Benjamin Anthony Rhodes

Can the Monster Speak?

after Paul B. Preciado

The monster is one who lives in transition. One whose face, body and behaviors cannot yet be considered true in a predetermined regime of knowledge and power.

To transition is to establish a transversal communication with the hormone which erases or, better still, eclipses what you call the female phenotype and allows for the awakening of another genealogy. This awakening is revolution. It is a molecular uprising. An assault on the power of the heteropatriarchal ego, of identity and of name. The process is a decolonization of the body.

It is the potential revolution inherent in any process of transition that terrifies normative psychology and psychoanalysis, which do everything they can to neutralize its power. In the dominant medical and psychological discourse, the trans body is a colony. The trans body is to heteronormativity what Lesbos is to Europe : a border whose form and extent can be perpetuated only through violence. Cut here, paste there, remove these organs, replace them with others. The trans body is a colony. Every day, on some street in Tijuana or Los Angeles, Saint Petersburg or Goa, Athens or Seville, a trans body is killed with the same impunity that a new occupied settlement is built on one bank or the other of the River Jordan. Medicine and clinical psychology are waging a war to impose and standardize the organs of the trans body.

The migrant has lost the nation state. The refugee has lost their house. The trans person loses their body. They all cross that border. The border is part of them and cuts through them. Usurps and overthrows them. 

To be trans is to understand that the rainbow can become a skin.

ar as to say that, contrary to what is routinely claimed, the mutation process that accompanies gender transitioning is one of the most beautiful and joyous things that I have ever done in my life. All the things that are terrible and terrifying about transsexuality and gender transitioning are not found in the process of transition itself, but in the way in which the boundaries between the sexes punish and threaten to kill anyone who dares cross them. It is not gender transitioning that is horrifying and dangerous, but the regime of sexual difference.

All regimes are policed by borders, thus migration continues to cause problems to this day, whether practised between bodies and souls or between nation states

You would need only to review your history of normalization and submission to the dominant social and political codes of gender and sexuality in order to feel the spinning wheel of fabrication whirl inside you once more and with it the desire to break free of the repetition, to disidentify.

 Allow me to reassure you: I have had surgery; carefully, over the course of lengthy political, practical and theoretical sessions, I surgically removed the epistemic apparatus that diagnoses my body and my behaviours as pathological.

 What if it were not clear-cut that there are only penises and the vulvas? What if there were girls with penises and boys with vulvas? What if there were more than two sexes, more than two genders, more than two core sexual orientations? What if genital difference or gender expression were not the criteria for the acceptance of a human body in a social and political collective?

In fact, the physical, erotic and sexual experiences of the trans person trigger an irrepressible anxiety in the analyst. As such, it is perhaps not the trans person who refuses to engage with the analytic process, but rather the analyst who cannot face the challenge of looking at a body beyond his/her cisgender heterosexual experience and sexual conventions.