„Please bring a referral letter“, „Do you know if you need a referral?“ and my favourite: „Don’t forget your ‘Ü-Schein!’ (which is a hilarious sounding abbreviation for the German translation). I almost felt like a young boy who was desperately waiting for an owl to save him from the dark closet under the staircase… Four days later, two pink sheets of paper fluttered in my hand with the word typed in the Courier New Font: Transsexualism.
As I walked away from the practice, the word echoed in my head over and over again: F64.0 Transsexualism. Resistance stirred within me. A small but nasty voice whispered: Look at you, well how does it feel to be pathologized… again? Do you feel worthy now of getting treated? I sighed and pushed the negative thoughts aside. Sure, psychology is a great science and therapy a very useful innovation but sometimes diagnoses just make one’s reality seem very strange. Before I was able to fall into a rabbit hole of bad thought another part of me turned my inner subwoofer and with a surprising accuracy I hummed, „But by night I‘m one hell of a lover. I‘m just a sweet transvestite from Transexual, Transylvania.“
Fortunately, there was still a part of my brain that happily resisted anything that didn’t feel good. The moment of anger was gone, instead, a big grin spread across my face. My brain commented on this with a “Dammit, Janet”; because I knew I would have an earworm for the rest of the day.
At the same time, I jumped onto the next train of thoughts and started to wonder.
There are a lot of queer people that condemn the Rocky Horror Picture Show or Tim Curry for transgender representation. Neither is the actor trans nor is Franken Further a person with high morals. Everyone and everything screams that I shouldn’t like the musical or the movie, but I still do… and that is mostly due to the aesthetics and its themes.
I was sure that there was such a thing as a queer aesthetic, but how universalistic was it? Where did it begin and where did it end? Did it have an end or was it as infinite as the universe? How did queer aesthetics relate to other aesthetics? I was tempted to borrow the next best book from the university library to answer these questions in a professional, philosophically sound manner, but my thoughts decided to take a different path. My solution was called: Alfred H. Barr.
Alfred H. Barr was an American art historian in the early 20th century. He designed a very cool bookcase for an exhibition in 1936. It shows a relatively simple flow chart of different art movements and how they relate to each other. The whole thing is also temporarily organised by two timelines. The most important point is that most of the Western art genres ended with the suffix “-ism”: Synthetism, Neo-Impressionism, Futurism, Purism, and Surrealism.
Since the exhibition catalogue was printed, this diagram has been adapted, satirised or updated by several artists.
Somehow I felt that if there was ever going to be another adaptation, transsexualism should appear in it. If trans people were going to be pathologised, they at least deserved a place in the art history canon.
But what did the suffix -ism mean, and if trans people were fighting for a place in art history, should this suffix also be used for them? Fortunately, Wikipedia knew more than I did, and the German-language entry in particular was much more informative than the English one, so excuse me for running with the German version.
„The suffix -ism [or in German -ismus] is a means of word formation through derivation. The resulting word usually denotes an abstraction, often a system of thought and belief, such as a doctrine, an ideology or world view or a religion, but also a social condition or an artistic genre.“
So, I wasn’t entirely wrong when my brain linked my diagnosis with different art movements. What struck me was the following part „often a system of thought and belief, such as a doctrine, an ideology or world view or a religion, but also a social condition.”
Certainly for all trans-exclusionary radical feminists „transgenderism“ posed an absolute threat to humanity. But what did it look like from the perspective of trans people? How did being trans as a worldview? Being the diplomat between cis women and cis men? Trans-scending one’s work ethic? Transing one’s daily routine? Well, taking hormones and starting to relate to society at large differently certainly changed the daily routine. At the latest when the first physical changes became noticeable and demanded attention. This may also have changed the work ethic.
All of them seemed very plausible but still didn’t quite explain why every second book had the word “queering” in its title: Queering the museum, queering the map or queering the Anthropocene. Sure, “queer” was a very practical umbrella term, but still trans-ing Philosophy seemed also like an appropriate title. However, the result would be the same, both queer people and trans people changed or permanently refused the typical pigeonholes of cis man-penis, cis woman-vulva or heterosexuality. Instead, there was more room for fluidity, ambivalence and uncertainty. There was less being right or wrong and more of the just „being“. But back to the flexible Suffix of the „ism“:
„The two endings -ism, which come from the Greek, mean something like ‚to act in a certain way, to proceed.'“
Well, that made a lot of sense. If you wanted to pass as a trans person, you had to behave a certain way. That explained how the word Transsexualism could be projected onto reality, but still didn’t address the question of how or what the cornerstones of a trans people art genre would look like. Would it be the piercings, the coloured and self-cut hair, the Victorian clothes, the skirts or cardigans? But what about leather jackets, studs, hats, straight-cut jeans or emo crop tops?
In the end, I realised that aesthetics was much more than just „clothes“. So what about themes? Ideas, points of conflict or problems that stayed with you throughout your life? I thought back to the Rocky Horror Picture Show and, despite vehement criticism, found myself in this film. As a kinkster cannibalism war the most romantic thing I could think of and in many cases, trans people continued to be led to believe that their desire to transition was a product of crude ethical principles. The consequences were a lack of understanding from family or supposed friends. What remained in the end was a life between worlds, the feeling of never fully fitting in like an alien and the lingering hope of finding a home at some point after all.
I wasn’t entirely satisfied with my mental conclusion, but I realised how the adrenaline was wearing off and a yawning tiredness was spreading. Further thoughts would have to wait for another time.