The Hauntology of Transness:
Or, Whither Gender Accelerationism?

On the train down to London, I felt more eyes on me than usual. Standing to one side as I waited to take my seat, a man passed me by, then stopped in the gangway, turning to look at me directly. His face was like thunder, as if he wanted to say something, and then quickly thought better of it.

I could think of no other reason for this strange interaction than the fact that my queerness is increasingly visible. It’s certainly not the sort of interaction I ever experienced prior to beginning my transition. But it’s also whatever. I laughed it off to myself, taking some bittersweet solace in the fact that my hormone regime is clearly starting to scramble some codes, even when I am making very little effort to visibly present myself in that way. It is a complex pill to swallow when sexism and queerphobic start to feel gender-affirming… It’s depressing this sad silver lining is one you regularly hear from trans people just going about their lives. It is also, of course, a personal defiance that only partly covers over a fear that increasingly pervades our existence in public spaces.

As the train pulled out of the station, with no window to look out of, I resigned myself to spending the next hour or so scrolling through Instagram reels. I came across one from Shon Faye, in which she reckons with her own fear at present, finding herself speaking vaguely and defensively when meeting new people, doing whatever she can to not reveal her transness. This paranoia is heightened, Faye explains, because she fears that, if she were to be open with someone — perhaps an organiser of an event, someone doing their job, etc. — they may well feel more empowered to dictate to her where she can and can’t piss. Better to hide and pass as best as possible.

Without wanting to draw any sort of equivalence between our experiences — Faye passes; I am very much a bricky girl — as I sat on the train, having already been looked at in a threatening way, I began my own process of wondering who I could call on for help, if anything were to happen.

The food trolley was wheeled by, pushed and pulled by two members of staff wearing a casual polo-t-shirt uniform with lanyards hanging around their necks. The lanyards — now commonly seen in many work and/or institutional settings — were striped with all the colours of the ‘progress’ flag. A strange feeling took over once I noticed this. Despite this signalling of allyship, I didn’t hold out that much hope that, in the event of some hypothetical incident, they’d be all that helpful. I assumed, in their working role, they’d defer to the law. The people I was most wary of, in that moment, were the people wearing the colours signalling… support for my liberation? Maybe not even that.

I was left thankful that all train toilets are, for the time being, gender-neutral…

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Despite initial feelings of defiance, in the face of the UK Supreme Court’s recent judgement on the status of trans women under the Equality Act, I’ve been left increasingly deflated by the state of trans discourse in this country as a whole — and not only among our enemies, but also our allies and even some trans people themselves.

Two Sundays ago, I attended a demonstration around Grey’s Monument in Newcastle, where a range of speakers spoke out against the Supreme Court judgement over the course of two hours in front of an enormous crowd of supporters. The day itself was wonderful, with so many of Newcastle’s queers gathering in the otherwise more hostile centre of town, as the sun shone joyfully upon us.

I heard one old man, passing by, refer to us as a “gathering of freaks”, but no one would have been stupid enough to start something; there were hundreds of people in attendance. We moved onto The Old Coal Yard shortly afterwards for How Mountain Girls Can Love, a new monthly event showcasing queer country acts. It was wholesome and affirming and I went home that evening with my heart full.

But as the next few days went by, I came to reflect on how the speeches at the demo had ultimately left me cold, as although they were expressions of opposition to this growing reactionary current within British liberalism, they also felt oddly liberal themselves…

This was far from the intention, of course. The chants rehearsed and repeated between each speech were familiar — “No borders, no nations, trans liberation”; “When trans people are under attack, what do we do? Fight back!” But what does “fighting back” look like in the context of trans liberation specifically?

Expressions of Palestinian solidarity were steadfast at this protest, as they have been at all protests over the last eighteen months, no matter the overarching cause rallied behind. As it should be. But when the two opposition movements are brought together so explicitly, highlighting how both are resisting various kinds of state control and othering, it became clear that one side had clearer targets for direct action than the other…

Palestine Action, for example, are an undeniably courageous group, which has utilised direct action to disrupt Israel’s infrastructure of apartheid, its genocide, and the UK’s complicity in both. But if we are hoping to place the struggle for trans liberation alongside this sort of action, then what do our methods of disruption and resistance look like? What are we sabotaging? What are we tearing down?

It seems there is an unfortunate limit to trans dissent in this country. There’s also a vague feeling that, when claims of intersection with other causes are made, they start to feel like stolen valour, only highlighting the paltry forms of resistance that queer people and their allies have felt able to effectuate. This is perhaps because trans politics in this country has often been reduced — not necessarily through any fault of its own, but due to the sheer force of the reaction directed against us — to challenging a certain disregard for social etiquette, but not a whole lot more than that.

Consider how it is only the liberal position that understands the “kinder, gentler politics” of the Corbyn years as meaning “more social politeness” (read: not being mean to reactionaries on Twitter), rather than a programme that seeks to directly intervene in the causes of social murder. Given the moral panic surrounding people’s shifting use of pronouns, this is one area in particular where dissent takes on an unfortunately liberal character. Of course, the use of people’s preferred pronouns is good, but it is, at base, only the polite thing to do. And in what other political domain can politeness be framed as a vanguardist position? It is in this context that a trans politics is woefully circumscribed in a liberal context it otherwise opposes, and I fear that, unless more action is taken to truly elevate this struggle to the level of those it rightly stands in solidarity with, it is at risk of remaining there.

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So, what is to be done? But also, what is already being done? There are many well-intentioned initiatives here and there, even if only at a local level.

Newcastle’s community has come together repeatedly over the last few years to throw fundraisers for different people’s gender-affirming healthcare, and has more recently crowdfunded legal support for a trans refugee seeking asylum in our city, who has since been given the right to remain. These initiatives have been run by trans people themselves, petitioning their cis allies for help and support. But this also further emphasises how the brunt of transitioning to a more equitable social reality is still loaded onto the back of trans people themselves, who are already engaged in their own forms of self-disruption.

This is arguably the entire reason why we are the subject of such cruelty at present. Talk to any trans person about their past lives — if they are even willing to divulge this information (many aren’t) — and you will find someone who was undergone a radical letting-go of the person they once were. This isn’t simply a position of transmedicalism (as some have claimed when I’ve argued this before); there are many ways in which we can materially change ourselves and how we relate to the world in which we live, and these are precisely the things we are being denied access to — economic stability, access to resources, housing, healthcare, general quality of life. We fall into the logic of our enemies when we make the ‘material’ synonymous with the ‘biological’, or even the ‘medical’ with the strictly ‘hormonal’ or ‘surgical’. It has always meant more than that. But this equivalence is one way in which the conversation lags behind where it should be, out of a fear of tripping over our inclusivity.

I think it is necessary, then, that we open out our understanding of what it means to be trans, beyond this simplistic inclusivity, whilst also not slipping into the sort of universalism that relativises the sorts of changes that trans people specifically undergo. This is tricky, but the point is essential because TERFs, to the contrary, are beholden to a ‘gender realism’ (as in ‘capitalist realism’) that tries to inscribe the mantra of ‘there is no alternative’ onto the level of biology and identity (with the two made somehow distinct, much like ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ themselves, such that only the latter is malleable, albeit it in an illusory way, when in fact they are both as real and mutable as each other). The only argument TERFs have, then, is that change — inscribed at any ‘level’ of our understanding of sex/gender — is impossible. This, however, is what makes the designation of ‘trans-exclusory radical feminism’ inapposite. Understood at its most reductive level, transness seeks a material change in one’s relationship to patriarchy — this is true for trans women, trans men and non-binary people. For any feminism to deny this surely disqualifies its claim to be a feminism.

It is for this reason that change cannot be cut off from our understanding of transness, especially right now. But does this also help illuminate what is required of our allies also, if they truly wish to align themselves with us? This is to ask whether it is not only imperative that our allies accept us and our choices, but that they also integrate a little transness into their own lives as well. Our allies must consider what they themselves are willing to let go of in order to liberate us. After all, do we not all desire some sort of transition — if not between (or out of) genders, then out of some sort of political / material reality? But does this also risk relativising transness as a process that only further elides the material differences between trans people and our allies?

Unfortunately, I fear that this conversation is not being had at the level it should be.

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I want to keep emphasising the material changes in question here. Despite all claims to the contrary, transness is not simply an identity politics, that is, an ideology — and anyway, even if it is an ideological position in some form, every ideology is necessarily built on top of an understanding of our material conditions. A trans politics, then, is fundamentally rooted, as a process, in tampering with the material constitution of your own life and social relations. It is about mutating what too many see as immutable. Indeed, far from being an impossibility, transness reveals the extent to which change is possible in myriad ways — even if this sense of possibility is always an open question. Transness, furthermore, is inherently political because it demonstrates just how malleable things are, just how adaptable society itself is. This constitutes a threat to a neoliberal order. But there is a subtly worth investigating further here, which is the difference between a subject position being inherently political and a subject position containing an inherent politics.

Billie Cashmore, in a recent essay for Splinter, puts a much finer point on this, building on the work of Judith Butler to consider not only transness but a recent redefinition of queerness in general. It is a difficult but hugely rewarding essay, and so my intention in deferring to it here is also to help lubricate my own understanding of it.

Cashmore, having introduced the central conceit of Butler’s most famous works, argues that:

Queerness is … defined here in a way that makes its explicit politicisation possible. Of course, queer people have, as long as sexuality and gender has been the concern of the state, been necessarily involved in politics, but what Butler’s redefinition [of gender via the ‘performative’] accomplishes is the claim that the political character of queerness is no longer secured in its negotiation with the state, but rather is related to its persistent destabilisation of patriarchal matrices of representation. We can now arrive at what feels like a slogan of queer politics of late, that queerness is “inherently” political. It is not just inherently political, it has an inherent politics, that is, its destabilising position is necessarily anti-patriarchal and, by virtue of the magic-trick permitted by intersectional analyses, thereby connected to all other struggles, and as such anti-capitalist. Hallelujah! Communism in the present.

I’m sure I don’t need to point out the sarcasm here. It is a definition of queerness that once again highlights just how disconnected trans political action can feel from the causes it otherwise aligns itself with — a disconnection, again, that is not the fault of trans people themselves, but a consequence of the bitter reaction against us, even in some feminist discourses. Nevertheless, for many of us, Cashmore’s conclusion (hopefully) bears true: we are conscious of the political character of our own queerness and affirm it as well as we can. But the trouble is that these pronouncements, this sloganeering, sometimes appears to be the limit of trans politics also. As Cashmore’s essay continues, this limit is felt ever more sharply.

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For all the work done to correct a popular and reductive understanding of Butler’s work — the assertion that their conception of ‘performativity’ is itself material as a kind of inscribed doing; that is, all gender is an act, or constituted by a chain of signifying actions, which does not delegitimate its materiality or ‘realness’, but rather inscribes sex and gender in the overall insistence of a symbolic order, or what’s more, our sense of reality — the impacts of this conception do not necessarily, in and of themselves, disrupt the world in which we live. In fact, it is telling that an example frequently used to demonstrate Butler’s thesis is one that many people are culturally far more familiar with: marriage, as an example of cishetero-performativity.

The declaration “I now pronounce you man and wife” is performative in the sense that is constitutes a performative utterance, which doesn’t mean it is meaningless but rather meaningful; it does change the relationship enjoyed by a couple getting married, by structurally elevating the status of their relationship in numerous ways. Already the efficacy of this example is strained, of course, since the relationships between modern married couples may not actually change a great deal after a marriage ceremony — they may already live together, sleep together, have children together, etc.; acts that marriage was previously used to authorise — but the ritual itself nonetheless remains as a kind of social confirmation, an approving ritual, which means a couple may view each other differently after this act of commitment is affirmed by law, by ‘God, and/or by their community. Thus, society, in turn, will also view a married couple differently as well (legally and otherwise).

The problem that this thesis of performativity (as it relates to cisness) introduces into trans politics, however, is that we have often sought recognition from the state in terms that mirror cisheteronormativity, which can end up (re)producing the contradictions already active in cisheteronormativity itself. In the context of the recent Supreme Court judgement, this is readily apparent, but it also sets the stage for various ‘approving’ documents to be used to conflict with one another, and thus brings an institutional transphobia to the fore, as it has the potential to water down the significance of, for example, GRCs (gender recognition certificates). But it is notable that this diminishment, in terms of its legal standing, only travels in one direction, failing to understand how gender recognition certificates are no less performative than birth/marriage/death certificates themselves.

The consequences of this, again, become more obvious when we limit ourselves to a consideration of cis performativity, which highlights how so much of cisheteronormativity defers to an under-defined sense of what is ‘natural’. Take the example of ‘gender reveal parties’, which are a far more recent performative ritual used to approve the signifying regime one is to be coached in from birth onwards. They are performative because pronouncements like “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!” are just as consequential as the declaration “I now pronounce you man and wife.” This observation unfolds in two directions: on the one hand, this sort of declaration is consequential because it will define your life in a meaningful and material way; on the other, if we were to declare that this declaration of gender is final and immutable, then we might as well regress to a time when divorce is no longer legal also… This, however, is seldom appreciated, heightening certain contradictions in our societal infrastructure.

This is a point that Butler (as quoted by Cashmore) frames as follows:

The resignification of norms is thus a function of their inefficacy, and so the question of subversion, of working the weakness in the norm, becomes a matter of inhabiting the practices of its rearticulation. The critical promise [of this rearticulation has] to do with … the exposure or the failure of heterosexual regimes ever fully to legislate or contain their own ideals.

GRCs precisely work on the weakness of a norm in this way, but we might argue that their efficacy becomes an issue for the interpretation of law only. The issue that Cashmore takes with this, which I think is vital, is that it is not enough. Indeed, again noting the occasional fear that arises when the ‘material’ is assumed to foreground an essentialism, we find ourselves in Marxist territory here: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” But what then becomes of a trans politics that fights for the autonomy to change on the basis of an interpretation of the law only?

Of course, this isn’t to say that Butler’s theses haven’t changed things; rather, the problem they too arrive at in their work is how to legitimate this rearticulation in terms that do not defer to the persistent quasi-solidity of cishetero-discourses themselves. In what sense, then, can a rearticulation of such actions highlight their performative nature whilst also, as is surely desired, escaping the ‘performative’ (in a pejorative sense) and actually having a lasting impact on the world in which we live?

Returning to Cashmore’s essay, it is here that we can understand how an inherent politics of queerness produces certain frictions, even amongst trans people themselves. Cashmore (again following Butler) highlights the example of drag, which likewise exists in a peculiar place in our social discourse, caught somewhere between a demonstration of the plasticity of gender and also a challenging (and ever-changing) monstration of it.

I’ve certainly heard people argue that drag is a kind of lampooning of women, for instance, but this presupposes that there are innate aspects of womanhood that are only being imitated (to the point of mockery) by people who do not ‘naturally‘ possess these characteristics. To the contrary, drag exaggerates the performance of gender to turn it into a performance-as-spectacle. Drag performances, then, “are radical (only) to the extent that they call the truth-regime of sex into question.” But if there is a discomfort produced among some viewers in this regard, it is because drag can also sometimes (re)produce the tensions of everyday gender performativity in negative. Cashmore continues, with this in mind: “Butler’s move, as we must always know, is to consider how resignification is possible in this performative mode, constantly implicated in that which it opposes.”

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, in the context of my pub job. Recently, my boss and I were puzzled as we considered how we might address a habit of some men on stag dos to wear dresses around town as an act of ritual humiliation. It is a ritual many men take on the chin, laughing it off and perhaps seeing it as a mark of courage, but which is changed when they end up ordering a drink from me at the bar — someone who may also be wearing women’s clothes, as a trans woman who does not yet pass. It is clear that we are wearing these clothes for very different reasons, but the problem then is how to go about voicing our opposition to their performances. Intentions, in this instance, are no doubt obvious, but it feels difficult to instigate a sort of soft ban on cross-dressing without making our otherwise openly queer-allied pub appear more hostile to trans people. Far from this being a major issue that warrants so much consternation, perhaps this also highlights the difficulty of making changes in this arena as it relates to Butlerian versus pejorative instances of the ‘performative’.

By way of another (more pressing) example, we can return again to birth/marriage certificates, and Cashmore’s observation that “what Butler’s redefinition accomplishes is the claim that the political character of queerness is no longer secured in its negotiation with the state”. This redefinition, if it is even acknowledged at the level of popular discourse, has hardly been properly implemented, even within queer communities themselves. Indeed, queer activism all too easily shades into arguing for a far looser equality than we should be seeking: civil partnerships are as significant as marriage certificates; gender recognition certificates are as significant as birth certificates. Whilst this is true, it somewhat misses the overarching point at hand, because, in measuring these alternatives against a prevailing norm, we end up meeting cisheteronormativity on its own terms. Although the intention behind this sort of demand can be considered, in Cashmore’s terms, as “a kind of transfiguration of Jacques Derrida’s logic of the supplement, wherein the coherence of any system requires a kind of included-exclusion which thereby deconstructs the system in its very construction”, are we not also left wondering just how deconstructive these breadcrumbs are in actuality?

This is the crux of Cashmore’s critique, and though I must confess to wrestling with it on publication, I have felt its power far more acutely in the aftermath of the Newcastle demo. The conflation of a trans ‘identity politics’ with expressions of solidarity with Palestine only heightened my own sense of their disconnection, in spite of proclamations to the contrary. It is this discrepancy that Cashmore skewers forcefully when she writes:

Intersectionality, rather than merely being read as a necessary identification of the ways individual subjects are constituted and dominated at the site of intersection between varying relations of domination, now reads each of these relations as reciprocally constitutive, such that there is no sense of what patriarchy is without white supremacy, no sense of queerness without a resistance to colonialism, and so on. As such, the interconnectedness of all struggles allows for some of the more politically questionable claims — for instance, that polyamory is necessarily connected with anti-colonial struggle — which thereby allows for a sense of activism through a set of choices one applies to one’s own life, by virtue of their apparent connection to all other modes of domination. No doubt there is not a struggle against oppression that we should not be committed to, and the interconnectedness of, for example, the genocide of Palestinians since 1948 by the settler colonial state of Israel is funded and technologically aided by the data-production of the tech industry which is now forming a new fascism in the United States. But claims to interconnectedness that imagine a total social space in which all relations can be said to depend on one another both misunderstands the radically disconnected quality of our lives under globalisation, but also allows for a form of political activism that functions as a resignation, a participation in only one’s own individual life, and which takes on the whole by its (often deeply tenuous) connection to all others.

Again, to reiterate the example above, I think this is demonstrated through the direct actions of those committed to the Palestinian cause — sabotaging weapons factories, most obviously — and the lack of any equivalent action (at present) in the context of trans liberation. At a certain point, we might even view these claims of intersectionality to be insulting to the particular experiences of domination being considered so holistically. And this is damning for a queer politics, as it risks evacuating queerness of any politics as such.

This is most apparent within the ‘radical inclusivity’ of queerness itself, where transness is relativised to the point that all emphasis is removed from its founding act of transition. This places a nefarious limit on trans people’s sense of self-authorising. The Palestinian people similarly self-authorise — they exist, and assert that fact against attempts to annihilate them — but then why does an assertion of the existence of trans people limit itself to the level of enunciation in our public sphere? Perhaps this is because the self-authorisation of trans people is paradoxically constituted through a self-questioning, which is not active in the Palestinian cause in the same way (they are questioned, but do not question themselves). As Cashmore writes: “Butler’s sense of an inhabitation of queerness might then, via this sense of being-at-home in queerness, offer us a surprising appearance of a well-known formulation, albeit in another form, that queer gender is that gender for whom its gender is in question” — a topic Butler discusses wonderfully in her underrated text Giving an Account of Oneself, which was integral for me in writing my last book on the equally knotted politics of narcissism, used to pathologize a self that calls itself into question.

The example of narcissism is useful here. In my book, I challenge the contradiction that narcissism-as-pathology is rooted in a certain self-assuredness, which is then moralised against for its apparent ‘arrogance’, when in fact narcissism has for much longer referred to a self-questioning. This is not to suggest that there is no sense of self-assuredness in contemporary narcissistic displays, but rather that these displays are defensive and only cover over an often existential predicament.

A similar contradiction is produced in trans politics. Trans people become trapped in a detrimental feedback loop between self-questioning and self-authorising — between renouncing an essentialist solidity and deferring to their own self-mastery. The latter mode soon tacks itself on the state’s ideological solidity, even as this solidity is itself in question. This, again, is not necessarily a problem that trans people produce for themselves; anyone who has been coached by another trans person as they seek access to medical transition (as I experienced last summer) will be aware that, in order to get what you want, you are encouraged to exaggerate your own certainty, even as you remain humble before all that you do not know about yourself in beginning this innately experimental process.

Although forced into such a position, it has nonetheless had an impact on how many trans people think about themselves, leading to the occasional voicing of suspicions in our own community, as some trans people are disparaged for not doing enough to pass. Again speaking personally, I am someone who feels increasingly assured in my own transness, as I have greatly enjoyed the significant (and still ongoing) changes that DIY HRT has made to my body. But at the same time, I feel indifferent towards my facial hair, which for many trans women is something they go to great financial lengths to have lasered off. When I look at myself in the mirror, I have come to see my five-o’clock shadow as a sort of readymade contouring that actually helps my face look more feminine, despite otherwise being a signal of masculinity. But as the complexity of this mixed semiotics of gender starts to scramble certain interpersonal codes, it nonetheless remains a point of anxiety as I wonder whether I too am really doing enough to let go off a past version of myself (since I’ve had a beard since I was 22 and, admittedly, still find its continuing if fading presence somewhat comforting).

This is to say that there is great difficulty involved as this rewriting of gendered codes leads to stereotypes and incredulity among cis and trans people together, and although a less regimented idea of queerness might afford some fluidity, it can nonetheless come back to bite us and undermine the greater freedoms desired by trans people collectively.

Cashmore lays out the stakes of this tension, with a ‘flat’ conception of queerness, as follows:

“Queerness” becomes accessible to everyone, as long as they are regarded as somewhat “calling into question” gendered norms. In a sense, this is what has allowed TERFs in the UK to refer to straight white women as “gender non-conforming” just because they have short hair: it’s essentially true! There seems to be little, then, that would separate queerness in this rather minimal sense from others in the queer community, who lie further outside the bounds of normative gender enactment for whatever reason. The attempt to articulate a notion of “queerness” that allows for radical inclusivity now flattens the varying and distinct representations of this “queerness”, reducing its political meaning to null, an empty signifier in which seemingly all can participate if they make the right choices about what shoes to buy, or what haircut to ask for. This is not an emptying of the political meaning of queerness by capitalist appropriation, but rather a process by which the establishment of queerness as ontological condition ensures that it loses all connection to its diffuse, particular discursive representations. […] This is a queerness whose politics has now ceased to exist entirely, since it bears no necessary relation to anything other than living truly with the always-extant deconstruction of norms that is already occurring: there is nothing, strictly, that must be changed, from the point of view of “queerness”. There is no politics of queerness.

I suspect that this is not a problem with Butler’s analysis, which to me seems absolutely correct from the point of view of drawing out what must surely be meant by “queerness” and its alleged politics. The problem is with this idea of “queerness” as something that exists at such a universal level. Helpful for a culture in which activism is demanded of all of us but the possibilities of radical change seem increasingly foreclosed, the inhabitation of queerness offers us all a radical politics that demands remarkably little of us.

What I find difficult to parse in this — and this difficulty is no doubt the issue at hand — is that, in reflecting on my own position in relation to this, I find myself falling into an impotent questioning that doesn’t really help me work my way out of the gender quagmire. Indeed, perhaps it is this emptying out of the political meaning of queerness that leads some trans people to take chunks out of each other. On the one hand, a trans person may look at me and see someone who isn’t really putting the effort in; on the other, I might defensively feel like binary transness delegitimates my capacity for self-expression and places a sense of authenticity above me that only exacerbates a gender dysphoria that has no end. There may be some truth to both positions, but neither feels entirely helpful. It leads to a sort of hand-wringing wherein politics suddenly appears absent. We remain tangled in the disastrous scaffolding of normative representation that helps nobody. It is actually a very depressing place to be.

In light of this, I think the point made about “the establishment of queerness as ontological condition” is integral here, as it appears that it is a process of ontologizing queerness that constitutes this very contradiction, which Cashmore frames as follows:

‘Queerness’, then, is always destabilising to gendered norms, and thus always political, though its entry into representation is only possible by a calling-into-question that involves an authentic inhabiting of the ontological structure of discourse, an authenticity always articulated as the impossibility of all performative authenticity. While Butler’s position may [very] well disallow any appeal to an authentic maleness or femaleness — even a sense of an authentic queerness itself — this sense of inhabiting queerness as critical instability calls into being the possibility of a queer person who is not inhabiting this queerness, where this queerness is constructed at such a general level so as to be a condition on all discourse. It is in this sense that Butler ontologises queerness: even if it is raised to the level of always destabilising the possibility of ontology, it takes this status only in being ontologised as the condition of impossibility of ontology.

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At this juncture, what I find all the more interesting in Cashmore’s essay is its implicit (if forestalled) relationship to a kind of gender accelerationism — and she has referred to herself as a “recovering accelerationist” to me in private. This may no doubt make her chuckle, just as we laughed about this after the recent anti-launch for Mark Fisher’s Flatline Constructs at Housmans a few weeks ago.

In conversation with Adam Jones of Acid Horizon, a familiar situation arose where Adam defended an opposition to an accelerationist politics in the context of Fisher’s thought, whilst I defended its enduring relevance. This is always fun for me, as despite this disagreement, Adam and I remain well-equipped to have a generative conversation, as our goals are very similar, even if we are methods and frameworks differ in nuanced ways. After the event, Cashmore expressed a similar pleasure in remaining suspicious of an accelerationist politics whilst still finding its discussion invigorating — even if that is only because of the infectious passion it brings out of me when I talk about it in public.

I wonder if I might invoke accelerationism here again then, as the underside of Cashmore’s problematic. If the problems she is wrestling with are related to the consequences of substantialising, or ontologising, traces of gender-nonconforming experience that are common to many, resulting in a slide into apolitical universalism, which elides those experiences that are more particular for trans people, are we perhaps talking about a kind of hauntology of gender here?

To be clear, I am thinking of Jacques Derrida’s invocation of hauntology here, rather than its more Fisherian variant. Regardless, this suggestion might seem like a leap, considering all that we have discussed so far, and the introduction of another intersecting discourse might be made in error. But given the fact that Derrida looms large in the background of Butler’s work as a whole, let me take a moment to lay out the intersection between performativity and hauntology as I see it.

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The specific tension Derrida wrestles with in Spectres of Marx is that which he finds in Marx’s work and its preoccupation with ghosts. Derrida’s work is immediately reflexive in this regard, with ‘pre-occupation’ functioning as a term for that which already (but perhaps only partially) resides in reality; for a being-already-haunted.

For Derrida, a haunting is thus “a habitation without proper inhabiting”; “it causes, it inhabits without residing, without ever confining itself”. He plays an etymological game here, noting how the word ‘haunt’ is derived from the Germanic haust (already close to the word haus), which means “dwells” or “resides”. This makes a haunting a kind of “dwelling again”, furthering the templexity of the revenant that both comes to reside and also returns to its non-place in a discourse.

This is how we are to understand Marx and Engels’ invocation of the spectre of communism: it is not the haunting of a past ideal (although it has its revolutionary antecedents), but is rather, as in Marcuse’s formulation, “the spectre of a world that could be free”. The spectre of communism is, then, the haunting of some future ghost / ghost of the future. Time is out of joint here. (Cue Mark Fisher’s paradoxical conception of “lost futures”, often shorn of its templexity and the tension held between the spectral and the psychedelic, where ghostly apparitions become hallucinations, blurring the line between speculating and remembering…)

Although this may seem completely irrelevant to a Butlerian discourse, I think we can turn to Derrida’s hauntologising of a certain politics in order to reframe the contractions at work in Butler’s notion of performativity. In fact, I’d like to wager that their thesis of “gender performativity” is precisely a transfiguration of Derridean hauntology, which discusses many of the same issues, regarding what it means to inhabit (if only partially) a notion like gender, thus ‘residing’ uncannily at the limits of ontologisation, that is, the ‘not-all’ residing of the unheimliche.

Consider, with Cashmore’s resistance to the ontologisation of gender in mind, how Derrida frames this notion of ‘haunting’ when he writes that a

logic of haunting would not be merely larger and more powerful than an ontology or a thinking of Being (of the “to be,” assuming that it is a matter of Being in the “to be or not to be,” but nothing is less certain). It would harbor within itself, but like circumscribed places or particular effects, eschatology and teleology themselves. It would comprehend them, but incomprehensibly. 

This is perhaps what Cashmore also identifies in Butler’s (im)possibility of performance, and even shades into a more Derridean position as it relates to (what might be called) an eschatology of transness, which is feared by many as the supposed endpoint of a once-formidable truth-regime of sexual categorisation. But queerness itself is inevitably embroiled in this eschatological current also, with Cashmore imagining, somewhat despondently, towards the end of her essay, that a “time-limit on ‘queerness’ is approaching,” after which “we will have to look for new ways to articulate our place in this world, and our mode of opposition to patriarchy, in all its instantiations.”

Is this not where Derrida finds himself also, in thinking the absent-presence of communism within the (im)possibility of the so-called ‘end of history’, which similarly engendered new (or as-yet-undecided) ways of articulating a (post-Soviet) idea of communism?

Perhaps I am falling into a now-familiar trap here, returning to a notion of queerness as “destabilising position [which is] necessarily anti-patriarchal and, by virtue of the magic-trick permitted by intersectional analyses, thereby connected to all other struggles, and as such anti-capitalist.” Nevertheless, the question Cashmore arrives at is that of how we re-inhabit transness (as a haunting) at a precise moment when a liberal discourse has slipped into reaction against its own inapposite proposition of the ‘end of gender’ — in the sense that, for the liberal mind, the ‘transgender tipping point’ has brought about an era of ‘post-gender politics’ in the same terms that the Obama presidency brought about a ‘post-racial politics’.

We are not, of course, living in anything that might possibly resemble a post-racial, post-gender or post-historical society. Indeed, what is ‘post-‘ in this regard is clearly not the absence of any opposition, the settling of all sexed and gendered tensions (and here I am thinking of Fukuyama explicitly); it rather designates a revenant process that persists beyond the end, which, in Derridean terms, “consists in autonomizing a representation (Vorstellung) and in forgetting its genesis as well as its real grounding (reale Grundlage).”

To me, this seems like the crux of Cashmore’s argument. The tide of an autonomizing of trans representation returns us to the terminal beach of liberal anti-politics, but this autonomous spectre still haunts us all the same, and returns to us now again, as Cashmore writes, with an explicit nod to Derrida, like “a kind of included-exclusion which thereby deconstructs the system in its very construction”.

The question of what is to be done resurfaces here, and it is in Spectres of Marx that we find some sort of outward path, or at least an emphasis on the ethical imperative required of us.

Consider how the status of included-exclusion is precisely that of the Derridean ghost, which we

welcome … but even while apprehending, with anxiety and the desire to exclude the stranger, to invite the stranger without accepting him or her, domestic hospitality that welcomes without welcoming the stranger, but a stranger who is already found within, more intimate with one than one is oneself, the absolute proximity of a stranger whose power is singular and anonymous, an unnameable and neutral power, that is, undecidable, neither active nor passive, an an-identity that, without doing anything, invisibly occupies places belonging finally neither to us nor to it.

How appropriate that one of the most memorable characters conjured by the arch-TERF J.K. Rowling, in her Harry Potter universe, is Moaning Myrtle — the wailing ghost who haunts a bathroom. Lest we forget, too, that Myrtle haunts the bathroom in which she was murdered because her killer has never been brought to justice, and justice is only finally secured when Potter, foregoing the ridicule and avoidance that characterises Myrtle’s posthumous experience, speaks to her, uncovering the final clue as to where her killer — a resurrected basilisk that has returned, after a long period of hibernation, to once again stalk the corridors of Hogwarts and kill its students — is located.

If you’ll excuse the grotesque Potterification of this position, it is nonetheless one akin to the one arrived at as Derrida’s text comes to its own end. He writes:

If I am getting ready to speak at length about ghosts … it is in the name of justice. Of justice where it is not yet, not yet there, where it is no longer, let us understand where it is no longer present, and where it will never be, no more than the law, reducible to laws or rights. It is necessary to speak of the ghost, indeed to the ghost and with it, from the moment that no ethics, no politics, whether revolutionary or not, seems possible and thinkable and just that does not recognize in its principle the respect for those others who are no longer or for those others who are not yet there, presently living, whether they are already dead or not yet born. No justice — let us not say no law and once again we are not speaking here of laws — seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of exterminations, victims of the oppressions of capitalist imperialism or any of the forms of totalitarianism. Without this non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present, without that which secretly unhinges it, without this responsibility and this respect for justice concerning those who are not there, of those who are no longer or who are not yet present and living, what sense would there be to ask the question “where?” “where tomorrow?” “whither?”

It is with this assertion (or thereabouts) that Spectres of Marx is ‘concluded’ (the door out is nonetheless left ajar). It is an assertion that once again brings to mind the disparity between the spectres of Palestinian and trans life — we seek justice for the former far more forcibly and directly than we seek justice for the other. And if we find ourselves feeling a kind of resignation here, it is no doubt because Derrida’s preoccupation with the ghost, with justice for the ghost, the ghost of justice, leaves us in a negative and even mournful position. Derrida’s text thus bequeaths a responsibility to us, but beyond that, it attempts to make something positive of our sense of an ending, which nonetheless arrives to us from both past and future in a time out of joint. It’s not a position inhabited all that easily — or, given the degradation of trans life at present, it horrifies us because we are already so mournful at the moment.

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Enter accelerationism.

Hauntology and accelerationism are, of course, not diametrically opposed. Although accelerationism emerged as an argument against hauntology, it nonetheless constructs itself obliquely from the same materials that hauntology itself is preoccupied with. Recall Alex Williams’ 2008 blogpost “Against Hauntology (Giving Up The Ghost)”, which begins with a critique similar to that just made above, arguing that a hauntological cultural studies “is contended that such music comes to terms with the deadlock which we face, the inability to properly think the new as such, and makes of this condition something positive”.

An album like Burial’s Untrue, for example — its name already producing a kind of tension between an ‘ontology’ of rave’s ‘presence’ (its ‘truth’), coupled with a (pre)fixation of its degradation — contents itself with rave’s apparent death but makes something beautiful out of the wreckage. It is thus situated within a paradox that accepts rave’s death as ‘true’, but also produces something revenant that nonetheless ‘follows’ its ending.

Against this sort of paradox, Williams instead proposes that a more “nihilistic” position (perhaps instantiated through an indifference to ‘death’ as such) could “in some senses … operate in a similar manner,” whilst being “crucially bereft of the quality of mourning“, thus overcoming hauntology’s affective resonance with “a mood of melancholic defeatism in Western left wing politics.”

Williams nonetheless acknowledges that a more hauntological thesis has its merits. “Some of the stronger pro-hauntology arguments have run along neo-Benjaminian lines,” he argues, perhaps with a nod to Mark Fisher, who similarly (or at least later) held “that it is not merely an act of mourning for a non-reclaimable past, but rather a way of redeeming time, of reaching across possible universes towards parallel utopias, thereby showing us the possible, rather than just the dead-end intractability of our present socio-cultural situation.” But for Williams, this is only a concessionary positivity found in hauntology’s often smothered hope for the future. Indeed, even from this more positive perspective, hauntology, he argues, is still

a cowardly move, lusting after utopias that never were, or which are now unreachable, a retreat into childhood/youth, just as trapped in the endless re-iterative mechanistics of the postmodern as the lowest form of retroism, merely in a hyper-self-aware form.

Here I’m reminded of Cashmore’s confession, when we were speaking recently, that she had soured on philosophical notions of “hope”. And it is interesting to me that Williams’ 2008 blogpost sketches out a position that Cashmore herself may be flirting with in her essay for Splinter mag, when she notes how a Butlerian politics of queerness, when it breaches popular discourses, too easily shades into liberal universalism — that is, it too often comes to resemble the thing it is otherwise opposing. Williams concludes similarly:

In summary, hauntology cedes too much ground to what it attempts to oppose, because of an a priori assumption: that there is nothing else, (at this moment in time at least) that nothing else is possible, and as such we are to make the best of this (and that the best we can do is to hint at the possible which remains forever out of reach — with all the pseudo-messianic dimensions this involves).

In response, he offers two alternative positions that he and others in the blogosphere would spend the next decade+ exploring:

Firstly (if we believe the hauntologists discursive a priori), as I have hinted at above, we might think a more nihilist aesthetic which seeks not merely to foreground the processes of postmodern[ity], but rather to accelerate the system to its ultimate demise, to speed up the rate of fashion-flux to a point of irredeemable collapse. Rather than an act of reverence, of mourning, of touching at impossible universes from a distance, this would be a deliberate and gleeful affirmation.

Such is the classic (and cliched) accelerationist position, and it is notable that Williams contextualises this position in a hauntological negativity. A crude accelerationism only makes sense, then, if we believe that this is as good as it gets, if we believe that we have reached the end of capitalism’s sense of progress, and there is no longer any sort of progress to be made, only a violent dissolution, which is not a deconstruction but rather a “drastically advanced regression”. In Williams’ cultural context, this can be generously analogised to the no-futurism of punk, but is just as applicable to the violent pessimism of a far-right that has taken the accelerationist project in vain.

Then comes the far more interesting and nuanced position, arrived at along a more post-punk vector, which twists back on itself, into a sort of Derridean spectrality without mourning:

Alternatively, we might consider Badiou’s analysis of the emergence of the new, which would entail a more strategic examination of … those regions which appear, from the in-situational point of view, to be marginal, and properly undecideable.

There is arguably far less distance between this position and the hauntological position than is often supposed. Spectres, after all, are apparitions phasing in and out of ‘reality’ — like rave itself, in its ‘Golden Era’, which was often discussed as a heterotopia (as in Simon Reynolds’ Energy Flash) — and are therefore innately undecidable themselves.

Having possibly reduced all of this to posturing and semantics, where exactly is the accelerationist heresy that we’re supposed to still be afraid of? It is to be found in how accelerationism understands capitalism’s role in the production of this marginality — a position that only Mark Fisher managed to make at all palatable when he wrote: “accelerationism maintains that there are desires and processes which capitalism gives rise to and feeds upon, but which it cannot contain; and it is the acceleration of these processes that will push capitalism beyond its limits.”

In a later post, this is also where Williams’ situates himself, albeit in more (intentionally) frightening terms: “To evade the dark/banal fall into mere neo-liberalism, we must maintain a firm belief in the horrifying and utterly negative nature of capital.” This is to acknowledge that it is primarily capitalism that deterritorializes all prior forms of stability. Just as Marx himself argued: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” In light of this, accelerationism notoriously affirms this meltdown, and in Williams’ formulation, comes to ask:

How might one ground a politics which aims towards an inhuman becoming (or perhaps we ought to say de-subjectivation) outside of a discourse of either alienation or alternately some kind of pseudo-biological vitalist ethology…? […] In other words[,] of how to apply a skilfully de-correlated philosophy to the always correlated domains of the subject (even if our intent is to ground a politics whose aim is towards the erasure of the very dimension of the subject itself).

What is notable about this, given Cashmore’s decisive move away from Deleuzianism, is that Williams too seeks to move beyond Deleuze’s “vitalist ethology”, and in so doing, strafes towards Badiou’s mathematization (as inhumanisation) of ontology, which is not without its problems — problems identified by Ray Brassier in his essay “Nihil Unbound”, which precedes the book of the same name, and contains an argument foreign to it; it is a tough essay to find, but if I can recall it correctly from memory, Brassier wonders how a mathematization of ontology might make human-being all the more susceptible to capitalism’s economic logics, since both work with numbers… (I’m being very reductive, and there is much more to be said on this by someone more familiar with Badiou’s theory of the subject — that is, by someone who isn’t me.)

It is in its attempts to later avoid this mathematized perspective that accelerationism comes to bear on transness. This is more often viewed in the aesthetic context of biohacking cyberpunk, which nonetheless helps explain the interest that many trans people end up taking in accelerationism as a whole. Transness again contains an inherent politics of subjective-material tinkering, as it expands beyond the limits of categories long applied to the human (if not exceeding the human as such), but Cashmore’s critique nonetheless remains valid here, as it is possible that this position ends up evacuated of a politics (and ‘unconditional accelerationism’, in particular, was open about its interest in an anti-politics, which many interpreted — wrongly, I’d argue — as being much the same thing as no politics).

The most difficult notion drawn out of an accelerationist politics in this regard is its focus on what Ed Berger refers to as “a sort of mutant subjectivity that begins (and ends) amidst the rubble of capitalism’s deterritorializing modernization processes.” Questions of agency are suspended here — usefully, I’d argue, as it is in deferring to a kind of agentic self-mastery that we risk falling back into neoliberal individualism — as the focus is placed instead on the affective conditions that produce trans people in modernity — that is, provocatively understanding trans people as a product of modernity itself, in a manner notably cleft from another questionable form of intersectionality, which is aligned with indigenous practices and belief systems where gender-nonconforming people are heralded as shamans, etc.

This is where the heresy of the accelerationist position is writ large: it is capitalism itself, as a deterritorialising process which scrambles all codes, that produces trans people themselves as subjectivised undecidables in its midst. Trans people may self-authorise, they may even self-question, but they are not self-produced. The world necessarily has a role in that, and we fail to acknowledge that to our detriment.

This is sticky territory, which may well lead us to psychoanalysis, for all its attempts to understand the interlinking of self and world. But the relationship between trans people and psychoanalysis is also fraught at present, since Preciado’s fall into popular reductions in “Can the Monster Speak?” There is a ‘positive’ conception of transness to be rescued from Lacan, for example, but it remains true that his language (and even his intent) are regrettable and outdated.

Borrowing from Lacan’s reading of James Joyce, trans people become untethered psychotics who are able to affirm their sinthome to align themselves with modernity’s scrambling of codes and find their own sense of agency in the chaos, as if to say, when faced with the tsunami of modernity, the psychotic hops on their board and yells “surf’s up!”, barrelling through the chaos that is otherwise covered over by reterritorialisations for more neurotic subjects. To be clear, this is a position that I think is problematic, but only because there is a familiar discomfort found here in being able to ‘explain away’ transness (even in the context of Lacan’s suspension of any sense of ‘normality’ and the fact that his passion and admiration for Joyce’s ‘psychosis’ is what led him to imitate his language so poorly at the end of his career).

The other side of this position also has its problems, however. The Deleuzian perspective on this process as vitalist, for example, can perhaps be understood in the same manner that J.G. Ballard ascribes to the mutant subjectivities of The Drowned World, wherein Kerans comes to wonder “what zone of transit he himself was entering, sure that his own withdrawal was symptomatic not of a dormant schizophrenia, but of a careful preparation for a radically new environment, with its own internal landscape and logic, where old categories of thought would merely be an encumbrance.” This is to say that, in The Drowned World, the humans who find themselves baking under the heat of a radioactive sun retreat into some psychic chrysalis wherein body and mind are ‘naturally’ rewired for a new environment. Hence, a ‘pseudo-biological’ process.

Accelerationist thought, to the contrary, acknowledges that what is rewiring us is not the ‘natural’ world but the inhuman mutations of capitalism itself, and so it on this basis that Williams continues:

Part of what I am looking for is a way to ground the Deleuzo-Guattarian model of capitalism (which even their harshest critics such as Peter Hallward and Ray Brassier hold is the finest conception of capital since Marx) outside of a faulty affirmative vitalism. That capital operates via a (largely state-mediated) axiomatic, controlling relative de/reterritorializations of flows seems too useful a model even for [Ray] Brassier himself to give up on… But even if such a regrounding were to be possible … the aim of the exercise, to re-introduce this into the social field in order to enable a radically new form of politics to become thinkable, the fundamental problematic remains. Outside either a vitalist ethology of ‘natural’ auto-self-maximisation, or some kind of Marxist-Hegelian dialectical drive towards the elimination of contradiction in the same, how might we be able to ground the very need for an inhumanising desubjectivation at all?

If trans people have long been drawn to these accelerationist theses — whether horrifically Landian, or something a lot cuter — it is perhaps because they occupy an errant mode of subjectivity that has continually failed to be reterritorialized under the auspices of a liberal ‘humanism’. This is how Amy Ireland frames accelerationism today, not according to some Landian noumena that is fundamentally unthinkable, but rather in the supernormal vectors of subjective delirium already borne of the Internet:

Accelerationism doesn’t just offer a theory of history that ends in Ray Kurzweil’s singularity or some shit like that. From a philosophical point of view, the idea is that something is changing human culture. It’s been doing this in concert with the historical emergence of capitalism, but it has this structure where what is happening can only be understood in posteriority. Human culture is being anastrophically guided toward assembling the future. It’s not about us humans imposing our will on history. The human subject has to be open to channeling the forces coming from this future that is assembling itself through human culture.

Against an “affirmative vitalism”, then, do we have here an “affirmative functionalism”? The problem with this assertion — which is nonetheless framed here as a virtue — is perhaps that the very “function” of subjective scrambling in the present remains undecided. Whereas psychoanalysis attempts to explain the emergence of certain psychic phenomena, opening itself up to appropriation by state apparatuses (not intentionally, but such is the Deleuzo-Guattarian critique), accelerationism attempts to stay with the trouble, even exacerbating it, resisting any reterritorialisation that allows for ‘the new’ to be given meaning in accordance with a pre-existing hegemony. (Capitalist society is, in this regard, a vast Ship of Theseus; we can sabotage its perpetual reconstruction?)

This is a crucial aspect of accelerationism in the present — one that was seen as entirely absent from Urbanomic’s #Accelerate reader, according to Simon O’Sullivan, who wrote in 2014 that

capitalism is not just an abstract inhuman agency ‘out there’, instantiated in forms of technology, and so forth (that is, as a supra-molar entity). It is also ‘in here’ – producing our very subjectivity on what we might call a molecular level. Capitalism goes all the way down, determining our affective states, as well as our very desires and the contours of our inner most worlds. Subjectivity, then, is not solely a rational business in this sense or, at least, those aspects not involved in the project of reason are also crucial to our sense of who and what we are – or, indeed, what we might become.

Whereas O’Sullivan is here critiquing the inhumanism of Reza Negarestani and others, the place of a “missing subject of accelerationism” has, over the decade since, been taken up by trans people most explicitly, particularly in Ireland’s work with Maya B. Kronic, and it is a similar point that Cashmore ends up at, quoting Butler once more before her essay is drawn to a close:

[W]e must recognize that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human. To be undone by another is a primary necessity, an anguish, to be sure, but also a chance — to be addressed, claimed, bound to what is not me, but also to be moved, to be prompted to act, to address myself elsewhere, and so to vacate the self-sufficient “I” as a kind of possession. 

Accelerationism reverses this formula: it is not “what forms us [that] diverges from what lies before us”, but rather what lies before us that differs from what forms us. The former is hauntological, the latter is accelerationist. Either way, I am reminded (as always) of my personal Deleuzean maxim: “not being unworthy of what happens to us”. For accelerationism, it is capitalism itself that is ‘happening’ to us; it is capitalism that produces — in spite of itself — the evental sites of mutation that it all too quickly papers over. Capitalism, as an ideological system, is incapable of making itself worthy of its own material processes; we, as capitalist subjects, needn’t follow suit.

In the context of the Supreme Court’s recent judgement, this is perhaps what we are witnessing acutely: the system’s reneging on a prior reterritorialization. The denigration of GRCs, in the context of other equally ‘performative’ documents, resituates trans people at the limit of neoliberal circumscription. The response cannot be a liberalised “I am what I am”, but rather a reassertion of transness as a transition to something else, which the law wants to (but cannot fully) deny. It is our undecidability that remains our strength in this regard, just as Cashmore asserts: “That we can — we must — be something else, is the shaking to the ground of all thusly constituted identity”; and what’s more: “Perhaps it is only here that we can feel the call of a liberated future.”

My conclusion here is perhaps not so different from Cashmore’s own, then, but what I think is notable, with regard to the sub-Derridean valences of her thesis, is that we can — we must — shake off the mournful quality that the present situation provokes within us. Perhaps what we have lost — or are in the process of losing right now — was not all it was cracked up to be in the first place. Perhaps this moment of reckoning will enforce a shift in our discourses that enables us to assert the fact that the scrambling of gender codes is not the responsibility of trans people themselves, but rather a consequence of capitalist chaos itself, which only highlights our particular preparedness for whatever is coming next, or what is struggling to be born.

If queerness has an inherent politics in this regard, perhaps we can shift the emphasis again to assert how it is our allies who lack a politics that truly intersects with our own. Trans people are doing enough, and it is a liberal hegemony that is struggling to keep pace with us. We cannot defer to those who would slam the brakes on our becoming. And what’s more, it is this braking that is grounded on an impossibility, because trans people not only have the potential to change, but are changing or have already changed. Irrespective of whether these changes are acknowledged by the state, it is the anti-trans brigade who we can relegate to the mournful position here. They are figures of vain sovereignty, like Canute, making judgements to outlaw a tide that has already washed over everything. They herald their own decisional power over what remains fundamentally undecidable. In doing so, they humiliate themselves.

This sort of defiance is nonetheless hard to come by right now, but just as I have done (much to my own surprise) in writing this blogpost, we can talk ourselves out of it. We can talk to the ghosts that we are, and understand ourselves differently — because we already do understand ourselves differently. And I wonder if a similar break — contrary to the brake — is fast approaching on the horizon for many of us, perhaps even Cashmore too… Yes, perhaps Billie’s accelerationist “recovery” misunderstands the direct of travel. Perhaps it is this “recovery” that has allowed for the work of mourning to reassert itself, regrettably.

This is necessary today, as we seek justice for ghosts without assuming their death a priori. Our ghosts are very much alive. They are only out of phase with a persistent reality that they seek no solidity within. We can understand this as a virtue, we must understand this as a virtue. After all, is this not the very foundation of (a politics of) transness as such?