA+ communities. Pride is a riot. Let’s throw bricks. This other crap isn’t working and I am sick of picturing Orwell’s future with the boot on my face.

The referenced podcast was posted June 23rd, 2022. It is titled “Pride and Prejudice: China’s LGBT Crackdown.”

My mother keeps making anodyne comments about the societal pressures faced by women: “society puts so many unfair expectations on women to conform.” It is her defence mechanism to justify the toxic attitudes she has internalized about growing older. My mother is beautiful at 60, as beautiful as she ever was, but at 20, she fit those social pressures. I usually reply something like, “I’ve noticed; I have eyes!” But she always reminds me, usually while telling me how many more pounds she’s lost doing keto, and how she feels like her “true self” again. I don’t have the heart to unpack that. Her invocation of essence has dark implications for her 30-something trans daughter. Hell, my cis sister struggles under the weight of my mother’s self-inflicted body torture-shaming. There is no point in saying anything, she just sees it as an unassailable feature of the world. Perhaps she is correct, but then again, when do trans people ever have the choice to just accept things as they are, even when our aspirations are the most perfunctory — read, normative.

In queer-world, we have better ways, or at least I tell myself this. At the very least, we have noble impulses toward more diverse inclusivity. In reality, we probably don’t. We have our butches, bears, nonbinary mascs, drag kings/queens, twinks, otters, futches, etc., but they all tend to fall into aesthetic parameters. Gay men have some of the strongest tendencies toward body-shaming. Maybe this has gotten better since I hung out with all the fags back in the day. Gay women fair better in this regard, but there are dominant looks. I remember my first day in graduate school for gender. It was one of those meet and greet days, and as I stared at my feet — the only trans feminine person in the group — I noticed, to my mild amusement, that I was the only one not wearing Doc Martins. In the end, after sitting in a circle on the floor, we were each asked to say something before closing the day’s activities. To which I quipped, “I had better buy some Docs!” I now own three pairs.

The trans corner of aesthetics is a mixed bag of strict demands and impulses. I was saying to a friend the other day that I would appear a little more fem/butch if I weren’t 6’2 (189cm). I remember shooting up past six feet as a teen and being celebrated by some of the sub-six-footers in my family (which is all of them) as if their average heights were some kind of deficit. If only I could have given them some. My transition worked out well considering my height and age (late 20s-early 30s), but when given a chance to get top surgery, I ultimately chose to. Not because I was unhappy with the B/C cup breasts I developed, but because I knew they were small for my frame. God knows how large they are now. In the consultation (fitting) room, for my surgery, the doctor asked, “so, what do you want?” I shrugged and said, “proportionality.” He helped me slide into mould forms until we both agreed on the optimum figure that appeared in the mirror. I said, “yup, that’s about right.” And that was that. Don’t get me wrong, I love them, but they were not important to me like my bottom surgery was. And yet, my top surgery has had a much larger effect on my gender presentation. They also take me away from that more neutral queer aesthetic I might have gone for, had bodies been different — more malleable. Still, I am not complaining. I’m just reflecting on the complexity of social demands placed on to trans feminine people. I don’t care about passing as a virtue unto itself, but I do fear being harassed in this increasingly depressing world we live in — we live in the Mirror Universe.

Then there is the face. Again, I like my face. I was approached multiple times by modelling scouts and agencies in my early 20s. I was tall, and had sharp, almost-feminine features. Not a twink, but atypically pretty. These features have served me well in transition. They balance out my size to a degree. But what if I could make it better, to situate myself more towards those amorphous, but ever tangible, social pressures.

Currently, facial-feminisation surgery (FFS) is de rigueur for trans femmes. Do I want it? Not really. But all the trans girls that I think are pretty, that have (had) a je ne sais quoi, to them opt for it. Hari Nef, for example. Sorry dear, you are still gorgeous, but in the way that cis women models are. In this context, when all the Youtubers you like and the handful of visible trans femmes in the media are opting for this cut, often before anything else, the pressure becomes intense. I get it. Wanting to pass and look cis is understandable, but I feel like the option to not do that is closing — only the normative trannies get through. I don’t want to be the only one holding the “aren’t we pretty enough already?” card by herself. So, should I give myself that edge?

It doesn’t matter, I don’t have the 10k €. If you are lucky enough to have health coverage for transcare, FFS is even more depressingly scarcely covered. This is unfortunate because, for many, it is one of the most crucial surgeries for inhabiting the world in a way that feels comfortable and safe. But for me? Do I want it? Or am I trying to keep up with the proverbial trans-Joneses?

I don’t think there are good answers to these questions. I figured I’d spit this out because whenever I’ve tried to approach this topic with others, either in the flesh or in digital spaces, I tend to get a bunch of young girls listing their surgery Christmas wish lists . Or, the other camp sees it as heretical. Both responses are missing the point of the anxiety: Where are these pressures coming from? Should I submit? Do I want it? I just want to move in the world more easily and be myself. And then there is another impulse: surgery is like tattooing. Am I just desiring my inevitable next one? Am I being seduced by the ecstasy of body transformation? Am I a David Cronenberg film? Am I just doing this out of FOMO, social pressures, to look more cis? How do I differentiate between myself, dysphoria (which is a complicated concept), and body dysmorphia?

See Mom, I get it. I always got it. I see the pressures put on other women and the extra layer put on trans feminine people to conform to an even narrower path, where wandering even a toe length astray sees us tumbling to our doom. At the end of the day, I just don’t want to internalise more transphobia. Maybe my face is good enough. Unless I find ten-grand. Then that little bitch is coming off!

I am co-writing an article on trans and nonbinary experiences with every day biometrics — not just at the sites like the airport. This is a very understudied and scary topic. As I was reading the lead author’s notes I came across the name “Giggle.” I assumed they had misspelled “Google” — but then I thought, they usually don’t make mistakes. So, I Googled “Giggle” and was horrified by what I found. Giggle is a social media app that describes itself as “a girls-only social network that safely and securely connects you with other girls who share a similar purpose. It’s designed to give girls choice, control and connection.” This excerpt comes from their Facebook page. On the application, when you sign up, it reads: “Giggle is for females.” If you noticed the shift in descriptors, then you have caught on to the issue. “Girls” to “females” is a deliberate shift in signifier which indicates the app’s insidious nature—to exclude trans women/femmes/enbies along the lines of bunk bio-essentialism. The very name of the app, “Giggle”—which the company spells with a lower case “g”—evokes the sense of soft collective laughter that is often associated with women. This further hints at the app’s essentialist stance.

A Verge article from 2020 tells you what you need to know. “‘Giggle is for all girls,’ the company points out on its website, before adding, ‘Due to the gender-verification software that giggle uses, trans-girls will experience trouble with being verified.’ It’s the stuff of a dystopian novel.” The Verge continues

Giggle, founded by Australian screenwriter Sall Grover, supposedly looks at the bone structure of a person’s face to determine their gender. That’s problematic on several fronts, not least of which is that bone structure is a poor indicator of gender identity. Nevertheless, Giggle says science is sound. ‘It’s Bio-Science, not pseudo-science like phrenology,’ the website declares.

The Verge’s piece is very short and simply points out that many Twitter users think it sounds like pseudo-science. Unfortunately, it both is and is not. But it is definitely the ugly first cousin of phrenology. Biometrics historically stem from arthrometry which is concerned with reducing humans to statistical averages to sort into desirable and undesirable categories. BMI, IQ, and face scanning technologies all find their origins here — even if some of the original creators of these ideas had other applications in mind (population level analyses).

There are branches of the social and computer sciences that work with gender and biometric scanning technologies. Os Keyes from the University of Washington writes

Researchers within Human-Computer Interaction have long studied the way that design processes dominated by men produce gendered, material differences in the usability of the resulting artefacts for women. But this frame of study is limited: too often, HCI research has implicitly or explicitly treated “gender” as a binary, immutable and physiologically-discernible concept. Such a model fundamentally erases transgender people, excluding their concerns, needs and existences from both design and research. (Keyes 2018).

So, there is a science working on face scanning, it’s just not very good science. What seems even more problematic to me is when I survey the literature from engineers designing scanning technologies they mostly treat transgender people and our transition timelines — which are freely strewn about the internet — as calibration fodder. Essentially reducing us to deceptions and problems the software needs to work out—to access our true identity. Giggle uses this type of software which automatically determine users’ gender. This technology currently has limited implementation, but the interest is there, and some commercial systems offer gender analysis as a standard feature.

This is all despite the fact that these systems are notoriously bad at determining gender and race. A Queer/trans/feminist reading of biometric tech points at a fundamental flaw, that it is premised on the idea that gender, and the body in general, are static measurable characteristics; they are not. Giggle is an early adopter of this type of osftware and an indicator of how easily it might start to pop up in our daily lives in mundane—and yet incredibly intrusive—ways. The text “Giggle is for females” appears before the app requests a selfie to analyse for entry. “Females” is laden with the biometric and gender critical assumptions that there are fixed traits and characteristics of the body — here the face — that the algorithm can read. I of course let it scan my selfie.

Affectively, as I read the words, “Giggle is for females,” I began to feel lightheaded. The process of being identified as female, in my case, has been traumatic. I have lived with mismatched documents for so long that the app immediately reduced my body to tremors of anxiety. Luckily for me, the problem has been more with ID cards than scans and Giggle accepted me. Maybe it’s just not very good at sorting faces. After all, these systems are not ironclad, but leaky. The app additionally requested access to my selfie folder. It also required my location and contact data. Once I was accepted, I immediately deleted Giggle. I want nothing to do with it as it sees people like me as infiltrators. Even though I passed its test, by being there, I become a kind of infiltrator, even if I should have access to all-female spaces, as a woman. Giggle cannot say that the app is for girls and then in the next breath say it will not read and accept trans girls without indicating that the latter is not considered a girl by Giggle—or rather in Giggle’s words, “not female.”

The Verge is correct, this does have strong dystopian vibes. Set aside the bevy of problems for access that this will create for trans and nonbinary people — who already struggle to enter critical spaces like the toilet — the knowledge that cameras, and even my mobile phone’s camera — is decompiling my face into data points for the purpose of potentially misgendering me is not welcome. Misgendering hurts. It can lead to physical violence, but it also is, at a minimum, a denial of a trans person’s sense of identity. This denial is perhaps not akin to physical violence, but it creates a kind of repeated hurt that wears one down. We certainly don’t need this added layer.

Technology is not a neutral tool. As it becomes more sophisticated, it can inadvertently incorporate its creator’s biases—which has been an issue with machine learning and race. Or, in the case of Giggle, it can intentionally integrate that bias. No one seriously working on gender and identification thinks gender is a stable concept that should be affixed to ID cards like height or a finger print. Gender is messy and complicated and should be abolished from biometric systems. Most activists in this field are calling for this, and some states, like the Netherlands, are listening. Unfortunately, the UN agency which governs the rules we fly by (ICAO), demands sex as a marker on passports. Giggle’s type of biometric gender scanning entrenches this position, that sex/gender are static markers. The difference is, you can avoid flying, most of the time. But new scanning technologies are easily placed throughout our everyday environments. They are being used on advertising pixel boards to create customized advertising based on gender — more intrusive customized advertising should feel dystopian even to cisgender people. Despite all the clamour over individual privacy around COVID vaccines, the rate at which we evacuate these concerns while using social media seems to me to indicate we are ripe for this type of intrusion to take over.

I will close by saying that while I can see the purpose of a girls only space on social media, the method Giggle is employing to achieve this is very distructive. But having looked at the language surrounding the app, it feels like a dog whistle to TERFs. I would question its good intentions. But even if they are proven to be good, the inventors of BMI and IQ also had good intentions, but their creations were immediately adopted by racists and eugenicists. We don’t need this crap.

My trans story goes way back. I just turned 36, which makes me feel very old. Not in the sense that 36 is actually old (it is!!!), but in the way, that time appears more relative as you get older, and that relativity translates into it seemingly moving faster. I am old enough to remember what it was like to be “transgender” before the word was codified in its current form; before the debate about and subsequent invention of the trans child (as Jake Halberstam might say); and before transitioning was a viable option for more and more people. Someone like myself, who medically transitioned around the middle of the last decade, will surely feel connected to the so-called Transgender Tipping Point (TTP). First, Janet Mock came out in Marie Claire in 2011, credit where credit is due. But Cox’s 2014 TIME magazine cover seemed to tip trans people, mostly women, into the limelight. National Geographic followed TIME with their edition on trans children, and of course, we got that infamous issue of Vanity Fair in 2015. And then we were on Netflix and Amazon. This new coverage was different than before. While I never watched Transparent (thankfully), I did grow up on Transamerica and Hedwig, but they were early millennial exceptions; I also remember 90s daytime talk shows sensationalizing trans women and then there was The Silence of the Lambs and its classically transphobic filmic ilk: Dressed to Kill, Psycho, Ace Ventura, Friends, etc, etc, etc. In other words, change was welcome in 2014, but stepping outside into the new spotlight still felt fraught — for good reason.

At the same time, scholar, agential trans-Frankenstein’s monster, and queer goddess Susan Stryker inaugurated Transgender Studies Quarterly (TSQ). Issue 1/2 were a special introductory collection of short glossic essays articulating topics and themes of this new field formation. The institutionalization of trans studies was a significant, if not more invisible, event that happened in tandem with the more exoteric TTP. I have a feeling that Duke University Press was spurred to support this new journal because of the TTP. Despite this, trans studies still has a relatively small institutional foothold. It mostly lurks in Gender Studies programmes as a one-off course, Trans 101. Only at Stryker’s University of Arizona is there a full programme. Here in Europe, the field is paid even less attention — this is something I am trying to remedy. Somewhat ironically, in TSQ’s inaugural two-part issue, Sandy Stone, who is referenced in its various glossary essays ad nauseam because she is the cyborg-grandmother of the fledgling disciple, wrote of this institutionalization: “thus begins the transition from revolutionary action to commodification.” Indeed, perhaps we spent the last seven years making up disciplinary jargon, as Stone warns against, to make ourselves feel special. Because during this time, something else grew out of the TTP, and trans studies was too cool to give it more than a passing glance. I speak of trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs). They started to bubble back to the surface, from their swampy sub-layer of the internet where they had occasionally crawled out to dox a trans woman in the decade prior to the TTP. Before 2014, trans theory felt it had already won that old argument. So, when TERFs began to inhabit the light again, trans scholars took only passing heed. But it turns out most people were not reading trans theory (or current feminist/queer theory for that matter), and this miasmatic ghost from the 70s rose up like a revenant, out for blood.

As such, this past autumn saw an update to the field issue in TSQ. Here, Stryker looks back on these past seven years from inside the academy (she is stepping down from the editorial board of the journal she created, from the discipline she helped to form). In it, she notes with some regret how 2014 also seeded us with this other transgender trend, a pushing point in the guise of Sheila Jeffreys’ Gender Hurts. Jeffreys is an old-guard TERF. As such, TSQ chose to respond to her book, which saw modest success in the academy, by having an issue loosely based around responding to Gender Hurts, instead of lowering itself to directly dealing with its thin arguments. Stryker seems to indicate that TSQ, and trans theory as a whole, somewhat naively thought that this line of marginalized feminism was dead and gone and that an issue showcasing transfeminisms would be a good way to show feminist circles what good little transes we are — all doing our trans* theories. But only one of these works had any mainstream appeal — hint, not TSQ’s issue on transfeminisms. The one with no scholarly merit, no research, or methodology was heard.

As so often is the case, the science went unnoticed, while the histrionic and fear-mongering rise to the spotlight. It’s not like Gender Hurts was an NYT bestseller, but someone was paying attention, and like many conservative-aligned movements, the gender-critical movement (the new self-styled name for TERFs), knew how to spin the false and debunked into a frenzied culture war. Anyone reading this might be familiar with this mobilization through J.K. Rowling’s recent shitstorms. It turns out that most people are not interested in new trans* theoretical articulations, ontologies, epistemologies, decolonial movements, or frameworks to broach the post-human. They care about bathrooms or at least the symbolic order to which the bathroom debate belongs. They are alienated by 21st-century life, and looking for, as Stryker notes, an “ethno-national movement” to scapegoat their woes. Re-enter transgender whipping girls just when it seemed okay to escape the closet.

Beyond Breadtube (white, left, YouTube, see Lindsay Ellis’ new video on transphobia), so few trans perspectives make it into the mainstream (this is also true of feminist theory). So, when TERFs, under their new banner of gender-critical feminists, position their arguments as mainstream feminism, few people notice outside academic circles. In a 2020 interview in the New Statesman, Alona Ferber takes this new positioning as factual in her discussion with Judith Butler. Butler, a long-time academic superstar, and one of queer/feminist theory’s few household names (RuPaul likes to quote her incorrectly), is forced to immediately counter this assertion as false. Butler’s opening response to Ferber states, “I want to first question whether trans-exclusionary feminists are really the same as mainstream feminists. If you are right to identify the one with the other, then a feminist position opposing transphobia is a marginal position.” Similarly, When the DailyNous asked philosopher Talia Mae Bettcher if she wanted to respond to philosopher/TERF Kathleen Stock’s transphobic writing, Bettcher wrote an online essay post for them titled “‘When Tables Speak’: On the Existence of Trans Philosophy” in a most exasperated tone. She then lists all of the easily accessible works by trans feminists which handily deal with Stock’s points, which Stock ignored and didn’t read.

Indeed, TERF arguments are old and easily handled, if you have a passing knowledge of these issues. They primarily rely on assertions that gender is an oppressive mode and that trans women replicate this oppression through their use of gender identity to justify their transitions and positions as women. This ignores the reality, backed by empirical studies, that trans women are more susceptible to gender and sex-based oppression than cis women. Thus, we should be keen allies, and indeed, many feminists are. And while cis and trans women have different reproductive needs, we have a strategic alliance here too. States that don’t accept abortion rights, don’t do so well with trans rights and vice versa. In other words, trans people do not wield the power of gender but are rather under its boot. TERF points also ignore nongender-based forms of trans identification. As such, their ideas about “biological sex” don’t fare much better. As they rely on a cartesian dualism, yuck, and an elementary understanding of sex and biology — “elementary” as in elementary school level.

Nevertheless, TERFs abound in the current mediascape. They helped to prevent reforms to the Gender Recognition Act in the UK and their work can be seen in anti-trans legislation like the bill in Minnesota currently attempting to criminalize trans youth from accessing the bathroom or sports facilities at school. (In between writing this and editing it, there are now 12 bills in US state legislatures seeking to criminalize providing healthcare to trans children [gosh, wait for the future]). In fact, gender-critical organizations have formed several seemingly legitimate organizations to propagate their hatred by affecting legislation and policy in the West (A Woman’s Place UK, Fair Play for Women, Transgender Trend, Our Duty, etc.). They are replicating the strategies, and are often supported by, conservative Christian and anti-immigration groups who form think tanks and organisations to lobby their agenda (white supremacy) — think the Heritage Foundation (which is an anti-trans organistion among other things). Even popular news and political magazines like The Atlantic have used anti-trans organizations as the basis for supposedly objective journalism about trans children. And The Economist in the UK has given voice to the aforementioned Kathleen Stock. Of course, there is little to no equivalent coverage given to trans specialists. This is not unusual, ironically, this is a major feminist grievance, to be talked at and not allowed to represent and advocate for yourself. Having a TERF like Stock write about trans people in The Economist, who is not a feminist or gender theorist, and then to have no equivalent response by an actual expert is like inviting Exxon circa 2000 to give a talk about climate change and not invite a climate scientist.

So, as the Transgender Day of Visibility rolls back around (yesterday), and people talk about the benefits of shows like Pose, and wider media exposure, I want to ask the question, who is being made visible? Certainly not trans perspectives in a meaningful way (and certainly not BIPOC trans perspectives), if that were the case, then there wouldn’t be this paternalistic attitude in the press and in legislatures toward letting trans people speak. And while TIME just did a cover with fellow Canadian Elliot Page, which is awesome, and is rightly being hailed as the next TTP for trans masculine people, I wonder how much good the first TTP did. The current article, while being very respectful, replicates old tropes about trans people, granted using Elliot’s words: “I always knew” and “now I’m fully who I am.” And while being true to yourself is important — after all, γνῶθι σ(ε)αυτόν — transness, if anyone really cared to look, suggests that looking for stable essences is not a good idea, or possible. Perhaps “now I’m becoming who I am” would be more trans.

Each year since the TTP I feel like aspects of our new visibility further expose us to hate and a growing anti-trans political movement. Because of this, I, along with a close friend/colleague of mine, started a Trans* and Psychoanalytic reading group at our university. We need to demand and hold more institutional space. And in this space, we are not only demanding to be seen but also heard — even within the limited confines of academia. In our second meeting, we looked at the intersection between trans and psychoanalytic perspectives on TERFs. As Elliot and Lyons (2017) show in “Transphobia as Symptom,” TERF arguments are undefendable. They can be countered, as they have, time and time again (as I alluded to earlier), but they still endure and proliferate. Elliot and Lyons instead employ a symptomatic reading of TERF arguments (in the form of Jeffreys’ text), what does the unconscious of the text indicate? For them, TERFs unconsciously point to a lack of stability and fixity they fantasize about with regard to the stability of sex and gender. Trans persons, but especially trans women, undermine this desire for stable categories. If we are to survive being the fantasied about unwoman in resurgent TERF/right-wing/religious psychoses we need to find platforms to make our words and stories heard in more meaningful ways. Those who seek to destroy us do so with false arguments that are easily disregarded, but they are masters of spin. And they are tapping into an anxiety which is felt across classes and nations in different forms.

In this climate we have to be vigilant, we have to be visible, but also vocal. We cannot congratulate ourselves over Hollywood representation which is often little more than diversity performativity which circulates as its own form of capital in liberal society. Sure, representation is important, and it inspires young people, but so does Harry Potter and look how that turned out. Be visible, but also, be radical, there is great potential in being trans. We deconstruct categories and emancipate people from narrowly focused and restrictive gender roles. There is also great joy in being trans and we need to show this.

It’s been five months since I had the surgery. It went well. I recently read that between 80–90 percent of female-identified post-operative transsexuals can achieve orgasm. I wish I had read that before. They always make it seem like there is a high chance it won’t work. Even the recovery was pretty smooth…save for that first day at home when the only mirror I could find to dilate with was a 5x magnification mirror — I cried. My vag even has a secondary clitoris in the canal. A specialty of my surgeon. While it is a little heteronormative, I am glad he has design and function on his mind. Even a few weeks after surgery, after the swelling had gone down a bit, it looked very typical. It wasn’t like some of the uncanny valley vaginas you see on surgeons’ websites; it isn’t shaven, clean, or dry. Rather it is verisimilitude; it’s wet, smelly, and covered in pubic hair. And even as much as I bristle at medical processes and their attempt to construct narratives around being transgender through surgical interventions — the last thing I heard before going under the knife was the assistant leaning over me to say I would wake a new woman — I am nevertheless fascinated by this venereal construct; it’s not the locus of my gender and sex, but it’s cool. All and all it just feels very natural — not underwhelming, but not revolutionary, just a thing that already feels like it’s always been there.

I was reflecting on how I felt about my genitals post-surgery because I was mucking about down there and wanted to know what other girls had felt, thought, and advised. I was surprised at how many semi-satirical video essays were on YouTube with titles like “Ten things I love about my vagina, and three I don’t,” Or, “Things I miss about my dick (but not really).” I tried to think about my penis, remember her. But I couldn’t. I remember her feeling, the sweaty bulge in my panties, the reason for not wanting to have sex, but not what she looked like, or her haptic qualities. I hadn’t seen her naked since, forever. I closed my eyes during that initial consultation with the SRS doctor. I had closed my eyes every time I had washed her in the shower for…forever. It wasn’t always like this, I remember what it once looked like, I can certainly remember the disdain I felt when it came to fruition. But I haven’t seen her in all her transmutations since I started HRT over four years ago. I suppose that’s what’s revolutionary about my vagina, that it appears visibly to me, and that when I am not looking at it, or thinking about it, it’s not there. It’s just neutral, a baseline feeling of my own normal. Not a reminder of discomfort, of the gender dysphoria of a testicle popping out of place in one’s panties, just that I feel okay.

A theorist once wrote — and I am too lazy to look it up, but it was in an issue of TSQ form last year — that surgery is “underwhelming.” I think that is wrong. At least for me, it is not under or overwhelming, it is just normal. I am not affirmed, but I no longer feel disaffirmation. For me, my penis was never symbolic of a “wrong body,” but rather an occasional somatic reminder that my body felt out of context with itself. It was nothing personal against penises; I’d just rather not. Surgery has meant that that particular somatic alarm is gone. I feel comfort in that absence, one less haunting visage of misassigned gender.

“I do know that for the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all. I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Recently I’ve been taking a nap around 2 pm most afternoons. In isolation, there isn’t much to do, and I am having bad hayfever. Last week, before one of these naps, I read in the paper that normal hospital operations were resuming in the Netherlands. My SRS was cancelled in February as we were moving into lockdown. I briefly wondered if this news would affect me before putting it out of my head until 3:20 when I received a real live phone call. I picked up my phone groggily, realizing I didn’t know how to answer a real phone call. The little green arrows seemed to suggest I slide the pulsating phone icon up; I did so and whispered, “hello.” A voice declared they were calling from the Velsen clinic, did I remember them. Yes. They then asked if I would be ready for surgery soon. How soon I asked? They replied, May 5th. I told the person on the phone I had just woken up and needed a moment. Then I replied, why not.

The news took a few minutes to process. I told my partner, who was between teaching classes on Zoom in the other room. We both said “holy shit” and held each other. The cancellation of my surgery had the benefit of reinforcing in my mind that I wanted it. I had felt a sense of loss when it was briefly taken away, something that felt more palpable than my ambivalent feelings about the whole process while it felt like an inexorable destination I was being pushed toward. But still, May 5th! At the time of the call, it was only 12 days away. That wasn’t much time to mentally prepare for such a serious procedure, especially one that could have complicated interactions with my already complex health. But after that initial “holy shit” moment, it felt like the right time. I calmed down. Ironically, what I am not ready to do is talk about it.

While I am happy to discuss gender, sex, sexuality, and queer topics in general — not that many cis/het people ask me about these — this is private. I am happy to wax on about social constructivism and the materiality of the body, these are things that I find most people need to spend more time thinking about. But SRS — and here even that label is complicated, fraught, and political — is too loaded. SRS is a sticky topic for trans people, we all have different feelings about it. SRS, or sexual reassignment surgery, feels like a very literal moniker, if not a little overladen with violent medical connotations. Gender-affirming surgery, a popular alternative designation, doesn’t work for me. My gender is not affirmed by my genitals. To me, “affirmation” has an undertone of trans-medicalism to it. I can see someone else feeling that way about SRS. Maybe sexual affirmation surgery would work, but then we’ve just moved from GAS to SASS. So, SRS, as imperfect a label as it is, is what I am sticking with. But my point here, if there is one, is that it’s complicated. But non-trans people, and probably some trans people, don’t have to think about this. SRS is a lazy narrative trope that keeps their notions of gender/sex protected.

For non-trans people, SRS is what “transgenders” do, to conform to normative notions about sex and gender. It corrects a mistake. It disciplines the body, and brings it into (re)alignment: girls have vaginas, and boys have penises. This is of course not so. There are many ways to approach this but in the most simple sense, if not a little binary, trans women/femmes, and trans men/mascs who undertake HRT do not have sex-typical genitals. And certainly not having HRT does not preclude a trans person from having a non-normative understanding of their junk. But the feminization and masculinization of genitals from HRT is a simple example to illustrate my point. When someone claims trans women aren’t real women because “women don’t have penises,” this fundamentally misunderstands how trans biology works. Like the prefix “cis” that I’m here avoiding, it invokes a static understanding of genitals. It ascribes essential forms to genitals, when in fact they are protean things, illustrated by the trans guy who fucks with his cock — his oversized clitoris which behaves like a dick and not a clit (is a dick). But it is no wonder that these nuances escape non-trans people, they were hardly discussed in media available to trans masculine people until quite recently. Some of the first non-op trans masc pornstars aren’t very old. What this means, is the necessity of sexual reassignment, as a telos of being transgender, is incorrect. Rather, such a narrative of wrong and correct bodies is designed to exclude these sexual variants. It hides indeterminacy and reifies binarism.

But then there are those of us who are for whatever reasons, and there are many, who still pursue surgery. And this can be a fraught topic, even inside the trans community. SRS, and those who pursue it, can appear to reaffirm cisgenderism and its seeming inherent imperative toward binarism. It also (re)entrenches the “wrong body” trope, which is another lazy narrative construct for non-trans people. It pathologizes our bodies and necessitates corrective measures — SRS is seen as the ultimate final step. And for this reason, surgery is viewed as the ultimate transposition, the translation, the crossing, of one sex into the other, as if there is nothing betwixt or between. But is this what we are doing? No.

Who is to say what metallurgy of body and society combine to make the trans(sexual) person? But she exists. And she/he/they break the normative mould they are cast in through speaking. In the abysmal Transsexual Empire, Janice Raymond, one of the ur TERFs, made the case that transsexuals are manifestations of male techno-patriarchy. They are not, but during the mid to late 20th century, as the category of transsexual was being created, trans people were subalternized (they were incapable of speaking and being heard in the dominant discourse). Thus, they appeared to some radical feminists as tools of patriarchy. But this was not the transsexual’s fault. To speak truth to power, to represent her subjectivity, the transsexual would be barred from receiving services. Death or silence was the game — and still is to some degree. So, she allowed herself to be used, to use the system. In the early 90s Sandy Stone, a former target of Raymond, and acolyte of trans-humanist feminist Donna Haraway, wrote “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.” (And not enough people talk about the amazing Star Wars reference.) In this discipline-defining text, Stone exhorts trans people to tell their stories, to speak, to reveal how potentially transgressive and deconstructive their subjectivities are; as another early trans author might say, show what gender rebels we are. Far from reifying female stereotypes into flesh, we exceed normative gender narratives.

Perhaps this sentiment is best captured by Susan Stryker in 1994’s “My Words to Victor Frankenstein…” Here, Stryker draws a parallel between the trans body and Shelly’s daemon. Frankenstein’s creation is imbued with his intention and desire to wield power over nature and death. When his creation is revealed to fall short of his hubristic designs, he casts it out. But later, when creator meets creature, the creature speaks, and reveals himself to be a foil, a mirror, to Victor Frankenstein’s monstrousness. Stryker too is created, like the daemon, and she too speaks. By speaking, she turns the mirror back on the creator and the society which constructs, revealing that they too are so. Thus, the formerly labelled transsexual exceeds her creation by speaking her truth, her story. She illustrates an intersubjective connection between trans and non-trans subjectivity.

There is something that drives me to this place, SRS. But I am more than sinew stitched back together. More than a cut. I am a dynamic process of becoming, protean, exceeding any single narrative of gender or the materiality underwriting it. As another author, who I greatly admire, might say, I am going to be cut, but this does not equal a lack, but a fold. A process of becoming which excites and rewrites new nerve endings and tissue. A lesson learned from a starfish. And maybe this is the most important issue. SRS, for non-trans people, is a voyeuristic fascination with the capitulation of the male sign. As masculinity is always dominant, this is seen as a loss. But the trans body is merely making a fold in a biodynamic process of change. I take comfort in this matter; reducing it to any simple set of causes belies its complexity. I just don’t want to talk about it.