On Cis People

& the labour of legibility

Cis people who don’t have trans friends frighten me. Cis people who want trans people to be more cis are worse. Cis people who want trans people to perform cisness are unforgivable. Cis people who have trans friends and are still normative are losers trying to signal to other cis people that they are one of the good ones. You’re not.

Cis people who only have one trans friend and use them in every argument. Cis people who say I don’t even think of you as trans, as if that is the compliment. Cis people who congratulate themselves for the pronoun. Cis people who go quiet when the gender critical aunt starts up at the dinner. Cis people who say let’s hear both sides. Cis people who treat the question of whether I exist as a debate they can sit out. Cis people who consume drag, consume the dolls, consume the aesthetic, and disappear when one of us dies. Cis people who require us to educate them, then resent the education. Cis people who require us to be calm, then read our calm as cold. Cis people who require us to be soft, then read our softness as begging. Cis people who require us to be legible—to themselves, family, editors—and then explain, kindly, that we are still not legible enough.

Cis people who fetishise. Cis people who chase. Cis people who tell you they are an ally on the dating app and ghost when you say what you want. Cis women who critique another woman’s surgery at the dinner table while you sit there with yours. Cis women who think their oppression cancels yours. Cis women who write we and mean not you. Cis men who confuse you for a fantasy. Cis men who confuse the fantasy for a politics. Cis editors who say house style. Cis editors who say legibility. Cis editors who add the words you would not have written and call you ungrateful for raising concerns.

I have been hurt by cis people and their normative perspectives my whole life. It’s in the texture of every room I have ever walked into. Their innocence has cost me, daily, in time and love and peace and joy and I’m fed up.

I’m over it. Ya’ll are fucking freaks. Fuck off.

*

The reason I cannot be cis is not the reason cis people might imagine. They imagine that the reason is my body, that I cannot pass into cis womanhood because the body refuses to be passed into, that the throat or the hairline or the wrist betrays me in some way, that the obstacle is technical and could in principle be addressed through better surgery or better hormones or better luck. My body is not the reason. My body is, on the contrary, a face I love, beautiful tits, and a cute stomach I had to fight for, and that I admire in the mirror with a kind of astonishment most mornings. I’m really grateful and happy about who I am and what I have become.

The reason I cannot be cis is that I came out of the conditions of my own production, as anyone does, and the conditions were: queer transsexual. There is no cis person inside me waiting to be released or exorcised into palatability. There never was, there never will be. The fantasy that there might have been is a cis myth, and like most cis fables it has been projected onto trans women so often and at such volume that we have been required, in order to remain employed and housed and in possession of our friendships, to act as if it were our own and true.

Sandy Stone, in 1987, in a manifesto written in furious response to a book that had described trans women as rapists and frauds, argued that the demand to pass was a demand to silence the voice that had been struggling, against considerable medical and cultural odds, to learn how to speak in the first place. Which hits so hard. To pass, Stone argued, was to enter cis womanhood through the back door of indistinguishability and, having entered, to pull the door shut behind one; to refuse to speak as the person one had been before passing, in case the speech should give one away. God forbid. Stone called the refusal of this demand the posttranssexual position. Sadly, she wrote the manifesto thirty-nine years ago. Sad because: the argument has not aged, a timeless little treacle. Hooray. The only thing new is that it has, on the contrary, become more urgent, because the contemporary culture we live in is invested more in our disappearance than it was in the 1980s, more than anyone could plausibly have imagined then.

I think about Stone when I am told, as I am told weekly, in some form or another, that I would be more legible if I were less particular, strange, odd. I think this advice is offered with care, from well meaning people who have no material reality or stake in my wellbeing. It’s something along the lines of, very subtly, being asked to be a smaller version of myself so that I will be more easily received or to make whoever I am with more comfortable. Though what I have found is that, once I am a tiny little tranny, that structure of a self (myself) becomes the version against which all subsequent versions of me are measured. It’s taken as the real me, which is such a deviation of my actual confident and beautiful personality. If I am to reach for a smaller baseline, becoming and constructing a more acceptable version, it would mean the complete and utter annihilation of myself; the moment of my self-erasure. Get fucked.

*

I went to a dinner with a bunch of cis-gals a while ago. We were eating a salad with pomegranate seeds and feta. Someone had brought a cake from a Turkish bakery down the street. It was cute.

The conversation turned, as conversations among cis women so often do when there is no man in the room (we love a cheeky goss hun) to the question of another woman’s face. One of the girls encouraged another to search for a picture of some famous woman online, and once it was pulled up in seconds, she started presenting and pointing at the botox sites on her face: we looked at the brow, the temples, the perioral lines and the lips, zooming in with excruciating detail. Some of the women were really cruel, which I think is a response to having grown up victim to the same scrutiny they were now applying to this woman’s face. But I was mostly surprised at how virtuosic they were, as if they themselves had never been the object of such enumeration. What I found even more disarming was that some of these women, who I really love, did not really consider, in that moment, to look at my face, which is also a face that has been surgically altered, in fact quite drastically; a face that, to be honest, has become a bit of a record of my own survival.

I sat still, stuffing my mouth full of pomegranate. I think they didn’t really include me in the conversation because 1: I was honestly struggling to offer anything, but also because 2: they knew it was a dissection and that if they motioned for my opinion I would hold them accountable for being, in that moment, really ugly. The irony was that a few of the girls in the room had work done too. I didn’t get why they were so enthusiastic to slate another woman. Real girls-girls, eek!

I waited for the conversation to end, though it took a while. I bit my tongue for the rest of the evening and excused myself at the end of cake. I walked to the high street and stood at the bus stop, watching cars pass by, feeling like I was going to vomit. When I got home, I crashed out on my bed without taking off my boots. I don’t really remember sleeping.

I have thought about that dinner since and the thing I have come to is this: those ladies are my friends, I love them. But what I have had to learn is that the structure I am living inside—that being the oppression of trans women—is not only held in place by cis strangers, or by cis enemies, or by the gender critical within public discourse, but also by the cis people who love me, who would say if asked that they love me, who do in fact love me, and who do not understand, because they have never been required to understand, that their love costs them nothing and can sometimes cost me a great deal.

It’s not always visible to them, I realise I have a responsibility in holding them accountable, to poke an elbow into their ribs and say: hey, you’re being shit. But if I’m constantly having to do that work, what do I become? What does that make me? Things are constructed in such a way as to not be visible to them, they are constantly protected. But should that mean my work and life as a trans person is to be subservient to the cycles of educating them when they have shit behaviour? Again, fucking forget about it.

*

Baldwin’s argument about whiteness, the argument he made and remade across four decades of essays and letters and televised interviews and pieces written for magazines that were paying him less than he was worth, was that whiteness depended on a certain innocence, and that the innocence depended, in turn, on the maintenance of a not-knowing which was itself a form of work. Chew on it.

The white American, Baldwin argued, did not know what had been done in their name. This, as we know, is not accidental; in fact the ignorance is a way of structurally erasing; is a position; is the thing that separates and shields white Americans (in a political-historical sense, which Baldwin was interested in) because to fully know what had been done in one’s name would have been to lose access to the position from which the ignorance could be performed. Which is to say, was the position of being white; further, being an ignorant fuck was, and very much still is, violent.

The version of Baldwin that is in current circulation, who is the inspirational Baldwin in a gif, with a pull-quote, has been smoothed for cis liberal consumption in much the same way that trans writing has been smoothed at the level of the line. The Baldwin I read is a more difficult writer than that. The Baldwin I read makes a claim that is not, in fact, easy to live with, which is the claim that there is no innocent position from which white people can encounter Blackness, and that the demand for an innocent position is itself the form the violence takes when it presents itself as goodwill. To require an innocent position is to request, structurally, that the pain continue to be paid by someone else. I appreciate that Baldwin didn’t spend his life succumbing to the softening of this, at whatever cost it demanded.

Cisness, I want to argue—respectfully, aware of the divergences, slippages, convergences between the historical specificities between transness and Blackness, and the experiences of those who offer such vivid insight of living with/in both identities—is structured by a comparable innocence. The cis person, in the present, does not know what is being done in their name. This is performed daily, at considerable rhetorical and emotional expense, by cis people for whom the ignorance is the precondition of their ability to continue moving through the world as if they were not implicated in the violence being legislated, currently, in parliaments. The thing I find most disgusting, and humouring if you catch me in the right mood is: if a cis person was to lose access to their vile ignorance, it would mean they would have to give up access to a position of cis comfort entirely. Meaning, they wouldn’t be able to attend a dinner and discuss another woman’s face and not feel oneself implicated in the long history of which the discussion is gross and pathetic.

*

Jules Gill-Peterson, in her short and devastating book A Short History of Trans Misogyny, makes an argument I would like, however briefly, to retail. Trans misogyny, Gill-Peterson argues, is not a derivative compound of transphobia and misogyny. It is not the sum of two adjacent prejudices. It is its own political formation, with its own history; colonial and racial. This history runs through nineteenth-century vagrancy laws that criminalised gender non-conformity on the public street, through the policing of feminised people of colour in twentieth-century American cities, the medical pathologisation of effeminacy, to the second-wave trans-exlusionary feminisms (stinky terf cunts) that organised in the 1970s—Janice Raymond, Mary Daly, Sheila Jeffreys—to slice trans women out of the category of woman as a feminist achievement.

The current British gender critical movement, which secured in April of last year a unanimous Supreme Court ruling that the word woman in our Equality Act refers, for the purposes of the Act, to biological sex assigned at birth is the most recent iteration of a political formation that has been refining itself, with serious institutional patience, for the better part of two hundred years.

Within days of the Supreme Court ruling, the Equality and Human Rights Commission—the body whose remit is the protection of minorities under the very Act being narrowed—issued interim guidance advising that trans women should not be permitted in single-sex women's facilities, by which they meant in toilets, changing rooms, hospital wards, gyms, leisure centres, schools, and so on. This guidance has been challenged in courts, yet in February of this year the High Court ruled it lawful.

Three months later, in May, the EHRC published a draft Code of Practice that extended the principle further; that authorised, in effect, the policing of single-sex spaces on the basis of appearance, by which is meant that any woman whose face or voice or gait or hairline departs, in any direction, from the security guard's (or anyone’s really) mental image of a woman can now, with the law behind her interrogators, be asked at the entrance to essential spaces whether she is a woman. The guidance will acutely force trans women out of public spaces and anyone, quite frankly, who deviates from a normative femininity that the law has now licensed everyone to enforce.

What is new, in the present, is not the structure. What is new is the way the structure has succeeded, in the last five years, in making its argument respectable. It’s everywhere: all over the radio, signed into law not just here but forcefully everywhere, legible in the editorial of newspapers and magazines whose editors I have, in some cases, met. The argument has been laundered, through the patient labour of foundations and lobbyists and self-described feminists, into a position that can be held by reasonable people at dinner parties without those people feeling themselves to be participating in a political project whose endpoint is the elimination of trans women from public life. This is sadly where we’re at.

*

I have worked with two publications recently who have tried to rewrite my voice. I was really vocal about it on my Instagram stories a week ago, that I had found words in a piece, authored by me, that I had not written. It was a critical piece about trans and queer making, the colloquial and canonical use and understanding of the word dolls for an exhibition, and some of the additions were argumentative moves that were poorly phrased and attributed to me. I really hated finding these.

When I queried the changes, I was told the original had not been house style enough. When I queried what house style meant in this instance, seeing as I had worked with them before and been praised for how beautiful the writing was, for a piece I had been commissioned to write because of the particularity of my voice, I was told that house style was under the discretion of the editors and that they retain the right to make all changes before publishing; without the collaboration of the author, in this case me, to approve of anything changed.

I am sometimes asked, by people who would like me to be larger about this, why such a seemingly small incident sends me off the deep end. It’s because it’s not accidental and it’s so fucking formulaic; this is what people believe a normal cis editorial relation to be with a trans writer: commission the trans voice for the trans particularity and visibility and inclusion; subdue the trans nuances at the level of the line; deliver the resulting product as evidence of the publication’s commitment to trans voices; decline to be questioned about the gap between the two, a process excluding the voice it aims to embolden. It’s essential for things to stay this way too as there is a financial responsibility interwoven, that being the publication can advertise their inclusiveness in producing work from trans people, though in the process of editing can remove or alter their voice so distinctly as to not ruffle the feathers of donors, advertisers, whoever the money is coming from, so that they can continue producing the same placid publication they did before hiring us. My response to this is, if the house style is so important, don’t hire me unless you want to collaborate with me.

Susan Stryker, in My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage, addresses the medical establishment as Frankenstein and addresses herself, the trans woman speaking from inside the medicalised body, as the monster Frankenstein made and then disavowed. The monster has things to say to its creator. The monster’s rage, Stryker insists, is not a failure of self-regulation, but is instead the only adequate response to having been brought into being by people who, having brought one into being, refused to recognise what they had made. I am a transsexual, and therefore I am a monster, she wrote. To me this sentence feels like one of the most generative sentences we have in the trans canon because it refuses the demand to perform a kind of simplicity for the comfort of the people whose peace has been built on the monster’s (my) silence. The alternative is a fucking trap if I have ever seen one!

Boo!

*

I want to talk about the unspoken labour of being trans. Hil Malatino, in Side Affects, calls some of it affective labour and some of it care work and some of it simply getting through. This type of labour, Malatino argues, is of producing one’s own affect, in cis rooms, in a texture that the cis room can metabolise; further meaning the trans woman must monitor her own face, voice, gestures, laughter, readiness to weep, in order to ensure that none of these modes exceeds, at any given moment, the bandwidth of the cis people present. What I find most disturbing is that this labour has to be performed even when the trans woman is, in her body, exhausted or grieving. More so, the cessation of this produces, in the cis room, a kind of social emergency for which the trans woman will be held responsible, regardless of her stated reasons.

Malatino’s argument, against this, is that the negative affects of trans life—the rage, fatigue, dysphoria, envy, melancholy—are not pathological. They are not symptoms of insufficient self-care or deficits to be remediated through better breath-work and a more curated Instagram and a meditation app subsidised by one’s employer. They are appropriate responses to the political conditions that produce them, and the demand that we manage them, individually and silently, is a demand to privatise what is in fact a structural problem. To translate one’s own experience, constantly, into terms the surrounding population can accept without choking, to me, feels diabolical.

Dr. Joy James (who I interviewed for Issue 7 of Worms Magazine) has written for many years about what she calls the captive maternal: the conscripted labour of producing care for systems that consume a person. James’s work is rooted in Black feminism (not the bell hooks kind, I suggest reading her critical take on hooks, I personally loved it) and is not directly addressed to trans politics, though I am aware from our conversation it is submerged in her work. As such, the analogy that I draw here, carefully still, is to do with the level of structure. Hear me out: the trans woman in the cis room performs the captive maternal labour of producing the room’s good behaviour by being patient with its bad behaviour. This care work is then extracted, described as a kind of inclusion. If you’re a bad trans woman who refuses the labour, you are described as difficult. If you’re a good trans woman who performs and is attentive to caring for long enough, you develop what Malatino describes as side affects: you get tired, this state of tiredness becomes a deep settled fatigue, it produces a kind of permanent flicker behind the eyes that the cis people in your life will sometimes notice, in passing, and ask about, though you will say, when asked, that you are fine, knowing well enough that you are not at all. You crumble, buckle under the pressure of more than you can hold…

*

David Wojnarowicz wrote in Close to the Knives, during the height of the AIDS epidemic, that he wished he could take the bodies of his dead friends and lay them on the steps of the people who had refused to act. He wished, he wrote, to do this as performance, to make the bodies of the dead visible. He wrote in fury and grief, through prose that has not, in my lifetime of reading, been matched because the conditions that produced his prose have not been the starting points for most writers; the rage in it is the despair of someone who has decided that the language of polite explanation is no longer available to him.

I guess… I am thinking about Wojnarowicz now because the present rhymes, in ways that should not need to be argued for, with the present he was describing. There is a population of trans women currently dying at a rate the state has decided not to intervene in. This population of intelligent, careful, thoughtful trans women, my sisters, are being harassed by the state with its disinterest in creating a strategy that would save them. The opposite is harrowingly true, they rather us die. That we have to ensure this level of legislative discrimination, and play nice around a dinner table, is really destabilising. The cis people I am being asked to be patient with, in this present, are the cis people who perpetuate the problem and are voting in the elections that are producing and upholding these strategies. Right in front of my salad.

I am interested in the material consequences of the law, which are that I am, by act of court, no longer a woman in the eyes of the state in which I live and work and pay tax and have built every adult relationship of my life. The state has now, formally, on the books, removed me from the category whose conditions I have spent my adulthood inhabiting. This is the current moment, a political time in which I am being asked, by certain cis acquaintances and by certain cis editors, to recognise that the discourse has become heated and that we should all, perhaps, try to lower the temperature.

*

There is a temptation, in essays of this kind, to turn the prose, near the end, toward a horizon; to redeem the damage, the part of the essay where the writer permits the reader to feel that the reading has been worth the time. I am suspicious of that turn in my own writing and in the writing of others, because I think it perpetuates (almost always) the infantilisation of trans futurity that has been used, for the entirety of my lifetime and my ancestors before me, to defer the question of trans liveability into a future I am not certain I will live to see.

José Esteban Muñoz wrote a book about queer futurity that I have read a lot, and the book has been deployed, in the years since his death in 2013, by a great many readers who would like trans women to wait. In some reviews I have reviewed, the book has been read as an argument for patience, and has been pulled from to suggest that the not-yet is coming, that we must build it together, that the building is, by implication, slow. I want to say, if I can be so blunt, that I don’t think this what Muñoz argued.

To me, Muñoz argued that the not-yet was a present-tense condition. The not-yet, in his account, is something we touch in the present, in moments of queer encounter, dance, sex, art. The not-yet is here, I think, in flashes. I believe the deferral is what has been done to Muñoz’s argument by readers for whom the immediacy of his claim was politically intolerable. The actual claim is more brutal: the present is unliveable, and a different present is being lived, in patches, by people who refuse to live in the conditions set out for us.

What this means for trans women in the present moment is that the trans women I love are, right now, in the patches of the not-yet. They are not waiting for it, but conducting it in their flats, work, in their writing for no money, in the care they are taking of each other, in the dinners they convene at which no one critiques another woman’s surgery. They are conducting it now, in the time that has been written off, by the cis public, as the time before the future; which is quite frankly bullshit. I want to live more thoughtfully in those patches, I really need it and I need cis people to be responsible for providing these spaces.

*

I have realised, in the course of writing this essay, that the magazine I have been editing for the better part of five years is the longest job I have ever held. I have quit, at this point, so many other jobs on the basis of incidents which involved cis people perpetuating larger problems for me that I found intolerable. Worms feels different.

Worms has, since its founding, included trans writers as a matter of editorial constitution rather than a matter of generosity. We have not had to make ourselves legible to a cis house style because the house style has been shaped, from the first issue, by writers including trans writers, which is not the same thing as a magazine that includes trans writers. The twelfth issue is almost in print. It contains the largest proportion of trans contributors of any issue we have made, none of which have been asked to adhere to any certain style of writing, or to make themselves legible to a cis audience. Fuck that. They have been asked to write what they wanted to write, and they have written what they wanted; the result, in my opinion, is the best issue we have made.

I feel compelled to write this here because I want you to understand what becomes possible when the editorial labour is not extracted from trans writers but distributed among them; to understand that this is actually something Worms has built by comparison to the vile and on-going structural issues I have to deal with in my personal freelance work. To me it seems a very simple ethic to adopt. Which is to also say: yes, those of you who remove this ethic from your structures are maniacal. Mwah x

xo
pea