Excerpt From ‘A Trans Body’s Path In Eight Folds’ From Pass With Care: Memoirs By Cooper Lee Bombardier

paolina russo fall 2022

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if you wanna understand why transmisogyny is so horrifying you have to understand the sorts of social and cultural patterns it takes to abuse someone until they will happily fulfill the role of the fetishized tokenized tranny bc any other option means isolation and death.

patriarchal society needs its sacrificial hypersexualized disgusting living sex-objects, and transmisogyny is how it tries to turn a human into that. i keep thinking abt this 4chan thread i read ~2013 shortly after i came out, in which a chaser talked about how he specifically liked dating trans women because “they have such low self-esteem that you can make them do anything”. he went on to talk about how he specifically looks for trans women with “dead, lifeless eyes” (aka dissociated from ptsd) because “they’re like a doll you can mold into whatever you want, then discard when you’re done, and there will always be more desperate for love”

that’s what transmisogyny is: a systematic pattern of abuse applied to a small sacrificial portion of the population to create a class of women with no claim to community or personhood, who will never be defended or avenged, who can be safely sunk into the attrition of patriarchy’s darker desires to protect the cis women, who after all could one day be mothers or some other kind of person. we are the class sacrificed to men’s violence and cis women’s violence. the socially unimportant. the weird and ugly. the punching bag. the blowup doll that talks. the mad artist that produces something great and then must burn out cause who could support that eccentric through life? the activist who makes huge steps for the better but stumbles on a community that would rather rape and abandon her than admit that it needs her. the queen of the dance who gets beaten with sticks as she’s leaving it and no one helps.

and its easy to do this, by painting the class as predatory, by making us hate and fear our own genitals, by indoctrinating us with an absurd amount of self-hatred, by giving us no out, no safe community, no one we can ever turn to. every cis person becomes a beartrap just waiting to swing shut and take out a chunk of flesh. and with fear and trauma we start to disappear from the world. we commit suicide, we overdose on heroin, we starve quitely in rooms playing videogames, or we become the tranny they want, deadeyed and always compliant and always ready to soak up blame. but whatever happens its the same: over time, we cease to exist. the person we are withdraws from the world until there is little to nothing left.

i don’t know how to stop it, but this has to stop. this is not something anyone ever should have to go through.

Transparent lamb skin shibari bag by Hannah Freeke. Tattooed by Thirty Nin.

Michaela Stark by Raga Munecas

- 2024

Jade Blue & Shane, San Francisco, 1997, Charles Gatewood, Badlands (1999)

Jean Paul Gaultier autumn/winter 2003

with the exception of metal, everything humans wear used to be alive. Even synthetics used to be alive, millions of years ago

kinda wild how many doctors will go "welllll we dont want you to have the increased risk of breast cancer that all cis women have so we will be giving you osteoporosis