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THIS PROJECT IS UNFINISHED AND A WORK IN PROGRESS
I started this project a year ago before I started taking estrogen, something I had been putting off for half a decade because I didn't want to talk to a psychiatrist. I was also conflicted about interfacing with the pharmaceutical industrial complex and working out my gender actualization within the framework of techno transhumanism- the loose set of ideas going back to the beginnings of silicon valley in the 60’s, that one could achieve transcendence through technological self-augmentation- a utopianism which I have long been skeptical of. I was also conflicted because I felt indignant, rightfully so, that in order to be accepted in cis society as a trans woman I was required to be medicalized -- cataloged within a vast index of other ‘patients’, analyzed, diagnosed, identified, endocrinologically and surgically altered, to be categorized, to be made both visible and knowable.
This project developed out of these anxieties and started off trying to work towards an answer to the question of how how trans people can navigate their identities that are so intertwined with these philosophies while maintaining a humanist, individualist and feminist understanding of the self in opposition to the necessarily capitalist and dehumanizing consequences of post-human thinking. Something I still haven’t figured out.
It’s changed a lot in the making, for a while it stayed as an increasingly expanding folder of screenshots, PDFs, youtube videos, and meandering jargony fragments. Then for a long time I was just writing a diary that I tried to tie back to theory so that writing felt meaningful and constructive. I’m not sure exactly what it is now.
It’s partly an autofictional coming-of-age trans narrative, part manic ramble, part campus novel. It’s in part an attempt to articulate a definition of a political transsexualism under technocratic capitalism, and what it might look like. It’s sometimes an a-theoretical narrative about what repression does to you and trying to escape it. It’s also about love, sex, loneliness, Star Trek and taking a lot of drugs in art school.