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- Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
Uranus is the coldest planet in the solar system, a frozen giant named after a Greek deity. It is also the inspiration for Uranism, a concept coined by the writer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in 1864 to define the 'third sex' and the rights of those who 'love differently'. Following in Ulrichs's footsteps, Paul B. Preciado dreams of an apartment on Uranus where he can live, free of the modern power taxonomies of race, gender, class or disability. In this bold and transgressive book, Preciado recounts his transformation from Beatriz into Paul B., and examines other processes of political, cultural and sexual transition, reflecting on socio-political issues including the rise of neo-fascism in Europe, the criminalization of migrants, the harassment of trans children, the technological appropriation of the uterus, and the role artists and museums might play in the writing of a new social contract. A stepchild of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, Preciado argues, with courage and conviction, for a planetary revolution of all living beings against the norm.
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‘Paul B. Preciado has the magic ability to fire off imperatives that don’t feel bossy, but rather incite us to join him in whatever crackling energy, urgent curiosity, and dynamic nomadism is flowing through him. Reading these chronological missives offers the real pleasure of Preciado’s company in time, and inspires us not just to stay with our trouble, but to greet it with unstoppable speech, complex solidarity, glitter, and defiance.’
— Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts
‘An arresting, bold and moving book about crossing boundaries — of body, sex, nation, species and language — by an important dissident of dualism.’
— Amia Srinivasan, author of The Right to Sex
Praise for Testo Junkie
‘Testo Junkie is a wild ride. Preciado leaves the identity politics of taking T to others, and instead, in the tradition of William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker, and Jean Genet, he conducts a wild textual experiment. The results are spectacular… The gendered body will never be the same again.’
— Jack Halberstam, author of The Queer Art of Failure
‘Paul B. Preciado’s brilliant book oscillates between high theory and the surging rush of testosterone. Flush with elegant theoretical formulations, lascivious sex narratives, and astute histories of gender, Testo Junkie is a key text to comprehend the deep interconnectedness of sex and drugs today.’
— José Esteban Muñoz, author of Cruising Utopia
5
AN APARTMENT ON URANUS
PAUL B. PRECIADO
Translated by
CHARLOTTE MANDELL
To Itziar
the broad sun the loved shore
‘The atmosphere of the planet Uranus appears to be so heavy that the ferns there are creepers; the animals drag along, crushed by the weight of the gases. I want to mingle with these humiliated creatures which are always on their bellies. If metempsychosis should grant me a new dwelling place, I choose that forlorn planet, I inhabit it with the convicts of my race. Amidst hideous reptiles, I pursue an eternal, miserable death in the darkness where the leaves will be black, the waters of the marshes thick and cold. Sleep will be denied me. On the contrary, I recognize, with increasing lucidity, the unclean fraternity of the smiling alligators.’
— Jean Genet, The Thief’s Journal (1949)
CONTENTS
PREFACE BY VIRGINIE DESPENTES
Paul,
When you asked me if I would write this preface, we were in the apartment where you were living in the centre of Paris. The places you settle in always look like monastic cells. A desk a computer a few notebooks a bed with a pile of books next to it. It’s still strange to be at your place without being at my place – you’re the person I’ve spent the most time with in my life; this sensation of the familiar-turned-strange remains an enigma for me, something halfway between pleasure and pain, which might be both at once, which must be nostalgia. You asked me if I would write this preface and I didn’t think twice before saying yes. We were living together when you began writing these columns, and after our separation you continued sending me your texts so I could check your French – we both know they could very easily have done that at Libération but it’s a way of maintaining a bond. For me, a way of continuing to live in your words – of not losing the thread of your thinking.
I know how you write. You don’t get writer’s block. I would be incapable of doing this kind of article-writing because every time, it would plunge me into a week of pure anguish – the same kind of week I’ve just spent in not managing to begin writing this preface. At first I thought it should be 1,500 words, the length of your articles. I thought up a plan, very quickly, but the property of writer’s block is that even if you know what you want to write, and you stay seated at your desk, nothing comes. The plan I had in mind began like this, ‘The day I’m writing this preface you’re leaving the police station where you went to lodge a complaint because your door was covered in graffiti, death threats, on the same night 22the same insults and the same threats were spray-painted on the door of the local LGBT centre in Barcelona. You wrote to me via WhatsApp ‘I’m leaving the police station my teeth are clenched and my bones are cold I don’t like going to the police’. But that’s not the first time you’ve gone since we’ve known each other, always for death threats. The first time it happened I told you let it go don’t say anything if they write to you to tell you how they’re going to kill you it’s because they don’t have any intention of doing it.’ And then a gay activist in Madrid had his throat slit when he was leaving his home and was left for dead, but he survived. He’d also received threats and so, after learning what had happened to him, you went to lodge a complaint, that first time. And you explained to the policemen everything they needed to know about queer micropolitics. That’s your speciality, telling people stories they never imagined – and convincing them it’s reasonable to want to see them come true.
The day I’m writing this preface, the Brazilian member of parliament Jean Wyllys is announcing his decision to leave his country because he fears for his life. The young Bilal Hassani is chosen to represent France on Eurovision and he is flooded with a torrent of homophobic insults.
When you began writing these columns for the newspaper Libération, anti-gay marriage demonstrations were being supported with a disturbing enthusiasm by the mainstream media – every day they had to be promoted: give the stand to intolerance, defend the right of the fundamentalists of heterosexuality to express their hate. This was indispensable. This was the signal – we 23all understood this – for the end of a decade of tolerance. Your name then was Beto and you didn’t regularly take testosterone but people spoke of you with the masculine pronoun, as you wanted. You called cis-guys ‘the fuzzies’ and that made me crack up. Today no one on the street would think of correcting themselves with ‘excuse me, madam’ after calling you ‘sir’ and then getting confused, not really understanding how to proceed. Today you are trans and when we’re together on the street what bothers me most is not that men speak to you better, it’s that women don’t behave in the same way anymore. They adore you. It used to be that straight women didn’t really know what to make of this feminine guy this masculine girl – they weren’t really at ease with you. Now they adore you, whether they’re walking their dogs in the street or selling cheese or are waitresses in a restaurant – women think you’re their type and they let you know as all women do, by showering you with little gratuitous attentions. You say it’s strange to become a man while keeping the memory of oppression and that anyway I’m exaggerating, that they’re not paying attention to you. And that just makes me laugh.
Your articles, gathered together, outline a coherent skyline. I remember each piece, I remember the time each one was published, but it’s a surprise to find them all together. An excellent surprise. Several stories unfold, in a quincunx, alternatively, or in a spiral, as Barthes would say – always around the same points, but not at the same level. It’s at once a book that stands out from your other books, more autobiographical, more accessible, and a book that is reminiscent of your Testo Junkie, which tangled several threads – you called it ‘a plait’. This collection too is a plait. There is one story thread 24that concerns you and me – our separation and the years that followed. And other threads that are woven, to form another motif. It’s also the story of the end of democracies in the West. How finance discovered it got along very well with authoritarian regimes – and even that it prefers authoritarian regimes since people consume even more when their wrists are bound. And it’s the story of refugees penned into camps, dead at sea or abandoned to poverty in opulent cities that call themselves Christian – and I know you’re not establishing a parallel between their situation and your own out of an aesthetic taste for a leftist pose but because you know, as a masculine dyke child who grew up at the end of the Franco dictatorship, and now as trans, that you are one of them. That you will always be one of them, that destitution, as Louis Calaferte says, ‘is never a question of strength’, moral or mental, or of merit. Destitution crushes you like a truck that’s overturned on top of you – it seizes you and breaks you. And you don’t forget it.
And it’s also, of course, the story of your transition – of your transitions. This central story not of going from one point to another, but of wandering and in-between-ness as the place of life. A constant transformation, without fixed identity, without fixed activity, or address, or country. You call this book An Apartment on Uranus and you have no apartment on Earth, just the keys to a place in Paris, as you’ve had the keys for two years to an apartment in Athens. You don’t settle down. It doesn’t interest you, to be fixed in place. You want the status of permanent illegal immigrant. You change your name on your identity papers and as soon as your name is Paul to cross borders, you write in Libé that you have no intention of adopting masculinity as your new gender – you 25want a utopian gender.
It’s as if the possible had become a prison and you the fugitive. You write between possibilities – and by doing so, you deploy another possibility. You taught me an essential thing: not to engage in politics without enthusiasm. If you get involved in politics without enthusiasm, you’re on the right. But you engage in politics with a contagious enthusiasm – with no hatred towards those who demand your death, just an awareness of the threat they dangle over you, over us. But you don’t have time for hostility, or the character for anger – you deploy worlds that appear from the margins, and the amazing thing about you is this ability to continue to imagine something else. As if propaganda slid right off you and your gaze were systematically able to destabilize the obvious. It’s your arrogance that’s sexy – that joyful arrogance that allows you to think elsewhere, in the interstices, to want to live on Uranus and to write in a language that is not your own before giving lectures in yet another language… from one language to another, from one theme to another, from one city to another, from one gender to another – transitions are your home. And I never want to leave this home completely, never forget your intermediary language, your crossroad language, your language in transition.
That’s the idea for the plan I had and I wanted to conclude by talking about this obsession all autocratic regimes have – whether they’re far-right, religious, or communist – with attacking queer bodies, slut bodies, trans bodies, bodies outside the law. It’s as if we had oil – and all powerful regimes want access to this oil, want to expel us from the management of our lands. It’s as if 26we were very rich in some undefinable raw material. By dint of interesting so many people, we end up telling ourselves we must have something having to do with some rare and precious essence – how otherwise can you explain why all freedom-destroying movements are so closely interested in what we do with our identities, our lives, and our bodies in our bedrooms? And for the first time since we’ve known each other, I am more optimistic than you are. I imagine that children born after the year 2000 will refuse to let themselves be dragooned into these idiocies – and I don’t know if my optimism comes from a terror so great that I refuse to confront it, if it comes from a correct intuition, or if it’s just that I’ve become bourgeois and I need to tell myself that everything’s going to continue as it is because I have too much at stake in it. I have no idea. But for the first time in my life I feel it – that it’s the swansong of traditional murderous raping abusive masculinity. The last time we’ll hear them shouting and killing us in the streets to ward off the wretchedness that constitutes their way of thinking. I think that children born after the year 2000 will be capable of thinking that continuing with this masculinist order – or in your words ‘techno-patriarchal’ – would be for everything to die, for everything to be lost.
And I think that these children will read your texts – and they’ll understand what you propose, they’ll want you. Your thinking, your horizon, your spaces. You write for a time that has not yet arrived. You write to children who have not yet been born, and who will also live in constant transition – which is the property of life.
And I wish the reader who enters your book all the 27pleasure in the world. Welcome to Paul B. Preciado – you climb into a capsule and you won’t come out unscathed, but you’ll see, there’s no violence. At some point while reading these pages, you’ll find yourself upside-down and gravity will be nothing but a distant memory. It will occur at a different point for each of you, without your realizing what’s happened. You will be elsewhere. And when you emerge from this reading, you’ll know that that space exists, and that it’s open to you – that it’s where you can become something entirely different from what you had been allowed to imagine.
Virginie Despentes
INTRODUCTION: AN APARTMENT ON URANUS
As the years passed, I learned to think of dreams as an integral part of life. There are dreams that, because of their sensory intensity, their realism or precisely their lack of realism, deserve to be introduced into autobiography, just as much as events that were actually lived through. Life begins and ends in the unconscious; the actions we carry out while fully lucid are only little islands in an archipelago of dreams. No existence can be completely rendered in its happiness or its madness without taking into account oneiric experiences. It’s Calderón de la Barca’s maxim reversed: it’s not a matter of thinking that life is a dream, but rather of realizing that dreams are also a form of life. It is just as strange to think, like the Egyptians, that dreams are cosmic channels through which the souls of ancestors pass in order to communicate with us, as to claim, as some of the neurosciences do, that dreams are a ‘cut-and-paste’ of elements experienced by the brain during waking life, elements that return in the dream’s REM phase, while our eyes move beneath our eyelids, as if they were watching. Closed and sleeping, eyes continue to see. Therefore, it is more appropriate to say that the human psyche never stops creating and dealing with reality, sometimes in dreams, sometimes in waking life.
Whereas over the course of the last few months my waking life has been, to use the euphemistic Catalan expression, ‘good, so long as we don’t go into details,’ my oneiric life has had the power of a novel by Ursula K. Le Guin. During one of my recent dreams, I was talking with the artist Dominique González-Foerster about my problem of geographic dislocation: after years of 30a nomadic life, it is hard for me to decide on a place to live in the world. While we were having this conversation, we were watching the planets spin slowly in their orbits, as if we were two giant children and the solar system were a Calder mobile. I was explaining to her that, for now, in order to avoid the conflict that the decision entailed, I had rented an apartment on each planet, but that I didn’t spend more than a month on any one of them, and that this situation was economically and physically unsustainable. Probably because she is the creator of the Exotourism project, Dominique in this dream was an expert on extra-terrestrial real-estate management. ‘If I were you, I’d have an apartment on Mars and I’d keep a pied-à-terre on Saturn,’ she was saying, showing a great deal of pragmatism, ‘but I’d get rid of the Uranus apartment. It’s much too far away.’
Awake, I don’t know much about astronomy; I don’t have the slightest idea of the positions or distances of the different planets in the solar system. But I consulted the Wikipedia page on Uranus: it is in fact one of the most distant planets from Earth. Only Neptune, Pluto and the dwarf planets Haumea, Makemake and Eris are further away. I read that Uranus was the first planet discovered with the help of a telescope, eight years before the French Revolution. With the help of a lens he himself had made, the astronomer and musician William Herschel observed it one night in March in a clear sky, from the garden of his house at 19 New King Street, in the city of Bath. Since he didn’t yet know if it was a huge star or a tailless comet, they say that Herschel called it ‘Georgium Sidus’, the Georgian Star, to console King George III for the loss of the British colonies in America: England had lost a continent, but the King had gained a planet. Thanks to Uranus, Herschel was 31able to live on a generous royal pension of two hundred pounds a year. Because of Uranus, he abandoned both music and the city of Bath, where he was a chapel organist and Director of Public Concerts, and settled in Windsor so that the King could be sure of his new conquest by observing it through a telescope. Because of Uranus, they say, Herschel went mad, and spent the rest of his life building the largest telescope of the eight-eenth century, which the English called ‘the monster’. Because of Uranus, they say, Herschel never played the oboe again. He died at the age of eighty-four: the number of years it takes for Uranus to go around the sun. They say that the tube of his telescope was so wide that the family used it as a dining hall at his funeral.
Uranus is what astrophysicists call a ‘gas giant’. Made up of ice, methane and ammonia, it is the coldest planet in the solar system, with winds that can exceed 900 kilometres per hour. In short, the living conditions are not especially suitable. So Dominique was right: I should leave the Uranus apartment.
But dream functions like a virus. From that night forward, while I’m awake, the sensation of having an apartment on Uranus increases, and I am more and more convinced that the place I should live is over there.
For the Greeks, as for me in this dream, Uranus was the solid roof of the world, the limit of the celestial vault. Uranus was regarded as the house of the gods in many Greek invocation rituals. In mythology, Uranus is the son that Gaia, the Earth, conceived alone, without insemination or coition. Greek mythology is at once a kind of retro sci-fi story anticipating in a do-it-yourself way the technologies of reproduction and bodily transformation that will appear throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; and at the same time a kitschy TV 32series in which the characters give themselves over to an unimaginable number of relationships outside the law. Thus Gaia married her son Uranus, a Titan often represented in the middle of a cloud of stars, like a sort of Tom of Finland dancing with other muscle-bound guys in a techno club on Mount Olympus. From the incestuous and ultimately not very heterosexual relationships between heaven and earth, the first generation of Titans were born, including Oceanus (Water), Chronos (Time), and Mnemosyne (Memory)… Uranus was both the son of the Earth and the father of all the others. We don’t quite know what Uranus’s problem was, but the truth is that he was not a good father: either he forced his children to remain in Gaia’s womb, or he threw them into Tartarus as soon as they were born. So Gaia convinced one of her children to carry out a contraceptive operation. You can see in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence the representation that Giorgio Vasari made in the sixteenth century of Chronos castrating his father Uranus with a scythe. Aphrodite, the goddess of love, emerged from Uranus’s amputated genital organs… which could imply that love comes from the disjunction of the body’s genital organs, from the displacement and externalization of genital force.
This form of non-heterosexual conception, cited in Plato’s Symposium, was the inspiration for the German lawyer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs to come up with the word ‘Uranian’ [Urning] in 1864 to designate what he called relations of the ‘third sex’. In order to explain men’s attraction to other men, Ulrichs, after Plato, cut subjectivity in half, separated the soul from the body, and imagined a combination of souls and bodies that authorized him to reclaim dignity for those who loved against the law. The segmentation of soul and body reproduces 33in the domain of experience the binary epistemology of sexual difference: there are only two options. Uranians are not, Ulrichs writes, sick or criminal, but feminine souls enclosed in masculine bodies attracted to masculine souls.
This is not a bad idea to legitimize a form of love that, at the time, could get you hanged in England or in Prussia, and that, today, remains illegal in seventy-four countries and is subject to the death penalty in thirteen countries, including Nigeria, Pakistan, Iran, and Qatar; a form of love that constitutes a common motive for vio-lence in family, society and police in most Western democracies.
Ulrichs does not make this statement as a lawyer or scientist: he is speaking in the first person. He does not say ‘there are Uranians’, but ‘I am a Uranian’. He asserts this, in Latin, on 28 August 1867, after having been condemned to prison and after his books have been banned and he speaks in front of an assembly of 500 jurists, members of the German Parliament, and a Bavarian prince – an ideal audience for such confessions. Until then, Ulrichs had hidden behind the pseudonym ‘Numa Numantius’. But from that day on, he speaks in his own name, he dares to taint the name of his father. In his diary, Ulrichs confesses he was terrified, and that, just before walking onto the stage of the Grand Hall of the Odeon Theatre in Munich, he had been thinking about running away, never to return. But he says he suddenly remembered the words of the Swiss writer Heinrich Hössli who, a few years before, had defended sodomites (though not, however, speaking in his own name): ‘Two ways lie before me,’ Hössli wrote, ‘to write this book and expose myself to persecution, or not to write it and be full of guilt until the day I am buried. Of course I have 34encountered the temptation to stop writing… But before my eyes appeared the images of the persecuted and the prospect of such wretched children who have not yet been born, and I thought of the unhappy mothers at their cradles, rocking their cursed yet innocent children! And then I saw our judges with their eyes blindfolded. Finally, I imagined my gravedigger slipping the cover of my coffin over my cold face. Then, before I submitted, the imperious desire to stand up and defend the oppressed truth possessed me… And so I continued to write with my eyes resolutely averted from those who have worked for my destruction. I do not have to choose between remaining silent or speaking. I say to myself: speak or be judged!’
Ulrichs writes in his journal that the judges and Parliamentarians seated in Munich’s Odeon Hall cried out, as they listened to his speech, like an angry crowd: End the meeting! End the meeting! But he also notes that one or two voices were raised to say: Let him continue! In the midst of a chaotic tumult, the President left the theatre, but some Parliamentarians remained. Ulrichs’s voice trembled. They listened.
But what does it mean to speak for those who have been refused access to reason and knowledge, for us who have been regarded as mentally ill? With what voice can we speak? Can the jaguar or the cyborg lend us their voices? To speak is to invent the language of the crossing, to project one’s voice into an interstellar expedition: to translate our difference into the language of the norm; while we continue, in secret, to practise a strange lingo that the law does not understand.
So Ulrichs was the first European citizen to declare publicly that he wanted to have an apartment on Uranus. He was the first mentally ill person, the first sexual 35criminal to stand up and denounce the categories that labelled him as sexually and criminally diseased. He did not say, ‘I am not a sodomite.’ On the contrary, he defended the right to practise sodomy between men, calling for a reorganization of the systems of signs, for a change of the political rituals that defined the social recognition of a body as healthy or sick, normal or criminal. He invented a new language and a new scene of enunciation. In each of Ulrichs’s words addressed from Uranus to the Munich jurists resounds the violence generated by the dualist epistemology of the West. The entire universe cut in half and solely in half. Everything is heads or tails in this system of knowledge. We are human or animal. Man or woman. Living or dead. We are the colonizer or the colonized. Living organism or machine. We have been divided by the norm. Cut in half and forced to remain on one side or the other of the rift. What we call ‘subjectivity’ is only the scar that, over the multiplicity of all that we could have been, covers the wound of this fracture. It is over this scar that property, family and inheritance were founded. Over this scar, names are written and sexual identities asserted.
On 6 May 1868, Karl Maria Kertbeny, an activist and defender of the rights of sexual minorities, sent a handwritten letter to Ulrichs in which for the first time he used the word ‘homosexual’ to refer to what his friend called ‘Uranians’. Against the anti-sodomy law promulgated in Prussia, Kertbeny defended the idea that sexual practices between people of the same sex were as ‘natural’ as the practices of those he calls – also for the first time – ‘heterosexuals’. For Kertbeny, homosexuality and heterosexuality were just two natural ways of loving. For medical jurisprudence at the end of the nineteenth century, however, homosexuality would be 36reclassified as a disease, a deviation, and a crime.
I am not speaking of history here. I am speaking to you of your lives, of mine, of today. While the notion of Uranianism has gone somewhat astray in the archives of literature, Kertbeny’s concepts would become authentic biopolitical techniques of dealing with sexuality and reproduction over the course of the twentieth century, to such an extent that most of you continue to use them to refer to your own identity, as if they were descriptive categories. Homosexuality would remain listed until 1975 in Western psychiatric manuals as a psychosexual disease. This remains a central notion, not only in the discourse of clinical psychology, but also in the political languages of Western democracies.
When the notion of homosexuality disappeared from psychiatric manuals, the notions of intersexuality and transsexuality appear as new pathologies for which medicine, pharmacology and law suggest remedies. Each body born in a hospital in the West is examined and subjected to the protocols of evaluation of gender normality invented in the 1950s in the United States by Drs John Money and John and Joan Hampson: if the baby’s body does not comply with the visual criteria of sexual difference, it will be submitted to a battery of operations of ‘sexual reassignment’. In the same way, with a few minor exceptions, neither scientific discourse nor the law in most Western democracies recognize the possibility of inscribing a body as a member of human society unless it is assigned either masculine or feminine gender. Transsexuality and intersexuality are described as psychosomatic pathologies, and not as the symptoms of the inadequacy of the politico-visual system of sexual differentiation when faced with the complexity of life.
How can you, how can we, organize an entire system 37of visibility, representation, right of self-determination and political recognition if we follow such categories? Do you really believe that you are male or female, that we are homosexual or heterosexual, intersex or trans? Do these distinctions worry you? Do you trust them? Does the very meaning of your human identity depend on them? If you feel your throat constricting when you hear one of these words, do not silence it. It’s the multiplicity of the cosmos that is trying to pierce through your chest, as if your throat were the tube of a Herschel telescope.
Let me tell you that homosexuality and hetero-sexuality do not exist outside of a dualistic, hierarchical epistemology that aims at preserving the domination of the paterfamilias over the reproduction of life. Homosexuality and heterosexuality, intersexuality and transsexuality do not exist outside of a colonial, capitalist epistemology, which privileges the sexual practices of reproduction as a strategy for managing the population and the reproduction of labour, but also the reproduction of the population of consumers. It is capital, not life, that is being reproduced. These categories are the map imposed by authority, not the territory of life. But if homosexuality and heterosexuality, intersexuality and transsexuality, do not exist, then who are we? How do we love? Imagine it.
Then, I remember my dream and I understand that my trans condition is a new form of Uranism. I am not a man and I am not a woman and I am not heterosexual I am not homosexual I am not bisexual. I am a dissident of the sex-gender system. I am the multiplicity of the cosmos trapped in a binary political and epistemological system, shouting in front of you. I am a Uranian confined inside the limits of techno-scientific capitalism. 38
Like Ulrichs, I am bringing no news from the margins; instead, I bring you a piece of horizon. I come with news of Uranus, which is neither the realm of God nor the sewer. Quite the contrary. I was assigned a female sex at birth. They said I was lesbian. I decided to self-administer regular doses of testosterone. I never thought I was a man. I never thought I was a woman. I was several. I didn’t think of myself as transsexual. I wanted to experiment with testosterone. I love its viscosity, the unpredictability of the changes it causes, the intensity of the emotions it provokes forty-eight hours after taking it. And, if the injections are regular, its ability to undo your identity, to make organic layers of the body emerge that otherwise would have remained invisible. Here as everywhere, what matters is the measure: the dosage, the rhythm of injections, the order of them, the cadence. I wanted to become unrecognizable. I wasn’t asking medical institutions for testosterone as hormone therapy to cure ‘gender dysphoria’. I wanted to function with testosterone, to experience the intensity of my desire through it, to multiply my faces by metamorphosing my subjectivity, creating a body that was a revolutionary machine. I undid the mask of femininity that society had plastered onto my face until my identity documents became ridiculous, obsolete. Then, with no way out, I agreed to identify myself as a transsexual, as a ‘mentally ill person’, so that the medico-legal system would acknowledge me as a living human body. I paid with my body for the name I bear.
By making the decision to construct my subjectivity with testosterone, the way the shaman constructs his with plants, I take on the negativity of my time, a negativity I am forced to represent and against which I can fight only from this paradoxical incarnation, which is 39to be a trans man in the twenty-first century, a feminist bearing the name of a man in the #MeToo movement, an atheist of the hetero-patriarchal system turned into a consumer of the pharmacopornographic industry. My existence as a trans man constitutes at once the acme of the sexual ancien régime and the beginning of its collapse, the climax of its normative progression and the signal of a proliferation still to come.
I have come to talk to you – to you and to the dead, or rather, to those who live as if they were already dead – but I have come especially to talk to the cursed, innocent children who are yet to be born. Uranians are the survivors of a systematic, political attempt at infanticide: we have survived the attempt to kill in us, while we were not yet adults, and while we could not defend ourselves, the radical multiplicity of life and the desire to change the names of all things. Are you dead? Will they be born tomorrow? I congratulate you, belatedly or in advance.
I bring you news of the crossing, which is the realm of neither God nor the sewer. Quite the contrary. Do not be afraid, do not be excited, I have not come to explain anything morbid. I have not come to tell you what a transsexual is, or how to change your sex, or at what precise instant a transition is good or bad. Because none of that would be true, no truer than the ray of afternoon sun falling on a certain spot on the planet and changing according to the place from which it is seen. No truer than that the slow orbit described by Uranus as it revolves above the Sun is yellow. I cannot tell you everything that goes on when you take testosterone, or what that does in your body. Take the trouble to administer the necessary doses of knowledge to yourself, as many as your taste for risk allows you.
I have not come for that. As my indigenous Chilean 40mother Pedro Lemebel said, I do not know why I come, but I am here. In this Uranian apartment that overlooks the gardens of Athens. And I’ll stay a while. At the crossroads. Because intersection is the only place that exists. There are no opposite shores. We are always at the crossing of paths. And it is from this crossroad that I address you, like the monster who has learned the language of humans.
