I’ve taken a pause in recent years from discussing or really commenting on my transness on public platforms, mostly from an exhaustion with the ways in which its dominated my adult life, but also because I’ve not really known what to say or how to comment on things. Reading Shon Faye’s recent eulogy for the “trans rights” movement, I feel compelled to say something. The movement is dead, however, it never held the capacity for progress in the first place.
My day job, outside of art making, is in a trans healthcare. We regularly see some of the worst affects of news cycles like this, young trans people, either coming to adulthood or just making steps to coming out, facing an overwhelming terror at the future thats currently ahead of them.
When I first came out in the mid 2010’s, the job market for working class trans people was dire. I spent most of my adult life struggling to get employment at supermarkets and clothes stores, let alone in anything that paid a stable wage and allowed me some fulfilment. Towards the late 2010’s this changed with the increased visibility of trans people in public debate pushing companies to up diversity in an attempt to cash in and market themselves as morally virtuous.
As any trans person can tell you, these jobs have and always are precarious. Often they are underpaid but come with an expectation to not just carry out your employment but also participate in educating and advocating for your own equality in the workplace. They mostly don’t come with opportunities for economic advancement and often lead to burn out, depression and before long, another round of unemployment/ job hunting. It was the rhythm of my 20’s.
Alongside this the art market is particularly fickle. You either get lucky (like in some ways I did) and find a group structure to work (hide) inside of, or your work comes with a pressure to commodify your transness. Again this is precarious, however, like with other aspects of employment, also a necessity.
Recently, this has felt less necessary, with the capacity to split my practice from personal aspects of my identity feeling like something thats still commercially viable. It’s easier to get artistic employment that doesn’t relate to or rely on my identity being at its forefront.
Reading Wendy Carlos’ talking about how much of her professional life was plagued by this (interviews focusing solely on her gender rather than her work), I’ve feel particularly privileged and thankful for how this has eased up recently. Ironically, it’s allowed me to engage in my gender far more internally and authentically than I have in the past.
However, all of this is precarious and I fear the last year of escalating transphobic legislation and politics have shown the limits of systemic recognition. Our rights and freedoms are on the decline, with dominant cultural trends having commodified parts of our culture to sell back at us, stripped down and without our involvement. The recognisable parts of our otherness, stripped away to make it more palatable to a cis audience, echoing the erasure of trans people from electronic music, a trend thats been happening cyclically ever since it’s invention.
Systemic capital is good at digesting otherness and filtering out the parts that challenge its politics of a frictionless system. In this, transness, as a philosophy of self identity that is directly othered from dominant societal norms, has always proposed a difficulty. It’s a form of identity that directly challenges structural legibility and contains an inherent friction that must be overcome to both acknowledge it or exist within in.
While markets have tried to assimilate transness, there is a core part that both cannot be removed, and cannot be digested. While this is why we make such valuable targets for exclusion, it’s also why we persist. Our identities have had to consistently occupy a space of opposition to societal norms.
This gives me some hope among things getting harder. Despite movements towards nostalgia and frictionless consumption (identified deftly under studies of Hauntology), otherness persists, all be it in sparse places. As a culture we’ve existed outside of legal, cultural and social lines of legibility and will continue to do so.
Though maybe the breathing room of the last few years has allowed us to further establish our own support networks and survival strategies, leaving us somewhat less isolated. Additionally, more people are publicly out than ever before. More people have to encounter us in everyday life. They have to acknowledge and confront (on some level) what we represent. That the unknowable/ illegible exists in the mundane, but more importantly, that they are also illegible to themselves. That friction is common in any network, regardless of the comfort provided by the known. Worse yet, that the unknowable is alluring.
In writing this, I wish to provide a change of outlook on the current despair present in the community. Not to say it isn’t valid. Things are scary and sad and overwhelming. But maybe this was inevitable when banking on recognition. I stand hopeful, though it’s a struggle at times, that we can building something out of that incompatibility, just as we have before.
18.09.2025 - politics / friction / trans identity