Trans Counter-Studies: What May I Do? What Must I Be?
Last Friday I paneled at a conference called Trans Disruptions: The Future of Change, and in spite of the bombastic title had a mostly good time. I think I'd like to do this more. I want to share my conference paper here and to reflect a little on how that went. This was my first experience splashing around in academic trans studies and I'm not entirely sure I grasped the assignment.
My panel, Trans Narrative, was organized by Connor Spencer, a Columbia grad student, and consisted of me, Grace Lavery, and RL Goldberg. In a bit of a reversal, Grace and RL both read excerpts of fiction in progress, involving Lana Del Ray and Martin Heidegger respectively, and I chose to go for straight theory. My paper was an attempt to dissent from some prevailing currents of anti-essentialism and ultra-liberal approaches to gender freedom, and along the way, to try to speak to the often misrecognized formal imperatives of trans writing.
Our panel contributions seemed reasonably complementary but the discussion section afterward was derailed by a question whose tune was something like "I feel put in a box called 'cis'" (I don't even particularly use this word, though I also don't think there is anything wrong with having a term for non-trans) or "what would I have to do to be trans enough" (why ask actual transsexuals this question?)—this kind of thing. This question, which came from a Columbia faculty member, was particularly odd for posing itself as a response to a composite of fragments of overheard gossip, rather than any of the prepared remarks or even particularly to the themes of the conference. Is this actually how things go in your field?
I feel there was a lot in my piece to potentially disagree with, yet strangely we spent all of our time in a therapy session for one audience member. Oh well. I have a bit more to say about the kind of anxieties that make this kind of question all too common, but mostly people have to learn to control themselves a little. I said, among other things, "toughen up," and I really mean it.
But I shouldn't dwell on the negative, the panel has already led to a lot of new conversations, new questions. New slurs, new verbs. https://afrolab9000.bandcamp.com/track/redguard-snipers-ft-sb-the-moor
And of course the real highlight of the conference was Torrey's keynote, a reading from a just-finished manuscript written under extreme formal, vocal, and period constraints: about lumberjacks.
Ok, here's the piece as promised. Sixteen easy pieces.
What May I Do? What Must I Be?
1
I want to begin by thanking the organizers for inviting me to this side of the zoo glass. It’s a position I’ve been uncomfortable with at times, partly because of a residual identification with a strain of trans counter-knowledge, something we could index by Anne Tagonist’s “Fuck your Fucking Thesis,” or Trish Salah’s “Undoing Trans Studies,” or Rocko Bulldagger’s “The End of Genderqueer,” or my own provocations in character as the Australian academic Cliff Cannon, and that’s what’s written down. There is a suspicion that we are in a domain here of sophistry, which is produced structurally by the unfreedom of the trans conversation and by the accident of institutionalizing in a decadent period of high theory. There is also a suspicion that as a trans person, participating in the field of trans studies is nothing more than the least effective way ever devised to take your clothes off for money. In other words that we are the object here, and not to get confused about that, however genteel the style of objectification.
The presumption in this point of view, which I will call the position of trans counter-studies, is that finally, trans people know better. And perhaps we do, at least in our after midnight table talk. The trouble is, our counter-knowledge, from below, from the margins, or the “of color” variety, seems only to get so far. We remain stranded in resentment, clowning, or in a brittle assertion of the superiority of situated knowledge. The thing is, if we can’t think our way out of this juncture, then the ideas themselves are failing. That is what it looks like for an idea to fail. It also might look like activist formations and countercultural micro-institutions failing again and again in identical ways, with a seeming inability to learn, unless it be “the hard way.” Every time is the first time. I take it for granted that this failure is occurring. So so much for trans counter-knowledge.
We may find ourselves at a unique moment of consolidation and reflection. It may be possible at last to evaluate how “speaking for ourselves” has really gone, and what kind of person inevitably nominates themselves to speak for all of us, which is what speaking for ourselves means in practice.
2
Trans counter-knowledge often begins with a refusal to be recruited into an agenda or argument. For example the agenda of subversion and destabilization of categories which we may indeed destabilize, but not without reserve. To give another example, closer to our theme, of the kind of pseudo-argument trans people can be recruited into, consider how many fine minds have been ruined by the observation that “gender” and “genre” are the same word in French. The notion here is that trans art carries a formalistic imperative toward hybridity, or for that matter that the trans body does. There is no time to say more than what I think about this: that this is a bad idea which produces bad art, and which falsifies life, and which misrepresents the link between them.
3
It is not only a bad idea but the bastard image of trans counter-knowledge. I think this unfortunate equation between formal and sexual instability may explain the prevalence of auto-theory and theory-performance, which after all are many of the master texts of this field. And isn’t that what I am doing now? In vaudevillian terms, the “straight man” too, is a clown. But see how little is gained in observing that fact.
4
Instead, I want to observe the triple ambiguity between the metaphorical sense of narrative as self-account, and on the other hand, the narrative which I write as a trans novelist, and on the third leg those narratives which I or others write about trans people. What we are, what we say, and what is said of us. I want to press the difference.
You could say for the last, those stories which are about trans people or in which trans people recognize themselves, or in which we are contended over, these are not only written or only written well by trans people. I want to throw out a specific recommendation of Rabih Alameddine’s book from a few years ago, The Wrong End of the Telescope.
For the first, I think there is something genuine about the interaction of literary form and “self-narration,” but we often take the wrong lesson. What that observation is for, which it never seems to activate, is to bring the editor’s red pen and scissors into the normative sphere. If life is like a book, that book is sometimes what goodreads reviewers call a “DNF,” and other times rewards rereading. It is probably true that the deficiencies of writing: cliches and various forms of unclarity, are also deficiencies of life. Though it is equally true that it might be exhausting to read a book length sequence of truly original sentences. Luckily, there is little risk we will ever have to.
5
With regard to what trans people write, that delicious middle which is the only part of this I care about, I want to make a detour to a tradition that was quite meaningful for me, and formative, that of the San Francisco “New Narrative” writers. I found them when I was figuring out how to be queer, and how to render lives like mine in literature, and how to loosen up. Since I am at the podium I would like to add: any errors are my addition.
The thing about this writing, in which my canon was Bruce and Kevin and Dodie and Bob and Sam and—here’s the thing. They had a short lived journal called Narrativity. Who reads it today? This is not to say that they failed, but I want to make the claim that New Narrative wasn’t new at all, but merely cynically recognized an imperative to represent yourself that way. We are new. But you have to say instead that the way we write is new. It is the critic who obsesses over formal and methodological novelty and transgression, and he demands satisfaction. “New Narrative” was a McGuffin and a way of playing ball. I don’t regard this cynically.
But actually, they wrote loose and they wrote themselves and they were some of the best to ever do it. Perhaps it is helpful to build hat racks for the academic critic, so that for example New Narrative can be opposed to Language Poetry can be opposed to official verse culture once again. That sort of fits into a thesis-shaped hole. Maybe trans writers have to do the same.
6
So perhaps we’re only telling stories.
7
I think we have room to talk about some trans ideas in trans narrative, and I’ve sometimes done that. There’s something to be said for stepping outside of yourself. For example, here’s the bridge.
8
For example, I might allow a character in a story to point out that our theories of the urgency and rightness of transition mostly fit into two buckets: liberty-theories and essence-theories. On the side of essence, that is to say character, fate, destiny, including the destiny which people sometimes say that biology is, it’s natural to suppose that people whose character is obstructed may have some medical or psychological problems. In the same way as an athlete injured in her prime, a bird without wings, or a lion with a thorn in his paw. Or say, a person sterilized against their will. One says here that transition is one determination among others of essence or of normative identity.
As for the liberty theories they are a little bit simpler, the point simply is that I’m free to dispose as I wish of my body, my property, my time, and my priorities, for good or ill. You can’t stop me from getting this tattoo. What adults do in the privacy of their own bedrooms. That sort of thing. The thing about these liberty arguments is that they tend to be more effective in liberal societies, among and as applied to the individuals in those societies already acknowledged to be free, and moreover individuals having the means to realize their freedom without much help from others (aside of course from those forms of help which are naturalized).
In both cases, possibility is obstructed, but the difference is between true autonomy and mere spontaneity.
9
Insofar as trans politics has been under an LGBT umbrella, emphasizing private sexual liberty and rights to expression and participation, you could say that the movement has tended to emphasize liberty theories, with some tensions, since after all it is a bit difficult to harmonize the relationship to medicine, or the role of children in contemporary politics, or even demands for recognition and accommodation, with those theories.
10
You might say that the liberty strategy is to extend the freedom of those already acknowledged to be free, to a material and relational reinvention of the body which is after all ours, and to extend the acknowledgment of freedom to a slightly larger group. This approach actually works pretty well for me, speaking now as the author, because I am a free-wheeling artist, not yet forty, and a person who pursued transition when I was, so-to-speak, good and ready. Only, what is it to be ready?
11
For people who are not “ready,” which is to say, not otherwise acknowledged to be free, and perhaps substantially unfree in a way we will describe further below, one either has to bite the bullet and connect trans liberation to a more wholesale liberation, or to abandon the strategy of liberty for the strategy of essence. This is a tough proposition in rooms like this one where “essentialism” is so often a dirty word, though you ought to try asking someone to explain in their own words some time just what it is they think is so darn bad about “to ti ên einai.”
12
And he might go on. Certain contemporary writers could be commended for biting the bullet, and admitting that the entailments of the liberty strategy include a wholesale Promethean radicalism, a reinvention of life. All of this seems possibly worth pursuing, but also like an unserious political strategy. Unless one also accepts as well the secret mantra that all the “serious political strategies” have failed already. The real motto here seems to be that famous wall line from that famous month of May, “soyez realistes, demander l’impossible.” Be realistic, demand the impossible.
My character, who is a liberal through and through, would not accept this. Though he might say something to the effect that it takes all kinds. But then he might go on, in his essay within a novel within an essay, which I now imagine is titled “Against Liberty,” to defend the strategy of essence, not merely as something expedient or pragmatic, but as the true which opposes the false.
13
I think I would have him make the comparison to kids playing music and sports and learning languages and maintaining connections to extended family — one finds here that a passive approach is only superficially freedom-respecting. The kid who wants to play ball won’t always wake up with the motivation to go to practice. But you accept your role as a prosthesis to their deliberation and resolve, carrying them through ordinary youthful distraction or flagging motivation. But there is an uncomfortable reversibility here. Perhaps you’re really forcing them to do it. I like the notion that the kid can quit, but shouldn’t quit lightly, say just because they stayed up too late one night or were slow to fill out a form. Practically speaking, there is a painful ambiguity in the idea of “supporting” a decision, sometimes you will push and pull and be wrong. And in those moments you are potentially “making them do it.” Though you may have thought you were simply “helping them get out of bed.”
My character would go on to wonder how he would handle this problem, of a kid who initiates a transition and neither quits nor follows through under their own power, but treats it the way kids treat everything, like practice. How impossible this would feel. To say, “come on, take your pills, you’ll be happier.” It’s one thing to support a decision and quite another to admit that real support includes taking the moral risks inherent in challenging ambivalence and inconstancy. Admitting the impossibility of neutral support. That the child’s agency is incomplete.
At this point I might intervene as the author again, to say that in times when I want to give up, I often do so unsustainably. I might think I am detaching from a conversation only to maintain myself in resentful silence, or I might neglect my transition in a way that is not relaxation but a continuous expression of despair. Resentment and despair which always breach containment. Sometimes a friend will “support” me in the real sense by saying, “don’t be silent unless your heart supports that silence,” or “don’t talk about yourself that way,” or “gender self-deprecation always hurts you in the end, and when you’re hurting, everybody hurts.” Something along the lines of, “We need you here walking in the light with the rest of us.” Pilgrim, lift up your head!
In other words, adult agency is also incomplete. And we observe this incompleteness in the wavering of our own desire to “play football for the coach.” On this account the problem is ubiquitous, and it seems possible that there are more good-enough approaches than we currently know.
But of course it also helps that we know something about essence, and can agree on it. That there really is a kind of person like this. That there are real needs here which we have in common. That’s the bottom line, what keeps this philosophical problem from erupting in its most uncomfortable and intractable forms.
14
In a way, this doesn’t seem like a problem for the liberty-strategy, it just suggests a more expansive and capacious and hybridized concept of liberty, one involving risky assertions of essence not only on our own behalf. Assertions about what kinds of essences there are. I think we could do it, actually. Though I am in a room with probably a few people who have put themselves through the impossible exercise of systematizing that perspective, and know how hard it can be sometimes to say exactly what you mean when you mean to say it exactly. So maybe it would be better to stage a conflict, in a story, to have the possibility of encountering the unreconciled elements.
15
I could write a story in which a character says all that, and in which I break the narrative to intervene in various ways, and then on a second or third pass I could reach for the eraser. To try to take myself out and make it true. To make it felt in the world, as plot, as what happens, or as what doesn’t happen, as the truth of character, or the truth of what in my small world and in some small way is. It’s also a way of expressing contradiction more nakedly, more like we find it here, in Noahide drunkenness. Bluntly, rather than accounting for trans studies, we could simply play with dolls and let ‘em fight.
16
Trans narrative might like all narratives present a chance to see life as it is, with its layers exposed and many more concealed. It could be a way to meet a constructed moment, with its veins of contemporaneity and non-contemporaneity, above all to tell the living from the dead. At least that’s the story that I’ve been telling.