Freya-Onions-report

—most of it/ what i say is an afterthought

I’ve been thinking a lot this past year about interpretation. Specifically, what my being trans, and my ‘discovery’ of my being trans has to do with it, and what the ‘gap’ crossed by the word ‘trans’ does for the act of interpretation. 

Of course ‘discovery’ is itself a type of interpretation. In fact, in using this word I have already aligned this part of my identity with a rather generalised archetype of narrativisation. I said it, called it a ‘discovery’, and the truth of it was lost. 

Because I never really ‘discovered’ it. One couldn’t say I had an epiphany. 

Nor could I claim that I came to such a conclusion after an exhaustive analysis of the concrete facts of my existence. It just happened, and my life changed colours. 

This is why interpretation, or what philosophers like to call ‘hermeneutics’, is of such great interest to me these days. 

The reality of it is that, on that afternoon, watching that sub-par movie,

wracked with confusion/fear and unable to disclose this to my friends or family,

I realised that I was trans through a kind of self-disclosure within a cognitive slippage. 

I thought: I want to sit in front of this this cinema chair like a woman sits in a cinema chair. 

Grace Lavery calls this a kind of freudian latency— a discovery of ‘the identity that 

marks me as one who desires’—- the disclosure was such a discovery in which I recognised that I only desire as, and am constituted by my internal positionality as a woman.

What follows, this book, represents my coming to terms with my identity and reading that revelation back into the mundane intricacies of my childhood and upbringing.

Of course it’s narcissistic. 

A lot has been written about transgender theory, and what it means in the contexts of feminism, queer theory and disability, but the ontology denoted by the prefix ‘trans-’ is often neglected for more materially satisfying discussions of corporeality. 

For me, if the prefix stands for a crossing, of, we presume, ‘gender’, then we should ask what is the quality of this terrain being traversed. How, for example, is it inscribed in space, and time, and how 

How has this gap, which I am now, one could hope, beginning to traverse, written into the very rhythm, the logic of my thoughts, my desires, my eros?

Some of you many be thinking that this ‘gap’ is a stand in for what is generally known as gender dysphoria, but here, again, I think the former is more useful because it allows for a larger reading of 

The way I see it is, though I have now realised myself to have been much happier a girl, I was raised, and spent much of my youth, living as a boy. As a result, I read the world through— or rather, across— a rather palpable glaze. 

This is not to say that to be neurotic, or hyper-analytical, particularly in any literary sense, is in any way a hallmark of trans identity, only that the selfsame temporal delay— the reparative readings that bookend the rushes of experience—quite often form the only moments of clarity to an otherwise unremittingly dysphoric existence. But how could I recognise it? Dysphoria is not what it seems, it’s far more flexible, more capacious, than is usually made out. It is not, in my case, wanting to cut my cock off noon and night; breakfast, lunch and dinner. 

What is ‘it’? It’s a kind of longing.

And that longing looks towards something glorious. A joy indescribably ecstatic, the preconditions for all things that could come to good. 

Only the backend of such a longing could be so cruel.

The style of poetry I developed over these years was accordingly analytical; an ethereal  and enmeshed voice modelled on Ashbery, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Carver, Hemingway, a few of the language poets. 

for example, I could say things like: from my little desk the adjacent office block is entirely transparent. Only the silhouettes of office chairs in the yellow sunset. steam from air vents.

My speech is refined, static and vertical as art deco. I am satisfactorily depressed, Laconically suicidal. 

I’ll just try and say it: The trans gap of dysphoria facilitates a trans hermeneutic because all acts must then be after the fact- across a physiological and psychological delay- an interpretation rather than an action.

…

I am skeptical of the way we generally require discrete narrative turning points to make sense of history and of our lives. The irony is not lost on me that my theory positions ‘trans’ ness and its self-disclosure as constitutive of a phenomenology characterised by its hermeneutic hunger: its fetish for putting itself into dream worlds. Though poetry was and is another dreamworld. 

Let’s face it. My description was terribly dissatisfying. Unfulfilling, like all definitions. I couldn’t even fuck myself with it. But that’s the thing, I, and many people like me, trans or not, feel like we have spent our whole lives reading towards this world-shattering exposition of meaning— the final disclosure— the event:

Then— then we can rest assured that there is utmost meaning to everything.

That’s what I had with these women I was obsessed with. Emma Stone, Bailey: whoever they were, they were the idea of this revelation ever growing in proximity. They were mirrors that exposed the gap and pointed a direction (hence the religiosity of some of these infatuations).

I was like a satellite, laying the groundwork for my own destruction. 

All that time I had been reading my own preemptive joy back into their emotions so far as to vicariously experience the life I needed through the intricacies of their mannerisms. I watched hours of interviews.

Because, and to some extent this is still the case, all the women I know closely stood for this: signals of this delay; reminders that I was indeed, caught up in my own narcissistic readings of the world in my own image. 

It is this indirect, inverted, stunted and vicarious existence that we enjoy when we read. Each time we read what we imagine is slightly different, and accordingly becomes disembodied, free, on the other side of things.

That is precisely it: ‘hermeneutics’ assumes a two-sided model of reality— a boundary which, presumably, we can ‘pass’ through. Bringing this back to the transgender: meaning becomes interchangeable with gender, or at least, gender euphoria. 

Readings, like transitions, occur across such a gap.

Let’s be clear: I do not think that gender is to be the coordinator of meaning in life, just that it, like everything else, cannot be separated from our experience, and, as a consequence, meaning at the point of discovery is itself gendered. So, gender dysphoria forces your readings of life to come across a double gap.

I am reminded of the end of Lavery’s essay on Trans Feminism and Free Speech:

Reflecting one last time on Eva Hayward’s image of a body pulled through itself in the act of invagination, we might imagine the language to which we could ascribe the property of freedom as similarly pulled through itself, similarly invaginated in the act of articulation, and similarly at war with the bedrock of its own psychic field. I don’t believe that we either have or require a better name for the subject of such language than “woman.” (Lavery, 146)

This, I think, is a valuable way of thinking of this double gap. Lavery reads the ontology of ‘woman’ in and through both her own eros for invagination as a trans woman and through the imagined body of another woman, Eva Hayward. 

Under this surgical metaphor, all readings are provisionally botched.

Another example of this gap: I don’t believe the ‘cognitive slippage’ even happened watching ‘Vita and Virginia’. That’s just something I read back into it. I actually have little to no idea when I realised anything. I know it happened ‘that summer’, that I swayed on the flight to Malta in the early dawn, chronically hungover and suicidal… 

As with all gaps, delays, and absences, it is difficult to locate precisely where or when it happened without obsessing over its privileged opposite. The ‘Blind Spot in an Old Dream of Symmetry’.

This book is also an attempt to transport this vicarious joy into an embodied one. This book is the sum of my attempt to be a ‘girl’.

It must be a series of readings not only because each is a provisional take on a phenomena which is inherently multidimensional, but because it is the gap between each reading and the thing being read that embodies a trans hermeneutic. Each reading is of an absence

because it all shatters the moment that meaning is achieved 

it is the tap that breaks everything .