Faster-than-light Transness
Transness, when separated from the existential positions of the transphobic and transgender, means the condition of being trans, such as someone who identifies with the label of transgender or expresses its essence in form through presentations of artwork, poetry, or fashion. What is this “essence”? Is it to find an excuse to be a victim, as some have accused? It is true that trans people are victimized, but the self-recognition of transness is the opposite of “playing the victim card." A different card is played—so to speak, the escape from victimhood card. If we’re continuing to play cards, then trans people have flipped the board and decided to play with their own hands. Flipping the board here doesn’t mean some euphemism for "naïve rebellion,” but active rebellion. The essence of transness is active rebellion. This is why it is otherized from cis-society as a monster on a rampage, a freak show, a robot gone wrong, or a zombie virus. What mad science created you?, the bigot says. My own, the trans person response. Between the freaks and the circus managers, always be the freak.
To be trans is to be outside and thus made into an alien from the gendered and gendering of birth status. Severing ties with domestic origins and reaching for the unknown. Transness is decoupling, disassembling, and hungry in this way. It is hungry in that it desires expansion from the outside. When society doesn’t offer certain complexities of the soul, it reaches through itself and comes out the opposite end, like a wormhole through culture. Wormholes, as theorized, fold time-space in order for someone to pass through from one end to another at faster-than-light travel. Passing great distances in less than a blink of an eye and allowing people to instantly travel between unknown, previously unavailable, and known spaces without having to move directly between the points.
Trans people are then searching for the othering of life from outside of itself in order to become. This "transition," although initially liminal, ends with the completion of a makeshift rite of passage. Where the rites are not ordained by the present but by the future, and the passage is not prepared by dictation but projected by self-consciousness. This process is infectious, explosive, and reality-bending. Is Being saying that transness is a type of time-traveling virus bomb? Nobody but a pansexual Martian would know such things.
As the pictures above show, transness causes the disruption of cis culture by forcing it to move faster than previously thought possible and allowable. This acceleration of cultural speed produces the destruction of the cis. The result is transness finally being able to move freely through the universe without the constraints imposed by cis time and its box.
“Trans people are a virus!” the virgin bigot says. The chad trans replies, “Yes.”
Transness then works as a source of solidity for trans people (which came from a detachment from cis-origins, causing liquification that was then resynthesized into a trans-solid) to provide existential grounding and to close a sense of homelessness. The validation of transness comes from this alien knowing and affirming it beyond the skies. This requires a new society to emerge. Preexisting cis-societies cannot "validate,” but only pretend to in order to fit trans people back into the fold. This expands the “cis box” in order to try and prevent disaster.
You’re not cis; you’re trans. To announce this affirmation to trans people is to announce that they have a place in your society. Denying this point of existence is dangerous. “You’re cis, not trans," the transphobe utters, denying not merely self-described identity but more a point, a home, a condition of closure. However, validation cannot merely be vocal; it must also be active. Turning trans people into consumers in capitalist society is to remake trans people as victims, but this time the victimization comes with a smile and a human-resources image. The slogan here, “You’re trans, now back to work,” isn’t as accepting when said outright.
When free people are not the pursuers of their own liberatory destinies, they’re servants to someone else's time, a history where they’re denied subjectivity. The slave fields made African-Americans victims of the whims of a white man’s history. Only when they took up arms and fought back did they start to affirm their own. In order to destroy white history, the essence of which is the subjugation of “nonwhites” as objects, the “nonwhites” must rediscover their own subjectivity and propel themselves forward. In a similar formula, trans people must destroy cis history in order to start their own.
The collision event, however, will mean that cis history won’t go without a fight. The transphobes view transness as a source of liquidity, to provide existential fallout, to open the floors beneath someone’s home. What is a source of comfort for the trans person is seen as a source of social alienation for the transphobe. The goal of this transphobic solidity is to remove the recognition of transness (societies that ban trans people still have trans people; they’re just forced into hiding this identity to survive) and bring ultimate alienation to the trans person. This means turning transness into a dead rebellion, a forgotten relic, or an object without flame. It’s hard for transphobes to really pull this off. What started transness in the first place was simply someone's recognition that their genedered origins weren't their own. If you think about it, trans people are inevitable in this way. “Why don’t you identify with the gender your parents gave you?” asked the curious. “Because the outside is calling, and something deeper within me picked up the phone than even this society or I even knew about,” responds the trans person.
It’s always good to remember that a point of closure for someone is a point of ambiguity for another. In this way, trans people are a threat to transphobes, but that to Being is a good thing. Be a threat to white history, be a threat to cis history, and end the history of hierarchy. Only then can a new history of freedom begin.