strobesence

[strobesence]

2006

[strobesence]

[strobesence]

1928-61 The Coffee Pot restaurant between Austin and Scottsberg, Indiana. From Historic Southern Indiana.

[strobesence]

A woman diving off a bathing wagon in to the sea by Thomas Rowlandson

[strobesence]

[strobesence]

A newborn baby girl will have to go through life with the wrong sex on her birth certificate after a registrar’s error, which her parents have been told they cannot change. Grace Bingham and her partner, Ewan Murray, were excited to register their first child at the Sutton-in-Ashfield Registration Office in Nottinghamshire last week. But, after nights of broken sleep, they failed to notice the registrar had written the wrong sex on the birth certificate until after it had been submitted. “We were horrified but assumed that, as we saw the mistake just a few seconds after it had happened, correcting it would be an easy matter,” said Murray. “But although the registrar apologised for her mistake – and the area manager also apologised – it turns out that birth certificates can’t be changed.”

this article is interesting because it demonstrates that cis people can very easily apply structural thinking to sex assignment - this couple immediately identifies that their daughter, having mistakenly been assigned male at birth by the registrar, will have administrative problems in employment, education, travel, and so on. they pretty adeptly identify the foundational role that sex assignment plays in the administrative and civil functions of a state, and how incorrect sex markers effectively produce a ‘rational’ reason for discrimination within these administrative and civil arenas:

The General Register Office (GRO), which is responsible for administering all civil registration in England and Wales, and the Home Office have both confirmed that Lilah’s birth certificate cannot be reissued, although an amendment can be made in the margin of the original document. But Bingham said this is not enough. “People reading a birth certificate might easily miss a tiny note in the margin – which means that Lilah could be regarded as male when she applies for school, her passport, for jobs – for everything that she needs a full birth certificate for.”

And given that this was published in The Guardian, this article makes zero mention as to why it’s impossible for this couple to receive an updated birth certificate with correct information (something the author notes was possible to do a year ago), but the reason is obviously transphobia. 

Now one might ask why there’s no exception for cis people whose birth certificates were recorded incorrectly at birth, but this reveals the instability of cissexualism. How would you determine who is a cis person with a mistaken birth certificate, versus a trans person who wants to change their mistaken sex assignment record? Sure, you could say well, this is an infant, of course she’s “really” “biologically” female (something the parents argue in the article as grounds for having their child’s birth certificate re-issued), but 1) that certainly can’t be argued for in all cases, 2) 'biological sex' is understood by medical doctors as alterable through hormones and surgery, which trans people are often required to undergo in order to change their records, and 3) binary sex assignment is already imprecise and discretionary, particularly if infants have sex characteristics that don’t conform to binary F/M assignment standards (which is part of how the category of intersex emerges, framing this failure to conform to state census categories as a biological defect - and in fact, many intersex people do not discover they are intersex until the onset of puberty or later, at which point they are even less in luck if they want to change their sex assignment - and if they don’t, if they are cis but have sex characteristics that do not conform to cis standards, they will be discriminated against anyway). 

Even setting aside the issue of transgender and intersex people for a moment, states fuck up all the time in administration! you've probably either experienced this directly or know someone who's had some kind of record fucked up by the government at some point in their life. If you get married they could fuck up changing your last name, fuck up your disability status, record your social insurance number wrong, print the wrong address on your driver’s license, fail to acknowledge you as a dependent when filing taxes, incorrectly mark you as having graduated when you’re still a student, fuck up your immigration paperwork, record your name wrong during immigration, etc etc into infinity, and this is not even getting into errors that occur when different levels of government pass information between one another. This level of administrative rigidity is purely to punish people who fail to perform cissexualism correctly, and in the case of this couple's child, the administrative error of the state is imputed to them as a personal failure that she and her parents will now have to deal with for the rest of their lives. 

I think the ultimate analysis is not that transphobia will become less precise and hit more "wrong" targets as it expands its reach, but that this is the exact same operational logic as all other liberal state measures - if you encounter a systemic issue, it’s your fault for not avoiding it, fuck you, go away. You’re poor because you’re lazy, you’re unhoused because you’re lazy, you’re disabled because you’re lazy, and your daughter is now administratively transsexual because you’re lazy. In this case, we don’t even need to assume the intentions of the state - they outright say it:

The family complained to the GRO but was told the mistake was their responsibility and could not be fully rectified. “The duty to ensure that information recorded in any particular entry is true is the responsibility of the person providing the information and not of the registrar general or the registrar recording the birth,” the GRO said.

[strobesence]

Dream of the Moon by Russian artist Igor (Krapar) Shcherbakov

[strobesence]

Théophile Alexandre Steinlen (Swiss-French,1859-1923)

Two cats, 1898 

[strobesence]

Sarcoma aka Doomed Sarcoma (Czech, based Siberia, Russia) - The Cabinet of Curiosities, 2024, Paintings: Digital Art

[strobesence]

Remedios Varo aka Remedios Varo Uranga aka María de los Remedios Alicia Rodriga Varo y Uranga (Spanish-Mexican, 1908-1963, b. Anglès, Girona, Spain, d. Mexico City, Mexico) - Astro Errante, 1961, Paintings: Oil on Paperboard

[strobesence]

Alexandra Czierpka - The Last Hue of Day, the First of the Moon, 2024 - Acrylic and Oil Crayon on Watercolor Paper

[strobesence]

Years of pressure and heat can cause the ink in photos to transfer directly onto plastic, a process known as image bleeding.

[strobesence]

[strobesence]

'portal gates, 1974' in the art of albert paley: iron, bronze, steel - edward lucie-smith (1996)

[strobesence]

David Lynch “I Find it Very Difficult to Understand What is Going on These Days,” (2009)

[strobesence]

Sarah Sze

Three Foot Drop, 2017

Mixed media, toothpicks, tape measure, archival prints, acrylic paint, string

63 5/8 × 18 ¼ × 17 in161.6 × 46.4 × 43.2 cm

[strobesence]

i will literally get obsessed with whatever