trans girl suicide museum and Daughter of the Nile
Oh hello
I have in my head an image of a vase smashed, buried, found stuck into rock, dated by archeologists to the fifth century BCE. I am removing jagged pieces of the vase from the rock with my hands, scratching, scraping, too zealous, at times, with my excavation, breaking the vase shards into smaller and smaller pieces. Still, unflappable, unblemished, I dig! The vase is taking shape! As I dig deeper, my search more frantic, my hands aching and my cuticles not just work wearied but a problem for the dermatological community, I keep clutching at what I think are bits of vase—precious artefacts—but turn out, in my hands, under closer inspection, to be just crusty lumps of dirt and rocks. As you can tell, I am tired.
I am thinking, while I do the dishes, while I make myself a coffee, while I lie on my bed: what do I keep and what do I discard? I am anxious that after the process of unraveling that you are witnessing live, there will be nothing left; that once I have removed, like I hope to, certain aspects of myself—qualities born from repression and fear, which have, over time, (because so much time has passed), calcified and hardened into who I am—there will be only an absence; or a self grounded in hiding, in trying to disappear.
I know, I am just tired and I need a good night’s sleep and my blue calming moisturiser will soon start working, I know, but in the meantime, while my internal world is subject to this self surveillance, I am looking for more ease outside. I am wearing long pleats and shapeless shirts and polos intended to subsume my shoulders, my arms and if possible, myself. Yes, the varsity aesthetic is so hot right now, we do, it’s true, live in an original gossip girl, Obama era reboot but, what I’m saying is that these clothes offer me a bit more comfort, a bit more security: a uniform for the non-existence McKenzie Wark writes about in Reverse Cowgirl. Really, I’m probably just tired. Really, this is all getting a bit predictable. Really, this is all beginning to sound cringe.
trans girl suicide museum (2019) by hannah baer
trans girl suicide museum is a personal essay by hannah baer about transitioning, taking ketamine, going to raves, and trying to create a life when it all seems to be falling apart. It begins in Spring 2017 and ends with an afterword in Spring 2019. baer writes about her life, but it is a life constructed in the discourse, so she also writes about, for instance, cis lesbians refusing to have sex with trans women, truscum, public and private signals, pronouns, and the control of trans identities. Baer is incisive but veers away from definitive statements; making clear, with caveats, the limits of her personal experience (she’s rich and white); and acting out in her writing the kind of expression that she would like to see more of: less critiques “because abstract critique is part of patriarchy” and more time simply expressing your underlying emotions. tgsm is a cutting and moving work.
The title—trans girl suicide museum—comes from baer’s description of her experience transitioning. “[I]t makes more sense to describe it as being trapped in a museum because my body belongs to me and I love it, but the thing I’m trapped in someone else built and i can’t find the door”. Suicide has a large presence in the museum (one room, she says, in her museum, is “the most normal white sterile high-ceilinged art gallery room you can picture, and then imagine a yellow metal seesaw in the middle of the room, with a giant opening over the high end of it, a mechanical cisgendered vagina ready to dump transphobia on you and lift you, from your seat on the low-end, up into quiet”). But there are lots of rooms (a whole wing, e.g., for parents) in which to be trapped, lost. This reframing—from being trapped in a body to being trapped, essentially, in your own particularly constructed world—is both comforting and depressing: comforting in that, for the most part, my body is here to stay; depressing in that the world is hard to change too.
There is so much kindness in tgsm: a warmth for herself and other trans women that isn’t sappy or overwrought. I’m not hoping for happiness but, I am, as I’ve said, tired, and I took a lot of solace in reading about how someone I admire conceptualised her fatigue and the difficulties of her transition. She writes:
My understanding that I am both getting better and worse, that I am moving towards something that I deeply want, and that the road inevitably leads to—and only maybe through —the museum, well, this understanding is one I try to hold for myself the way a parent might hold an infant: loving, protective, forgiving. This is what I wished for from my parents, and also why I could never say to them the depth of the museum in detail, why I had to try to keep a game face. They already didn’t want me to be trans, who would want their kid to be a fucking mess the way I am now. Like a stunted version of my teenage self forever.
tgsm is also about building a person. baer says that wanting your transition to resolve questions of personal identity is fraught: “the construction of that question in alienated consumer capitalism is basically unanswerable in a meaningful personal way”. Looking in the mirror at your chin, your breasts, your feet, yourself might not, in fact, (surprise, surprise) result in clarity or euphoria. It might just create more rooms in your museum in which to get trapped. But the answer can’t be, I don’t think, to stop looking entirely, and I don’t think baer is saying it is. At least for me, transitioning is about how I relate to the world and the world relates to me: that requires, I think, some scrutiny of myself as part of that process. But, perhaps baer is suggesting that there are different degrees of scrutiny (like the difference between looking at yourself in the mirror, and looking at yourself with severe fluorescent lighting in a mirror that also magnifies.) I don’t know. baer writes about being on ketamine and feeling “less of a subject”; in feeling connected to others now and in other periods of time while on k. She says that her dream is for “a group of trans femmes burning down a museum”. If we’re to take time away from the mirror, baer suggests we should be orienting ourselves towards others, to our community and world.
I remember, to return to me, last halloween walking home from a rave, still definitely high on m, and wanting, as corny as this sounds, to hold onto what I felt that night forever; to develop an ethic for myself from the mix of independence and interconnection I experienced dancing and dancing on the dirt and gravel. I felt so grateful in that moment that I could have that, that I could live a life with that kind of connection and freedom, enmeshed with others while still spinning, spinning, spinning. I don’t think that’s exactly what baer is saying, but, well, it is still, I think, what I want.
Daughter of the Nile (1987) by Hou Hsiao-hsien
In Daughter of the Nile, everyone around Lin Hsiao-yang is dying or getting sick or moving away. Her big brother dies. Her mother dies. Her crush moves away, and ultimately dies. Lin is left there, in 1980s Taipei, living with a brother who develops a gambling problem, a daughter whose school uniform requires endless repairs, a dad who is mainly absent, and a grandpa who seems incoherent. It is a time of shoulder pads, collarless shirts, pastels, teased fringes, pants belted high. Lin is in school and works at the KFC. She looks after her family. She listens to her walkman, she plays with her cat, she drives a yellow motorbike. Lin is part of a gang, but the gang is splitting up. People are growing up! At the beach, her gang listens, with their knees pulled to their chests, occasionally swigging on drinks, a fire the only lighting, to a recording from one member who is leaving for military service. He says: “life always forces us to keep moving forwards”. Lin narrates that she sees herself as the Daughter of the Nile, a character from a manga called Crest of the Royal Family. In that story, the Daughter is taken from the twentieth century to Ancient Egypt where she is destined to die by the time she is 22: “she is happy there but lonely”.
The director, Hou Hsiao-hsien, has a deftness and calm to his cinematography that reminded me of Edward Yang—another great Taiwanese film director—and fits the plaintive resignation in Lin’s character. In a life driven by duty and punctuated by violence, what is there left for Lin? The puzzle, I think, in watching Daughter of the Nile, is what exactly Lin wants for herself. It is clear I think that she doesn’t want this. But filled always with obligation and the demands of family and school and her job, she becomes, not empty, but less of a person and more like a vessel for her virtues. Watching it, you want her to break free, to make a change, but you know she can’t do that. She has to tend to her dad, who is sick. She needs to keep mending her sister’s uniform. These are things that she must do.
Love
Anne