I never actually assaulted anyone, and I am fairly certain now—because nothing untoward happened then—that most of these men meant me no harm and would have been very surprised to know that I was waiting for that fatal wrong move, which I would have answered by whirling around with fists, elbows, knees and feet flying. And I cannot say that in the moment I hated them. I did find it exasperating that they could not seem to figure out that walking right behind a woman on an uncrowded sidewalk might be construed as threatening behavior and that therefore they might want to consider what they were doing. Still, hate is too strong a word for what I was feeling then.

I may have changed my mind now.

It has been almost fifteen years since I began a transition from appearing to walk the earth as a woman to appearing to do so as a man. It has turned out not to be a “gender transition” exactly, because I am not convinced that my gender has changed. It is now packaged differently, and I usually feel less cognitive dissonance when others react to me as though I were just another guy than I did when they reacted to me as just another dyke, but what I thought was a desire to “become a man” has quite vanished, and with it any idea as to what a man is or should be or should do in almost any circumstance. I am pushing fifty so closely that by the time you read this I might not be pushing anymore but have arrived and already begun coasting downhill, but I have not the first clue as to what a fifty-year-old, bearded white guy—a description that reasonably approximates my current presentation—is expected to do, like, pretty much, ever.

And other older white guys? Oh my god.

I am a writer, a reader, and a thinker of some fashion or other. I spent my formative thinking years as a body that was read as female and thus often assumed to be incapable of adequate thought. I was, and still am, so introverted that I pull introversion/extroversion scales wrong side out when I take personality inventories. I hate confrontation for various reasons and for various, often related, reasons, I assume most primarily that I do not know what I am talking about when conversing with others in real time. I do not think quickly on my feet; my brand of introversion and social anxiety makes it difficult to articulate myself at all outside of my room and without a keyboard or at least a pencil and paper. I think intuitively and visually and have to translate this sort of thought into a linear language of at least somewhat common understanding before I can present myself coherently, and that takes time—time that is usually not available at parties, in discussion groups, in seminars, or in other social situations in which I have been called to try to think and present at the same time.

Short version: I do not do well in real-time arguments and spent the first half of my life not being taken seriously anyway due to (somewhat) female appearances. Thus, in spite of the fact that I am supposedly educated and well-read, I will still default to Intimidated in an average conversation with anyone. Conversations with men, in particular, though, have become almost surreal since I have come to look like one of them.

Interestingly, perhaps, men still address me as though they are quite assured that they have given whatever matter all necessary thought and are offering me the Single Inescapable Conclusion on whatever topic. That has not changed, and so I am getting the impression that in US culture men do not talk to men all that differently from the way they talk to women, except they do sometimes have the sense to keep overt sexism to themselves when women are around. This means I have heard some even-more-horrifyingly-than-before sexist things since transitioning to a masculine presentation, but the whole patronizing tone has not changed. It was always horrifying and it still is.

I suppose I should clarify my terms here. When I say “men” in this case, I am usually referring to cisgendered men with whom I might interact in an average day, or men who have, to the best of my knowledge, no prior experience living as a body perceived and/or labeled as feminine. This is not to say I have not had any conversations with maddeningly obtuse men whose history includes identification as trans- or some other variety of gender nonconformity and/or transition, but this happens less often. Whether this is because other trans-spectrum men [1] are more likely to have at least some awareness of the vagaries of societal gender expectations or because there are simply not very many of us, I am not certain.

What I am describing here, though, are my experiences in conversation with apparently cisgendered men as a USian trans-identified male who spent thirty-five years as a body hailed more or less as female (less as I got older, cut my hair shorter, stopped wearing anything but men’s clothing, bound or otherwise hid my breasts, etc—but this resulted in a confusing presentation much more often than in one “mistaken” for male), and as a person whose temperament makes confrontation quite difficult to negotiate and disagreeable to contemplate.

So, when I encounter men still holding forth as though their thoughts are the unassailable products of rigorous reasoning, even when said reasoning is obviously lacking and nobody appearing to be a woman is present [2], I find myself in a position of not knowing, exactly, what is going on. My experiences as the assumed-feminine recipient of male wisdom do not help me: although I did come to understand that, where I live, patronizing condescension is to be expected of men if one appears to be a woman, this tells me nothing about what to expect if one appears to be a man.

On the one hand, the fountain of youth from which so many female-to-male transsexual individuals drink has rendered my visage a good ten to fifteen years younger-looking than it actually is, and so it may be that I am still considered a novitiate in the world of masculine knowledge, and I am being condescended to because of the tenderness of my perceived years. On the other hand, I wonder whether it is that men simply spout off all the time, expecting other men to challenge them with counter-spouting-off if they hear something with which they disagree. Whether or not the man spouting off believes he is actually right is unclear to me as well, because the “knowledge” so imparted is often so obviously self-serving that I wonder if it is being offered in some sort of ironic self-deprecation that I am just not getting.

Whatever the case may be, I still feel like a squirrel in front of an oncoming car, trying desperately to decide which direction to run, when confronted with Self-Obvious Truths as Mediated by Men. My self-assurance in these situations is almost nil. I do not expect anyone ever to take anything I say to heart, and I do not expect to be able to out-spout any pontificating personage regardless of gender. It occurs to me that I might simply act as though I thought whatever comeback I could manage were gospel, but I do not yet have the bravado necessary to do that. Besides, if I were ever to become a condescending, patronizing know-it-all, I would beg you to please shoot me. I do not think that acting like one even without conviction would be a particularly good idea.

On those occasions when a retreat to computer-mediated communication is possible, I still do not know what is the best way to proceed when I am faced with a man who has no idea that any experience diverging from his could even exist in a parallel universe, much less on this very planet and possibly even next door. I can write, and I know I can write, but I am not convinced that burying someone in discourse is advisable or healthy for all parties concerned. That is, if the tendency in men to declare themselves master of whatever field of knowledge is at hand is also an invitation to other men to join some sort of dick-waving competition, I am not sure that answering that invitation helps things at all. Although I may be in a venue where I can respond, how to modulate that response so as not to stage yet another cock fight is less clear.

I do know that the longer I am on testosterone, the harder it is to resist such competition. This is not so much because I want to compete, but rather because it drives me over the edge with anxiety and rage when one man appears to be dominating the conversation to the exclusion of all others: I am acutely aware of the silencing of others and sensitive also to being silenced myself, living as I do under a constant din of self-doubt, where silence has, for so long, felt safest. Testosterone has had the effect, in me, of amplifying both my emotions and their ensuing impulses to the point that they are often difficult to resist.

But I participated in a few too many usenet flamewars in my internet youth. Thus, my response to being told how I think, for instance, or who I am, is often simply to flee. To approximately here, where I can write abstract treatises on how it is to figure out social propriety when one is not well-versed in determining what might be proper in any given situation. I grew up as an extremely introverted girl, terrified of being wrong but usually convinced that she was so. I am no less introverted and no less terrified than before, and still convinced about 75% of the time, which means that when I do engage in written argument, my instinct is to argue as though my life depended on it. It sort of does, in what my therapist calls my “rich inner life.”

Small animals who think their lives are in danger are extremely hazardous to handle; they may not not mean to take anyone out, but will not hesitate to try to do so if they feel threatened. One reason I was able, when it was my job, to deal with animals in that state without any fear or anger of my own was because their aggression made perfect sense to me. I even identified with it much of the time I was at work: trying to negotiate the intense sociality of a daily job left me feeling much like that completely bewildered cat that will take your arm off if you reach for it.

But so any internal model for responding to disagreement without immediately escalating into combat readiness is quite lacking with me. Fight or flight are the only options that make instinctive sense to me, while human social functioning is incomprehensibly subtle. Add the complexities of socialized gender and I am thrown into my own personal third-body problem, where calculating real trajectories—much less ideal ones—becomes operationally impossible. And so answering the pronouncements of men who are so sure they are sure that they don’t even have to care about the actual cause they are promoting becomes an exercise in what I can only describe as sublimely disastrous communication.

I do not suppose that I actually hate men in general because certain ones of them drive me to this sort of distraction, but between my own disabilities in negotiating conversation and the very tiring fact that these same conversations just keep happening, I have come to a place where I question ever more vehemently the very idea of What Men Do in my culture. That devil’s advocate, for instance: who would want to be one? One is reminded of big brothers who torment their younger sisters just to get a rise out of them. Arguing without conviction for a position that makes little difference to the arguing party seems to me to betray some sort of delight in eliciting responses that are enormously costly, in terms of emotional energy, to the person goaded into a response, and in watching, without having to pay a particularly high price for the “entertainment,” the gyrations of another in pain. And what is that? Sociopathy? Psychopathy in larval form?

I wonder, and I wonder how it is that one comes to believe that behaving thus is acceptable in what passes for polite company. Here I am, having gone to some effort to cross over to the “other side,” but how the lifelong residents here choose to behave is every bit as bewildering, and nearly as maddening, as it was before I arrived. I do realize that there is no here here and that there never was; that is, I realize that “men” is a completely fictional category (though not, for all that, necessarily voluntarily chosen). But it is a familiar category, and one that I was led to believe, as most of us were, would make sense upon investigation.

But, no. Like most of life thus far, it makes less sense than ever.

[1] I use the term “trans-spectrum” here as something of a neologism, because it is difficult to use the term “trans” together with “man” in such a way that every person who might be included under such a locution would agree to being included thus, and so there is no current consensus that I am aware of as to how to refer generally to the class of human bodies who were assigned female at birth but who identify as some other gender. “Coercively assigned female at birth” might come fairly close to naming an experience that many of us have in common, but even there rests some controversy, so I note it here and hope that “trans-spectrum” men can be taken provisionally, as it is offered, as a shorthand term that is necessarily inadequate.

[2] See Rebecca Solnit’s “Men Explain Things to Me” for a very useful exposition of the phenomenon of Men Educating Women. What I am mainly considering here is why and how Men Educate Everyone, apparently.

Well, you cannot say I have not been busy. I have books to mail; videos to plan, film, edit, and release; and I am posting my autobiography, UnDiaGnosed online piece by piece, partly as a spur to finish it already, and partly as a serial experiment in publishing and distribution over the internet.

And I have taken to composing lyrical pieces when I am feeling especially inarticulate. Maybe there will be another collection sometime in the not terribly distant future.

Not to mention some interesting developments in the world of politics that have been begging me for some sort of contribution. But I am not going to say any more than that for now.

So, please, go read UnDiaGnosed; I am trying to post a new part every two weeks. I do not really know how long this will take because I have many sections to work on but some of them are short and so I will combining varying numbers of the into single posts. It might be some sort of entertainment for about a year, though.

If I think of something worth arguing prosaically, I will consider running off at the mouth here.

What defense against the apprehension of loss is at work in the blithe way in which we accept deaths caused by military means with a shrug or with self-righteousness or with clear vindictiveness? To what extent have Arab peoples, predominantly practitioners of Islam, fallen outside the “human” as it has been naturalized in its “Western” mold by the contemporary workings of humanism? … After all, if someone is lost, and that person is not someone, then what and where is the loss, and how does mourning take place?
… If violence is done to those who are unreal, then, from the perspective of violence, it fails to injure or negate those lives since those lives are already negated. But they have a strange way of remaining animated and so must be negated again (and again). …Violence renews itself in the face of the apparent inexhaustibility of its object.
Judith Butler, Precarious Life 32-33

Today being the day it is I decided that rather than participate in the public spectacle we seem intent on creating out of our inability to mourn whatever it was that we in the US think we lost ten years ago–although we may well have never had it to begin with –rather than go along with the ruse of our fallen, long-mythologized invulnerability to attack or even decay, that I was going to re-read Judith’s Precarious Life, since in it she addresses violence and mourning in direct response to the war that we imagine only began in 2001. I wanted to try to understand what it was exactly in our fetishization of the images of destruction that I find so frustrating to deal with, beyond even practical and political concerns over the extent to which we seem to be willing to give up every last shred of dignity and “freedom” (were we “free” before?), if it will help us to reestablish our illusion of security and safety from political violence.

I am also thinking a bit about death and the multiple, complex relations between life and death–not only in the realm of the human, but even in whatever cycle it is with which the forces of the whole universe are engaged: materialization out of potential, animation out of elementary energy, and any and all inevitable returns to entropy that we might also be undertaking as moments of complexity and approximate coherence in a system characterized by violent destruction in creation, and creation in destruction.

As is usual, I managed to get about thirty pages into my chosen reading before I felt compelled to begin writing. The questions that arise upon reading anything with nuance or subtlety are irresistible to me, and so I remain in interminable study, never able to finish much of anything but always starting again to reformulate this process in which I have, for most of my life, been chasing after ways to express the inexpressible and to narrate that which defies language. To put it all too neatly.

It is not a simple coincidence that the refusal to integrate our national experience into a humane course of action causes me to pause over this question of what it is to live in close proximity with death–even here in the US where death is sequestered and hidden away beneath neatly manicured lawns and behind antiseptic curtains. And it is not simple coincidence that this question occurs to me at the same time as does my perennial questions concerning the limits of language and sense, for death is one name for an ultimately senseless way of going along: it is the primary way in which I myself have been and will be related to all that is for all but the tiniest sliver of time that I claim as my uncertain lifespan. I do not mean by this that ultimately I will be dead, but rather that my being dead, or my not being, or something inexpressible that has to do with never having come to be to begin with despite my apparent sensible existence at the moment, constitutes the primary and primordial relations that ground this current state in which, for now, I seem to be here.

To put it in a Zen Buddhist sort of way, I am already dead and always have been. There are infinite other ways of putting it, for it will not be put, or it will not stay put, or in other words there are no other words and so there will always be an ongoing stream of other words. What we in the US seem unable to comprehend is that our ideal of individualism and consequence-free domination of whatever it is we damned well feel pleased to dominate has been bound from the time of its conception to meet, eventually, its limiting case, its moment of mortality realized, its susceptibility to destructive forces and its vulnerability to the violence that it so easily calculates as acceptable expenses for a political economy that will admit no peer. That is, empires are destined to fall. Are we falling now? Have we not already fallen?

–

To the degree that we must recognize the unrecognizable–that is, our “primary vulnerability” to that upon which our very being falters, even disastrously, in its attempt to circumscribe itself as independent and individualistic –in order to be able to mourn whatever is lost in a violent encounter, in a disaster, then to that degree, one who suffers loss might attempt to disavow one’s own vulnerability to loss by virtue of the fact that injury is instigated by an unrecognizable force. Thus is rendered impossible the question of any sort of narration of loss or resolution in sensible language of the insensibile moment of trauma. But rather than pausing to consider what might be the consequence of our all being exposed in this way, by virtue of our primary vulnerability, if we decline even to pause in the face of what undoes us in violence, if we attempt to master our vulnerability, we only manage to deny the very conditions of our existence and are immediately closed off from the possibility of our own future. With the unrecognizable other, we also die, or are discarded, or are disavowed, or are visited in the continuing cycles of violence that serve the interests of this denial of vulnerability, which is a denial of life itself.

We are thrown here on a sort of paradoxical demand: that the unrecognizable not be consigned to illegibility or, worse, to unreality, because we are not prepared to acknowledge that we might not be able to conceptualize, chart, categorize, or comprehend the nature of our own being exposed to an other. That is, this would be the ethical demand of living itself: not to deny the fact of our helplessness, not to foreclose the possibility of incursions from unpredictable sources–incursions which may cause us pain or pleasure or both, which may occasion the possibility of our being able to live in a more lively way, or which may frustrate our desire to keep our lives in order. One cannot predict which it will be, or whether all of these moments might be bound up together in such a way that pain is the precondition of pleasure and vice versa, or, more precisely, in such a way that the distinction between pleasure and pain is lost in the very potential of coming to life as terrestrial creatures.

Relegating to the unreal that which threatens the security of the self, denying conceptual meaning to that which breaks the bounds of conceptualization, is a form of impotence in the face of the other. This impotence is realized as the impossibility of negating that which, conceptually, one has already negated–as well as the impossibility of negating that which is not subject to the workings of negation! But although the workings of negation or exclusivity or ideation cannot bring this other into any sort of domesticated, enforced “peace”, this other remains naked and vulnerable in relation to the subject of the act of negation. Our impotence, or inability to erase what is not, to begin with, legible, visits upon the other a violence without end, a real violence that incurs real atrocities precisely because its mission is impossible, and thus must be repeated indefinitely, so long as the subject inflicting that violence seeks to immunize itself against what is crucial to the being of that very subject: its other, against which it attempts to define itself. And fails.

This is how, or one of the reasons why, totalitarian violence is in the last analysis suicidal: an attempt to destroy the other which faces me and makes my utterance of “self” possible in that primordial encounter, the effort to sever relations with that in which we are already entangled and always were, from a time prior to memory and thus prior to time, is, in a very real way, the destruction of ourselves. It is not only that the balance of an interconnected ecosystem can be fatally disrupted by exploitation to the point that exploiter and exploited both perish, although to conceive of the relations between living things in the universe in this way makes our fragility in the faceless face of our own exploitative appetites quite clear. But it is also that without those relations we are, quite simply, not. Or rather, not simply at all: those relations’ being the anteroom of history and discourse renders them both foreign to and constitutive of our ability to try to name them as such.

I have no idea how to end this, but it seems as though it might be worthwhile to pause at the point of our own suicidality as it emerges from militaristic efforts to secure our place in eternity. There is no such place to be had, of course, and we only hasten our own demise in struggling to erect for ourselves a line of defense against every possible enemy. Again, this is not only because we are happy to relinquish our ideals for the illusion of safety, but it is at least that and also our current relation to that which has, in the “West”, so long been designated as inadmissible: vulnerability itself, subjection itself, fallibility itself, interdependence and the possibility that our ideals themselves are inadequate and provisional.

Looking at the anecdotes posted at tsastatus.net for SEA and SFO sent me diving for a Klonopin. These stories are not particularly graphic and do not consist of the most horrible cases of TSA personal encroachment that have been passed around, but imagining myself in the place of the people describing their experiences as they went through the security line was enough to send a cascade of cortisol through my body. And so I do what is necessary to counteract it.

I only fly sedated to begin with. See flying, fear of. I developed this fear slowly with my growing sense of mortality but for some reason I will still drive when given the opportunity. I know it is not rational considering how unlikely it is to be in a plane crash at all, but car accidents happen quickly most of the time. I mean, I do still think that the trailer of that truck came at my head in slow motion when the driver cut me off by taking a wide right in front of me, but even so the whole thing lasted a few seconds at most and the slow motion thing was me thinking that I needed to get my head down if the car did not stop sliding under. Fortunately we came to rest nestled against the rear tires of the truck, but to this day I believe I had time to duck.

The point there is that you only have time to go into survival mode in a car crash, where everything falls away and it is just you and death hanging out and waiting to see if the date is on or off. Plane crashes can last a long time and you can fall tens of thousands of feet still conscious. I do not like that idea and so I take plenty of panic-stopping agents before ever getting to the airport.

Still I am not sure I could make it through a TSA screening that involved either what my friend Tim calls the naked scanners or what he also calls the grope–that would be the “enhanced” patdown. I have heard it said that we should not give in to our fears and go on with our lives as normal but it is not that simple for everyone, for one, and for two, it is our country that has succumbed to fear in allowing ourselves to be intruded upon in this way in order to travel in the manner to which we have grown accustomed. The practices of the TSA are discriminatory towards a variety of people with a variety body types and practically prohibitive towards others who are neurologically atypical.

Maybe it is just as well. My carbon footprint does not need to get any bigger. But it is not fear that stops me from dealing with whatever the TSA might have in store for me or it is not as simple as me failing to decide not to be afraid. Would you send an autistic transsexual man with PTSD from sexual assault and abuse through a naked scanner or a grope? Would you expect him simply to be able to swallow his misgivings and go through it like a good sheep?

The thing is that I do not have conscious control over when my body decides to go into flashback mode or the amount of emotional pain that will cause. I have little control over how long flashbacks last and some control over how I react once I am reliving whatever it is I might be reliving. I have the most control over staying out of situations that stimulate flashbacks. PTSD is a physiological phenomenon, which, because we Westerners think about things ass-backwards sometimes, will possibly help some to understand why the effects of PTSD elude conscious control. Fact is “free will” is also a physiological phenomenon but I am not going to stop to explain my philosophy regarding the compelling nature of that which is supposed to be artificial, cultural, mental, emotional, or whatever word you want to choose to try to shame someone over something that we never have had control over and never will.

Reading over the brief accounts of experiences with the TSA , it occurs to me that I cannot predict how I would react if someone put their hand inside the waistband of my pants. Imagining such a thing feels alarmingly similar to how it would feel to be about to have my pants pulled off of me. It has been over thirty-five years but that has been thirty-five years of repeatedly vowing that nobody will ever do that again. Given that PTSD reactions are physiologically similar to the what has been called the fight or flight instinct and given that there would be no place to run in the little TSA area, well that leaves only the alternative to flight.

I do not like where this is going. If I had a bit more money I might take a winding itinerary away from airports with naked scanners–Portland OR apparently has none, and it is not a long train or bus ride down from Seattle –but I do not have that kind of leeway in my travel plans. The TSA has grounded me, more or less, although some would say I have grounded myself. But why in the name of all that is good and pure (wherever that might be found..) would I voluntarily put myself in a situation where I might end up arrested for assaulting a TSA attendant? I cannot think of very many good reasons, myself.

What puzzles me the most about the whole situation is why more people are not pissed off about it. But so many have written that we have become a nation of hypnotized obeisance to whatever daddy says is good for us that it seems hardly useful to write about it again. I would like it though if one person felt pissed off for me. That would make my day. I am so tired of being told that I should be able to handle what is “no big deal” to most others that I am beginning to wonder just who out there is still awake enough to care that we are reflexively giving up our options to live unmolested, literally, with hardly a word of protest and more than one look of scorn towards those who find the situation at the TSA lines intolerable.

Go ahead. Make my day.

You knew that was coming. Don’t pretend otherwise.

And it’s fun, besides. :)

If you wish to bookmark the page (but pledge soon, because 45 days is not as long as it sounds!), use this url: www.tinyurl.com/onelastditch –it’s much easier to remember than the long Kickstarter url.

Um. Please. If you don’t mind.

Usually when I read the phrase “post-modern ‘anything goes’” it is being written by someone in a field in which postmodern theory does not figure very large–often a science-y type or sometimes a social science-y type; I suspect that in the social sciences postmodernism does get airplay but it is something like an AM radio broadcast of what needs to be auditioned live and in person.

Yes, the author is a fiction in most postmodern theory, and yes, it is difficult to make any claims to objective reality from within a postmodern critique of metaphysics. We do live in a discursively constituted, culturally mediated environment as postmodern Westerners and narrative does tend to be where one looks when one is trying to discern the grounds of classical Western metaphysics.

But “narrative” does not equal “not real” or “not binding” or even “voluntary” or “at somebody’s whim.”

That is a larger argument, but the question that I was looking at when I wrote what follows was about narrative and ethics, and some claim that the two terms are somehow mutually exclusive, which follows fairly quickly from assuming that narrative is unreal or whimsical. There is, in fact, an ethics of narrative that has been under investigation and exposition for quite some time, but maybe not in those circles where postmodernism is seen as a code word for absolute relativism.

Postmodernism’s critique has always been that it may be impossible to critique any given narrative from an objective point of view, but what is little spoken of is that this does not leave us with “only” subjective points of view; rather it questions such dualisms as objective/subjective as metaphysical assumptions and thus, implicitly in some cases, critiques both objective truth and subjective relativism, as well as the metaphysical order that relies on binary constructions.

What that leaves us with can vary depending on whom one talks to, but among other things, it is possible to critique cultural constructions from within their very constructedness without having to appeal to an objective standard. In fact it is the constructions themselves that are critiqued: arguments and their consequences are not without consequences simply because they are not objective. The real does not dissolve when dualism is questioned but becomes a part of discursive practices that have real effects on real beings whose discursive aspects do not render them less real or less prone to suffering.

There are still choices to be made in narrative constructivism, and consequences for making them. There may not be any externally applicable rules, but there are internal effects whose originating arguments can be questioned without appeal to external rules.

What results is a kind of argumentative analysis where used to appear moral debates. Instead of marshaling objective standards and decrees behind a particular position, one must instead construct a narrative that can withstand challenges that are also narrative. It may, ultimately, be true that the grounding assumptions of any given piece of discourse must simply be agreed upon by the group adhering to that discourse, but that those assumptions can always be questioned does not mean that they have no purchase, be it narrative or ethical or pathetic or logical. It simply means that they cannot be assumed to ground every possible discourse.

That any given assumption cannot ground every possible discourse does not render all assumptions equal. We can make still make ethical judgments about the consequences that obtain from following out a set of assumptions, for instance, and we can decide, as a community, upon what sorts of grounds our ethical practice will rest. That these grounds may not be universal renders them no less real and no less consequential in the world of discourse itself–that is, our world. We may have to do a bit of extra work in explaining why we hold a certain ethical principle as operational and necessary, but is this a bad thing? Principles that must answer for themselves may in fact be more humane than those that feel they can claim universal objectivity–for who can question the latter with mere words?

Ultimately, though, the narrative situation itself implies an ethical relationship between speakers, or between teachers of language and learners of language, or between those with voices in a given context and those without, and in other discursive situations that might occur under various circumstances. There remains at the heart of narrative itself an ethical relation, and one which is only beginning to be articulated as such. How we approach this relation without falling back on the distinction between subjective and objective–for it turns out that this relation appears before either of those concepts can be defined–may be where the ethical question of postmodernity lies.

The ethical relation that obtains prior to the metaphysical split between subject and object is the ethical problem that we in our discursive constitution inhabit. It is something of a rather strange event, for it marks the very possibility of language, as language’s inaugural gesture, while it eludes the grasp of that language which it realizes. This does not make it universal, or relative, or objective, or subjective–it is not situated at all within the domain of discursive conceptions that arise between speakers, for at that point language has already begun; its inaugural gesture might be said to be adhering illegibly to the far side of that language, where language itself cannot speak about it.

To say much more would be to open a book-length work on how this event or relation or situation might be the most consequential event or relation or situation in which we ever find ourselves, and thus be the most ethically relevant. An ethics that arises prior to conceptual discourse is necessarily one that cannot be codified discursively even though it is bound to language much like something resembling an unconscious is bound to our everyday thought and speech. The postmodern situation–the discursive situation–emerges from ethics, from an infinite series of ethical relations or events, in which speakers approach one another under circumstances that vary from one narrative event to the next.

What can one take away from this, given that it is only a beginning of an approach to postmodern ethics? For one, discourse is conseqential: it has effects, and those effects are realized in a world where beings are in always shifting relations to one another. Those consequences can be analyzed discursively and ethically and they are subject to ethical judgment within the particular situations in which the living approaches the living. At a discursive level, values can be held in community and they can be argued for and against. The absence of objective standards does not make this less so or even less necessary–if anything, such an absence makes deliberation one of the most consequential acts we undertake.

This is perhaps our provisional situation, the one in which we work within discourse and within relation to each other and relation to creatures with varying linguistic abilities: discursive principles are always open to interpretation and reinterpretation as well as to critique and recapitulation. Just prior to this situation is that in which another who speaks approaches us with what will be the gift–both promise and poison–of language itself. That relationship is the ever-unfolding event in which discursive practice arises and is something like our ethical unconscious every time we speak. The consequence of this event are enormous for we who live under the regime of speech and those who are subject to our actions and words. The ethical question at the heart of this relation is both the possibility and necessity of the question itself. That it may not have a discursive answer is not something we need to mourn, as we sometimes do those times when we could assume a universal relevance for our ethical decrees. That it is a question may be the motive behind ethics: to be open to question, to be prone to deliberation, may well be the only possible condition in which we can approach one another without rendering ourselves ethically bereft.

There is nothing new about any of this; it has been said elsewhere both more interestingly and better. However, this particular inquiry does not get much airplay in popular conceptions of what it means to be postmodern or to live in a time characterized as postmodern. Regardless of how much we might like to go back to where truth was grounded in something besides our own speech, that time is over–the variety of human experience cannot be pared back once it has made itself manifest. But we do not need universality or to salvage the objective in order to answer the question of ethics in postmodern thought. We need only to arrive at some partial conception of the question itself to understand that we stand before one another in a state of disarmament and undress, and that this moment is the ethical question for which no answer is adequate–and this could be a fortunate situation for those who have labored under answers whose adequacy was assumed to be a universal given, but only if we continue to resist precisely those types of answers.

Until I was about high school age it was the family story that one day we would move back to Seattle. My parents never did and now claim that they hated the rain anyway and prefer tornados to earthquakes, but of all the things they indocrinated me with, the only one that took was that I had to get back to Seattle. After a childhood of flying back to visit relatives in this lost paradise where it never got hot and the grass stayed green all year I was so hell-bent on getting back to Seattle that when my partner and I decided that we had to leave Atlanta in 1987 because, well, it was the South, I immediately and relentlessly campaigned for us to move to Seattle.

I was successful, much to my immense pleasure. Now I live in San Francisco but that has turned out to be something of an accident and I still assume that one day I will head back up to the land of dark and rainy winters. I miss those actually: one could stay in bed all day in the winter and not feel slothful in the slightest.

But what I mean to write about is going home. For me, going home and going to Seattle are at once similar ideas and yet completely different. While it is true that my childhood narrative of being Seattle-born (Puyallup, actually) and thus not of the strange people of the South had a great deal to do with my learning never to feel at home where I was unless it happened to be within 100 miles of Seattle, “home” itself would have turned out to be a complicated notion even without the involuntary exodus of my toddlerhood.

I wish my story were unique except that if it were I would not have very much company and that would make life feel even less worth living than it sometimes does with company. I have a theory about the nuclear family of the US in particular, and the Puritan/Protestant Anglo-Saxon ideal that is sold as the gold standard of familial foundations this country. I would try to state it minutely and precisely, but some years ago the magazine Granta summed it up so perfectly that I could hardly do better with a long exegesis: the family. It fucks you up.

Here are some of the things I associate with “home” as it coincides with “family of origin” or “immediate family”: shaming disciplinary tactics, horrifying religious indocrination (truly horrifying. I was told that I would burn forever if I did not “get saved”–I understood this to be the case by the time I was eight years old), sexual molestation, secrecy around said sexual molestation, and to cap all that off–to the point that by age 17 I was set to explode in a cavalcade of self-destruction — the suppression of any emotion that made the adults uncomfortable. We could not be angry and sadness was only permitted as long as the adults agreed that yes thing X was sad. If they did not agree, then you should be ashamed.

My parents are human. I don’t rattle all this off to damn them in some mid-life vendetta. In fact I think that what I grew up with is not all that unusual in the US, although sometimes some of it might be a little more subtle than it was in my case. We are a culture of indoctrination and subjugation. I do not know what history lessons consist of in public schools now–except in those places where the Tea Party is making sure they do not include any inconvenient truth–but my history lessons in Georgia, at least up until high school, consisted of mythological tales with the occasional supporting fact thrown in when such could be located and named.

There were no Indians in Georgia, for one. Or at least, if there had been, they vanished a very long time ago under such mysterious circumstances that it was not until I was in my mid-20s that I learned that in fact the Trail of Tears was precisely the forced relocation of many Southern tribes to what was at the time the far West. Although I had heard of the Trail of Tears, we were never told that it started where we were sitting or that it had anything to do with the South at all. At all! No clue.

And by this I do not mean to indict the public schools of the Deep South in particular. No, I suspect that most history taught to my generation consisted of construction-paper pilgrim hats and headdresses at Thanksgiving time and the regrettable but sadly no longer reversible fact that Europeans were forced to rough up a few people in order to obtain this land from sea to shining sea, our land, the land made for you and me.

Home? What would it be like to go home?

“Home” did not stop its descent into unrecognizability with my re-education in American history, which I undertook mainly on my own. No, to add to the confusion, I had to grow up queer. Growing up queer in the Southern US in the late 70s meant growing up without the first morsel of a vocabulary with which to describe, name, or explain one’s growing crushes on best friends. The word “homosexual” was not unknown; it was spat out with great distaste and the one guy in my high school class who was openly gay was bullied mercilessly. Honestly I do not know how or where he found the self-awareness to be able not only to name himself as gay but also to openly acknowledge it in the extremely, painfully conservative town we were growing up in.

Without that level of self-awareness, which I had not the slightest chance of developing at that age, being more concerned with escaping hellfire and figuring out what to do with a growing urge to kill myself, the best I could do was to try to explain to myself that I was really physically attracted to boys and only emotionally attracted to girls (yeah, right!)–but this mote of self-understanding arose after a very slow realization that I might actually have to consider whether or not I might be.. a lesbian!

Turned out I was a lesbian, for a little while at least, and then I decided I was a dyke for several years before remembering that as a child I had always thought I was supposed to be a boy and thus realizing that I was transsexual here in the very long run. But this took many, many years and long nights of wondering just what the hell was the matter with me.

I could not talk to my family about any of this–in fact, it has only been the past few months that I have had much communication with my parents since I told them I was going to be transitioning to “become a man” (it was about the only way to put in order that it make a lick of sense to them) fifteen years ago. We had had a vaguely unsettled truce going about my dykehood for a few years there, but when I rediscovered that I was trans at age 35, that all came tumbling down right quick. “Home” in the sense of “that place where you grew up” was foreclosed to me immediately at that point.

And so home, as you might gather, is an extremely unclear concept to me. I do feel as though I “belong” in Seattle and I seem to like the West Coast much better than the Deep South, but from a cultural standpoint of knowing I live on land that was literally stolen to a deeply personal perspective where “home” was a place where life was either inexplicably painful or it was a place that did not really exist at all in a familial sense, I honestly cannot tell you precisely where or what “home” is or how to get there.

And I do not think I am alone in that. Am I?

Keep an eye on onelastditch.com and I will also post notices here and there around the places I hang out these days.

20110328 update:
It has a title now and I changed the ending which may or may not really be the ending but for now it is.

~~~~~~

Speaking of which
whetting molted silver gelatin and tin
Estate sales without captions
prints adrift.
I have a book in my cupboard it is
a board
for cups or so it..

driftwoods spirit face moving
over water
I jumped. I meant
to go back and jump again

pinned on my back when he leapt
unheard “do
what I say and I won’t
hurt you” only
what he said itself blunt force
bearing down on me
and up

Between “turn
over” and
“you’re free to go”
blank space or not space yet
as blank
eraser ripping paper it was so hard to modulate
the swipe.

whisper it.
Ships topple sails purple
slack waving
Flagstone and remnant coursing according
to tide tables
traced
tenderly

Rescind me.
One hot July night not fighting but
well sighted
Sighed open ceiling white sheetrock
I slipped through
roughshod tottering
a canyon rim yonder lights out
ignites shout under jet
streamed ice waterwheel
turned or
burned
or
fern walled gullies in March I place
my cheek to wet moss

splayed under this body
three times my size
in spasms beyond recall
This gentle assailant stalls
rubbing himself
forgetful.

Myself I could not seize the moment
only counting on time to peter out
slow blinking deriliction no notes
Here the scene ends

and ends
and ends
and never tires of ending

I cut my teeth on critique
could train resolve on careful reasoning
Neither
jester
nor prince and you
read with the cunning of
some species reknown
for sprightly banter be it
blood at the teeth or thick wine
tableside

Me I
sputter and point
words
pelts
Spit sticks like glue
if you choose your materials
with care.

Water
paper
plastic
Thrown at the wheel or under

Foam specks on the lens
where it met
my teeth
If speech embargoed emits
tines or spikes
might tumbled sand anaesthetics
supply torsioned skin as parchment.

In my dreams soldiers shadows steel-browed and tensile
summon aircraft screeching phallic and armed.
Set us to flight or walk or crawl
or pulling one fist of earth over the other against that insistent friction

You
have dreamed it too:
cement walled crawl spaces
transparent tenements for
the likes
of us.

Who could have less to hide–

but drift
across storefronts
under street lamps
crowd into shopping malls
shipyards
senate chambers

–in hairshirts
of many colors
Cache of zinc
and lead
tungsten flame
charm
of mercury vapor
let us
let our wolf note
exhale
half-buried
half-ascent
its troubled
wave battered
breath
now swept low–

Shall I

swear or forewarn
as thought races its
final lap
My legs numb
still lurching seaward.