Transcription of a talk for an exhibition “Monstrous: a collective refusal to be small” organised by “Roter Keil”

“Everything is transgender. Everybody transgender. 
That is all you hear about and that is why we won the election in record numbers.” 
(Donald Trump)

What Trump involuntarily points out is the generic transsexuality. The transsexual is not something that I – I’m a cisgender woman anyway – or ‚we‘ or someone else is anyhow, it’s an obsessed spook, a coming-of-age Frankenstein rom-com or a 70s sci-fi story infected by Bravo lovestories. Generic transsexuality exists coming from two directions:

1. The transsexual per se is monstrous.
   1. “It means you’re contagious.” (Torry Peters, Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones)
      That which is so endlessly monstrous about the transsexual is what they do to the other, without doing anything. Every person gets confronted with their own decision-making on sex & gender (sex is not just biological and gender cultural – it’s slightly more complicated), with how they inhabit their body, just by pure (imaginary) presence, experiencing at once what they usually might not. And basically tasting a small dose of what gender dysphoria might feel like.
      Transsexuality a viral infection, a Ophiocordyceps unilateralis – trans-human fungus.
      „Contamination is the companion of categorization. It is all but impossible to feel entirely unambivalent about, entirely described by, a social identity category; this was never the goal of transgender or transsexual politics in the first place. The question, then, is whether we can develop a tolerance for contamination and for the inevitable misfit of identity categories, rather than continually kicking the bucket further down the road, generating ever more terms in pursuit of an impossible dream—that of social categories capable of matching the uniqueness of individual psyches. To accomplish all of this, we must, first and foremost, relinquish the fantasy that gender is a means of self-knowledge, self-expression, and authenticity rather than a shared, and therefore imperfect, social schema. This means developing a robust trans politics and discourse without gender identity.“
      (Kadji Amin, We Are All Nonbinary: A Brief History of Accidents)
   2. The angelic transsexual body is in the flickering state of Schrödinger’s Sexuality at the same time hypersexualized – as it is sacred, therefore forbidden, –, as it is absolutely desexualized – and asexual being –, anyhow it is closer to a doll than a human being, so don’t bother. It is hyper-coded gender performance.
      1. The forbidden or the heterogenous, the ‘sacred’, is exciting: 
         Over the past 3 years ‚Shemale’ rose from the 7th to the 6th to the 4th most popular porn category worldwide. In 2022 alone (when it became the 7th most popular category) popularity rose by 75%. Now keep in mind that we speak of a population that’s estimated to be a little than 1% of the world population.
 And the timeframe we’re speaking of 2022 until now is that in which the backlash against transgender people is at an all time high.
      2. While the transgendered (or I’ll prefer using transsexual in this case) body obviously is desired this might turn against itself, the desiring person (usually cis-) becomes scared of their own desire. The abjective can not be contained, as it is filthy. The monstrous at the beginning external is internalised and therefore its source must be destroyed. Therefore the transsexual body – now monstrous – is contagious and must be destroyed.
      3. „The sense of repulsion that a travesti provokes, and this is sensed in everyday interactions, seem to approximate her to Julia Kristeva’s conception of abject. When verbally attacked, the association with animals, demons, Satan himself and all sorts of non-human beings are employed with emphasis. While women were often understood as commodities (objects), travestis complexify the status of objects-subjects by being socially assigned to another: that of the abject.“ 
         (Eduarda Camargo, „Second order individuation: Technological conceptions of Gender under the Travesti Body“)
   3. The monstrous has a tendency of being transformed into something cute – think of toys. While the cute inherently is on the brink of becoming monstrous. The monstrous in cute’s clothing. Or the Kawaii might turn into Yami-Kawaii (‘sickly cute’) – oh, artificial sweeteners.
      
      1. “Nothing uncute makes it out of the near future, and the cute will very soon no longer be even remotely human.” 
         (Amy Ireland & Maya B. Kronic, Cute Accelerationism)
      2. A common misconception is to make an artificial divide between the so called artificial – ‘human made’ – & the natural – something that’s somehow indescribable there/given –, while misleadingly assuming that the artificial were not natural.
      3. The cute is usually hated for its display of powerlessness.
         „[cute] power depends on irresolvable ambivalences that, as we have seen, shift unstably between familiar and unfamiliar, vulnerable and resilient, powerless and powerful, innocent and experienced, masculine and feminine, young and old. […] If the cute speak any language at all, it is the language of unpindownability. “ 
         (Simon May, The Power Of Cute)
         1. Speaking of which, there’s this very cute guy from Frankfurt.
            
            “I just can’t get you out of my head
            Boy, your loving is all I think about
            I just can’t get you out of my head
            Boy, it’s more than I dare to think aboutThere’s a dark secret in me
            Don’t leave me locked in your heart
            Set me free
            Feel the need in me
            Set me free
            Stay forever and ever and ever and ever “
            (Kylie Minogue, Can’t Get You Out of My Head)
            
            „What I’d really like to leave our listeners to think about is a particular phenomenon, which is all too often pushed aside in the enthusiasm which accompanies the desire to change things – that is, that any serious attempts to intervene in order to alter our world in any specific area immediately come up against the overwhelming force of inertia in the prevailing situation, and seem condemned to impotence. Anyone who wishes to bring about change can probably only do so at all, by turning that very impotence, and their own impotence, into an active ingredient in their own thinking and maybe in their own actions too.“ 
            (Th. W. Adorno, Education for maturity and responsibility)
2. Now “Can the monster speak?” (Paul B. Preciado)
   1. The idea of having to explain why you become trans- instead of having to explain why you became cis- is the very problem and the affect trans bodies induce into cis gender people is prove of it: 
      let’s call it cis-fragility.„Are you cis enough to be cis? What would that even mean?“ (Reddit)
      1. Therefore: everyones trans.
         In her book “Females – Everyone is female, and everyone hates it.” Andrea Long Chu starts by describing a world in which everyone single person, yes dear Mr. President, is termed female. On this premise she’s developing an ontological (in short: ‘study of being’) concept of the world: Everyones female.
         “The thesis of this little book is that femaleness is a universal sex defined by self-negation, against which all politics, even feminist politics, rebels. Put more simply: Everyone is female, and everyone hates it.
         Some explanations are in order. For our purposes here, I’ll define as female any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another. These desires may be real or imagined, concentrated or diffuse – a boyfriend’s sexual needs, a set of cultural expectations, a literal pregnancy – but in all cases, the self is hollowed out, made into an incubator for an alien force. To be female is to let someone else do your desiring for you, at your own expense. This means that femaleness, while it hurts only sometimes, is always bad for you. Its ultimate toll, at least in every case heretofore recorded, is death.
         Clearly, this is a wildly tendentious definition. It’s even more far-fetched if you, like me, are applying it to everyone – literally everyone, every single human being in the history of the planet. So it’s true: When I talk about females, I am not referring to biological sex, though I’m not referring to gender, either. I’m referring instead to something that might as well be sex, the way that reactionaries describe it (permanent, unchanging, etc.), but whose nature is ontological, not biological. Femaleness is not anatomical or genetic characteristic of an organism, but rather a universal existential condition, the one and only structure of human consciousness. To be is to be female: the two are identical.”
         (Andrea Long Chu, Females)
         I reread her work by replacing female with trans; everyone is trans, and everyone hates it.
         What I mean is, that everyones an open wound, porous, formed by outside forces.
         
         1. Especially speaking of trans woman we’re speaking of desiring becoming the collectively undesired. Transfeminization is also the demasculinization of (body) characteristics, becoming ‘soft’ (physically & emotionally).
      2. When Paul B. Preciado was speaking in front of 3500 Psychoanalysts at a psychoanalytical conference, November 17, 2019, he was the first trans person invited to speak from their perspective in front of the psychoanalytical community. And so the monster spoke back.Until today a person that transitioned in their life can not undertake psychoanalytic training, in most countries.An essay written by two Psychoanalysts that won a prize by the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA), and therefore supposed to be published, was hindered from publication, because it accused psychoanalysts and some of their theories as being involved and even responsible for some of the violence done to trans persons. Therefore they tried private publication, the IPA intervened and prevented its publication. In response the two analysts turned the essay into a book, that could not legally be prevented from publication. The following are some of those heretic words:
         “If gender is not its own primary, ontological category, but rather a set of translational codes through which the infantile sexual is bound, then we may profitably see gender as an emergent process that allows many twists and turns.
 Gender translations, then, are not either right or not (matching the body’s biological sex markers, the individual’s gender assignment at birth, or their “true” sense of gender), but more a matter of a goodness of fit, a degree of match. As a culturally transmitted object that is elaborated through the parent’s unconscious, all gender is definitionally inflected with parental emotional debris, and all gender positions in their efflorescence as well as their humiliations carry the batons of intergenerational conflicts. To think otherwise is to permit normative strivings to exert considerable regulatory pressures (Corbett 2011) on our metapsychology by imagining that some genders are unconstrained by personal history or cultural infiltrations.” 
         (Avgi Saketopoulou & Ann Pellegrini, Gender Without Identity)
      3. A queer theory in tune with the times would not have to pursue the deconstruction of gender or trace the genealogy of the gender category, nor would it have to point out a multitude of realized genders and gender identities, but rather grasp the fundamental ungroundedness that precedes any definition of gender. The systematization into one, two, three, inter-, trans-, binary or non-binary, many genders in spectra or scales is always to be understood as posteriority, retroaction, an afterwardsness (a term borrowed from Freud). The classification itself serves to mask and contain the horror that the real monstrosity of irreducible diversity, or heterogeneity, creates in us. It is therefore not about post- or trans-humanism, nor about queer-, cyber- or xeno-feminism, but rather about a quantum-theoretical critique of a systematized gendering. Gendering as process of individuation functions like filtering of noise, it’s the cutting off of unwanted frequencies, a limitation of potential, while at the same time that which arises or emerges out of the noisy basis.
         1. A major problem of philosophizing and politicizing the transgendered from any side or perspective in contemporary discourses is thinking to know what it is – the pretensions to know it’s truth -, instead of accounting for its opacity, strangeness and undetermination. A non-standard theory of sex & gender does not proceed by claiming to know the truth of sex nor gender, but that the sexuation or genderuation (derived from Simondon’s individuation, the individual as a product of a continuous & never-ending proccess) is determined in the last instance as immanent force of the real, which is yet to unfold.Instead genderuation – and with it it’s accompanying interpretation of sex (sexuation) – is a reaction to the traumatic encounter of their immanent reality, they are fiction-science, science-fiction, myth-science, auto-poetik, auto-fiction or auto-theory. While having to account for the very problem that self, identity, or ego already are defunkt concepts.In Futurama the Globetrotter’s ask: “Bender, you can talk trash, you can handle the ball, but look in your heart and ask yourself: Are you funky enough to be a globetrotter? Are you? ARE YOU?” A defunkt concept corresponds to the questions as not being funky enough. A defunkt concept of sex, gender and sexuality tries to transfix these in biological or ontological essentialism, relativistic perspectivism or (de-)constructivism, bound by concepts of identity & difference – self & other. A funktioning concept instead opens them up as sexuation, genderuation or sexualuation suggesting to be read as opaque multiplicities of becomings. Their truth being foreclosed, unde(te)rmined, and only accessible as self-fabulation; mine-ing in this case is the active immunization of the fictive self fending off change.
3. “We’re All Going To The World’s Fair” (Jane Schoenbrun) or the map (con-)fused with the territory.
   
   1. „Simulation takes place when a representation precedes the real of which it pretends to be a representation; it produces this real as reality itself instead of modelling a pre-existing reality. The more the simulated reality resembles an existing reality, the less it resembles it. If both realities are exactly the same, the simulated reality is no longer a reality, but a different original. The gap that is necessary to distinguish between copy and original has therefore disappeared. Actually, the representation system can only function on the basis of a gap between representation and reality, but as soon as the gap has closed and the system has lost contact with reality, it has to produce its own reality in order to continue functioning. This real is what Baudrillard calls the hyperreal, the more real than the real, and Baudrillard calls this process, in which the representation produces its own reality, simulation. In the process, referents or other realities continue to be produced as alibis. Baudrillard’s analysis takes place both at the level of the explanation that simulated systems give themselves (descriptive) and at the level of their own analysis. The simulation does not renounce the real, but attempts to realise it as reality by capturing it in its own system of representation. In hyperreality, therefore, we have not moved too far away from the real, but too far towards it. There is also a confusion between simulative models and their referents, which leads to epistemological nihilism. Each theory produces its own reality, and there seems to be no independent reference by which one theory could be judged better or worse than another. Simulation thus leads to a relativism of all theories, whereby the difference between binary oppositions also disappears. With simulation, systems become reversible, all hypotheses are equally plausible, and counter-hypotheses merely serve to support the system of simulation. Truth must be proven by scandal, the law by transgression, work by strike, the system by crisis, etc. On the one hand, the simulation thus strengthens the economy by giving this system the hegemony to take over all antagonisms, and, on the other hand, the simulation is an internal deconstruction of the system of meaning on which the economy is still based.“ (Achim Szepanski, In The Delirium Of The Simulation – Baudrillard Revisited)
      
A theory of gender is necessarily hyperrealistic: the attempt to define gender as broader term or specifically as defining a gender (i.e. male or female) or performing gender is trapped in systems of simulations – here also think of the simulator, i.e. the child telling their parents they’re to sick to go to school, becoming the very thing simulated by the process of simulation. It is always models of gender that are performed, represented, simulated, modelled. Understanding gender as simulation, modelled data, also explains why their performance.

The generic transgender is an ontological horror, not simply because it challenges the binary, but because it dissolves the very premise of sex and gender identity as coherent formations. It precludes them in their entirety, replacing the humanist fantasy of sexed bodies with a transsexuality that is neither essential nor performative, neither natural nor constructed, but inhumanly indifferent to the order that would seek to name it. In this, it echoes the monstrosity of xenogenders, of inchoate identity formations, of gender as a site of unthinkability—where the human dissolves into the speculative.

Cuteness, in its most radical form, is an anti-identity technology, a non-threatening monstrosity that disarms the ideological structures of cis-normativity by being too soft, too artificial, and too perfect to be real. In the landscape of inhuman-fictioning, kawaii is not a passive affect but an invasive, viral form of gendered irreality—one that camouflages its monstrosity in smoothness, softness, and simulation.
 Kawaii is not a retreat from the inhuman—it is the inhuman made seductive, the speculative gendering of unreality itself.

„Honestly cis people aren’t even real. Like why are we pretending that people can actually have their identity match up with their agab? Clearly, I don’t understand it and that means they are just delusional. It’s just basic biology, plus I speak for God himself bc all his opinions happen to be the same as mine so if you disagree with me you are automatically wrong and unworthy of consideration or respect. Which you already were anyway if You’re a cis “woman”. They need to at least disclose themselves!!!“ (Reddit)