In no way do I claim that this essay will be a linear one. We will need to morph together… to pass through the viscous… we will need to progress, reflect, evolve out loud. We will need to alter direction based on our needs.
I want to say that I am here to continue the conversation about Trans. I am here to add my body as a space--to this space and in that action make this space more transparently Trans.
I identify as Trans (both in terms of physiology as well as text). In this essay I speak my own philosophies of Trans as someone who identifies as Trans. By Trans I mean this:
I have never felt like a woman. I have never felt like a man. By Trans I mean never only feminine nor only masculine. I mean that I need you to not need me to be either a woman or a man. I mean embodied-motility. I mean morphability. I mean non-mutability. .
I mean “please inquire tenderly before assuming.” I mean “please have your desire to contact me be rooted in our working collaboratively to create future spaces that can include and even celebrate all bodies that in any way transgress the social norm.”
I do not need you to identify as I identify in order to understand Trans.
Trans as an interpreter… Trans as an interjector… Trans as an inter-locutor…
Trans as an instigator… Trans as passage… Trans as port… Trans as portal…
Let this be a working definition of Trans: Having two or more genes each carrying a mutation. With this definition of Trans we are able to consider that Trans may in fact be a alternate to the patriarchal binary-based categorization practices upon which many branches of human historicity have previously depended.
In this revelation there is hope.
I want to say that I vehemently believe in your body’s ability to add to the conversation about Trans (through creativity, analysis, activism, theory, art, personal narrative/story etc.). This is an invitation for you to do just that.
Let us begin with some basic considerations and questions in order to intentionally open the conversation about Trans:
-In the context of the consideration of Trans/ the variant, we must first consider what is non-variant.
-What is “normal” and by whose standards?
-Who decides what that normalcy entails? And further-- concerning the pressure that that normalcy places on all bodies within a system--how as Trans bodies and Trans advocates can we work to rebel against expectations to assimilate to norms?
-What are the ethics involved in considering a body that is different (be those textual bodies, physiological bodies, communal bodies, bordered bodies, refugee bodies or bodies without accurate historical representation)? By different, I mean not part of the typical shapes and structures of privileged or dominant positions within patriarchal society.
-What are some possible repercussions in assuming that all bodies have been given a place in the world and thereby that they have place?
-What are ways that we can re-imagine or renovate the perception of a basic equality in order to truly address and inhabit equity practices concerning which bodies are supported by norms and which are disempowered or oppressed by norms?
It is time to deeply consider these types of questions. It is time to make this type of seeking our own.
I ask that we look at how non-normalized bodies are socialized to comply and assimilate with norms—and I ask that we work together to imagine extreme renovations of space and traditional systemic function so that the focus (concerning inhabitation, embodiment and existing) can be based on celebration of the variant rather than diminution of the variant.
I am asking us to decide where we will exist on the continuum of equity concerning underrepresented and non-supported bodies that do not uphold the social norm concerning polarity and binary traditions.
Polarity and Binary are defined as follows:
Polarity: Diametrically opposed parts
Binary: Consisting of, indicating or involving only two
Polarity and binary are nearly impossible limits for any body—but particularly for Trans identified bodies that are inherently transcendent of those norms. As a Trans identified person I am interested in how we as a human species can collaborate to come up with entirely new imaginations, as poultice to the damages and violences inflicted onto Trans by polarity and/or linearities concerning “social acceptability”, space, texts and bodies.
I live and enact my body in ways that make the binary systems and methods transparent as obsolete and outdated (concerning them being representative of a ‘universal’ model).
Not everyone has a Trans identity--but everyone crosses. Therefore if we are able to amplify our view of our own thresholds and junctures, perhaps we can better track the moments where we do in fact cross and fuse with something ulterior to what we were previous to that crossing. This is Trans. And in this action of recognition, it is my hope that we can begin to claim our moments as our identity, thereby more deeply solidifying ourselves in our own integrities of visage (rather than regurgitating others’ narratives and forms which inherently have within them a base in limit of idea, perspective and/or intent).
It is my hope that you will hear what I am saying and feel it as a true logic…
that you will make your own forms for recognizing and enlivening what YOU truly are. I hope that you take pride in ever engaging your own accurate tendencies toward fusion…in ways that allow you to continue as a textual body, as a physiological body. In doing so, you make yourself that much more luminous, that much more vigorous, that much more embodied and bold,
that much more unable to be colonized.
Trans body: Transbody
intersections of desire, form and intent with public space as well as self-invented space
this in order to no longer have to experience the world as a constant site of panic or constraint
this in order to come to know that we belong here
I am arguing for Trans as a personally infused/infusable site
a place where there is an inherent need to dissolve identity (as what is projected onto one body via an other) and past that dissolution, amplify identity as a site for self-named accuracies, limitless imaginations and motilities
exploding the inherently personal until everything
within its radius is left
soaked
by these serums leaking through the balcony prongs
by these ways of saying truth through
we swim out to the middle
of our holding
with an oversized mirror bound to our hands
becoming exact replicas
of the coil that we imagine
then before embedding the genuflects of reflection
