Philosophical Sexchange

This was a piece of crit that was part of an unfinished book of poetry and essays.

“Men as well as women, for Freud, represented partial, imperfect solutions to the universal threat of castration. The presence or absence of a literal penis is, it turns out, only incidental to castration anxiety; what matters is the idea of one.”

- Andrea Long Chu, Females

Avital Ronnell might wish to avoid “the particulars of his [Neitzchse’s philosophical sex change” (12) but that does not mean that we have to. Philosophy is, even whilst being generally misogynistic, a rather feminised occupation to have, so far removed from masculinised conceptions of work, instead focused on sitting and thinking for long periods of time in a room of one’s own. What, then, differentiates a “philosophical sex change” from a regular sex change? I am currently undergoing the second of those things, but have I gone through the first? If we look at my poetry (not to self analyse) there is a recurrent idea of my own screaming, screaming repeated words into an imagined abyss. Earlier in this book (WHO WILL SURVIVE AND WHAT WILL BE LEFT OF THEM, sometimes stylised as “WH() WILL SURVIVE AND WHAT WILL BE LEFT ()F THEM”) I (and it is important that it is I screaming, not some ‘speaker’, a concept invented by poets who are too cowardly to admit any presence in their poetry) screamed “Are you a girl, do you just want a cunt?” over and over, the phrase becoming corrupted and changed the more it is said. What Solanas misses is that it is practically impossible to repeat a phrase and have it remain the same. I repeat the title phrase of this book over and over, who will surivive and what will be left of them, becoming ever more desperate -- is that title (a twofold reference to both The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the experimental folk band Murder By Death) a question, pleading to know the outcome of this (apocalyptic) scenario, or is it a statement, claiming knowledge? I don’t know the answer to it. Do you?

One day recently, I travelled to Billinghurst for a hook-up. Whilst I was there, the girl I was seeing gave me an edible. I hadn’t ever really had an edible before, but I ate it, too quickly. During the initiation of the sex act, I became paralysed with images of nuclear annihilation. More accurately, it was an accelerating series of images: a computer loading screen, the face of a girl who sexually assaulted me, and a nuclear bomb exploding. It flashed in this order, growing quicker andquicker, until the images formed a blurry single image of all three happening at once. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t fuck. I could, I suppose, have been fucked. I mean, I was fucked, fucked in the sense that I was stuck, and messed up, and my erection died. There was still room for me to be fucked, even if I was being, despite my womanhood, emasculated.

In Emanuela Biachi’s The Feminine Symptom, Bianchi describes elements of Plato’s cosmology and what he believed women were: “A soul residing in a star would be born into a body “by necessity”. If [...] a soul thus embodied showed mastery of the sensations, desires, and feelings [...] the soul would return to its star. Those who failed to do so would be changed into women [...] such a soul “would have no respite from change and suffering until he allowed the motion of the Same and uniform in himself to subdue all that multitude of riotous and irrational feelings which have clung to it since its association with fire, water, air and earth, and with reason thus in control returned once more to his first and best form.” (88) Am I woman only because I have no fucking mastery of my emotions, because a tiny little bit of weed sends me spiralling, gets me fucked beyond belief? Another girl I slept with told me I was emotionally fragile, that I was only upset with her because I was a trans woman. This stands somehow alongside beliefs that trans women are manipulative violent rapists secretly controlling society… that we are at once in control and out of control. If women are chaotic souls who have no control of their own emotions then there can be no doubt: I am a woman, and I always have been. Plato’s belief is really that souls change gender depending on their psychological mastery of sensation, it finds a justification that women are inherently irrational in its concept of the soul and gives women the option of manhood if they can stop being a woman (there is, it seems, no reverse option, no way for a man to lose control of his self and um, degenerate into w()manhood, like I did, but there is certainly a fear that it could happen, because any time you construct a hierarchy there is an inherent fear that one should lose one’s position in that, a sort of castration anxiety of the soul) (obviously Plato’s ideas here are, to put it mildly, utter tosh) (but it’s accurate insofar as I did become a woman after a period of intense psychological trauma, in which I lost any grip on myself and who I was, and had to essentially reconstruct a new self out of the mess, and that new self was a woman) (so suck on that, Plato, I did it, I moved further from ever returning to the star where I apparently belong). And that’s to say nothing of the fact that Plato casts the universe as existing inside of a woman’s body -- I suppose in her w()mb, in her “()” (her negative space), because where else is there space inside a woman for an entire universe, what with all those sensations happening? The universal vagina can be a number of things, and one of them is that, the fact that the universe is practically held softly within one. That typifies how ‘femaleness’ has often been seen, the core contradiction of it being both a maligned social position and a pure, natural one, the weaponisation of female-ness by misogynistic and racist right wing forces as something they must protect from an imagined other, for example.

Andrea Long Chu’s book Females is based around a basic psychoanalytic principle that, as she puts it, “Everyone is female, and everyone hates it” (20). Her evidence for this concept is that she defines a female as “any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another.” Freud never found a definition for what a woman was, and his psychoanalysis of women is famously, for want of a more expansive description, wrong. He turns to Plato in trying to understand gender and sexuality: “Are we to follow the clue of the poet-philosopher and make the daring assumption that living substance was at the time of its animation rent into small particles, which since that time strive for reunion by means of the sexual instincts? That these instincts—in which the chemical affinity of inanimate matter is continued—passing through the realm of the protozoa gradually overcome all hindrances set to their striving by an environment charged with stimuli dangerous to life, and are impelled by it to form a protecting covering layer? And that these dispersed fragments of living substance thus achieve a multicellular organisation, and finally transfer to the germ-cells in a highly concentrated form the instinct for reunion? I think this is the point at which to break off.” (47) This paragraph shows Freud essentially airing his own doubts about his understanding of gender (and sexuality, he seems to glue both things together into one subject) and becoming caught up in the materialism of Plato’s beliefs rather than engaging with the emotions behind them, what this desire for a sexual reunification symbolises. That this should be a moment of doubt for Freud, (“I might be asked whether I am myself convinced of the views here set forward,” he says right after this, “and if so how far”) is fascinating. Long Chu advances this idea of the human drive for sexual/gender unification (or re-unification, if we are basing this off of the Greeks) by claiming that we already find ourselves all grouped under the social category of female, which is not actually a sexual or gendered term but an “universal existential condition, the one and only structure of human consciousness. To be is to be female: the two are identical.” (21) Freud’s ideas on gender then, and Plato’s before him, are only attempts to explain what a female is, because they see it as a difficult thing to grapple with even in a theoretical sense -- they must strive to cosmology for an answer, because the category of female is not a physical role, it is, perhaps, a spiritual one. 

Carol Ann Duffy, to whom this book is dedicated, has a terrible poem from her book The World’s Wife called Frau Freud, in which she tries to inhabit Freud’s wife, but also, in a way, tries to imagine a Freud that is female and therefore superior at understanding gender: “ladies, dear ladies, the average penis - not pretty .../the squint of its envious solitary eye ... one's feeling of pity …” Duffy, attempting to eviscerate the idea of penis envy completely, ends up focusing so much on how it looks, how it might be described, that she sort of reverses back into confirming that there is something minside everybody that desires a penis, and that desires to use it, because the feeling of pity requires an element of empathy, an element of… imagining yourself in that position, correct? Freud believed the conception of one’s gender identity happened during the ‘phallic phase’, but this theory only applies to penises as “the female genitals remain unrecognized for a long time to come; in its attempt to understand the sexual processes, the child clings devotedly to the venerable cloacal theory which is, genetically speaking, entirely justified.” (47) I remember being told that boys have a “willy” while girls have “a hole”, so there definitely is truth in this idea of “cloacal theory”, and that girls grow up knowing, more specifically, being told, that they have different genitalia to boys, but that boys have to come to this realisation themselves at a later point… that boys assume that girls are different in some other way, but they still share the same genitalia, because the possibility of not having a penis is unthinkable. That everyone shares the same genitalia. That everyone shares the same universal h(o)le. Adults think like this too. We accept (somewhat) variation between penises but less so variation between vaginas. Of course, men often still feel inferiority complexes based on the size of their penises, which is not so different from the idea of Freudian penis envy… and it’s pretty understandable from there how you get to the idea that everyone is female, if you are to base your concept of female-hood on having these sorts of psychological traits. This sort of concept germinates in Freud: “We call everything that is strong and active ‘male’ and everything that is weak and passive ‘female’,” (122) for example. 

I don’t agree, in fact, with Long Chu’s hypothesis, because I don’t think that female is a useful social class, and any use that it has is entirely disintegrated by positing that it encompasses everything. What I would venture to say is that everybody is dysphoric (and, yes, that everyone hates it), because I do not find there to be a meaningful distinction between the ideas of penis envy/castration anxiety and what we have come to know as dysphoria. Long Chu says that “the castration complex is easily mistaken for the fear that one will be castrated; in fact, it is the fear that one, having been castrated, will like it.” (38) Dysphoria is, I think, partly rooted in fear. Most people first encounter the idea of changed sex in the form of fear, in the form of tabloid horror stories of botched circumcisions leading to a change of sex and such like. It also comes from a fear of one’s own body, from a fear that it is not right… the want for a bigger penis is functionally not that different from the want for someone without a penis to have one, because both parties desire the same thing. It is a scary thing to consider one’s own body and how it might be perceived by others. Freud doesn’t account for transness because it doesn’t really fit his own theories, that everybody innately has a wish/fear of being the other sex. Transness breaks that mold because it implies that, even if this is a shared, universal experience, it is experienced to different degrees, so much so that some people experience it enough that they can actually make that switch. When I say that these envies and anxieties are functionally the same as dysphoria, I do not mean that everybody is trans: I experience dysphoria very differently than, I imagine, the president of the United States does, or an average mid-level Banker in Japan (although in both regards, and I mean this sincerely, it is impossible to know). I experience dysphoria in a way that makes me trans, that is, I experience it in a way that means I think my life would be greatly improved by undergoing a medical sex change. There is talk within my community that has been going on for a very long time about whether it is possible to be trans without being dysphoric, and yes, I believe it is insofar as transness is the active choice to transition, but I believe that dysphoria is a pretty fundamental side effect of how gender has been constructed and therefore it seems unlikely that anybody would want to transition if they do not experience dysphoria, but, more properly, somebody can be trans even if they experience dysphoria in a different way than I do. There is not a universal trans experience. Freud believed that castration anxiety was “the central experience of childhood,” (129) but he does seem to never account for the fact that the loss of a penis and the construction of a vagina from it is an actual possibility (and it was in his lifetime, Lili Elbe lived at the same time as him).

In SCUM Manifesto, Solanas writes that “if men were wise, they would seek to become really female, would do intensive biological research that would lead to men, by means of operations on the brain and nervous system, being able to be transformed in psyche, as well as body, into women.” (114). This appears to have been a very important line for Long Chu. In her piece “On Liking Women” she writes that it “took my breath away. This was a vision of transsexuality as separatism, an image of how male-to-female gender transition might express not just disidentification with maleness but disaffiliation with men. Here, transition, like revolution, was recast in aesthetic terms, as if transsexual women decided to transition, not to “confirm” some kind of innate gender identity, but because being a man is stupid and boring.” I can agree with the final part. Being a man for me was defined by chronic indecision, and general social cluelessness. For Solanas, then, and of course we can never entirely take her at her word, the inherent difference between “man” and “woman” is that a man is not a woman, despite having the power to be one, and for Long Chu a man is not a woman because he makes the fundamental choice not to be one… as I’ve already said, I think everybody is dissatisfied with their shape and form and gender, and building on Freud everybody probably has this desire to feel what the ‘other side’ feels. This can complicate transness. As I say, “Am I a girl, do I just want a cunt?” and “Am I a girl, do I just have a cunt?” Be you a girl or not, we all share a cunt, we either have one, or we want one, or we don’t want one. It’s a universal hole. It’s a universal vagina. It’s inescapable. To everybody from your Great Aunt Ethel to Muammar Gaddafi.Everybody has a cunt, and everyone hates it.