Here Forever
We have always been here, together and apart.
I recently attended a huge celebration of trans healthcare for the annual Trans Day of Visibility on March 31st. Dozens of trans folks gathered at the Capitol mall in Saint Paul to communally take our hormone replacement therapy drugs in public, a refutation of the ongoing fascist repression of transness. I sang songs shoulder to shoulder with other trans folks I’d met that day and some I’ve protested beside in years past. I listened to speakers, mainly youth (this event was organized by TIGERRS, a local youth organization for trans, intersex, and gender radical folks) who shouted their commitment to weathering the coming state violence together. There was a massive trans flag created by local artist A.P. Looze with the words “Here Forever” in foot tall letters in the middle. Hell. Yes.
But this event got me thinking about all the ways transness will look and survive this moment, all the ways it has looked in the past, and what we really mean when we say “here forever.”
Undoubtedly there will be people who go back in the closet, who either destransition or approximate it outwardly as a disguise. There always have been those for whichever personal reason have not come out or do not plan to. I think most of us are probably scared that when push comes to shove, we will join their ranks. I don’t think there is a wrong way to survive what amounts to a genocide, a targeted elimination. I don't criticize anyone who chooses subtlety in such unsubtle times, but I don’t think most of us will hide. For many of us, it is impossible anyway, and I truly believe that once the cat is out of the bag, so to speak, you’ve been irrevocably changed.
I’m not talking about the “irreversible damages” of HRT and surgeries. My surgery scars will never be hidden, and I don’t even have nipples anymore. Without clothes, no one could ever mistake me for cis. There is no going back. The part of me that has changed the most is the part of my heart that is autonomous, critical, self-possessed and liberated. Being transexual to me has nothing to do with the chemicals inside of me, with the procedures I have had done. It can speak to my experience of the medical system, the binary conception of “healthy” versus “unhealthy” and the need to interface with frameworks I do not believe in in order to access care. But none of that creates my gender.
I do. We do it together, and we do it alone.
I believe my gender can be and is relational. I believe my gender is a lens for me to view the world and be viewed through. I believe that like all lenses it distorts the subject if used inappropriately. I believe the idea that the government has any say in who I am is laughable. As a matter of fact, what I actually do is abolish my gender. Defile it. Crush it. Bend it. Spread it. Desire it, reject it, play with it. It is mine, created inside of me, for my enjoyment. I share it with everyone around me. I subvert. I delight.
There is not a single tool of fascism that would change me into a cis person. To deny my gender, they would have to kill me.
I think some of what brings my hope for the coming years is the realization that there is nothing they can do to me to make me cis. There is not a single tool of fascism that would change me into a cis person. To deny my gender, they would have to kill me. In a grim way, that hardens my resolve. The stakes are and always have been life and death, and have never realistically been destransition. I think that is what makes me transexual. It's not about medicine. Even if I hid, disguised myself with clothes or prosthetics, who I am is eternally trans. There is nothing any outside power can do to change me. That is what makes us dangerous and incompatible with fascist authoritarian thought, with the hegemony, the hierarchical power, of the State.
I believe we invest too much in taxonomies that do not free us. If we are invested in the idea that each of us occupies discreet identity labels, that words and terms and charts and disorders create borders within which our identities live, we are missing the fullness of the queer experience. By all means, define yourself with the words you want! You are a woman! Or you never were a woman! But you do not need anyone else to diagnose you as trans. You are who you say you are. Your identity is self evident.
Beyond discourses of permission or validity, what I am describing gives us more than a condition that could be withheld in the future. Transition is agency, autonomy, self liberation. Our inherent human dignity, our rights, comes from inside of us. The State cannot patrol and delineate those borders which they have no dominion over.
Take hormones with your friends. Or don't do that. Write zines, make art, make friends, make lovers. The government was never going to invite you into anything other than a conditional surrender. You do not need the DMV or the insurance company to tell you what your gender is. They get it wrong all the time! We are not beholden to them. We need only to establish the channels necessary to provide us with the care we desire for ourselves. Trans people, some of them doctors and therapists and community organizers and teachers and bus drivers, are doing exactly that. Connect with them, with us, wherever you are. We need one another.
So take your hormones on the Capitol steps and remind the government that we do not perform our genders for their benefit. If we ever did, it was only doing what was needful. Now, even the pretext of safety is gone. We owe absolutely nothing to the system that alleged to authorize our transitions, systems in which we petition for judicial permission to change our names or get a medical procedure.
We are our own authors, now and in the past, everywhere else and here, forever.
