isnât the squeeze of the irreversible, leaving our tenderest natures aside, active in the strict yet nonlinear complication of the so-called spectrum? not trying to go for any sort of take, hot or not, but iâm thinking about MOGAI and still racked with ambivalence and real confusion about the possibility of living some personas in any fiction where your body has to find its bearings while physically on the scene, in public or even just at the edges of public visibilityâŚ
my bitterest nature would say: let as many identities flower as you like but good luck getting read â though i also get the caveat that a new word can be self-descriptive without rising to a demand for recognition, or make that demand only in the company of similars
averting binary sexuation -- a stratifying machine that everywhere cuts through intimacies, scripts and encloses gestures, assembles divisions of labor -- need not mean laying claim to recognition, and may even remain thin or negative as self-description... if i have to admit a hesitation to simply accept the pragmatics of the more obscure gender terms, i also have to admit that it comes with a long attraction to how narcissisms converge in and scatter out from imaginary belonging to a type -- i admire how the descriptive impulse pressing on these terms can become sharp and inviting enough to undercut the identitarian purposes from which they would seem to stem
all this could just be an indulgence in that sort of imaginary anyway -- specifically vis-a-vis the terms altersex and parasex. what makes these terms both useful and difficult to inhabit is their resistance to the modesty of bids for recognition that are based in a claim on âgender identityâ Â
altersex refers to those whose sexual morphologies shift out of binary order -- apparently coined to talk about fictional beings, but in theory also available for real live people who alter their sex chemically or surgically. parasex is another way to frame this idea but more neutral bc just about deviation from perisex, the normative absence of ânonconformitiesâ in the sexed body. altersex and parasex are both modeled on intersex, attempting a compromise that would acknowledge potential similarities in experience without appropriating the specific positioning of intersex people w/r/t medical assignments of sexed embodiment and the resultant vulnerability to clinical intervention / biopolitical control...Â
altersex and parasex, in contrast to many of the MOGAI terms, refer not to a gender identity but to morphological difference. i should clarify though that sex in this sense is not at all limited to physical embodiment. nor is it complicit in the deceptive and controlling vagueness of a term like âbiological sex.â altersex and parasex define sex to include body image and other forms of auto-affection that operate on the experience of a sexed body
maybe there is something unsavory creeping in here -- a reification of the sex/gender division such that alter- or parasexedness would, in a transmedicalist vein, assert superior proximity to the material reconstitution of sex in the âreal worldâ and therefore consign gender identity to the merely imaginary. of course though identification and morphology cannot be so easily pulled apart. nobody really knows where their body image ends and imaginary typification beginsÂ
and yet that doesnât make it any less important to mark how the social ascription of gender can diverge from the lived experience of your body rubbing up against and changing alongside such ascriptions -- as with alterations of hormonal equilibria, for example. not always a damaging or invalidating divergence, but often a difficult one -- bc most people wonât intuitively know or bother trying to match whatever ambiguities your frame offers them with a suitable abbreviation. most people may not even know how to get their sensorium to notice ambiguities in the first place, and when they do itâs mostly just so they can wipe them away asap by initiating a calculus to squeeze your body into one of the two slots. normative protocols of scanning and casual assessment (to say nothing of the affective reticence with which etiquette smooths and clouds such encounters) are designed to put trans people at a loss to find the desire or ability or safety to interrupt the automatic confidence and awkward grasp of cis criteriaÂ
not that you always need to âcorrectâ the binary disambiguation, though -- maybe you peel away the anxiolytic film of their knowingness, maybe you choke on or cough up the niceness they stuff the air with, maybe you lock your eyes and flit past their affectations of bewilderment, seeing yourself veer inches from attack. even in the middle of a reflex misrecognition your body image still knows itâs also in the middle of a longer process. it comes up at various loci of response: fear without paranoia; erogenous acceleration or suffusion or muffling or dilation; inversions, deflections, and recompositions of aggression; awareness of the advancing or retracting contour; giddiness, lightness, impulsiveness; the suction, retention, and leakage of your metabolic cycle and the living conditions it scrubs through... none of that is quite reducible to the phrasing of a self or a persona -- because it is small and gradual enough not to know when exactly it could be assumed, a thousand little habitus transfers that streak further outward with each run through the circuit and in that curvature without telos return on the irreversibleÂ
