#hil malatino

[gatheringbones]

[“A trans gaze can be an incredibly productive historiographical tool. A trans gaze is what allows us to look at a case of historical gender nonconformity and remain open to the full spectrum of possibilities it represents. A trans gaze is what allows us to read about an individual wearing a mixture of male- and female-coded clothing, and ask, ‘But what did that feel like?’ A trans gaze is what allows us to accept and take seriously the fact that a person’s gender can be a spiritual or sexual experience, in a way we can’t empathise with – or, indeed, that what looks like gender sometimes isn’t at all – because we know first-hand how it feels when people don’t take seriously how we articulate our selves. This is the gaze that I hope will continue to transform the way we think about the past.

The simple precept of knowing people on their own terms can transform more than history; it also has the power to liberate us in the present. I’ve shown throughout this book that the way we think about gender today is not natural or traditional but constructed and contingent; gender has always been open to disruption and challenge. This in itself is an important, potentially transformative realisation. But imagine if, alongside this, we could simply trust people to know their gendered selves – without prior assumptions, without constraining frameworks, without structures of assessment or judgement. When Faye argues that ‘The liberation of trans people would improve the lives of everyone in our society’; when Feinberg argues that ‘when [trans] lives are suppressed, everyone is denied an understanding of the rich diversity of sex and gender expression and experience that exist in human society’; this, I think, is key to what they mean.

People often ask me if I think we should aim for a future without gender, and while I usually feel a tinge of frustration at this kind of speculative enquiry (maybe we should, but we have gender now, so how do we pursue trans liberation in this society?), I always say that while the experience of having a gender is important to many people, there are lots of things about institutionalised, state-sanctioned gender that we could certainly do without. As Malatino puts it, ‘There are genders and there is Gender and I believe we can have the former without the latter’]

kit heyam, from before we were trans: a new history of gender, 2022

[puppybot]

chapter 3: found wanting, on envy

[haveyoureadthistransbook]

The t4t Issue edited by Cameron Awkward-Rich and Hil Malatino

goodreads

Originating in Craigslist personals to indicate a trans person seeking another trans person, the term “t4t” has come to describe not only circuits of desire and attraction but also practices of trans solidarity and mutual aid. Contributors to this issue investigate the multiple meanings associated with t4t, considering both its potential and its shortcomings. They explore forms of Black trans kinship, consider the possibilities and limits of trans crowdfunding, theorize transmasculine pornography as a site of identity formation, and critique t4t spaces that allow for abuse or exploitation. Because t4t names a type of separatism, it carries risks such as identity policing, the prioritization of one aspect of identity over others, and difficulty engaging in strategic coalition. And yet, in a world that remains hostile to trans forms of life, t4t also circulates as a promising practice of love, repair, and healing.

Mod opinion: I haven't heard of this book before, but I really want to read it, it sounds incredibly interesting!

[princesskuragina]

I have also felt compelled to write about trans archives and hirstoricity, because a common feature of trans arts of cultivating resilience has to do with turning to the historical record for proof of life, for evidence that trans lives are livable because they’ve been lived. Care enters here, as well, because we turn to the archive for the purposes of support and self-care, but in that turning we are also confronted with the ineffability and alterity of these personages—many of them only a trace, a suggestion, a minor life only lightly embroidered upon in the scraps to which we have access. How do we care for these traces of past lives that haunt us in ways that are loving, insofar as they offer a balm through providing evidence of past trans flourishing and joy, and terrifying, because they testify to the conditions of intensive violence that these subjects lived within and through? How do we care for these ghosts that take such care of us?

- Hil Malatino, Trans Care

[senkovi]

I have also felt compelled to write about trans archives and hirstoricity, because a common feature of trans arts of cultivating resilience has to do with turning to the historical record for proof of life, for evidence that trans lives are livable because they've been lived. Care enters here, as well, because we turn to the archive for the purposes of support and self-care, but in that turning we are also confronted with the ineffability and alterity of these personages—many of them only a trace, a suggestion, a minor life only lightly embroidered upon the scraps to which we have access. How do we care for these traces of past lives that haunt us in ways that are loving, insofar as they offer a balm through providing evidence of past trans flourishing and joy, and terrifying, because they testify to the conditions of intensive violence that these subjects lived within and through? How do we care for these ghosts that take such care of us?

Hil Malatino, Trans Care

[fragbot]

The famed ambiguity of the photo renders Cahun a kind of universally fungible object of desire—maybe a boy, maybe a girl, maybe a man, maybe a woman, but precisely none of these things. Whatever it is that you’re into, maybe they can become it—maybe they’re in training to be the whatever of your dreams.

- from Trans Care, Hil Malatino (x)

[variousqueerthings]

reblogging this once more for 2023 with more texts!

The Care We Dream Of: Liberatory & Transformative Approaches to LGBTQ+ Health by Zena Sharman

What if you could trust in getting the health care you need in ways that felt good and helped you thrive? What if the health system honoured and valued queer and trans people's lives, bodies, and expertise? What if LGBTQ+ communities led and organized our own health care as a form of mutual aid? What if every aspect of our health care was rooted in a commitment to our healing, pleasure, and liberation?

Trans Care by Hil Malatino (2020)

What does it mean for trans people to show up for one another, to care deeply for one another? How have failures of care shaped trans lives? What care practices have trans subjects and communities cultivated in the wake of widespread transphobia and systemic forms of trans exclusion? 

Including this online talk and this online talk about the book

Mutual Aid by Dean Spade (2020)

This book is about mutual aid: why it is so important, what it looks like, and how to do it. It provides a grassroots theory of mutual aid, describes how mutual aid has been a part of all larger, powerful social movements, and offers concrete tools for organizing, such as how to work in groups, decision-making process, how to prevent and address conflict, and how to deal with burnout.

Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber (2011) <- internet archive copy

a fascinating chronicle of this little known history—as well as how it has defined human history, and what it means for the credit crisis of the present day and the future of our economy.

Countersexual manifesto: subverting gender identities by Paul Beatriz Preciado, Jack Halberstam (2018) <- anna's archive copy

Countersexual Manifesto is an outrageous yet rigorous work of trans theory, a performative literary text, and an insistent call to action. Seeking to overthrow all constraints on what can be done with and to the body, Paul B. Preciado offers a provocative challenge to even the most radical claims about gender, sexuality, and desire.

and another bell hooks conference: Are You Still A Slave? Liberating The Black Female Body with author Marci Blackman (Tradition), film director Shola Lynch (Free Angela and All Political Prisoners), and author and activist Janet Mock (Redefining Realness)

generally: check out internet archive, anna's archive, and register with your local library! and if you have a queer and/or independent bookshop in your area, check it out and give it support

and here are two film lists -- documentaries about queer subjects and queer cultural imagery both organised by release year

happy pride reccing some anti-assimilationist, anti-capitalist, and abolitionist books and texts

BOOKS

Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? edited by Matilda Bernstein Sycamore (2012)

"Whatever happened to sexual flamboyance and gender liberation, an end to marriage, the military, and the nuclear family? As backrooms are shut down to make way for wedding vows, and gay sexual culture morphs into "straight-acting dudes hangin' out," what are the possibilities for a defiant faggotry that challenges the assimilationist norms of a corporate-cozy lifestyle?"

Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come by Leslie Feinberg (1992)

This pamphlet is an attempt to trace the historic rise of an oppression that, as yet, has no commonly agreed name. We are talking here about people who defy the ‘man’-made boundaries of gender.

Transgender Warriors: Making history from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman by Leslie Feinberg (1996)

[Leslie Feinberg's] book celebrated the resistance to transphobia and a vision of trans liberation articulated from the perspective of class struggle. It understood that no liberation from transphobia or any of the divisive and violent oppressions in class society is possible without the transformation of capitalism into socialism.

The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions by Larry Mitchell (1977)

Stories told of these times make the faggots and their friends weep. The second revolutions made many of the people less poor and a small group of men without color very rich. With craftiness and wit the faggots and their friends are able to live in this time, some in comfort and some in defiance.

Also this interview

Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation edited by Kate Bornstein, and S. Bear Bergman (2010)

Today's transgenders and other sex/gender radicals are writing a drastically new world into being.

Made In India: Decolonizations, Queer Sexualities, Trans/National Projects by Suparna Bhaskaran (2004)

Made In India explores the making of "queer" and "heterosexual" consciousness and identities in light of economic privatization, global condom enterprises, sexuality-focused NGOs, the Bollywood-ization of beauty contests, and trans/national activism.

That's Revolting: Queer Strategies For Resisting Assimilation edited by Matilda Bernstein Sycamore (2008)

As the growing gay mainstream prioritises the attainment of straight privilege over all else, it drains queer identity of any meaning, relevance or cultural value.

How To Blow Up A Pipeline by Andreas Malm (2021)

Malm argues that sabotage is a logical form of climate activism, and criticizes both pacifism within the climate movement and "climate fatalism" outside it.

On Connection by Kae Tempest (2020)

On Connection is medicine for these wounded times.

Are Prisons Obsolete by Angela Y. Davies (2003)

If you know anything about Angela Davis—anti-racist activist, Marxist-feminist scholar—you know that her answer to the question posed in the title is "Yes." This is a short primer on the prison abolition movement

Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom by Derecka Purnell

This profound, urgent, beautiful, and necessary book is an invitation to imagine and organize for a less violent and more liberatory world.

Black Marxism by Cedric Johnson (1983)

Influenced by many African American and Black economists and radical thinkers of the 19th century, Robinson creates a historical-critical analysis of Marxism and the Eurocentric tradition from which it evolved. The book does not build from nor reiterate Marxist thought, but rather introduces racial analysis to the Marxist tradition.

The Transgender Issue: An Argument For Justice by Shon Faye (2021)

[Shon Faye] provides a compelling, wide-ranging analysis of trans lives from youth to old age, exploring work, family, housing, healthcare, the prison system and trans participation in the LGBTQ+ and feminist communities, in contemporary Britain and beyond.

Burn The Binary: selected writings on the politics of being trans, genderqueer, and non-binary by Riki Wilchins (2017)

This single volume offers a selection of Riki’s most penetrating and insightful pieces, as well as the best of two decades of Riki’s online columns for The Advocate never before collected, from "Where Have All the Butches Gone," to "Attack of the 6-Foot Intersex People"

ARTICLES

Assuming The Perspective Of The Ancestor by Claire Schwartz (2022)

Philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò on building constructive, future-oriented politics, at scale.

The Gender Binary Is A Tool For White Supremacy by Kravitz M (2020)

A brief history of gender expansiveness - and how colonialism slaughtered it

Meet Chris Smalls, the man who organized Amazon workers in New York By Anna Betts, Greg Jaffe, and Rachel Lerman (2022)

The fired worker and former rapper did what nobody else has done in the U.S.

The Nuclear Family Was A Mistake by David Brooks (2020)

The family structure we’ve held up as the cultural ideal for the past half century has been a catastrophe for many. It’s time to figure out better ways to live together.

Universal basic income seems to improve employment and well-being by Donna Lu (2020)

Extinction Isn’t the Worst That Can Happen by Kai Heron (2021)

"This brings us to the third problem with eschatological framings of the climate crisis: they overlook the fact that for many, the end of the world has already happened. In October last year, Nemonte Nenquimo, a Waorani woman, mother and leader, wrote a desperate letter to the western world reminding us that for Indigenous peoples, “the fires are raging still”."

MISC

Manifesto: An Aromantic Manifesto by yingchen and yingtong

free to read

their tumblr (with further resources)

Essay: I Dream Of Canteens by Rebecca May Johnson (2019)

There is a space for everyone. A space, a glass of water, and a plug socket.* Chairs and tables and cleaned toilets. So many chairs so that no one is without one.

Acceptance Speech (video and text): The National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters speech by Ursula Le Guin

Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope.

And here's a video to cleanse the soul: bell hooks: Transgression

bell hooks & Gloria Steinem at Eugene Lang College

[redheadedfailgirl]

Genuinely I think a lot of platitudes about passing and happiness post-transition are based on survivorship bias. We hold up the transition timelines of the people that managed to meet the cisgender baseline, photoshopped selfies of people who were already more than pretty enough, and tell people that 'hrt is magic' and a lot of people end up not passing, not meeting the bar for conventional attractiveness, and blaming themselves. The people that make it out are very much extraordinary examples, who probably should be celebrated and feel good about their progress, but aren't 100% of transitions.

I don't want people to think that they're doomed or it isn't possible, because it is. But it isn't universal. Some people aren't going to pass. Some people aren't going to be bombshells. And there has to be a way to reckon with that other than telling them to get ffs, try harder, and wait for hrt to work its magic. There has to be a way to make it feel okay for those people.

[lobelene]

“He’s not suspicious of his own investment in masculinity. It operates almost pre-reflexively here, and shamelessly, which is from the perspective of a transmasculine person with a deep and abiding suspicion of my own relationship to masculinity….kind of enviable, and also, kind of unbelievable.”

[gatheringbones]

[“In a 2019 tweet (since deleted), Twitter user Brooke wrote of ‘carving “trans” into every bone of my body so when they find my skeleton in two hundred years they don’t get too confused’. A reply parodied the response of an oblivious archaeologist: ‘We must be careful not to jump to conclusions about what these ancient carvings could have meant; This individual could have had a passion for mass transit, transcontinental travel, or a combination of poor spelling and a love of trance music’.

Every time I read jokes like this, I get a jolt of hurt and defensiveness: not all historians and academics are like that! I try so hard, every day, not to do the kind of history they’re talking about! And yet I can hardly blame these people for talking and writing the way they do. The fact is that the discipline of history is set up to erase queer lives, and particularly trans lives. We are expected to adhere to double standards of evidence, which encourage us to state with impunity that a historical figure was definitely cis, but to hedge with caveats the suggestion that they were maybe, possibly trans; to use phrases like ‘cross-dresser’ or ‘impersonator’ as if they’re neutral, and to write lengthy defences of ourselves if we decide to avoid them; to expect backlash from colleagues and reviewers if we choose to use any pronouns for a historical figure other than those associated with the gender they were assigned at birth; to say, like the caricatured archaeologist above, ‘We must be careful not to jump to conclusions’, even when the evidence for trans experience is actually abundantly conclusive. It hurts when people memeify the oblivious, transphobic ‘historian’, but it’s also not unfair of them to do it. History, while it may not perpetuate physical harm, still repeatedly enacts violence against trans lives in the past and the present. And it’s not the job of the communities we’ve hurt to give us the benefit of the doubt: it’s our job to convince them that historians can be different.

In this book, I’ve identified new ways, and new places, to look for trans history. I’ve argued for the presence of trans experience in histories of gender-nonconforming fashion; histories of gender-nonconforming performance; and histories of people taking on a social role that isn’t associated with the gender they were assigned at birth. I’ve shown that many trans histories are inextricable from histories of other experiences: the sexual, the intersex, the anti-patriarchal, the spiritual. I’ve argued both for acknowledging trans possibility in histories of widespread gender nonconformity that have previously been explained in other ways, and for understanding gendered histories on their own terms – including seeing them, where necessary, as both trans history and the history of other kinds of people and experiences.

In this last kind of history in particular, I’ve often been confronted by what writer and philosopher Hil Malatino (quoting fellow scholar Abram J. Lewis) calls the ‘irreducible alterity’ of people in the past: the fact that some histories of gender are not possible to map onto or relate to the way people experience gender today. Malatino characterises the acknowledgement of this ‘irreducible alterity’ as a form of care for those past people, an idea that speaks deeply to me. It struck me, when I first read it, how different this framing of ‘care’ was from the arguments historians more commonly make against describing people in the past as trans: that it is presentist, that it is anachronistic, that it inappropriately fixes past people in modern categories. These arguments have rarely seemed to me to come from a place of care for people in the past; instead their priority seems to be history or historiographical methodology as an abstract, faux-objective entity. Still more rarely do they seem to acknowledge the concurrent urgency of caring for people in the present: the people who are living now, experiencing and articulating their gender in manifold ways and drawing strength from the histories of people who have done the same. Might it not be possible to find ways of recognising the essential difference of people in the past – people who disrupted gender before we were trans – while simultaneously holding space for the feelings of identification with them held by people in the present, the people who are trans now?”]

kit heyam, from before we were trans: a new history of gender, 2022

[haveyoureadthistransbook]

Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad by Hil Malatino

goodreads

How the “bad feelings” of trans experience inform trans survival and flourishing Some days—or weeks, or months, or even years—being trans feels bad. Yet as Hil Malatino points out, there is little space for trans people to think through, let alone speak of, these bad feelings. Negative emotions are suspect because they unsettle narratives of acceptance or reinforce virulently phobic framings of trans as inauthentic and threatening.  In Side Affects , Malatino opens a new conversation about trans experience that acknowledges the reality of feeling fatigue, envy, burnout, numbness, and rage amid the ongoing onslaught of casual and structural transphobia in order to map the intricate emotional terrain of trans survival. Trans structures of feeling are frequently coded as negative on both sides of transition. Before transition, narratives are framed in terms of childhood trauma and being in the “wrong body.” Posttransition, trans individuals—especially trans people of color—are subject to unrelenting transantagonism. Yet trans individuals are discouraged from displaying or admitting to despondency or despair.  By moving these unloved feelings to the center of trans experience, Side Affects proposes an affective trans commons that exists outside political debates about inclusion. Acknowledging such powerful and elided feelings as anger and exhaustion, Malatino contends, is critical to motivating justice-oriented advocacy and organizing—and recalibrating new possibilities for survival and well-being.

Mod opinion: I haven't heard of this book before, but it sounds like a really interesting addition to trans studies and I'd like to check it out at some point.

[senkovi]

What hormone time does—and what related futural narratives of medicalized transition do, such as those that prioritize top or bottom surgery (or both) as the sine qua non of a 'completed' transition—is position biomedical intervention as necessary and fundamental to securing the future one desires, to achieving the promised moment of harmony between the felt and the perceived body. I want to push against this promissory narrative for a few different reasons. First, it encourages trans subjects to cathect hope for a more livable life to a for-profit medical industry that, too often, lacks empathy and sensitivity and treats trans subjects as a niche market rife for economic exploitation. This means that doctors become saviors, capable of enabling or disabling the possibility of a better future for trans subjects. It also means that the politics of access to forms of medical transition—which are simultaneously geographical, economic, racialized, and gendered, not to mention contingent on questions of employment, insurance, citizenship, and carceral status—aren’t significantly engaged, and those that experience compromised access are encouraged to understand this as tantamount to a foreclosed future.

Hil Malatino, Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad

[joanofarcisdead]

yeah ok i’m still thinking about frank iero

call him ataulfo the way i’m gonna suck his seed

[opencommunion]

"This new mode of sex intelligibility necessitated the eradication of the ‘true hermaphrodite’—that is, a conception of the hermaphrodite as possessing ‘both’ sexes, in a manner of corporeal simultaneity. This conception of hermaphroditism is reliant on what Anne Fausto-Sterling terms, citing early modern English jurist Sir Edward Coke, the doctrine of the ‘sex which prevaileth,’ a notion which, while testifying to the legal and juridical fixity of a two-gender system, nevertheless acknowledged a certain sexed co-presence in cases concerning hermaphrodites.

It is precisely this conception of sexed co-presence which is erased with the rise of the ‘pseudo-hermaphrodite’, which relegated hermaphroditic hybridity to the realm of the chimerical, claiming that behind the apparently mixed sexual attributes of hermaphrodites lay a ‘true’ sex, rather than a ‘prevailing’ or dominant one.

What ensued was the development of a variety of methodologies and experiments which aimed to find one absolute material determinant of sex and, thus, to discredit ‘true hermaphroditism’ (that is, an absolute, irreducible entwinement of ‘male’ and ‘female’ attributes in a subject) in order to reify and further congeal dominant cultural conceptions regarding the ‘truth’ of univocal sex."

Hil Malatino, "Situating Bio-Logic, Refiguring Sex: Intersexuality and Coloniality," in Critical Intersex ed. Morgan Holmes, 2009

[librarycards]

i have an intersex friend who's never met or spoken to another intersex person, and i was wondering if you had any recs on books or resources? i felt like you'd be the person to ask and anything would be helpful 🤍 also i hope you are doing well 🤍🤍🤍

disclaimer: i am not intersex, so take everything i recommend here with salt!

i also recommend looking to the resources @trans-axolotl has shared over the years; i have certainly availed myself of them with my own questions (especially while writing Failure to Comply, whose primary supporting character is intersex and for which I had to do a significant amount of reading).

Intersex speculative fiction author and editor Bogi Takács has a superb collection of lists on books of all genres with intersex characters and by intersex people. Rivers Solomon is a friend and intersex author of speculative fiction, and I particularly recommend faer book Sorrowland for intersex-related storylines!

In terms of scholarly sources, I'd recommend Emi Koyama's bibliography, as well as Hil Malatino's Queer Embodiment. These, as well as excerpts from Celeste Orr's Cripping Intersex (which I have not read in full).

More broadly, has your friend contacted/looked through the InterACT website? I know they have support groups and events/activities listed pretty regularly that your friend may be interested in!

[plumsilk]

from the very end of the intro to side affects, by hil malatino