Nothing against the sky now, no stains show
Of smoke. We’re done. Only a few work on,
Against time now – working to end your time.— Valentine Ackland, ‘Communist Poem, 1935’ [1]
It kinda stumbled upon me. I have been sorta out of my mind lately, in whatever sense you want to take that. Already reeling from frustration and disappointment with some local organising going years back now, I have been working seemingly endless early morning shifts at a job I hate, swarmed by post-lockdown crowds. And my sense of time isn’t that strong at the best of times. So I was in bed after yet another shift, reading distractedly or maybe checking Blaseball, when on Saturday (17.04.2021), I realised that it was my one year anniversary of starting hormones.
Part of me felt as if I should mark the occasion, though I couldn’t say why. Though I can understand some people may want to document what can be a very abstract process, to me the anniversary only seemed to drive home the abstraction of it. The past year has mostly been spent totally unaware of my hormones, or suddenly trying on a certain top one day and realising there is a small shelf on my chest now, or anxiously prodding that same chest flesh wondering when all this promised progress will materialise. My hair has grown too long for me to compare my face to photos from a year ago. Whilst I don’t deny sometimes wanting a narrative for this experience (I want all sorts of things) I am too cynical to expect one to arrive any time soon.
I am also cynical about where this impulse overlaps with the impulses of cis people watching at home. When I told my mother I was a woman, one of the first things she asked was whether I knew I was a girl when I was a child. I barely remember being a child in the first place. But I think she needed some points of reference in which to anchor her shock. She needed the fragments of my life that I have, and that I have learnt to live with as best I can, to assume a shape she recognises.
Jules Gill-Peterson has argued that the early 20th century medical establishment was drawn to the plasticity of white trans childhood, to the possibility that this bodily indeterminacy could become a controlled change, an evolution, representing new avenues for the eugenic perfection of mankind. Whilst this was, of course, a form of violence, it still promised a ‘normal’ life to those white children subjected to it. Similarly the contemporary GIC system demands that transsexuals become productive members of society ”in accordance with” their gender identity. In this way, the state and the medical establishment made possible a form of development, a narrative, for trans people - one that sutures gender transition to whiteness and to capitalist accumulation.
As ever, the wheels of progress are greased with blood. When John Hopkins Hospital staff abducted Black people to experiment on as research for these eugenic projects, it wasn’t with the hope of eventually making them productive. Normativity also wasn’t the goal of the incarceration of Black trans children as insane, ongoing then and now.
As I rode the bus to work the past few weeks, the sun barely rising, shining blood red in the glass of the city’s numerous new office towers, my mind returned repeatedly to a passage from Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History.
Not man or men but the struggling, oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge. In Marx it appears as the last enslaved class, as the avenger that completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden. This conviction which had a brief resurgence in the Spartacist group, has always been objectionable to Social Democrats. Within three decades they managed virtually to erase the name of Blanqui, though it had been the rallying sound that had reverberated through the preceding century. Social Democracy thought fit to assign to the working class the role of the redeemer of future generations, in this way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength. This training made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren. [2]
In my mental state at the time, I could not see the daily crowds wandering through and past my shop as anything but reminders of the eugenic mass death event we are watching unfold almost unremarked upon - itself, simply another instance of five hundred years of conquest, slavery, and capitalist accumulation. It is hard to remain a productive worker, let alone fabricate and maintain a clear narrative of a personal gender journey, with that scale of violence breathing down your neck
Benjamin also notes the valorisation of productivity or work as another fatal flaw of German Social Democracy. Observed by contemporaries to be not entirely a normatively-male normatively-heterosexual, Benjamin, like many German Marxists of the time, spend some time staying at Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in the 1920s, thus allowing him plenty of experience of the strictures of gender role, eugenic development, and productivity Hirschfeld’s transvestites were subjected to in order to access treatment. In spite of this, Berlin’s trans subcultures continued to survive, flourish, and die, lumpenproletariat exchanging sex and their sex, their lives and movements exceeding the developmental paradigms of medicine, social democracy, and the State that both answered to.
I don’t deny anyone the satisfaction of a transition timeline, a way of charting our goals, a way to seek what we desire, desperately. I simply seek to explain my own detachment from my own timeline. “Not man or men but the struggling, oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge.” I take my hormones, need to take them, as one site of a complex set of conflicts and kinships between myself, a world torn between empires and their underbellies, and a body that will not respond to hopes, expectations, or commands from any of us. There is no teleology I can appeal to that satisfactorily resolves this. I will settle instead for remembrance of the dead, not a witnessing of ideal victimhood,[3] but a practice of returning to the depository of knowledge Benjamin names, as to a communal assembly still rife with conflict - the real movement that abolishes the present state of things.
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[1] Journey from Winter: Selected Poems, (Carcarnet Press 2008) p. 116. Valentine was a trans poet and a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain from the early 30s until (if I recall correctly) the end of the Second World War. I hope to write about him more for this newsletter at a later date.
[2] Illuminations, (Schocken Books 2007) p. 260. Benjamin’s remembrance might share the ambivalence and violence of Gill-Peterson’s plasticity, in which Black death is transformed into white hope, a transformation made possible by differing valuations of a shared bodily indeterminacy. Benjamin’s reference to an “enslaved class” sits between a Jewish remembrance of the exodus out of Egypt and European Communism’s tendency to elide the distinction between wage labour of the white worker and enslavement of Black people as chattel. (Cf. Frank Wilderson III, ‘Blacks and the Master/Slave Relation’, p. 17.) J. Lorand Matory and James Baldwin have written eloquently, if very differently, about some of these ambivalences between Jewish disidentifications from and appeals to Euro-America, Whiteness, Blackness, and Africa.
[3] See this paper by Sarah Lamble, on Trans Day of Remembrance, racialised violence, and white innocence.