Arts, Faculty of
English, Department of
DSpace
UBCV
Johansen, Astrid Christine
Master of Arts - MA
University of British Columbia
In the past ten years we have experienced a mainstreaming of trans politics through the rapid circulation of images of trans people and especially trans children on the Internet in digital communities on social media circling out into traditional media, and in political discourse. This saturation of trans* has led to a regulation of political discourse, new laws (putting “X” in passports as a third gender marker), changing spaces (bathrooms, changing rooms) etc. In this thesis I discuss the figure of the trans* child and what its emergence in the mainstream in the West means socio-culturally and politically in our current moment in the light of the historicity of “the child” as metaphor within medical discourse and its ties to the invention of the sex/gender binary, and sex as a racial phenotype (Gill-Peterson 2018). I further look at the speech activity of trans* children online on the social media platform YouTube and consider what makes the trans* child audible in the mainstream in our current moment? I consider this by thinking with and applying Michel Foucault’s thought on the relationship between truth, power, and the subject in the Western critical tradition in his engagement with parrhesia (truth-telling). Foucault argued in his last lecture series in Berkeley in 1983 that parrhesia did no longer function within the western critical tradition. What I posit in this thesis is that the Internet enables parrhesia to function again through digital communities and social media as a platform to speak truth to power. I argue that the trans* child functions as parrhesiastes in our current moment both enabled by the Internet and by the specificity of the history of “the child” as metaphor within western medical discourse. The trans* child resides between metaphor and materiality in our current moment and it is this ambiguity that allow them to speak truth to power as a parrhesiastes.
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TRUTH, POWER, AND THE SUBJECT: THE SPEECH ACTIVITY OF THE TRANS* CHILD AS PARRHESIA by Astrid Christine Johansen B.A., The University of Copenhagen, 2018 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (English) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) April 2021 © Astrid Christine Johansen, 2021 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the thesis entitled: The Relationship Between Truth, Power, and the Subject: The Speech Activity of the Trans* Child as Parrhesia submitted by Astrid Christine Johansen in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English Examining Committee: Judith Paltin, English Language and Literatures, UBC Supervisor Janice L. Stewart, The Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, UBC Supervisory Committee Member iii Abstract In the past ten years we have experienced a mainstreaming of trans politics through the rapid circulation of images of trans people and especially trans children on the Internet in digital communities on social media circling out into traditional media, and in political discourse. This saturation of trans* has led to a regulation of political discourse, new laws (putting “X” in passports as a third gender marker), changing spaces (bathrooms, changing rooms) etc. In this thesis I discuss the figure of the trans* child and what its emergence in the mainstream in the West means socio-culturally and politically in our current moment in the light of the historicity of “the child” as metaphor within medical discourse and its ties to the invention of the sex/gender binary, and sex as a racial phenotype (Gill-Peterson 2018). I further look at the speech activity of trans* children online on the social media platform YouTube and consider what makes the trans* child audible in the mainstream in our current moment? I consider this by thinking with and applying Michel Foucault’s thought on the relationship between truth, power, and the subject in the Western critical tradition in his engagement with parrhesia (truth-telling). Foucault argued in his last lecture series in Berkeley in 1983 that parrhesia did no longer function within the western critical tradition. What I posit in this thesis is that the Internet enables parrhesia to function again through digital communities and social media as a platform to speak truth to power. I argue that the trans* child functions as parrhesiastes in our current moment both enabled by the Internet and by the specificity of the history of “the child” as metaphor within western medical discourse. The trans* child resides between metaphor and materiality in our current moment and it is this ambiguity that allow them to speak truth to power as a parrhesiastes. iv Lay Summary I consider the political and socio-cultural effects of the saturation and mainstreaming of trans* and trans politics within the last ten years through the figure of the trans* child. I discuss the trans* child both as an image used to regulate political discourse in the light of “the child” as a metaphor within medical discourse and the speech activity of the trans* child on social media as a way to speak truth to power. I argue that the Internet enables new subjects to be truth-tellers in the West and that the trans* child through the specific history and symbolism of “the child” are making the subject’s relation to power and truth visible to us. v Preface This thesis is original, unpublished, independent work by the author Astrid Christine Johansen. vi Table of Contents Abstract ................................................................................................................................................... iii Lay Summary ......................................................................................................................................... iv Preface ....................................................................................................................................................... v Table of Contents .................................................................................................................................. vi Introduction ............................................................................................................................................ 1 Methodology: A Political Manifesto ............................................................................................................ 3 Notes on Material .............................................................................................................................................. 5 Chapter I: The Figure of the Trans* and the Internet as an Extension of Our Neural Network .................................................................................................................................................... 7 1.1 Metaphor and Matter: “The Child” as a Metaphor in Medical Discourse and the Emergence of the Trans* Child in the Mainstream ............................................................................... 7 1.2 Binaries are for Computers: Refusing the Binary and Claiming our own Bodies ............ 30 Chapter II: The Relationship between Truth, Power, and the Subject in the Western Critical Tradition and The Trans* Child’s Speech Online as Parrhesia ............................ 42 2.1 The Internet as a Technopolis that Enables the Trans* Child to be Parrhesiastes in our Current Moment ............................................................................................................................................. 42 2.2 The Mainstreaming of Trans Politics through the Figure of the Trans* Child ................. 53 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................. 59 Works Cited ........................................................................................................................................... 61 1 Introduction When I sat in my room as a young person watching other trans* and queer people on social media I would not have dreamed of the sonic speed with which the mainstreaming of trans politics have happened in the West in the scope of the past ten years. In this thesis I discuss the different factors that enable the figure of the trans* child to emerge in the mainstream in our current moment and what make them audible and able to have the impact culturally and politically that they do. I went to high school from 2008-2011 when the first LGBTQIA2S+ content was being released on YouTube and Tumblr from teenagers’ bedrooms across the globe (though mostly from the English-speaking West). At the time, the most frequent kind of video was the coming-out video; youth telling their parents, family, and friends that they were queer, gay, and lesbian. Slowly, these coming-out videos gave rise to Internet wormholes and phenomena of young queer and trans* people making vlogs, posts, and memes discussing gender, sex, the body, relationality, and subject formation outside the academy and other institutions offline. Through these YouTube videos, Tumblr, Instagram and TikTok posts the speech activity of the trans* child has circled out AFK (away from keyboard)1 and is being discussed in mainstream traditional media regulating political discourse, restructuring space (bathrooms and changing rooms), restructuring relationality within the nuclear family, changing administrational systems and laws (“X” is being put in passports), and medical discourse. The speech activity of the trans* child as well as the circulation and saturation of the image of the trans* child are shifting our 1 AFK (Away From Keyboard) is a term developed in chat rooms in the 1990s, the abbreviation has later been adopted by the gaming community. See Russell 2020. 2 understanding of the sex/gender binary and through this shift challenge the Western critical tradition’s relationship with self, truth, and power. In Chapter 1 I explore why the figure of the trans* child has such an impact on our political discourse in our current moment through the specificity of the historicity of “the child” as metaphor in medical discourse and the idea of biological human plasticity and its links to the sex/gender binary and the phenotyping of race (Gill-Peterson 2018). I further discuss “the child” as a universalizing image used to regulate political discourse (Edelman 2004). I look at how metaphors come to matter and their relationship to both science and politics specific to the trans* child through the work of Donna Haraway (1976) and Jules Gill-Peterson (2018). In Chapter 2 I turn to the actual trans* children and their speech activity in digital communities on the Internet. Asking what enables these children to be audible in the mainstream in our current moment? I turn to Michel Foucault and his last lecture series at the University of California Berkeley in 1983, which through his discussion of parrhesia (what in English can be translated as free speech) is concerned with the relationship between the subject, truth, and power by asking: who can speak truth to power? Who can be truth-teller and what is the subject’s relation to power? Foucault concluded in 1983 that parrhesia no longer functioned within our modern Western critical tradition. What I argue is that the Internet as our technological polis has made a technē of self-care possible, which trans* people did not have access to before the Internet’s and social media’s ability to connect us. I posit that the Internet enables the truth-telling technology of parrhesia to function again in our current moment (and not only for the trans* child). As a technology for speaking truth to power parrhesia enabled by digital communities online allows for other subjects than cisheterosexual men and women to be parrhesiastes. That other subjects like children, trans* people, Black, Indigenous, and People of 3 Colour can speak truth to power in previous unseen ways due to the connectivity of the Internet. I discuss both the possibilities and the dangers of discourses created online that ripple through the nervous system of the Internet, circle back out into the world AFK, and changes our relationality within the home and the family. I discuss how the figure is situated within Trans Studies; tracing the discussions of the trans* child in academia I show how the figure works as an image to regulate political discourse by the mainstream media, politicians and within the juridical sphere. This is what Jack Halberstam has called “the unwelcome spectacle of the trans* child” (2018, 53). Here I emphasize the importance of listening to and discussing the actual embodiment of transgender children like we are being urged to do by scholars like Jules Gill-Peterson (2018). I will not attempt to answer whether or not the figure of the trans* child can liberate us from the cisheterosexual matrix, rather, I want to take part in the ongoing conversation within Trans Studies, Black Studies, and Indigenous Studies on which subjects can be heard under the cisheterosexual law and white supremacy? And what mechanisms makes us able to speak and be heard? I look at how the speech activity of the trans* child has come to matter AFK and if we from this can argue that we are approaching a new episteme where the relationship between self, truth, and power has shifted to allow for children and other others to be parrhesiastes (truth-tellers). Methodology: A Political Manifesto For this project I try, like Sara Ahmed does in her feminist phenomenological practice and work, to take good care and be very careful to listen -, reach out to, and respect the subject or subjects I am working with and writing about. For this project I want to take good care, to be careful to 4 listen - and reach out to and respect the actual lived and embodied experiences of trans* children and youth. I am first and foremost interested in listening carefully to the trans* child in the videos and posts on social media. I am concerned with their speech acts, the discourse they create and become together with, and the “cosmic corporealities” they inhabit both virtually on the Internet and AFK. 2 I try to steer away from the modern, bourgeois, adult gaze, which we often meet the (trans*) child with, while being aware of my own position as someone who is writing about the trans* child. I cannot fully escape this. My phenomenological approach remains implicit through most of this paper. It serves as an underlying strategy of paying attention to how the trans* children in the YouTube videos orient themselves. Here I do not only mean what identity they claim, but rather, understanding trans* not as a transition with an end goal, but as an ongoing becoming where we continuously reorient ourselves. Through phenomenology we can understand lived and embodied experience as a source of knowledge; a way to touch, to sense, to feel, and to know. How we find ourselves orientated toward or away from things: “Phenomenology provides as set of tools for thinking about orientation.” (Ahmed 2006, 181). I am trying to be careful to tend to, listen to, and hopefully have a dialogue with the trans* child, rather, than solely understanding them as symbols dense with meaning used to regulate political discourse through medical discourse, traditional mainstream media, and law. It is a haptic way of going about it, rather, than only looking at trans* as limited to current North American political discourse. On the other hand, I recognize that this thesis consists mostly of discussion of how metaphors come to matter and of speech as an act that can change our relationality, kinship, politics, and ideas of ourselves as humans and subjects. It is way of writing about trans* children 2 Russell 2020. 5 as images, figures, or symbols, rather, than engaging with actual trans* children. However, we must remember that all metaphors come to matter. In engaging with the metaphor, we also engage with the object and materiality of the metaphor. It is my hope that we will, and I do urge all, to listen to the actual trans* children and hear what they know about themselves. Notes on Material This project takes as its archive and eclectic collection of materials videos created and uploaded by trans* children to the social media platform YouTube within the past five years. Content on social media platforms such as Facebook (2004-), YouTube (2005-), Tumblr (2007-) and later on Instagram (2010-), Vine (2012-19) and most recently TikTok (2018-) and Discord (2015, which is now being used outside the gaming community) has become community spaces for LGBTQIA2S+ children, a technē of self-care, and tool and technology for advocacy for dismantling the cisheterosexual matrix. In this thesis I look at a broad spectrum of videos uploaded to YouTube by nonbinary, trans*, genderqueer, genderfluid, and agender children. My interest in the figure of the trans* child and the Internet both as an archive and as a tool for speaking truth to power stems from watching a trans* futurity unfold as a possibility through my screen virtually in my room as a young person reading Tumblr blogs and watching YouTube videos to now seeing this materialize AFK with a speed I never dreamed possible sitting in my bedroom as a sixteen-year-old. When I first read Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble as an undergraduate student at the University of Copenhagen in 2013, I did not imagine people in the mainstream West discussing gender outside the binary as a liveable possibility. As Jami Weinstein and Eva Hayward write in their text “Traniamalities”: Within fluid mechanics the asterisk * denotes sonic speed. (21). The changes trans* is bringing about for our possibilities to claim and name our bodies does feel like sonic speed to me. 6 I was born right before generation Z, who grew up with screens and the Internet from they were born. The Internet was there when I was born, but smartphones and the always already glow of the screen was not invented in 1992 when I was born. In this way I am not completely a part of the trans* children and youth on the Internet. On the other hand, community and representation online has come to mean a great deal to me in my late teenage years. So even though I cannot claim to be part of gen Z growing up with the Internet as an extended part of their bodies I am also not apart from them. I am part of a generation born in the early 90s that are somewhat in between the analogue and digital generations. I am trying not to use an adult gaze looking at the figure of the trans* child as an image and symbol, rather, than a subject with agency. We should also remember in our scholarship when we discuss the child as a figure or an image that all metaphor becomes matter. Instead, what I urge us to do is listen to the trans* child and to follow the figure around both historically and in our current moment as it becomes audible in the mainstream. I have chosen my material carefully, in the way that I have chosen things that I care for. I am engaging with the figure of the trans* child and youth by looking deeper into the YouTube videos of young trans* people that I as a nonbinary person continuously have been and still are becoming together with. As I sat in my room as a young person searching for people, who felt constrained by the cisheteroseuxal matrix the same way I did, who also had queer feelings that did not fit the feelings I was told I was supposed to have, I found a community online on social media platforms. I am knotted into this and continue to become together with the trans* community online. The asterisk reaches out through the screen and through my database searches of other ways to be in this world than inside binaries and touches me back. 7 Chapter I: The Figure of the Trans* and the Internet as an Extension of Our Neural Network 1.1 Metaphor and Matter: “The Child” as a Metaphor in Medical Discourse and the Emergence of the Trans* Child in the Mainstream This text is moving alongside and thinking together with other recent scholarly work in Trans Studies focused on the figure of the trans* child (e.g. Gill-Peterson 2018, Halberstam 2018). The recent work within Trans Studies on the figure of the trans* child is mainly concerned with two things as I see it: The trans* child as a figure, image, or metaphor in medical discourse, political discourse, and its emergence in the mainstream, traditional media and the effect this figurative notion of the (trans*) child has on actual lives of gender variant children. When I first begun working on this project, I especially found the archival and historical work of Jules Gill-Peterson helpful and instructive when considering the emergence of the figure of the trans* child in the mainstream. In her book Histories of the Transgender Child (2018) Gill-Peterson unfolds the racist and violent history of how “sex became synonymous” with the idea of human biological plasticity within endocrinology and eugenics in the nineteenth and twentieth century (Gill-Peterson 2018, 35). Gill-Peterson discusses how different scientific experiments on animals and their conclusions were made analogous to human beings and their sex. Beginning with experiments on chickens, first done in the 18th century and then reperformed in Germany by Arnold Adolph Berthold’s in 1848 and -49, where roosters testes were removed, and their behaviour observed. Berthold concluded that the roosters “underwent a radical “femininization” in morphology and behavior, not only looking like hens but also acting like them.” (Gill-Peterson 2018, 40). After the first observation Berthold replaced the testes in the 8 stomach of the roosters to prove that the gonads had no link to the nervous system and instead were part of “internal secretions” circulating in the body (the dominant hypothesis in endocrinology at the time). This time he observed that the roosters “exhibited the normal behavior of uncastrated fowls” (quote from Berthold in Gill-Peterson 2018, 40). The conclusions from the study on the chickens further developed the hypothesis “that a unique system of internal secretions governed much of the biological life of the animal.” (Gill-Peterson 2018, 40). This idea of biological plasticity in animals was quickly made analogous to human beings leading to the idea of medical enhancement and modifiability of the human body both regarding sex and race. The early studies on fowls lead to studies conducted on guinea pigs and rats (Eugen Steinach and Paul Kammerer) and later pigeons (Oscar Riddle) focused on altering and changing the sex of the animals. Through their research on rats, Steinach and Kammerer, claimed that humans like rats in warmer climates grew “more prominent secondary sexual characteristics” and were hypersexualized (Ibid 51). All these studies performed on different animals combined, created a medical discourse on racial biological plasticity, which led to ‘sex’ being understood as “an alterable morphology”, which was “racialized as a phenotype.” (Gill-Peterson 2018, 35). Tying sex to race in this way “relied on the concept of plasticity” and it is what gave it its “eugenic significance” (Ibid 52). The idea of sex as alterable or the two sexes as latent in both female and male animals lead to the general idea of human bisexuality.3 Further, the idea of latent bisexuality in all humans made the endocrinologists interested in the embryo: “the embryo was probably the most plastic of all life” (Gill-Peterson 2018, 44) and later on the child and child development: “[…] the child could serve as a much better metaphor for plasticity, combining cell theory with the 3 Gill-Peterson 2018, 50. 9 concept of life’s natural bisexuality through the narrative drama of development.” (Gill-Peterson 2018, 47). Throughout the twentieth century the metaphor of the child as a support for the notion of human biological plasticity within medical discourse moved into the medical clinic unto actual children’s bodies in the medicalization of intersex and trans* children.4 In other medical fields like urology: “Black bodies, disabled bodies, women’s bodies, and children’s bodies, particularly in their overlap with queer, intersex, and trans forms, were frequently those that urology made available to itself […]” (Gill-Peterson 2018b, 608). C. Riley Snorton shows in Black on Both Sides (2017) that this is also the case in the field of gynecology in his discussion of J. Marion Sim’s “violent experimentation on enslaved Black women” (Gill-Peterson 2018b, Snorton 2017 18-20). Hortense Spillers provides us with a larger framework within which we can understand this violent experimentation on BIPOC and LGBTQIA2S+ bodies. In her seminal text “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” Spillers makes a distinction between body and flesh where subjects have bodies and the Black enslaved peoples were seen as “ungendered” flesh, which was associated with sexualization and desire (Spillers 68). This ungendering of Black people as well as a hypersexualization of Black bodies are a direct result of endocrinologists and eugenics notion of biological human plasticity and sex as a racial phenotype. Spillers’ work shows how racial phenotyping and the tying of sex to race within medical discourse are ongoing and makes Black, people of color, and Indigenous bodies disposable and precarious. Gill-Peterson shows how we can broaden this category to gender variant people and especially to children. In this way Black scholarship and historiography warns us about “ungendering”, which historically has been a way to abject Black people, and flesh signifying object and commodity, rather, than body and recognizable subject. Sex and gender 4 Gill-Peterson, 2018. 10 was the tools that made them flesh and commodity through the colonial gaze. “Trans is not necessarily a progressive mechanism for revealing cultures of violence; rather, the formation of trans (transgender, transsexual, trans*, gender queer, gender non-binary/conforming) is always part of the ways sex and gender are inscribed to manage, conceal, reinforce, displace, and the effects and histories of race and racism. This said, because it is installed as a crisis associated with sex and gender, it also indexes how established categories of sex and gender have always worked to stabilize technologies of colonial racism.” (Gossett and Hayward, 18). When thinking about trans* we always need to think about Black and Indigenous peoples’ histories as well. Trans Studies is therefore always entangled with Black - and Indigenous Studies. We need to consider the histories of sex as a racial phenotype and its ongoing colonial, racist, and violent structures distributing value along the lines of sex, gender, and race as categories tied together through the concept of plasticity.5 But as Che Gossett and Eva Hayward also reminds us trans* “also indexes how established categories of sex and gender have always worked to stabilize technologies of colonial racism” (Ibid). I do think trans* is a helpful and necessary way to challenge the tying of race to sex through the concept of plasticity and the metaphor of the child. The recuperation of Black trans or trans of color subjects “into a positive condition for trans of color historiography” is thus also what both Gill-Peterson and Snorton work toward (Gill-Peterson 2018b, 608). To circle back to the child as metaphor, I have shown how it was being used by endocrinologists and eugenic scientists to support and consolidate the idea of biological plasticity 5 Gill-Peterson, 2018. 11 and sex as a racial phenotype. I have also unfolded how this medical discourse relying on the assumed plasticity of the child is ongoing within the medical clinic, but also circling out from the medical and scientific sphere to function as a metaphor regulating political discourse. Engaging with Donna Haraway’s work on the important function of metaphor in biology in her first book Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors That Shape Embryos (1976), Haraway reminds us how metaphors come to matter epistemologically and politically through their use within biology. Haraway argues that the entanglement of the object of the metaphor, here the child, in scientific discourse with the scientific observer comes to matter in the lives of actual children. “The child has been made a living figure in biology because children can metaphorically accommodate the ultimately paradoxical relationship between form and plasticity that, some-how, grows into the human and can be altered by medical science.” (Gill-Peterson 2018, 56). The metaphor does not exist without relation to its object. When producing knowledge, we must be conscious that knowledge is situated and that using metaphors in science (and elsewhere) has material effects.6 Haraway argues that the method of using and being conscious of metaphors within sciences therefore is an ethical and political methodology where we must strive for a considered, intentional, and ethical relationality, kinship, and acknowledgement of our deep connection with all critters on Earth.7 This should not be read as Haraway condoning the use of the research and studies on animals’ sex to eugenics on human beings, rather, Haraway is reminding us of the epistemological and political power of the use of metaphor within biological and medical discourse. Haraway and Gill-Peterson both remind us that, rather, than avoiding or opposing metaphors, we need to “imagine different ones that would reshape the practice of science and the 6 Haraway shows how knowledge production is never objective, but that it is always situated in the social locations of the subject producing knowledge. See Haraway 1988. 7 Haraway uses the word critters interchangeably and promiscuously for both humans, animals, bacteria, microbes, plants and machines. See Haraway, 2016. 12 production of biological knowledge from the situated perspective of the long- presumed passive object.” (Gill-Peterson 2018, 38). Within the past ten years the trans* child has emerged both as a figure in the mainstream and as an active subject online. In the late 2000s the traditional, mainstream media in the West began writing about what they called a “gender revolution”8 and the image of the trans* child and the actual trans* children’s speech acts in their online communities on social media platforms began circling out into the mainstream. Rather, than serving as just the passive object of the metaphor of “the child”, the trans* child exists both in extension of the history of the use of the child as metaphor and at the same time they are existing as an active subject with a will of their own and an audibility enabled through the Internet. It is within this space of moving between being an object and figure in the mainstream and a subject representing themselves enabled by the Internet that the trans* child currently resides. In the coming pages I will unfold, how on the one hand the trans* child can be seen as an object, figure or image used to regulate political discourse and on the other hand how the trans* child can be seen as a subject with a will of their own enabled by digital communities on the Internet. I will try and follow the trans* child’s movement between metaphor and materiality around. Firstly, we can turn to Lee Edelman’s work on the child as a universalizing figure as a way to understand the trans* child as a figure or image used to regulate political discourse. Edelman explores the current bourgeois notions of childhood in the West, which places the child as a signifier of the social, the human, futurity, innocence, and domestication. As a primal scene of social and futurity the child serves as an image used to regulate political discourse: “its coercive universalization […] serves to regulate political discourse - to prescribe what will 8 National Geographic 2017. 13 count as political discourse - by compelling such discourse to accede in advance to the reality of a collective future whose figurative status we are never permitted to acknowledge or address.” (Edelman 23). The child functions as an object within political discourse just like it does within medical discourse. As a refusal of participating in the cisheterosexual reproductive futurism Lee Edelman, instead, advocates for “no future”; for leaning into our queerness, jouissance, and the death drive, as a powerful negation - and subversion of the future (2004). When Edelman first wrote about the impossibility of the queer child, queer people and reproduction were not considered together the way it is in our current moment and children were not queer or trans*. The trans* child to Edelman is a paradox. The child symbolizes futurity. Trans symbolizes death and no future. As Jack Halberstam writes: “Childhood in the past was never queer, never trans*, always oriented toward a normativity to come.” (Halberstam 2018, 62). Halberstam’s statement should of course not be understood, as though gender variant children did not exist before our current moment, rather, we should read it as though the invention of the sex/gender binary has made it impossible for us to understand the existence of the trans* child within our Western epistemological framework and language. Linking childhood with trans* or childhood with queer did not exist when Jack Halberstam grew up. In trans communal memory childhood was often not allowed to be trans. Instead, children were reprimanded, ostracized, or surgically altered when straying from binary embodiment.9 The work of Jules Gill-Peterson shows us how gender variable children have always existed, but that they since the post-war era has been thwarted through violent processes to understand themselves within a sex/gender binary invented in the medical clinic.10 9 Gill-Peterson 2018b. 10 Gill-Peterson 2018, 58. 14 To better understand how the trans* child as an image changes our understanding of sex and gender through adding a prefix to child as a metaphor used as a device to argue for the biological plasticity of the human and further as an image that regulate political discourse, let me first turn to the critique of the saturated image of the trans* child made by Halberstam, who argues that the current political discourse centers on the white middle-class transgender child.11 This, first of all, means that some trans bodies are protected and maybe even valued while others are not. The image of the trans* child in political discourse is the image of a white, middle-class, transgender child, which leaves trans* people of colour, Two-Spirit people, Black trans* people among others outside the social, the human, and futurity. Halberstam further argues, that gender variant children are simply being mediated through and thwarted by their parents and through medicine and the pharmaceutical industry to first of all understand themselves as being transgender and that what it means is to move in a straight line between one sex and gender to another sex and gender within the sex and gender binary (Halberstam 2018, 53-54). Halberstam argues that this activism by liberal parents in the US “has prematurely stabilized the meaning of the trans* child’s gender variance and put protocols in place for the normalization of his or her gender.” (Halberstam 2018, 54). Halberstam is fearful that the bourgeois, white, middle-class trans* child because of these medical protocols and the bureaucratic administration of their bodies will by the patriarchal and neocolonial gaze be put into unwanted categories of normalization. This Halberstam suggests undermines fifty years of trans activism prior to what he calls “the unwelcome spectacle of the trans* child.” (Halberstam 53). 11 Halberstam 53 15 I, like Halberstam, is concerned about the use of the trans* child as an image to regulate political discourse. The continuation of the child as metaphor in the objectification of the trans* child is difficult for the trans* community to control. Rather, the image of the trans* child spins out of control and is in the hands of the mainstream, traditional media, the cisheterosexual parents within the structure of the nuclear family, and can be used as a device by people with other intentions than the ones held by trans* people within the trans* community. Here we might ask who is the subject of trans? Trans is not a stable term, and it is through its inherent incorporation of all kinds of gender variance that it functions as a radical politics under cisheterosexual law. It is its inherent ability to encompass different embodiments of sex and gender that the asterisk points at, opening trans up and pointing directly at the ontological problem inherent in the sex/gender binary and thereby in the category of trans. We should note that the trans* community of course is not one group of people, who all think the same or have the same values. As I posit in this thesis, the trans* child is able to represent themselves on social media and make themselves audible in the mainstream. Since Edelman published No Future Queer Theory and the Death Drive in 2004 describing the future as “kid stuff” and describing the impossibility of the queer child, the trans* child emerged on the Internet representing themselves and creating new words to name and claim their bodies. On platforms like Tumblr and YouTube children began to describe themselves outside the gender binary using words like non-binary, genderqueer, agender, genderfluid etc. The question we then must ask is what it means, if we like Edelman understand the image of the child as what regulates political discourse, to then add the prefix trans* and then in turn talk about the trans* child? Gender variant children are no longer confined to spaces like the medical clinic and the nuclear, cisheterosexual family, as Halberstam argues. When thinking about the emergence of the trans* child in the mainstream, 16 we must consider the Internet as a techno-polis, which changes the regulation of political discourse in a radical way. To look closer at the political discourse created through the use of the image of the trans* child we need to look at what this image looks like and how it moves and loops through both the wormholes of the Internet as well as how it circles out AFK. The many images in videos of the trans* child online and the discourse created in their communities, which circles out AFK, has resulted in a regulation of the political discourse, which has led to restructuring of physical spaces (bathrooms, changing rooms), laws and administrational systems as well as medical discourse and protocols. By restructuring space the bodies that inhabit them take their shape as well. In this way the speech of the trans* child online, and the trans* child as a figure are actively regulating political discourse and in glimpses subverting the cisheterosexual matrix, capitalism, and colonialism. Trans* children are often described as what Sara Ahmed would call a willful subject. Ahmed begins her book Willful Subjects (2014) with a reading of the Grimm fable “A Willful Child”. I picked up the book to read about ‘the willful subject’ and had forgotten that what it begins with is the willful child. The child in the story refuses to do as she is being told by her mother and therefore falls ill and dies because “God had no pleasure in her, and let her become ill” (Grimm qtd in Ahmed 2014, 1). When buried the arm of the (willful) child keeps reaching back up through the earth until the mother of the child with a rod as her tool gets her way and the child finally is quiet in her grave. Ahmed is interested in the rod used as a violent device or technology to silence and kill “the willful child”. We can understand the child as metaphor as the rod of medical discourse enabling sex as a racial phenotype and in turn violent experimentation on BIPOC and trans* and intersex bodies. The child as a metaphor as the rod continues to objectify and render the trans* child abject and passive, however, the trans* child is willful and 17 unlike the Grimm fable, we can read the trans* child as defying the objectifying gaze of the doctor as personage and the mainstream, traditional media.12 Like Ahmed, I am interested in where we tend to find willfulness and who is characterized as willful and who is not: “Where do we tend to find willfulness? When does willfulness come up? Who is attributed as willful? A key aspect of the argument is that willfulness is not only deposited in certain places but that through this depositing the will is unevenly distributed in the social field. The reverse mechanism is the same mechanism: the uneven distribution of the will is how a figure can appear as willful […]” (Ahmed 2014, 17). The child is often characterized as being willful when showing agency, will or being disobedient because of what Ahmed describes as “the uneven distribution of will in the social field.” (Ibid). The trans* child is characterized as willful in the same way as the child in the fable and through the attribution of will to the doctor they are being described like: “having a mental disorder”, “being a special snowflake”, “attention seeking” (YouTubers Come Out as Nonbinary). On the other hand, children following straight lines within the binary are often being praised. We need to take notice of who is being described as willful and who is not. It matters that the trans* child is attributed with willfulness and not will and agency both in the medical clinic, the traditional mainstream media, and in scholarship on the trans* child. What can we learn if we listen to the “undisciplined” or “rowdy” children not following straight lines? Within the cisheterosexual matrix created through the notion of plasticity supported by the child as a metaphor, the trans* child is rowdy and undisciplined. 12 See Foucault 2009. 18 I want to think of actual trans* children as subjects with agency and will of their own. Not solely as an image or object or as subjects being thwarted by their parents or failed administrational protocols put in place in their name. If we listen to what the trans* child say in the videos on social media, it is that it is them researching and figuring out that they are trans* and then telling their parents what they need. Not the other way around. Noah Finn Adams a young transman from the UK creating content on YouTube with the channel name NOAHFINNCE has uploaded several videos featuring his mom. Viewers get to ask his mom questions about what it is like for her to have a child, who is transgender. They ask things like “If she knew he was trans before he told her he was?”, “If she has any advice for other parents with trans children?”, “What she thought when he told her?”, “Did you ever think he was going through a phase?”, “Did he same happier after he came out?”, “What do you feel about him starting T [testosterone]?”, “What do you think about top-surgery?”, (TRANSGENDER SON Q&A WITH MY MOM). To the question on top-surgery, Noah’s mom says she is “worried”, because “it will hurt” and “it is surgery”, but that she knows “he is looking forward to it.” (12:11-12:15s). Her answers show that this is something Noah wants, not something she is pushing on him. Although she is very accepting and supportive of Noah’s choices she is not trying to thwart him or make him seek medical help, rather, she is worried about him and wishes that he did not have to go through it. The same is the case in another video made by Jamie Raines another trans* person on YouTube, who has made Q&A videos featuring both his parents. Jamie asks his mom: ”What helped you to support me through my transition?” And the mom answers: “The fact that you educated yourself 100% about it all. You looked up information on the Internet. You found out about how other mothers experienced it. How other people 19 explained it to their parents and told me all about it. Told me about other people’s experiences… Seeing all of that made me feel… not that it was more normal or more acceptable necessarily, but more that you could have a normal life […]” (FTM Transgender: Q&A with my mum 2:50-3:35). Here it is clear that it is the trans* child, who tell their parents about what they need and not the other way around. Jamie’s mom continues: “[…] I thought it [being trans] was just something peculiar that very few people experienced. […] Then the kind of shock horror of it subsides and you have to listen to your child and what would make them happy” (FTM Transgender: Q&A with my mum, 0:35:0:40, 1:00-1:16). The mom uses the words “shock horror” to first describe her reaction when Jamie told her he was trans*, but that she then decided to support him. Videos like the one with Noah and his mom and Jamie and his mom show trans* children and youth as subjects with agency who make decisions for themselves about medical intervention, and it shows that they are the ones teaching their parents what trans* means, rather, than the other way around. The discourse around the trans* child thus circles out into the trans* child’s life AFK to the parents, mainstream traditional media, the medical clinic etc. It does not begin as or become a liberal project for the parents to take out. This is not to suggest that what Jack Halberstam describes is not also taking place in some privileged parts of white upperclass America and other rich parts of the world, but the vast majority of trans* children are not accepted by their families or thwarted to identify as trans*. I strongly agree with Halberstam and Gill-Peterson that we should be wary and critical of the protocols set in place in the name of trans* children both within the medical clinic and the law. Protocols that I examine more closely in Chapter 2 of this thesis. However, I am wary of being 20 critical of the trans* child and their parents. If they do not get to decide what they need or what is true from them then who holds this power? Halberstam’s critique falls short in that it reproduces the child as being innocent and without a will of their own by attributing the will to their parents, rather, than critiquing the system that disciplines and governs trans bodies. Only reading the figure of the trans* child as an image that they are not themselves in control of, but an image created by liberal parents, the media, and politics is to underestimate the political impact of the trans* child through the Internet as a tool for speaking truth to power. In turn, I am trying to not only understand the figure of the trans* child through the image portrayed in political discourse, the traditional, mainstream media, the representation existing of trans* people in popular culture (Halberstam 2018) or in art (Russell 2020), but to also understand the trans* child as a subject with agency of their own. I am interested in the ways in which the trans* child is speaking back and reaching back into the world AFK. How do these reoccurring gestures and speech acts interfere in our current political moment? The trans* child gives us an opportunity to subvert the tying together of race and sex through the notion of plasticity within medical discourse through the metaphor of the (normative, binary) child. Unlike the child as a metaphor, the actual trans* children represent themselves online and it is their image and speech acts that circle out in the mainstream in traditional media and political discourse. We see their speech challenge both the medical discourse and the use of the child as a metaphor to support the argument of sex as racial plasticity. I am looking at the emergence of the trans* child in the mainstream through the lens of “the child” as metaphor in support of the medical discourse on human biological plasticity and its history within eugenics and racialized phenotyping leading to violent experimentation performed on BIPOC and gender variant women, children, and disabled people as well as “the child” as a saturated image and universalizing figure used to regulate political discourse 21 (Edelman). It is in the light of these histories of necropolitics that the emergence of the trans* child in the mainstream is interesting.13 This is not to say that trans* or nonbinary elders do not exist or that gender variance comes with the child or as something inherent in younger generations. Rather, my focus on the trans* child for this project specifically should be seen in the light of the histories outlined above. The trans* child as a figure emerging in the mainstream is interesting in the light of the history of the child as metaphor, figure, and image in the West used to regulate both medical and political discourse and the consequences this regulation has had and continue to have for BIPOC, disabled, trans* and intersex people. The use of the metaphor of the child to regulate political discourse has given the trans* child both an abstract and deeply rooted significance in our current political moment. Through the specific history of the metaphor of the child within medical discourse the trans* child as a figure in the mainstream is making the cisheterosexual matrix, the continuous racialization of certain bodies, and the ongoing colonialism visible to us. The use of the metaphor of the child has given the trans* child a platform from which to speak and an impact, which is specific to the historicity of the child as a metaphor within medical discourse in the West. Like Gill-Peterson I am therefore committed to a focus and care for the actual trans* child and their lived, embodied experience. She urges us to listen to and consider what the trans* child knows about themselves; to listen to the actual lived experiences of the trans* child as a radical act within cisheterosexual patriarchy: “That critique, which this book has undertaken for the twentieth century, confronts us with an array of immediate possibilities for reimagining the clinic, which would revolve around actually listening to what trans children say about themselves, grounding 13 Mbembe 2003. 22 medical care in their desires, and abandoning binary models of transition and dysphoria that continue to connect children to developmental teleologies ending in heterosexual masculinity or femininity.” (Gill-Peterson 2018, 198). This thesis should be read as a political manifesto urging people to listen to the actual trans* children, who speak to us in the medical clinic, in the traditional media and most forcefully through digital communities where they represent themselves on their own terms. I urge you to listen to the actual trans* child as a way of recognizing and healing from the long racist, violent history using “the child” as a metaphor within medical discourse to underpin the notion and idea of plasticity of human biology and the use of results from studies done on animals to describe, categorize, improve through hierarchy human beings where “the white, binary, male body” was the ideal (Gill-Peterson 2018, 48).14 The child as a metaphor for human biological plasticity was always directed towards a binary sex and gender. The idea of the child as our most plastic state was not meant to suggest that humans should not when reaching adulthood become either male or female, rather, the plastic state of childhood was used by endocrinologists and eugenic scientists to ensure through surgery and hormonal treatments of intersex and gender variant people that they ended up fitting within the sex/gender binary. “While it may seem like the trans boys and girls in this book in the 1960s and 1970s, black and white, represent a more binary, congealed experience of transness than those from the 1930s or 1940s, my argument historicizes this easily made misreading. Any binary impression, to the extent that it exists, is in actuality an ideological effect of the 14 See Gill-Peterson’s discussion of G. Stanley Hall’s ideas of child development and the child as “neo-atavistic”. As well has his idea of an “ideal, mature form or phenotype for the human”, which for Hall was “a white, binary, male body.” Gill-Peterson 2018, 47-48. 23 incredibly limiting medical discourse of transsexuality, as well as the invention of gender, both which have been deeply invested in passing of the gender binary as much more natural than it has ever proved to be in medical practice or lived experience.” (Gill Peterson 2018b, 201). The idea of biological plasticity through child development has structured the Western understanding of children and ““the child” has profoundly overlaid—sometimes, overdetermined—the lives of actual children.” (Gill-Peterson 2018, 36). The trans* child is an interesting figure for this project exactly because it is a direct affront to “the child” as metaphor for human biological plasticity, which was a normative, white, binary, able-bodied child. “The child” could be enhanced and modified through medicine, the trans* child has agency to speak for themselves and be heard. The emergence of the trans* child in the mainstream is a subversion of the cisheterosexual matrix and the mechanisms of the necropolitics of Western medical discourse enabled through the metaphor of the child. The trans* child in its willful attempt to lose all categorization (nonbinary, genderqueer, genderfluid) insists on embodying its fluid, blurry, and abstract selves outside categorization. Through existing and telling their truth they confront the administrational management of us through categorization and the mechanisms of necropolitics. Actual trans* children have gained a platform on the Internet enabling them to speak for themselves and not find themselves confined within the walls of the medical clinic or traditional, mainstream media speaking for them. What this thesis posits is that through the emergence of the trans* child in the mainstream “the child” as a passive object tied to the metaphor used in medical discourse is being challenged by the active and willful trans* child that through social platforms of the Internet gain agency and a voice of their own outside the walls of 24 the medical clinic. Trans* reaches and let us feel our way through our tissue and language and embody a range of multiple selves like humans have always done, but medicine and societal norms have restricted us from doing. When reading the historical work of Gill-Peterson we see this multiplicity found in the archive: “While this narrative of change over the twentieth century might seem on the surface to reinforce a succession from a pre- to posttranssexuality paradigm, in reality the only through line is the rich variability of trans childhood as a plastic state of being, in spite of its many colonizations by medicine. “, (Gill-Peterson 200). What trans* and the Internet has done is make this rich variability visible to the mainstream through digital communities that has fostered the emergence of language describing trans* and nonbinary gender identities in the West, outside the medical clinic. The interconnectedness of the Internet made trans* children across the world find each other through virtual wormholes and challenge the fixed ontology that the sex/gender binary offers within the borders of the medical clinic. The Internet supports the work Gill-Peterson does and helps recuperates a trans* subject outside medical discourse and -reason. The trans* child functions as a counter metaphor to the normative child as metaphor, who by medical science can be enhanced or modified within the ideal of the sex/gender binary. I think of trans* as a reorientation technology. We could look at the trans* body through the experience of being “out of place” in a space organized around compulsory whiteness and cis-heterosexuality (Ahmed 2006). When the binary sex male/female as well as binary gender man/woman are the predominant orientation, subjects who deviate embody distance, or even absence. Subjects that are straying from the straight lines already drawn up will be seen as deviant (Ibid). I set out to follow the lines of the asterisk in more directions than just the two of binary sex and gender. I am not understanding these directions/orientations as being fixed or 25 finite or down to the actual lines of the asterisk (*). Rather, I am letting the arms of the asterisk, through the embodiment and speech of the trans* child, touch and feel their way as an ongoing becoming trans*. The asterisk points to a crisis in ontology (and a crisis in trans). We need to come up with new metaphors that take us elsewhere than the metaphor of the child has done. Eva Hayward and Jami Weinstein uses both animal metaphoricity as well as reminds us of the use of the asterisk in computer code and maths. Considering the use of studies performed on animal leading to violent experimentations on the human body the animal analogies might at first seem misplaced and dangerous. However, I read them as a defiant way of defining, claiming, and naming their own bodies as abstract and multiple and as a part of nature and the human as animal both as metaphor, but also as material and haptic. To recuperate the trans* subject, and understand the human in relation to “all critters” on Earth I think these animal analogies helpful. “The asterisk, a diminutive astral symbol miming a starfish’s limby reach, follows trans and attaches to it, attaches it to something else, a spiky, allergenic pollen soliciting immunological mobilizations, a viral latching-on to membraneous surfaces of words. Trans* is meant, in part, to break open the category of transgender, transwoman, or transman. It is recognized as ”an effort” (after all, an asterisk can suggest emphasis, which is perhaps also affective) to include all noncisgender identities. The * is a paratactic: it denotes a database search, it designates multiplication, it can be a disclaimer indexing the fine print, it indicates pseudonyms or names that have been changed, and, in computer code, asterisks around a word will embolden it. The multi-pointed asterisk is fingery; it both points and touches.” (Hayward and Weinstein, 2015). 26 I, like Hayward and Weinstein, think of the asterisk as something that latches-on to trans and opens up our Western, limited understanding of relationality through our binary systems of gender, sex, and race. Trans* points at the colonial gaze and grasps, reaches, and touches upon something larger, unfixed, and abstract and at the same time something material and haptic. Again it is between metaphor and matter that the figure of the trans* child resides. Trans* people make visible that gender and sex are performatives that cannot hold in the same way Judith Butler in their reading of Sophocles’ Antigone argues that Antigone by taking on the role of the man makes visible that the cisheterosexual matrix cannot hold.15 It is this crisis in ontology, in beingness, and in trans that the asterisk as well as words like nonbinary, genderqueer, and agender make visible to us. The idea that our categories are constant or hold up through history is of course not true. Rather, all categories leak at times, continuously become, and are dismissed in favor of new categories. In their seminal work Gender Trouble Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) Butler first put forward their ideas on gender and sex as performative. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, Simone de Beauvoir and Monique Wittig, Butler argued that gender is a public and exterior “stylized repetition of acts” an “identity tenuously constituted in time” (Butler 1999, 178). By constituted in time we should understand gender as a social and historical category that moves and becomes over time, rather, than a fixed category as medical discourse from the eighteenth century forward has perpetuated through the construction of the sex/gender binary (see my reading of Gill-Peterson in section 1.1). How we embody gender in any specific moment is “a gendered corporealization of time” (Ibid 179). It is an approximation of the phantasmatic idea of gender in a particular time, which we can never fully embody. The same applies to sex, Butler argues, just as gender is phantasmatic so is the 15 See Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, 2000. 27 notion of “an essential sex and a true or abiding masculinity or femininity” (Ibid 180). These notions founded in medical discourse are also “constituted as part of the strategy that conceals gender’s performative character and the performative possibilities for proliferating gender configurations outside the restricting frames of masculinist domination and compulsory heterosexuality.” (Ibid 180). Like Butler’s theory on sex and gender as performative trans* signals that the sex/gender binary is an insufficient classificatory system. Trans* shows a crisis in ontology, coherence, and the idea of universality in the Western world. What we see now is a movement away from being known and named by science and medical discourse. The trans* community is naming themselves, claiming that in fact medical discourse do not know them at all. In choosing your own way, to categorize yourself and name yourself, and to through this become a subject were unthinkable in 1990’s when Judith Butler published the works Gender Trouble (1990), Bodies that Matter (1993), Excitable Speech (1997). Applying the work of Louis Althusser and speech act theory by J.L. Austin, Butler argued that we could choose not to turn when being hailed in the street, the example used by Althusser in his discussion of subject formation, and instead queer gender norms. However, at the same time Butler made it very clear that even though both sex and gender are performative, there are structures and discourses, which we cannot escape. When refusing to turn when hailed as being for instance a boy or a girl, a man or a woman, we might be rendered unrecognizable and thus abject and in turn our lives become precarious. However, what we are seeing in our current moment is just that: People refusing the binary system of sex and gender, naming themselves outside this system, and they are slowly being recognized as subjects by traditional media, by law, and by administrational systems and medical discourse. We see instead the binary system and discourse adapt to include people 28 identifying outside the binary. For the young trans* people on the Internet “trans*” is a hacking and reorientation device leading away from the binary system of sex/gender. Trans* is not simply a new identity to fit underneath the LGBTQIA2S+ umbrella; it is not an add on, rather, it is a way of seeing and embodying differently. However, it is not a deliberate political statement or speech act, which the trans* child utters when they speak of themselves as trans*, nonbinary, genderqueer etc. The child speaks out of a need. The videos online are a manifestation and technē of self-care, and of reaching out for a community with the arms of the asterisk (*). “As such, the multi-pointed asterisk is needy, is fingery, as if putting greater political emphasis on both the prepositional and the prefixial valences of trans to signal an ontological refusal. If trans was not understood, in at least one of its modes, as always already relational, working and playing parasitically at the level of language, thought, and ideology, then the * repurposes, displaces, renames, replicates, and intensifies terms, adding yet more texture and the possibility of nearby-ness. The anemone that is this asterisk is hungry for connection.” (Hayward and Gossett 21) Trans* is “hungry for connection”, which is found both virtually and often later in urban areas AFK for the trans* children. Even though trans* is not said by the trans* child as a political act, trans* is political in its “ontological refusal” of the Western sex/gender binary. Adding trans* as a descriptor to children then means talking about a trans* political discourse, talking about a trans* future. Understanding trans* as human and bringing it into the social by including it in the nuclear cisheterosexual family. In this way the figure of the trans* child can be seen as a 29 subversive figure that through disrupting the gender binary and adding trans* as a prefix to the universal image of the child used to regulate political discourse changes our understanding of the human, the social, futurity, relationality, and through all of this capitalism and neocolonialism. Like Sara Ahmed argues in her work on queer phenomenology: “I would not argue that queer has “no future” as Lee Edelman […]” (Ahmed 2006, 178), rather, I am hopeful because of the ways the direction of queer and trans* orientation has already come to matter. As Ahmed continues, she is having hope in the future because: “the lines that accumulate through the repetition of gestures, the lines that gather on skin, already take surprising forms.” (Ahmed 2006, 178-79). I would argue that these forms are not new, but that the language used to understand gender variance outside the binary is new, radical especially in the light of the mainstreaming of trans politics within the past five to ten years. I do not think “future” as a linear movement, but rather, a circular one where we “fold back into our bodies”, tissue, and self as well as our cultural signification of them (Hayward 2018). Jack Halberstam argues that “The arrival of trans* children disrupt not only the meaning of the gendered body but our understandings of time, development, and order itself.” (Halberstam, 62). If we do not all grow up to be cis-heterosexual men and women living together in the constellation of the nuclear family owning private property this can shift and reorientate us away from neocapitalism and bureaucratic systems being held together by colonial binaries. Listening to the trans* child is a way of engaging with our relationality both with each other as humans, but also with our “other relatives”: animals, insects, mycelium webs, plants, microbes, and machines to name but a few.16 16 See Haraway 2016. 30 1.2 Binaries are for Computers: Refusing the Binary and Claiming our own Bodies “Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?” (Haraway, 178). The space we occupy online can be crucial especially as children or young people when our world is not bigger than the school we go to, the people that make up our family, and the town we live in. Especially queer and trans* children and youth find representation online that they do not have access to offline. A qualitative study done in 2019 across departments of pediatrics and different universities in the United States concludes that: “Social media platforms represent hubs of community for transgender adolescents. These communities provide emotional, appraisal, and informational support that transgender youth may not otherwise be able to access.” (Selkie et.al.). The study shows that online spaces and social media is where young queer and trans* people come into their bodies and selves and continue to become together.17 Dylan, a young transgender boy says in an Interview with Channel4 on transgender youth in the UK that the hardest part about being transgender is “self-acceptance” and when asked what helps him when he is “feeling low?” He answers: “Search YouTube videos would often help me” and continues that it is “Reassurance that I am not the only one dealing with it” that helps him the most (10:15-10:30). The Internet provides a window and a wormhole for connection, community, and kinship for Dylan where he can escape the cisheterosexual matrix and find a room with people, who feels and are orientated like him. The Internet can also be understood as a space we can occupy and 17 See Deleuze and Guattari, 1980. 31 inhabit. The Internet not as fantasy, play, and make-believe versus IRL or the “real world”, but the Internet as real. I am opposed to the idea of “real” life or the offline world as being valued more than the digital or virtual world. We need to remember that the effects of acts (texts, videos, posts etc.) are material and embodied. Like Gene McHugh, I think that “For many people who came of age as individuals and sexual beings online, the internet is not an esoteric corner of culture where people come to escape reality and play make-believe. It is reality.” (McHugh, 31). Social media and the Internet are where young trans* people find representation, community, and kinship. The Internet extends their bodies and selves beyond their skin through their search (*) of other people who have queer feelings like they do. Here, we must stop and ask what is a body? The Oxford English dictionary tells us that the etymology of the word is uncertain, but that it today among other things means: “The complete physical form of a person or animal; the assemblage of parts, organs, and tissues that constitutes the whole material organism.” (OED, “body”). To only think of the body as physical and material is, as Donna Haraway suggested in her Cyborg Manifesto, not quite enough: “why should our bodies end at the skin” (178). Rather, than just understanding the body as physical matter we need to think of the body as an assemblage that reaches beyond AFK and into the extended nervous system that has become the Internet. The “cosmic corporealities” we experience online are also our bodies (Russell 2020). “The body is an idea that is cosmic, which is to say, “inconceivably vast.” […] Body: it is a world-building word, filled with potential, and […] with movement. […] Noun and verb alike, we use body to give form to abstraction, to identify an amalgamated whole.” (Ibid 41-42). The digital communities give us feedback and the content in them loops and gets reshared. We give form to these spaces and in return they form and shape us back. The trans* child’s body is an assemblage or an amalgamation of the saturated images, cosmic corporealities, digital 32 experiences, the Internet as an extended nervous system, AFK experiences, the physical matter and tissue that make up our bodies and the trans* discourse created on SoMe platforms like YouTube, Tumblr, Instagram and TikTok. However, rather, than understanding the body as a “whole” as Russell writes above, Hayward argues for the body as multiple and an ongoing process of materialization. In a critique of Jay Prosser’s discussion of the meaning of the body (trans or not) Hayward writes: “The body (trans or not) is not a pure, coherent, and positive integrity. The important distinction is not the binary one between wrong body and right body, or between fragmentation and wholeness; it is instead a question of experiencing multiple and continually varying interactions between what can be defined indifferently as coherent transformation, decentered certainty, or limited possibility. Transsexuals do not transcend gender and sex. We create embodiment by not jumping out of our bodies, but by taking up a fold in our bodies, by folding (or cutting) ourselves, and creating a transformative scar of ourselves. There is no absolute division, but continuity between the physiological and affective responses of my different historical bodies. Again, I am of my body in order that I might experience a subjective, energetic transformation.” (Hayward 2008, 73). The critique of the idea of the body as a whole, pure, and coherent entity is also a moving away from the Western, modern thought of the division between body and mind, and the ideas of coherence and harmony. It is a moving away of thinking about transgender people getting surgery as moving from “the wrong body” into a “a right body”. The “right body” within medical discourse understood as a cis, heterosexual, white, male body. The trans* discourse is of multitudes, abstract, and blurry bodies that can reach and stretch and “fold into” their own tissue 33 in ways that bodies always have, but has been restricted from doing, by the invention of the sex/gender binary in the twentieth century (Hayward 2008, Gill-Peterson 2018, 201). It is further a moving away from the racialized discourse and idea that medicine can alter, optimize, and enhance human beings through phenotyping and biological plasticity. Through the trans* child’s challenging the child as a metaphor, medicine is now assisting trans* people making what Eva Hayward has called “transformational-scars” in her argument that trans* people of course always already are of their bodies and of their tissue and that surgery is not cutting things away, rather, the cut is of the body, is welcomed, is possibility, is a folding into: “When I pay my surgeon to cut my penis into a neovagina, I am moving toward myself through myself.” (Hayward 2008, 72). A surgeon can shape and form a body – make the cuts – but the trans* person is the architect of the flesh that draw the lines and decide what should be cut. Medical discourse continuously recreated in the medical clinic is still trying to thwart and force trans* people to rework their bodies within the binary. However, the trans* child’s disruption of the child as metaphor is beginning to leak into the medical discourse and the medical clinic, making it possible for trans* children to choose what kinds of “transformational-scars” they want and how they want to rework their bodies outside the binary. The medical systems are slowly changing procedures and protocols, not without pathologizing and trouble in many places, but nonetheless do we see the medical system slowly adapting to the new discourses created by trans* children and not the other way around. Thinking about the Internet as an extension of our bodies. I want to think of the Internet as material and something physical. Both as an ever-evolving databank, archive, and as algorithms and deep learning networks, which we do no longer fully control after humans created them and gave them their first inputs, they continue on their own out of our control 34 processing big sets of data, reading, and moving, touching, and controlling our bodies.18 The Internet is acquiring a body of its own; body both in the sense of a (diverse) collection of knowledge, as physical databanks in warehouses across the globe, and as a body and a mind with a budding will of its own through deep learning neural networks or so called machine learning.19 Through deep learning networks as well as communities online the Internet is becoming extensions of our bodies as a nervous system. This thesis explores how we materialize and become together with the Internet. I orientate myself toward the language being used in trans* communities online to describe another ontology of trans and non-being or existing as unfixed (nonbinary, genderqueer, agender, trans*) than what has been created in Western medical discourse (Gill-Peterson 203). I am interested in how these words nonbinary, genderqueer, agender etc. are always already materializing and becoming virtually as well as AFK. In this way I want to be careful not to slip into a neglect of the body, which is often the critique of recent queer and trans* studies. Rather, I want to acknowledge and discuss my always already enmeshment in the Internet; the Internet as part of my nervous system, and extension of my body. I further understand our entanglement with the Internet and social media through what Haraway has named ‘the fourth wound: the wound of the synthetic: ”The liveliness of what we call technological has to be accommodated in ways that neither Freud nor Lacan had the opportunity to theorize” (Haraway lecture, 11:00-11:03s). If technology inflicts a fourth wound on “the narcissism of the ontological human” then we become through and with the Internet (11:10-11s). Through this fourth wound the digital and virtual is turned into ourselves and the 18 The deep learning networks makes sure that we receive advertisements curated for the individual, that we stay in “echo champers” online and that the same values that we already have keep being fed to us through a curation of posts and videos created through the algorithms of the deep learning network, (Cybernauterne, 2020, Du, 2020). 19 Du, 2020. 35 formation of the subject. Through the search (*) of other trans* people the online communities become part of our trans* epistemology and ontology: ”For my body, then, subversion came via digital remix, searching for those sites of experimentation where I could explore my true self, open and ready to be read by those who spoke my language. Online, I sought to become a fugitive from the mainstream, unwilling to accept its limited definition of bodies like my own. What the world AFK offered was not enough, I wanted – demanded – more.” (Russell 2020, 6). The Internet as our nervous system touches us back. When we as trans* people reach out and make a data search (*) and find community then we are touched back; we feel the reach back through the screen, the arms of the asterisk reach and touches us when we see and listen to people, who feel the same as we do. When the world tells us we do not exist the Internet tells us otherwise. Social media is holding us, seeing us, and giving us knowledge that our families, small towns, friends, institutions like schools, museums, and the traditional mainstream media continuously have failed to teach and show us when we are AFK. The cells that we occupy online are crucial for trans* youth. In Cruising Utopia the Then and There of Queer Futurity José Esteban Muñoz wrote: “We have been cast out of straight times rhythm, and we have made worlds in our temporal and spatial configurations.” (1). Here Muñoz is of course not discussing the trans* child or the Internet, however, I think of trans* child online as doing exactly that. Cast out of “straight times rhythm” they make “worlds of temporal and spatial configuration”; wormholes and spaces of their own, online, on social media 36 platforms. The Internet is not governed by straight or linear time, rather, it circles back in the form of videos, memes and gifs that keep looping and being shared. The YouTube videos and posts are there as an accessible archive for the history of the outsider, who is not archived AFK. As Derrida reminds us: it matters who gets to assemble the archive. The Internet threatens the power of institutions AFK like the gallery as a white cube and the national, historical archives that catalogue monarchs and state power in linear succession dated by year. The Internet functions as an archive of both queer feelings, trauma, imagination, hope, and dreams. As Carolyn Steedman puts it: ”The archive is also a place of dreams.” (70). In this way the YouTube video archive created by the trans* children are both a way to exist in the present and to dream for the future as a place that holds and disseminate trans history and imagine liveable trans* lives for the future. The Internet can in this sense be understood as a space, which makes it possible for precarious bodies to have a platform to speak from and a way to archive their stories and histories on a global scale. The digital trans* communities enable the trans* child to be recognized as a subject and come into their bodies in a way that they are not yet being recognized AFK. Stef Sanjati, a young trans woman, who has created YouTube videos since 2012, expresses how she finds it easier to deal with her dysphoria online, being able to edit photos of herself and control what people see and make it align with how she sees herself (Stef and Hardell 2017). In the same video Stef further says: “she hates the word passing”. It is not about passing as cisgender or binary to her, but rather, to be able to control what people see and what they do not see. To be able to be her own abstract self on her own terms. The use of the asterisk online by the trans* child makes them able to “rename”, resignify, reassign, “repurpose” their own bodies and this is in turn add more texture and nuance to the already dense meaning of trans (Hayward and Gossett, 21). The trans* digital communities create “possibility of nearby- 37 ness” (Ibid). The trans* children reach out for others through the arms of the asterisk “hungry for connection” and the Internet and the reach of trans asterisk creates a possibility of nearby-ness, connection, community, and kinship (Ibid). The trans* children are not intentionally being political, they reach out because of a need to do so, but their reach through the asterisk is, as Hayward and Gossett put it: “playing parasitically at the level of language, thought, and ideology” (21). On the other hand, the Internet is not a democracy. It is not a protected space of one shared public where everyone is equal and has the same size platform to speak from, rather, your reach and audibility are as big as the number of followers or subscribers that you have. Further, the Internet consists of cells, rather, than being one techno-polis, which also fosters things like “Internet trolls”, who are attacking groups outside their own cell as well as right wing groups, and what has been coined the Manosphere. The Manosphere is a way to collectively describe “influencers, online fora, which focuses on masculinity and men’s rights with the basis that feminism and fights for equality and equity has “gone to far” and in reality oppress men” (Cybernauterne 2020, 9. Translation by me). The Manosphere consists of a series of subgroups such as Incels (Involuntary celibate), Men’s rights activists (MRA), Men going their own way (MGTOW), and Pickup-artists (PUA), who all have that in common that they consist of cisgender boys and men, who believe that feminism is attacking them and their masculinity and for the most extreme of the groups that feminists are subverting the entire foundation of our society. The Manosphere is centering on people like Jordan Peterson, who through mainstream social media channels like YouTube and Twitter disseminate conservative, sexist, neoliberal ideas, that often lead people deeper into the Manosphere, and into right wing and Neonazi fora 38 and communities, which in many cases have lead to violence and murder of women, LGBTQIA2S -, Black -, Indigenous people, and people of colour AFK.20 Besides political, human collectives online, algorithms are also political and curate the space that is the Internet. One of the most recent algorithms is one on Instagram, which can detect post-op chests of trans-masculine people and censor these posts still recognizing them as women’s breast and nipple even though the breast tissue and fat has been removed. Cis men on the other hand can post their chests with no issue.21 This targets trans masculine people online, but it also targets people, who identify as cis women, who are being censored when they show their bodies. The algorithm upholds the invention of the sex/gender binary and the colonial gaze in this way. These algorithms directly target already precarious groups, who for a while thought, that they had found a safer space virtually where their bodies could stretch, and unfold, and reach in ways they themselves wanted them to, and which they could not do AFK. Thirdly, the trans* child is commodified by the platforms on the Internet, which they use to speak from. The first thing they see on their YouTube dashboard is statistics on whether or not they have gotten more subscribers since last time they logged on. If they are doing good the color on their screen is green, if their channel has not grown the color on their screen is red. Further, we can argue that the way the traditional mainstream media is representing the trans* child both as an image of the primal scene of the social and as click bait are a way of commodifying the trans* child and trans* in and of itself. On the other hand, where traditional media only uses the trans*child as click bait or a way to regulate political discourse, social media does allow for the 20 Cybernauterne 2020. 21 See ”An Investigation into Algorithmic Bias in Content Policing on Instagram”, 2021. YouTube and Tumblr target LGBTQIA2S+ content, where accounts are often deleted or blocked by the tech institutions with a claim that “they violate community guidelines” when in fact it might just be a video on sex education or trans* person showing their flat chest post-up. 39 trans* child to represent themselves albeit within the economy of likes, followers, and subscribers. “[…] glitch feminism remains a mediation of desire for all those bodies like mine who continue to come of age at night on the Internet. The glitch acknowledges that gendered bodies are far from absolute but rather an imaginary, manufactured and commodified for capital. The glitch is an activist prayer, a call to action, as we work toward fantastic failure, breaking free of an understanding of genders as something stationary” (Russell, 9) In her manifesto Glitch Feminism Legacy Russel gives us a political manifesto, an “activist prayer”, “a call to action”, and a celebration of the relationality, kinship, and community that spaces online can give precarious bodies; femme -, Black -, people of colour, Indigenous -, queer -, and trans* bodies. Computers are inherently a binary technology of algorithms consisting of the number one and zeroes. A glitch is caused by lost or incorrect binary code, glitch is “error, a mistake, a failure to function.” (Russell, 6). Russell advocates for glitch as a space, which can hold all of us, who exist outside the binaries. Glitch feminism shows us glimpses of failure and is a device, which we can use to move toward a total failure, “a fantastic failure” of the cisheterosexual matrix (Ibid). “In glitch feminism, we look at the notion of glitch-as-error with its genesis in the realm of the machinic and the digital and consider how it can be reapplied to inform the way we see the AFK world, shaping how we might participate in it toward greater agency for and by ourselves.” (Russell, 8). A glitch is an error, meaning failure, from err, meaning to stray. We fail and we stray from the binary code both online and AFK. Even though the Internet was not built for us with its binary code and algorithms targeting LGBTQIA2S+ 40 content across different social media platforms we are still here.22 This is another way to say that the trans* child exists in the glitch or is glitchy in their existing and connecting online. Through glitch that is always already there within the machine, within the technology, within the binary code we exist, we reach out and connect and we grief with each other when another trans* person has died, and we see each other thriving and follow each other’s lives across continents and physical borders: “People who are also nonbinary feel represented and can see someone else living their life and doing just fine. I want to be visible […] and show other people that I can be agender and still live my life and be successful. That is also one of the main reasons why I started making other videos besides LGBT videos as well.” (YOUTUBERS COME OUT AS NONBINARY 11:30-11:37). As Russell also unfolds in her manifesto the digital glitch is a parallel to transness in the way that they both point at error or at performatives that cannot hold. When our machines or technology glitch the idea of seamlessness of the digital fails. All machines and systems glitch. Within the binary code of the computer is the glitch or the bug. The same goes for trans* within the cisheterosexual matrix; trans* shows the glitchyness of the cisheterosexual matrix, which is always already there. Both point to a leak inherent in the episteme of the (sex/gender), (race), (subject/object) binary. Both glitch and trans* can both be understood as world-building technologies. In the glitch, the error, the straying from the straight lines through different ways of embodiment, understanding of the self, and relationships between truth and power lies other possibilities of embodiment and being. The trans* child on the Internet claims their bodies in new ways. They do not try “to 41 impose more precise descriptions of what it means to be human” or in other words come up with still more “identity markers” (Halberstam 2018, 52), rather, they want to be free of these markers and categories. “Within glitch feminism, glitch is celebrated as a vehicle of refusal, a strategy of nonperformance. This glitch aims to make abstract again that which has been forced into an uncomfortable and ill-defined material: the body.” (Russell 8). As Miles McKenna a young trans* YouTuber says: “I was afraid to come out as anything because it would mean that I would have to stick with it. Finding out now that I am just continuously becoming.” (McKenna 2020). 42 Chapter II: The Relationship between Truth, Power, and the Subject in the Western Critical Tradition and The Trans* Child’s Speech Online as Parrhesia “This emergence of new language signals the end of a period of medical/psychiatric control of the discourse and the beginning of a new paradigm within which people collaborate to name their understandings of contrary embodiment.” (Halberstam 2018, 10-11). “My intention was not to deal with the problem of truth, but with the problem of the truth teller, or of truth-telling as an activity:...who is able to tell the truth, about what, with what consequences, and with what relations to power...[W]ith the question of the importance of telling the truth, knowing who is able to tell the truth, and knowing why we should tell the truth, we have the roots of what we could call the ‘critical’ tradition in the West.” (Foucault 2001, 1). 2.1 The Internet as a Technopolis that Enables the Trans* Child to be Parrhesiastes in our Current Moment In the second chapter I am attending to the speech acts of the trans* child in their digital communities and how this dense sonic landscape of voices circles out AFK and into the mainstream. I will not attempt to prove that the trans* child’s speech can disrupt or liberate us 43 from the cisheterosexual matrix, within the limits of this thesis, but I will discuss how the speech of the trans* child moves through the circular time of the Internet and out AFK, and discuss how to best describe what it is that this speech does and what it is that makes it audible in our current moment? In the first chapter I offered part of the answer to these questions by showing how the trans* child as a figure subverts the child as a metaphor as the foundation for medical eugenics, the invention of the sex/gender binary, and the tying of sex to race. The second part of the answer to these questions lies in an analysis of the trans* child’s speech and its audibility within a social sphere with sound as a social currency. I will explore how the speech of the trans* child allows us glimpses of the subversion of the cisheterosexual matrix. I will try and stay with the undefined, abstract, the blurry, the nonlinear, and the incoherence of trans* and of the time of the Internet as way of moving away from the idea of linear progression and coherence in the Western critical tradition. This insistence on incoherence, circular movements and the abstract and multiple selves is a conscious and deliberate way to stay with and to listen to the trans* child on the Internet. To consider the trans* child both as metaphor and as materiality is a way for us to make the contours of the cisheterosexual matrix and the colonial gaze visible in the mainstream. Staying with and listening to the trans* child is a way for trans* futures to materialize. I will move closer to what the trans* child’s speech does through Foucault’s question in his last series of lectures at Berkeley on truth-telling or parrhesia and his analysis of its relation to power and the Western critical tradition. I am concerned with how the speech of the trans* child, or “speech activity” as Foucault chooses to call it pointing to the speech both as an act, but also to the situation or condition in which it is being done, is troubling the relationship between 44 power and truth in the West.23 In the lectures delivered by Foucault at the University of California at Berkeley from October-November 1983 Foucault’s idea of his own project changes from being histories to be an ethical-political project centered on the concept of truth. Not understood in the way that he is trying to determine what truth is or how to determine what is true or false, rather, Foucault is interested in the ethical and political relationship between truth and power. There are connections between the discussion of parrhesia in Foucault’s Berkeley lectures and his ideas on criticism in “What is enlightenment” and of truth in his lecture on “the hermeneutics of the subject”. He sets up a framework for discussing the relationship between the subject and truth and truth and power in his project on a genealogy of criticism in the West. During the Berkeley lectures Foucault thought it interesting to compare Greek parrhesia with the modern criticism and the Cartesian ideas of truth, belief, and “evidential (mental) experience” (Foucault 1983, 3). Showing that the relationship between truth and power was very different to the Greeks than to us within “the critical tradition of the West” (3). “For the Greeks […] the coincidence between belief and truth does not take place in a (mental) experience and through criticism, but in a verbal activity, namely, parrhesia.” (Foucault 1983, 3). Foucault held six lectures on the topic of what he called the problem of ’the truth-teller, or of truth-telling as an activity’: “My intention was not to deal with the problem of truth, but with the problem of the truth teller, or of truth-telling as an activity:...who is able to tell the truth, about what, with what consequences, and with what relations to power...[W]ith the question of the importance of telling the truth, knowing who is able to tell the truth, and knowing why 23 See Practice of parrhesia: Discourse & Truth, Problematization of Parrhesia, Six lectures given by Michel Foucault at the University of California at Berkeley, Oct-Nov. 1983, 2. 45 we should tell the truth, we have the roots of what we could call the ‘critical’ tradition in the West.” (Foucault 2001, 1). He discussed this problem by tracing the word parrhesia in Greek and Roman literature and critically analyzing what it means for the possibility and precarity of the truth-teller and the activity of truth-telling in general. “Etymologically, “parrhesiazesthai” means “to say everything — from “pan” (everything) and “rhema” (that which is said).” (Foucault 1983, 2). He lists three forms of the word parrhesia: the nominal form parrhesia, which is usually translated into “free speech” in English, the verb form parrhesiazomai or parrhesiazesthai, which means to use parrhesia, and the word parrhesiastes, which means “the one who uses parrhesia, i.e., the one who speaks the truth” (Foucault 2001, 11). For a speech act to be considered parrhesia it must live up to several criteria: Firstly, frankness and duty. The parrhesiastes speaks frankly from the heart without hiding anything and they/she/he does not use rhetorical devices to sway the audience. The parrhesiastes “acts on other people’s minds by showing them as directly as possible what he actually believes.” (Foucault 2001, 12). No one is making them speak. The parrhesiastes speaks out of duty. Secondly, truth, danger, and criticism. How do we know that what is spoken is the truth? In Greek society there was a correlation between belief and truth. Today, after Descartes, we do not understand truth the same way. However, we know it is parrhesia or truth-telling, Foucault argues, if the parrhesiastes is sincere, speaks truth to power (their opinion is a dangerous opinion to share) and it critiques the speaker themself, the interlocutor and often threatens the majority and thereby threatens the speaker or the speaker’s position. 46 However, what Foucault argues is that: “It appears that parrhesia, in this Greek sense, can no longer occur in our modern epistemological framework” (Foucault 1983, 3). Here Foucault both refers to our Western critical tradition, but also to the relationship between truth and power. This focus is a continuous thread in Foucault’s histories. In Birth of the Clinic, Madness and Civilization, for instance, he shows how the research structures of medicine were radically changed towards the end of the 18th century and a new episteme was set in place through the creation of asylums to house the unwanted citizens of Paris (mad, poor, old etc.) and the doctor becoming a new authority. Madness then went from being understood as a part of the human condition to an (mental) illness. Being rational became the only human virtue. If you were not rational you were mad or animal. It was a way to segregate people, using truth as a tool for power. The doctor as personage gains an authority and power to determine truth and decide which bodies are human and which are disposable. Foucault argues that within this epistemological framework of the Western critical tradition and the clinic and the doctor as authority, parrhesia as a way of truth-telling is no longer possible. This was true for the West when Michel Foucault gave his lectures in the 1980’s. However, maybe this is exactly what the Internet and social media has made possible again? The Internet and social media have troubled our relationship with truth and power and who gets to speak truth to power and be truth-teller. Could we think of the Internet as a technology making parrhesia possible again? The trans* child speaks frankly from the heart in the videos they film and put on YouTube. They begin to make videos and upload them to YouTube as acts of “self-care”; a way to find others like themselves, kinship, and community they do not find AFK. In his analysis of parrhesia and philosophy understood as an “art of life” Foucault reads Alcibiades Major and 47 concludes: “Before he will be able to take care of Athens, he must first learn to take care of himself. Philosophical parrhesia is thus associated with the theme of the care of oneself (epimeleia heautou).” (8). It is through the technē of self-care that the trans* child ends up speaking truth to power through their speech activity and embodiment of trans*. The YouTube videos created by trans* children range from educational videos like young trans YouTuber Ash Hardell’s nonbinary comes in every age, some intersex education, biological sex is not always binary etc. to vlogs where you follow the trans* child or young person in their day-to-day life, to watching them get surgery, makeup tutorials, workout tips, videos with their parents and much more. What all of them have in common is that they are created as an act of self-care and as an act of duty towards the trans* community. When asked why they create these videos almost everyone of the trans* YouTubers say it is to give back to the community that once helped them with similar videos when they were even younger (Hardell and Sanjati 2017). The trans*child does not use rhetorical devices to sway their audience, but simply speak their truth. When Stef Sanjati, a young trans woman creating content on YouTube is asked about how she became a YouTuber and how her being trans* has influenced her content she says: “I do think the transness built my audience, but it was more like a support for me and I am grateful.” (Hardell and Sanjati 2017: 6:10:6:18). This quote shows how Sanjati started making these videos for herself and not for an audience. Agender YouTuber Chandler N. Wilson says: “All I want with my channel is for people to feel like they are hanging out with a friend or talking to a friend” (Wilson and Hardell 2017, 10:53:10:58). These quotes show how these channels on YouTube become communities of support for young trans* children and youth as well as for the trans* creators themselves. These videos are not initially made for political reasons or as a way to speak truth to power, but they come from a need of support, representation, community, and kinship 48 not found AFK. They become political because trans lives are inherently politicized. The trans* children are through their existence and in effect through these videos speaking truth to power. Their categorizations outside the binary (nonbinary, agender, genderfluid, genderqueer, demigirl, demiboy etc.) are adding texture and multiplicity to the range of selves we all inhabit, rather, than confine us to a binary. They play on language, ideology and sociopolitics even though that is not what they are trying to do when they search (*) and create temporalities and spatialities where they fit online. This is why I argue, that they speak “from the heart” and not with a strategic political agenda (even though it might become strategic and political as they find a community and reach and touch through the trans asterisk (*). The trans* child “act on other people’s minds by showing them as directly as possible what he [they/she] actually believes.” (Foucault 2001, 12). The trans* child’s videos are not made to be intentionally political, but the trans* child speaks frankly and out of duty in the sense, that they have always felt that there was not space for their bodies within cisheterosexual patriarchy, with trans* they are able to reach in directions which were prohibited within the binary thinking they grew up with. Finding these spaces online make trans* children film videos and upload them to YouTube as a platform for other people like themselves to watch them, to be able to find community and kinship. It is this kind of duty I speak of, when I say that trans* children speak out of duty. It is dangerous for the trans* children to speak about gender and sex outside the binary both AFK and virtually. As Stef Sanjati phrases it: “when we’re talking about gender, it is a targeted thing and people do like to dismiss it.” (Hardell & Sanjati 2017, 7:44:7:47). The Internet might provide the opportunity for trans* children to find representation and kinship and work as a platform, which enables them to speak truth to power, but they are of course not the only ones using the Internet as a device for speaking truth to power or finding kinship. We should be wary 49 of the different online, social media institutions just as we are wary of offline institutions. The Internet also fosters a lot of other political communities and algorithms upholding the binary and colonial gaze (see my description of the Manosphere above in Chapter 1). The Internet, like the world AFK, is not a “safe space” or protected space where there are no consequences of speaking out. People within the LGBTQIA2S+ community also makes hateful videos in response to the videos made by trans* children and youth. There are YouTube channels where most of content if not all of the content is put up as a direct response to the videos the trans* children make. One example is Arielle Scarcella, a young, lesbian YouTuber, who went from creating content, which advocated for her own rights as a lesbian to uploading “response videos” to the trans* children’s videos claiming that what she calls “todays gender ideology” put forward by trans people is hurting cis women (Scarcella 2020). She calls her videos “damage control” and continuously asks: “where did all the lesbians go?” whenever a trans person “comes out as trans*” (Scarcella 2020). She still understands this as a way of advocating for her own rights, however, in reality, she is attacking trans* children and their spaces on YouTube. Scarcella understands trans* children as a threat to the category “woman”, which troubles the foundation of her existence and political fight. Where the category “woman” and the activism in the 1970’s was founded on identification maybe trans* and the current political activism is founded on disidentification. This is also why AFK institutions like departments of women’s studies and gender studies find it hard to fit trans* studies into their spaces and scholarship. (Salamon 2010). Like lesbians and butch women threatened the white, feminine, cis woman, and like the Black and poc woman threatened white feminism so does trans* in an even more subversive way. Trans* is not another add-on like gay and lesbian studies were in these same departments. When we argue that 50 gender is performative and a historical category of our invention, rather, than a category naturally attached to biological sex as biological determinists and now TERFS are arguing, we in some ways trouble and subvert the very foundation of women’s and gender studies (Salamon 2010). These TERF and anti trans* videos are coming from within the LGBTQIA2S+ community. Outside the community groups of cisgender boys and men within the Manosphere attacks the trans* children as well. The trans* child online experience a lot of hate and harassment as Sanjati puts it: “The harassment is definitely worse online.” (Hardell & Stef 2017). The trans* child speaking out is dangerous. As one trans* person with the channel name @Laineybot puts in a video on Chandler N. Wilsons channel with the title: YouTubers Come Out as Nonbinary: “The video received a lot of negative feedback. People said that nonbinary is not real or valid. People who are nonbinary are special snowflakes, attention seeking, publicity stunts […]” (4:00-4:07). An agender person named Danni Vanloon said: “The most negative comments I have got was on YouTube… People saying I have some kind of mental disorder. That everyone has a gender and that agender doesn’t exist” (4:15-4:23). Some of these creators try to uphold the community space by weeding out in the negative and hateful comments like Sanjati, who puts it this way: “I don’t need that negativity and neither do my subscribers” (Hardell and Sanjati 2017). All of the above shows a clear picture of the danger of speaking out for trans* people. The lesbian and gay community is speaking out against them, Internet trolls and different groups within the Manosphere are speaking out against them, people AFK are speaking out against them and groups like Incels have committed violent acts and murder sparked by their online communities and lastly, algorithms are censoring the content made by trans* children.24 Foucault 24 Cybernauterne, 2020. 51 further describes how to recognize speech as parrhesia this way: “If there is a kind of “proof” of the sincerity of the parrhesiastes, it is his courage. The fact that a speaker says something dangerous — different from what the majority believes— is a strong indication that he is a parrhesiastes.” (Foucault 1983, 3). The trans* child speak out even though they as speakers and their speaking position are threatened when they critique the majority, which is why we can argue that the speech activity of the trans* child can be characterized as parrhesia. For the ancients it was only the man in the polis who could speak truth to power, who could in turn be a parrhesiastes (truth-teller, one who uses parrhesia). Women, children, and enslaved people could not be a parrhesiastes since their relation to power were not one of status, they could not lose anything from speaking truth to power since they did not have anything to lose. Children today are not able to be parrhesiastes AFK, but the Internet flattens the hierarchy of who is audible. The quality of being heard and perceived is in the West dependent on the relationship between truth and power within the Western critical tradition according to Foucault. Sound is a social currency distributed along the lines of sex, gender, and race. The trans* body and the child’s body are traditionally both silenced. They both inhabit a space in opposition to the sonorous white, cis, abled body. On the Internet, on the other hand, people can get platforms to speak from, from when they are very young, which skews their relation to power AFK under the cisheterosexual law. This is evident from the effect we see on law, administration, institutions, and relationality as a result of the speech activity of the trans* child online. The fact that the Internet has made it possible for children to speak truth to power has changed the relationship between truth, self, and power in the West. The role of the truth-teller can now be taken up by anyone on the Internet for good or bad. With the arrival and reach of trans* on the Internet circling out AFK the glitchyness of the sex/gender binary becomes visible. By 52 challenging medical discourse and what Foucault calls the personage of the doctor as a figure of authority and power in turn the relationship between any subject and power changes and through this we can name and claim our own bodies. We must listen as a radical and political act to the actual voices of trans* children online. With the above analysis of the speech activity of the trans* child, I have tried to show how we can characterize it as parrhesia by using the criteria laid out by Foucault in his Berkeley lectures. I am applying the thought of Foucault precisely because it deals with the history of the West and its critical tradition. To understand the changes in our understanding of sex and gender in the West in our current moment we must like Foucault does look at how we as humans changed from being knowers to being something that could be known in the Enlightenment and onwards or as he argues in The Will to Knowledge how we changed from being a people to a population understood as an “economic and political problem.” (Foucault 1978, 25). I am engaging with the work of Foucault precisely because he was invested in a critique of Western critical tradition and with that the relation between truth and power. For this project both the history of the Western understanding of gender and sex as well as the Western understanding of “the child” both within medical discourse and in the mainstream has been important in understanding the vlogs and speech activity of the trans* child on the Internet and how they move us beyond a binary Western understanding of gender and sex through changing the relationship between truth and power. Trans* children’s use of parrhesia on the Internet creates a possibility where trans* signifies the possible breaking of the binaries invented in the West: gender/sex, subject/object, nature/culture, polis/oikos, private/public the many dichotomies which the ontology of human in the Western critical tradition rests on. 53 2.2 The Mainstreaming of Trans Politics through the Figure of the Trans* Child In this last section of the thesis, I want to look at the current material consequences of the trans* child as both metaphor and material and the mainstreaming of trans politics. What does the changing of laws or administrational systems mean for trans* people and for dismantling or subverting the cisheterosexual matrix? One of the final questions I follow around in this text, without claiming to have any final answers, is, does the trans* child actively subvert the cis-heterosexual matrix or is the matrix too flexible, bendable, and stretchy? Does the mainstreaming of trans politics simply lead to an incorporation of the figure of the trans* child and a continuation down the straight line of Western societies, rather, than a disruption of the system in place? Or as Dean Spade phrases it: “can we survive mainstreaming?” (Spade 2016). Some of the most important work done when speaking of administrational systems and protocols and how they control our bodies is done by Spade, who applies administrative law as his focal point, and at the same time addresses the pitfalls of the “well funded agenda” focusing on legislation against hate crimes and harassment and on the other hand the right to marry and in an American context, the right to serve in the military. Spade argues that administrative law as a focal point will benefit actual trans* people in its engagement with the systems categorizing and administering people based on sex, gender, and race, rather, than making laws like the right to marry, which does not rethink violent systems, but rather, incorporates trans* people into the current system based on the sex/gender binary (Spade 2016, 3:00-3:30s). It is laws of administration that control which bodies are “cultivated” and which are “abandoned, imprisoned or extinguished” (Spade 2011, 73). Trans* people and intersex people do not fit neatly within the gender binary, which means that they do not neatly fit within administrative systems and laws based on the sex/gender binary. This leaves trans* people vulnerable, without security, and to 54 fear for their lives since their access to health care, jobs, housing, shelters, education, as well as simple things like going to the pool, going to the bathroom, or getting or showing a library card etc. all is administered through the binary sex/gender system. The current mainstreaming of trans politics through the saturation of the figure of the trans* child has led to changes such as adding an “X” in state documents like the passports or fitting trans* people into administrational systems as a third gender category. This might in effect, at a first glance, be a way to safe trans* lives and make the trans* body less precarious to inhabit in certain circumstances (at the border, accessing housing, shelters etc. through an administrative system based on sex/gender). Adding and an “X” as a gender marker could then seem as a positive; a way to fit trans* people in the system, which right now are to blame for the trans* body to be precarious to inhabit. In some instances, this is true. But we must ask the question who is it that benefits for incorporating a third gender category into administrational systems? Does “X” as a gender marker help all trans* people fit inside the system? And do we want to fit in the system to begin with? Is colonialism and capitalism being subverted or challenged if we simply fit trans* people into existing administrational systems and documents like the passport? When the parrhesia of the trans* child and the trans* child as disruption of the metaphor of the child are used to regulate political discourse in order to fit trans* people into administrational systems and give them rights (like their own bathroom or changing room) we do not actually dismantle the gender binary, which at least is what the (radical) trans* youth are asking for; to recognize gender not as binary, but as a spectrum (Hardell 2018, Wilson 2016). What we see when “X” is put in state documents like a third gender marker is the cisheterosexual matrix being flexible, bending, and incorporating trans* and nonbinary people into its binary system in a seamless way, which does not lead to actual changes of the system. However, what 55 trans* does, that the agenda of rights and legislation against hate crimes that came before it did not do, is direct its critique at the system of the cisheterosexual matrix, both through challenging the child as a metaphor as the foundation of eugenics and the sex/gender binary within medical discourse and through addressing the binary of sex/gender, race, subject/object as the actual issue. However, the legislation and rights following the speech of the trans* child is so far not leading us to a total failure of the system currently in place. Rather, trans* is being incorporated into the Western concept of the human as another category, besides man and woman, with which we can manage the population. On the one hand, the “X” in passports does not dismantle the sex/gender binary it keeps the system going. This will not have any real material change for trans* people. The framework remains the same, even if it can include rather than abject trans* people. Trans bodies will still be more precarious; higher risk of death, violence, homelessness, unemployment etc. than cisgender people will. Even though “X” and nonbinary seems to be naming a category that do adeptly speak against categorization it is a way of labeling and knowing subjects that are trying to escape exactly that. It is a way of handling a growing number of visible trans* bodies within a system built since the Enlightenment to categorize bodies in order manage the population (Foucault 1963, 1978). The trans* body has in some cases been accepted as a part of Western society as human, but only if it lets itself be deciphered and categorized within the already existing system built on categorizing human beings in order to manage the population with the sex/gender binary as one of the primary technologies to uphold the cisheterosexual matrix, colonialism, and capitalism distributing value along the lines of precisely sex, gender, and race. On the other hand, these new laws and incorporation of trans* people in administrational systems and protocols show us that the speech of the trans* child is audible and does come to 56 matter. Like the cishetereosexual matrix or the binary categorizing of sex and gender is a world-changing and world-building fiction - so is trans*: “If “queer” in the 1990s and 2000s was the marker of a politics of sex and gender that exceeded identity and gestured toward a critique of state power and assimilationist goals, we could say the term “trans*” marks a politics based on a general instability of identity and oriented toward social transformation, not political accommodation.” (Halberstam 50). The speech activity of the trans* child on the Internet does trouble the structure of the cisheterosexual matrix and the circulation of the trans* child’s speech into the mainstream does change physical space and the bodies that inhabit this space. In this way trans* is a world building project “oriented toward social transformation, not political accommodation” (Ibid 50). We need to keep listening carefully to the trans* child and youth, to women, trans* -, queer -, and 2S people as both Black and Indigenous knowledge and scholarship is teaching us and continuously reminding us to do (Gill-Peterson 2018, Simpson 2017). The nonlinear time of the Internet with its GIFs, memes and continuous resharing of posts, videos and images and the reach of trans* through digital communities let us in glimpses and glitches circle back into our bodies and selves beyond the invention of the binary and race and let us see the possibilities beyond the cisheterosexual matrix, neocolonialism, and white supremacy. As young queer, trans*, and Two-Spirit people we look to the Internet for the possibility to see ourselves represented and feel others, who exists within the glitch: 57 “I do most of my #QueerIndigenousEthics research on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook and other online communities in which queer Indigenous youth are disseminating lived values in quippy GIFs, memes and infographics. Fallon Simard made a series of memes that play with the idea of using social media for the rapid-share of revolutionary ideas, and speaks to how younger generations are thinking about and enacting queer ethics in art, outside of settler-colonial institutions like universities and art museums.” (Lindsay Nixon). With the asterisk in trans* we reach outside the colonial gaze and try to look elsewhere, outside the cisheterosexual matrix. Trans* functions as poetic, rupture, and techonology thief, a metaphor for the excess that is denied existence within the medical discourse and the metaphor of the child leading towards a normative, binary, white male body. I will not attempt to answer if the mainstreaming of trans politics through the trans* child as a willful subject can heal or move us beyond the cisheterosexual matrix and racialization. However, I will say that this is what trans* is seeking to do without claiming to give any final solutions or ways out, but we must hold on to the glimpses and glitches of hope afforded to us whenever the performative of the sex/gender binary breaks down even if only for a moment. This troubling of the system that the trans* digital communities and the figure of the trans* child give rise to gives me hope. On Instagram we see nonbinary Janaya Future Khan, who just goes by Future lead the Black Lives Matter movement and give Sunday Sermons through Instagram live. And on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok young trans* people continue to find each other despite binary code and algorithms trying to censor their content. Nonbinary people are slowly being recognized as more than flesh or object by 58 administrational systems and protocols, by law, and in medical discourse. We have managed to become recognized as subjects with a will and agency of our own in the glitching of the Internet that allows for making space for the parrhesia of the trans* child challenging the universalizing image of the child as metaphor within Western medical discourse. Standing on the shoulders of gender variant and intersex children and POC and Black transwomen and gender variant and Two-Spirit people the trans* children in our current moment are troubling the relationship between truth and power allowing parrhesia to function again as a technology through which we can speak truth to power. It is this destabilization of the Western critical tradition, neocolonialism, and the cisheterosexual matrix that gives me hope for a future where our bodies are not constrained, killed, and extinguished by binaries invented and working necropolitically by targeting Black, Indigenous and POC bodies as well as white trans* and intersex bodies. 59 Conclusion In the first chapter of the thesis, as a continuation of the important archival and historical work by Jules Gill-Peterson, I presented an analysis of how the trans* child both as a metaphor and as actual trans* children emerging in the mainstream from digital communities on the Internet are challenging “the child” as a metaphor as the legitimization of the idea of human biological plasticity, the development of the sex/gender binary, and the idea of the cisgender, white man as the ideal within medical discourse. I discussed how the historic specificity of the metaphor of “the child” within medical discourse meant that the figure of the trans* child is saturated with meaning and is troubling the sex/gender binary and its ties to race in new and fundamental ways. I further argue, that we first of all need to listen to the actual trans* children speaking and representing themselves on social media as a way to imagine a trans* futurity. Secondly, that we need to look for different metaphors like the figure of the trans* child for new and different systems to materialize. In the second half of Chapter 1 I discussed the time of the Internet as circular through the looping and sharing and resharing of GIFs, memes, posts, videos etc. Like trans* the time of the Internet is a folding into itself and becoming of itself, rather, than a linear progression. The trans* child exists within the binary algorithms through the always already inherent glitchyness of all machines and systems. The glitchyness of binary codes is analogous to trans* existence both online and AFK within the cisheterosexual matrix. In Chapter 2 I explore the speech activity of the trans* child on the social media platform YouTube in relation to Michel Foucault’s work on the Western critical tradition and the relationship between the self, truth, and power. In his Berkeley lectures Foucault argued that parrhesia or truth-telling is no longer possible within the critical tradition of the West. I agree 60 that this was the case in the beginning of the 1980s when Foucault gave his lecture series on the relationship between truth and power. However, I posit, that the Internet has made parrhesia possible again in our current moment by making new subjects like children audible through platforms and digital communities on the Internet. These communities and the circular time of the Internet saturating images and creating sonorous dense landscapes of voices has enabled the trans* child to emerge in the mainstream and have political impact. I argue that the audibility of the trans* child appears to suggest that the relationship between truth and power in the West has shifted through the technopolis of the Internet. Trans* is a world-building word. As with any discourse we exist inside it, as an extension and because of it at the same time as we are creating it. We inhabit this language and our bodies become together with it. The speech of the trans* child is moving inside the nervous system of the Internet and circles out and changes the discourse and framework of our current socio-culture, our bodies, relationality, community, and kinship and with that it makes out the contours of colonialism and capitalism and makes them both and their interconnectedness visible to us. This thesis will not attempt to answer whether or not the figure of the trans* child or the trans* child as parrhesiastes can liberate us from the cisheterosexual matrix, but I hope this work can be helpful as a part of the continuous conversation both scholarly and outside the academy on sex and gender, the subjects relationship to truth and power and the possibilities and dangers of the Internet. I further hope that we all both in the mainstream, in the medical clinic as well as in offline institutions will keep listening to the trans* child. I firmly believe that with the figure of the trans* child as our guide a trans* futurity becomes possible which changes our relationality to all critters in a necessary way for the Earth to become a liveable place for us all. 61 Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology Orientation, Objects, Others. Duke University Press, 2006. - Willful Subjects. Duke University Press, 2014. 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Thesis/Dissertation
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The relationship between truth, power, and the subject : the speech activity of the trans* child as parrhesia
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