I MEASURE MY ANGER IN FEAR, AND I’M TERRIFIED.
2023. Photography, Video, Archive and Text.
My bags are packed, but there’s nowhere to run. This is what it feels like to be trans today. It seems like just about every politician, news outlet, billionaire and public figure has something to say about us. So little of it is positive.
As the world turns down an increasingly fascist path, the risk to our safety increases in kind. Trans people are all too aware of history in this regard. When the Nazis stormed the Institute for Sexual Research in 1933, they burned the research but kept the address books which contained the identity of the trans people who sought care there.
What may seem like banal paperwork to cis people, is a tool toward our eventual destruction in the wrong hands. When the world seems aligned against me, the one thing I can control is who knows.
But if you don’t begin to take seriously, as trans people have been asking you to, the threat towards us that is building, no amount of paranoid immolation will protect us.
Protect trans lives. Stand up, fight back. It won’t stop with us.
Film Stills.
Screenshots from Video Piece.
I photographed anti-trans political speeches using the aesthetics of pre-war newsreels (4:3 aspect ratio, black and white film.) to present my own point of view as a trans woman watching these speeches calling for my rights to be stripped away. These politics belong to the past.
Writing.
I need you to understand something about me: My earliest memory was watching 9/11 on the news. This is the world I was born into. One where I sat by and watched the result of hatred play out as cartoons had moments before. Well, I won’t just sit by any longer. Because now the world I occupy is one that directs that hate toward me, and selfish as it is, that’s what it took to make me fight back. But how can I? How can I fight back?
When the towers fell, the world was behind America. When that very same America makes performing in Drag illegal, when that very same America outlaws healthcare for trans youth, when that very same America makes it legal to murder trans people for simply being trans; our lives become a topic for debate at best, and a distraction at worst.
The world it seems is not behind Americans. It is behind America’s power. If the world is behind America, then it is against me. Of course, I don’t live in America, I am not American. I hesitate to call myself a citizen of any place because it is clear that the world as it stands, will not tolerate people like me as its citizens. But the place I trouble so is the United Kingdom. A place that is known to trans people as T–E–R–F,‘TERF island’. Because what is being tried in America was tested here first, perfected here. A new system of hatred disguised as ‘concern’. But all the same, an old system of hatred, devised against those who are different to thee, for no other reason than the fact that we disgust you.
I feel no draw to own a television now. What can it give me as a trans person? To this nation’s ideal citizen, the T.V. gives hope. Hope that you can be rich, famous, and loved. It gives me nothing! Because to make the masses feel powerful, the T.V. must put the minority down. And it puts me down. And if you really pay attention, you will recognise that it puts you down too. Because trans people are not a minority. Cis people are not the majority. The only true minority in this world is powerful people, and they must have you believe that you are not a minority through arbitrary division, so that you will feel empowered. It is only while you feel empowered, that you will remain blind to the fact that you have none. And right now, it is easy to feel powerful by taking it from trans people.
I’m only told I’m part of a minority to keep me scared. I’m told that trans people cannot effectively revolt against this tide of hatred towards us by the government, because there are so few of us. Well, I put it to you that it does not matter how few we have, so long as you continue to believe that it is not also you they are after. Because the oppression of trans people is the oppression of all people who are not powerful. Rather, it is the oppression of all people who don’t yet know that they have power because that is what they have been told their whole lives. If I didn’t pose a threat to their power, they wouldn’t oppress me. Their oppression of me is my power! Your oppression of me is your weakness.
I MEASURE MY ANGER IN FEAR, AND I’M TERRIFIED.
I wake up every day and I read the news because I’m a masochist. And each day I read that another right of mine has been taken from me, that another country has made my existence illegal, that another trans life has been cut short by this system that is in fact a slaughterhouse of the marginalised, and you’re the consumer who props it up when you don’t stop to say, “Enough!” Because it is a sick synecdoche that you buy into when you think that politicians represent you and your interests, and not the interests of ExxonMobil, Halliburton, and the Lockheed Skunks.
When you take rights from the marginalised, you feel as though you are getting something in kind. You are in fact taking those rights from yourself, by conceding that the state has power over its people, when it should be the people who have power over the state.
VMK – 26/02/23
Ashes of Estradiol.
2023. Video and Archive.
In a ritual of fear to prevent my trans identity from being documented and discoverable via the enormous paper trail that is left behind through the everyday bureaucracies of being trans in the modern day, I took to regularly burning any such documentation.
The video piece follows the process of first anonymising my paperwork and burning it on a pyre built to resemble the one made to burn the books seized from the Institute for Sexual Research in 1933. Drawing a line also to religious colonialism's role throughout history in enforcing a patriarchal gender binary that has necessitated the creation of transphobia, this pyre was assembled in a baptismal font.