Lu

And now, after living beside you all these years, and wat­ching your wheel of a mind bring forth an art of pure wildness—as I labor grim­ly on these sen­tences, won­de­ring all the while if prose is but the gra­ves­tone mar­king the for­sa­king of wild­ness (fide­li­ty to sense-making, to asser­tion, to argu­ment, howe­ver loose)—I’m no lon­ger sure which of us is more at home in the world, which of us more free.

How to explain—“trans” may work well enough as shor­thand, but the qui­ck­ly deve­lo­ping mains­tream nar­ra­tive it evokes (“born in the wrong body,” neces­si­ta­ting an ortho­pe­dic pil­gri­mage bet­ween two fixed des­ti­na­tions) is use­less for some—but par­tial­ly, or even pro­found­ly, use­ful for others ? That for some, “tran­si­tio­ning” may mean lea­ving one gen­der enti­re­ly behind, while for others—like Harry, who is hap­py to iden­ti­fy as a butch on T—it doesn’t ? I’m not on my way anyw­here, Harry some­times tells inqui­rers. How to explain, in a culture fran­tic for reso­lu­tion, that some­times the shit stays mes­sy ? I do not want the female gen­der that has been assi­gned to me at birth. Neither do I want the male gen­der that trans­sexual medi­cine can fur­nish and that the state will award me if I behave in the right way. I don’t want any of it. (Preciado) How to explain that for some, or for some at some times, this irre­so­lu­tion is OK—desirable, even (e.g., “gen­der hackers”)—whereas for others, or for others at some times, it stays a source of conflict or grief ? How does one get across the fact that the best way to find out how people feel about their gen­der or their sexuality—or any­thing else, really—is to lis­ten to what they tell you, and to try to treat them accor­din­gly, without shel­la­cking over their ver­sion of rea­li­ty with yours ?

The pre­sump­tuous­ness of it all. On the one hand, the Aristotelian, per­haps evo­lu­tio­na­ry need to put eve­ry­thing into cate­go­ries—pre­da­tor, twi­light, edible—on the other, the need to pay homage to the tran­si­tive, the flight, the great soup of being in which we actual­ly live. Becoming, Deleuze and Guattari cal­led this flight : beco­ming-ani­mal, beco­ming-woman, beco­ming-mole­cu­lar. A beco­ming in which one never becomes, a beco­ming whose rule is nei­ther evo­lu­tion nor asymp­tote but a cer­tain tur­ning, a cer­tain tur­ning inward, tur­ning into my own / tur­ning on in / to my own self / at last / tur­ning out of the / white cage, tur­ning out of the / lady cage / tur­ning at last. (Clifton)

Shame-spot : being someone who spoke free­ly, copious­ly, and pas­sio­na­te­ly in high school, then arri­ving in col­lege and rea­li­zing I was in dan­ger of beco­ming one of those people who makes eve­ryone else roll their eyes : there she goes again. It took some time and trouble, but even­tual­ly I lear­ned to stop tal­king, to be (imper­so­nate, real­ly) an obser­ver. This imper­so­na­tion led me to write an enor­mous amount in the mar­gins of my note­books— mar­gi­na­lia I would later mine to make poems.

Forcing myself to shut up, pou­ring lan­guage onto paper ins­tead : this became a habit. But now I’ve retur­ned to copious spea­king as well, in the form of tea­ching.

Sometimes, when I’m tea­ching, when I inter­ject a com­ment without anyone cal­ling on me, without caring that I just spoke a moment before, or when I inter­rupt someone to redi­rect the conver­sa­tion away from an eddy I per­so­nal­ly find fruit­less, I feel high on the know­ledge that I can talk as much as I want to, as qui­ck­ly as I want to, in any direc­tion that I want to, without anyone overt­ly rol­ling her eyes at me or sug­ges­ting I go to speech the­ra­py. I’m not saying this is good peda­go­gy. I am saying that its plea­sures are deep.

When I was gro­wing up, my mother would some­times tell me to switch the TV chan­nel to a sta­tion with a male wea­ther­man. They usual­ly have the more accu­rate fore­cast, she’d say.

The wea­ther people are rea­ding a script, I would say, rol­ling my eyes. It’s all the same fore­cast.

It’s just a fee­ling, she would shrug.

Alas, it isn’t just a fee­ling. Even if women are consul­ting the same satel­lites, or rea­ding from the same script : their reports are sus­pect ; the jig is up. In other words, the arti­cu­la­tion of the rea­li­ty of my sex is impos­sible in dis­course, and for a struc­tu­ral, eide­tic rea­son. My sex is remo­ved, at least as the pro­per­ty of a sub­ject, from the pre­di­ca­tive mecha­nism that assures dis­cur­sive cohe­rence. (Luce Irigaray)

Irigaray’s ans­wer to this conun­drum?: to des­troy … [but] with nup­tial tools…. The option left to me, she writes, was to have a fling with the phi­lo­so­phers.

I’ve never been able to ans­wer to com­rade, nor share in this fan­ta­sy of attack. In fact I have come to unders­tand revo­lu­tio­na­ry lan­guage as a sort of fetish—in which case, one res­ponse to the above might be, Our diag­no­sis is simi­lar, but our per­ver­si­ties are not com­pa­tible.

One of the most annoying things about hea­ring the refrain “same-sex mar­riage” over and over again is that I don’t know many—if any—queers who think of their desire’s main fea­ture as being “same-sex.” It’s true that a lot of les­bian sex wri­ting from the ’70s was about being tur­ned on, and even poli­ti­cal­ly trans­for­med, by an encoun­ter with same­ness. This encoun­ter was, is, can be, impor­tant, as it has to do with seeing reflec­ted that which has been revi­led, with exchan­ging alie­na­tion or inter­na­li­zed revul­sion for desire and care. To devote your­self to someone else’s pus­sy can be a means of devo­ting your­self to your own. But wha­te­ver same­ness I’ve noted in my rela­tion­ships with women is not the same­ness of Woman, and cer­tain­ly not the same­ness of parts. Rather, it is the sha­red, cru­shing unders­tan­ding of what it means to live in a patriar­chy.