Transitional Thoughts on Trans-

… the phenomenological way: take a thing for what it is and let it talk.

James Hillman, Inter Views

Any body

I’m writing, not from a certain identity position some readers might demand, but from nothing other my own essentially random position, stand or fall. And I’m nobody—not trans, no kind of academic or expert, not even a journalist. Just someone with a particular mix of traits and experiences, observing things and thinking about them. The contingency of my starting point is important: who has the right to address this issue? I’d say, anyone. Any old nobody. 

First, because the drive is inbuilt: we all wonder, we all read the signs for orientation wherever we happen to find ourselves. (We can suppress the questioning, but denial has its price. And we might choose to read only familiar signs, but it risks getting us even more lost.) Second, because we’re all in the midst of upheavals that go to the heart of human being: matters of sex and gender implicate us all because the body itself—anybody’s, everybody’s—is the ground of contention. 

The prefix trans- points us toward a topic where our corporeal fears and techno-dreams run riot, where primeval past and potential futures battle over the very real present. Few terms seem more emblematic of our situation: “Where are we?” In transition … 

Binary choices

Decisions take us in one direction or another, this way or that. Each closes off certain possibilities and enables others. If the word “nonbinary” has assumed a sudden cultural importance, whether as a mere trend or a significant indication of future developments, it has the undeniable function of creating a new binary. Whether we like it or not, we can’t step out of our time and situation to avoid the decision the word itself demands of us (ironically enough). We will inevitably find ourselves on this side or that of every cultural challenge. 

We may find ourselves opposed along obvious lines (“traditionalists vs. radicals”), we may remain trapped in completely understandable confusion, or we may make new alliances across political, social, and spiritual lines we’d once thought were clear-cut. If we are indeed facing a “brave new world,” old identities (not just “gender identities,” though they’re all the rage) might be worth reconsidering, while “old” values may yet be renewed, reimagined. 

But if our familiar determinations don’t always guarantee truly meaningful resemblances, how will we find our allies; how will we recognize those who share our convictions? 

“… let it talk”

A reaction isn’t only my reaction; it belongs to a situation. If it’s deep enough… it isn’t just subjective personal opinion. It’s giving voice to something. (James Hillman, “A Psychologist Talks About…”)

The notion of “my truth” does have its place: as a corrective. When someone references it, what they’re talking about is the reality of their life: “It is true that I experienced this.” And they are asking that their experience be recognized as part of the general understanding of some situation. They are speaking for something denied or discounted by such collective recognition. 

Any one person’s experience is, however, wholly inadequate for grasping the larger truths of which our own represent but partial aspects. Similarly, “my position”—my opinion, my political or moral stance—can’t do justice to the complexity of a real-world phenomenon. One may advocate for pro-trans activism, trans-critical feminism, or traditional male/female roles; one may dream of free choice in every area or warn about commodified faux-freedom. These are various possibilities the phenomenon holds out, and we gravitate toward whichever is most accessible or appealing to us for whatever reasons (upbringing, community, personal factors). Underneath the diversity of responses, though, there has been a shift in our shared reality itself, a change in our collective coordinates. 

Our situation has created a new “we” out of all of us. Everything that constitutes the trans phenomenon (people, organizations, ideas, dreams, technologies) moves around a center of gravity, a “black hole” of a question that addresses us collectively and personally: what is “human”? Whether or not biological sex and social gender roles can or should be transcended, whether or not, as the most ambitious trans visionaries would have it, we are indeed moving into the “trans-human,” our self-understanding is in transition. We are all implicated. 

It appears … 

The word “phenomenon” comes from the Greek “to appear” and the root “to shine.”  Today, the trans phenomenon “shines,” demanding our attention whether we want to look or not. No matter our distinct viewpoints, it might also help us determine where we all are, if we can look together at the face of what faces us. But it encompasses a mind-boggling array of dimensions, each shot through with its own contradictions in addition to the contradictions between them. 

To some, the creative side is most immediately obvious: the contributions of trans and gender-bending artists, the new vistas opening up for creative exploration; the joys of self-discovery and self-expression; the advances in medical technology associated with some research; greater social acceptance of gender nonconformity and other forms of diversity. 

This was where my own background and experience has led me, initially. The issue of gender never troubled me personally, but blurred gender never felt terribly threatening. I grew up with the variations of androgyny from Bowie to Radical Faeries at Pride gatherings, with science fiction novels that predicted sex-change at a whim, with knowledge of pioneers like Wendy (née Walter) Carlos and Jan (née James) Morris, with underground cultural icons like Wayne/Jayne County and Genesis P-Orridge. Many people in my circle, from collaborators and co-workers to dear friends, bent gender into the most astonishing shapes—including the person I call “the third great unrequited love of my life” (there’d been one each in elementary and junior high) who in high school revealed to me that he’d always felt he had—or was—“a woman inside.” He was expressing something very difficult, then; today, she is much happier. There are countless examples of people unequivocal about the value of having “transitioned,” whatever its trials.

Meanwhile, the other side to this positive reality has been in the news: natal (biological) males competing in women’s sports, with predictable results; vicious battles over the meaning of words, justified by complex academic theorizing; the growing power of trans lobbyists to effect policy without public input; the rise in diagnoses of “gender dysphoria,” especially among young women, and the inevitable accompanying regret among some who choose to “de-transition”; the dangerous presence of trans-identified males in women’s spaces and in sex-segregated facilities like prisons and shelters; the vilification and violence directed toward critics of trans ideology. 

The trans rise to prominence has occurred with astonishing speed in every sector—social, political, medical, legal, academic, athletic, commercial. This alone demands explanation. And it turns out that there are “grassroots” movements being funded by the most powerful biotech and pharmaceutical companies, censorship and social control advanced under the banner of the most “progressive” ideals, tolerance for hateful bullying legitimized by “human rights” organizations.

Although each position has its flaws and limitations, there are not only serious arguments being made for most of them, but many caring, intelligent people making them. So, by what criteria can we judge? Is compromise possible? Is it even desirable? 

Home 

The “trans phenomenon” is about the human body. The body unites us as a species, but it has always embroiled us in dramas of opposition, too, often to the death. It has pitted us against one another in contest for physical resources (war), in the trials of intimacy and mating (“the war of the sexes”), and in all manner of exploitation, control, and domination (the “race war”). 

It also divides us against ourselves, psychologically. The body is, after all, where “the soul” landed, and this human subject—ego, consciousness, every avatar of “me”—is at once at home and a stranger in the material domain. The body is the primordial contested territory because it’s where every “I” comes to be—the site of our self-definition, where we make our selves. 

The distinction between nature (from natus “born”) and technology (from the root, teks- “to fabricate,” “fashion,” “make”) plays out here: that which comes into being of itself versus what we produce through our own agency. “Nature or nurture?” is thus a question concerning technology: how much do we in fact shape what we normally take as given? How much is ultimately in our hands, and therefore our responsibility? 

The postmodern threat to cultural norms has been unavoidable because, as far it goes (but only that far), the theory of social constructivism is right: even before our birth, our “nature” and ideas of “natural” are being fashioned for us. As we go on to form what (and who) comes after. 

But “constructed” clearly needn’t mean “false.” After all, humans “made” language and continually refashion it—for better or worse is the question. Words are completely “artificial.” But they open up shareable worlds—and build exclusionary ones. They create realities—and destroy them. They allow human cultural life to blossom—and they limit it. 

“We” 

I said that our time is “in transition.” But really, we have always been in transition, only the periods of relative stability used to be much longer. We lived in oral, ritual cultures for seventy-thousand years or so—how easy all that “pre-history” is to forget, when we look back at our official “history” of a few measly millennia! 

So, yes, “we” is now anybody and everybody—each individual living at this time, in this rocking world. Yet change has been accelerating steadily since the dawn of modernity, revolution following furiously upon revolution—scientific, industrial, political, artistic, sexual, digital. And our positions inevitably vie for dominance, face off in mortal combat. Our binary choices about that uncanny phenomenon that faces us all—even the decision whether or not to speak of anyone as “nonbinary”—will divide us. 

Because, unfortunately for utopian fantasies, truth divides. It divides despite referring to “collective recognition,” despite its definition as “the objectively shared” in contrast to “the subjectively private.” Unanimity only belongs in Utopia, that is, nowhere—in a Heaven where truth is always already known, no communication necessary. But real truth, real-world truth, asks us to decide, in the words of the classic union song by Florence Reece, “Which side are you on?” 

I myself can’t be “against” the trans movement. But neither can I support those aggressive and influential trans forces that are making life miserable for anyone who doesn’t bow to their demands. I can rejoice in human creativity, but also expose its risks and its exploitation. This, finally, brings me to the fragile point around which we might still come together. 

In Berlin, there’s a German Resistance Memorial Center. The rooms are dedicated respectively to various demographics that made up the anti-Nazi resistance: workers, business leaders, artists, intellectuals, students, soldiers, Christians, Jews, Roma, and so on. Despite the differences between them, some indeed irreconcilable, they allied to fight a common danger. I’m not equating the trans movement with Nazism, as I hope the preceding makes very clear. I also hope, however, that I’ve suggested some of the real dangers the movement poses, a sense of its totalitarian potential that makes even such a perilous, extreme comparison resonant. 

We—male, female, trans; religious, secular; conservative, liberal; academic, artist, trucker—can unite precisely against those forces that would divide by mere demographic categories. And our resistance must divide us from whoever—male, female, trans; religious, secular; conservative, liberal; academic, artist, trucker—would dominate us all, whoever would rob us of our individuality and diminish our uniqueness. We can argue, draw our own lines, make our own determinations, stick with “our people”—as long as we find ourselves, in the end, resisting the totalitarians together. 

There are real struggles to be waged over real-world actions impacting real human lives. The idea of “facing” the phenomenon isn’t to provide answers, but only to help us identify where we are. If it removes us from the field of battle, it also allows us to return better informed, with a stronger sense of the forces in play and of the humanity of the players. How to respond remains in our hands, determining the quality of our social “constructions”; it remains in our feet, determining which direction we let them take us. So these thoughts can’t be anything but transitional—but that’s all thoughts have ever been. And if that doesn’t sound too impressive—well, it shouldn’t.