Independent publishing and archival

Drawing on forking practices in software development, sampling practices in audio production, my work with collage art, and the speculative archival work of Saidiya Hartman, I've been trying to develop new artistic forms more sensitive to the networked nature of our histories and futures. Enter incarnations: a literary form in which you rewrite a historical text and set it in a far future, and write it from the perspective of your future self. The form also functions as a strategy for intervening in processes of “copyright”-making by challenging traditional conventions of authorship and (self-)publishing. Finally, incarnations also fall under a new, umbrella genre of speculative writing I call autofabulation, conceived as an explicitly anti-colonial, anti-imperial, and anti-oppressive artform intended to allow its practitioner to actively work towards liberation. This event will also include generative prompts that encourage participants to engage in their own forms of speculative archival work, including—but not limited to—writing their own incarnations.

Content/trigger warnings: Discussions of colonialism, slavery, white supremacy, capitalism, anthropological dehumanization, mental health (depression), death, and transitioning; brief references to parental abuse, parental death, illness (cancer), economic apartheid, torture, lynching, amputation, medically transitioning, and transphobia; oblique references to current U.S./world politics

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Dear [REDACTED],

A week ago, I was certain what I would offer you in this space.

I've had the honor of teaching others about incarnations and autofabulation three times now: last summer, to creative nonfiction writers at a seminar hosted by Tin House, a small press and esteemed literary institution; and twice in the last few months during two virtual workshop series hosted by Relatively Queer, a small community of queer and trans creatives that I was invited to join as a co-facilitator after meeting one of the other co-facilitators in the Tin House seminar. They listened to me read an incarnation aloud during the seminar, and were compelled to correspond with me via e-mail about archival work, speculative writing, and the mechanisms of (neo)colonialism (among other topics), and soon I was formalizing what I'd developed around autofabulation into a workshop curriculum and presentation slides.

My original intention was simply present you with a slightly modified, more “tech-oriented” version of the materials I'd previously created, but a series of strange and unpredictable events this week has pushed me off this path and onto another one.

Bear with me, if you will.

More background: I was admitted to the Tin House seminar after submitting an unfinished draft of the second chapter of a book project written as a series of a letters to my younger self. I wrote the first chapter, and had the idea to turn it into a book project, after a publication reached out to solicit a piece from me, the first and only time this has happened to me since I began taking the work of writing professionally seriously. The editor who solicited the piece reached out because she had read an early draft of my forthcoming essay collection as a reader for one of the small presses to which I had submitted it; they didn't accept it, but another of their readers was the one who connected me to the small press that eventually did accept it for publication. The essay collection only came together in the first place because I took all of the writing I did in 2023, during the first year of my medical transition, and then assembled it into a little book, the idea being to use the sales from the book to fund mutual aid projects like the one I started in January 2023, Art, Strike!, which was essentially the catalyst for everything I wrote that year.

This is a lineage.

The connective tissue here (the line of this lineage) is one of tiny interactions. My publisher, tRaum Books, noted recently that they've never held an open submission period. Every book they've ever published has found them through one connection here or elsewhere in the vast and sprawling network of small connections people make online. My book is no exception. The correspondence I've had with tRaum's founder, Rysz, has produced some of the most impactful writing I've ever read and/or written; as is the case with my correspondence with alks, my former Art, Strike! co-editor, whom I met in a comment thread on a now-defunct, short-lived, and little-known microblogging platform; as is the case with some new correspondence that began this week on precisely the topics of this session with a relative stranger on the fediverse; as is the case with my connections to and with the Relatively Queer community; as is the unidirectional correspondence I've had with my younger self in the aforementioned epistolary essays.

As is, perhaps, the correspondence we are embarking on right now.

Black and white timeline of the events detailed in the preceding section (2023 to 2025). Dots along a straight line in the center labelled, from left to right: Art, Strike! (mutual aid project); The Ecology of Art, Strike! (essay collection); Split/Lip Press tiered rejection (connects me to my publisher, tRaum Books); Under the Sun reaches out (essay solicitation); The Trans Girl's Guide to Grey's Anatomy, chapter two (unfinished draft); Tin House seminar; Relatively Queer (virtual workshop series); FluConf 2025.

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exhortation

Draw a straight line across a blank page. What series of events brought you to this moment? What tiny interactions, online or otherwise, facilitated your ability to be present here? Who is part of your lineage? What else is that lineage comprised of? Mark these on the line with labeled dots. Go as far into your history as necessary to get as clear a sense as possible of how you got here. Honor momentous occasions. Honor mundane ones equally. How integral have small connections been to your journey through this life? How integral are they certain to be moving forward?

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As a child and teenager, in order to escape a household rife with violence and abuse, I spent a tremendous amount of time in libraries. My favorite sections were those where books were for sale, usually for pennies, and often books you'd never find available for checking out (books that were out of print, wholly unpopular, self-published, or otherwise perceived to be relatively valueless). One of these was a writing textbook published sometime in the latter half of the 20th-century; I took it home with me and didn't crack it open for many years after, and only did when I was in my early 20's and facing a stubborn case of writer's block.

One of the chapters was about style; in order to get the writer thinking about what comprises style, it exhorted the reader of the textbook to take a passage written by another writer, and replace all the nouns, verbs, and adjectives in it with nouns, verbs, and adjectives of their own. Everything else was to remain the same: the pronouns, the conjunctions, the structures of the sentences. The idea was to wear another writer's rhythm like a glove, to try it on for the length of a paragraph and see what it felt like. The author's style (their essence), the textbook argued, was not in the content of their writing, but in the unique ways in which they chose to present that content to the reader.

I tried it out for myself with a passage from a short story from my big blue The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (even then, a decade before admitting to myself I was a trans woman, I was always drawn to writing by women, and the main characters of my stories were always women, too).

Immediately, the writer's block vanished. Abandoning the passage I'd tried on like a glove, but remaining deeply inspired by it, I wrote and completed a short story for the first time in years. It was terrible, and I wouldn't show it to anyone even if you paid me, but I did finish it. And the exercise stayed with me.

Many years later, I began taking computer science classes at my local community college with the intention of minoring in the discipline once I transferred to a four-year university. I'd been playing with code since childhood, when my parents enrolled me in a small, free summer program at my elementary school that included curriculum on HTML programming; it was then that I built my first website, which sported nothing more than a menu for an imagined restaurant. I'd taken computer science classes in high school, part of the school's requirements for graduation, being a public science and technology magnet high to which I'd had to apply in a process not dissimilar in intensity to the process I'd go through again four years later, and then again many years after that, in order to make my way into higher ed. But it wasn't until the community college classes that I learned of Git, and version control systems, and the forking of a codebase that can occur during a solo project as you take it in a slightly new direction, or a collaborative project when one or more decide to spin it off into their own.

Many years after that, in Pasadena, California (a city which I like to call Robledo, after the fictionalized version in Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower), I found myself in the midst of a profoundly disabling depressive episode, catalyzed by the diagnosis of my stepfather with stage four colon cancer, the assurance of his imminent death, and my brewing awareness that I was trans and that I needed, more than anything, to muster the courage to tell him before he passed. Trusting a whim whipped up by a long-ago learned strategy for combatting depression—taking on a silly art project—I sat before some blank canvasses I'd bought years before and began cutting up the copious political flyers residents of a city receive in the mail promoting this or that local candidate, or local resolution. I taped the words onto the canvas to form a cheeky critique of the economic apartheid my city, like all others, was deeply invested in maintaining: eliminating rent control, protecting the rights of landlords and property owners, criminalizing homelessness, and so on, and so forth. This was my first collage—the first of what would soon be many.

Less than a year after that, after my stepfather's death—after my failure to come out to him in time, after coming out to my partner and then the world, after starting my medical transition—I wrote a hermit crab essay, a genre-agnostic literary form in which the author takes an otherwise “unartistic” format (like a recipe, product review, or job application) and uses it as the shell for a piece of writing that subverts and/or transcends the format. A tiny excerpt from a pages-long run-on sentence in the piece, titled “Job Application”:

...I am trying to learn to trust my whims more instead of talk myself out of them (I can talk myself out of—or into—anything, which I learned far too late is a very, very bad thing)...

This approach to trusting my whims had drawn me that day into a downtown Pasadena bookstore, where the employees' kindness in trying not to misgender me at a stage in my transition when I felt extremely self-conscious about my gender presentation had made me want to apply to work there (“Job Application” hermit crabs the application I would have filled out had it not been for the fact that the bookstore was apparently very anti-stealing, and asked multiple questions on the form about what you would do in the case of witnessing theft, and, given my staunch belief in the necessity of abolishing the concept of property, plus the fact that a few Reddit threads noted the bookstore's extremely hostile attitude towards its employees, all this made me turn the application into a hermit crab essay instead of actually applying).

Inside the bookstore, though, and before the interaction with the kind employees, trusting my whims made me pick up, for no articulable reason, a book on Martin Luther, about whom I knew little save for his most well-known act: nailing 95 theses to a church door in 1517 and subsequently ushering in the Protestant Reformation. I took the book home with me and began to read it, and all I could see was myself.

The book begins:

In Spring 2017 I was asked to speak from Luther's pulpit. I knew that this would be an emotional experience, because I had spent the last twelve years writing a biography of the reformer. Few biographers get so close to where their protagonist lived and worked, and others who had spoken from the Wittenberg pulpit had told me of its effect on their lives. I knew too that the event would bring back strong memories of my father, who had died just ten months before, and who had been a minister of religion when I was growing up in Melbourne, Australia.

Moments after reading it, I began to type:

In Spring 2117 I was asked to speak in Rivera’s apartment. I knew that this would be an emotional experience, because I had spent the last twelve years of my life writing a biography of the abolitionist. Few writers get so close to where their protagonist lived and worked, and others who had spoken from the Robledo apartment had told me of its effect on their lives. I knew too that the event would bring back strong memories of my stepfather, who had died just two months before, and who had been an organizer around abolitionism when I was growing up in a U.S. American colony.

The Rivera in the second excerpt is me.

This was the first incarnation.

Black and white timeline of the events detailed in the preceding section (1991 to 2023). Dots along a straight line in the center labelled, from left to right: turbulent household/obssession with libraries; first exposure to programming; purchase of writing textbook; first short story completed in years; first exposure to version control systems; diagnosis and death of stepfather; first collage; purchase of book on Martin Luther; first incarnation.

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exhortation

Consider a project of yours that you care about. What events pocked your journey towards it? What texts did you need to access in order to begin? How did you use them? When and why? Who wrote them? What whims did you need to trust in order to begin this journey? What traumas did you needlessly endure theretofore? What coping mechanisms did you develop in response? What have all of these prevented you from doing? Enabled you to do? What firsts did you need to hurdle over in order to get there? How did these coalesce, over time, into this particular project? How have they endlessly shaped it? Draw another straight line across a second blank page. Mark your answers with labeled dots. Go as far back as birth, if needed. Recognize the unceasing current of happenstance. Locate it in all that seems predictable, assured.

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I have a standard definition of incarnations and autofabulation that is included in the abstract for this presentation, but I think the best way to define these terms is to quote directly from my work.

First, an excerpt from the source text for the first incarnation I wrote that explicitly defined the terms:

In 2001, everything changed. Cercas exploded onto the literary scene with his novel Soldiers of Salamis, which sold more than a million copies worldwide, won numerous awards, and was quickly turned into a major film. The novel, which tells the story of how a journalist named Javier Cercas finds an anonymous Republican soldier who spared the life of the fascist ideologue during the Spanish Civil War, swapped the university campus for the reporting trip. But the metafiction was still there, this time in modified form. It no longer involved Escheresque circularity but rather something much more directly self-referential. Cercas had inserted himself—name, image, and likeness—directly into the novel.

Today, we’re used to this kind of writing. It’s called autofiction, and it can be found everywhere in contemporary fiction. In fact, it is to thank for some of the biggest names in literature today: Karl Ove Knausgaard, Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk, Maggie Nelson. The list of practitioners is long. Autofiction describes fictional writing in which the author, narrator, and protagonist share a name, many biographical details, or, most often, both. It is frequently seen as the fictional corollary to memoir, and thus as a genre of “life writing” that prioritizes introspection.

This can come in different flavors: some prefer Knausgaardian novella-length digressions that give rhythm to the mundane chores of daily life, others favor the vibes of the Nelsonian graduate school theory classroom, replete with sex, gender, and philosophy. But no matter what the approach, they all lead in the direction of the self.

Not so for Cercas. His autofictional novels deal with a different kind of intimacy: the intimacy of how to report a newspaper opinion column. Against the popular stereotype of the armchair op-ed writer, opinion journalism, like its newsroom corollary, relies a great deal on facts and, often, on first-hand reporting. Opinion writers might report on the history of feminism or the history of their own family. But the best report all the same. What marks the difference between what they write and what those in a newsroom write has a lot to do with self-reflection, that is, the extent to which opinion journalists avow the persuasive techniques they use in their own writing. Op-ed writing, after all, doesn’t just identify a problem, it proposes a solution.

And now, an excerpt from my incarnation of it:

In 2041, everything changed. Rivera exploded onto the abolitionist scene with her Manifesto for Abolishing Democracy and Civilization, which was distributed to more than a million readers worldwide, sparked numerous burnings, and was quickly banned by several major nation-states. The book, which tells the story of how an abolitionist named Erica Rivera discovers an anonymously written text that accurately prophecies the end of the U.S. empire, swapped the nefarious corporation for the colonial project writ large. But the autofiction was still there, this time in modified form. It no longer involved funhouse-mirror reflexivity but rather something much more prescient and incisive. Rivera had inserted the near-future—in name, image, and likeness—directly into the novel.

Today, we’re used to this kind of writing. It’s called autofabulation, and it can be found everywhere abolitionists and anarchists are. In fact, it is to thank for some of the biggest name in anticolonial agitation today: Aro Nusar, Hi Hi, E.R.E.R., Cheus, I-El. The list of practitioners is long. Autofabulation describes fictional writing in which the author draws on historical knowledge to prefigure a future for themselves that has yet to become. It is frequently seen as the artistic corollary to clairvoyance, and thus as a genre of “prophetic writing” that prioritizes introspection.

This can come in different flavors: some prefer Riveran essay-length incarnations that give new life to the mundane nonfictional writing of the past, others favor the I-Elian community-based antitheory, replete with handwritten annotations, generative exercises, and iterative collaborations. But no matter what the approach, they all lead in the direction of the future.

For Rivera, her autofabulist work deals with a particular kind of intimacy: the intimacy necessary for understanding one’s place in history and trajectory through time. Against the popular stereotype of the armchair activist, autofabulation, like its spiritual corollary, relies a great deal on a deep and strategic entanglement with space-time and, often, on first-hand experience building community. Autofabulists might report on the future of feminism by excavating a “speculative archive” of their potential path through it, based on the real experiences they’ve already had within it. What marks the difference between what they write and what those in traditional literature write has a lot to do with self-reflection, that is, the extent to which autofabulists avow the prophetic techniques they use in their own writing. Autofabulation, after all, doesn’t just identify the conditions of an immediate present, it proposes a shape for the foreseeable future.

Autofabulation—and in particular, this manifestation of it, the incarnation—weaves together all the threads I described in the previous section. It is as much influenced by version control systems and collage art, as it is by the humble writing textbook I stumbled upon as a teenager, as it is by the (speculative) archival work of Saidiya Hartman.

To both explain and tell the story of how I learned of her work, here follows an excerpt from the source text for the incarnation I presented to the people in my Tin House seminar:

In 1910, Dr. Kleiweg de Zwaan went to Sumatra to take facial casts of Nias Islanders. He covered their faces with plaster and brought the masks home. Now in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam you can see a wall lined with the plaster casts of these men’s faces, eyes squinted, mouths shut against the intrusion. This is one kind of research. De Zwaan lacked the imagination to see that Nias Islanders were also people, just like him.

At its worst, heavily researched nonfiction risks becoming not only anti-feminist, but also inherently western and White, in privileging disembodied intellect—the clinical voice, the pretext of objectivity, as well as outside authority—over one’s own lived experience, body, and imagination (though as Toni Morrison has pointed out, imagination itself can be conscripted or constrained by the same biases that drive such clinical research). 

In contrast, one of the powers of autotheory is its push toward embodiment and invention. It refuses the objective voice, the pretense of neutrality, the fabrication that we can be all brain and no body, with body’s accompanying pleasures, embarrassments, and disappointments. It brings in the vulnerable elements of personal narrative and of one’s own body.

One reason Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts has been so popular, and that other works of autotheory including Cvetkovich’s book Depression: A Public Feeling have been so powerful, is that they are vulnerable books, divulging very personal details in ways that are neither confessional nor egoistic, but are instead an offering to readers: here is mine. In this way, they have the power of giving voice to experiences and lives that are more often sidelined, discounted, silenced, marginalized. 

And here follows an excerpt from my incarnation of it, which was eventually published by queer/trans indie publishing pillar fifth wheel press's GARLAND:

Almost sixty years ago, at a moment of great upheaval in the imperial core, I had yet to understand what was ahead of me. I was attempting to squeeze some sliver of economic survival out of a writing practice, and had hastily cobbled together an experimental hybrid novella titled EUPHORIUM. At the time, a service called QueryTracker allowed me to seek out literary agents, a relic of a profession, from a time when art was still largely mediated by capitalist exchange. I found an agent who I believed would understand the work I was trying to undertake and did my due diligence in researching her. She kept a list of the books she was reading on a pre-collapse networked database called Goodreads, and there I spotted a book I’d never heard of: Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. At the time, I couldn’t afford to buy the book and I didn’t have a library card, but I did find a free-to-access scholarly journal article discussing the book and its central conceit: critical fabulation.

Critical fabulation is one kind of research attuned to the fact that the archive is necessarily lacking. Archives regularly draw on what history leaves a record of, and what history leaves a record of is defined and delimited by settler colonialism, white supremacy, cisheterosexism, and biases along all sorts of lines of apartheid that allow the details of one person’s life to be easily excavatable, and the details of another’s to be completely erased. At its worst, archival work is a patchwork quilt filled with gaping holes. It risks telling a narrative that is not only wholly false, but also carelessly upholds what the archivist’s milieu already believes about the subject of the archive. In privileging what is available—the clinical record, the objective document, the authoritative report—over what one senses, intuits, and imagines both about what is and what cannot be available, the archive becomes as fictional a tale as any novel or short story.

Saidiya Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation, as I understand it, was to foreground this idea, to lean into it, to push through it—and to draw attention to the impossibility built into this ambition. In “Venus in Two Acts,” Hartman explores a Black female figure both omnipresent in the archive of Atlantic slavery, and yet whose story or history, or stories or histories, cannot be told, cannot be excavated. She writes: “The intent of this practice is not to give voice to the slave, but rather to imagine what cannot be verified… It is a history of an unrecoverable past; it is a narrative of what might have been or could have been; it is a history written with and against the archive… I have attempted to jeopardize the status of the event, to displace the received or authorized account, and to imagine what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done.”

One reason that Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments has been so popular, and that other works of critical fabulation have been so powerful, is that they are vulnerable texts, divulging the very personal experience of doing archival work in ways that connect one’s present to the past, offering readers a methodology for doing the same: here I am, here we are. In this way, readers have the power not of giving voice to experiences and lives that have been silenced or marginalized, but rather understanding the silencing and marginalizing more deeply, and to do so through an active process of participation, through a terrifyingly incomplete process of connection, reconnection, and disconnection, as a fragmented collage of past, present and future.

Hartman writes: “As I understand it, a history of the present strives to illuminate the intimacy of our experience with the lives of the dead, to write our now as it is interrupted by this past, and to imagine a free state, not as the time before captivity or slavery, but rather as the anticipated future of this writing.”

So, yes, I can write to you to tell you that incarnations are the practice of forking a historical text, setting it in the far future, and centering yourself in this new narrative (for example, by narrating it from the perspective of your future self, as I do in the second incarnation in this section, or by narrating it from the perspective of some other future figure who is writing about you, as I do in the other incarnations I've shared so far), a narrative explicitly defined by its certainty in the triumph of anti-colonial and anti-imperial forces (for example, as is the case for all my incarnations, a storyworld in which the U.S. American empire collapses in the year 2089). And I can tell you that autofabulation is an umbrella term for an emerging genre of work that combines introspective, critical, historical, and speculative writing in order to giving the writer (at least a few of) the tools necessary to determine how they can participate in ensuring such a narrative/storyworld becomes reality.

But these simple, textbook definitions cannot do justice to the magic of writing, or reading, incarnations. As someone who has written and published a handful, and worked on but left unpublished several others, and as someone who returns to read these incarnations over and over again, enough to have memorized entire chunks of them, I can tell you: every incarnation is utterly exhausting to write (and sometimes to read). As I write, I have to hold in my head, all at once: the history being traced by the source text; the future being written by someone far away in time and space as though it is their present, looking back on what will be my history; my own present, as well as the present of the person who will read this today or tomorrow; and everything that will unfold in between these present and that future, which I will eventually traverse, and throughout which others will read this in their own time. It's dizzying. It's mesmerizing. It's terrifying.

The category under which this talk is filed is “Independent publishing and archival,” and as someone who has been doing a lot of both over the last two years, dizzying, mesmerizing, and terrifying are exactly how I would describe this work. I've found that last term, “terrifying,” especially useful as a framework for understanding archival work as it relates to trans and nonbinary peoples, Black and Indigenous peoples, and people of color. There is so much horror to be found and to experience in these archives, so much that is frightening and chilling and appalling, if only because there is a direct throughline between what is there, what isn't (and cannot) be there, and what is and has been unfolding around us right now.

From the transcript of a Relatively Queer session where I talk more about Saidiya Hartman:

Saidiya Hartman is a Black woman writer and academic, whose work has been really influential, for I think all of us [transcriber's note: this is in reference to the three co-facilitators for Relatively Queer, which includes me], especially because it goes beyond reparative archiving. And I’m not super familiar with all of her books, but I had the pleasure of like, sort of, kind of, auditing a course at the Brooklyn Institute around her 2007 book Lose Your Mother, which is about how the slave trade and its associated destructions of archival materials, not just in the form of tangible objects, but also familial connections, how this causes slaves and their descendants to “lose their mothers,” their histories, their countries, their kin and their past.

So she develops this methodology for addressing this that she calls critical fabulation. And it comes out of her own understanding of her own archival or historical work as being a bridge between theory and narrative. In an interview, she says, “I work intuitively, and will follow a trail of documents or my instincts until the project emerges. When writing, I will ask what are some of the key terms that I’m thinking with or that I'm writing against.” For her, archival work is always extremely personal. She writes that “narrating counter-histories of slavery has always been inseparable from writing a history of present, by which I mean the incomplete project of freedom,” and that “this writing is personal, because this history has engendered me.”

So that last quote, and this one, come from an essay of hers, called “Venus in Two Acts,” in which she reflects on her attempts to confront the limits of the archive while writing Lose Your Mother. And she’s reflecting on writing that book and feeling like she’s failed in some way in addressing one particular Black female figure that appears over and over again in the archives relating to the slave trade. In that essay, she goes over the fact that, actually, the archive is almost excessive, in that there is such a meticulous documentation of the violence perpetrated by slave owners against slaves. And she writes: “Scandal and excess inundate the archive: the incantatory stories of shocking violence penned by abolitionists, the fascinated eyewitness, reports of mercenary soldiers eager to divulge what decency forbids them to disclose, and the rituals of torture, the beatings, hangings, and amputations enshrined as law.”

And this quote really doesn’t do justice to just how explicit and graphic the archival materials she's working with are, and she describes some of that in the essay. But because she’s relying on archival materials being produced by oppressors—white lawyers, white surgeons, captains, etc.—she writes that her own writing “falters before the archive’s silence and reproduces its own omissions. The irreparable violence of the Atlantic slave trade resides precisely in all the stories that we cannot know, and that will never be recovered. This formidable obstacle or constitutive impossibility defines the parameters of my work.”

So by the end of “Venus in Two Acts,” what Hartman essentially does is create a non-story or an archival fiction about the Black female figure called Venus. And this story, or non-story, it explores her own wishes for the story she wants to tell. It explores the ways in which the archive both supports and contradicts that story; the ways in which the archive can neither support nor contradict it; and what are the limits of even trying to write that non-story. And she acknowledges it’s totally possible that she hasn’t really succeeded at anything except just drawing attention to the impossibilities built into archival work.

There’s really no sense of closure or a solution to the problem she's describing in “Venus in Two Acts,” but she notes that that’s important. She writes: “Narrative restraint to the refusal to fill in the gaps and provide closure is a requirement of this method. The intent of this practice is not to give voice to the slave, but rather to imagine what cannot be verified, a realm of experience which is situated between two zones of death, social and corporeal death, and to reckon with the precarious lives which are visible only in the moment of their disappearance.”

So, in contrast to reparative archiving— Oh, excuse me.

[transcriber's note: brief silence]

Sorry! I just needed to cough.

In contrast to reparative archiving [transcriber's note: this is in reference to an earlier part of the presentation that explores Lae'l Hughes-Watkins's work with reparative archiving], which seems to take a more material approach to reparations, Saidiya Hartman’s work highlights the utility of imagining, speculating, and negotiating with the limits of archival materials, and trying to exceed the limits of the archive oneself, as well as reckoning with the limits of archival materials, and contesting those limits in a variety of ways.

And this is the kind of the most difficult part of all of this for me to sit with, hence the dizzy emoji [transcriber's note: a large dizzy emoji appeared on the presentation slide during this part of the session]. She also advocates for methodologies that include things that feel like antithetical to academic work or archival work, which includes things like: refusing to provide or refusing to even seek out a sense of closure; denying that closure for the reader; and maybe even also being open to failing, which I think can be its own kind of success.

*Black and white illustration of the incarnatory forking of Living I Was Your Plague: Martin Luther's Life and Legacy by Lyndal Roper. A straight line just off of the left edge of the page begins with a dot labeled with this source text. Diagonal lines branch off of the dot and off the page in forward directions. Further down the straight line is another dot, labelled “there is no writing without editing, there are no futures without presence, and there is no such thing as predestination”. Diagonal lines also branch off of this dot and off the page in forward directions.*

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exhortation

Consider a project you care about, yours or someone else's. Reflect on what it means to offer it freely to others: to allow them to remix, adapt, fork, and incarnate it as they please, to treat it as an open source. What are the potential risks therein (to you, to them, to the project, to your communities)? What are the potential benefits? What kind of world does this approach to a project leave behind? What kind of world might it inaugurate? For the last time, draw a straight line on yet another blank page, but start the line somewhere off of the page's left edge. Label the left edge of this line with a dot and the name of your project. Who would you want to incarnate your work? How would you hope for them to do so? How would you have to treat your own project in order to court these future developments? Draw diagonal lines that begin at the dot at differently angled forward directions. Somewhere along one of those lines, place a single dot. Can you see the future ahead of you yet? Can the future ahead see you?

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I told you at the start that, “A week ago, I was certain what I would offer you in this space,” the epistolary greeting and the you of this quoted sentence implying a singular correspondent.

I alluded near the end of this correspondence to the importance of “refusing to provide or refusing to even seek out a sense of closure; denying that closure for the reader; and maybe even also being open to failing, which I think can be its own kind of success.”

This letter may have ended somewhat abruptly, without providing clear or concrete answers to many implied and unasked questions, including what incarnations mean for conceptions of “copyright” and “intellectual property”; how they may come to transform (self-)publishing; and what kinds of technologies might be best suited (or need to be invented) for an incarnated, autofabulated world.

Additionally, this letter may appear in a public setting, and it may even benefit those who read it but for whom it is not meant, but ultimately, this letter is intended for you, and only for you—whoever you are, whenever you are.

But you know already what this world is. You already know what is happening. You know what you and I must do.

We may not yet know exactly how, but we've always been quick studies.

To quote myself once more:

there's a girl out there watching and now probably laughing, saying, “girl, i literally laid the roadmap out for you.” and she did. and she has.

Black and white illustration of the incarnatory forking of this letter. A straight line just off of the left edge of the page begins with a dot labeled “Forking the historical text: Incarnations, autofabulation, and beyond”. Diagonal lines branch off of the dot and off the page in forward directions. Further down the straight line is another dot, labelled with a question mark. Diagonal lines also branch off of this dot and off the page in forward directions.

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exhortation

Incarnate some or all of this letter. Send it to someone you (want to) know and care about.

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Relevant resources

Relatively Queer, a virtual workshop series and community space for queer and trans folks seeking to recover lost queer and trans traces in their families of origin, broadly defined

Art, Strike!, an online art/literary publication founded on the principles of mutual aid

tRaum Books, a trans-led micropress that will publish The Ecology of Art, Strike!, an essay collection by me, in late 2025

“Job Application,” hermit crab essay

“The Trans Girl's Guide to Grey's Anatomy,” epistolary essay written to my younger self

“Venus in Two Acts,” by Saidiya Hartman, PDF download (131 KB)

“Reparative Acts and the Caste of Archival Erasure,” hour-long presentation given by Lae'l Hughes-Watkins, YouTube link

“Ted Nelson in Herzog's 'Lo and Behold',” three-minute clip from Werner Herzog's documentary Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World, YouTube link

“there is no writing without editing, there are no futures without presence, and there is no such thing as predestination (incarnation of the preface to Living I Was Your Plague: Martin Luther's World and Legacy by Lyndal Roper)”

“there is no self without reflection, there is no mirror without light, and there is no such thing as fabulation (incarnation of an excerpt from The Op-Ed Novel: A Literary History of Post-Franco Spain by Bécquer Seguín)”

“there is no intuition without revolt, there is no movement without a turn, and there is no such thing as speculation (incarnation of Arianne Zwartjes’s “Autotheory as Rebellion: On Research, Embodiment, and Imagination in Creative Nonfiction”),” available to read by downloading Issue 2 of fifth wheel press's GARLAND for any price, including $0, on Ko-fi

“ends,” prose poem

content/trigger warnings: graphic depictions of self-immolation, discussion of genocide

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after “Palestine” by Samuel Mena, Jr.

Photograph of a man with his left arm on fire, clutching his face with his right hand, looking upwards, screaming in pain. Photograph of Samuel Mena, Jr., a photojournalist, his left arm on fire, his agonized face pointed up towards the heavens. Photograph of a light-skinned person in a lilac button-down, press credentials in plastic attached to a lanyard hanging from his neck, his sleeves rolled up, his left arm on fire, his face twisted up, his mouth agape. Photograph of Samuel Mena, Jr., a Mexican American photojournalist, in a light purple dress shirt, its bottom-left corner blown upwards by wind, the bottom-right corner draped over dark pants, where his shirt sits under his arms dampened by sweat, his right sleeve sloppily rolled up, the left sleeve a little more neatly folded, its bottom edge blackened by soot and combusting in flames leading down the shirt towards his elbow and leading up the bare skin of his arm to the point where pinky meets palm, the flame white-hot at the center and yellow-orange at the edges, emanating at least a foot away from his body. Photograph of a young person with his left arm on fire. Photograph of a young man with his left arm on fire, his left hand a half-fist, lifted up towards the sky, his right hand open and over his forehead and eyes. Photograph of a person of conscience with his left arm alight. Photograph of Samuel Mena, Jr., an artist, writer, and activist, his left arm in flames, face torn by exhaustion, body clenched up with pain, torso steady and firm, legs out of frame but holding him upright. Photograph of someone with something to say. Screenshot of a Tweet with the photo described heretofore, posted on October 6, 2024, at 5:37 pm, with 911,000 views, 444 comments, 12,000 retweets, 48,000 likes, 1,700 bookmarks, and the caption reading, in white text on black background, “In his words: ‘To the 10,000 children of Gaza who have lost a limb in this conflict, I give you my left arm.’”

content/trigger warnings: discussions of political violence, imperialism, and colonialism; references to police/state violence and delusional thinking; brief depictions of political assassinations; use of ableist language

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This week is what I call Parable of the Sower week: the seven days leading up to July 20, 2024. This is the day that inaugurates the narrative in Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower, as well as the 15th birthday of its protagonist.

I'm what you might call superstitious about things like this, though I don't know if superstitious is the right word, since I consider myself and claim to be something of a clairvoyant.

I have feared for a very long time that something of great import would occur on the 20th, though I try to approach phenomena like clairvoyance, superstition, and serendipity soberly: things of great import occur every day, at every hour, at every moment. At the same time, things of great import don't really “occur” at all; they unfold, over much longer periods of time than a day, and in tandem with all other things, of import or no, in ways that are inextricable from each other.

Nevertheless, because of my particular vantage, I feel and understand the world in moments, hours, days. It's hard for me to not assign importance to the day at the end of this week, or even to the week itself (despite neither “day” nor “week” being particularly coherent temporal groupings anyways).

I often describe my writing as an attempt to intervene in the thorny political economy of art production, but you could just as well describe it as an attempt to democratize clairvoyance. If pressed, I would admit that I consider these projects to be one and the same. In my essay titled “Inca(r)n(t)ation,” I write:

The truth is that everyone is clairvoyant. Those who already know this know also that its source is trauma; trauma is the catalyst for clairvoyance. This is because clairvoyance is the same as hyperempathy; a better word for it may be hypersensitivity. Clairvoyants are sensitive to everything: the tiniest twitches, the most invisible winds. If you allow yourself to feel enough, you will have visions too.

My visions come to me mostly in my dreams, but also in my writing. Earlier this year, I dreamt a long dream—had a long vision—in which I shot a politician. I transcribed what I remembered of the dream after waking, and then turned it into a short story originally titled “Letters,” and later retitled “Los Anaranjados.” The short story follows three economically precarious siblings as they navigate the chaos initiated by a series of disturbing letters, sent out to seemingly random groups of residents of their unnamed metropolis. Each letter urges its recipient to commit a specific act of murder.

The original title was a nod to the power of language, that a city could be thrust into turmoil by a few handwritten words on paper. The change in title came from the speculative conceit that helped me give narrative coherence to my strange and violent vision.

From the story:

The mayor is holding a press conference, where he announces that he’s the one who’s been writing the letters. I push my way to the front of the crowd because I need to hear him speak. I want to understand.

The mayor says his office commissioned a novel law enforcement program, an artificial intelligence that can determine a person’s propensity for murder. It sorted residents into groups coded by color: fresa red, piña yellow, limón green. Of our populace of millions, eleven percent comprised the first group: extremely likely to kill or fatally injure another person. He says the program was defunded but his conscience remained ablaze. He says he illegally obtained the addresses of those flagged as killers—mailed letters to their residences, to goad them into doing what he thought they’d do anyways, what he’d be powerless to stop unless he got them to do it sooner, got them all off the streets and behind bars in one elegant swoop.

He corrects himself. Six elegant swoops.

Doing it all at once would have overwhelmed the postal service, he explains dispassionately. He says he’s sorry for the trouble and the trauma he’s caused. He says he sees now the error of his ways, and he says nothing else because I shoot him in the chest.

I buy a gun after the third letter because I know it will come in handy. I kill him as a matter of self-defense. As the city protecting itself, acting through me.

“Los Anaranjados” is Spanish for “the orange ones.” It's an oblique reference to the idea that, if there are groups of people “extremely likely to kill or fatally injure another person” (the red ones), and groups of people less likely to do so (the yellow and the green ones), there must also be the orange ones: those only extremely likely to kill or fatally injure another person under very specific circumstances.

For example, as a matter of self-defense.

And in a world riven by colonialism, the vast majority of us are in the business of defending ourselves.

As I wrote this part of the story, I left out a small detail: while the mayor talks about the artificial intelligence and its color-coded groupings, he gestures to a screen behind him. On it, a slide from a presentation depicts the three colors the narrator describes: “...fresa red, piña yellow, limón green.” In my mind, it was a pie chart with big, brightly colored slices, but I couldn't think of a good way to write this into the story, for two reasons. The first was that, earlier in the story, I referenced a “colorful infographic” that ran in the city paper, and I simply didn't think it artful to repeat such a detail. The second, more substantive reason was that I felt it took away from the explanation for the letters, which—at this point in the story—is essentially the story's climax. The city and the characters have been shaken up over the course of six rounds of letters, and the mayor's press conference is the big reveal that purportedly explains what they were all about. (Shortly thereafter, this is revealed to be a charade; the press conference was all lies, for reasons not relevant enough to this essay to explain here.)

I worried that cramming too much detail about the presentation into this moment would take away from the climax: the politician's speech, and the narrator's violent reaction.

***

I've followed the national news this week at something of a distance; I always do. I like to know the broad strokes, not because I think that it can tell me much about reality directly, but because what small fraction of information it has chosen to become the quote-unquote “broad strokes”—and how that fraction of information is depicted—can. Sometimes on social media I'll read a post that says people who watch reality TV are preternaturally intelligent because they are avid scholars of human behavior, but the problem with this thesis is that you are never really seeing human behavior on television, reality or otherwise. Reality TV provides insight into the psyches of reality TV producers, whom I definitely consider an interesting bunch to psychoanalyze, but are certainly not a representative slice of humanity writ large.

In the same way, keeping abreast of what most people refer to as quote-unquote “the news” does not provide any insight into what is actually unfolding in the world, but rather gives one insight into the psyches of news producers. And since news producers are beholden to all kinds of mechanisms of colonial power, watching the news is an excellent way to keep tabs on how empire is seeing itself. How it understands itself. How intensely it is rationalizing its contradictions. How close it is to its inevitable implosion.

***

A presidential assassination attempt inaugurated Parable of the Sower week. The assassination target in question wasn't the president at the time of the shooting, though he will likely soon be again, and he wasn't badly injured, nor is there much evidence that the whole affair wasn't staged, which—as is the case with all violence—is more or less irrelevant.

I don't bother to watch the footage save for the highlights that appear on my TikTok feed against my will—I try to engage with quote-unquote “political content” on TikTok as little as possible—and then the short clip posted on the front page of every major U.S. news website. In only one of those clips—one which I see days after the shooting, and the one which catalyzes the bulk of this essay—can you clearly see what was behind the assassination target at the moment of impact.

Photo of the 45th president of the so-called United States emoting at a podium while pointing during one of his political rallies on July 13, 2024, moments before he is shot. He, like the crowd behind him, is white, and dons a red MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN hat. Behind him is a large screen with a white background on which is displayed a compound line graph titled ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION INTO THE US. The bottom layer of the compound line graph is the largest, and is filled in with orange. The graph looks almost like the flame of a fire.

I am a bit taken aback by this, but only insomuch as any clairvoyant can be surprised by the accuracy of their visions. I quickly process the mechanism by which I came to see this before it happened: it is not uncommon for politicians to be framed during political rallies by a screen, or for that screen to display informational graphics like charts. It is not implausible for politicians to be shot during political rallies; in fact, it is more likely for them to be shot there than anywhere else. If you asked a million people to describe in detail what they saw if they carefully imagined a future presidential assassination attempt, the majority would likely include somewhere in their description a screen like the one in the photo and a chart like the one in my dream.

None of this contradicts my understanding of clairvoyance. It only reinforces it.

The thing I am actually taken aback by is how superstitious the assassination target turns out to be. Multiple times after the shooting, he publicly credits the chart for “saving his life,” most recently just yesterday, in a 90-minute speech on the closing night of the Republican National Convention. In the story he tells of his supposed near-death experience—a story he will tell and retell until the day on which death fails to elude him—the chart is the climax.

From his speech:

Behind me, and to the right, was a large screen that was displaying a chart of border crossings under my leadership. The numbers were absolutely amazing. In order to see the chart, I started to, like this, turn to my right, and was ready to begin a little bit further turn, which I’m very lucky I didn’t do, when I heard a loud whizzing sound and felt something hit me really, really hard. On my right ear. I said to myself, “Wow, what was that? It can only be a bullet.”

Photo of the 45th president of the so-called United States speaking at the Republican National Convention on July 18, 2024. He looks tiny behind a small metal podium on a large stage packed with nine differently sized screens that form an arc over him. Behind him is a facsimile of the White House. American flags bookend the stage. All nine screens display the chart depicted in the previous photo.

And again, later in the speech:

But you can see [the] chart that saved my life. That was the chart that saved my life. I said, “Look at, I’m so proud of it.” I think it’s one of the greatest — it was done by the Border Patrol — one of the greatest charts I’ve ever seen. It showed everything, just like that. You know the chart.

Oh, there it is. That’s pretty good. Wow.

***

In April, I receive an $75 scholarship to attend a short seminar on writing. The scholarship is randomly assigned via a lottery, so it is completely by chance that I receive it and attend (though I hope you have come to understand by now that there is no such thing as quote-unquote “chance”).

During the seminar, we undertake a far more practical writing exercise than most: putting together an artist's statement that argues why we deserve this or that share of a pool of funding. For many artists, these statements are what receiving meaningful funding hinges upon. We are constantly asked to explain and justify ourselves. I am no exception, in this regard and every other.

The seminar leader frames the exercise uniquely, and for this, I feel grateful. We are asked to take the strangest and most unpackageable part of our work and to package it up into a tidy, compelling artist's statement, strangeness be damned. At first, I resist my instinct to write about the topics in this essay—most of my time is spent worrying about whether or not I am using my clairvoyance appropriately—until finally I determine an interesting way into the exercise. How do you write about clairvoyance without sounding mad? How do you pitch delusional thinking as an asset?

In the few minutes we are given to produce a draft, I write the following:

As a prophetic writer, I conjure predictive fiction and nonfiction that traces the trajectory of the near-present and far future. The value of this work is its prescience; my readers can learn about the future the way they might learn about history from a textbook. Prophetic work is not uncommon or particularly esoteric in the age of big data: corporations, institutions, and governments regularly use data analysis, a tool of prophetic writing, to make weighty decisions about resource allocation.

Projection and prophecy, after all, are one and the same—equally flawed and equally potent.

***

Time, as it is commonly perceived, is hardly stable. I begin writing this essay on July 14, 2024, at 6:50 PM PST. I write this sentence on July 19, 2024, at 3:30 PM PST. If you read this essay, you will likely experience it in a single sitting, which will of course not correlate at all with the rhythm of the temporal arc over which the essay was written. And if you read it in pieces—or revisit it over and again as weeks, months, or years pass—that experience will not correlate with mine either. Time, as it is commonly conceived of, is inherently disjointed.

In most of the rest of the world, it is already July 20, 2024.

And it will be over 37 hours before July 20, 2024, has officially come to a close.

Looking outwards from so-called “American politics,” the news reports this morning are of a global tech outage across airlines, hospitals, emergency hotlines, retail stores, and more. One outlet refers to it as the most widespread information technology failure in history. I have been preparing for a cyberattack of these proportions—or larger—for some time, forgetting perhaps that the cyberattack already took place, over the course of many decades, carried out by countless attackers: the construction of a way of life in which critical biosocial functions are so reliant on fragile, interconnected digital networks that a bug in an otherwise banal software update can rewrite the trajectories of millions. It rerouted mine. I wouldn't have spent the last five minutes writing this paragraph if the outage had not made its way into the broad strokes of today's English-language news reports. There is no way to know what this paragraph—or the rest of this essay—would have said if it had not occurred.

There is also no way to know what this part of the essay would have said if I knew more about the countless processes that have proceeded, piecemeal, around the world since the start of July 20. Since the start of this week.

The present, as it is commonly perceived, is hardly complete. Reality, as it is commonly conceived of, is inherently disjointed. There is no way to know what today or tomorrow will hold.

I mean, of course, I have some ideas.

I am certain you do too.

length: 5,540 words

content/trigger warnings: discussions of mental health, the medical industrial complex, psychiatric incarceration, suicidal ideation, death, grief, ableism, substance abuse, the biomedicalization of transness, transphobia, hormone therapy, neurodivergence, sterility, settler colonialism, patriarchy, misogyny, cisheterosexism, white supremacy, violence, abuse, and intersexness, written from the perspective of someone who is not intersex; brief references to blood, gore, illness (cancer, dementia), surgery, bombings, murder, and gender dysphoria

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1

Still of Ellen Pompeo as Meredith Grey, a young brown-haired white woman, in the pilot episode of Grey’s Anatomy, in a brightly lit OR. The show’s subtitle reads, “I’m screwed.”

You’ll start watching Grey’s Anatomy because—four years into puberty, at 13—you’re already familiar with imminent death. The blood, the guts, the gore of injury and trauma: it fascinates you more than it upsets you. In a way, you feel at home. A scalpel making its way through someone’s body is the perfect metaphor for how you feel inside.

Plus, you’ve just been accepted into the country’s top-ranked high school. Dr. Webber’s speech in the pilot episode is repeated many times throughout the series, and will repeat in your mind as you navigate a world of incomparable wunderkinds. “Look around you. Say hello to your competition. Eight of you will switch to an easier specialty. Five will crack under the pressure. Two of you will be asked to leave.” This ratio is about right, both at your high school and at the prestigious institutions you’ll all spend four years working to gain entry into. Mostly things like depression and substance abuse will take your peers out. What you accurately diagnose as your alcoholism, and what professionals separately misdiagnose as bipolar disorder, will be the culprits for you.

But then this isn’t House, M.D.; your journey has little to do with the puzzle of diagnosis, or even with the process of treatment.

What matters on Grey’s is emotional interplay—between doctor and patient, doctor and doctor, medical case and personal life, personal life and the desire for so much more.

Desire, ambition, metaphor, melodrama: this is the lifeblood of Grey’s Anatomy.

You’re a brilliant young trans girl.

Of course you eat this up.

Don’t worry if none of this makes sense. At your age, your jumbled trans girl brain—not yet on hormones, but not by choice—can’t comprehend your gender, nor your sexuality, let alone why you, an aspiring creative writer, are so drawn to a show about cutthroat surgical interns. At your age, you mostly just like that the soundtrack is all cute indie music, and that there’s a member of the ensemble cast who’s a sensitive, effeminate buffoon.

Also, that the main character is sad.

Unlike the other main characters of the other shows you watch (the only possible exception here being Courage the Cowardly Dog), the main character of this show looks like she’s always on the verge of tears and is always being forced by her circumstances to hide them. This is new to you, and appealing: it is a joy to see someone on TV who’s as perpetually devastated as you.

8

Still from episode 8 of Grey’s Anatomy: a young white female doctor is telling a concerned-looking white male patient, “I brought the consent forms again.”

When you’re 14 years old is when you’ll start talking to yourself. When you’re 14 is when it’ll become a habit, a survival mechanism. Technically, it’ll keep you away from the thing you need most—a good talk therapist—but then that’s the paradox built into every survival mechanism.

At first, it is a rehearsal. Sitting on the floor of your bedroom closet, rocking back and forth, you’re preparing yourself to meet with a professional, one who will ask you all sorts of questions—hard questions. Abuse is neither simple to endure nor to share, and you can hardly do either. You’re certain your unedited answers would get you uprooted from your life; you need to be able to give the answers the professionals would prefer. You want care, you do—but only the kind you believe you’re capable of surviving.

Your imagination is so vivid that this imagined therapy, undertaken in stolen moments of utter privacy, satisfies your need to be heard. The only person hearing you is you, but you in someone else’s skin: alone in the closet, you don the costume of a caretaker, nodding at yourself with kindness, genuinely invested in your own suffering.

You’ll return to school to take your seat beside future Fulbright scholars, tech giants, Ivy League professors; you’ll watch them ingest the science and engineering curricula that will take them where they want—or have been told to want—to go. Lost in your thoughts at school as often as at home, you’re learning instead the value of roleplay, of acting—of benefiting from a semblance when you lack access to the real thing.

In the penultimate episode of Grey’s Anatomy’s inaugural season, a stubborn patient believes he’s clairvoyant, and is told this is an illness. The show is young, so it employs a silly trope: the patient mysteriously knows things he absolutely shouldn’t, with no logical explanation. It’s a suspension of believability the show won’t pull again without cues clearly indicating, for example, a tumor-induced hallucination.

The so-called clairvoyant does not have a tumor, but he does have an arteriovenous malformation. He puts off surgery partly for fear of death, but his bigger fear is losing his supposed gift.

You’ll put off therapy partly for fear of Child Protective Services, but your bigger fear is losing your supposed gifts. You’ve been marked since age five as “gifted and talented,” and even at 14, you already suspect this refers to something like clairvoyance—an invisible external force dictating the future to you from afar. You’ll contextualize this psychosis with logical explanations, like the vivid imagination of an aspiring writer. Whatever it is that makes you “special” (and you feel so different from everyone else, you build your identity around the idea that you, in fact, are), you don’t want to lose it to the medical industrial complex; to diagnosis and treatment; to talk therapy.

In the show, after much cajoling, the man is talked into having surgery. He wakes up to find his gift survives too.

As will soon become another habit, you’ll refuse to learn the lesson provided.

22

Still from episode 22 of Grey's Anatomy. George O’Malley, a young white male doctor with scraggly hair, is saying, “What, am I just supposed to lie to her?”

The ninth episode of the show leans on another silly trope. Dr. Burke’s supposedly virile friend turns out to be sterile and (surprise!) intersex. Literature has a long tradition of treating so-called sex/gender variation as a plot twist—for the person who’s the supposed variant, for the people around them, or else for the unsuspecting audience. The patient rages the rage of indignation and disgust pioneered and perfected by trans people, but mostly because his sterility indicates that his pregnant wife has had a secret affair.

The 22nd episode does trans rage a bit more justice: the patient is a kid with the killer name of Bex, who looks to the doctors (and presumably the audience) like a moody, tomboyish girl. Bex turns out to be intersex too. Their parents take up too much space for Bex to get to rage; instead, Bex quietly stews, pouring themselves into their comic art. The sensitive, effeminate buffoon’s arc also takes a twist when he defies his superior, refusing to conceal Bex’s diagnosis because, as he empathetically proclaims, Bex just wants to know why they’ve always felt so different. The episode never uses the word “trans,” but it’s implied at the end that Bex will transition, the first thing to happen during their storyline that makes the character smile. (At 32 years old, you’ll rewatch the series for the first time since beginning to transition, and this will be one of many scenes that will make you cry nonstop.)

But if the show’s going to go any further than surprise intersex diagnoses, it’s going to need a reason. (Remember, these episodes are premiering in 2005 and 2006—a veritable century ago in terms of “progressive representation.”) The answer is the most stereotypical plastic surgeon Grey’s Anatomy creator and showrunner Shonda Rhimes can muster: a self-described “man-whore” whom the characters call “McSteamy,” who’s defined by his abs, his jawline, and his propensity for sexually harassing his subordinates. He’s so distasteful, his character’s unforeseeable twist is that, when an out trans person arrives in episode 43 (played by an out trans person, the splendid Alexandra Billings), it’s shocking how kindly he treats her, chastising his colleagues for misgendering her, and respecting all of her demands, even when they run the risk of killing her. This melodramatic plotline leans on one more silly trope: the character turns out to have breast cancer. The episode’s formulation is that what makes her a woman will kill her. Her trans rage is that she’d rather die than stop taking hormones or be forced to put off indefinitely her impending vaginoplasty.

I’m sorry to say that this scenario will someday be more relatable than anyone could possibly bear.

27

Still from episode 22 of Grey's Anatomy. Bex, a white teenager wearing a beanie, looks out at their parents through the gridded rectangle of an exam room window.

“Intersex” is one of many diagnostic categories the medical industrial complex simply cannot handle. “Neurodivergence,” another. Youth, writ large—yet another.

You can replace “the medical industrial complex” here and elsewhere with “Western medicine,” “settler colonial conceptions of health and wellness,” or any number of equally pejorative but accurate phrases.

Your first dealings with the medical industrial complex revolve around your asthma. You’re hospitalized for it for the first time when you’re age 5, or 7, or maybe 8 years old, all of which would be good times for the doctors to ask you about your mental, social, and familial health.

They don’t.

Instead of meeting with a social worker or child psychologist (either of whom would make your life tremendously better or tremendously worse, with no possible in-between), you’ll be sent home with inhalers and a cool little rubberized tube, clear in the middle, cerulean at the ends. You might imagine a pinkish equivalent given to cis girls, but you’d only assume this because the rest of your dealings with the medical industrial complex will be so fucking gendered.

You’ll start seeing mental health professionals when you’re age 19, or 20, or maybe 22 years old (you’ll spend those years so intoxicated, you’ll remember too little, though the uglier truth is it’s maybe psychosomatic—a word/concept you’ll come to consider hopelessly out of touch). For over a decade, you’ll see more therapists than you can count, and almost every single one will be a straight, cisgender white woman. To them, you’ll be something of a sensitive, effeminate buffoon—well, that’s the gender you’ll be performing at the time. (Buffoon can be a gender, though the medical industrial complex has no place on its forms where that could possibly be noted.)

Because they’re cishet white women, and because the stories you’re drawn to up until that age are written by white gay men who portray cishet women as both enviable and irreparably damaged, or else by women of color who portray white women as both malevolent and sympathetic, you’ll simultaneously envy, distrust, pity, and want to heal them—these women who are supposed to be helping you heal (heal your mind, heal your brain, heal your heart; the medical industrial complex doesn’t have a decent metaphor for this; you’ll eventually prefer something like “soul”). You’ll always feel this way when you meet white, or cis, or straight people, which is why you’ll need to avoid them at all costs.

You’re trans. I.e.: you have too much empathy, and yet you have no choice but to conserve it.

Still, these women won’t be the reason you’ll be unable to tell your story.

They simply will not know any better.

Nor, at that point, will you.

By the time you get to therapy, you will have had more access to educational resources than most adults whom you encounter. You’ll have been given the opportunity to familiarize yourself with more theories, more histories, more information and analytical tools than most people on Earth. (This is not an asset: the well-known graph showing that personal happiness plateaus—and, in fact, decreases—beyond a certain threshold of income probably maps one-to-one to formal schooling. Trust your intuition here; people with/earning PhDs do not, on the whole, seem particularly thrilled to be alive.) What this means is that the people who are supposed to help you do not have the capacity, as you do, to detect invisibility—to know the future, to manipulate time and space as a storyteller can.

Heterosexuality is a perceptual cage from which you’ll have already escaped, but it is a cage enclosed by another cage (cisness) enclosed by another cage (whiteness). It will take you decades to escape these and other cages, and still, one foot will remain entangled in the bars—the price of making it out alive at all. When you do finally make it out, you will understand what it is to be gifted and talented. It is to know better, and for this to be a hindrance. Self-awareness, as the Book of Genesis implies, is the original, ultimate prison.

43

Still from episode 43 of Grey's Anatomy. A white male doctor seated across from Donna, a white trans woman, looks down as she tells him, “I've wanted this since I can remember. I've waited forever. I'm not stopping now.”

At 31 years old, you’ll thank God that the parking area for UCLA Beverly Hills Medical Center is underground. It means you’ll only be visible to the public for a short half-block walk, dressed awkwardly in a tight, purple V-neck sweater; a fluttery, ankle-length skirt; your favorite pink New Balance sneakers; your cherry red Ray-Ban eyeglasses, your fingernails painted to match; your face and arms shaved; your lips colored pomegranate by a makeup brand called Fenty (you haven’t heard of Rihanna yet, but you will, later in life, refer to her as our lord and savior), though your lips won’t even be visible under your N95 (you haven’t thought much about pandemics yet, but you will, later in life, whether you want to or not).

Your breasts will be small, your hair short, so to you, you’ll still look like a cis man in dress-up, and not in a good way, despite the string of cis celebrities who are now awarded brand deals and public praise for what would get you pilloried and pariahed in elementary school and junior high. Really, you’ll just look like a crossdresser (or, in your more self-deprecating moments, a brick), but crossdressers (and bricks) still fall under the trans-with-an-asterisk umbrella, and besides, there’s no one way to be trans. Forget this at your peril. Coming out as trans-with-an-asterisk will, thankfully, be the last time you’ll deal with feeling not [insert identity marker here] enough. But this is not yet your concern.

Outside UCLA Beverly Hills Medical Center, your concern will be safety. This is a fucking joke. There are few places safer than the journey to the Center’s esteemed Gender Health Program, cradled by the shell of your partner’s Mazda, your meals at this time in your life assured, your care at this particular place certain to be excellent. There’s a paradox to this, too. Your suicidality will always be entangled with survivor’s guilt. You’ll feel less suicidal, for example, when you start hoarding some of your estradiol, to give to any stranger who wants it, and you’ll feel more suicidal when you realize this isn’t particularly helpful unless you hoard your testosterone blockers too—which you can’t because your body’s not supposed to contain high levels of both hormones at once, and which you won’t because testosterone is what you’re most afraid of (the thing around which, completely irrationally, you feel least safe). As has already become another habit, you fear the things inside you more than anything outside.

This fear is misplaced, of course: there is nothing inherently wrong with testosterone, nor anything especially holy about estrogen either. The fear you will identify is the fear of ill-gotten gains, of the bargain you have made in order to transition.

You will be forced to tell a story, as many trans people must, in order to earn the medical designation of transgender. That story will have needed to include a neatly legible tale of persistent gender dysphoria and, wherever possible, indications that you exhibited signs of the diagnostic criterion at as early an age as possible (you’ll share with your doctors a childhood affinity for American Girl books, and how, when your mother unhelpfully used stickers to relabel them as American Boy books, you understood even then that she wanted you to paper over your idiosyncrasies, when what you wanted instead was affirmation that you were, indeed, an American girl). That story will not have room for facts like that, at my age, you like the look and feel of your beard, particularly the centimeter-length it stays at once you commence your hormone therapy; that you like to wear your old boy clothes sometimes, in an Avril Lavigne, tomboy punk, intersex Bex kind of way, which means you sometimes pass as male (and which is why you cannot wait for your breast augmentation, the clearest sign to any onlooker that they’re not dealing with someone cis); and that you don’t feel particularly strongly about any pronouns and only choose she/her upon transitioning because it seems powerful politically. In truth, if pressed, you’d identify as an imp, the way trans-with-an-asterisk legal scholar and Episcopal priest Pauli Murray did at the end of her/his/their/imp’s life.

The version of your story that omits these things, the version of the story you initially tell: it’s dangerous because it is compelling. Narratives always run the risk of ossifying upon their telling. We don’t yet have adequate technologies for presenting texts as malleable, ever-changing fluids. Whiteness, for example, cannot function without the rigid persistence of stories of superiority; cisheterosexism cannot succeed without the deceptively timeless fable of the nuclear family; colonialism cannot conquer without the infrastructure for disseminating narratives that justify dispossession at all costs.

You, like so many before you, will be tempted to offer up counter-narratives in response, to write the same old stories replacing the people at the center with people like yourself. You will feel the pressure to claim that representation matters, because it will feel good to finally be at the center of things. When you make this awful bargain, you will in the process justify the utility of story as a weapon, as a means for positioning yourself as superior to those whose lives and experiences cannot fit the mold of a story that’s neatly legible—to anyone, but particularly to our proliferation of industrial complexes, medical and otherwise.

You will someday suspect that if every art form were valued equally—if they all offered the same amount of pay—most people would not choose storytelling. Maybe no one would choose it at all. Language is a tool of communication, of interaction. When transmuted into an art performed in silence and solitude, it runs the risk of calcifying, and even the least capable doctor among us knows that calcification, in the wrong place at the wrong time, will lead to certain death.

52

Still from episode 53 of Grey's Anatomy. Meredith Grey lies on a gurney, intubated and surrounded by medical equipment, pale and presumably dead.

Whenever you visit a doctor, there is risk.

Your doctor may fail to diagnose you, may misdiagnose you. They may prescribe the wrong medication, or the incorrect dosage. They will likely ask the wrong questions, fail to consider the appropriate conditions. They are nearly guaranteed to fail to ask you about your home life, about the meaningful parts of your family history that have nothing to do with your internal organs. Even the doctors who are supposed to ask about these things will do it wrong (and you can replace the word “doctors” here with several equally pejorative but accurate phrases).

It is sensible, then, to be afraid. To feel unsafe. Watch enough episodes of Grey’s Anatomyand you will understand how often small amounts of wrong decisions can lead to certain death.

In episodes 25 and 26, Meredith Grey, the show’s titular character, nearly dies while helping surgically remove unexploded ammunition from a patient’s body cavity. Seconds after the explosive device is removed and transferred out of the operating room, it goes off—just a few yards in front of her, launching her in slow motion away from the member of the bomb squad who has become a cloud of pink mist. The ultradramatic two-parter during which this plotline unfolds is responsible for turning the show into a primetime juggernaut, and is bookended by oblique references to Meredith’s suicidality, which lie just beneath the surface of the show. They’re hidden under what looks like, to the casual viewer, the stress of having your abusive mother succumb to Alzheimer’s in a nursing home. (You, suicidal to varying degrees from ages 9 through 31, are not the casual viewer.)

Meredith states, at the beginning of episode 25, that she doesn’t want to go to work because she feels like she’s going to die today, her premonition prompting concerned looks from her friends, all surgeons. These are the kinds of looks you’ll become inured to after receiving them enough times; clairvoyance, since at least the time of Salem, has always been dreadfully suspect.

Still from episode 27 of Grey's Anatomy. Meredith Grey is looking disdainfully at someone off-screen, her eyes flooded with tears.

In the section labelled “27,” you’ll write about your excessive educational privileges, and the resulting curses this lays at your feet. You’ll skip over what actually happens in episode 27 of Grey’s Anatomy: how Meredith’s near-death experience compels her to visit her estranged father, who is at least partially at fault for the abuse Meredith experiences throughout her life at the hands of her emotionally tortured mother, and whom she visits in order to make this clear. In both 27's, someone is being centered at the expense of another—a practice for which there is always an unbearable price.

In episode 52 of Grey’s Anatomy, Meredith is unwell in every sense of the word. Her mother is in the hospital, suddenly lucid and desperate to inflict abuse on anyone who enters her vicinity—particularly Meredith, with whom she is disgusted and disappointed, in part for not having simply let her die and thus sparing her the indignities of dementia. Meredith—distracted and morose, attempting to save a man’s life at the scene of a chaotic mass casualty incident—accidentally falls into the sea. Shonda Rhimes, the show’s creator and the episode’s writer, gives Meredith the opportunity to drown. Meredith elects to take it.

Technically, Meredith dies; her doctors take extreme, extraordinary measures; ultimately, she is miraculously revived. The episode never uses the word “suicidality,” but many characters, including Meredith, finally recognize that it would be appropriate.

Still from episode 53 of Grey's Anatomy. Meredith Grey, in blue scrubs, is looking down and despondent, crying while saying, “I stopped fighting.”

Over the next several episodes, Meredith’s father and his new wife will use the newly clarified depths of her depression as a reasonable excuse to grow closer to her. Their daughter and newborn grandchild were, after all, successfully operated on by Meredith’s friends in episodes 46, 47, and 48. Meredith’s second near-death experience finally grants her a more positive outlook on life, and a chance at building a healthy relationship with her father and his family.

Because of this silly chain of events set in motion seasons prior, when Meredith’s father’s wife can’t stop hiccuping in episode 58, they will opt to visit Meredith’s hospital, where—in episode 59, after some rare but plausible complications—Meredith’s father’s wife will die.

Neither Meredith nor her father will ever be the same.

Over the course of the rest of the series, at the rate of about one episode per season, Meredith’s father will succumb to the bodily toll of alcoholism, of trauma that has ultimately been accumulated over the course of an entire lifetime.

It is possible, perhaps likely, that the preceding does not happen if Meredith does not visit and accost him in episode 27, making their estrangement about her and her alone (forgetting that a parent who abuses a child is just as likely to abuse a spouse). It is possible, perhaps likely, that the preceding does not happen if, in episodes 46 through 48, Meredith does not take the neonatal surgery needed by her father’s child as an opportunity to reconnect, rather than recusing herself as a doctor, or distancing herself as a relative stranger, as would have been ethical and appropriate (but then Meredith does not see things in black and white, hence her surname, and the title/premise of the show). It is possible, perhaps likely, that some or all of the preceding is Meredith’s fault. At least this is how Meredith’s father sees it, giving him a supposedly good reason to drink himself to death.

These kinds of plot arcs make for what we consider a good story. The trajectories of the new century’s most well-received TV shows embody this kind of seamlessness, like a puzzle that can only be put together one way. Every decision affects everything that comes after. Sometimes these shows are called “TV novels.” They employ the literary technique of making every plot point matter, a departure from a time when continuity on TV was an afterthought rather than the norm. On TV, as in novels, it effectively clarifies for the audience characters’ development over time. It’s effective because it’s how we perceive our lives.

Still from episode 52 of Grey's Anatomy. Meredith Grey is drowning, barely able to keep her head above water.

When you write this, you’ll be in episode 52 yourself. The metaphor you’ll use to describe your transition is the murder of your body’s prior occupant and his replacement with the woman you’ll become. You’ll give that man the opportunity to drown, then you’ll make him take it.

Other things will be out of order.

You’ll reconnect with your father before the quasi-death you’ll think of your gender transition as, in which you kill your father’s son and birth him a daughter.

You will, upon reconnection, make your estrangement all about you, thinking him at least partially at fault for the abuse you experience throughout your life at the hands of your emotionally tortured mother, but forgetting that a parent who abuses a child is just as likely to abuse a spouse.

Your mother will, at this point in your life, have become estranged too, so she will not yet have succumbed to dementia, at least as far as you will be aware of.

As for your father’s wife, she will not be dead; nor will he have blamed you for her death; nor will he have subsequently spiraled into alcoholism.

But if or when these things do happen (because they are possible, perhaps even likely), you will have remained at such a frustrating emotional distance that you will blame yourself—for being incapable of imparting whatever it is you possess, for being unwilling to listen to them tell their own stories, for failing to recognize that the trauma they’ve accumulated over their lifetimes has taken a lethal toll on their bodies. There are no doctors they would be willing to see capable of alleviating or addressing their pain. Sometimes what stands between injury and health is the decision-making of a relative stranger.

Still from episode 52 of Grey's Anatomy. Meredith Grey, mid-drowning, looks resigned. The show's subtitle reads, “There's more I have to say.”

It is always easy to talk about how you were failed. It is much harder to talk about how you failed others. There is no amount of pain large enough to make self-reflection a desirable alternative. You will hurt people, harm them, fail them, wrong them. You will too many times prioritize the inert, immature ideas in your writing over the living, breathing organisms in your orbit who need more than to simply watch you work. You will condemn those who care about you to emotional destitution because you will think your gifts so critical to your species’ survival, you will fail to realize this is one of the most inhuman things a person can possibly do.

You are a star, but you are not the star. At your age, you may be told you are the best and the brightest, but everyone around you is as good and bright as you. You’re a kid. I’m sorry everyone around you will fail you so many times. I’m sorry you will go on to fail everyone around you so many times. There’s no such thing, in real life, as a subplot; as a side character; as a filler episode. There are few things more dangerous than what your contemporaries call “main character energy.” I know why we draw on it as a power source. People like us have been denied at every turn everything we deserve: life, love, respect, dignity. For a queer and trans woman of color to center herself in a white supremacist, cisheterosexist world is a form of resistance.

A form. A semblance.

An acting-out. A roleplay.

Practice. Rehearsal.

Not necessarily the real thing. Not necessarily the thing you need.

Still from episode 22 of Grey's Anatomy. A doctor uses scissors to cut Bex's long hair short, as Bex looks into a handheld mirror with a hesitant, careful satisfaction.