Some thoughts on whiteness and trans genre (ie writing and authorship)...(thread)

I was mulling over Preciado’s astonishing claim in An Apartment on Venus that “sex change and migration” are the signature “crossings” that undermine contemporary citizenship...

...and part of the objection to this claim might be that the way it aims to link race and transness—through the “and”—does the opposite. It separates them as discrete, equivalent matters...

...so that who disappears is the trans migrant, so often a poor, brown trans woman, who cannot deploy “crossing” in the cool trans way that Preciado claims for himself.

And so I think “trans” is actually the category that covers over the undisclosed inter-racial relation of Preciado to the unimaginable trans woman of color migrant.

And that this object lesson broadens as follows: trans is a genre of disavowal in many cases of a racial haunting of the author, given that the modern genealogy of the category is assumed to be sexological, colonial, and white-autobiographical.

I can’t hype enough @cawkward_rich’s call to consider what other textual genealogies there are for trans than the white colonial, sexological one. Genealogies that would arrive elsewhere than trans as a white thing that has to find its racialized other,

because it seems like to avoid erasing the trans woman of color, so much trans writing instead idealizes her to reveal the constructedness of the white trans author, especially when he’s masc...

...thinking here of the brilliant discussion of this at the end of semester merting in @graceelavery’s seminar, with @daniel_m_lavery and @jordy_rosenberg.

I wonder what “trans” writing or genre would look like if it didn’t have to start with its whitened, colonial-sexological-autobiographical mode and THEN establish a relation to racialized subjects...

...in other words, how would a pluralized, trans of color ground for trans genres disrupt this very problem and proliferate beyond trans as it is currently being marketed and consumed?