Wanting to See and Know: Positives and Negatives of Trans Visibility

A tiny Chanukah reflection

Hanukkiah by Tucker Lieberman, based on chandelier by Gerd Altmann on Pixabay

The Chanukah menorah lights up, and I think about questions of visibility.

On the “double-edged sword” of trans visibility, Florence Ashley writes:

“It helps people realize that they’re trans. You have more access to trans narratives, which gives you more space to understand yourself, and that’s very positive. But at the social and political level, it has been quite negative. We’re seeing a lot more people who vehemently hate trans people, who are even willing to harm trans people. Whereas people who are favorable to trans people largely just leave us alone.” — Florence Ashley, interviewed by OpenMind

I think this means:

Trans people’s visibility to ourselves is productive. When we see ourselves, we have to face ourselves. There’s a reckoning, a character formation. It’s hard at times, but it’s a net positive.

Yet our visibility to others can be a net negative. Those who accept us treat us as they treat everyone else, while those who are intolerant can be intensely harmful. On balance, being seen tends to be a drag.

And so we have to manage our visibility. We want to see ourselves, but we don’t always want to be seen. We find ourselves modulating our comings and goings, our indwellings and outings. It’s very serious business.

“Modulations of visibility aren’t always about life or death, but also, at some level, they are. How much shit can you metabolize and still be expected to keep on living, to keep on desiring this world?” — Hil Malatino, *Trans Care*

There is no single answer. The “right thing to do” depends on what any one person sees, metabolizes, and wants.

One thing we know:

The language we use shifts the categories we perceive.

Our terms for transness, the formal definitions we’d give if asked, the way we informally speak: these are the detectors with which we make our way through the world.

Sometimes it feels right to change our language, and when we do so, we change what we metabolize, and we gear up our engine to keep going. There are life drives and death drives. There are knowledge drives too. We go the way that points onward.

Snail by Tania Melnyczuk on Unsplash