How to Be a Trans Writer in the Era of Never-Ending Gender Wars
“To write is to claim the audacity to speak and the courage to yield, to dare for a moment to care for ourselves in speech, in writing, and in solitude.”
First things first, accept that everything you say or don’t say is wrong, too late, not enough, not relevant.
If you’re lucky enough to land an actual writing gig somewhere, disregard all indications of friendships initiated by your editors. Accept that you are filling a role, whether anyone will admit it or not. Your role is to be as trans as possible. And if you’re writing for a site owned by right-wing Christians, accept the impossible challenge that you must be both trans enough to make your owners look liberal, but not so trans as to make anyone uncomfortable by calling out their corporate affiliates.
Inevitably, you’ll fail and get booted. But don’t worry because everyone will be too busy blaming John Halstead to notice. You’ll find other gigs and they’ll publish you as long as it’s clear that you’re a trans writer, never just a writer, never permitted to be neutral in matters of being categorized-other.
You can write about bathroom bills, but not capitalism. Gender, but not climate change. Discrimination, but not civilization. Feelings, but never theory.
You will be an identity from now on, not a human being. You will be the trans writer, not the writer who likes to forage, the writer who likes to weave, or the writer who has suffered from depression for half their life so far and tried to off themselves more recently than anyone is comfortable with.
You will be trans, and trans alone, but never trans enough. In a crushed velvet dress, drawing Inanna down from the heavens while serving vintage witchy woman realness, it will still be a surprise, a gag, not real, not enough. Hunty.
Naked and in bed with your next lover, it’ll all seem like a far-off dream. But you’ll have internalized it—who could love you? Who could touch this body for pleasure? You’ll fight about gender, because of course you will. Of course this world must be material, not ecstatic, labeled, territories and border walls, from Palestine to monogamy, to our thighs touching and my eyes shut tight, trying.
The crackle of your laughter can light up a room, but in the digital world, you’ll be a howl on the wind of Earth’s darkest nights, a shot of pain, an assemblage of social realities, flattened, fixed in place.
Readers will mince your words, pulling apart some string of pronouns and ambiguity to determine which gender when and which gender now. Readers will gauge your truth, scrutinizing a filtered two-dimensional profile picture for their reality of who they know you must actually be. More will be gleaned about your life by your readers than you will ever have the platform to publish or the privilege to even draft.
Constantly outed, no consequence considered. Constantly demanded, no aftermath concerning. Singular. One-dimensional identity. Constantly roped back and down to your trauma, the trauma, of which you are never an adequate martyr.
You aren’t a storyteller. This isn’t the Stone Age. It’s 2018 and you produce content to be consumed, discarded. No one gives a fuck about your life, your interests, your passions, your growth. A few times a year, some well-established Pagan woman somewhere will dare to speak her mind, and then all of the sudden, you’ll matter again. Except you won’t. Your labor will.
The thing about writing is that there is never any way to be right. There is no correct way to write about trans issues. If trans people do it, always-helpful readers will chastise cis people for not stepping up and collecting their people. If cis people dare exit their lanes and write something, readers will complain that trans voices should be amplified! Centered! Yes! Rip us into the spotlight—we have no lives of value to protect, no agency in determining whether something necessitates a response, no worth beyond a good retort we haven’t typed out a thousand times already. This time it will matter, surely. Five more likes and shares and the Goddess will grant us a miracle!
To write about trans issues is to subject yourself to a full-on public examination of your gender, a scrutiny of your public presence, and a tallying of all the ways you are male, you are female, you are mad, angry, fossilized, and archaic. All of this—the scales for determining the value of your voice.
And why? Why is it always our voices? Why is it never allowed to be our bodies? Our minds? Our health? Our lives? Dare we ever get to judge a political theorist on the quality of their theories more than the sensationalism of their trauma?
To write is to trespass a thousand million unspoken, presumed laws we will never know of until it is already too late. To write is to claim the audacity to speak and the courage to yield, to dare for a moment to care for ourselves in speech, in writing, and in solitude. And for these sins, every fiber of our existence will still be determined wrong in some new, pseudo-nuanced way.
We are disposable conveniences to you.
Nearly one hundred thousand people read an article I published a couple years ago. Yet not one person is ever within reach when I plunge into the depths of depression and existential horror. Where are you, dear readers? Who are you to make any demands of me or anyone mantled by any identity?
I know you aren’t my allies. I dare to proclaim you aren’t my community either.
You don’t want resolution, you don’t want healing.
You want blood. You want a fight.
You want rape and slow, brutal, verbal murder. You want the chance to scavenge our still-breathing corpses for every wrong word, wrong deed, and wrong idea. You want to choke out the life of young trans people, filling their heads with fake statistics about their alleged lifespan until they succumb to a suicide you can count with glory in your spectator martyrdom. You want to keep repeating that bullshit no matter how many times it is explained to you that it is wrong. You want to silence whatever anarchic spirit rises contrary to your pleasure, your comfort, your conceptualization of us, the writers, givers, power-shakers, the disabled, the whores, the mad.
You are insatiable.
And in your demand, there is no liberation. There is no break from the trauma in your consumption of us. We will perpetually be rape victims and sex workers, permitted only ever to be destitute survivors or proudly empowered feminists in this trade, never trafficked, never coerced, never self-hating, never grown-up traumatized children working through toxic relationships to sexuality and capitalism. For the duration of a Facebook thread or a five minute speech at your weekend rally, we will be fabulous and stunningly feminine, brave and on brand, centered and amplified, righteous and fuming—or we will be no one remotely of value. Never are we allowed to heal, to not care, to decline, to merge with the Ohr Ein Sof, to love drag culture, to just move on or dare to politic differently.
Your concern for trans people is limited to an abstract rendering of our lives into a consumable text format or sound bit for you to like and share and boldly critique without ever having to consider the author as a human being who breaks, who cries, who has limits, who has boundaries.
You are a hammer. You demand a nail. You demand to crucify.
You don’t want to hear trans voices. You want to hear yourself echoed and applauded in a lifeless metaphor embodied by a trans person you couldn’t give two shits about.
You want to share a witty piece about emotional labor, but you wouldn’t dare interrogate your own unceasing demands for it.
You want to conjure us out like personal Jesus goddesses every time there’s a conflict in the community, as if our whole lives begin with every moment you need us.
You want another battle royale, angry dykes vs. angry trannies, angry feminism, blood and hormones, a performance for your entertainment and never our own resolution. I think it was Utah Phillips who asked Ani Difranco why don’t you write angry feminist songs anymore?
You want to catalogue our identities so you can catalogue our sins.
You want clearly MALE or clearly FEMALE, clearly CIS or clearly TRANS, because you still cannot handle the glorious, radiant biology of intersexuality, the sex of angels, the holy mystery of ambiguity and the tidal movement of life between continental bodies in a shimmering ocean.
God/dess bless you. Bless all your hearts.
I am finished anchoring my politics in the trauma of my identities for the sake of people other than the fiery spirit within my own heart. I am finished being called up like an enslaved Goetic daemon to pen whatever it is the readers demand to dictate this time. I am not going to identify myself for you anymore.
WO/MAN HAS THE RIGHT TO WRITE WHAT S/HE WILL.
Pat Mosley
Pat Mosley is a bodyworker and writer based in the Carolina Piedmont. His work is rooted in compassionate touch, permaculture, and deep ecology with the resilience of all Earth's children in mind. Connect with him at https://www.pat-mosley.com/