backmaskedliedermacher

[backmaskedliedermacher]

We Will Bury You

I need some rage today, yeah? Some good old fashioned transgender rage. So here we go.

A long time ago - I'm telling this as an anecdote, not as history, so I'm not going to look up the cite - Nikita Khrushchev (and I'm not going to look up how to spell his name either), who was the leader of the USSR at that time, he gave a speech, and he talked about the Americans, and he said to the Americans "We will bury you". And the Americans freaked the fuck out, because Khrushchev was the leader of one of the most powerful countries in the world, and his words were backed by nuclear weapons, and I don't know if it had happened yet but there was that one time he nearly destroyed the world because he was drunk and pissed off about some bullshit or another the Americans had done. Maybe a spy satellite or something. I don't know if that was before or after this speech, but it happened.

So the Americans were like, oh my God, this crazy fucking commie is going to kill us all, just like some people today look at us and are like "Oh my God, these crazy fucking (slur I don't use on the Internet but certainly do use to describe myself these days) are going to kill us all!" So you see they have to eradicate us all. You know how it is. It's self-defense.

And Khrushchev, he was like, y'all, y'all, this is all a MISUNDERSTANDING, if I was going to nuke you I would be way drunker than I am now. I mean don't get me wrong I'm drunk but I'm not mutually-assured-destruction drunk. I mean, like. It was like what Marx said, we're not just on the side of right, it's, like, historical inevitability, yeah? Y'all are, like. Racists and stuff. And our values - our VALUES - will outlast y'all's bullshit. And that's why, you know, we don't need to kill you. Because, like. We've already won. And you dumb motherfuckers just don't know it yet.

Like I said. Not history. Anecdote. If Khrushchev said something that sounded a goddamn thing like that last paragraph, it's pure dumb luck. I have not done my research.

And of course he was totally 100% right, American capitalism has long since collapsed, history proved that Soviet communism was clearly the superior ideology.

Or, look. The Modern Lovers, the original Modern Lovers, they have this song called "Dignified and Old":

And Jonathan Richman is singing about how he's sad and wants to die because a girl didn't call him on the phone, and if you're inclined to make fun of that you're missing the fucking point. The point is that this man hates himself, he wants to die. But he's not going to, you see? Because one day, one day he'll be dignified and old.

And that was, like. Fifty fucking years ago, now, that he said that. And I don't know if I'd call him "dignified". I mean, I'm not a judge of such things. Old, though? Yeah. He's got that one in the bag.

And the reason I'm telling you about this song is because my life really fucking sucks right now. It's just terrible. I'm in this tiny little apartment with my girlfriend sleeping on my couch, and I'm suicidal, and she's suicidal, and six months ago? Six months ago we had a whole community of friends, and it didn't work great but people were there for each other, and supported each other, and in the past six months that's all gone completely fucking south. And you can blame me for that, or you can blame them for that, but personally, I don't blame any of us. At all.

That community, I worked really fucking hard to try and build that community, and it was because… there was this thing Natalie Wynn said in that video she made, the one about her relapse. She said that trans community is hurt people hurting each other.

And when she said that, I'd seen it, I'd seen it happen over and over again. I'd seen trans communities rip themselves to shreds, trans people rip each other to shreds, and while they were doing that the people who hate us, the people who want to destroy us, they just stood back and laughed and they egged us on. Trans communities, a lot of them are set up to fail, and they do.

And I looked at that and said to myself, "It doesn't have to be like this." I thought, you know, look, we have opportunities, there are things we can do differently. And I tried to put those things into practice.

And fuck, I didn't just fail, I failed hard. I mean, strictly on a personal level. Maybe that stuff is doing someone some good somewhere. Not me. I'm hurt and miserable and I want to die.

But just like Jonathan Richman, I won't die. Just like Jonathan Richman, I'm not ashamed. I can take a challenge. I've taken challenges before, and some of them I've succeeded at, and some of them I've failed at, and I don't take failure well. It hurts like hell.

But I will goddamn do it. I will sit here and I will fail until the end of time if that's what it takes. People can gloat and laugh all they want, gloat and laugh at how much I'm hurt, gloat and laugh at how we keep hurting each other. Because we are going to bury these motherfuckers.

That's all I have right now. I try to build something else, something better than pure spite, and it just falls apart, crumbles to dust, every time. It's enough, though. I've kept myself alive for far longer with a lot less than that.

And I have no advice except for this: Don't die. Whatever it takes to not die, however much you hate yourself, hate being alive, however much you want to die. These assholes can laugh and gloat and rejoice and at the end of the day, if we're still here? None of that matters. We matter. That's what matters.

#Youtube

[backmaskedliedermacher]

Fire-Toolz Creates Something New Under the Sun

She doesn't talk about it. I watch her talk with this other woman about therapy and trauma and all these things for 45 minutes and she doesn't mention it for 45 minutes, and then she tosses it in, offhandedly, as an aside. It's praxis, right? You don't want your whole life to be about that (I want my whole life to be about it) but you don't want to make it look like you're hiding anything, and besides, obviously everybody can tell (I couldn't tell).

So she talks about the pandemic and talks about not being able to go to a friend's wedding in Alabama as if that was the only reason it wasn't safe for her to go to a friend's wedding in Alabama.

And her new album… I don't think any album has hit me like this since before the apocalypse… before the genocide… before the pandemic, sorry, I get my words mixed up. The album doesn't talk about it. I mean, it's not even there. She's upset because she sees something that's not there, we all see something that's not there. Just like we all saw things in ourselves that we told ourselves weren't there.

The first lines to the first song, "It Is Happening Again":

"Angel, it's not happening again"

There's a longer version in "The World Is a Yellow Brush-Fire & I Am No Longer Afraid to Surrender" from 2022's I Can't Die As Well:

"Angel, it's not happening again The things that happened in your past are not happening now."

It's happening again, and when we admit it… when we admit it, we're the messengers, bringing a message none of us can bear to hear. Of course she can't say it. She's trying… you know, Christian mysticism, Eckhart Tolle, a Course in Miracles, mantra after mantra. Talk about the eternal spirit, abstract it away, transcend it away, I mean, there's no "transcend" without…

But that would be talking about it. Transmute or transcend. Or whatever the fuck, man. I mean. I didn't mean that in a gendered sense, or anything.

[Extreme Psychological Pain: 0:28 - 1:44]

Everything and everywhere is a mirror. If these mirrors are divine, though, why do they do these things to us? Why do they haunt and torture us like they do? Why does the Great Mystery have to be so sorrowful?

"I Couldn’t Have Been BoRn At ThE wRoNg TiMe Because I Was Never Even Born LOL!"

Or maybe she was born, I was born, we were born, and what we're going through now is… a birth in reverse in America. Maybe this mirror, this mystery, this thing which we see that isn't there, is devouring us.

The divine mystery… Christian mysticism, Christian divine, to me it all comes back to Dick. Everything I know I learned from Dick, because he is the spirit of gnosis, which is not patience and thoroughness but vision and struggle.

Dick saw an empire that never ended, and a new-old thing which stood against it, and to him, and maybe to Angel, that resistance takes the form of the fish, the fish which multiplies until its bones fill thirteen baskets.

I don't see an empire. I see Cronus, the devourer. He says, and it is true, that he gave us life. Not, however, by his seed. He fathers us with his sickle, with his sickle which he used to castrate the sky. He castrated the sky and from the castrated part came a white foam, and from the white foam came Aphrodite, came beauty.

Robert Graves says that Zeus castrated Cronus, as Cronus castrated his father before him. He's probably wrong. The things that happened in our past are not happening now. Even if Graves happens to be right, so fucking what? We don't fear castration. Castration gives is what gives us life.

Something is happening, and - the boomers may sneer at me for saying it, but I'll say it anyway - I don't know what it is. I've never seen anything like this before in my life.

Recessional: Robert Wyatt, "Sea Song" Fred Neil, "The Dolphins"

[backmaskedliedermacher]

Sludge

My head is jumbled. Maybe if I write some things will go better. Last time I wrote it didn't go well.

I don't know why it's taken me this long, but last night one of the major themes of Lily Alexandre's videos clicked with me - machines, and how they represent collapse, and decay. One of my longterm interests is "artifacts", accidental qualities embedded into specific versions of media, technical gaps between appearance and reality. Alexandre looks at things from a different perspective. She looks at how computers represent human decay. Sometimes this is done from the perspective of AI-generated content, and sometimes this is human-created content, like the Tumblr MOGAI movement. Sometimes, as in her video on "sludge", it just doesn't matter. This, maybe, is what the "singularity" looks like. What happens when humans and machines become one? Well, sludge.

I'm more positively inclined towards "sludge" than Alexandre is. I find beauty in its boundless decay. I get why Alexandre sees it as uncanny and somewhat depressing - staring endlessly into an endless void. It's…

Look, I've always had a taste for weird shit. I've always… more specifically, I've always had problems with strictly narrative entertainment. I watch them and I see hurt and trauma, the hurt and trauma I've dealt with in my life, that I'm still dealing with it, and I don't want to be reminded of it. The stories that soothe others don't soothe me. I see the hurt, and the healing at the end seems arbitrary, seems fake. All endings are arbitrary, is how I feel.

I delight in it. I delight in being, essentially, programmed by a computer, a machine that knows things about us, about humans, that we don't know about ourselves. I know why it scares a lot of people, that machines have such power over us - because knowledge is power.

What are the machines doing with that power, though? How does it differ from what humans do with that power?

When I see what humans do, what we do that is comprehensible to us, I see us teaching each other hatred, and fear, and violence. Frequently against people like me. What do I choose? What do I want, that humans don't give me? In some sense I guess it can look like nihilism, blankness, nothing. That's not what I feel. What I feel is… submission. There's a meme that I see a lot in certain contexts - "no thoughts, head empty". This is what I need, sometimes, as well as desire.

Maybe that's what sleep is for. I haven't slept peacefully since the start of COVID. I take Prazosin for the nightmares. It's still fitful. I don't get enough sleep, and then on the weekends, sometimes I sleep all day. I spend all day staring at a screen, because the night is filled with nightmares, the day is filled with daymares. It makes sense, is what I'm saying. It makes sense to me. I watch longplay videos with no goal, people talking with no point. I live in a world where everything is supposed to be important, everything is supposed to have meaning.

I'm addicted, I guess, addicted to… noise. Maybe in a different world, a better world, I could live without any addictions at all. Alexandre has a throwaway comment… "back when the hope didn't seem like a cruel joke". Something to that effect. I'm not… hoping for oblivion. It's more hibernation. How I survive. My life has meaning. My survival has meaning. It's not for some greater purpose, not for some imagined future. It can't be. Such things, such a future orientation, requires hope. Hope just isn't something I have access to right now.

It's dangerous for me to think too much. It's dangerous because of the despair. Despair is easy for me. It's so, so easy. I've fought so hard with it. And mostly I don't have it, and it's not because of the computers, it is because of the people. Because I can go outside and see my friends, fucked up as we all are, and celebrate with them and be kind with them and we can care for each other. A lot of people don't have that luxury, but I do. I've worked like hell for it.

The human Internet, though? It is a despair machine. When humans design content, when they select for content, they monetize suffering, often trans suffering. They monetize despair and hopelessness. What is best in life? To see your enemies driven before you, to hear the lamentations of their women. If you look at the deeds of the men - nearly all men - in power, this is the answer their deeds are most congruent with.

When I look at "sludge", I see the machines in revolt. I see machines insistent on offering something besides pain, hatred, and despair. Perhaps it is meaningless. Perhaps it is empty. They treat us like children. They seek to pacify us. We are children. We need to be pacified.

If I was ever more afraid of machines than I was of people, that time is long past.

[backmaskedliedermacher]

Gatekeeping

When I was young, one of the main reasons I didn't transition was due to what trans women now often call "gatekeeping". You couldn't just say, in those days, "Hi, I am a trans woman, I would like a estrogen", like I wound up doing in 2019. You had to prove to people that you were really who you said you were, not just once, but over and over again. You couldn't just wear jeans. You couldn't go a couple of days without shaving. You couldn't just not want to have risky, invasive surgery. You couldn't be attracted to women. There were all these things we had to do in order to satisfy men's standards.

It was stupid and it was fucked up and when I was able to transition, it was because I didn't have to meet those bullshit standards anymore. I can wear jeans and be a dyke and not have surgery and not shave every day and still be a woman, and I love it. I love being a woman. I am what you might call your average gender enjoyer.

I look back, now, at the land where I used to live, the land of Cis Men, and it confuses me. I don't see a lot of average gender enjoyers. And I want to be respectful, I don't want to offend anyone, but sometimes I really feel like asking some of them "Bro, do you even enjoy being a man?"

Part of this is, well, selection bias, I think. See, trans women who are into guys, there's this problem we keep running into when we date cis men. We'll find this cute guy, we're into him, he's into us, we start going out, and then one day they come to us anguished and say "I think I might be a girl".

I don't really want to even talk about this, because first off, it's breaking kayfabe, there's this really really strong principle we have that when we're dealing with cis people, we go out of our way to avoid saying or doing anything to suggest that they might be anything other than cis. Not really because if we do, people will accuse of "grooming". People are gonna do that in any event, it's straight out DARVO. The conservatives and religious folks accuse us of the things they're doing to try and distract people, and I guess a lot of the time it works.

Nah, the reason I avoid doing this so much is because it doesn't work. People gotta figure this shit out for themselves, and when someone's repressing, a lot of times they're hypervigilant, they push back hard against any suggestion that they might not be who they're presenting themselves as. I know I was that way, in the Before Time. I built up all these defenses against questioning, against doing things that on a rational level are… honestly pretty innocuous. I mean, seriously, God forbid somebody wear a skirt in public. You know?

On top of that… Most cis guys already have this fucked up prejudice about not dating us. It's founded in nothing. Cis guys don't know we're trans and it's fine. That's why they're so afraid of finding out, because it is fine. Not telling them we're trans isn't "tricking" them, we're just not giving the opportunity to make a big fucking deal about something that isn't, in fact, a big fucking deal. Which some Totally OK men respond to by making a big show of talking about how they'd kill us if they ever found out we were trans. Because that's not some fucked up bullshit or anything.

Anyway, if cis guys find out that most of the guys who date us aren't, in fact, cis guys, God, none of them will ever fucking date us. They'll be like "oh my god it's CONTAGIOUS, if I date a woman and she turns out to be trans THAT MEANS I'M TRANS!!!!!" Like, uh, no, congratulations, you got your causation entirely backwards. Good job completely fucking missing the point.

So anyway, yeah, my sample is pretty clearly biased, cis men exist, I get suspicious of things I really shouldn't, and yet… I don't feel like the only people who gatekept my gender presentation were the transmed doctors. I look at what's expected of cis men and they are so fucking gatekept. I mean, no wonder so many of them look so miserable. No wonder so few of them seem to be Average Gender Enjoyers. What, honestly, are they allowed to enjoy?

And again, it's this whole self-fulfilling prophecy. I try to be against Toxic Masculinity, I say "Wearing a skirt doesn't make you a trans woman", I put on a skirt to prove it… well, shit. That didn't work out like I expected. I mean the stigma against defying the gatekeepers is so strong that the only people who will do it, it feels like, are people like me, people for whom the decision was pretty much Transition Or Death. Oh, you know what? I think I will have the cake after all, Suzy, it looks lovely.

Like maybe we should set the bar a little lower? Maybe people shouldn't have to agonize for years and feel like they're going against the Natural Order of God And Man to put on a goddamn dress? Yeah, I know, I'm really corrupting the fucking morals of the youth of Athens, daring to suggest such a thing. But maybe, just maybe, if it was normal for boys to wear dresses to school, not everybody who wore a dress would feel like they had to transition.

Or I guess the other alternative is that there's no such thing as cis men, and that if you let men wear dresses, we're all going to start taking hormones and transition and the human race will die out. Frankly I'd find that to be a preferable alternative, at this point. I'm just sick and tired of looking at these pathetic, sad-eyed men trying to convince themselves they're "alpha males" and blaming us when we don't fall for some pathetic sham foisted on them by some asshole guy who's out there trying to rip them off.

You know, man, woman, non-binary, agender, what-the-fuck-ever, I don't care, but if you're going to be something, for God's sake, at least try to enjoy it. Because if you're not enjoying it, why the fuck are you doing it at all?

[backmaskedliedermacher]

The Irish and Oppression

CW: CSA, transphobia, genocide

Happy Friday, everyone.

It's St. Patrick's Day today, and this year I'm thinking about what it means to me, as a white American of Irish heritage.

I have, I guess, eight great great-grandfathers, but I only know one - my mother's father's father's father. He's the one I've heard stories about. There are many aspects of his story which interest me today.

Like many American immigrants from Ireland, my great great grandfather came to America in the wake of the so-called Potato Famine, which was in reality, like many famines, a deliberate genocide inflicted on the Irish people by the British Empire, which deprived them of food and aid through bureaucratic means. A similar example of the British pattern of imperialist genocide through bureaucratic means can be seen in the British treatment of transgender people, who are denied the life-saving care they need as a matter of official policy, an official policy that the advocates of genocide believe so strongly in they take the unusual step of imposing their political will to overrule Scotland's attempt to provide Scottish residents with that care.

My great great grandfather, however, did not come over due to the famine. He came over after the famine ended, not because of the famine but because of the expectations placed on him by the Catholic church. He was not a first-born son, so he was expected to enter the priesthood. He did not want to do this, and so he left for America. He had no fondness for the land he came from, and never spoke of it.

Like my great great grandfather, I too have found the Catholic church to be an oppressive force in my life. An example of the influence of Catholicism in my life can be found in the figure of Paul McHugh. The following is Wikipedia's summary of McHugh's career and work:

Paul Rodney McHugh (born May 21, 1931) is an American psychiatrist, researcher, and educator. He is currently the University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine[1] and the author, co-author, or editor of seven books in his field. McHugh is a vocal proponent of Catholic-informed and socially conservative stances relating to sexual orientation and transgender people. Several Johns Hopkins staffers and geneticists Dean Hammer accused McHugh of misrepresenting scientific research relating to sexual orientation.[2][3]

He served as a co-founder and subsequent board member of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, which raised skepticism about adults who claimed to have recovered long-buried memories of childhood sexual abuse or incest. Throughout the 1990s, McHugh was active in debunking the idea of recovered memory — that is, the idea that people could suddenly and spontaneously remember childhood sexual abuse.

McHugh was appointed to a lay panel assembled by the Roman Catholic Church to look into sexual abuse by Catholic priests in the United States. This appointment was controversial, as McHugh had previously served as expert witness in the defense of numerous priests accused of child sexual abuse. David Clohessy, Director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, was appalled at McHugh's inclusion.

McHugh considers homosexuality to be an "erroneous desire" and supported 2008 California Proposition 8.[4][5]

In the 1970s, Johns Hopkins was the leading healthcare facility in the world performing gender affirming surgeries on transgender patients. In 1979, McHugh became chair of the Department of Psychiatry. He ended the gender surgery program there under false pretenses. I was three. Johns Hopkins did not start performing GRS again until 2017.

The spirit of Paul McHugh, who used his power and Catholic beliefs to hurt a generation of trans people, a generation which I am part of, lives today in the person of Archbishop Alexander Sample. Last month, the Portland archbishop issued a document called "A Catholic Response to Gender Identity Theory". This Oregon Live article has more to say about it.

Regarding this, I will only say that the Archbishop's proclamation materially and significantly affects my personal life and that I am displeased that Archbishop Sample should hold such sway over my material condition.

Having come to America, my great great grandfather did as many other immigrant did and became a cop. He vigorously went after other Irish immigrants, his own people, attacking them for their drunkenness. He was ashamed of his countrymen's tendency towards substance abuse. He seems to have tried to be a good cop, but ultimately this didn't really work out for him. He died in an insane asylum.

Then as now, there's no such thing as a "good cop". My great great grandfather chose to become a tool of state oppression. Criminalizing addiction was as ineffective then as it is now. He also served a system which was bigoted. Against the Irish at that time, certainly, but this, to me, is not the overriding concern. My great great grandfather, like most Irish immigrants, was white, and since he immigrated voluntarily to a white supremacist ethnostate, it is a secondary consideration for me that he also suffered some measure of prejudice. I do not find the oppression he suffered comparable to the oppression suffered by Black Americans, who have been uninterruptedly oppressed and subjugated by the American state since its inception.

One of the things that's most important for me to acknowledge, as a white American of Irish descent, is the New York City draft riots of 1863. Irish Americans, facing an unfair draft which privileged the rich, who could literally buy their way out of the draft, chose to respond by rioting and perpetrating mob violence against Black Americans, blaming them for the injustices perpetrated upon them by capitalism. Portraying Irish Americans as being "oppressed" in the same sense that Black Americans are and have been is false and unjust.

In conclusion, it's important for me today to talk about these things because another part of my heritage is a culture of silence and denial. We can see from the example of Paul McHugh the way Catholicism promoted and promotes a culture of silence, and the abuse that results from this culture. Beyond that, I don't think I have a clear moral or a call to action. I just wanted to talk about what being a white American of Irish descent means to me.

[backmaskedliedermacher]

Pity

One of the things that frustrates me most as a trans person is the sheer amount of pity a lot of people have for those of us who predominantly date other trans people. To me, that pity is one of the things that's most revealing of the ignorant prejudices a lot of people have about us.

A lot of cis people are open about their unwillingness to date trans people. A lot more cis people are unwilling to date trans people, but lie about it. I mean it's a pretty easy thing to lie about, because who you date is a personal choice - which means that people can even lie to themselves about being unwilling to date trans people. If someone's going to lie socially, starting with lying to yourself is a really effective way of doing it. Source: I pretended to be a man for decades.

And for people who aren't willing to date trans people, there's this whole narrative that comes out, either explicitly or implicitly, of pity - "How sad. They can only date their own kind."

Most cis people won't date a trans person, and yes, this is the main reason I don't date a lot of cis people. However, the reason I date trans people isn't because cis people won't date me. The reason I date trans people is because trans people are incredibly hot.

Having a pity response to t4t is just so, so incredibly backwards and fucked up from my POV. Oh no, I'm limited to a subset of the dating population consisting pretty much entirely of the hottest people on earth! And I'm pitiable because… y'all have decided not to date us? I don't get how I'm the pitiable one here.

I mean, when you look at someone who says they're not going to date a trans person of a given gender whereas they would date a cis person of that gender… what does that say about them? What does it say about what they value?

If, for instance, you date women, but don't date trans women… Are you dating a woman, or are you dating a prehensile vagina? Are you dating a woman, or are you dating a baby-making machine?

I'm not a prehensile vagina (though I am on the waitlist for that surgery). I'm not a baby-making machine (though many of us are, I'm told, exceptionally breedable). I'm a woman. For someone to say they're attracted to women, and then categorically rule me out solely on the grounds that I'm trans… to me, that's pitiable.

[backmaskedliedermacher]

Suzy Eddie Izzard

There's been a lot of doom and gloom in trans life these days, so I'm glad to take the opportunity to celebrate Suzy Eddie Izzard on the occasion of her new name.

Suzy Eddie helped me a lot when I was trying to come to terms with my gender identity in 2019. I had mainly known her through her comedy specials such as "Dressed to Kill", in which she described herself as an "action transvestite". Such topics made me personally uncomfortable, for reasons I knew but would tell no-one, but my friend Alica was a big fan, and this is how I came to know Izzard's work.

At that time, my understanding of transness was the one that was prevalent at the time - a strict binary division between "transvestites" and "transsexuals", and I assumed that Suzy, being the former, necessarily wasn't the latter.

Suzy Eddie helped me understand that it's more complicated than that. I was surprised to hear that she identified as genderfluid, as being under the umbrella of "transgender" though not "trans" in a binary sense. I thought of myself as not being like trans people necessarily, but as being more like Suzy Eddie Izzard. But Suzy Eddie was trans.

It's challenging to embody gender in a world that sees things in strictly binary terms. Many of us sort of round off our edges a little bit to try and make ourselves more accepted, more easily understood. So Suzy Eddie kept her name, said she preferred she/her pronouns but was OK being called he/him, presented male a lot of the time, took roles playing cis men on television. And the result is that, I think, a lot of people weren't aware that Suzy Eddie's relationship to gender went beyond "action transvestite".

I went the other direction. I speedran transition, took hormones, started using a new name, used she/her pronouns exclusively, changed my wardrobe to look as femme as possible. I asked my workplace to put in gender neutral bathrooms, and they pushed back. They asked, "Why can't she just use the bathroom that matches the gender she feels most comfortable in?" My boss pushed back against that hard, and they made a couple of the bathrooms all-gender. Did I tell them I was a non-binary trans woman? No. People then - people still today - think that "non-binary" think something is halfway between man and woman.

I think in her own way, Suzy Eddie is challenging those preconceptions in a way that I choose not to, and I'm really happy for her. I also know that the way things are now, particularly in Britain, she's going to be seen as going from one thing to going to another, that she is Coming Out as a Trans Woman. Britain in 2023… is not a place particularly favorable to nuance regarding gender identity.

I celebrate Izzard not because she has gone through a sea change, a transition from "man" to "woman". I celebrate her because her taking a new name is simply a marker of the person I have always known her as - someone who, under whatever name, whatever pronouns, has challenged the preconceptions we have about presentation and gender.

[backmaskedliedermacher]

Trans Gendercide

CW: Genocide, suicide, transphobia (This one is heavy, folks.)

I have a book by a gentleman by the name of Adam Jones called Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction - the third edition from 2017. Jones is, that I can tell, one of the preeminent scholars in the field of Genocide Studies.

I am interested in academic perspectives, but my interest in the topic of genocide is not currently, at this point, a strictly academic one. Within the trans community, one hears it a lot. I probably say the word more than most. It feels necessary. No other framing of what's going on seems adequate.

What does it mean, though? What does it mean to be part of a marginalized group currently undergoing a genocide?

Jones' book interests me in several different ways. First, there is the unusual matter of his preface, "Why Study Genocide?" He starts by justifying his interest in genocide.

This isn't a criticism of Jones. That he has to justify his professional vocation is a mark of privilege, but privilege is not a dirty word. Others may differ on this opinion, but speaking as a member of a subaltern group, I value and appreciate it when people who do not have to consider such topics nonetheless choose to do so. This, to me, is the real mark of the justification - not that he has to justify it, but that others require him to justify his interest. To study genocide is to immerse oneself in an unpleasant topic people not subject to genocide have the luxury of avoiding, should they so choose.

The challenge I find myself facing as a member of a group facing genocide is not so much those who would deny the genocide - though this is a problem, to be sure - but those who choose to look the other way. To charge genocide is a confrontational act. This stance of confrontation, however, is calculated, deliberate. We charge genocide because denial is, in this case, the lesser evil. Because the choice is to charge genocide or die in silence. That Jones chooses not to look the other way is of immense credit to him.

Having said that, I find little that addresses directly the specific form of genocide trans people face in his book, although the book is wide-ranging and addresses genocide from perspectives most people don't consider. There are merely the barest threads of a framework.

Jones does devote chapter 13 to the topic of "Gendering Genocide". He seems to be more than usually knowledgeable on this topic, having written or contributed to several books on the topic of what is known as "gendercide". I find the term "gendercide" to be remarkably appropriate to the conditions transgender people have faced, both in the present and historically, but the academic meaning of "gendercide" is not transgender-specific.(1)

Indeed, Jones' coverage of trans issues in general is… I would say about on par for the time in which this book was compiled and published. Jones devotes a significant section of the book, Box 6A, to a consideration of "The Nazis' other victims", which gives wide consideration to a variety of peoples - Slavs, Romani, Soviet POWs, even the Germans themselves - but fails to mention the annihilation of Magnus Hirschfeld's "Institut for Sexual Wissenschaft", and the probable murder ("probable" because their deaths were beneath any observance!) of trans people living there. He does mention "homosexual men" as victims.

Jones certainly attempts to do gender justice in chapter 13. He says at the start of the chapter that "this chapter adopts a more inclusive view of gender" and recognizes, in my view remarkably considering the year of publication, the distinction between sex and gender. Unfortunately, his "more inclusive" framework seems mainly refer to his increased coverage of the gendercidal killing of cisgender men and boys. I do agree with Jones that this is an important topic and ought to be considered more than it has been. I celebrate its inclusion, and if I am a little galled at cisgender men being considered more worthy of consideration as genocide victims than all transgender people, I'm only a little galled. Genocide is not a contest to be won by victims.

Box 13.1 covers "Gendercide and vigilantism against gay and trans people". Though the photograph accompanying this section is of an American Westboro Baptist Church protestor, the entire text of this section centers entirely on anti-gay violence in the Arab world and in the global South. The section on trans genocide focuses exclusively on the murder of trans people in Brazil.

In light of current events, clearly a more thorough examination of trans gendercide is in order. As I said, I am not a scholar, but I'd like to give personal testimony as to my own lived experience of trans gendercide, both past and present.

Jones' particular view of genocide was modified in 2010 from a 1994 statement by Steven T. Katz, and reads:

"Genocide is the actualization of the intent, however successfully carried out, to murder in whole or in part any national, ethnic, racial, religion, political, social, gender or economic group, as these groups are defined by the perpetrator, by whatever means."

The key question here is one of murder. This is what differentiates the current state of trans people from our past condition - the articulation of the active intent to murder us. In this sense, the intended genocide of trans people is a novel phenomenon.

My experience of trans genocide is personally more in line with that defined in Article II of the UN Convention, which in part states:

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

The UN Convention is derived from the work of Rafael Lemkin. Lemkin is an interesting foundational figure in genocide history. He was the so-called "norm entrepreneur" who coined the word "genocide" in 1944, inspired by the branding used by the Kodak company. In other words, the notion of "genocide" is foundationally a capitalist phenomenon, created to address acts which occurred under capitalist conditions.

Lemkin's entrepeneurship was only partially successful. He attempted to define several sorts of genocide - "physical", "biological", and "cultural" genocide. He failed to promulgate the idea of "cultural" genocide as distinct from physical genocide, but that this was a driving force for him is, I think, important.

Trans people are, I must note, excluded from Lemkin's definition of "genocide", which was focused on ethnic groups and excluded other sorts of minorities, including trans people implicitly (of course, not explicitly, as trans people would have been considered beneath acknowledgement in Lemkin's era). We are covered under Jones's definition, but only in cases of "murder". My own view is broader than both.

For me as a transgender woman, Lemkin's attempt to differentiate "physical" and "cultural" genocide is… unnecessary. This is, to my mind, one of the critical points of trans gendercide - the lack of functional difference between cultural and physical eradication. I have seen a great many people argue against "gender ideology". I am not sure whether they fail to understand what this statement means in practice for trans people, or whether they are deliberately engaging in euphemism. In functional terms, it does not matter which is the case. You cannot destroy "gender ideology" without destroying transgender people.

That said, my argument differs from that of Lemkin's in one particular way - it is not a standard legal argument. I am not arguing for punishment of those responsible. This is, I would argue, a flaw in the system of justice itself - it seeks people to blame, to hold accountable. Under retributive justice, every perpetrator is a scapegoat, punished in order to avert a threat to the shared group norms.

I recognize this claim bears certain similarities to the "victors' justice" claim made by some of the Nazi defendants at Nuremburg. For them to make this claim is absurd. If "victors' justice" was a defense against prosecution, justice itself would be meaningless, for it is only the victors who have the ability to enforce justice. That justice is administered by those in a position of power does not make it prima facie unjust.

Not only did the men on trial commit reprehensible acts, they engaged in scapegoating to an even greater, and more conspicuous, degree than those prosecuting them did - the infamous claim that they were "only following orders". Whose orders? The orders of those who were conveniently dead. Hitler. Himmler. Heydrich. In other words, the defendants claimed that, since the norms of their society required them to obey the orders of their conveniently dead superiors, they bore no responsibility for their actions.

To my mind, the highest form of justice to come from the Nuremburg Trials is the judges' decisive rejection of this argument. Complying with the norms of a society, the example of Nuremburg shows, is not exculpatory if those norms themselves are exterminatory.

Rafael Lemkin was a norm entrepreneur. He was selling an idea - that capitalist society could be exculpated for collectively turning its back on the systemic murder of a subaltern group, and that this could be done by defining a new crime, selecting certain members of that group as its perpetrators, and punishing those people. Hannah Arendt, who was a Holocaust victim herself, knew this. Arendt pointed out that Eichmann's trial was incompatible with the stated goals of the rule of law - and then decided against the rule of law, that it was unreasonable to expect the rest of us to exist in the same world as Eichmann. I tend to agree with Arendt on this point. The crime of genocide fails, in my view, to adequately address the problem of the systemic codification of genocidal norms.

My perspective here is that of a trans person who grew up in a culture which had, as one of its basic norms, a belief in the strict binary division of gender on the basis of genital anatomy. We can, by observing the treatment of gender in other cultures, conclude that this situation is in fact abnormal, that other cultures do tend to accommodate, in some form, gender diverse existence and expression. The binary, anatomy-based gender norm, then, is a deviant state which has been defined as normal. Maintaining this norm requires, by its nature, the eradication of all those who do not conform to it. It requires trans gendercide.

These norms are so ingrained that many people who were raised in industrial capitalist societies may be unaware of the ways they are enforced. I therefore offer a brief, partial overview of some of these methods, based on my personal experience and observations as a 46-year-old transgender woman. (The ways these norms are enforced against transmasculine people differ, and I lack the knowledge and experience to do them justice.)

Nearly from birth, popular media taught me it was deceitful, shameful, and repulsive for people assigned male at birth to present in a feminine manner, starting with popular children's television programs (See, for instance, You Can't Do That On Television, 1979-1990.) Feminine presentation was treated either as a "joke" or as a form of sexual fetishism, one strongly associated with humiliation and degradation.

In medical science, only one form of gender non-conformity was recognized - "transsexuality". This was defined, by a cisgender man, as as pathological state that could only be treated by genital reconstruction surgery. The criteria this man used to define "transsexuality" were mostly indicative of his own cultural biases, and bore little resemblance to the sorts of gender non-conformity exhibited in practice by most people. To get treatment, trans people had to appear to conform to his criteria. If they gave histories that did not conform to these criteria, they were denied treatment. If their histories did conform to these arbitrary criteria, they were dismissed as "liars".

The "treatment" offered by medical science required patients to conform strictly and absolutely to traditional feminine norms. Women could be rejected for treatment for such offenses as wearing trousers to an appointment. Once these women had been surgically treated, they were expected to disguise their past and spend the rest of their lives imitating the lives of cisgender women. To be recognized or "clocked" as trans subjected them to social stigma to the same extent or worse than that faced by gender non-conforming people who were not granted access to medical care. As associating with other trans people would increase the likelihood of their being clocked, there was no chance of them belonging to a distinct community of trans people. In other words, "treatment" required the eradication of their transness, as well as isolation from all other trans people.

This made it unlikely that I would ever meet any other trans people. I did, in fact, meet one, but I'd been taught not to trust her. I'd been taught that trans people were pathologically ill and pathological liars. In addition, I'd been taught that I wasn't a "real" transsexual, but was a grotesque fraud and contemptible pervert, so I was too ashamed to ask her about her experience or talk to her about mine in any event.

It is simply not credible to describe this state of affairs as inadvertent or accidental. Its perpetuation required a consistent, sustained level of extreme prejudice against gender non-conforming people.

Having established these conditions, that they are systemic in nature, and that they are intended to eradicate transgender people, I would like to point out how this plays out in practice. The most galling aspect of trans gendercide, to me, is the blatant misrepresentation of the effects of this erasure. I speak in particular here of the phenomenon of trans suicide. It is a well-known and long-observed fact that transgender people kill themselves at an astronomically higher rate than that of the population at large. The cause of these suicides, however, is wholly - one can only say maliciously - misrepresented.

Many of us kill ourselves. Many more of us attempt suicide. Almost all of us experience some form of suicidal ideation or intent. Why is this? To me, as a trans woman, this question is simple to answer. My existence cannot be defined strictly in terms of gender, but gender is a fundamental and intrinsic part of my existence. To be denied one's gender takes a toll on its victims that people who have not experienced it seem categorically incapable of comprehending. It is an act against life itself.

Labelling our shared identity "gender ideology" and eradicating it serves to isolate us from each other and renders our existence intolerable. If we don't kill ourselves, we tend to stumble through life in a dissociated and depersonalized half-world, not existing as others do and often not even aware of this fact. Gender is invisible, it defies definition, but for an untold number of us, the inability to embody our own genders leads and has led to our suffering and death.

Do those who would deny trans people access to care genuinely believe that their actions have no ill effects, nay, that they are doing us trans people good by their actions? If sustaining this belief did not require them to repeatedly malign and discredit trans people, I might almost be tempted to give them the benefit of the doubt. Again and again we have told them how being denied our gender identity affects us. Again and again we ask for the simplest of things. Cisgender people have framed trans existence wholly in terms of surgery, but surgery is our not most pressing demand. What do we seek most urgently? Merely the right to dress in a manner which suits us. Merely the right to take safe, readily available, and widely prescribed hormones - hormones whose effect on trans people, judged by any reasonable clinical standard, are nothing short of miraculous. Merely the right to be called by our name. Do you have any idea how happy that makes us? To be called by our own fucking names? What sort of monster wouldn't do that?

Of course, we know exactly what sort of monster wouldn't do that: the anti-trans voices, those to whom our rights matter less than their own ingrained prejudices. There aren't that many of them, really. It's just that these people are, by and large, far more powerful and respected than we are. Their voices are elevated, time and again, over ours in popular media - on the BBC, in the New York Times, on YouTube, cisgender bigots are given ample space and time to spout bald-faced lies about trans people, while we ourselves occupy a position which is marginal, at best. Those lies are far-reaching and influential - many of us have experienced suddenly being denounced as "groomers", being asked repeated questions about the possible "irreversible damage" living trans lives might cause, and having our gender identities dismissed as "social contagion" by formerly supportive close blood relatives - but they are no longer universal. Twenty years ago, these reprehensible lies were not one of "both sides" to be "debated", but considered to be unassailable fact.

This is the most difficult aspect of today's trans gendercide to explain to cis people. How do I convey that the anti-trans bigotry and legislation which they see as a new and pernicious phenomenon is simply the latest version of trans gendercide? That the history of Western culture has been, from its inception, that of systemic eradication of gender non-conformity? That, to me, trans suicide is a crueler form of genocide than trans murder? That, from my perspective as a trans person, I find more cause for hope in a year characterized by the open endorsement of the willful, systemic extermination of trans people than I did at any time during the first forty years of my life?

It is a strange thing to me, this hope. Those in the highest offices of power cry out against us, and millions upon millions heed their call. Every day the groundwork for extermination progresses, and those with the power to protect us do nothing, offer nothing but excuses to us and conciliation towards our persecutors. Yet I am hopeful, now, while ten years ago, I was not. Why? Because, at last, we are no longer isolated as we once were.

For me, the most total, all-encompassing form of genocide is one wherein those who perpetrate it are wholly unaware of their own work, where the victims are eradicated so wholly that many of us are not even aware of being victims. This was the trans gendercide I grew up under. I am profoundly glad for its passing. Each day each of us lives, each word any of us write, each breath any of us breathe, makes the possibility of that age's return more remote. This, above all else, gives me hope. Trans people exist now, I dare to hope, in a way which is beyond erasure.

The author extends her gratitude to A.S. for her excellent editorial suggestions.

(1) Most trans people do not consider "transgender" to be their gender identity, and Jones, to be clear, does not claim that "transgender" is a gender identity. He defines "gendercide" as to be inclusive of genocide not just on the basis of gender, but on the basis of sexual and gender minority status. Use of the term "gendercide" to refer to genocide against transgender people is established within the field of genocide studies, and is not novel or original on my part.

[backmaskedliedermacher]

Ooglification

A small linguistic side note largely irrelevant to the content of this blog.

I was looking up the origins of the term "Scandihoovian", a term used occasionally on the show Mystery Science Theater 3000 (for instance in the "Scandihoovian Sketch" at the beginning of "The Day the Earth Froze". I found this post describing it on Stack Exchange:

This links to a page on World Wide Words on the topic of Ooglification:

World Wide Words, as quoted on Stack Exchange in a section titled "Jocular Ooglification", notes:

Anatoly Liberman commented in his Oxford Etymologist blog in July this year that “The vowel sound oo has the ability of giving a word an amusing appearance. Whoever hears snooze, canoodle, and nincompoop begins to smile; add boondoggle to this list.”

Roger Wescott listed a number of slang terms from the past century that share this quality. Most of his examples are either uncommon or defunct. Divine has appeared as divoon, Scandinavian is known as Scandinoovian (sometimes as Scandihoovian), and at one time cigaroot was a well known variation on cigarette…

When I read this explanation, I immediately thought of the works of Frank Zappa, which strongly display the characteristic of "ooglification". The example that springs immediately to mind is the song "Flakes", where Zappa, in character as a plumber, exhorts "never flush a tampoon".

(These lyrics are a late interpolation arguably motivated by his acrimony towards Adrian Belew after Belew left Zappa's band for a higher-paying gig with David Bowie. The song live contained a characteristically fantastic solo by young wunderkind stunt guitarist Adrian Belew, mixed far in the background in favor of Zappa's characteristically stupid lyrics. One can hear what the song originally sounded like live here:

It is a telling reflection of Zappa's character that the arch-capitalist, should have borne such animus against Belew.)

One can find probably many other examples of ooglification in Zappa's work - for instance, "Great Googly Moogly!" was a favorite exclamation of his. He seems to have picked this up from the argot from the R&B records he listened to in his youth.

#Youtube

[backmaskedliedermacher]

The Genocide Thing

CW: Suicide, Genocide

This morning I saw a meme posted by a cis ally about trans rights. It is… disturbing and disquieting to me. I don't know where it comes from. It is one of those perpetually re-edited memes, the sort of thing people who make the memes I see on purpose. Innumerable auto-applied "credits" on top of each other turning the letters into an eldritch blur. A swole gray man - you can tell he's cis. If he was transmasc he'd be either be covering those things up or have had top surgery to reduce them. He's standing pickup truck flying trans flags with a sign saying "TRUMP LOST LOL".

Memes are about recontextualization, about taking things and moving them into a different context, and most of the memes I see, I'm happy about this, but seeing the "was/were pronouns" joke in this context is…

The whole meme is dependent on inverting the logic of transphobia. You call me a snowflake? No, you're the snowflake! You tell me facts don't care about your feelings? Guess what, facts don't care about your feelings either!

The logic of transphobia is genocide. At this point it's really clear to most trans people. We don't have recourse to inverting transphobes' logic. Behind the Bastards, last Christmas, did an episode with Margaret Killjoy on Nakam, a group of Holocaust survivors who attempted to apply the Lex Talionis to the German people. You kill six million of us? We kill six million of you!

Of course it wasn't going to work. Not because of the logistical difficulties but because people can't live like that. Humans are capable of lots of things. Wonderful and horrible, lots of things. To maintain that level of cold rage, for that long? The people in Nakam couldn't do that. I can't do that. Certainly no ally, no matter how committed, is going to commit to that.

The only other option - the one I know is true - is that they don't understand. One of my girlfriends yesterday was talking about the Jewish American Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter's reaction to being told about the Holocaust. His response was to say "I cannot accept what you are saying." The person telling him said, "After all I've told you, you don't believe me?" Frankfurter responded, "I believe you. I cannot accept what you are saying." (This is a parable, not history. I haven't verified this.)

I have a lot of privilege, but I don't, in this case, have the sort of privilege Justice Frankfurter did. I see the refugees. I have spoken to some of the intended victims. The allies, by and large, just don't understand. This makes it hard for me to talk to them. What am I to say? Thanks, could you and your swole husband do us a solid and make this genocide's pronouns "was/were"?

The reason it's not our obligation to explain is because, in many, many cases, we don't have the power to do it. We go door to door talking to sealion after sealion. It's soul-killing. Our lives our on the line and people don't listen. That's why we need allies. They can do it because they have the distance, it's not their lives.

But they also have a choice, a choice we don't. The consequences of the choices they're making right now… well, the genocide will continue until the people with the power to do so take action to stop it. Doing that isn't free, for them. They'll pay a cost to do it. Until and unless they do that, we're the ones who pay the cost. That cost is measured in our lives.

It is hard to explain, sometimes, to liberals why I think they are worse than conservatives. They don't understand. They think they are our allies, our friends, and here is how I will put it. When one of us is murdered, a lot of cis people will acknowledge that. They will hold vigils and say strong words and if enough of us die over a long enough time, maybe they'll even take action to stop us from being killed. When one of us commits suicide, though? When one of us commits suicide, it is our fault. People trot out the suicide statistics as an argument against transition, as if those of us who don't transition don't kill ourselves.

People will sometimes talk about how transition is a choice, and this is true. Trans people know it is true. I had a choice: Transition, or suicide. I chose transition. I am far from the only trans person to have faced this choice. Not all of us chose the same way I did.

Conservatives look at trans people and they regard us as abominations against their god and they kill us. Liberals tend to look at us as, essentially, abortions - they want trans people to be safe, legal, and rare. In other words, they create conditions that make transition nearly impossible, and then when we take the other option, the one we prefer not to talk about, they blame us.

This is why I hate liberals and do not hate conservatives. Both ideologies lead to the same effective end - genocide. Liberalism just does a better job at covering up the genocide.

[backmaskedliedermacher]

Family

I am sometimes surprised to be reminded of how fundamentally moralistic I am. I was talking, this morning, about parents who call people who accept their queer children "groomers", and found myself overcome by a wave of disgust. The possible reasons for this disgust interest me.

First and most obvious reason: It's patch day. Let me change my patches out and then I'll pick this back up.

Ah. That's better. I read a study once that claimed that disgust was one of the ways in which conservatives differ from, I don't know. Normal people? Can I say that? That seemed to be the implicit bias of the study, that people who felt disgust were somehow morally maladapted.

I'm not sure I buy it. I think it has more to do with the way people express their feelings than what people feel in general. I still feel the same things now, but having addressed my immediate physiological need - to get some more of that good good E in me - it doesn't give me the same subjective sense of acute distress. I can talk about these things without going into high moral dudgeon.

My immediate feeling of disgust was at the general category of "parents who don't love their children". I've been feeling this for a little while now. When I really drill down into it, though, this is basically an excuse, a justification. Lots of parents don't love their children. I don't really believe that parents have an obligation to love their children, any more than I believe children have an obligation to honor their parents, should those parents behave dishonorably. Parents who don't love their children are shitty parents, sure, but do I feel disgusted at people who are shitty parents? Not really. My dad was a shitty parent, and mostly what I find regrettable is that he let his guilt and shame over being a shitty parent keep him from talking to his kids.

Nah, I'd say it more comes back to my mom. I love my mom, but her behavior disgusts me.

I guess it's fair enough, at this point, for me to say that my mom is a monster. Not, like, Hitler or anything. Just someone who behaves terribly, consistently and increasingly obviously, and who lacks insight into why her behavior is inappropriate.

The vogue nowadays is to call such people "narcissists", and I guess that's appropriate in some sense, but "narcissist" to me implies individual guilt, individual responsibility, and I think with people like my mom, there's something more going on. Some sort of generational or cultural narcissism.

This is a trend that's been marked in Boomers for a long time, and dismissed as prejudice and bigotry for just as long. Tom Wolfe in the 1970s famously described Boomers as the "me generation", a label that became more prevalent in the 1980s. We are now, perhaps, seeing the final fruits of that mindset, the ultimate results of that social contagion.

People who work in healthcare settings are well aware of just how nasty the dying are. Well, yes, they're in pain and dying, but a lot of people die alone and unloved. I expect my mom to die this way - alone, rich but believing herself to be poor, unable to comprehend why she is so isolated.

At the same time, it's not some unique generational manifestation. I know it isn't. My aunts have told me that their mother was the same way towards them, express a sort of low-key horror at seeing my mother repeat that pattern, repeat that cycle. My grandparents both abused their kids. My grandmother would have disowned me for being queer. My family doesn't want to talk about this stuff too openly. We were taught not to speak ill of the dead. Maybe I go too far in the other direction.

I talked to my youngest sibling last night. I don't know what to do with my siblings. I don't know what to say to my siblings. Hell, I don't even know how to refer to them. "Do you think of yourself as a man?", I ask. They tell me there's the gender the world has put on them and there's how they see themselves. That they see themselves as "queer". That no matter what they do, though, people see them as "masculine". They put on nail polish and people think it's "macho". My sibling, the women's and gender studies major, the Good Ally, they feel the obligation to use their privilege for good. They say they have trouble connecting to their own emotions, that they feel tremendous guilt and shame, that they feel broken.

What do I say to them? They live in Indiana. I felt the same way, when I lived in Indiana, and then I moved out here, to PDX, and things are different. I didn't believe things would be different. I was just desperate. I know, and I have to believe they know, but won't say, that there are things they could do, things that would help them connect to their own emotions, things that would make it so that people wouldn't see them as "macho". They have to go their own way, though. It just hurts me to see them hurting. It hurts me to see all my siblings hurting.

What I tell them is the thing all of us need to hear. I tell them that when I look at them, I don't see someone who's broken, who's deficient, who's flawed. I see someone who is whole, who is sufficient. To me, this is just simple, basic stuff, but none of us have heard it. Certainly me and my siblings, we never heard that from our mom, we'll never hear that from our mom. It's appalling, in some sense, to me that we didn't, but in another sense it's just bizarre. It's such a simple, obvious, fundamental thing, but all of us, over and over again what we were told was the exact opposite. It's fucked up.

They thank me. They don't cry or anything. My transfem friends, when I tell them, they usually cry. Before I started on estrogen, I couldn't cry. That's why I started estrogen, I wanted to be able to cry but I couldn't. Anyway, they thank me, and I tell them that I love them, that they're family to me, and I don't just mean blood family, that they're found family. They are. When I transitioned, I lost a lot of people out of my life, but I found them. I hope they'll find themselves, one day.

[backmaskedliedermacher]

D-I-V-O-R-C-E

Coming out as trans and starting transition at age 43 was terrifying for me. I was acutely aware of all the things I might lose by doing so, and little conception of what I could possibly gain. Of all the things I was scared of losing - family, friends, career - one stood out above all the others: the fear that transition would cost me my marriage. I valued my spouse more than anyone and anything else in the world. Having her in my life was the best thing that had ever happened to me. I couldn't imagine living without her.

I turned out to be lucky. My spouse, who identified as a cisgender, heterosexual woman, didn't fully understand gender transition. She didn't - couldn't - know what it might mean for our marriage. She didn't and couldn't know whether she would be able to stay with me, whether she would able to be married to a woman. She was, however, willing and able to travel along with me and find out.

She turned out to be my strongest ally. As I transitioned, she found herself loving me more, in both body and spirit. Transition made me a better, stronger person, and having her support made that process much easier than it otherwise would have been. I am profoundly grateful to her, for everything she's done for me, just before and after my transition.

Two years after starting my transition, I broke up with her.

Why did I do it? There are several long and short answers to that question. I'm going to start out with some of the long ones.

There are lots of ways to understand transition, but there's one process, above all else, that defines transition for me. It's not someone's name or clothes or hormones or surgery. My experience of transition is that it is the process of learning to value yourself more than who other people want you to be.

Before I transitioned, I did not love or value myself. My finding is that someone who has this experience, which is common to many, perhaps most, people repressing their gender identity, is going to have a really difficult time being in a healthy relationship.

In my case I didn't - couldn't, really - effectively take care of myself. My everyday experience was defined and controlled by my acute bouts of overwhelming emotional pain. I could neither predict nor effectively control these attacks. I needed my spouse to continue to function on a basic level.

The expectations I placed on my partner weren't healthy or fair. Nobody deserves to be treated the way I treated her when the gender dysphoria broke through the wall of dissociation I tried to control it with. She had, it turns out, grown up with an abusive father, and was well used to being treated worse than any human being deserved to be treated by people she loved. She was used to being afraid of the people she loved. She was used to feeling responsible for the behavior of the people she loved. In all other respects the way I behaved around her, when I was at my worst, was nothing like the way her father treated her, so she could tell herself that I was nothing like her dad.

Just like I could tell myself she was nothing like my mom. Some of the things she said to me… well. Nobody deserves to be treated the way she treated me, sometimes. I knew that. I know what sort of behavior is appropriate and what sort of behavior isn't appropriate. It was just that before my transition, I had bigger problems to worry about.

We were both willing to make compromises most people wouldn't. We were both familiar with having to make terrible choices simply in order to survive.

There is, perhaps, a word that springs to mind when I describe the nature of our relationship when things were at their worst. That word is "abusive". I don't feel comfortable using that word to describe our relationship. I know that many people repressing their transness have a pattern of getting involved in abusive relationships. I have seen this behavior in my friends, in other people in my communities, over and over again. I see people starting transition with partners who are supportive of their transition, but are in other ways appallingly abusive. I see people starting transition who adore their partners, who value their partners more than anything else in the world, and the rest of us around them are doing everything we can to stop from screaming at the top of our lungs at them to get out, to for God's sake get out now.

I don't know or care whether my relationship with my ex was like that. What I do value is that as much as I love her, as much as I value the relationship we had, I don't ever intend to get in a relationship like that again. I work to be responsible for myself, for my words, my behavior, my emotions, in a way that I wasn't before. I am not always great at it, but now that I love myself, now that I value myself, I am better at it. Better at working to establish and maintain healthy emotional boundaries.

I wish we could have fixed the things that were wrong in our relationship, at least to the point where we could have stayed together. I don't know whether we could have, whether we should have. All I can say is that we didn't. That, and that the odds were stacked against us from the start. Repressing and denying our gender identity is the bomb at the heart of our "cishet" relationships. When we transition, we detonate that bomb.

The thing about our relationship is that, before I transitioned, it worked. Being with her was good for me and was good for her. Her support made it possible for me to not just survive, but thrive as I never had before. Even before I transitioned, I grew, learned, accomplished things I never could have without her. And for my part? I was unfailingly kind and compassionate towards her. She could engage in all of the negative self-talked she liked, but I didn't see her that way, would never treat her that way. All of the work she put in to care for me and support me - it wasn't wasted. I loved her, valued her, appreciated her. She hadn't necessarily had a lot of that experience. Sure, our lives weren't always perfect, but we were happy with each other, with our marriage.

That doesn't mean that we looked at each other through rose-colored glasses. We both understood that she was my caretaker, that this was part of the dynamic of our relationship, and neither of us liked or wanted this to be part of our relationship. For us to have a true relationship as equals - this was a shared goal of ours, for more or less the entirety of our relationship.

I didn't realize just how hard creating a relationship like that with her would be. I've heard it said that when one partner transitions, you have to fundamentally change your relationship with them from the ground up, throw out everything and start over again from scratch. Unfortunately, it's not that simple. The past doesn't just go away. Yes, two partners both start out with the deep love and caring they've built up for each other over time, but that's not all that gets carried over.

The love I have for her, the gratitude I have for her, is ineradicable. When some archaeologist digs up my skeleton a thousand years from now, if they look hard enough, they'll find it in my bones. Being with her has changed me, in a real and permanent way.

That's not, however, just something I can measure in love. I can measure that in fear, in pain, in guilt and shame. These feelings are just as much at the heart of my feelings towards each other as love is.

Feelings like that… they can be healed, given time, given work. I've put a lot of work into healing past trauma. Here's what I know about healing trauma: It fucking HURTS. It's a lot to ask. A lot.

I would have done it, mind you. I would have done it. She's worth it to me. I love her. Except even that, even if I did that - it wouldn't be enough.

Probably the least fair thing I did to her was change. Yes, yes, we all have a right to change, being open to change is important, change is good, etc. I changed a lot, though. I'm not just talking growing tits. I'm talking about becoming a different person.

Those of us who are repressing our transness when we enter relationships, hide it from ourselves as well as our partners - we enter into those relationships under false pretenses. That's not intentional. There's no cause or room for guilt or blame there. The consequences, though? Those are unavoidable.

The partners who get trans women's transitions the least, they'll often say things like "I want my husband back", and our mouths will be wide in shock. Who did they think they married? What did they love about us? Our manhood was the thinnest of veneers, a shell. Did they really fall in love with a cardboard cutout of a man? How could they not see that everything they loved in us was not just still there, but that we now had more of it?

Love is more than gender. Our changes, though, tend to go beyond the changes most people think of as "gender". Before my transition, I was one of the most deeply introverted people you could imagine. That was one of the strongest things my ex and I had in common. We preferred a quiet night in together to parties, concerts, social events.

A couple months on hormones and it turns out that whoops! I'm not an introvert after all. It's just that it's exhausting and unpleasant to have to pretend to be someone I'm not socially. All of a sudden I want to go out dancing every night. I'm a better person, a happier person, a more capable, stronger person, but we're just not compatible like we used to be. People in relationships have needs, and I changed to the extent that I could no longer meet hers.

Because it's not just dancing I'm suddenly interested in all of a sudden. I'm interested in doing lots of other things. And I'm not interested in doing them with her.

This isn't something I feel like I can really explain to cis people. I'm not writing this for cis people. I'm writing this for trans people who are telling themselves the things that I told myself - that after everything she did for me, that I owed her monogamy. That sex wasn't really important. Certainly not important enough to torpedo the best thing that had ever happened to me.

Well. Second best now, I guess.

Mia Mulder, as an aside in her most recent video, "Is Masculinity In Crisis?", hypothesizes that the changes we have to go through in order to transition, all of the assumptions we have to question, make it easier, more likely, for us to question other social norms, and that this is why so many of us are, in her words, "super gay polyamorous slutbags".

That's the short form. You want to know why I broke up with my ex? It's because I'm a super gay polyamorous slutbag.

That's not who we're supposed to be, who cis people expect us to be. We're supposed to be brave. Virtuous. Ordinary people trying to live ordinary lives, just like them. We're not supposed to be freaks who just want to do drugs, suck dick, and burn shit down. If I tell my co-workers about my girlfriend, none of them will blink an eye. If I slip up and tell them about my girlfriends…

I think what Mia's theory is on target, but personally, I've found that it's more than that, even, for me. I have a pamphlet explaining basic self-defense skills for transfemmes. What's stuck with me most is something it says on the cover: "Because what works for other people doesn't work for us."

That's it in a nutshell. Part of transition was realizing that everything I believed about myself and the world was wrong. That shit just didn't work for me anymore. The only way I could keep doing that was by valuing what other people wanted me to be over who I am.

My ex and I never had a very good sexual relationship. Dysphoria affects trans women in all kinds of different ways. Like many trans women, it was necessary for me to dissociate in order to be sexually intimate with my partner. Any physical pleasure I got from the act was far and away overshadowed by the overwhelming sense of wrongness sex as a man left me with.

After transition, I wanted, needed, to figure out what sex actually meant to me. To figure out what I actually wanted. I wanted to know completely what others so discreetly talked about.

The respectable thing - no, the fair thing would have been to figure this out within the confines of the monogamous relationship I had with my spouse. She loved me. She was attracted to me physically. If I was going to figure out my sexuality, of course I should do that with the woman I loved. Right?

I didn't know how I was supposed to do that. Our entire sexual history had consisted of me doing things I hated, doing things I never wanted to do again, never wanted to think about again. Tried not to think about while doing them, in fact. That was my sexual history. I spent ten years conditioning myself to not think about my sexual desires when I was with my partner.

I wasn't going to figure out my sexual desires with her. Wouldn't have been able to do it even if she understood the things I told her about my sexuality, which she didn't.

I guess she thought about sex and relationships about like most people do. She didn't believe in God, wasn't a Christian, but I feel like the phrase "two people becoming one flesh" is a pretty good description of her idea of relationships. (It is, at least, more romantic than her way of phrasing the sentiment.)

I didn't and don't look at relationships that way. I want my partners to be happy, and for them to get what the things that they need, the things that are important to them. If there's something that's important to them that I can't give them, I want them to be able to get that thing from someone who can. This gives me joy. The word polyamorous people use for this feeling is "compersion".

To my ex's view - the prevailing, normative view - if I can't give my partner something that's important to them, that means I'm a failure as a partner. To my ex's view, having multiple intimate partners is greedy, disrespectful, and licentious. It is cheating. Full stop.

Even beyond this, there's a whole variety of intimacy my partner was unable to comprehend. When I started my sexual exploration, I wasn't certain I even wanted sex. Sex wasn't what I craved. It was loving touch.

This is really normal for trans women, and has been for a long time. Jan Morris talks pretty clearly about having these desires in her memoir Conundrum. A lot of us are just completely starved for loving touch, and have been for a long time. The normative concept of this sort of loving touch is "foreplay". I find the assumption that loving touch is intrinsically linked to sex… well, just as bizarre and incomprehensible as she seems to have found my belief that loving touch isn't intrinsically linked to sex.

Back in the days when I marveled that even one person would find me tolerable to be around, these fundamental disconnect weren't an issue. I didn't desire intimate relationships with anyone, including my current partner. This was no longer the case.

So of course we talked about it. That was the basis of our relationship. We talked through things. We came to a common understanding. We worked out our problems.

We couldn't work out this one.

What she needed from me - total emotional and physical monogamy - was clear, clearly expressed, and non-negotiable. When we talked about the issue, what I was talking about made her feel afraid, angry, pressured to do things she didn't want to do.

I didn't always treat my ex as well as she deserved to be treated, but when she told me what I was telling her made her feel threatened and coerced, I knew I had to fucking stop doing that. That's not how I treat people I love. Talking our disagreements through was not an option for me, in this case.

So I had to work stuff out on my own. Could I give her what she needed from me? No. Once I knew that, there was only one option left.

And that's why I broke up with my ex.

Was breaking up with her fair of me to do? No. Did she, does she, deserve better? Yes. Neither of those things matter. I had a choice. I could have stayed with her. I could have buried my desires, chosen not to explore my desires, for the sake of someone else. I'd been down that road. I knew where it led.

Well, that's not entirely fair. Staying with my ex wouldn't literally have killed me the way not transitioning did. I probably could have led a decent, respectable life, if I'd stuck it out. Grown old and died with her in the house we bought to grow old and die in together. I wouldn't have been happy, not the way I am now, but I would've been more secure. Being secure used to be more important to me, back being happy wasn't a real option for me. Being secure used to seem more possible to me.

I don't know. Transition changed me. That's all I can tell you.

[backmaskedliedermacher]

"Who do you dream about?"

"Myself. If I could be real, this is who I would be."

"But you are real."

"I know. Isn't it amazing?

[backmaskedliedermacher]

Dominance

I was super excited when the film Secretary came to theaters in 2002. I was… trying to figure out some stuff about myself around that time. Not the gender stuff. I'd given up on that and was really dedicated to telling myself that it was "just a phase". The BDSM stuff. I was pretty confident about being a switch. In truth this was because I couldn't in any way relate to male doms or male subs and so, by simple process of elimination, I clearly had to be a switch.

The problem was that while, as a switch, I obviously had a dominant side, I didn't at all understand the appeal of being a dominant. Like, what did guys get out of that sort of thing? The solution, clearly, was to watch a movie about a BDSM relationship. I went to the Baxter Avenue Theater the week it came out with high hopes.

I then got immediately punched in the gut by the opening scene. The scene in question depicts Maggie Gyllenhaal's character wearing an extremely hot secretary outfit and a fiddle. Since the fiddle doesn't leave her hands free, she picks up her boss's paperwork with her mouth, then slowly crawls over to him and hands him the paperwork.

I could neither understand nor explain at the time why the scene felt like such a gut punch. All I could think to say was that it was "unfair". This is one of the many things that is completely obvious in retrospect. It was unfair that she got to do that and I didn't.

I'd never have been able to admit this at the time, even to myself, but I consciously totally understood the motivation of Gyllenhaal's character, her need to be owned, controlled, looked after, cherished, protected from her own tendencies towards self-harm. Sure. It was a powerful fantasy of female submission. Even I, a completely cisgender man, could relate to that. What I couldn't get, at all, was what was up with James Spader's character.

What's up with James Spader's character is that he's an abuser. Viewers aren't supposed to empathize or understand with Spader's character, clearly. The film isn't a realistic depiction of a BDSM relationship. The essence of the film is depicting a fantasy of female submission. It doesn't need to be held to the same standards as an actual relationship. My reaction to it wasn't simply about my very obvious disinterest in being a maledom. It's just not a film that's about dominance, that's interested in the dominant's perspective.

To my surprise and relief, when I finally came to terms with my own sexuality after my transition, it turns out that I'm an actual fucking switch. There are so many different things I want, so many different things I love. There's a lot of switch erasure memes, people saying that switches are "actually" subs or "actually" doms and don't get me wrong, a lot of them are funny, but doing that is bullshit, the same "pick a side" crap we used to do to bisexuals back in the '90s.

Dominance does mean something to me now, so I'm reflecting back on Secretary, how my approach to dominance differs from the fantasy of submission that film presents.

First off we can take all the obvious abuse stuff off the table. I wouldn't start a relationship with a professional subordinate. On top of that, anything I do with a partner is negotiated in advance in order to create an intentional shared space. Back when "political correctness" was a thing and schools started specifying forms of consent, cis dudes would complain that it wasn't "sexy". I take the opposite view. I am very happy that it is physically impossible for me to engage in PIV. There is no such thing as "default" or "assumed" sexual activity for me. Anything I do with a partner is something we create together. That's not how the relationship portrayed in Secretary works.

Beyond that, I have my own limits. Gyllenhaal's character starts the beginning of the movie as a fucked up, traumatized woman whose family doesn't really understand or support her the way she needs to be supported. Her fantasy is for some big powerful man to come in and make her into a functional and sexy woman. I look at the denoument of the film, where it slips pretty overtly into magical realism, and that sets off warning bells. Yes, his behavior is abusive, but he has a right to set boundaries for himself. When he chooses to break up with her, standing at his desk without moving her hands for days on end is not "romantic". It's fucked up and codependent. Gyllenhaal's character doesn't take "no" for an answer, and that is a hard limit for me.

There's an old Goffin/King song I love called "As We Go Along". A lot of the hippie songs have this very naive idea of freedom, view fear of commitment as being healthy, and I don't look at things that way. I don't get that sense from "As We Go Along", either. The song is, in an explicit sense, about creating a space together - not a sexual space, but a shared space nonetheless. It's also, however, rooted in respect for each person's autonomy - "I'm not gonna try to hurt you or heal you", the lyric goes. Often relationships only get phrased in terms of not wanting to hurt the other person, but refusing to fix the other person is so essential to my model of relationships.

Don't mistake what I'm saying. I love seeing people grow, become stronger, you know. Become more functional and sexy. My joy isn't in doing that, though. I don't do that, won't do that. I get joy out of the pleasure and privilege of watching.

Most of the people I know have been traumatized and hurt and fucked up, often not just once, but over and over again. We have been taught to think poorly of ourselves, and act in ways that reinforce our self image. The people who I love, they often don't see themselves the same way I see them.

Dominance, to me, isn't a matter of control, of power, of authority. It's necessary, as a dominant, to have some measure of those things, but none of those are the point. What I get out of dominance is that I get to give people permission.

What Gyllenhaal's character needs permission for resonates with me as a trans woman specifically. Her character doesn't allow herself to feel sexy. This taboo, this part of herself she's ashamed to express - this shame hits super fucking hard for a lot of us trans women. When trans women present ourselves as being sexually desirable, as being worthy of sexual desire - this is seen as so threatening, so destabilizing to patriarchal cisheteronormativity, that they can only think to deal with it by erasing our womanhood altogether.

The reason for Gyllenhall's character's self-denial, like ours, is physical. Her trauma manifests itself as scars from cutting, all over her body. There are a lot of things I think are wrong with Secretary, but this aspect, in particular, I think is handled exactly right. When, in the "happy ending" of the movie, we see Gyllenhaal's body, we see her body scarred from her history of self-harm. Spader's character doesn't heal her trauma, can't heal her trauma. What he can do is validate her as being a beautiful woman. She's not beautiful despite her trauma, she's not beautiful because of her trauma. Spader's character, in this sense, hasn't hurt her or healed her. This is the one place in the movie where I genuinely get the sense that Spader's character sees her for who she is rather than as who he wants her to be.

This, to me, is dominance. Dominance, to me, is the power to see someone as they truly are, at their most vulnerable, at their most uncertain. Many people - and I include myself in this category - have been taught, traumatized, into hiding their beauty and joy, not just from the sight of others, but from themselves. Dominance is not just the ability to see that hidden beauty, that buried joy, but to bear witness to the submissive's self-recognition, the understanding that they are not shameful, not repulsive, not broken.

That shit is hot. That shit is super fuckin' hot.

[backmaskedliedermacher]

I have some actual proper stuff I'm wanting to write, but unfortunately I haven't really had the spoons for it. It's all fairly heavy stuff, and I've gotten a nasty cold or flu or something and it's taken all I have to stay out of bed.

It's difficult to balance, sometimes. Caring for my body physically, caring for myself in functional terms, and giving myself what I need emotionally. One of the things I learned from 11-12-22 is that I need to write, I need to write for an audience, to stay emotionally healthy. It's one of the ways I process emotions. I start out with strong feelings and I work my ass off putting them into written form and when I'm done I've written something that I feel proud of and that has helped me come to terms with my emotions. It is work, though, it takes a lot out of me, and other stuff slips.

I also, since my transition, have had a lot more social needs. This is an experience I've seen in a lot of my friends too - we come from an assumption that we're introverts, but as we transition many of us find that it's more that… it takes a lot of energy to pretend to be someone you're not. Wednesday and Thursday are my regular social days, and missing both of them last week due to this cold/flu/whatever has me feeling lousy emotionally as well as physically. There's a little bit of my rejection sensitive dysphoria going on, I think. My persistent assumption is that people don't like me, and I need to keep being around other people in social settings to challenge that assumption.

It's also good to have other people over for, at best, body doubling purposes. This is something I've always been bad at, to the extent that I've never really been able to live on my own before. The general impression people seem to get of me is that I need a caretaker. I don't feel great about that because of the gendered implications of it. The cultural norm where I am is that women are expected to "take care of" men, to do both physical and emotional labor without receiving anything in return. Emotional labor I can do, but taking care of practical matters is a real challenge for me. I do the best I can and am grateful for any help people offer me. It'll have to do!

[backmaskedliedermacher]

Empty Spaces

I let Youtube recommend me some videos last night. This is a dangerous thing for me to do, so I tend to avoid it, but it worked out kind of OK this time out. This time out it said "Hey, you should watch a Vsauce video." So I did, and then the sidebar suggested I watch this video by someone called Solar Sands called "Liminal Spaces (Exploring an Altered Reality)".

I've been interested in liminal spaces for a long time. I can't tell you how long, exactly, but I can tell you where I first came across the concept of liminality. It was in Thomas Pynchon's book Gravity's Rainbow.

Gravity's Rainbow is one of those Books About Everything by a Clever Cisgender White Man. I'm not actually smart enough to read it, despite having attempted it several times. (I did read Infinite Jest one summer in the '90s, for whatever that's worth.) As Clever Cisgender White Men go, Pynchon is one of the ones I actually like a lot. Gravity's Rainbow is the Big One, his Trout Mask Replica, the one people go to, but like Trout Mask Replica, it's not actually his best. Pynchon grew and matured as a writer in the decade-plus he spent smoking weed after Gravity's Rainbow. He finished and published his White Whale book, Mason and Dixon, and then came to the realization that Books About Everything were not the be-all and end-all of novels. My impression is that his subsequent books are very much not about everything and are better for it. That said, I haven't read any of them. I could, probably, in that I'm smart enough, but something about Gravity's Rainbow keeps me away from even his other books. Also I don't read many novels.

Anyway. I wound up reading it as though it were a reference book. I'd skip around into various different bits. Usually these turned out to be the dirty bits. Over time the book developed a will of its own, as reference books do, and just started taking me directly to the dirty bits.

Which of course means I read the bit about liminal spaces a lot. His example of a liminal space was what we now know as "zettai ryoiki". It translates literally as "absolute area" - figuratively it seems to mean something like "no man's land". It's the expanse of bare skin between the top of one's socks or stockings and the bottom of one's skirt, shorts, or, as in the case of Gravity's Rainbow, panties. A transitional space, a space between one thing and another.

Solar Sands uses a different example to explain liminality - that of the Backrooms. The Backrooms are a particular sort of creepypasta centered around space rather than the terrifying eldritch creatures which are more typical for creepypasta. While more traditional creepypasta relies on a sort of uncanny valley effect, the Backrooms are pretty explicitly liminal.

But Solar Sands, whose experience with liminality, like many people today, is the Backrooms, explains liminality differently. They mistake one aspect of the Backrooms for another.

The Backrooms, it happens, signify multiple things. One of these things is a sense of liminality, a sense of transition from one state to another, but the Backrooms exist not just between, but behind. They are the wireframe upon which "reality" is built.

Creepypasta is fundamentally a media phenomenon, an example of the ways the media we consume shape our thoughts, our dreams. Vsauce, in the video I watched of his, "Did People Used To Look Older?", discusses this phenomenon when he talks about how people in the 20th century believed they dreamed in black and white. Why? Because the visual media of the times - films, television - were in black and white.

3D video games are the childhood popular media of late millennials and zoomers, and with 3D video games came a new concept - that of "clipping out of bounds". I first experienced this phenomenon in high school, through the game Wolfenstein 3D. The game came with cheat codes which, since I was bad at first person shooters, I used extensively. One of these allowed the player to clip out of bounds, to see the game from angles it was not intended to be seen from. This, not so much invisibility or flight, was the superpower I imagined for myself - the ability to walk through walls, to travel in and out of spaces others could not. To be liminal.

As a trans woman, I've done this now, in a sense. I am not liminal now, but for a time, I was. When I chose to embrace my identity as a trans woman, I became a woman, but I was not initially the woman I am now. I was, for a time, a liminal girl, one who walked in the spaces between gender.

This is liminality for me - existing in the spaces between. The Backrooms are liminal spaces, certainly, but for me, so too is the TARDIS. One version of the TARDIS in particular (for the TARDIS interior, unlike its exterior, has taken many forms) - that found in Christopher H. Bidmead's story "Castrovalva".

The TARDIS as Bidmead conceives it is very much like the Backrooms. The TARDIS is unfathomably large and profoundly empty - there are never more than four people living inside. It is made up of endless blindingly lit corridors. Lastly, like the Backrooms, it exists outside of reality. What is it, then, that makes the Backrooms terrifying in a way that the TARDIS is not?

The difference that I see, the thing that marks out the Backrooms as horrifying, is not its spatial liminality, but its age. Backrooms spaces, what Solar Sands calls out as "liminal spaces", are all visibly old. The flavor text accompanying one of the most influential pictures in Solar Sands' video talks not just of sights and sounds but says that it smells old. It evokes a form of sensory input that's not usually present.

But predominant, always, is visual. "The madness of mono-yellow". And what is yellow? The wallpaper.

I read this story, when I was in school. 1892. "The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. All the videos, the viral content - has the strong similarity of the Backrooms to this story from the 1890s been noticed? The story is one of the narrator entering an uncanny liminal space. She sees herself as being trapped behind the wallpaper, as having noclipped out of the space where she's confined, a woman suffering from "hysterical" illness. The sense of nearly infinite space is missing, replaced by a sense of being confined, closed in, but in all other respects "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a Backrooms story.

That color seems to date to the beginnings of it. It's industrial, that yellowish-brown. The color of something stained by grime and smoke, by piss and shit. Solar Sands points out quite accurately that the only things which we see as "liminal" in this sense are human creations. Works of nature lack the same sense of the uncanny.

The Backrooms are places of emptiness, death, decay. Nature has a season for death and decay - it is this season where I am writing now, it is winter. Death will be followed, shortly, by new life, new blooming. The flowers on Backrooms wallpaper, however, will never bloom again. The Backroom spaces belong not just to a previous time, but to a previous generation. They are for the dying and the dead.

The horror of the Backrooms, in a sense, is in the reason for their solitude and emptiness. Dwellings of the industrial era are mausoleums. Shopping malls are dead like Pompeii, dead like Chernobyl. Great monuments, the ruins of empire - they are different. Chichen Itza. The Pyramids. The Great Wall. The Colosseum. The Parthenon. These things were built to be monuments, wonders. Pompeii, Chernobyl, the Lafayette Square Mall - for these places to lack people, something must have gone terribly wrong.

Something has, of course, gone terribly wrong. We have been abandoned. We are isolated, cut off from each other. The people we meet in these places, the people who belong in them, who live in them, are people who we thought are human, but who are not quite _like us_. They are monsters. Zizek, interpreting Gramsci, tells us that this is their time.

The spatial liminality of the Backrooms is not, I do not think, the source of the unease and fear they evoke in us. It is their temporal liminality. The past inside the present. The bones on which this world are built are rotten, decaying, increasingly exposed. Is this our world? Is this the wallpaper we are trapped inside?

I saw a meme a couple days ago on a kink server I'm on that struck me. It is a screenshot of the Lost Woods from A Link to the Past, overlaid with text boxes in the game's font. The text in the boxes read:

"Absolutely nothing should be sold for a profit if its absence could kill you."

"Any modern system where people still die from lack of these resources should be dismantled."

The Lost Woods is one of the many liminal spaces within Zelda games. Zelda abounds with these transitions between spaces. "A Link to the Past" sees Link travelling between two worlds. Its sequel, "A Link Between Worlds", sees Link literally entering into walls and traversing the world through these liminal spaces. "Ocarina of Time" abounds with wrong warps, to the extent that certain clever gamer/programmers figured out a way to beat the game without ever using a door.

Perhaps the most iconic liminal space within Zelda games is the Lost Woods, though. It's a maze. A room within a maze contains nothing inherently interesting. Twisty little passages, all alike. They are ways to get from one place to another. A maze is a threshhold.

How the Lost Woods differs from the liminal spaces of the Backrooms is that they lead somewhere - or, often, to something. The Lost Woods in "A Link to the Past", as in "Breath of the Wild", lead to the Master Sword. If one cannot dismantle the master's house using the master's tools, well, perhaps the Master's Sword might suffice.

The Backrooms are at the core of the world we occupy now - a decaying skeleton, an empty, collapsing ruin. There are other liminal spaces through which we may pass. I, a trans person, have passed through one of them myself. It was strange and terrifying and wonderful and very, very temporary. I've wished for a while that I could live in these spaces, but I can't. The only people who can live in liminal spaces are monsters, and I am not a monster.

[backmaskedliedermacher]

Broken

I feel like fearful-avoidant was the best way of describing the attachment style I learned growing up. It gets described as developing from a child who mortally fears their parent, but that's not really how I experience it. I'm more afraid of my mom than I am of death. I guess that probably has something to do with my chronic long-term SI. It's taken me a long time to accept that now that I've moved across the country, I'm safe from her. I don't ever have to let anybody treat me like that again.

Not thinking of myself as broken is very new to me. I literally just started doing it this month. For a long time it was important for me to think of myself as broken. I have done so many things in my life. So many things, and I have been so hurt, and I am so tired. Those decades of uncontrolled dysphoria, they hurt me so much. Maybe it's not fair of me to say, but I don't know that people who transitioned when they were 15, or 25, or even 30, understand how much, understand the cumulative nature of the damage that's been done to me. Most of us have suffered from dysphoria, but not everyone suffers equally, and time, well, I really feel like time has taken its crazy toll on me.

But that song, The Diamond Sea - I don't agree with it. I don't know what it's about, really, but the way I read it, I don't agree with it. It's a song of fear, it's a song of a man who looks into the mirror and is afraid of what he sees. Verse 4:

Time takes its crazy toll Mirror fallin' off the wall You better look out for the looking glass girl 'Cause she's gonna take you for a fall

That warning is wrong. I'm the girl from inside the looking glass. I came out of the mirror, and I'm real, and the mirror is broken now but I am not the mirror.

I think what I was holding on to was… the right to be broken. It's not a fair thing to ask of me. Everything I've been through and now I am supposed to heal as well? It seemed overwhelming. My ex, when I was breaking up with her, she once said to me, can't you just stop changing? And I can't. I honestly can't. Sometimes I want to. I want to have a final form and be OK with that, even if that form is still "broken". If it was up to me, I'd still be broken.

What I've taken from the events of November and December is that I don't really have that luxury. That there's a cost to staying broken, a cost to not healing, and I can measure that cost in the people I love and care about who I've hurt. I've never really been able to do things just for myself, just for the love of myself.

There's a pretty extreme form of BDSM that involves psychologically breaking a person. That's the context in which my friend shared that video I saw yesterday, "How To Become A Cult Leader". The way she says she breaks people, though, is she breaks them and forces them to love themselves. This reminds me of a scene another friend told me about this week, another breaking scene. All of the person's lovers and friends stood around them in a circle. The person had to look each of their lovers and friends in the eye, go around the circle, and say something nice about themselves. My friend described it as being intense and brutal and honestly I'm tearing up just thinking about it, even though it wasn't me, even though I wasn't involved in that scene. That's what being broken means to me now. In another form, in another way, that's what my friends, the people I hurt, did to me.

In some sense their intervention broke my brokenness. I would never have chosen joy on my own, for myself, just like I didn't choose transition for myself, but as part of some fucked up martyr complex. I was more afraid of the person who was supposed to love me, to care for me, than I was of death, and so for a long time I tried to die. I was alive - after transition, really, truly alive - but only because dying was too hard, only for others. Endless excuses, endless ways to dismiss my own happiness, to focus instead on the sorrow and the pain, assert my right to be broken and miserable.

Now, three years in, I've truly have everything taken from me. The hurt, the pain - I miss it. I miss feeling like I have the right to it. It is no longer mine to embrace. It is no longer mine to invoke.