CAT SYLVIA BLACKWELL

*NOTE: This is an edited excerpt from a published paper titled “Waiting for History: Interest Convergence As Applied to the Transgender Question.”

Quitting Smoking: What Happens to a Life Deferred?

“The public health authorities never mention the main reason many Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide.”

Kurt Vonnegut, Welcome to the Monkey House

So the million dollar question: what’s a tranny to do? When trans existence and healthcare become illegal in the South (as Florida has recently made reality), what is to be done? Staying while maintaining an open trans-identity at a time when such a thing is punishable by felony is akin to a death sentence for trans women, should they be imprisoned. The clearest option and the one all trans people in the South are wondering about is whether we should simply leave. I mean this in a Camusian sense, as I see three fundamental choices the trans community of the South faces in the near future. Many of us have already made the choice. Do we commit suicide and end the cycle of cruelty we endure; do we stay and have faith that existing democratic systems will protect us (eventually), or do we recognize the situation and abandon our homes and move to more welcoming land and continue the struggle there? I argue the final option is, more or less, the correct choice given the current circumstances, but the others need to be discussed first due to their popularity.

SUICIDE: DEATH BEFORE DETRANSITION

Before class recently, I and several trans friends sat in a nook near campus under a mural dedicated to a trans girl who took her own life. As we sat under this mural, we all acknowledged it, but we had no interest in discussing us. To address such a thing is almost unnecessary, as we are already familiar with our shared death drives which we have all had years to confront, often in solitude. We’re reminded of them every time we see the scars on our thighs, look at the news, or are subject to daily examples of casual transphobia. After years of isolation in adolescence, the last thing most trans women want to do is linger on such things when we have achieved the conditional freedom of adulthood. Under the mural, we took drags off our cigarettes and talked about the things that make us smile. We did not leave flowers at the mural; we left cigarette butts. The mural has since been painted over, but the cigarette butts remain. They will stay there long after I have moved away from Denton, Texas.

Due to the obvious restrictions most people have on completely uprooting their lives and starting a new one, the urge to leave manifests for many as suicidality. Candidly, I can say most trans women I know have had suicide attempts before and many have persistent issues due to adjacent substance abuse, either past or current. We all have scars; some literal, some mental, some faded, some fresh. Recently, among other trans women, we realized three out of the four of us had HPPD, or hallucinogen-persisting perception disorder, due to past drug abuse. Those with HPPD have vision that is altered, often including constant visual fuzz or persistent minor visual hallucinations, almost like a mental/visual form of psychedelic tinnitus. The perceived hopelessness and want of escape that prompted this excessive drug use and parallel suicidality is not found on this scale in any other group: no other demographic seems to have a suicide rate as high as trans people (around 40% have attempted it). Most trans people will make clear the reason for this is not internal, such as the idea we are just depressed and mentally ill. It is externally driven; it is our environmental, familial, socio-economic, and political situation that prompts this. Trans people, with their geographic and social isolation, are entirely detached from political power in any meaningful sense and we all know it, to speak it aloud is just a grim reminder of that reality. On the topic of the political agency of the marginalized, critical race theorist Patricia Williams wrote, “We live in a society in which the closest equivalent of nobility is the display of unremittingly controlled will-fulness. To be perceived as unremittingly will-less is to be imbued with an almost lethal trait”. Our political powerlessness is not changed by the fact that the Biden Administration will appoint an occasional trans person to a prominent position. (In fact, the massive inevitable backlash for doing so usually becomes all that is remembered of such appointments, i.e. Sam Brinton or Rachel Levine). While many persecuted groups have had large and influential organizations fighting for their rights and freedoms, trans people have no such distinct movement; at best being a “+” or added to the end of LGBT as “and transgender.” There are no common examples of transgender agency in which we can find solace. One of the only examples that people actually know about, the Stonewall Riot, has been so thoroughly co-opted by bourgeois-assimilationist forces and removed for their original contexts that an exhibit titled “Rise Up: Stonewall” at the Dallas Holocaust Museum can be sponsored by Wells Fargo and Texas Instruments with much of the exhibit dedicated to people like Ellen Degeneres and Pete Buttigieg.

FAITH: ONE NATION, UNDER GOD

Trans people don’t tend to be very religious or very big fans of liberal democracy. Obviously, these two concepts have a long history of directing energy toward the oppression of trans people and so we mostly perceive them in opposition to our existence. A common push of the anti-trans movement is that trans people did not exist until the last few years, and this speaks to our invisibility and lack of social prominence or power within a society dominated by Christianity and liberal democracy. Very few Southern trans people have any faith that we are going to be saved by democracy or adjacent idealistic projects. After all, when has peaceful democracy ever been what stopped the South? While it is useful from the position of a social theorist to consider democratic solutions, the conclusion that they will not help us here is something that most of us have been able to figure out on our own time. There are are certainly some that believe in the power of democracy, although they are often confined to areas where social progressivism is dominant and where they face little immediate existential threat from the political right. To be fair, things are looking better for trans people in places like Minnesota or California which have recently passed massive and often unprecedented pro-trans legislation, but even this is almost entirely in efforts to offset the more explicitly genocidal laws being passed in the South and other red states. Many of these laws are not additional and needed legal protections for trans people, but rather commitments by states to not extradite or cooperate with the genocidal politics of the South. The South has done the same, attempting to pass laws giving officials the ability to prohibit leaving states for gender-affirming care, meaning states are being drawn into direct legal conflict with each other. This conflict is rather unprecedented, and it is not uncommon to see columnists and writers publish things like: “It appears that no such law allowing states or citizens to reach across boundaries to enforce a state law without an extradition procedure has been enacted in the U.S. since the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, one of the most detested statutes ever passed by Congress.” While evocations of the lead-up to the Civil War are common in media (they have been whenever there is social strife), I think it is safe to say, as was discussed in the first section of this essay, that there will be no Civil War over trans people. Such a fundamental overturning of democracy will take a much larger (i.e. economic) catalyst, first and foremost. The nation’s largest opposition to Southern oppression, the Democratic Party (Don’t laugh!), didn’t come close to civil conflict over the removal of Roe V. Wade, and they will not come to that conclusion over the removal of trans people, as trans people are seen as a comparable “social issue” to a large enough portion of them. Similarly to democratic norms, Southern trans people are rarely tied down by religious faith as most organized religions here completely hate us. There are small exceptions like reform Judaism or certain types of spiritual Christianity, but for many trans people, abandoning the faiths we were brought up in was easy, given our necessary rejection of many adjacent systems of power instilled into us from birth: parental influence, trust of government, and social/sexual norms more generally. The worst damage of religion is often inflicted on those that clung to it or were forced to stay through means of coercion. I have known several people who were sent to conversion camps or were institutionalized and typically the only thing they have to show for it are scars and a nicotine addiction.

RECOGNITION: “AND THOUGH ENGLAND IS MINE, I MUST LEAVE IT ALL BEHIND.”

If we want to deal with the issues facing the transgender community, we must first accept that the first two impulses are untenable with reality should we wish to ensure our survival. But where can trans people go that guarantees safety in the long term? It seems like the majority of Western nations are either already extremely hostile to trans people, or on track towards becoming so, pending an election cycle or two. Hard blue states and more socially progressive countries like Canada are the best options, currently. (It is important to note many Asian countries offer notably better transgender care than much of the West and it is not uncommon for Westerners to travel to Asia for transgender healthcare. But these places pose many unique challenges relating to immigration and finances that are beyond this essay’s scope.) These places are not yet swept with the current wave of government-spon-sored transphobia the UK and parts of the US are seeing, and thus are the most likely to be prioritized by trans people. Unlike many past mass migrations of marginalized groups, there is no historical homeland for trans people to turn to; such a suggestion is absurd. There will be no transgender Garveyism, Zionism, or traditional revolutionary nationalism. The closest thing we, in the United States, are likely to see to this is continued waves of mostly internal migration to gay, not trans, neighborhoods, not nations. Far from liberation, this is ultimately a queer gentrification and extension of settler-colonialism and we cannot mistake it for something revolutionary. Neighborhoods like Bushwick in Brooklyn or more historically safe spaces like the extremely gentrified Castro in San Francisco stand out as examples. (I can imagine few things less dignified or triumphant as moving to Bushwick or the Castro.) As previously discussed though, the treatment of trans people in gay-centric neighborhoods often reflects the will of cis-normative gay business owners (coined “homonormativity”) first and foremost. A clear example of this is Vancouver’s most notable gay neighborhood, Davie Village, although examples can be picked from nearly any major city. In the ‘80s, the existing networks of largely trans and indigenous sex workers that worked in Davie Village were forcibly displaced by cis white gay petite-bourgeois locals who claimed they were cleaning up the neighborhood and making the gay community look better. Trans and indigenous sex workers were forced into progressively more precarious and dangerous neighborhoods, leading to many deaths, with as many as 49 being murdered by Canadian serial killer Robert Pickton into the 2000s. The gay neighborhoods that are the clearest and safest route for trans people who wish to not only survive but thrive do not guarantee safety for trans people in any sense if they are still subject to the will of queer-tolerant capital. Petite-bourgeois individuals and organizations which prioritize the further accumulation of capital before the lives of trans people, of whom a primary line of work under capitalism is certain to be sex work will not side with trans people unless they are forced to, likely through capital or whatever other means are necessary. Certainly, should self-determination and agency be truly secured for trans people, it will take prolonged conflict with not only the explicit agents of transphobia and anti-trans violence, but also against those who should be our allies but have been willing to throw us to the wolves at the door when expedient. These neighborhoods of cis-gay capital are where our existing power is the strongest and therefore, constitute the most likely places where we can successfully exert enough influence to meaningfully impact policy and capital enough to secure our rights, although constant attacks from all directions are almost certain, as they have always been.

Should we carve space in the urban landscape out for ourselves, we will need cigarette butts at our feet, not flowers. Fundamental values of cis society such as fertility and birthrates (evoked by fascists just as much as liberals) do not matter to us, and an evaluation of our relation to all such values, heteronormative or homonormative, is needed. The next generations of trans people will emerge and grow regardless of our personal reproductive capacities. This conventional infertility and inability to directly engage in social reproduction are what differentiate us in the first place. We have found a way to exist in spite of the existing order, and our continued existence will never be able to purely integrate into that order. We are cast in contrast to the natural world by our detractors, but this conflict is core to our existence. This conflict of cigarette butts and flowers, of mustard gas and roses attempting to occupy the same ground is what defines us to those who perceive us. Should we establish territorial political power that will guarantee our future rights, it will be through unrelenting campaigns of hundreds, if not thousands, of cigarette butts filling the streets, marking territory as safe for us. A red rose on a lapel will quickly die, but the cigarette butts we leave behind will stay long enough for the next group in our space to add to the pile after we have left. All that will eventually grow in this disordered land of cigarette butts will be beautiful wildflowers, the kind that get cut down by lawn mowers in every suburban yard or sprayed with ammonia in city streets for daring to exist there. This land of cigarette butts and wildflowers will be ignored or actively distained by most who walk by, but we will know better. Home is likely impossible, but the cigarettes and wildflowers growing through the concrete signal something between Robert Frost and William S. Burroughs that is probably as close to home as many of us will ever get.