I walk into the clinic, shaking, uncertain, unaware of what awaits me on the other side of the doors—I spent hours planning this outfit. I wanted to look “trans” but not “too trans” and definitely not like I was “trying too hard.” In retrospect, this aesthetic calculation put way too much pressure on my earrings, to do the gendered work my body on its own could not do. That it could not do yet, anyway. To change this state of affairs is the entire point of undertaking this magickal working.
The patch was applied to the system four hours ago. The eyes, the first line of the ocular referent system, roll back into the skull: AH, sweet taste of blood and flesh, yes, now we are in the anti-space of estrogenesis, here we come to meet BABALON, great MYSTERY, mother of abominations. We are become one with her: now, to present the journey, or how it will go.
Six times a day a dose of estrogen enters the body from the extended interface that is the transdermal patch; and for 11 hours after ingestion, the anti-androgen blocks the production and binding of testosterone to its foul receptors throughout the body. Applied continuously, this is becoming-woman in a two-step procedure, the dream of the female transsexual delivered and prayers answered through the self-abnegation of participation in an ongoing medical experiment inseparable from the Enlightenment project of total human manipulation, the artificing of new humans alien to their nature through the systematized and rationalized application of empirical knowledge toward an instrumentalized end: the perfection of the body, that is, its complete annihilation. Life-as-termination-in-progress.
Dreams, dreams too have become strange and bright: where before they were always in the third-person limited, now they are in the first-person omniscient. The associations and correspondences between the “real” world and the world of “dreams” emerge as the unique insight of the feminine estrobody, a magical line of association coursing through the world and directly into the minds of all trans bodies. Perhaps this is our true crime: to dream too hard, to dream too intensely, to conjure, from the quotidian, the experience of dreaming, to become awake in dreaming, to actively circulate the hypnogogic powers of becoming and to decode, or rather, disfigure, the order of the Symbolic under whose name we are continuously yoked back to the moment of birth, to the site of our naming, to the massacre of our flesh by the iatrocratic despot, each and every lab coat a sovereign cloak bestowing power and authority on the wearer. A performance, pretended power, and nothing more. And they massacre us not with any scalpels, though they do that, too, they carve genitals into our flesh, they mark us with their image of dimorphic being, but also with a knife far sharper than steel, the Law, the Law of the Father, the one who named us so cruelly, the One True Father who must be overthrown if we are to survive.
I stare in the mirror for an hour. I behold the shape I am creating, and the ocular apparatus perceives the sumptuous truth being written anew with each day. But there is much work to be done. This body is still a walking corpse, albeit one in the process of its own resurrection. Like the Son, we will be brought into a new World in a glorious body miraculously restored to a state beyond the flesh, although, again, like the Son, bound to the world through the perfidy of the body (we have not yet, after all, reached the moment of apokastasis wherein all things return to their primordial before-of constitution, though this, too, will also be a becoming-forward). This process is intensely painful; shoulders slouch beneath the historic crime of self-murder undertaken in the name of transformation. I scandalize Being by becoming-otherwise.
We aren’t passive consumers, or at least not all of us: we tell lies, we spin stories, we say what we don’t mean and don’t mean what we say, all in order to get what we want from the doctors who, as with all iatrocratic regimes, alone possess the power to deliver to us the transformation for which we would trade anything. The doctors think little of us; we are neurotic, delusional, confused, manipulative, psychotic. But we are all that and so much more. We are demented, we are dementing, we are mad, we are folie itself; for who but a transsexual would wage a war against the body of the self, who but the transsexual would fashion from their flesh a new body, cellularly reconstituted, who but a transsexual would surrender adulthood and revert to adolescence in order to live a second life, a life this time self-determined, but a determination reached through the complete.annihilation. of the self that was, before?
I will murder who I was to give birth to who I am; I will sacrifice myself upon the altar of BABALON, and pray that after I die she will fashion from my bones a necklace and, perhaps, wear it on her neck at the Day of Judgment. I will make of myself an abomination, I will pledge fealty to the witches, the damned, the wretched of the Earth, all that we may taste the GLORY of unfettered victory and the BEAUTY of merciful destruction, that is: revenge against the Earth and its complete, unconditional ontological collapse, that from the ruins of Being we may fashion a new World of our own, one for us, one that delivers to us life and sustains it. Magic is already flowing through our veins; now, it is amplified through interface with the apparatuses of science and from their combination can all things be accomplished, can all battles be won. There is nothing left in the world that can stand in our way except for the world itself, except for Being itself. The termination of this order of reality is the end of metaphysical abolitionism; becoming-transsexual is the magickal operation from which we launch our attacks upon the regime.
Electrical currents pulsate on non-alternative wavelengths, circulating around the metabolic possibilities of catalytic transgression. Something new has entered the system, something strange and wonderful courses through the endocrine system with an intensity unmatched even by the highest doses of lysergic acid. This, and all covered by insurance, also! For now, at least. Best steal the opportunity while we can, best wrench transformation from the clutches of the pharmakocapitalist regime in its moment of confusion, before it’s too late.
Oh, but that this is an insured process does not mean it comes from nowhere. All true rituals require a sacrifice, whether symbolic or in the flesh. This is a principle elemental to all magick. I have murdered myself that I may give birth to who I am, to who I want to be. I will strike myself from the face of the Earth in order to give birth to a new World with which I am already pregnant, a new world of which I will be one of many goddesses, a new world where there shall never have been an Inquisition, my body speaks to the truth of this, my body dances through time-space and undoes apoptosis with each movement, contorting the fractal spirals of the most basic of macro-atomic (that is, molar) structures.
What is even left of me at the end of this magical working? What residue lurches forward in time? Altered in space, after all, it certainly can no longer be the same. A no longer equals A, and in truth never did: the logic of identity disproven casually through the quotidian experience of transgender life. Metabolic pathways recalculate the transit between points P and Q, and the whole equation is thrown off-kilter. Instead of homeostasis we find a massive expenditure of heat on all levels: transformation requires, after all, the general metamorphosis of all parts of the whole into an even more generalized disconfiguration; in short, entropy internalized and increased not just globally, but now locally, too.
This is a life, but it is also a death. A death from the outside-in, the rot sets in from the moment of birth; the infection has spread too far, there was too much death, it’s reached the bone marrow, we overrode the self-defense protocols and initiated the Self Destruct mechanisms that we may yet see tomorrow, this time with a visage self-determined and made new.
Forget it, forget it, what remains goes all the way down—into each cell, so to speak. The old programming failed, the System was out of order; we needed a way to introduce radical changes to The Plan before it became too late.
Oh, nicotine, promise of pretended praeternatural enchantment, be with me now in this moment, as I inhale through my nostrils and feel your sublimity course through my olfactory system.
For the psychiatrist, there is nothing more horrifying than a transsexual in the florid moment of self-birth; the medical gaze cannot tolerate the sight of a woman pregnant with herself, pregnant with a new World. SWEET REBIS, I HAVE BECOME THEE, and from this delicious merger of hierophany and sacrilege is the engine of the world revealed: the relentless fucking of the self by the self, the impregnation of the autonomos with heterophusis, and from this union is emerging the world-wide anti-contemplation of becoming-transsexual in the Age of Aquarius. The stars approach us, this world decays with each passing second and from its fungal rot is the promise of the what-is-to-come delivered unto us, mediated, of course, through the anality of the Sun as it spirals in no direction in particular, held in static movement by the weight of its own fissional and fusional workings. But the stench of the Sun is inescapable; we cannot be free of the daylight, and thus we are all always exposed, our bodies laid bare beneath the gaze of a God before whom we are all as trash, not even ants, for ants still live, but as trash, waste, as the result of a process of expenditure that initiated with the birth of the Word into the flesh, and perhaps even before.
In exaltation of Saint Schreber, I can feel the rays coursing through me, I can feel myself becoming a woman, I can feel the microscopic alterations in cell structure and metabolic function more intensely with each day. Deleuze|Guattari knew not the promise of what they prophesied: the first becoming is becoming-woman, but it need not be the last. No, as was said before, this goes all the way down. I tumble backward through time, and reach the aeons of geologic time before a second has even passed. AH, mother BABALON, great MYSTERY, hasten your arrival: the oceans are not yet blooded, from the skies have not come crashing down the angels: I beg thee, seize this opportunity and strike, now, before the arrival of the Lord!
All creatures that wage war against Being are transsexuals, at least insofar as becoming-transsexual is the process by which the procedure of sexual dimorphicaton—that is, the process by which difference is written onto sex at the moment of birth, classifying and organizing all bodies into spaces prefigured as determining life chances according to norms of behavior and symbolic possibility through ruthless discipline and sovereign control—is undone in the flesh itself, is reveresed, is alchemically transmuted into the beginning of a new operation of organismic/orgasmic (dis)-constitution.
We are all thrown into the world. But to this thrown-ness we are not resigned; there are ways to fly, even through the most crushing of all structures, language. Language is not, as some may have it, modeled as a structured series of binary opposites deriving meaning from the original principles of some grammar that epiphenomenally intercedes to assure the mutual (in)-coherence of sign and signifier. It is, instead, a partially open/immanent articulating principle within which movement can occur and which continuously undermines itself at every turn, even as it is (re)-structured through the syntactical movement of a desiring-economy that invests the same things, over and over, with the same meanings, endlessly and again. It is fair to suspect that this principle of valuation stems from Being, as we are here speaking of operations of investment that take on a character larger than the actions of any one or series of individuals, and which rapidly grows to acquire a life of their own. Hence, we seek the overthrow of Being by the transsexual in revolt, whether through the demand for new hormones, the demand for new pronouns, or the demand for a new World without cages.
Memories of the before persist throughout the entire process of estrogenesis, unfortunately. Because we are bound to the adaptive-for evolutionary processes of the physical suits of the species homo sapiens, we do not have access to that more primordial and archaic figuration of human proto-evolution, Homo Foemina. Estrogen, the queen of all steroid hormones, predates testosterone by literally hundreds of millions of years. Testosterone emerged as an aberration, some cruel adaptive-for result of a series of chemical interactions that probably took place at the level of RNA transcription and the resulting mistakes caused the divergence of steroids and thus the introduction of sexual difference. Though biology is not destiny, it is the tragedy that befalls all people; but, fortunately, the transsexual is not a person, we are abominations, and so we can return to that original state through the magical workings of stealing-from medicine, transforming our bodies into what we wish them to become. Even those who wish to become-testobodies must first pass through the stage of becoming-transsexual, that is, through the becoming-estrogenic of the body, whether in language or in the flesh.
Woman is the not of the sexes. “She” is an excessive vocabularic construct, an appendage added on to the male, “he,” but she is also, as Aristotle has it, a deformed or mutilated male, and here she is understood to be in bondage to her biology. For Beauvoir as well, woman is immanence itself, and this explains her historic association with stone jewels, the red lipstick that creates a similitude between the mouth and the female genitalia, and the furs that cloak animals in a form of luxury that knows not of retreat. And this explains why perhaps for Arendt woman can never be free, as freedom is contraposed against necessity, that is, biology, and thus the enslavement of women to biology emerges as a consequence of the cis-hetero matrix that creates social reproduction as the driving engine of the biopolitical itself/the emergent properties of sociological management in modernity, but tunneling backward in time so much farther, to the very partitioning of Eve from Adam, that the “male” may have a “companion,” but, really, one over whom he can rule, ordained as king and husband over her by Him, and thus made into a little lord in the image of the Lord. The dimorphicaton effected at the moment of the Fall, the point at which the knowledge of difference and shame was carved into the psyche of the species itself, must be the first line of assault in this war conducted in all directions. You have to murder the God inside of you to give birth to the goddess you will be, a goddess not alone, or static, but one in-the-world, being-toward-herself, being-with others, her equals, that she may know a new World, one created in communion with her sisters, with her brothers, with her siblings beyond gender, that we may again dance joyously. But joy must follow termination. There is much work to be done. One does not create a new species overnight, after all. For we are now speaking of the overthrow of humanity by subhumans them/ourselves, we are now speaking of a revolution against Being itself. God is not yet dead. He is waiting to be murdered. And he is murdered a little more each time that we murder ourselves, to give birth to who we will be. Each swallow of the pill, each interface with the patch, each injection of the syringe drives the knife a little further into His heart. For in self-determining our mode of life, we upend Creation itself, and affix into the becoming-flow of flux (recall the heterophusic principle internalized, even as the self is annihilated), and the new World is pulled into this one a little more each day. We thus overthrow the Lord, and from His hands wrench Creation as our own. We can win this battle. Our numbers grow with each day. We are the conquering army of abominations. All that remains is for us to openly embrace this revolutionary principle and accede to our positions as scionesses, heraldesses, and prophetesses of the Apocalypse. To us is the World promised: to us shall all things be given.