Transgender pessimism
This is not a manifesto. This is not liberation. This is not revolutionary. This is not leftist, or communist, or anarchist.
AXIOMS
Transgender pessimism operates under a list of axioms which provide an alternative to the trap that most pessimisms, including broader philosophical pessimism (e.g. Cioran, Ligotti, early Land, Mainlander, Malcouer and other figures of tremendous import to this essay), fall prey to - their sadness becomes an argument. We will likely fall prey to this sadness-as-argument in time, but this will only serve as evidence of our claims and allow us to die happy. In the meantime, our axioms are as follows:
The ‘best’ time to be transgender across history was approximately 2-3 years before contemporary TERF movements gained serious political purchase.
The ‘best’ place to be transgender is the West.
Minority rights are not set on a linear progression towards enlightenment. They are contingent on a number of fallible and fragile social circumstances that are easily eroded by microfascisms and the threat of the unavoidable climate crisis (see Desert or the words of every climate scientist for the past 30 years).
Things can always get worse, and enjoy following through on this promise.
Now you must allow me some philosophising, for as much as I would have these axioms stand as the bedrock of transgender pessimism they need some clarification. First, you will have noticed the word ‘best’ employed in quotation marks as if to suggest I don’t really mean it. I do, but I want to stress that this is not a value claim about the West or a particular moment in the history of liberal democracies. ‘Best’ means that broadly speaking, more transgender people are structurally exempt from exceptions to the monopoly on violence provided by the state, and more transgender people are afforded access to care that would have been considered lavish or needlessly expensive across most of history, in those places and at that time than in any other place at any other time. If you were a transgender person placed behind Rawls’ veil of ignorance, you would be insane to pick any other place or any other time than in a liberal democracy circa 2019. Second, the last premise is both the most important for transgender pessimism and the most disposable. It is this axiom that makes this pessimism stand on greater shoulders than mere empirical observation; it is also essentially an appeal to the reader’s temperament, and there will be many optimistic trans people who read it and scoff. That’s okay, I am often an optimist, or at least I find optimism very compelling. I am also someone who believes that not only revolution is impossible in the current climate (literally), but that it is even more impossible i.e. the conditions for the generation of its possibility are even further out of view, if one does not accept the sheer wickedness and brutality of the task and opposition movements facing the would-be revolutionaries. In this case, we could add a few corollary axioms, whose content is merely factual and not speculative.
Transgender people are, and will remain, a small minority group, relative to POC or women for example.
Transgender healthcare, which is and will remain vital for the core of the minority group, is seen politically as an excessive ‘vanity’ provision.
For most of human history, nearly all people have been extremely ‘poor’ by present-day standards, and once liberal democracies begin to collapse that poor state will become the norm again.
Another clarification is needed here before I continue. When I say ‘core’, I am trying to clarify a distinction often made carelessly by transsexual people between the transsexuals and the transgenders (see Serrano for a textbook example of this distinction rendered pseudo-academically). I see it as a fact that some people call themselves transgender and mean that they intend to take cross-sex hormones and present a distinctly different image to the world (meaning strangers and friends alike) from that which they would be expected to present. Other people call themselves transgender due to a complicated relationship with a gender presentation which they do not explicitly intend to change but which they interpret, linguistically and/or psychologically, in a non-standard manner. Both groups are so-called ‘valid’. The latter group is merely less incentivised to defend their rights claims that come with being transgender, as their physical health and mental well-being is less dependent on a set of material provisions which align with those rights claims. In other words, when it comes down to it, the latter group has less basic incentive to stake their being on transgender rights. They may stake their principles, their values, their feelings of self-worth on transgender rights, but it seems to me that this is not the same thing. Thus when I say ‘core’ I mean to indicate the image of a target, where transsexuals are in the direct firing line, and transgenders are hurt because they are in concentric proximity to the transsexuals and the archers are incompetent at best.
STIRNER/ANARCHY
Is anarchy a principle or the absence of principles? I fear this debate. It invokes all of the worst ontological gotchas (‘Doing nothing is actually still doing something’, ‘Being and nothing are exactly the same’, other trite nonsense) and, far worse than achieving nothing (the same could be said for all other anarchist behaviours) it is pointless. Max Stirner’s relentless laughter is one of history’s few antidotes to the vast pointlessness of anarchism, and short of fellating oneself at the altar of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, does appear to provide the anarchist with her only practical tools. I am gesturing in this section at the tendency of fringe social movements to look to Stirner for some hope amidst the madness and depravity of having no values, that is, no values that force will put its weight behind. Let it be known that transgender people really are about as crazy and unstable as the media would have it; the problem is just the corollary that craziness is dangerous. Stirner lets you eat your cake and then, after eating it, have it. For those who do not accept the increasingly memetic view that ‘trans people are just normal, they’re normal guys’ because frankly, that does not describe the political reality in any way that anyone could understand, Stirner lets you think power from the anarchist’s gutter without denying the accusations that the gutter is full of worthless miscreants and deviants. Stirner, much more than that small-minded racist who called himself Caiaphas, is the fringe thinker’s fringe thinker, one who has lost sight of the relative badness of filth such that he is happy just to call it his own. The egoist is one who sees in society a tremendous and joyous excess of confidence and daring muted only by those who think of such impossibilities as ‘going too far’. It’s obvious: almost all actual horrors are imparted by normal people. The crazy are responsible for so many new joys just by being glad to have anything at all. Normal people take their property as a given, not what it really is: a cosmic accident of excess energy bestowed upon a cornucopia of worthless nothings. This is crack for transgender people, who in their view haven’t done anything wrong except violate a social given.
Egoism is still a bad idea. Implicit in every fringe notion of gender (/acc, anarchism, nihilism etc.) is a gender egoism. It says: because I am the exception that disproves the rule in this system, gender is really mine, it is mine because everyone else has it so unconsciously and with such entitlement, but I worked for it, I saw its broken heart, the limitless singularity that burns at its centre, what else would owning something be? This supposes that exceptions disproves rules ever. Exceptions exist to pleasure a sadistic God by demonstrating to her subjects what hope would look like if it were really possible, and to make the brutality of systems more exciting in general. Gender is a brutal system because its enforcers have never really existed and must be spoken about in even more abstract terms than ‘the bourgeoisie’ or ‘white people’. 50% of everyone who has ever lived is a ‘man’ and we are no closer to understanding what one is, which indicates the situation for ‘women’ must be pretty dire (and it is). We have gained what little understanding we have under the false pretence of exceptions and through the massive truth of violence, leading 4th wave feminists to parochially squawk that one ought not define womanhood by violence, except what else? Sure, those who do believe they could define something by violence are misled, but only because violence’s truth does not belong to definitions. Gender is a system which allows errors to satiate God and itself, in order to make examples of people. It is a system with no leader and no power structure save for one universal construct that flits into life between every instance of more than one person, constantly demanding an unthinking subjugation (clearly absurd at first glance) and punishing those who complain loudest, or loudly at all. This is the behaviour of a sadist - create an impossible task through the fixedness of your request and your intolerable behaviour, then punish the bottom both for failing and for daring to identify its impossibility.
Careful… I almost let sadness be my argument. What I mean to say is that in vain do we transsexuals pretend our hormones are the revolution. Revolutions are exceptions with lifespans of their own and their teleology is sadistically dominated by whatever system they seek to overthrow. In the process they destroy us, on whom they subsist for their being-in-the-world, completely - whether we win or lose. In other words, if socialism is organised compassion, anarchism is organised hope, and both depend on exceptions to the mechanics of various interlaced systems which must periodically vent pressure.
NIETZSCHE
Truth and lies in Nietzsche have nought to do with true and false as we ordinarily understand them. Some honest Fregians might claim that truth is a property to which predicates refer, or that which is output by the concatenation of predicate logic in the sentence. But Nietzsche is him who claims at once, “there are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths”, and that Art will stop us dying from the truth, all the while admonishing the liars for taking us away from that same truth. I will not try to make some sort of interpretive claim, that Nietzsche is speaking of different denotations when he says truth in the former or latter sense. Instead, we can say that while lying is a structure, truth is much like Nietzsche’s famous abyss - being nothing, it can infect you with no great effort. Note that the interpretation is a function of power and not truth, and that it would be fair to call Christianity one particularly grotesque interpretation, a malfeasant transvaluation. The Christians had power and made no good use of it - they wasted it, on what we shall yet see. In Nietzsche, we go beyond Frege’s true and false to find truth and lies, the truth and the liars. At every stage is the truth uncovered until its bareness degrades and defeats us, lest we overcome it somehow. And at every stage is the lying done and thus built up into a structure sometimes called morality, other times religion (hence: “I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity”). We note moreover that it is the great horror of the truth and the great comfort of the lie that stops this duality from resolving into an inverted morality of its own kind. It is easy to accidentally reinvent morality when one is transvaluating. Nietzsche’s call to experiment with the good, for the good is experimentation, and his insistence that one joy’s affirmation begets a multiplicity of sorrows, forces one to consider that the road beyond good and evil will not come without great pains. ‘God is such an obvious and crass solution; a solution which is a sheer indelicacy to us thinkers - at bottom He is really nothing but a coarse commandment against us: ye shall not think!” Thinking will get us to the good if done right, but nowhere in the truth will we find justification for the good itself or the right itself. The truth will not justify us or validate us or punish us - all these are for our own undertakings. Thus we understand phenomenologically how truth and lying differ in kind and not merely as outputs. Moreover, we find in truth the exposed and raw core of amor fati. Forget appearances, forget idealism, forget the shadow of the world and affirm that by ridding oneself of commandments against thinking, one really does touch the real. For Nietzsche, real/apparent distinctions are not metaphysically unviable, they are cowardice manifest. It is not that he objects to the distinction on its terms, but he sees it as the conclusion of a liar in waiting, one who is ready to draw up schema against the threat of the real. For the real is terrifying, as Lacan well knew, and does terrible things to the philosopher. This is why the true philosopher in Nietzsche is such a bold spirit, when it would be fair to say on first impression that no philosopher is so bold and that Nietzsche is self-aggrandising when he makes such claims. It is common that we call a structure of lies a philosophy because of the ornate pretence it develops to ward against both intuition and thinking - maintained though a regime of signs or image of Thought - but in fact this is not what a philosopher does. Captured by a regime of lies, the philosopher’s own skillset has been turned against her. A true philosopher ought to stare down the real and bare its exposed core. A true philosopher experiences the miseries of life and subjects herself to mad, impulsive, irrational reactions just to see, just to know their becoming. Hence: “only great pain, the long, slow pain that takes its time... compels us to descend to our ultimate depths... I doubt that such pain makes us “better”; but I know it makes us more profound... In the end, lest what is most important remain unsaid: from such abysses, from such severe sickness, one returns newborn, having shed one’s skin... with merrier senses, with a second dangerous innocence in joy, more childlike and yet a hundred times subtler than one has ever been before.” Make no mistake - there are flashes of the real/apparent distinction in Nietzsche; we even saw one in the distinction between truth and interpretation. But not only does the truth always diverge rapidly in kind from its associates and set off on a line of flight, fleeing creatively to unseen pastures, the apparent is always constructed and the real is always obvious. It is not an epistemological lack that leads us to construct the apparent but an inadequacy of courage, an aversion to affirmation, not enough amor fati. We are afraid of “dying of fatal truths”; and as a result generate hundreds of “antidotes” - but this too is not enough, we must make like Spinoza and turn the primitive superstitions of religious man into a universal doctrine, a law that binds every citizen. Only then will the sad passions have been excised. It is sad that hope, then, is that most “evil” of virtues, for it prolongs our suffering. But again, we must not make sadness our argument.
NIHILIST REGRESS
One might remark that this has all been said before. Pessimism has a distinct capacity to feel unoriginal, perhaps because we all always think it and dare not speak it aloud lest it become real. Certainly I owe my pessimism about gender to Dworkin and perhaps to Andrea Long-Chu or whatever dialectical beast lives inside Julia Serrano. Certainly I owe my small-minded rage to Nietzsche. But still I find myself infuriated with those who are not transgender pessimists but still find much to be hopeless about. I call this the nihilist’s regress - for those who have already spoken their worst nightmares into being, the only option left is an arms race towards annihilation (see Nick Land). Those who abandon hope only to espouse community, or abandon community only to espouse hedonism (possibly philosophy’s most confused notion - a concept lacking a concept, like a nightmare version of Kantian beauty), are simply not going far enough. Just like the transsexual relies on her hormones to distinguish her from the ‘fake’ transgenders, these pseudo-pessimists think they can ‘optimism of the will’ their way into a conceptual territory that will bear the tremendous weight of being an exception. Community cannot do it - it lost the fight against capital long ago. And worse, these aren’t even good egoists. Far from eliminating the spooks from their thought, they pick a spook and substitute it for their unique. Even as ‘pure’ hedonism, they fix themselves to a concept which comes to own them by way of an image of thought. Instead, one will find that the nihilist’s regress is its own comfort. It is the comfort of the whale newly borne into the rapid fall to Earth (thanks Douglas Adams), a twisted comfort owed to overcoming which requires complete ignorance, utter novelty, calling the approaching ground a new friend. It is therefore an impossible dream which substitutes for hope; a smug grin now that you and everyone else have got what they deserved.
Do I even have principles? My axioms are mostly provocation. I’m sure you could think of a better time in history. Much of our contemporary suffering is remarkably novel and strange, but maybe that flow subsists on a tremendous undercurrent of nightmares which existence has allowed to pass by unconsciously. I am too tired to write a conclusion, which is how every conclusion is ever formed. The writing keeps on happening somewhere, at least not visibly on the page, but only because one is too tired to keep seeing it. I turn on my prohibitions against thinking that send me to sleep and find that my argument has gone beyond sadness. It has gone to ignorance, a new and cold ignorance, not the blissful dream of the whale as it falls but the waking nightmare of the truly mindless, a brutally possible overcoming of the truth which does not make one more profound but only leaves me exhausted. Many of the worst years are yet to come for transgender people, and it is only now at the apotheosis of liberal small-mindedness that we can contemplate without being bludgeoned into aching rather than thinking. The fundamental failing of transgender theory is its belief that when we soothe ourselves with surgery and hormone therapy, we could have any access to reason at all. Thus the inability to ‘solve’ being transgender is most probably due to it belonging to the skin band - and ‘luckily’ for us, it is on this level that the brutality will commence. I speak only of “the brutality”, then, to gesture at its ineffability in this theoretical domain. It will break your reason. It will make us stupid. We have revelled in being exceptions to the rule that human behaviour is irrational and violence is the norm. And when the levee breaks, we won’t even know what we’re missing out on.
Thanks for this.
I apologize. I did not realize.