Title: Trans Care
Author(s): Hil Malatino
Date: 2020
decentralized care webs
This queer and trans care web has no center […] some of what binds us to one another is directly tied to the affective and practical disinvestment of the people and institutions we’ve needed—or been forced—to rely on for survival (2-3)
divesting from the family model
both hegemonic and resistant cultural imaginaries of care have depended on a heterocisnormative investment in the family as the primary locus of care. […] our ability to flourish is reliant on forms of care that outstrip the mythic purported providential reach of the family. (6)
care as multidirectional labor
the only way to address differential distribution of care is to name the material consequences of privilege/power dynamics
A resilient care web coheres through consistently foregrounding the realities of burnout and the gendered, raced, and classed dynamics that result in the differential distribution of care—for those receiving it as well as those giving it. (2)
lack of collective supports makes the toll of doing unpaid gender work unavoidable
the impulse […] to produce a resource for trans folk who found themselves doing mostly unremunerated advocacy work—speaks both to the absolutely common and widespread phenomenon of “voluntary gender work” (anecdotally, I don’t know any trans people who don’t do this work) and to the dearth of communal, institutional, and social support for such work, which makes such labor ultimately unsustainable and typically deleterious in the long-term. (20)
burnout is an insufficient framework for trans care exhaustion
There are a number of founding assumptions worth troubling in this articulation of burnout. The first is that burnout is, specifically, a stress related to employment and thus a problem for both employers and employees to recognize and attempt to manage. Another is that it is characterized by a fundamentally bifurcated and unequal energetic exchange, where the roles of helper and recipient are clearly demarcated, hierarchical, nonfungible, and nonreciprocal—the relationships that produce burnout are not horizontal or nonhierarchical, peer-to-peer. As an extension of this logic, burnout is conceptualized as a personal—individualized—rather than a communal issue, one that affects, in particular, those in the so-called (and often feminized) helping professions. Another extension of this logic is that the cause of burnout is rooted, most often, in working with traumatized or “troubled” recipients of care and that burnout is, thus, a kind of “compassion fatigue” or vicarious trauma—not necessarily complicated by the helper’s own “troubles” or traumas. (22)
caring/cared for are porous categories in intercommunity trans care
The boundaries between who is a carer and who is a recipient of care are pretty radically blurred in such a situation [as voluntary gender work]; any act of caring is simultaneously an act of maintaining those minimal networks of support that sustain you. […] a hierarchy of traumatization [can’t] possibly, in its ordinal logic, do justice to the kinds of mutual traumatic resonance that circulate between trans subjects involved in acts of caring. (22)
aftercare: surgery, childcare, kink
There are two linked definitions of aftercare, then. It is what needs to be provided in order to help a subject heal in the wake of massive upheaval and transformation, and it is what facilitates and supports emergence into a radically recalibrated experience of both bodymind and the world it encounters. (3)
glimmers of trans lives past
a common feature of trans arts of cultivating resilience has to do with turning to the historical record for proof of life, for evidence that trans lives are livable because they’ve been lived. (7)
care as index of contemporary political orientation
at the center of this whirlwind, a four-letter word that has, in some ways, come to stand in the place of traditional partisan orientations: care. Do you care or don’t you? (9)
microaggressions as indicative of insufficient care
Grievance is not adequate grounds for dismissing a critique. More to the point: one might actually learn something by studying grievance, particularly if the form of grievance they are quickly moving to dismiss as unworthy of study is one that seems minor. (14)
the trans masc resonance of pop punk cringe
there might be a kind of trans specificity to Fall Out Boy fandom. […] The boy at the center of a Fall Out Boy track is gamely and selfishly working his way through minor emotional devastations, centering his sexuality (however problematic or cringeworthy these narratives are, replete with boys “wishing to be the friction in your jeans”), and being eminently braggadocious and narcissistic—he’ll be your “number one with a bullet.” He’s stationed directly at the center of a completely solipsistic universe. No matter how insufferable this kind of guy is in reality, I would have killed for a fraction of his swaggering self-confidence as a kid. […] I do my best to empathize with this baby trans masc, regardless. I dilate on what might lead them to love a band I loathe, on how that band might speak to transmasculine fantasies and desires, even if I find them politically and ethically suspect. This, too, is all about care. Sometimes young trans guys annoy me in precisely the ways that Fall Out Boy annoys me. But I want them to have their clueless and self-involved boyhoods. I want them to be able to take the long road through navigating toxic masculinity, to sloppily grapple with it the way that other boys get to do. (17-18)
it’s easier to pass in dim light
Passing is a fragile art, dependent on, among many other variables, the light. Flood lights are transphobic. Hypervisibility and the drive to transparency, and the technologies that enable it, are not trans-friendly. (27)
trans people as both unworthy of care and as the ultimate victims
these are the public roles available to us, altogether undeserving of care, on one side, and the demographic most in need of robust rights protection at both state and federal levels, on the other. (30-31)
gender affirmation from friends only goes so far
the encounter with the stranger has always held the real weight—and burden—as far as the conferral of gender goes. (36)
gender is relationally, laboriously produced
trans people are alienated from our gender labour
[trans people] all recognize gender as a morally loaded laborious process. It is work. And our labor is alienated, insofar as we don’t own what we produce and we rely on someone else to determine its value and worth. (38)
trans experience illuminates the conditional nature of recognition and selfhood
the concept of autonomy that underwrites romantic myths of the insurrectionary subject can’t hold. Gender recognition is sustained by a web of forces that we don’t control. Because we rely on others for recognition, we understand how selfhood is given through such forms of recognition. Because, when such recognition is withheld, we intimately sense that we are being relegated to the position of the monstrous, simultaneously both more and less than human. Because we exert agency in determining our forms of life and flesh, but that agency is always only one part of a much broader assembly into which our flesh—and its possibilities—are grafted. (38-39)
If we’re serious about addressing the production of burnout, fatigue, exhaustion, debility, and disability within trans lives and communities, we cannot afford to internalize and operationalize a concept of care as debt. (46)
trans subjects cultivate detachment, distance, and numbness in order to survive in and through inuring ourselves to the hostilities that surround us. […] caring for us—and our practice of caring for one another—is no simple task; we’re sometimes swaddled thick in completely justified defenses. We might not be able to hear you, or each other, very well at all. (50)
When the milieu you inhabit feels hostile, it’s deeply comforting to turn to text and image from another time. I was desperate for representation, but more than that, I was desperate for some sense that other subjects had encountered and survived some of the transphobic, cissexist bullshit with which I was being repeatedly confronted. I needed resources for resilience. I wanted a roadmap for another way of being. (51)
This space—nascent, indeterminate, delivering an evasive image prone to the projections of others—resonates as a particularly trans look. Inhabiting a gender-liminal or provisionally gendered body—as so many of us do, before, during, or after “transition,” whatever that is—means being subject to continuous erotic interrogation, being tossed squarely onto the shores of cis shame about their own desires, being made an impossible—and impossibly disrupted—object of desire. (52)
Desire and dysphoria are tightly bonded to one another, and in the midst of transition, even the most well-intentioned and routine forms of intimacy run the risk of being received as confirmation that an other wants a bodymind that we aren’t (entirely or quite.) (53)
archival traces of trans, intersex, and gender nonconforming lives [feel] like a gift that I’m still figuring out how to use. All I know for sure is that it sparks a sense of connection that resonates even as it remains opaque. (54)
In order to communicate about these lives, you engage in forms of speculation, projection, invention, and translation that inevitably fail to render subjecthood faithfully. The piecemeal, the partial, the imperfect is all you have. Each claim you make is overdetermined and only ever possibly resonant with the vicissitude of their lived experience. (57)
We turn to social media for support that is simultaneously fiscal and affective, simultaneously practical […] and ephemerally affirmative (66)
the echo chamber afforded by social media might be better understood as a provisionary form of trans separatism that offers imperative reprieve. It’s where we access forms of preservative love withheld in the popular domain, and too often scarce in our everyday interactions. (67)
The better networked you are, the more social media capital you have, the more successful your bid for funding will be. This means that crowdfunding favors folks with the time, the extroverted capacity for engagement, and an extant and well-received “brand.” […] trans care can all too easily reproduce hierarchies of attention, aid, and deservingness [and] such hierarchies exacerbate and amplify inequities. (69)