I ate dinner at the library, rode home, tried to begin work again and realised I couldn’t concentrate until I made a cake. A semolina syrup cake with orange blossom water and coconut milk, to be exact. Rather an experiment, but we shall see. (The coconut milk is in the cake, not the syrup.)

I’m working on a draft of my final thesis chapter, which is also a book chapter due very soon, and have had my head in gendered and postcolonial theorisations of affective labour all day. I’m reading some fantastic books on migration and gendered labour, such as Rhacel Parreñas’ Servants of Globalization, an ethnography of Filipino/a migrant women, most of whom do domestic work. On the other hand, Parreñas focuses on the familial and resistant practices of her informants outside of the workplace, and what I need right now is writing on gendered and racialised subjective relationships within workplaces. Never mind, it’s a great book and well worth the read.

Today in the Reserve shelves I also randomly found a really awesome critique of the political economy of Thai sex work, Thanh-Dam Truong’s Sex, Money and Morality. Truong talks a lot about women’s ‘emotional labour’ in the context of tourism. I’m not writing about sexwork, but I do draw a parallel between sexwork and the new Thai health tourism economy — this latter is a less explicity sexual economy, to be sure, but it still draws on the same repackaging of ‘traditional’ Thai femininity and requires workers to perform that traditional femininity. Truong’s marxist politics are spot-on, and it’s from 1990, predating any post-autonomist writing on affective labor. This feels like hitting the jackpot, just a little, as if the library was in a good mood and decided to give me a present. I should hang out in the library Reserve section more often.

Where is the room to write thesis, when I’m so busy thinking about everything else? I’m replying on my ability to draw things together fast, because this week the deadline is Wednesday. 3000 words, assembled from notes. Whatever. At 4am, unable to sleep and now entirely nocturnal, I listen to The Pointer Sisters’ “Send Him Back”, Pilooski edit, courtesy of s0metim3s, and it mirrors a thrust into thought I’m enacting, arms windmilling in 60’s dance moves, or was that boxing…? And the new email list I’m moderating (which has a name I think, and maybe we’ll even get some institutional support at some point) is finally in flow. But all I can do is read people’s article recommendations and chew over stuff in my head.

Tonight I attended a HREOC sex and gender diversity project public meeting. I’m glad I went, although my horoscope for today said I’d be annoyed by a business outcome, and to “strategise, don’t nark off.” So right. Based on the initial submissions they received, HREOC has already decided that their project will focus on the question of identity documents: recommending federal legislation to make gender marker changes on birth certificates and passports consistent/coherent. So, defer thinking about affordable healthcare, Medicare subsidies, and forget removing gender from identity documents altogether. (S. suggested this latter solution at the meeting and a lot of people laughed, as if it was absurd.) So, the big question the HREOC people wanted to ask: “What line in the sand do we draw?” Because we have to draw a line somewhere, for people to change their document permanently from M to F or F to M. Surgery and hormones? Psychiatric or psychological assessment? Two years or one? Which legislation is better, Spain’s or the UK’s? Oh, so limited. So frustrating.

But the actual comments, the meeting itself, ran so far outside the bounds of this question that I started to feel better, optimistic. Trans legislative questions always run aground on these immense philosophical rocks that simultaneously connect very material every day existence with the whole epistemology of gender as a central category organising bodies violently, and why we find it so difficult to think without it. So, yes, why is it that someone’s gender is M at such and such an institution but F at another? Why is it that one can change one’s birth certificate, but when one gets pulled over by a motorcycle cop on a deserted country road, the cop can check one’s entire police record with previous names and genders and call one ‘Sir’, and throw in a few transphobic slurs as well? Why is it that in the Family Court, a transwoman suing for partial custody of her children could be denied it on the basis that she was upsetting her children by wearing women’s clothing around them? How do we think about these children’s desires to have a ‘normal family,’ and the violence that enacts against this woman, who has a life-threatening disease, and who just wants to be a ‘normal woman’? How do we think the crazily proliferating deployments of ‘normal’ in this context? How do you even think, when the story is so heart-breaking?

What really surprises me is the intensity of a lot of transfolks’ desires to gain recognition, preferably on an important looking piece of paper with a government seal. So much so that this validation forms a kind of fetish. If we have the piece of paper, everything will be okay. But what the meeting really demonstrated is that no, a piece of paper cannot make everything okay.

My favourite moment was when A. started talking about the costs of outing oneself as trans, and how much safer it is to be stealth. But staying stealth has to break whenever you witness violence erupt against another transperson. You have to stand up and tell people that’s not on, he said. “Do we stand up for each other? Can we have solidarity with each other, even if it means outing ourselves? This is the only line in the sand I want to draw.” What a beautiful intervention.

Here are a couple of paragraphs of what I’m working on right now. Comments please!

_________________________________________________

In this part of the chapter, I want to explore the logic behind posing, as I’ve done, a distinction between two subtly different ways of articulating resistance to gender variant patient subjectivation. On one hand, as we’ve seen, a sense of disempowerment frames the experiences of subjects who come into tension with modes of gender variant patient subjectivation in Australia, but have no other option to fall back on. On the other hand, the transwomen interviewees who obtained GRS with Thai surgeons enunciated their disposition to gender variant patient subjectivation in terms of dissatisfaction. Initially it seems obvious that of course, gender variant individuals who were able to do what they wanted were happier with the overall outcome. This is the case even given that many of the transwomen I interviewed in Thailand and Australia, intent on journeying to Thailand, were either midway through a number of surgeries and revision work, or had yet to undergo any procedures at all. (more…)

Fangirl tagged me for this:

The rules are as follows: Post a picture or make/take/create your own that captures what you are most passionate for students to learn about. Give your picture a short title. Title your post “Meme: I can’t believe it’s not a passion quilt!”.* Link back to this blog entry. Include links to 5 (or more) educators.

In the archive of LTTR (which is perfect for a Saturday afternoon web browse and inspirational for all sorts of reasons, those homos know how to make art and shit) I found this piece by Boots, about an extremely awesome Pudding Tits Project, illegibility and language. Here’s an extract:

Right after I got surgery, I felt strange. I felt strange that I spent so much money on something so self-indulgent. And I felt really strange about my place in the world. I called a friend who, like me, is not taking testosterone, gets read as female fairly frequently, and who had chest reconstruction surgery. I tried to articulate the fact that all of a sudden, it felt as if I didn’t exist in the world, save for in the presence of a few people that understood my wonderfully freakish, spectacularly monstrous gender. He both reassured and disappointed me with his reply: “We’re illegible. But everyone is, it’s just that most people are never confronted with the situation of really realizing it.”

I know this experience of feeling as if I don’t exist. I’d articulate a little differently, though — in the sense that since I’ve begun to be read as unproblematically male, everyday life is a little ‘easier’, but I lose the power of making my own freakishness visible.

For example, I don’t think many of this year’s crop of gender studies students know that I’m trans. A couple of them expressed fairly transphobic sentiments earlier in the semester, along the lines of, “If someone wants to be called a woman, fine. I’d use female pronouns to their face. But to me they were born men and they’ll always be men.” I encouraged other students to deconstruct or challenge those sentiments, and was impressed when the other students in the class rose effortlessly to the challenge. But somehow I could not say, “So I guess that to you I would count as a woman?” Partially this is because being an educator (at least in gender studies) is about dismantling the reliability of students’ individual experiences of their worlds, and offering them a toolbox with which to read the abstract, the invisible. But it was also about protecting myself from surveillance, and not allowing the class to become a space in which my gender performances were scrutinised. I wanted to retain a space in which my identity was unimportant, and where I remained effective as a conduit for learning. Also, I couldn’t think of how to describe my gender, how to account for it, to them. Remaining illegible has its uses.

Perhaps my students would learn just as much if I were ‘open’ about being trans as not. But since I don’t know how to ‘come out’ to them, I’ve tried to teach them that none of us has a stable gender (or sexuality or ethnicity or identity), and that we are all being misrecognised, all the time. If I am passionate about anything, this is it.

Anyhow, since I’ve been back from North America, I’ve been experimenting with style. Long ago, I decided that tight jeans and tight-fitting sweaters would probably make it more difficult for me to pass as a guy. No, worse — because let’s not diminish the homophobia implicit in this arithmetic around tightness and bagginess — it seemed easier to pass as a straighter-looking white boy than a queer. The excuse I gave myself was that my bum was too big for tight jeans. I’ve always felt uneasy about it, but at Transsomatechnics my whole structure of passing anxiety crumbled into dust. No-one cared. Or, people did care, but in an encouraging and nourishing way. So why is it different in Melbourne? We are still operating in reactionary response to a medicalised system in which anyone who wants to modify their bodies surgically or hormonally must engage with the ‘true transsexual’ narrative. The stakes of not passing as a true transsexual at the clinic are high — people self-harm, destroy their relationships, kill themselves. Even in the spaces made to resist this poison, we are still so psychically alert to the prevailing pressures of passing as ‘trans enough’ everywhere else that we cannot entirely innoculate ourselves against it. Lately I have been wearing flamboyantly skinny jeans, pink-streaked 80s ties and cornflower blue sweaters. Eyeliner, too. The world needs more boys with eyeliner. For now, this will be my innoculation.

Tag!: Ika, Jonathan, Craig, Wildly Parenthetical and Mattilda.

PS Today I had breakfast with a friend. After our Minor Place bagels turned out not to fill our stomachs, we went wandering through Brunswick on a mission to find baklava. On the way, we discussed what, if it were not for how the last month has been chock full of brain-shatteringly exciting things for me, would certainly be the most exciting project ever. It makes me shiver with barely repressed glee. Good things are going to happen, I just know it.

In a bar the other night someone was explaining how some Duke University psychologists in the 1930s developed this instrument for measuring how happy people were. The instrument was a Euphorimeter, and they called the units of potential happiness ‘euphors’. Apparently, when people with very low euphor levels were shown how lots of people had really high euphor levels, the low-euphor people suddenly stopped being as depressed.

Maybe this is not the best metaphor to describe the last week, but it does come close. Transsomatechnics was by far the best conference I’ve ever been to. So little of the usual competitiveness and depoliticised intellectual wankery; so many people humbly offering their ideas in the spirit of collaboration and shared resistance. It was especially refreshing for people not to have to do the ‘trans 101′ spiel at the start of papers; here was a space in which some things were already known, and critical conversations could begin right away (rather than question time being full of random people whose contribution is “OMG that is so INTERESTING!”). A lot of fruitful things will come out of this conference, I think.

And then there was the brilliant high school dorkiness of the after-party, which was just like Trans Prom, and hanging out in Vancouver parks and streets and this tiny slice of beach, and catching up with people I never ever see enough, and making a whole crew of new beautiful friends. Seriously, if someone could measure my euphors right now, I might break the machine.

Last week, Erin Kyan at Fat Sexy Gender posted a really anger-inducing account of his ‘treatment’ by Monash Gender Clinic. He is transitioning, and went on the clinic program to access testosterone and chest surgery. After having been on the program for some time, Erin has been told that he cannot access hormones or surgery until he recovers from CFS/fibromyalgia and loses weight:

I have been told (to my face) that I need to lose weight before I will be allowed to transition - and when I explained that I cannot exercise I was told that I can “take pills for it nowadays”. I have been told (to my face) that I should wait until my chronic illness that I have had for ten years gets better before I transition.

I’ve also been scowled at, looked down upon and scoffed at for being bisexual, polyamorous, and unemployed (even though, you know, I AM DISABLED.)

… So I go to the doctor. I tell him what the problem is. I tell him that I need to lose weight in order to receive medical treatment. I tell him why I cannot lose weight the “normal” way — I already eat well and I cannot exercise due to that whole disability thing.

He spends 20 minutes telling me that I am disgustingly overweight and it’s all my fault. Oh, and by the way, I’m not really disabled — I’m just fat. And that whole thing where I can’t walk? The cure for that is to walk, apparently!

Apart from how this is a really clear-cut case of discrimination, so clear-cut that it could easily be taken to the Equal Opportunity Commission, Erin’s story exemplifies the sheer incompetence of the Monash team. I was under the impression that taking amphetamines to lose weight went out of medical fashion some time in the 1980s.

It’s also just really infuriating and I am really pissed off that I don’t know what to do, at all, to make things better for Erin. Or for any number of people who call TMGP telling similar stories.

It’s actually impossible for me to watch this. I keep pausing it, switching tabs, going back to the clip only to be astounded by another of Oprah’s really fucking odd statements. Apparently until not too long ago, gay teenagers understood themselves as being ‘in the wrong body’, genderwise. There’s other stuff, which you can see for yourselves. Mostly, I can’t watch the clip because I identify with Thomas Beatie, his nervousness, his desire to please and be seen as sympathetic — even the attempt at which is sure to be coded as ‘feminine’, because a ‘real man’ never explains, never apologises. I relate to the attempt to tell a complex story publicly that in the soundbite logic of the medium, winds up seeming implausible. And I relate, more than a tiny bit, to his desire to bear a child.

Of course, while the mainstream media has a poke, ftm email lists and communities are going just as crazy, if not more so. First, you have the transmen who respond with pure disgust, rage and a flat dictate: “Men don’t have babies; therefore Thomas Beatie is a woman.” The more interesting arguments touch on the politics of visibility and invisibility. A lot of transmen seem to think Beatie should have just borne his baby quietly without making a stink. Some of these arguments are conservative: the logic that as long as a pregnant transman ‘does it’ in private, it’s acceptable; when it’s public, it becomes unacceptable, because it tarnishes the image of transmen as authentically male. The other argument against visibility is far more precise: given the swing of public aympathy against Beatie, law-makers will use this example as a way to argue for regulating access to change of gender markers even more than they already are, possibly requiring infertility as a condition of any rights. I am a fan of clandestinity, at times; I don’t think visibility or recognition is necessarily always the right answer. But I’m wondering how in this case, various transpeople’s desire for a clandestinity which facilitates more freedom seems to be collapsing into the logic that all ‘authentic’ transpeople desire to remain stealth, and that stealth (passing as ‘real’ men and women) should, in fact, be a condition of recognition. When does a radical clandestine politics mutate into a conservatism that simply preserves the status quo?

Riki alerted me to to this excellent article by Dan Irving, “Normalized Transgressions: Legitimizing the Transsexual Body as Productive,” in the Queer Futures edition of the Radical History Review. He quotes a line I’m proud of writing. But better, he takes a beautifully hard line about trans studies’ almost complete ignorance of gender variance as a form of consumption/production that is entirely very enmeshed within capitalist relations:

Scholars within trans studies rarely contextualize trans identities, subjectivities, and activism within historical and contemporary capitalist relations. Much scholarship seeks to save trans identities from invisibility, as well as to counter the ongoing reproduction of the heteronormative binary of sex/gender through detailed analyses of the vast array of existing trans identities. There is a tendency within this commentary to reify trans identities as solely matters of sex/gender and to challenge state and institutional dominance over trans people by emphasizing the necessity of self-determination of sex/gender. Such advocacy of self-determination is often coupled with arguments for human rights protections. Progressive scholars must question the theoretical and political implications of putting forward individualistic strategies of sex/gender self-determination, especially within the contemporary neoliberal context, where the minimalist state and a free-market economy demand individual self-sufficiency. While some texts address the impacts of capitalist socioeconomic relations on trans people’s lives, a critical analysis of the exploitative labor relations that comprise the logic of capital remains lacking.

Yes! Yes! Yes! Where is this Dan Irving, we must converse.

So a friend was asking around for some info and resources on transfag sex the other week. I had no idea where to direct him. Until I found this:

Primed: The Back Pocket Guide to Transmen and the Men Who Dig Them (pdf)

Well written, sexy, engaging information with hot artwork. Nice.

Some resources:

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (ed), Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity (San Francisco: Seal Press, 2006).
Dean Spade, “Compliance is Gendered: Struggling for Gender Self-Determination in a Hostile Economy,” in Paisley Currah, Richard M. Juang, and Shannon Price Minter (eds), Transgender Rights (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
Michelle O’Brien, “Tracing this Body: Transsexuality, pharmaceuticals & capitalism.” (2003)
Jo Hirschman, “TransAction: Organizing against capitalism and state violence in San Francisco”, Socialist Review (2001)

Coburg is hot and dry, the house is an oven. Our neighbours on one side have ripped up their lawn, front and back, as well as the carefully-planted lavender bushes and saplings the previous occupants put in to make it look like there was a garden. In place of grass, the guy is laying down astroturf. Apparently astroturf will save heaps of water; it’s really ‘hardy’, but unfortunately not biodegradable. This is the neighbour who encouraged our landlord to fell the one surviving eucalypt in our front yard, as it was dropping flowers on his car. Today they’re using some astroturf laying machine. On the other side, the neighbours have NOVA FM on the stereo turned up crazy loud.

So there was this one moment at the Transdestinations “Trans Law” panel on Sunday when I seriously considered the tactical sense of walking offstage in a dramatic funk. I didn’t, because it would have looked like I was spitting the dummy. (I talked about this afterwards, I can’t remember who I was talking to, but I said this and they responded, “Yeah, Az, you would have been spitting the dummy AGAIN!” Oh.) But it would have short-circuited the falsely nice sense that all the panellists agreed on the definition of what was politically important. Plus it might have shut Jamie Gardiner up for more than a half-second. Three things about Jamie Gardiner: a) he was the only non-trans person on the panel; b) he wears knee socks; and c) he’s from the Victorian Equal Opportunity Commission and is now trying to sell the merits of the new Victorian Human Rights Charter. It’s sort of vague how transpeople can benefit from the charter, but as Jamie says, “change is incremental and we don’t want to try too hard, but just write lots of letters to your local member.” Since he spent 50% of the session talking, this dominated discussion totally. He seemed blithely ignorant of how bad this made him look.

The amazing thing is that people did, in fact, intervene on the great non-discussion of the Human Rights Charter. Crystal Johnson intervened. Crystal is a sistagirl from the Tiwi Islands. I guess one of the only great things about being nearly the only Indigenous person at a trans conference is that the facilitators’ white liberal guilt will make them give you the microphone (nearly) every time you want it. She said something brilliant, which was, “Where are our human rights? We don’t have any. We’re getting raped and beaten up and having stones thrown at our houses. What does this thing mean to us?”

At this point, Tracie O’Keefe, a hardnosed Sydney trans therapist, spoke — directly to Crystal. She said, pretty much, “It’s up to you to stop them. Wipe the blood from your face and keep getting up in the morning.” There was no sense of solidarity, it was basically, “You have to do it yourself.” It’s one of the most offensive things I’ve ever heard someone say at a conference.

It’s not really possible to communicate how fucking angry that panel made me, and how frustrating the entire conference was. Politically, it could have been much more powerful and useful. I don’t think these are teething problems; I think they have to do with what political concerns motivate conferences, and how the people organising them imagine and design the space allocated to talking about politics. Just getting a bunch of trans ‘public spokespeople’ in a room together does not result in anything worthwhile, necessarily. Good conference design is all about figuring out which conversations need to happen, and why, and how they might intervene in a broader framework where the most important conversations are hardly ever heard. Facilitators have to be on the same page about what’s important, so they can direct proceedings.

I feel bad making these criticisms, because most of the organisers are my friends, but it feels even more important to say, given this. Next year might be better. I hope so.

On the other hand, the arts and performance quotient of the weekend was terrific. Lots of great shows, especially Byrne and Erge doing a slapstick wrestlers’ bout depicting transmasculinity as scarcity, and Crystal’s performance/autobiographical rant. And while I’m linking to pics, you can also spy a picture of me doing my dirty Dr Seuss poem here.

Wednesday I’ll be back in Melbourne town. Probably I’ll already miss the hum of the air-conditioner and the goldish fug of Bangkok smog, even as I cough up the residues of said smog all next week. I’m certain to miss the smells and the tastes of this place, particularly som tum on demand, menthol inhalers, cooling powder and sweet-sweet-sweet iced coffee. Also, I will miss people. Especially B. — we’ve been working together a lot, but we’ve also become great friends. She says all her friends leave Bangkok, and I hate to reinforce a stereotype. But I guess, after all, that this means I’ll be back sooner rather than later.

Anyhow, I’m going home to a huge week. Even apart from how first of all there’s an airport reunion to be had with an enchanting giver of Wizz Fizz, who has been missed like crazy. This would be huge and exciting enough on its own. But wait, there’s (a lot) more. On Saturday, Midsumma fun begins with Transdestinations. Transdestinations is the first ever trans-dedicated symposium in Melbourne.

This is the rough schedule:

• Gendermash on Saturday night, including performances by… Actually, the website doesn’t say who’s performing, but I can tell you that I am! I’m planning to read some porno stuff I’ve been working on specially over the ‘holidays’. (Also, Gendermash is hosted by the great PJ Fotiades, which is reason enough to attend even if you don’t like the sound of porn.)
• There’s an all day talkfest on Sunday, with loads and loads of amazing people, including visitors from interstate like Norrie May-Welby, and Julie Peters, and other denizens of awesomeness.
• Upstart Alley on Sunday night — featuring my favourite Aotearoan boys Tom Erge and Jack Byrne, plus Husny from Australian Idol. No I’m not kidding, he’s really going to perform! It’s gonna rock.

But the fun doesn’t end on Sunday, because Monday is the Big Day Out, and we’re seeing Bjork AND Dizzee Rascal AND the Arcade Fire AND LCD Soundsystem and possibly Billy Bragg or Spoon and finally, most unexpectedly, DR OCTAGON…. I never dreamed I would see Kool Keith perform as Dr Octagon live, it’s making me wheezy with excitement as I type this. Then on Tuesday, if I’m still alive, the Arcade Fire solo show. And then Thursday there’s some other spoken word thing I’m reading at, also featuring Ed Burger who I remember from distant Fitzroy spoken word days. Hopefully I won’t be dead from thrill overdose by then.

‘9 in the afternoon’: a good way to talk about the odd machinations of my bodyclock. Last night I went to bed at 1am, woke up at 7am on the dot, read for an hour, went back to sleep, woke up again at 1.30pm. Morning in the (hot) mid-afternoon. Now it’s early morning and according to my bodyclock, well, just an hour or so after dinnertime. Weird.

Today I spent some time wrapping up loose ends for the Gender Centre project and TMGP. Over the last couple of weeks, people involved in the former project have been debating organising principles with some tension. Should we be a committee with a President and Secretary, or a working group with no defined roles? Do we need to be representative of the ‘trans community’, or can we try instead to be accountable to those people who might use the service we provide, without seeking to represent them? Do we need one media spokesperson and to broadcast a singular message, so that we gain credibility, or can we sustain difference of opinion transparently and non-representationally, even as we attempt to appropriate resources from bureaucratic state apparatuses of doom? Does it matter?

My answer is, yes, it does matter, but I had to scramble to articulate precisely why to people who felt confronted by the possibility that we might not care about our ‘public image’ or our credibility outside. This was an object lesson for me. I have spent years, now, working in a pretty intuitive autonomous/decentralised way on various projects. My intuitive explanations do sound vague, under-theorised and impractical. The upshot is, the working group is writing a document that says very clearly why it is important to organise autonomously, and how that will happen, and why we want it to happen. I feel reasonably optimistic. It feels good to be participating in the creation of a document that states our organising principles — autonomous, decentralised, non-hierarchical — and to already have found that writing this out clearly can result in a deeper understanding all round. (And to have won the battle against bureaucratic committee structures and community representation this time.)

Browsing back through the ‘After Sex’ edition of South Atlantic Quarterly, I found this excellent excerpt from “Do You Smoke? Or, Is There Life? After Sex?” by Michael Moon:

To begin with, I remember standing with Tony before the magazine counter in the local grocery store when I was about eight, and not long after he had learned to read, and peering at a line of glossy news magazines that all had cover stories that week about “sex on campus.” I might be vague about sex, but I was already fascinated with “campus”; in our Victorian-size family, we already had an eldest brother away at college. Here was something else that sounded possibly enticing, but remained opaque to me as a concept. “Sex,” I remember musing aloud, “what could it be?” “I don’t know,” Tony replied, with more wisdom than he knew, “but I think it must be something that’s sort of everywhere, like the weather.”

That may not seem like much to work with, but it was a start. Later that same year, Tony pragmatically redefined sex when our teenage sister Eleanor asked him if he liked the red shirt she had given him for his birthday. “Yes, it’s so sexy!” he cheerfully responded. Our sister, surprised, countered, “What do you think that word means?” “Bright-colored!” Tony, unfazed, shot back improvisatorially. Now all we had to figure out was, what was bright-colored and sort of everywhere like the weather?

And from the same essay:

“What is the use of being a boy,” Gertrude Stein asks in her lecture, “What Are Master-pieces,” “if one is going to grow up to be a man?” ….[N]estled within the cry of futility that I first heard Stein’s utterance as being—“What is the use?”—there is interlining it something I soon began to hear quite otherwise than as a counsel of despair: overdetermined as the process of “becoming a man” must be in our society with a myriad of toxic contents, it doesn’t always take—no, it doesn’t.

Yes, quite. Why not be a boy always? (Or something else entirely?)

Back in thesis mode, I’m once again tied up in crazy [massively self-absorbed] theoretical knots. For the fourth time this year, I’ve lost a sense of how my chapters work, as a logical progression through particular theoretical sites. Sometimes I know exactly how it all works, but it’s a really blink and you miss it enterprise: like one of those 3D pictures. There really is no logic, actually, just a cosmetic one that looks okay in thesis plans but comes apart when I try to write it out in those required linking sentences that end up about a paragraph long. “While in Chapter Two, I argued [insert long, grammatically suspect clause], in Chapter Three I shift registers to [insert another, longer, more grammatically suspect clause].” Hysterical.

Structure, discipline, thought order… All the things I mark my first-years down for in their teensy 1500 word essays, I fail monstrously at.

I think too much. I have too many ideas, and they all shoot off into the outer atmosphere right away. It’s like when I tell people what my thesis is about, and if they’re nice they generally say, “Wow, that’s so interesting, yeah, wow,” and tell me how they’ve heard that Singapore is the gender reassignment capital of the world or whatever, random contributions to the archive of trans travel practices. This archive is busting at the seams, it’s so huge, and I have decided for some insane reason that I should be the person to file it all under headings. I’m mostly interested in the crazy stories, the tiny details, the archive; not so interested in contextualising it all, making sense of it, fitting everything in boxes. But this is what a thesis does. Or so I’ve heard. It’s like P. said, after hearing one of my ‘o-hai-here’s-a-crazy-idea-i’m-still-working-on-the-theory’ papers earlier in the year: “So exciting! Or it will be, when you tie it all down.” And the bitch is, I know this monster won’t be readable or coherent unless I do that grounding work.

It’s hard to tie down. Maybe I should just throw the whole thing out and start again.