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"We Are All
Transsexuals Now"
2025
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Terrorism as (transpolitical) political form, AIDS and cancer as pathological form, the transsexual and the travestied as sexual and aesthetic form in general. Only these forms provide any genuine mental fascination today. … The nuclearization of bodies began at Hiroshima, but it continues endemically, incessantly, in irradiation by the media, by images, signs, programmes and networks.
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Jean Baudrillard 1987, “We are all Transsexuals Now”,
in Screened Out 2002, trans. Chris Turner
It’s odd to expect me not to be suicidal. Inexplicably, one of the best recent runs of television was a Star Wars-franchise production on Disney Plus, i.e. the first season of Andor. In it, protagonists take child hostages and a prison labourer says the words, “We’re cheaper than droids and easier to replace.” To escape, the prison labourers storm a series of corridors, their bodies given as armour for the bodies behind, all to no end but surging the mass forward. Now chest-to-chest with the shooters, hand-to-hand combat begins. The guards die. The surge breaches the next corridor. At every turn, the heroic, foremost fighters collapse, fodder on fodder. The prison wards and wings rendezvous up top and it’s all apt for comparison to the Long March. No spoilers on how many survive. Snowpiercer (2013) has its own spin. Today on Twitter someone thanked their “trans comrades”: to unite the world’s working classes, he wrote, trans people had been sacrificed. We served as a canary in whose cries, he elaborated, the ruling class’s intent was now laid bare. He saw and acknowledged us.
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“It was something about not saving the world – or, perhaps more accurately, about redefining what saving the world looks like.” —Cat Fitzpatrick and Casey Plett
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Is it time to confess our impurity of heart? That, in addition to all elsewhere, another reason we’d rather not save the world is we – many of us at least – don’t care much for those who fill it? Why are there no trans women in the Sith Empire’s men’s prisons? Mr Andor himself was grabbed at random and imprisoned with no cause. In the midst of quotas and a galaxy-wide program to amass an army of forced labourers, there’s an expenseless way to restore morale. Why in all these gritty dystopias is no one V-coded? (V-coding is when you get a trans woman in your men’s prison and think: Great! I’ll stick her with Eyehole-Raper Ray and the beast’ll wear himself out, and you do and he does. It happens a lot.) Why in all your dark imaginings of worst-case futures can you not imagine a reality even so terrible as that which many, many trans women already inhabit? In the grim darkness of the far future, on the whole, things are better for the most marginalised. Their actual, present conditions are too confronting to hold in one’s mind and, so, do not survive the world’s transcription – through the hegemonic imaginary – into representation. A territory rife with abominations of the topographer’s own making cannot be mapped. The finger shakes too wildly to reproduce one’s cruelty from the victim’s angle. For Disney Plus to churn out a show that, closely enough, regards revolution with pragmatic, realpolitisch eyes is no miracle. Songs of salvation won’t slow the work. If the world can yet be saved, well, hang around. Just in case. But that Twitter user – the one who called us his comrade canaries – is right. There are other worlds and they are worse. In dystopian futurology, we yet spy a narrow aperture, a way through to victory, freedom, satisfaction, whatever. But, updating, spraying, and re-wiping our lenses, the Real dissatisfies, the light floods grimmer, and as High-Holy Ray charges the corridor, in the midst of all that certain death, the question is whether there’s some way to kill ourselves without helping anyone. A realpolitisch artwork cannot be a realistic one. Were it realistic, the audience would end up as I am. Suicidal. Unwilling to revolt. And (as many are) not so much “therefore unwilling to work” as therefore dead. Like my friends. Already dead. Unable to work because dead.
Jean Baudrillard’s little writeup on the transsexualisation of American social life is a disgusting artefact. Its thesis is: the sexual revolution emptied men and women of their essential selfhoods, leaving them to construct their maleness, femaleness, and other identities through artifice (as, of course, transsexuals do); thus, we’re “all transsexuals now.” Most essays in Screened Out can be summarised about as quickly, as can just about everything I’ve read of Baudrillard’s. “The sexual revolution will perhaps merely have been,” he writes, “a decisive stage in the journey towards transsexuality. This is, ultimately, the problematic fate of every revolution.” But, see, that second sentence is genuinely funny. The transsexual is the demographic avatar of farce and farce – i.e. repetition as farce – is the fate of every revolution. So, it is in the transsexual that revolution, salvation, hope etc. dies. If, as the avatar of farce, the transsexual is also the avatar of death (or the avatar of doom), then, Baudrillard is almost right. Look around you. You think another pandemic’s not coming? You think the last wildfire or tsunami was the worst? That the next won’t be closer? A canary won’t stop a cave-in. We’re all dying down here. In that one mad respect we are all transsexuals now. But you’re still not, are you? We know what’s coming – what’s in your hearts – and what will be made of us in the days before the oxygen wears too thin.
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—E
3 June 2656 b.c.
Iapeta Café & Cocktail Bar, Portside Esp.
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