#ineffable transgenderism

[overthefartingwall]

there's been something on my mind as a transmasc gomens fan and i'm not sure i can quite put into words what i'm trying to convey here so forgive anything that doesn't come off quite right... but there's something very transgender about aziraphale. i absolutely adore crowley's genderfluidity and i think it's portrayed really well in the show and i'm glad it's an aspect of the character that gets the love and attention it deserves from the fan base. but i also think there should be some acknowledgement of aziraphale's relationship to gender that i, personally, also think is worth noting and worth interpreting as queer in nature. i'm very aware that in canon angels and demons don't have the same concept of gender that humans do but that's precisely why i view aziraphale as trans in his own way. both aziraphale and crowley play with human concepts and activities routinely, and that's a large part of their characters. we see it with food, with clothes, with books and plants, with hobbies, etc., and we definitely see it in how crowley constantly plays with gender. but as for aziraphale, it tends to get overlooked because he consistently presents as male. but there's something very trans about that? that a being that isn't assigned any sex or gender familiarizes himself with human manhood and sees himself in it, chooses to participate in it over and over again, is a man even though that wasn't expected of him... idk it's obviously not the same thing as being assigned female at birth and then transitioning to male, but there is still a transition to male... this is such a long post for such a simple point does anybody understand what i'm getting at here

[skoople]

Frankenweenie: Transmutation as Transsexuality in Frankenstein

Gender Threshold

Victor Frankenstein’s creation, who will from here be referred to as Adam¹, experiences many of the struggles of an openly transgender person. In this reading, Frankenstein is a story about a transsexual body, and because it is a horror story, it is especially about the transphobia that the gendered individual undergoes. These struggles will be broken down into four main categories² as seen throughout the book. The first category is a pervasive self-loathing, which is a catalysed product of the second facet: social punishment, whether that punishment is disgust or rejection or alienation. The third facet is the medicalization of Adam’s body; a body created through obfuscated means, but presumably some surgery, which contributes to the fourth: a profound desexualization, which does not exclude but rather amplifies a sexual anxiety around his body and removes him from the right to companionship, physical closeness, and the ability to be loved.

This investigation will be using the term “transsexual” interchangeably with “transgender” for three reasons: first, it reaffirms the mutable nature of sexual characteristics; second, it emphasizes the medicalized experience of trans people; finally, the use of “transsexual” calls to mind the frightened cisgender projection of the boogey-trans³, and a descriptor for someone which has been socially determined as monstrous certainly holds relevance to Frankenstein. “Katrina Roen, in turn, clarifies that transgenderism is “a political positioning that draws from postmodern notions of fluidity (for both bodies and gender),” while transsexualism is “a state of being that assumes the preexistence of two sexes between which one may transition””(qtd. In Rodríguez-Salas 82). Roen’s criticism holds true for much of the social writing pertaining to a gendered experience; however, the purposes of this paper have more to do with a distorted, mythical perception of the gendered individual than with practical social reform.

Four Elements of Transphobia

Self-Loathing is a complex and personal aspect of any life, but holds special relevance to a transgender life. Air is an all-encompassing and inescapable element. It is the least material; the least quantifiable; air could be likened to gender dysphoria in its ineffability. As clouds or mist are formed by the water cycle, self image is merely an apparatus intended to extend the social perception into an internal affair. While forming a sense of identity and self-image, Adam lives in open-air lodging and is subject to the changing of the sky and the winds. “I sickened as I read,” he says. “Increase of knowledge only discovered to me what a wretched outcast I was” (Shelley 124, 125).

Social Punishment is an essential function of transphobia, and the one that occupies the widest variety of forms, much like the capricious element of Water. Binary and cisgendered concepts of sex and gender as immutable, essential, and dual-uniform can only survive through rigid self-policing and an acceptance of a certain portion of hypocrisy. Gender non-conforming and transgender people disrupt and expose the flaws in a hegemonic understanding of gender, and are thus swiftly punished and minimized to preserve order, which shakily remains at the expense of gender liberation and transgender lives. When Adam first sees his reflection in a pond, literally the self reflected in water, he despairs due to his understanding of the social reaction to a transsexual body. Similarly, his final condemnation to exile and suicide occurs on an icy sea, into dark and frozen water. The fluid social conventions give life to Victor in some contexts⁴, but cause Adam to drown beneath the waves.

Medicalization is a grounded, material aspect that is best represented by Earth. Presumptuous as it may be to intrude upon the clinical details of a person’s body, such a gaze is considered a prerequisite when the body in question is something considered to be anomalous. We as an audience to Frankenstein yearn for detail in Victor’s alchemical process, just as a talk show audience pokes and prods to know more about the guest’s plans for their own genitalia.

“The consciousness shaped by the transsexual body is no more the creation of the science that refigures its flesh than the monster’s mind is the creation of Frankenstein. The agenda that produced hormonal and surgical sex reassignment techniques is no less pretentious, and no more noble, than Frankenstein’s… hubristic desire to create life itself.” (Stryker 242).

Here, the endowment of life is likened here to a sex change⁵; the birth undergone by a transsexual body at the hand of doctors that commodify or pathologize their creations. When Victor thinks on the process of his creation, and when he begins to construct a companion for Adam, he goes to a lake or the coast of Scotland. In other words, he goes to where the water meets the earth, usually for isolation, a simulated social alienation of his own, to enact surgical processes aping a sex change. The earth near a body of water happens to be ideal conditions for clay, in a story subtitled “the modern Prometheus.” It is noteworthy that most cultural depictions of Frankenstein’s process involve him literally unearthing corpses from the grave to use as materials.

Desexualization is a presumed natural consequence of a body shaped by the medical or surgical realm. The transsexual body of Adam, is at once reviled and fetishized. “His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! … but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast” (Shelley 104). This simultaneous fetishization and revulsion is reiterated in Victor’s nightmare of Elizabeth undergoing the same putrefaction of his creation. Fire is classically representative of passion, and both Adam and Victor describe seeking a “warmth” from companionship. Adam in particular is fascinated and enticed by the embers of a fire, but is hurt when he attempts to get too close. He explains that he does not know how to recreate fire for himself, in the same conversation that he asks Victor for the option to seek companionship. Because of his aberrant body, his desires, his privacy, and his autonomy are not inherent rights, but conditional, to be granted or revoked at the whims of Victor’s cisgender authority.

Let us read a passage with these elements at play: “A flash of lightning illuminated the object… it was the wretch, the filthy dæmon, to whom I had given life.” (Shelley 102). In a synthesis of air and fire, accompanied by water, we see lightning literally illuminating Adam. In keeping with the elements outlined above, this is a burst of self and desire overwhelming the darkness of a social curtain and exposing the transgender individual in brief flashes of truth.

Gender Synthesis

Horror is essential to any transgender narrative where transphobia is present. In order to see the tragedy clearly, we must remark upon the cruelty with as much shock and condemnation as the gendered victim is regarded with through the eyes of transphobia. In Frankenstein especially, it is a tragedy of the potential lost to social victimization. Sonny Nordmarken writes about his experience undergoing hormone therapy and watching the way he is socially perceived shift: “As I continue to change shape, I am becoming more transsexed. My body is becoming more monstrous, but my monstrousness is becoming less outwardly obvious than it was before. I am becoming new betweenings.” (Nordmarken 39). This familiar⁶ acknowledgement of the monster-creature-self leads to a new lens on cisnormative society. Referring to Susan Stryker’s explosive performance essay My Words to Victor Frankenstein, Jolene Zigarovich claims that “transgender fury pushes her to speak her disidentification with gendered norms and to name ways to become differently legible in spite of those strictures” (Zigarovich 266). Forging a new language to fit her perspective is necessary, because she, like the creature, must express herself to live as a full being.

A transgender conclusion to monstrosity is not to deny the outrageous nature of a supposedly incorrect gendered body, but to advocate for more of the grotesquely beautiful. “The monster always represents the disruption of categories, the destruction of boundaries, and the presence of impurities and so we need monsters and we need to recognize and celebrate our own monstrosities,”(Halberstam 27) declares Jack Halberstam in Skin Shows, his 1995 book about the social and gender sensibilities of horror (both Gothic and modern). A rigid cisgender binary is clean and known and proper, and yet it does not fulfil anyone for a sense of identity in society. Therefore, in order to know and to enrich ourselves as individuals within the whole, we must turn to the hideous face of the truth and find what we can love in it. Our story does not need to be horror as long as someone is willing to take courage in the true self.

FOOTNOTES

This is for ease of reading and emphasis on personhood. The name “Adam” was chosen to allude to the biblical First Man; his first sin is knowledge. It is the creature’s independence that cements his fall from grace in the eyes of Victor Frankenstein. Adam does not express reverent gratitude, but instead begs for a companion to be shaped from his rib. Additionally, going by a simple, common name aids in making him feel familiar and relatable. Anecdotally, many of my transgender friends and acquaintances have names from the beginning of the alphabet. Usually the reason for this is that they sorted through a baby names list in alphabetical order.

This is a somewhat simplified depiction of transphobia

The phrase “boogey-trans” is my own invention, as a tongue-in-cheek descriptor of transphobic caricatures historically demonized in popular culture. Examples of the boogey-trans include, of course, Buffalo Bill, along with the antagonist Ray Finkle of Ace Ventura, and Frank N. Furter of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. While it is an accepted reality among transgender writers and media critics, it lacks a shorthand; I have devised my own to maintain flow and clarity.

For example, he is revived by the ministrations of Henry Clerval; his wellbeing is dependent on the social connections he spurns for the sake of convenience.

Although sex change typically refers to a surgical procedure (especially vaginoplasty or phalloplasty), it is used in this essay as a catch-all term for medical transition, whether surgical or hormonal.

It is a familiar sentiment to most people who have medically transitioned.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Halberstam, Jack. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Duke University Press Books, 1995.

Nordmarken, Sonny. “Becoming Ever More Monstrous: Feeling Transgender In-Betweenness.” Qualitative Inquiry, vol. 20, no. 1, 2014, pp. 37-50.

Rodríguez-Salas, Gerardo. “Frankenstein’s Creature’s Self-Portrait: Transgender Politics in =Man Into Woman and The Danish Girl.” Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies, vol. 44, no. 1, 2022, pp. 74-91.

Stryker, Susan. “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage.” GLQ, vol. 1, 1994, pp. 237-254.

Zigarovich, Jolene. “The Trans Legacy of Frankenstein.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 45, no. 2, July 2018, pp. 260-272.9

[transgenderer]

ok students, the book we're using for this class is introduction to winningology by summer transgenderer,

i think if one were to write a treatise, or an explainer, or whatever, on Winning, it would have to take the form of a series of questions and answers, like, "is this winning? yes, because..." or "no, because...". its hard to compress! its ineffable!

[theresgloryforyou]

The furor over the “bathroom bill” in North Carolina has given the trans movement the perfect kindling to continue fostering their campaign of nationwide acceptance. It has also sparked a semi-hysterical “transphobic” backlash of self-righteous traditionalists.

I do not consider myself in either camp. I approach this topic with a wrenching awareness of what it feels like to be disconnected from your body, to hate with every fiber of your being the way you look in the mirror, and to be willing to undergo great feats of self-mutilation to achieve a vision that is always just out of grasp. My perspective on the matter, however, probably would not go over well among most LGBTQ individuals. As a person who has struggled with anorexia nervosa since puberty, the transgender anguish resonates with me. The similarities between the two illnesses are striking. Yet one is an identity, and the other is a disorder. Why?

At the heart of gender dysphoria is a paradoxical desire to be characterized as something one simultaneously declares is ineffable (i.e. gender roles are illusory cultural constructs, but I yearn to concretely embody that illusion). The contradictory desire in transgenderism is similar in hopelessness as the desire in anorexia. The goal is to be thin, and one is never thin enough until one is dead. The goal is to be a sex other than one’s biological makeup, and one cannot alter one’s chromosomes and genetic makeup.

If a man wants to wear makeup, dresses, even get breast implants, who are we to stop him? If he wants to legally change his name to Maureen, great! But language policing, the implication that by misusing a pronoun we are savaging a person’s very core, is untenable. Using “he” instead of “she” may very well hurt someone’s feelings, but that is a level of sensitivity on par with agoraphobia (fear of crowded or enclosed public spaces). The onus is on the person to find ways of coping. The world cannot be responsible for validating a confusing, opaque issue that has been too quickly transferred from “disorder” to “condition,” from irrational to heroic.

An All-Consuming Desire to Alter One’s Self

Advocates insist that gender dysphoria is not a pathology. The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) describes a disorder as “a description of something with which a person might struggle, not a description of the person or the person’s identity.” This is an absurd string of verbiage. A person’s identity is not his or her biological sex. That is part of a person’s identity.

However, many individuals with gender dysphoria feel they must try to change their outward appearance to match this inner ideal. Due to the physiological makeup of the human body, however, this attempt is often a mighty undertaking. One may even go so far as to say it’s a struggle. The intensity of this all-consuming desire to alter one’s self is what I find most similar to my own illness. We cannot rest until the outside matches the inside.

Many individuals with eating disorders assume an identity centered completely on that disorder. According to an article on the Social Issues Research Centre website, pro-anorexia websites espouse starvation as “the right lifestyle choice for them, and will allow them to achieve happiness and perfection.” Imagine if someone with crippling obsessive-compulsive disorder about germs could impose his beliefs. We’d be obligated to all carry gloves and wear face masks.

The same could be said for a chronically depressed exhibitionist. Accommodation and what is essentially encouraging a delusion is bound to “improve” the life of an individual who has felt like an alien in her own body for years. Unfortunately social support will never change the basic biological facts. Clinging to an illusion does not make a person crazy, marginalized, or inferior. It makes him human.

Remember Your Descartes? Feelings Aren’t Reliable

We cannot rely on our “feelings,” as strong as they are. If I relied on my feelings, I’d be dead. Why? Because my feelings tell me that eating food means gaining weight, and gaining weight is intolerable. Transgender children are apparently absolutely sure they were born in the wrong body. It is a belief held so deeply that we throw out all the entrenched knowledge of psychology and mental illness to appease it.

People with anorexia can often trace their discomfort with their own bodies back to early childhood, as well. Both situations are abstract feelings that clearly contradict reality. The certainty that one is a woman despite being born a man sounds awfully similar to the conviction that one’s body is overweight even when body-mass index is at starvation levels. The feeling of hunger—the most primal, ingrained of physiological response—impels the individual to abstain. Can you question the depth of that belief?

No one with any understanding of the matter is denying that a mismatch exists between the person’s brain and her body. The approach to “wellness” however, is hopelessly backward. The brain is the component of this puzzle with the capacity for immense plasticity. Noninvasive reconditioning occurs every day. The body is the factor that is hardest to alter in any meaningful way. So why are sex-reassignment surgeries the gold-standard treatment method in gender dysphoria literature? Why is such a drastic, violent procedure championed so fiercely?

The question is not whether someone’s identity should be validated, but whether the validation should accompany an attempt to fabricate an impossible artifice. If a man feels he is a woman on the inside, this begs the question: What is a woman? The unswervingly nebulous explanations that abound in defense of transgender rights echo the desperate bravado of the pro-ana crowd.

Adults have the right to dress, act, and live however they damn well please. But the swiftness with which the transgender “condition” has been accepted as mentally healthy is unfair to both the public at large and the individuals themselves. There are no 100 percent effective treatments for anorexia nervosa, but that doesn’t mean that’s how my mind is supposed to work and I should embrace it. The same should apply to gender dysphoria.

Moira Fleming is a writer and social worker currently pursuing her MSW at West Chester University.