Thursday morning in mid-December: a sudden call from a hospital. I was in my office, talking and having a casual discussion with Sofyan and Ridha about politics, dissertations, and everything else in-between. I didn’t pick up the call right away. I quickly sighed. The last time they called me, they moved an appointment (which I had to wait for six months) three weeks further from the initial one. The last time made me weeping as I blamed myself for not taking things earlier. This time I was more prepared for a delay.
“Hello.” “Yes, this is me.” “Tomorrow at 8 am? [pause] Yes, of course, I’m available.” “Okay. Mmmm should I bring anything?” “Alright. Okay. Thank you. See you tomorrow then.”
Sofyan and Ridha still continued the conversation, while I was taking time to process. I stared at my table for a few second. The call was not a delay. It was an acceleration. “Guys, the surgery office moves my appointment a month earlier.” I smiled, perhaps too widely. I could not hide feelings. They congratulated. My heart elevated like a balloon. Is this happening, is this not happening, is this happening, I hope I don’t jinx it. When Pepe finally came to the office, I told them and asked if they’re free to accompany me tomorrow. They said yes, and later spent a night in my apartment so we and Bram could wake up together in the morning and walked together to the hospital.
As I’m writing this, I try to remember what happened on the next hours and days after that call. I was still on my screen for hours reading news and updates and writings about Palestine, Sudan, Syria, and of course, Indonesia; also books, movies, music, whatever within the reach of scrolling fingers. Bram and I moved around preparing for a gathering with Sofyan and Ridha’s families and Ebi and Dindul. My mind occasionally jumped to Semarang because I missed out my sister’s engagement and big family gathering. I missed my friends in Jakarta, Surabaya, and Bussum Netherlands. I had to keep up with my own dissertation deadline and job application. I visited a psychiatrist and physician to consult, and tried to regulate my emotions and keep them in an euthymic state. The last ten days of December felt like a long dream where I do a lot of things and not quite.
I keep telling myself that my little life doesn’t have to be strangers’ spectacles or amusement or cautionary tale. I like to post things on social media and blog site but I also keep most things by myself that I’m trapped with the seesaw game of sharing too much or not at all (millennials like me are cursed). What should I do with this fact that I’m pursuing a surgical affirmation and that it’s getting nearer yet I’m afraid things will fall apart? One voice: You should keep it for yourself and your closest ones. Another voice: I know you want to write about it, you want to make meanings out of it; just do it. Transparency and openness doesn’t attract me—I adore opacity. But I also love to write about life, mine or others. And I also want to try some stuffs on writing about life, mine or others,
And and and, I’m unsure if this attempt—of essay—works for … what? Perhaps nothing aside for thinking (or, trying to think).
A beautiful and controversial book (more like a pamphlet) by Andrea Long Chu, Females, makes another return to me. Debuted by Verso in 2019, the book made a roar with an idea summarized by its first sentence: “Everyone is female.” Chu was deliberate in her ways of making a polemic. Polemic is useful to challenge stable ideas, whatever the ideas are. Polemic is dangerous. Polemic is funny and often sound silly. Polemic tries to make sense through seemingly “non-sense” statements such as “everyone is female.”
Polemic makes visible such a desire of making sense. In Chu’s polemic, Valeria Solanas and her SCUM Manifesto and her twice attempts of killing Andy Warhol were the object of attention. “Valerie has been arresting me with her desires for a long time. […] a friend alerted me to the existence of a pornographic video in which a female teacher uses a quotation from the SCUM Manifesto to seduce two female students, turning them into lesbians. This made instance, perfect sense. It’s what Valerie did to me.” I re-read my annotation, written under that paragraph, “It’s what you did to me too, Andrea.”
I return to Females through a memory not of Andrea’s words but her effects on me as I desire her attachment to an object, I desire her flowing thought, seductive enough to make me moaning out of intellectual satisfaction. “Gender transition, not matter the direction, is always a process of becoming a canvas for someone’s else fantasy.” Almost like a fact though it’s not, the insistence in this statement, simple in grammar and syntax yet complicated in its philosophical arrival and departure, attracts me. In the middle of self-confessing narratives about transition that many trans-people tell to themselves and public others, Chu’s words makes me battle with the ambivalence about transitioning I have hold almost for the rest of my adolescent and adult life. Desire of transitioning is relations (and in relations), and less about something inherent from oneself that it comes up as pure metaphysical essence of one’s identity.
But my summary of Females is lazy, vague, and boring. (The main reason I don’t do much book reviews anymore is I increasingly hate a kind of book talk that have no judgment, no thinking through, lukewarm takes and mere affirmations). My obsession with Females is not because I like Chu’s thesis so much that it makes me recognize my own ambivalence. It’s because Females makes me confronting the nonconsensual adjective of desire to the point I make a plea of wanting to be all kinds of gender and have all kinds of sex. To denounce other’s fantasy, of saying “no I don’t consent to your fantasy” assuming we could and would enact, requires an identification about our own desire of and for others wherein we also breach the consensual boundaries of themselves. Through our desire, we can harm and hurt each other, as well we can have sex and be intimate.
This embodiment of female, of being fucked but not wanting to be fucked from which the pleasure and displeasure of being fucked—hard—outpouring: I know that, not too much (I only live three decades) but enough to recognize fuckery troubles and jouissance. So, it feels a little bit embarrassing to acknowledge the possibility of perpetual transition out of ambivalence getting intensified that transition is the only way, and it has always been happening and will be. This is how Females opens my physical and affective horizon of gender transition. The other’s fantasy and my fantasy, as the other’s other, about my body fuck each other.
“Dear love, I hate my chest and mastectomy is the only way, but you can touch it for the last, for us. I am your (fe)male. Say goodbye to this body together.”
I sent an email to the hospital’s administrator: the letters are in. They will proceed with insurance authorization. I feel good. I have nothing to complain. I’m grateful, as so far, things are going well. I don’t want to jinx it. I hope I’ll soon have a date. But if things don’t go as I’ve planned, I believe I will find another way. The words of trans-writers are always with me. I will battle with them again and for another time.
Nik Setiadarma 