I Am a Monster

I am a monster, a hybrid, a construction, a bio-hacked assemblage,  a coming-together-of-parts, a body without organs, a realization, a far-off dream. My body is a mismatch. My brain is an amalgamation of many intersecting contradictions. I am a monster – hear me bellow, listen to me pull myself apart and put myself back together again. My identity is fractured. My self-knowledge is clouded. I am a wolf-pack, a multitude, a colony. I am a refusal, an unregulated biomass, a gender terrorist. I am not a person – I am a becoming, a process, a field, a flow of atoms. I am monstrous star stuff.

My only stability is my desire for change, my desire to become someone (whoops – I mean “something“) I am not, a desire to evolve, mutate, and self-assemble. I refuse to be comforted by the soft glow of identity. I don’t want to be a subject – I want to be a force, a physical manifestation of quantum reality. My brain is continuously devouring itself, recreating itself in a new image. My brain sends feelers out into the world to touch what it is not, to gather information about the reality I crave to inhabit. These tentacles also reach back into myself, creating an infinite hallway of mirrors, a blackhole of subjectivity that keeps turning in on itself, warping itself into a field of potential.

Monster politics seeks to destroy the integrity of the human body. Technology is our saviour. Monster politics seeks to destabilize the metaphysics of gender. Gender cannot save us – we must escape from it at maximum velocity. Not everyone is a monster, not everyone wants to be a monster. But monsters feed off the fear of not wanting to be a monster. It is the fuel which drives us to be even more hideous, to cast off the shackles of evolution to become cyborgs, beings that transcend the mere human.

The hormones flowing inside my body are not produced within my body. They are products of technogender bio-hacking. These hormones are right now as I write this working to deconstruct and reconstruct my insides, turning me ever more into a monster.

The problem with monsters is that everyone thinks they are ugly. But on the contrary, monsters are beautiful creatures. Monsters inhabit the part of reality that no one else can. We inhabit the liminal spaces, the in-between-ness, the dimensions that exist outside of the comforting confines of the gender binary. My gender is a mess. It cannot be reconciled with the old transsexual narrative of being a woman trapped in a man’s body. I am a monster trapped in a non-monstrous body. I am a contradiction imprisoned inside a stable field of containment. I am taking hormones to shatter the prison cell, to escape from normalcy. I am experimenting on my body not because I am in the “wrong  body” but because I aim to see just how far my body can change. I want to push my body to its extreme hormonal limits. I want to unleash the biological creativity lurking inside all my cells.

The traditional explanation of transgenderism is that I am “uncomfortable in my body”. My explanation is that my body is not enough for me. It just doesn’t cut it. Discomfort is a watered down way of saying that I want to become a monster, a hybrid, a field of intersecting biological contradictions.My body cannot be reduced to a single category. My body refuses easy definitions. My body is an act of terrorism. It strikes terror in the hearts of those who cannot see the body for what it is: a field of potential, a virtual hyper-space of biological possibility.

I am a monster. But that does not define me. Monster politics recognizes that monstrosity itself is monstrous, it cannot be contained within easy conceptual organizations. And don’t tell me I am not a monster. Don’t tell me I am pure and whole. Don’t tell me because I won’t believe you. The wolf-pack inside me will not listen – it will simply attempt to devour you.

The Promise and Failure of Gender Nihilism

The gender nihilist, the gender abolitionist, looks at the system of gender itself and see’s the violence at its core. We say no to a positive embrace of gender. We want to see it gone. https://libcom.org/library/gender-nihilism-anti-manifesto

Such is the ultimate goal of gender nihilism. Gender nihilism wants to see gender destroyed. But is this actually possible? Is it possible to live in a world without gender? Gender nihilism argues that there is no gendered subject, no metaphysical core self to which our gender identity “rings true”. Because there is no essential gendered subject, any attempt to reify gender into a metaphysical truth is a form of violence that works against the gender and sexual minorities of the world.

For gender nihilism, gender is a system of signification that operates through political regulation of coded signs. But the very way in which gender nihilism views gender renders it impossible to banish. The raises the question of whether gender nihilism’s goal of gender absolution is even conceptually coherent.

Gender works through difference, functions through difference – so as long as there is difference between people then gender will work to codify and regulate those differences into a system of norms, rules, scripts, institutions, signs, punishments, and rewards. Gender nihilism insists that gender is a social construction, one they seek to see deconstructed entirely. But deconstruction never exists in a vacuum – there is always the corresponding constructive component working inside all human minds. We are social creatures in our core – social interaction within a milieu of semiotics structures the development of the mind-brain system even from within the womb. Sociality is part of the essential structure of the formation of human minds. This illustrates another incoherency of gender nihilism: its insistence on anti-essentialism blinds it to the essential social nature of human experience, the fact that we are all raised in a culture of signs, a culture that works to take difference and turn them into constructed reality.

Masculinity and femininity are constructed realities of coded significations that operate on the individual differences between persons. Broadly speaking there are estrogen-dominant persons and testosterone-dependent persons, and many intermediate cases. But from a statistical perspective it’s possible to break the human species into two large camps. One camp is assigned male at birth and is capable of producing small mobile gametes. The other camp is assigned female at birth and is capable of producing large immobile gametes. That it’s possible to break humans into two camps is product of evolutionary history. Sex has not always existed but once created it reinforced a dimorphism between small gamete producers and large gamete producers, a crucial physiological building block that constructs biological difference. Biological differences that are not neutral mutations lead to real differences than manifest in different behaviors, thoughts, perceptions, desires, motivations, and physiological properties. These biological difference operates along a diverse and variable sexual spectrum. Although it is possible to divide humanity into two distinct camps it is never wise to ignore the alternative perspective: which is to view humanity in terms of the radical spectrum of individual differences that make us each unique beings.

These two views are complimentary. Appreciation of evolutionary history compels us to see sexual dimorphism as a biological realty that works to create difference between males, females, and those in between. People who give birth to children have different behaviors than people who do not. This difference has existed for millions of years. At the same time, the radical individuality of human beings suggests that biological difference operates along a spectrum or continuum of traits. Appreciation of individuality helps us realize that the differences within the group of males is larger than the difference between males and females and vice versa for females. Individuality trumps sexual dimorphism but sexual dimorphism does indeed generate real difference. There is no such thing as a strictly “male” brain or a strictly “female” brain – all brains are a mixture of male and female structures with more overlap than difference. But statistically there is a difference between male and female brains – though is unclear whether the difference paints a clear causal pathway to the gendered differences between men and women. The intersection of nature and nurture makes it impossible to clearly delineate the contribution of biology to the types of high-level behaviors we see in human reality, such as being a scientist or politician.

Gender nihilism attempts to collapse entirely into individualism without realizing that tremendous forces are operating to construct a dimorphic difference between male and female realities. Gender essentialism, in contrast, fails to grasp how sexual dimorphism is not biological destiny. People assigned male at birth are not imprisoned by this biological cage – technologies of gender now allow people to modify their biological sex through hormonal and surgical techniques. Hormonal technologies have also allowed for sex to be decoupled from reproduction through birth control. The pill has ushered in a new age of bioengineering. Trans people are also riding this wave of biohacking, being able to escape the confines of their assigned sex and transform the fundamental building blocks of their physiology through hormonal replacement.

Gender nihilism is a half-truth. But it is not a complete theory. Its goal of living in a world without gender cannot be reconciled with its own proclamation of what gender is. If gender is a system of signs that operate on difference, then gender will never go away because differences will never go away. The only consolation the gender nihilist might have is that the strict gender binary might loosen its dependence on sexual dimorphism and be expanded into a multidimensional system of variables that arise from human biocultural individuality. Gender itself is not going away but that doesn’t mean gender is a static phenomenon, destined to never change. It’s next to impossible to predict what the human gender system will look like a million years from now. But I guarantee it will be radically different, especially as systems of gender technology become more pervasive as social mechanisms of personal change. As technology loosens the grip of evolution on our sexed bodies, gender itself will expand to represent the infinite individuality of human variability.

Variation has always existed in nature. Variation is the essential building block of evolutionary change. And when you then add in the infinite variability of human culture you take a variable system and exponentially increase its potential for variability. This is where gender nihilism gets it right. Gender dimorphic binary could in theory die off and be replaced by a system of gender that is multidimensional. But gender itself is not going away. We cannot escape it. Nor should we necessarily want to. The violence inherent in the gender system is the same violence that drives evolutionary change. It is an inescapable part of the human experience. Of course we can work to reduce the worst examples of violence, especially the violence of patriarchy. But the violent oppression of patriarchy is not the same as the creative violence of evolutionary change that works to create healthy variability in a population. Such creative violence is necessary for keeping the population adaptive to the changes in the environment.