C.

Bain
tiresiasprojekt@gmail.com
Working draft January 10, 2021
Wings For The Ship

Loving Jordan is the best thing I’ve done. I’ve been doing it since 2015. The relationship ended in
2016, leaving the love bizarrely intact. That’s not usually how it goes for me. I had been out as trans
for maybe 4 years when we met. I had dated a little, since transition, but she was the first trans girl I
had been with in any kind of seriousness. I was the first person she had dated since she’d been out,
which had only been about a year and a half.

If I am trans, as in the prefix, meaning across, beyond, or trans as in the prefix, meaning on or to the
other side of, it’s worth asking if I am the person I was before. It’s worth asking that of anyone,
however. Are you the person you were before, when you look at your grade school pictures?
Theseus’s ship, used as a thought experiment to explore whether things remain what they are, as
they change, is described by Plutarch like this:

The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by
the Athenians … they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their places,
insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow;
one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.

The first place I touched Jordan was the left side of her face, by the eye socket and cheekbone. I
asked, first, if I could touch her. We were in a tea shop with a kind of nasty, plastic, gentrified
atmosphere. She’d chosen it on the internet without ever having been there. I wanted to touch that
side of her face because there was a strangeness to it, though I could not have said what it was. She
told me, later, that the strangeness was the outcome of a major violence that had happened a couple
years before—she had been beaten, severely, in a bathroom in a library in Chicago. The man who
beat her was, in this instance, a stranger. He broke several bones in her face. She had been in a
men’s bathroom, when the man broke the bones in her face, because that was where she was
supposed to be. She was trying not to transition because she knew it wasn’t safe. She was trying to
be a man, to avert the violence, but the violence kept finding her anyway. She saw other physical
results, of the injuries, which I did not think were visible. Shadows under her eyes, for example. But
if she believed in them, they were probably there, probably the fault lies with my perception. When
bones mend themselves, the healing shape of the bone forms a kind of bubble around the break, the
bone that regrows is thicker, a bone scab. A bone will not break in exactly the same way twice, that
is, the replacement bone is stronger. What is restored is not the same.

There is a moralized-over, hearsay-supplied Margaret Mead quote about the earliest evidence of
human civilization being a broken and healed human femur. The idea being that for someone to
survive, to be restored to health, when they could not run, required a social fabric. That evidence of
care is taken to be evidence of “civilized culture,” a culture that would not let the injured die. Jordan,
with her face broken, went back to the childhood home where she’d been beaten from around age
ten to age fifteen, by a man who was not a stranger. It was the only place when could stay for free.
Healing in those circumstances seems like it should have been impossible, but she made it. An
evolutionary wonder, honestly. She made it and survived and ended up with her face in my hand, in
a tea shop.
The human body regenerates. The popular literature says every seven years your cells have almost
completely turned over, although some kinds of cell seem more tenacious and static, or more poorly
understood. The brain, for example, although there are new indications of neuroplasticity, seems
more inclined to be static, compared to the way that your fingernails or pancreas sluff themselves
away, quietly regenerating with soft declines in efficacy. Theseus’s ship with the prow replaced. By
now, my body is not the body that laid in bed with Jordan, the skin cells and protein strands
rebirthing themselves.

Theseus is also a hero, which is to say he’s famous for having killed someone. Theseus killed the
minotaur, a very trans*-inclined mythic figure; born of the copulation of a witch-queen who was
forced, as punishment for her pride and beauty, to fall in carnal love with a god disguised as a bull.
The minotaur is the monstrous product of her bestiality: he is the monster even though he is
blameless, cursed to have your fathers head, cursed to mark your mother’s shame. Cursed to live in a
puzzle-cage outside of society, to protect decent people from having to look at you.

We met on OkCupid. Under “What do you do on a Friday night?” she had written something like,
“revenge fantasies? Sure those too.” What I liked about her profile was her intelligence and
skittishness, her aversion to formulating herself for a market. I mostly hate t4t personal ads. They
mostly say “I want to be with someone I don’t have to explain everything to” or “I feel safe with
other trans people” which are both, for me, anti-erotic sentiments that also tend to be untrue. I was
surprised when she wrote me back. She blew off our first couple of dates. I was surprised when she
showed up, when she walked into the tea shop, looking exactly like herself, and sat down with me.
Hi, Jordan, hi.

One thing about memory is that the more it is recalled, (rebuilt) the less faithful it is. This is grim
and perverse, in a way. Each time something is brought into conscious awareness, it picks up traces,
new interpretations, associations with the present that it is being recalled into. So my memory of
Jordan, in this moment, her blue eyes, her low ponytail, her tan sweater, though I perceive it as
extremely well inscribed, is in fact eroded by the very frequency with which I turn to it.

When we got together I asked her, a few times, if she was ever with men. I was her first partner,
after her transition, and all the people she talked about dating, before, were girls. Are you ever with
men? No, she said. No, but don’t let them know that. And so I wondered if I was men, if she were
with me.

Theseus’s ship. Is love the same love, each time it happens? Of course not. Love mutates, deforms,
hypertrophies in the area that it extends into. Every time love is formed, it leaves the husk of its
former self behind.

I have always been talking about violence. From when I was fourteen or so and started going to
poetry slams, part of what I said in my many mostly execrable performance poems was about
violence, sexual violence, sex and violence, my body as a marker of those twinned phenomena. It
did not occur to me that being voiced, being unpoliced enough to name what had happened to me,
was itself a privilege, was something I would probably not have done, if I had been socialized as a
man.
Much of the aggression I faced as a woman was performative. Men yelling from a construction site,
from the windows of their cars. Easy to refuse, easy to yell fuck you back at them, to flip them off. I
talked about this type of aggression, wrote about it, read poems about it in rooms that applauded. It
had been part of my life since grade school. It’s what I thought sexual harassment was, how the
phrase was defined for me. This dumb public thing that constantly happened. Easy to have a feeling
of offense, paired (I speak only for myself) with a feeling that I was being given some small irritating
tribute, like they were cats bringing me dead trophies, or dogs trying to play fetch with a turd.

And then I went on hormone replacement, on testosterone, at a low dose for a couple of years. In
the first five or six months, I encountered a kind of violence I had never known before. It was
invisible to those outside of it: a man following me home from the train station, power walking out
in front of me, pissing onto the sidewalk, continuing to follow me home, only averted by the family
who lived on the first floor of my building leaving, laundry cart and small children in tow, as I
entered. The boy who masturbated, through his pants, into my face, standing above me, for the ride
from union square to 125th street on the 5 train, his skinny hips canted to the side so that I was the
only one who could see it. I mean, it was utterly silent, the small friction sounds of fabric or urine
swallowed up in the field of city noise. No yelling, no public display. And the subtext, rather than
the men publicly declaring that they would be great at having sex with me, was that the men were
going to kill me. There would be a rape, but the rape would be incidental to my death.

The very fact that it was tacit means that I never knew exactly why it was happening. If they thought
I was offering a failed performance as a woman, or as a man; if they thought I was too aggressive or
too swishy. The fact that I can’t offer a definite statement of why it happened, this spike in para-
violent social interaction (and the couple of landed blows, shoves, one man sent me down a shot
flight of stairs that fractured my arm) over the first six months that I was on hormones, provokes
some people, of course, to say that it never happened, or that it didn’t happen for the reasons that I
think. That my perception of those violences is a kind of paranoia, on my part. It’s true, I guess, that
there are no signed affidavits. I only infer that the violence happened because I had changed my
location, on the continuous circuit that connects desire and revulsion. I retained some vestige of
attractiveness, or the behavior of an attractive person, while small facts about hair follicle activation
and fat distribution changed, rendering me an inappropriate object choice for a heterosexual man.
The mobility across the field, from desire to revulsion, happened faster than I anticipated, and I was
more disoriented by it than I expected to be.

I had a reasonable degree of sexual-romantic “success” as a woman, Jordan dated a fair amount as a
boy. That’s a weird implication of the transition timeline photo meme phenomenon, the before and
after, people want to show that they didn’t transition out of failure or ugliness.

Eventually, through loving Jordan, it occurred to me, a slow slow blooming, that the things that had
allowed me to like men were not things that men generally shared with each other. Their secrets,
their wounds, the sorrow that was under the rage. Even being in the position of being asked to
undertake the emotional labor of being with men was a perverse kind of privilege, relative to being
shut out, on the superficial level of the violence that men face each other with. Especially, the
violence with which men face other, weaker men. That was what Jordan thought male desire was, a
kind of invisible terrorist framework, more invested in disavowing sex, erasing sex through violence,
than with its inescapable nature as a form of sexual expression. I think about the way that she was
hurt as a kid, with her bright face and boy name. The desire that silences, that promises your
murder, that I had encountered for the first time in my late 20s, on hormone replacement, that was
what masculine desire had been, for Jordan, all her life. When I wanted to be with her, that’s what
being wanted reminded her of. Jordan never knew men the way I did, as creatures who were, or
could have been, capable of sweetness.

Certainly, when I transitioned, I did not expect to learn anything about sex. I thought my knowledge
was comprehensive, and would transfer. I was in my early 30s. I thought I was very worldly and self-
aware. I mean, I was. The last man I tried to date, before transitioning, when I came out to him,
yelled at me a bunch, saying I stole his heterosexuality, and no one was going to want me anymore,
after I did it. Ass hair was central to his argument. I thought he was saying it just to be hurtful. I
mean, he was saying it just to be hurtful. He also coincidentally was right.

Of course I did learn a lot. Not entirely through my own transition, but through Jordan. I am sick of
men talking about how much they love women’s bodies, their animal bodies, but here I go like all of
them. Jordan’s bird-shoulders, her dinosaurmouse ears, her little teeth, the constellation of freckles
on her back. Jordan on our third date coming to my apartment and suddenly taking off all her
clothes, standing there like a wish. Like something about to disappear. Jordan wearing her nice black
dress and giggling when I unzipped the back with my teeth. Jordan in my mouth, small noises of
exclamation, wonderment. There is a breadth of data about whether or not she liked me, is what I’m
saying. The initial dopamine rush of a new entanglement carried her on the crest of the wave for a
while.

Watching her eyes get bluer, full of salt, stars, cretaceous pools, spiral galaxies. Up until I knew
Jordan, in fact, I was a self-righteous bisexual. Obnoxious, honestly, trying to have conversations
with people about how self-limiting they were being, about exceptions within gender categories,
about insecurity. How can you even know what you don’t like if you’ve never done it? that kind of thing. Time
began to sing and melt around us. Oh, I thought. This is how you know. It’s happening.

I don’t mean to imply that it was only or mostly physical. The first message I sent her on OkCupid
said “I like that you are a language person.” We built, very quickly, a shared symbolic system;
mythologies, pop culture and soft science references. Late cretaceous, constellating, cartography,
raptor majoris, quantum entanglement, galaxy twin, therapod death pose. The past, the future, the
Anthropocene, the extinction, the hopeful monster, evolutionary mutant exploding into reality ahead
of its time. Her splashing, tentacle branching intelligence. I hadn’t had someone I could talk to like
that, before.

We liked a lot of the same cool things, but not that many of the same stupid things. I was into
musicals; she was into Disney. We did not talk more about Beauty and the Beast, being, both of us,
monsters, chimeras. Being both of us beasts, the legend would not have made sense. Even less so
the Disney version. Lately, though, I think of Jordan being protected, I try to envision it. Which
means I sometimes see her in a bell jar, I sometimes see her as the rose. Crystalline red glimmer
edged under glass, aeternal. She was so tough but also so delicate. The freaky unloosing of
adolescence from biological time that hormone replacement affords makes all of us a little strange to
look at, I’ll admit it. In her case that also meant being held in a crucible, always-becoming, always in
rapprochement, nearly able to embrace the world (herself) that she knew was there and knew to fear,
from the beginning. To learn to be the rose, to let the rose be seen, when the barest shadow-ghost-
scent of the rose seeping out of her, when she had tried to hide it and failed, was the reason that she
was brutalized. (We talked about Disney’s Beauty and the Beast once, that I remember, and we
decided that I was probably Gaston. Burly, handsome, thoughtless, the real monster, driven by his
avarice.)

I reject, as one must, the notion that trans people are broken. I reject that we are defined by, reduced
to, our bodies. I reject that we are sexual freaks. My rejection, however, is rendered a little suspicious
by the fact that I personally, individually, am all of those things. Post traumatic stress, and disorders of
complex and recurrent post-traumatic stress. Trauma so routinized, so familiar, that the pathology of
denying it would be as extreme as the pathology of letting it run your life. The amount of emotional
processing, metabolism of negative emotion and repressed desire of cisheterosexuals, it is a miracle
that we ever hold it together, it is a miracle when we find each other at all.

Barad (2015) writes about lightening, the interplay of electricity forming in the sky finally reaching
down to earth, which is not neutral, but rather a charged, desiring field. She echoes this electricity
against the visible trace of bioelectric impulse, in the development of frog embryos, that traces the
features and destiny of cells before the body is formed. These two electrical phenomena, for Barad,
form desire-maps, charges that dictate the future, that delimit or expand future possibility according
to energetic blueprints in the present.

I think that Barad is conceiving of desire as a force, a scientific inclination, but desire inside of the
human distorts under the weight of our psychology, the refracting difficulty of knowing and
admitting what we want. I am thinking of the Freud’s repetition compulsion, inscribed even more
indelibly when the repeated act is unknown, or unconscious. Isn’t that also an act of desire, the
constant replication of something which can’t be escaped. I am sure that I loved Jordan because of,
not despite, the qualities that eventually kept us from being together. Jordan, I think, in loving me,
needed to make me familiar, that is to say, needed to make me a man in her life; that is to say,
needed to make me a monster. All the explorations of desire’s quantum force, the manifesting
potential of desire, pulling on the future, run into a version of this problem; are violences, cancers,
accidents, called to us because they are on some level desired? Do desire and trauma glom together
to form a curse, a set of invisible rules, that become the architecture of the remainder of a life, once
set in motion.

The question then is violence. If it is inevitable, if it is necessary, if it is possible to avoid, on some

level, desiring it after its initiation. The thing I knew and wasn’t supposed to know, when I was a
teenager reading my dumb slam poems, the thing that filled me, with a need to share what I knew,
was that violence is survivable. The alterations violence made to my character and my person did not
eradicate me. In fact it was kind of sensitizing, like a radioactive spider bite, it became the site of
irritating, involuntary superpowers—my need to project competence, my occasional ability to know
what people need to hear. The violences done to me as a woman were mostly careless and not
undertaken for my benefit. The violences Jordan dealt with, brutal and comprehensive, left her with
an ability to make herself adorable, dazzlingly intelligent, charming, unknowable, aware of what
other people need. This is part of the psychic burden of clockable trans people, (shared by many
people with trauma histories, including those with resultant cluster B personality disorders): the
ability to plot yourself inside the psychic life of the person you are speaking to, to know whether or
not they want to eradicate you, to know how you can love or placate or hurt them to bring them
into a relation with you that is familiar.
People were so mean to Jordan with me right there. Even when I tried to intervene, staring back,
bringing my body between her and the aggressor, I could still feel it, how difficult it was for them to
see her, how hard it was for her to be seen. Deep gaping blinks from women in expensive blazers.
Skinny hipster bartenders yelling that she was knocking on the door of the wrong restroom
(honestly hipster bartender, I hope you rot in hell.) When she went out alone, men shoved her to the
ground while she walked down the sidewalk. Trauma sets up a frequency, gathers, asks for more,
repeats itself. It was one of the ways I was unkind, to her, telling her that her nervousness, the
tentative way she carried herself, was one of the reasons people gawked at her, picked on her. I’m
ashamed of saying that to her. As though that were a choice she was making, as though there were
any excuse for the cruelty she endured.

Creation and desire share a quality of violence, a conjuring of something singular from the field of
possibility. Desire and creation will still happen; indeed I expect I’ll keep generating them myself.
But I know that they’re not benign. I know, in a way that I did not really know before transition,
that it is possible for my desire, for the creation of a connection between myself and a desired other,
to constitute a violence, in itself. I think, with regret, with a new male guilt, that it’s possible that my
desire violence corrodes, deforms, degrades, the thing that it is directed at.

Is carnal desire, of the kind that I certainly felt for Jordan, and which she eventually did not feel for
me, necessarily violent? I would have said no, for most of my life. I would have said, before
transition, that it was possible to enter into desire with a complete tenderness, unformulated,
uninformed by the social structures of power and violence that are brought to bear on us. I would
have said that it is rare, but that there was no reason to think it was impossible. Now I am less sure.
Most of what we understand sexual desire to be emerges from the framework of a cisheterosexual
dyad. Through the course of history, through endless iteration, the position of “women” has been
scripted as a position of chattel. Sex is a kind of use of property, a kind of using up of the
commodity of women’s chastity. Of course I don’t like that idea, but I think it’s inescapable, as is the
“normal” (male, cisheterosexual) reading of the receptive sexual act as something that is shameful,
and accompanied by physical pain. Men (historically, in the broadest brush) think that’s what sex is,
and so, because they believe it, that is what sex becomes. We replace parts of the idea—women’s
empowerment, marriage as a mark of emotional maturity—but the shape of it remains the same.

I used a feminine presentation as a foil and a blind for violence, with the result that I believed my
“power” and personality resided in my ability to elicit certain sexual-affective responses from
straight men. Whatever change I could inflect on the course of events around me, I assumed, was
small, and was something I was entitled to, as a generally disempowered person. I didn’t think about
violence because I didn’t think about power, because I didn’t think that I could hold power in a way
that was aligned with the violence I saw in the world around me. I was wrong, about that. Women
are able to think that, and they are wrong. Meaning that if I unmoor myself from womanhood, from
a victim status, the status of a violated “woman” in a male supremacist system, nothing works
anymore. My ploys for sex in the form of sympathy or comfort, if leveled by now-me (a masculine
presenting person) against a trans woman, have the full weight of patriarchy behind them and as
such are abusive. Was it abusive before, the same seduction-manipulation-perversion of tactics of
mercy, deployed by me, against men? Maybe, but I still can’t bring myself to care that much. In the
absence of a system bounded by cisheterosexist distributions of power, nothing works, I don’t know
how to operate, I don’t know what to do.
*

There is a version of this story where Jordan made me a real man, where the transcendent desire and
humiliating grief of being with her and losing her are initiation into a masculine fold. In scenarios
when I am in courtship with a trans person, there tends to be a moment of uncertainty. While I
think I am sometimes “supposed” to lean into some sort of insistent masculinity performance, I in
fact do not. I try to do what I think is responsible, and kind, and treat uncertainty as a soft no, as
being declined. I have nothing to sell. I do not want to artificially inflate anyone’s enthusiasm. What
I notice about this is that it is distinctly unlike the behavior of cis men who I encountered as a
poorly socialized, poorly guardianed adolescent girl. So I get to do some small thing to interrupt that
cycle of violent masculine entitlement. It’s a gift, to be able to step outside of a harm that was done
to me, a harm I was taught to re-inflict. And it also means that I am not with anyone, anymore.
Since Jordan and I broke up, about 5 years ago now, there have been some proto-romantic, briefly
hazarded configurations, but no one has signed up for it. Nothing gets off the ground.

How did it end? First, she stopped wanting me sexually, which I tried to absorb, because I loved her
so much. She said, You were right, you know, I am just not really attracted to men. And I look at you and see a
man. And I thought, well, that makes one person on the face of the earth, who looks at me and sees
a man. I supposed, along with the fact that my lover didn’t want to be with me (and the more
horrible, subterranean reality that she had probably felt an aversion long before she mustered the
ability to tell me, that is, that I had been loving her body thinking it loved me back and I had been
wrong) that fact, that she sees something that’s true about me is the silver lining. I thought we would
have a love-relationship without sex. I was sad, but it was clearly worth it.

Then Jordan used coded language about my selfishness for weeks—a Virgo, an only child, my habits
of sleeping and eating all marks of inconsideration. Constant undercutting marks of disdain. I was
crying every day. Finally she told me I was being inconsiderate by doing vocal warm ups (when in
fact I was considerate of, and was mortified by, the fact that people could overhear me working on
my voice.) I asked her if she really meant it. She said yes. And I lost my mind. I knew it was nothing,
and I couldn’t stop. Which is what she wanted, I think. The familiar circumstance of being with a
man, a monster, red faced, screaming at her through the bathroom door. Reaction formation.
Aversion to intimacy. I never hit her, but I hit myself, I threw things, I felt the strangling worms of
blood turn in my neck. I had never done that. I haven’t done it since. This is how I know I am
capable of violence, this is how I know I am not better than the people who hurt me. That is one of
her gifts, to me, that I now know that.

We were living together, and we kept living together while she found a new place. I never stopped
feeling that her body was precious. I never stopped wanting to protect her, even when it became
clear that part of what she needed protection from was me.

Once, more than a year after it was over, again forgetting my power-position as a man, or ignoring
the fucked-upness of my premise, I said something to her about missing our sex life. She texted back
Well I don’t, and you should find someone else to do that with instead of making me feel guilty. I literally never think
about it at all. Which is another gift, from her, in my masculine initiation. The sting I felt, victimized
by the refusal of some lovelorn self-important entitlement that I should not have burdened her with,
from the start.
I looked at her OkCupid profile once, after we were over, (even in New York if you are looking to
date trans women the options are finite. I am looking to date trans women, at this point, that was
one of my realizations in our time together. I didn’t seek her profile out but I found it. And I should
not have looked at the profile but I did.) Before, it didn’t say “I don’t date or hook up with men!”
and now it says that. So we taught each other some things, we learned some things.

I’m always trying to crawl out of myself, to be the anthropologist and the subject, to see the
labyrinth from above. It seems like, if my transition has rendered the acts of courtship I used to
engage in into acts of predation, removing myself from the field is probably the best I can do. I
don’t get to be an incel because having been socialized as a woman my power analysis is too strong,
but I don’t have a solution either.

At this point, I have thought of Jordan more often as a kind of fatalist script, a symbol that means
that I don’t get to have a real lover, more than I have thought of Jordan, the whole person with her
own life, who spent some time loving me and is now out there inhabiting the real world. That is to
say that my narrative construction of her, of our relationship, is another way that I am reinscribing
violence. For me to cling to my sad boy story, to an impossibility of ethical relationship, is also a
strong selective reading of the data. I’m not trying to posit a universal. I know a lot of trans men,
and some of them are out there having scintillating sexual lives.

The other side of Barad’s lightening-frog fetus-neural imagery is that, if you can change desire, you
can change the future. If you decide to stop building a ship, for example. If you begin building
wings, when the oars fall away. As negative as it might seem like I am being, loving Jordan continues
to be the boat, taking flight. Jordan, star baby, Jordan a new hope. Indeed, the only hope I have ever
had that someone could see me, see the bulk resting underneath the iceberg that pokes up over the
surface. Even if it is, finally, destructive, even if it is, ultimately, intolerable, Jordan is the evidence I
have encountered that it can be seen, at all.

Works Cited

Karen Barad, (2015) “Transmaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings”

GLQ, a journal of lesbian and gay studies