3 Texts on trans* Identity

All 3 Texts were written in 2023 and have been presented partly on the queer-voices podcast: https://queer-voices.de/

They are all part of the long text Project “My 21. Century Fever Dream.”

I. Eyes

Stares and glances, eyes that scrutinize me, my body, my being. When I ride my bike through the city. Public transportation. Sidewalks and hallways. They look at me not like one looks at a person, a human being – but a beast. They strip myself away from me. They judge me, show me hatred, confusion or disgust. There are eyes growing on my body. Stranger’s eyes that look at me constantly. It’s like a creeping disease, an infection of eyes popping up here and there, some on my face, some on my belly, my legs, my butt, my breasts. On the bus their eyes can’t find a conclusion they’re happy with, so they stare between my legs. Indignant glares that turn away hastily as soon as I meet them.But those eyes turn inwards. I cannot distinguish the stranger’s eyes from my own anymore. They melt together. Outside organs that grow all over me, nailing me down to their order. Their hatred and disgust become my own, even though I’m kicking and screaming, trying to protect myself. The world feels like a zoo, displaying me as some abject curiosity – or as a virus. Contagious, something better to be eradicated.

It frightens me, turns me mad, sad. Angry. Look at *** with paint in *** face all clownish and weird. The hateful things some of them sometimes say – they echo in my head. I turn into an object. An object of discussion, of abjection, an object to be dismissed. My right to life – an object of discussion. Have you been listening to what is being said about us? The discourse? Well, you better don’t.

II. Yet Another Meditation on the Meaning of Trans-Identity

Maybe this is what I embrace the most about the ‘Identity’-Aspect of being a trans woman: That it implies something of a ‘decision’ (lol) to leave masculinity behind for good? To leave its so called ‘superiority’ and its hollow privileges behind, dead in the mud. And by that to subvert the logic of domination itself. To forcefully challenge any system of hierarchy. To say No! This is not right! And to claim a maximum of agency for ones own destiny. Being able to embrace oneself by fully saying Yes! to some vague concept, but something I so deeply admire and feel the desire to embody within and through myself… ‘Femininity’, whatever that means…

… Maybe as a form of subjectivity like the ones Cixous describes? As a de-territorialized body without organs, a body as a map – like Deleuze and Guattari say?

Simply… a body?

The divine feeling of ‘having a body’ itself.

Not ‘owning’ one, but living in one as something one has a cultivating, a playful

(and sometimes frustrating) friendship with?

I don’t know.

This form of ‘not knowing’ gives me relief.

III. Looking Back from the Point of View of a Precarious Body

I guess I hate writing about my past so much (just as I tend to hate thinking about it) because it again and again presents itself as this way of circling around a time and feeling of loss. A time in which everything had been some sort of mimicry or something, a time that doesn’t feel like anything but a big coping mechanism. De-Personalization.

… Like once again I’m lying in my Lover’s arms. Crying. I seem to cry like all the time these days. This time I cry about this fucking sense of loss again. Those years and years I’ve lived as a ‘man’ without ever wanting to, but without any sort of vision about what else I could’ve done, I could’ve been. There are scenes running by in front of my closed eyelids, scenes from different times… It’s this weird construction of a past. This narrativization of a Self… Flashbacks filled with sense that is being produced right here, right now, in the arms of my Lover whilst crying… These years and years of testosterone poisoning… The scars it has left all over me…

Looking back fills me with grief and emptiness. It proves a point though: It proves that a lot of times, when we lash out against something outside of us, we do it because of some other, uncanny thing living within. It proves that we seem to have to distance ourselves from the things within us that we’re afraid of. Up to a point were we rather embody a weird caricature instead of the truth of our own desires…

Looking back makes me learn things, but it’s only through pain that I reach my conclusions. If I could just reset all this stupid shit, like… what are those conclusions even for…

… Violence…

… Violence… I talked with my Lover about my earliest childhood relationship. The first friend I had and how I’ve learned that being emotionally involved, being loved, has to do with violence… Okay, like, we’ve talked about the possible origins of the humiliation kink I sometimes have… Which means that I used that phrase and they (you) used the phrase ‘humiliation kink that you have most of the time.’

But yeah.

The logic of domination has been imprinted on me. The logic of humiliation.

…

“Spit on me. Push me on my knees, my head into the mattress. Slap my face and call me a slut. Give me orders. Tell me to crawl on all fours for you, to kiss your feet… I want you to treat me as if I was your property. As if I wasn’t entitled to a will of my own. I’d like to be reminded that I’m nothing but your stupid little bitch and that my worth is being your property. Choke me. Tell me to shut the fuck up… Let me play the roll, I’ll be,

your animal.“

…

Violence. In the course of reproducing itself.

And yes.

I have reproduced it myself…

Should I talk more about this? Do I want to? I don’t know.

…

You’ve got me on a leash by the way – a leash that I begged for.

…

You first drew patterns on my body, similar to those which you’d drawn on yourself before… Then you took pictures of me, your artwork… I’m usually very self-conscious and shy about that, usually they only make me weary, but this time I enjoyed it.

…

Then you start doing other things.

…

You make me moan, make my body flash away from you but you pin me down, fixate me.

…

I feel the leash tight around my neck. I breath heavily, faltering, with tension, then with relief…

…

After my back bends upwards and falls back on the mattress, you hold me for a long time. You envelop me with your sweet smell. You kiss and caress me and ask if everything you’ve done was okay.

…

It was.

…

We tell us that we love each other and I feel relief because you seemed distant when I’d first arrived at your place…

… I’ve been scared and anxious and insecure a lot lately.

Being so close to you makes me feel scared. I’m always afraid that I’ll do something wrong, but you give me lots of affirmation.

You’re very comforting.

I realize more and more that as much as anything else this whole text is a love letter to my Lover. To You. A love letter to the kind of love you embody. A letter about tenderness and honesty, vulnerability and the sort of freedom that comes with it. Some sort of committed stability within a field of motion we both know we cannot control – or the pursuit of an ethical navigation through chaos? And challenge.

…

A love letter for a different kind of love, because your love is revolutionary.

…

And all the while this Body-Instability…

… a precarious body. Like slipping in and out of it again and again… feeling and completely feeling it from time to time, then again contemplating about it’s fundamental absurdity… Or being frightened by the ‘possible’ outside view…

The Evil Eye.

– also this weird imposter-syndrome.

Always this feeling of having to justify myself before myself.

Like Grace Lavery writes:

[…] but if I’m honest, I’m raging not just at the failure to transition, but the more obvious failure, the one everyone saw at the time and remembers now, which is my failure not to have been a boy. There is an archive of stories about me, out there in the world, in which I am unquestionably a boy […] There are moments – strange, multiple, glints in the past – when I was not treated as a boy, either by myself or others. […] These moments, and they are not few, have become beacons in my sense of my own history […] It can only be special pleading to which I am drawn when I default to the notion that my transition must prove itself, every day in every way. (Please Miss, 2022).

The switch happens so fast.

I wish you’d keep me tight in your grip. I wish to stay here. But I already start slipping and fading.

…

Imagine you want to listen to a symphony but there’s a second tab playing Noise in the background and they both merge into each other and you just can’t seem to find this fucking second tab and turn it off!

…

Sometimes it just takes a brief second for me to think about it all, to give myself the Evil Eye, and suddenly I slip out of my body again – because it’s not mine, not ours. How could it be ours, this ruin? This is nothing but an absurd assemblage of foreign organs, surfaces, an organism I cannot relate to.

…

This can’t be ours, can it?

…

But then I slip back. I’m overwhelmed with joy and relief. I feel the lust which my nerve endings start to produce. I suddenly feel my movements and how they fit me. I hear my soft utterances under your touch and it sounds like me. I can sense that I’m on the right track. I’m feeling the sun, listening to the waves, they taste like salt on my lips, my fist clinging to the sheets. Or just some short instance of me and this song and we dance together and it plays with my body, my body is being played by it, it’s playable, I become a playground of sensations, of sparkles and the soft kisses of air.

…

All those fucking years we’ve spent as a Ghost.

…

They’re all ‘gone’ – whatever that means.

…

And it makes me so fucking sad that I’m happy about being able to cry at least, ’cause this is the only fucking reasonable reaction to this whole mess.

…

Then there’s this weird genital dysphoria coming up and again and again lately. And I don’t wanna think about it! Like, no… Let this just NOT become a fucking topic right now, okay?

I don’t wanna hear about that! I’m covering my ears.

Alienation…

You ask me: “Are there moments in which you really like it, or are there just moments in which it doesn’t bother you?” And I’m like FUUUUCK… I don’t know! I don’t wanna talk about it lets just never ever bring it up again!

…

This slipping in and out is exhausting. I’m weary.

I mean;

Can’t I just BE for a prolonged amount of time?