1 This is for the girls that want to cut off their penis but don’t have the balls to do it.
2 In my dreams I live in an old house next to the sea. It has that old-house smell, and subtle stains of evaporated saltwater. I will keep my house mostly empty except for the shells and beach ephemera foraged by my visitors, and the ceramics mama has made for me, the stiff, stone-washed cloth I have made for myself, and a bed in the middle of everything. Slowly I suspect that it is a house not on the oceanside at all, but in a boundless grove of fig trees, or on the moon.
3 I will call it not Moonless-Earth Theory, but Earthless-Moon Theory, just as all the problems on the moon would be solved through nuclear disaster on Earth. The cockroaches, tardigrades, nematodes, or amoebas won’t survive as we understand them. Without an Earth, they will become unencumbered, saved from a race of monkeys enamored with false cloth surrogates.
4 I don’t have a castration fantasy.
5 Though these photos, I am describing a floor plan of the house in which I live. I hope by then, I will have already exonerated this guilt. These are self-portraits and an attempt to banish shame by looking at my life honestly.
6 In praise of everything. I am poking holes in my photos as if they were Leonard Cohen lyrics, as if they were bells that still rung. As if they were offerings at all. Really, they are just gradually-fading memories.
7 Put the cloth mother away, Dr. Harlow. I will love the wire one. Let’s call a spade a spade: a body is a beautiful burden no matter how you call it. Give Sleeping Hermaphroditus her hands and for the love of God put Warhol’s and Avedon’s cameras in Candy Darling’s hands.
8 Life these days still feels like a fluid dream with characters I’ve fabricated for myself. It’s July and I’m the dreamer asleep in my childhood room at my parents’ old house in Connecticut. It’s May and I’m sleeping with you still in my arms.
9 Sometimes I go around pretending I am the only person left alive on the earth. I like to invent hypothetical solar-flare situations where there is no modern electricity: moss and light have begun reclaiming human architecture. I imagine a deafeningly silent spring, an endless rendition of John Cage’s 4'33". We all manage in our own way.
10 I am describing, as I remember it, the details of my life as the dreamer, with my voice now as the dream itself. Something small (the dream) inside something vast (the dreamer).
11 Life is so beautiful. I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
12 “Don’t forget to look up at the moon tonight. It’s going to be pretty big in a way that is probably only easily distinguishable by a high powered telescope. It’ll only look exactly like this again 9 years from now. Imagine how much suffering you will know by then.” [1]
13 Through these photos, I propose a method of being that inverses intersectionality: I am calling it anti-sectionality. The aspects of my life, namely in gender and sexuality, become disentwined, just as a moon could exist un-orbiting a mother planet, or could be seen without reflecting the sun’s light. They are no longer the echo and an answer. A sea-side cottage that comforts its emptiness. They are twins walking diverging paths.
14 I am practicing the incompatibility of being a trans girl and a straight boy at the same time. I am learning how to compartmentalize contradictions of myself so that they need not be mutually exclusive. I am living my life as of late as a moon that circles no earth. Like a performance art piece in which I am playing a “boy.” I have read your texts and literature on detransition and a dissenting opinion is rising from me like the first birdsong of spring: it is not all that you make it out to be.
— —
[1] Anonymous Twitter user. (August 2023). https://twitter.com/superlameballs/status/1686346379285630976