The Emergence of the Compound Gaze, and the role of women in a filmic landscape dominated by infinite pornography.

By Gren Bee

When I came into the business of being a woman, not of a filmmaker, I carried with me no expectation, desire, or aspiration of Hollywood. I left those dreams, my name, my hair color, a relationship with my family, and firm erections behind when I crossed the threshold into total shemaledom. The moment I injected estrogen into the meat of my thigh was the moment I accepted that there would never be money behind a camera I picked up, and I wish my sisters could see the same and revel in it.

I am a guerrilla filmmaker and always will be, because I walk the streets a guerrilla woman. I am dyke, I am whore, I am fat frumpy nothing, I am everything in the world, I am a useless sales assistant, I am a tyrannical tranny dictator marching through the streets stomping my platform shoes on the hull of a tank which destroys every building along Michigan avenue. When you become the thing the government is most terrified of and also the thing it refuses to recognize, you transform into a kind of invisible, all-powerful, multidimensional nullification warlock which lingers within the obsession of all who fear you; and all do.

Everyone is obsessed with the transsexual. You are at every party, or wanted there, and according to Vice, you’re the number one most important guest. The transsexual is a between placer; occupying the distance between life and death since time immemorium, like the nádleehí of the Diné people. We are a kind of channeler, and our spiritual presence has been noticed and needed, and remembered for centuries. What separates us from our transgender elders is merely time, technology, and easier access to pharmaceutical drugs: hormonal or otherwise.

The trans woman is the new woman, not in actuality or in history but in conversation. Feminism in contemporary conversation revolves around us; Our access to bathrooms, what occupations we’re allowed to have, our ability to be allowed in public spaces, the right to privacy regarding our genitals. Regardless of what’s conversationally advantageous, both for cis feminists and trans women, our conversations overlap a whole lot more than many of us would like to admit, especially when it comes to our place in the arts, and in my art, film.

It pains me to no end, as a formal essayist who writes both “trans” centered pieces and “women’s” centered pieces, that I need to continuously define the intention of an essay for my audience or note somewhere that when I write about women, I’m also writing about trans women, but I do, and that’s what this is. I cannot break from the skin-tight, soaking wet, aphyxiating, tobacco-and-whisky musked, bloody, harsh, jaded, spiked, latex under freshly blacked leather shackles of my intersectionality, and neither can the needless dichotomy between “women” and “trans women” when I refer to them.

Women, working under capitalism, patriarchy, the surveillance of the state, and of men and of each other, rapidly redefining feminism every day against AI, fascism, genocide, generational trauma, and the constant looming threat of violence, will stop at nothing to create art and show it to the world that revels in their anticipated rape and dismemberment. I could not be prouder to be among them, and to share a bullhorn in a massive wall of female sound, which roars like a microphone to hell under heavy distortion.

For the longest time, women filmmakers and film theorists have had a pretty good hold on the practice of feminist film theory, first advocating for women filmmakers and actors to be paid, then paid equally, then to be represented better and with more developed characters in films made by men, then in leading roles, then in films made by women, then in especially progressive women made films pitted against other women made films. Women behind and in front of the camera; Capturing and performing the written words of women; women talking about anything other than men; women sometimes (often) destroying men; women making love to people of their choosing; women making love to women. But so much has changed now that there are more women, and more different types of women, than have ever been seen on screen or behind cameras.

I’ve written about this before in my essay, Fat Transsexuals Looking At Each Other Sexually, but I had never seen someone who looked like me represented on screen before I put myself on one; not to say I had never seen a good representation of someone like me, just no representation at all. To my knowledge, I am the first fat, explicitly intersex, transsexual butch, male to female, dyke to be in a movie that wasn’t porn of someone like me getting force fed and tortured.

The onus here is especially put on the “fat” part of my intersectionality, because as we see in the mainstream media, gender play and expression is totally fine as long as you're skinny and hot and preferably white and mostly feminine. Long gone is the picture of a transsexual, a short, hunched-over, 50-year-old man in a dress or a towering, beautiful, black revolutionary drag queen. Now it’s Hunter Schafer, or the occasional tall and thin white bass player with long brown hair, patch tattoos on her muscular arms, and a huge low-dose-of-progesterone-and-still-pumping cock between her legs.

You’re either a tiny aryan princess or a stunning Scotch-Irish twink with a long skirt and a drinking problem, or you lie with the undesirables. The fat, the butch, the non-transitioning, the bricks, the girls who pretend to be dogs, the disabled, and of course any woman of color, like all women of color, always and forever treated like shit by those who see us through the dichotomy of fuckable or not and assign us a value. It’s strange how binaries aren’t to be adhered to anymore, but we still can’t get over that one.

Another binary, the artist/muse, and the shaman/whore, where somewhere, all women who create something are destined to fall between, assigned by both history and contemporary society.

A woman is not successful in the same way as a man, and any woman who gains extreme wealth and success within male-dominated creative fields is by extreme exception and often by dark evil. This is, of course, mostly because these fields are so often deeply entrenched in evil to begin with, just look who’s connected to these production companies and fixers. Instead, successful women who don’t play by the wickedness of the professional game often lead artistic lives that intersect with success but are not defined by it (See Virgine Depentes, Lee Miller, Stanya Kahn), and these examples should be seen as goals for feminist filmmakers, not as compromises.

Of course, there’s another side to the coin of the woman artist, as one must occupy the role of muse to another, usually a man. These women have Wikipedias completely tainted with the names of men underscored in blue: Virginie’s Paul B. Preciado, Miller’s Man Ray, Kahn’s Harry Dodge. I chose these women and their respective men because I respect the work of these men, and am grateful for much of the work that has resulted from their musings off of these women, especially Preciado’s Testo Junkie or Kahn & Dodge’s Can’t Swallow It, Can’t Spit It Out.

Muse is an inescapable path for a woman artist, as is walking down the street without being rated sexually on a scale of 1-10 by the mindless drone of a crowd of men, whether they yell out to you about it or not. But why is this? Why can’t a woman choose to exist and create without being seen, without being sexualized? This has much more to do with how women are seen altogether and the effect created by women existing on screen in front of an audience, regardless of how they are depicted or who depicts them.

I am not talking about the male gaze, or rather, I am talking about something which looms near and is much greater than the male gaze and includes the male gaze. I am discussing the “compound gaze,” which I have identified in my filmography and in conversations with peers and students, but never have I properly documented it in writing.

The compound gaze has always existed, ever since figures could be observed on surfaces that were separated from their bodies (i.e., paintings, photography, security footage, crystal balls, and, to some extent, the image conjured mentally while reading someone’s description). The compound gaze occurs when multiple sets of eyes observe the visual information of a being from a single image, such as a picture on printed paper, or, in most cases, a projection or a screen.

While versions of the compound gaze have existed across time imemorium, its practice has multiplied a billionfold with the introduction of the internet and smartphone technology. When millions are able to perceive the image of a single woman, it changes how that woman is seen, and potentially what that woman is to a greater extent.

To be transmogrified by gaze is something that many feminist theorists explore, but they mostly focus on what happens when a single man gazes upon a woman and not on what happens when a writhing mass of eyes gaze upon a woman at once. It’s always a conversation about one man from the crowd looking, and not a crowd of men, and certainly never women onlookers, or those of marginal gender identities on a broader spectrum, who also have the capability to devour with their gaze and make anew through visual digestion.

This is another problem I have with how Foucault’s Panopticon theory is discussed broadly, especially online. The Panopticon is not merely one guard in a tower, spectating an endless army of unarmed prisoners, as the prisoners are part of the surveillance too; And especially in the digital era, the prisoners are armed with surveillance cameras. Some of the prisoners even fancy themselves “filmmakers”. Some of the prisoners empathize with the guard. “I wanna know his story!”

The compound gaze is not something that can be disputed, whether witnessed on one screen or many simultaneously, the relationship between a figure and an audience is the same as a fly’s to rotting meat or fruit. The fly sees its prey through a cocophanic stream of red lenses which make up enormous ball-like eyes on its head. The fly sees every angle of the detritus it hungers for and whatever is behind it and next to it before it lands on top of its food, throws up all over it, and consumes it.

We see through the eyeballs of flies, and we consume what we see in a very similar way through a spewing of morally bankrupt and undignified digestive enzymes, sucking everything back up through the horrible, hairy, tubular, grey whirlpool of our mouths.

And when we, women, are projected onto surfaces and consumed, we are caste into two different categories: observer and observed. But the theory of the compound gaze is not one that puts the onus of its politicization on its purveyor, like the “male gaze” or the “female gaze” or the “queer lens”. The compound gaze cannot be adopted into one of these groups because it includes all of them, as they are merely three lenses in its massive bulb alongside the “black lens,” and the “transgender lens,” and the “opositional gaze”, and the “psychoanalytic lens”, and the “indigenous lens”, and the “disabled lens”, and the “marxist lens”, and the “post-colonial lens”, and all the other lenses.

The compound gaze assumes the biases, both “good” and “bad”, “intended” and “unintended”, of every member of an audience and ropes them together to better understand how anything and everything, and especially the bodies of women, are seen by an audience. And when this miasma of sharp critical lenses is applied to an individual, that individual is dissected upon them like a dissenter is pulled apart by opposing horses across stalks of sharp sugar cane, then eaten by birds.

Pornstars understand the compound gaze better than anyone. They look into the lens of the camera affixed to a desktop computer, to a tripod, or to a man’s headgear who is fucking them. They peer not only into this lens, but into the gaze of an audience of millions, putting 2 eyes on various formats and screen sizes, connecting with their souls directly and telling them to fuck harder and faster and more and more and only breaking eye contact to better suck their dicks or to turn around and face a wall when the camera wants to take them from behind.

When a woman pornstar fucks a man, they also fuck the eyes of every person who watches on their telephones, turning sex into a teleconnetic ritualistic seance between a mortal girl and a many-aged, many-sexed, massive unkillable insect with 14 billion eyes and 32 billion legs indulging upon and digesting and eye-fucking a population of cocubine priestesses who embody the only true separation between people, the only binary that matters: Sacrifice & Centipede God.

No one is disengaged from porn, as all photography is pornography for someone, and all human beings are photographed, even those on internetless islands who are photographed from planes and drones they think and know are the machinations of devils. There are only the starlets and the voyeurs, those who gaze and who are gazed upon, and all who gaze are compounded in a universal and pseudo-fascistic alien omnipotent who stands in every room and undresses all they see like narrators.

The compound gaze is not inherently political. It is not inherently feminist. It does not have a race, and it does not have a body. It is just a truer way of recognizing seeing that does not ignore the brutality of simultaneity and irrepressible and un-unlearnable bias.

The compound gaze is not a disputable theory in the conversation of feminist film criticism, because it simply exists. This is how people, things, and places are seen: by many, not simply by one. And all who see and all who gaze are a part of this. Take this photo of a woman, Briar Rose, for example:

(Fig. 1. Briar Rose Portrait, (Photograph by Gren Bee. 2026.)

There, you’ve gazed at a single image of a woman along with every other reader of the essay. You have entered the compound gaze of my readership, you horrible centipede.

The question that comes to mind as a woman filmmaker should not be “how do i overcome the compound gaze?”, but rather “how do I utilize it?”. “How do I represent a truer picture of how women are seen?”.

When compound gaze is applied intentionally in a film, it looks a lot like my film, OBLITERATOR (2025). The film is about a conspiracy theorist and republican grifter, Tessa Lee, who gets exposed for being a trans chaser, and must go on an erysichthonean journey through a forest to smite a flock of psychic transsexual warlocks with the hopes of securing and expanding their wealth and social clout. Their greed brings them to self-destruction, specifically self-cannibalism.

Compound gaze, and its utilization, come into play with how I shot OBLITERATOR, which is to say I only shot about a fifth of it, and almost every angle of the film was shot by totally inexperienced women photographers who had never stepped foot on a film set or experienced a day of film school. I gave everyone point-and-shoot cameras and gave vague instructions on how to stand, and only did a few takes of each shot(s) since we shot every scene simultaneously, then I cut those images together rapidly, cutting between them and sometimes (often) overlaying them.

The reason I worked with amateur filmmakers was more than just a clever cost-cutting strategy, but also an attempt at surpassing the male-gazeyness of film education and the patriarchal underpinnings of so much of conventional cinematography. Essentially, I needed a cinematography team without cinematographers.

I had this team shoot simultaneously so that I could pick between which angle caught the best emotion and the most action, not focusing on how the actors looked or presented themselves physically in the scene, ignoring the “line” and much continuity. Especially working with a diverse range of gender and racial backgrounds both behind on screen and off-screen, my hope was to use these decisions to counteract the internal biases of my crew, and of myself, by allowing these biases and informing backgrounds to clash against each other and cancel each other out; arrive at what I hope to be closer to a true image.

Obliterator was specifically shot with five different cameras with a variety of video formats. All digital, but some SD, some 1080, some mini disc on a handycam. These formats came with different aspect ratios and different visual qualities and colorations, all of which created a kaleidoscopic picture which better replicated, to me, the way the compound gaze manifests, especially when you consider that the film would be watched on a myriad of different-sized phones, laptops, and maybe even television screens across the world and by all different types of people.

Of course, this experiment was not without flaws. The biggest one is that I edited the film and ultimately made the decisions as to which angle was shown and how often. I tried to forget who shot what, but there were definitely more shots from some photographers than others, and the only real way to be completely unbiased would have been to layer all the shots over each other in different overlays and hope for the best. I did think about this while editing, but unfortunately, my desire to know what the fuck was going on prevailed.

With all that being said, I still think that anticipating the compound gaze, not working to repel it, is the way to go. And not only putting the cameras in the hands of more than one person, but putting the cameras in the hands of the people with the voices you most want to hear. In my case, no men are allowed to touch cameras, and very rarely do men appear in front of them either. I’m a dykesploitationist after all, and so are my camera operators.

Now onto the other side of the binary, the Shaman/Whore of it all. The shaman/whore is the missing piece to contemporary feminist film theory and art criticism that is brought about divinely by transsexual women. The shaman/whore coin more accurately reflects the experiences of trans women in all aspects of social living outside of and within the arts.

First, let’s discuss the whore side of things because it’s more immediately apparent and quicker to explain. I will speak for myself. I was a sex worker in North Texas for a period of about two years while I worked retail, did digital art commissions, and worked a remote design job that didn’t pay me nearly enough to live off of. I put myself through college the new-fangled way, which is to say I made internet pornography, specifically audio internet pornography, where I would write and read arousing scripts to a short list of online clients for profit and then share them on popular porn video sites to collect a small percentage of ad revenue. It was a lot of work and not worth the trouble.

If that’s not enough for me to call myself a sex worker, then I’ll also let you know that I used to wear the cheapest latex you can imagine and beat the shit out of old men, weird gamer type guys, the occasional trust fund she/they, and the odd transsexual who could never afford to pay me but usually offered some sort of bartering that was always ultimately very disappointing like a craft or a piece of junk they didn’t need. I think I got a couple of used GBA games from one girl, and that’s about as good as it got.

I didn’t make as much as I would have liked to, because I didn’t know what I was doing. I’ve talked to other girls who’ve done this kind of work and talked prices, and WOW was I being ripped off. The North Texas prostitution game is not for the faint of heart, either. Long drives between parking lot nothings to grey and light blue condos, perfectly 40 minutes between each other like fragments of a constellation.

One time, I went to a job where I was supposed to fuck another trans girl, and a man about 1.5x my dad’s age opened the door, and I stupidly followed. She was there, too, alright, behind a garage door, totally out of her mind on something, at least completely stoned. They led me up to a room with the biggest TV I’ve ever seen, blasting porn, and an Alaskan king-size bed covered in bottles of lotion, surrounded by cameras on tripods, which was not communicated to me at all. I decided to “get something from my car” and drive the fuck out of there as fast as I could. I realized I didn’t have the heart for the job but still gave it another five months or so.

I might not have had the chutzpa for it, but lots of other girls did and do, and they all make pretty incredible movies. I always try to shoot with at least one pornstar on set, and if I can’t get one, I consider it a failure. Despite popular belief, pornstars are better behind the camera, because all day at work they stare them down and learn every inch of them. They’re better at working the cameras than most of the guys that use em cause they actually like their jobs, whereas most of these NYU dropouts are just pissed they’re not working on some bullshit Nolan movie.

Like I said before, once you’re free from Hollywood’s lime lit tractor beam, you’re free to make whatever you want, and you’re certainly a lot less stressed out about whether or not you’ll make it because you know you won’t; you’ve been marked a whore by the camera already. Being a whore isn’t only a commonality between so many trans women and women, it’s an identity that can never be stripped from you.

Many cis women find their way toward whoredom, but when they arrive, it’s seen as some sort of spectacular failure, whereas for trans women, it’s assumed as the default starting position. Ask yourself why congressmen think drag queens can’t be around children, schools, or churches. It’s not because drag queens pose a real threat; it’s because the only women that look like this in the lives of politicians are the women they’re sleeping with, and they can’t risk their kids or their wives or their pastors finding out.

Nobody is as surprised as I want them to be when I tell them I used to make porn or I used to be a dominatrix. It’s assumed. They only get surprised when I tell them I have a master's degree, or that I directed a feature, or that I wrote a graphic novel. The whore of it all is assumed, of course, I’m a whore, I’m a trans woman.

People are surprised to find a whore within the walls of an institution, however. When I studied at SAIC, lots were surprised to know where I’d been. Maybe just because most of my peers had relied on presidential connections and the dollar of their military contractor fathers, so they just couldn’t imagine an artist working at all, let alone sex work, but to me, my stint as a whore is irrevocable from my practice as an artist.

And this is true for many women artists across history. The muses across almost all 19th-century artworks, when they were not nobility, were almost always sex workers. And since women could not pursue art making at the academic level, and they were forbidden from painting and drawing the nude form, the only way for most women artists to learn theory and craft was to sleep with the ones who taught it or would teach it to them. There used to be a time when an older man you slept with could teach you a thing or two, but they’re so obsessed with alt-right grifters and masculinity podcast slop to teach you about a figure other than the newest cryptocurrency they’ve sunk their kids' college fund into.

I tell you this, bearing in mind the known consequences of the compound gaze, how it transforms the sex worker and the othering begotten by it, to tell you that there is something deeply freeing about knowing where you fall into the equation. If you are a woman in the arts, or a woman who has been on screen, or a woman who has been photographed, or a woman who has been seen, you are food for the beast. In other words, you are made whore by the compound gaze, innately, and it’s your choice whether you will continue to look down on people who have accepted our fate or join us and make some

fucking money.

I’m not asking you to debase yourself more than you already do, just to be aware of the exchange going on every time you are visible to all who see you, and if you are creating visual media where you will be seen, you are selling yourself, and if you are creating visual media in which others are seen, you are selling them. This is not a weakness of a system, but a design of it, and a design you can exploit nonetheless. Now that you are not burdened by “good representation” and “Hollywood success”, now that you know yourself to be the pornstar, it becomes your goal to become the pornographer.

The pornographer, in the exchange of seen and seer, is the only true medium. The one behind the camera is the only person who is invisible. Even the man operating a POV camera to have sex with a pornstar, whose lower body is in frame, is de-personed by the projection of the desire of the viewer; his body becomes their body. They’re fucking her, not him, and the pornstar knows this to be true, which is why she looks into the eye of the camera and not the eye of the cameraman.

The pornographer as a role within the exchange of the compound gaze breaks itself from the binary set before: Sacrifice and centipede god. Because someone needs to make that sacrifice: The Shaman.

The Shaman acts as a medium between gods, between spirits, between life and death, and between good and evil. Creating the environment, acknowledging the power that one has, to create a message, an experience, a manifested desire that is for the good of the community or for the good of the self. The shaman is an exploitationist, and that’s why their movies are the best. The shaman will risk it all for entertainment and desired meaning.

The reason that shaman, then, is classified with whore, is simple. Because what I’m ultimately asking you to do in this essay, and in my body of work, is to start making your own movies on your own terms and with your own body. Tell the story you want to tell, especially if it's your own story, and film yourself. Put the cameras in the hands of women who have no idea what they’re doing, a bunch of them preferably, and tell them generally where to stand and what to point at. Act as yourself, play all the characters if you have to. Know that you will be judged, that you will be sexualized, that you will be consumed. You must become the pornstar and the pornographer. You must rise to the occasion of shaman and sacrifice. Cut open your own belly and spill forth into the mouth of god. Feed the centipede all your hopes and dreams and your desire, and who gives a fuck about success or money, since when was this about money? You didn’t get into film or art to make money; you wanted to get onto the screen and into the museum to become immortal. To become GOD. When was someone gonna tell you it doesn’t happen for women like us? Trannies don’t get happy endings. We walk between life and death and always have. We’ve existed before all beings on this earth and will be here long after everyone has died, because we have the power to transcend humanity. Is this not what you set out to do? Is this not the Artist/Muse/Shaman/Whore destiny you had been promised? Curse your staff and your sacrificial blade and throw them into the pits of hell, then make a movie about it. You are not going to Hollywood, my sister, you are getting into heaven through the maw of a terrible insect beast. You are chosen for something greater than Scientology-backed, rape-fueled, Epstein Island-filling, economy of getting your movie in an AMC theater. You were put on this earth for one reason and one reason only: to make amateur porn.

By the way, I lied. There is a way to defeat the compound gaze; it just may be disappointing for some. Film yourself, and only yourself, talking about you, and no one else, and watch it, by yourself, and show no one. Or just… show the people you want to see it.

Depentes, Virginie. King Kong Theory. Translated by Stéphanie Benson. New York: Feminist Press, 2010.

Dodge, Harry, and Stanya Kahn. Can’t Swallow It, Can’t Spit It Out. Video art/performance work. 2006.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.

Kahn, Stanya. It’s Cool, I’m Good. Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2010.

Miller, Lee. Lee Miller’s War: Photographer and Correspondent with the Allies in Europe, 1944–1945. Edited by Antony Penrose. London: Thames & Hudson, 1992.

Preciado, Paul B. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. Translated by Bruce Benderson. New York: Feminist Press, 2013.

Films:

Bee, Gren, dir. OBLITERATOR. 2025. Independent feature film.

Kahn, Stanya, and Harry Dodge. Can’t Swallow It, Can’t Spit It Out. 2006. Video/performance work.

“Dyke-kini”

gREN bEE

2026

Bright blue water like full of vitamins gushes shoots and sundered all across and over a massive pile of fat children. A great big soaking bandaid sticks to surface like a dead bat soaking up pee and poop and blood and coronavirus. Thousands of wet feet stampede concrete to rush out of the micro-lake and storm the concession stand; this metal shack painted red and white arches casts before swine popsicles shaped like ninja turtles. With gumball eyes. Looking.

She holds a foam cup. Eerily still. Her fat boy body trembles at the sight of water. Her shirt, still on, resists the pool like sentences to millionaire whites. Children cheer in a miasmic legs and arms and funky-trunk pattern ball like a sacrifice. She does not enter; she never enters. Her skin burning red, the fanta in her styrofoam subject to ten thousand bees. Like black Colombian heroin licked off the mixologist’s finger by junkie tourists.

Bri’s bullshit trashcan ship enters orbit. She pushes her big hands through the gauntlet steering gloves. Leaned over the cockpit like a motorcycle arcade game, similar plastic too. She makes careful movements with her fingers to penetrate through the neon-chartreuse halogen clouds, the branding and paint fade and melt on her repurposed aerial terragator turned starcraft. It was built to mix and spray liquid fertilizer over the New Panhandle, but now it just barely hauled refrigeration equipment and AC units through the cosmos on contract.

The truck said “Wilson Refrigeration”, but today she was descending onto the chlorine planet, “Kokomo”, on a job from Margarettaville Intergalactic, to pick up the mega-marg-mixer from a failed resort project. She didn’t know why it failed, only that the planet’s air was extremely inhospitable, and her sensors picked up no sapien lifeforms.

The sound of her landers beeping filled the sky. Yellow warning lights and regulation OSHA-PETA animal-get-out-the-way signals projected from the truck onto the landing zone: A large concrete mass beside the resort city nestled up on an ocean of Gatorade-blue water.

She landed and strapped on her black and yellow haz-suit. It went on like a loose rubber jumpsuit and was smelting hot under the eternal summer of the Kokomo suns. Her helmet consisted of a single-lens copper visor which sat above a black respirator with two potion-shaped transparent bulbs on the side of it, a large red headlamp affixed to a holo-net she shoved her unconditioned hair into, and great big Dewalt headphones blasting her dad’s favorites.

Her red light beamed like a laser through the green mist at a massive, smiling crack on the dome over the resort city. It looks like something got through the dome and flooded the temp-mosphere with toxic gas. Her hypothesis checked out as she walked through the city. Charred, fatless, trunked, and bikini’d bodies splayed out awfully across plastic lawns, spilling out of chairs like hollowed out carcass people, eyes evaporated, bodies burnt green and crispy, tangled up like snakes left in hot cars, or the bacon type of roadkill. The breast and cheek and hair and dick implants kept their shape against the vacant bloodless mangled cicada shell everything else.

Flat nothings on top of the pools like dead rats caught in filters, GOD, she hated water.

She followed the beep on her gig watch. It was shaped like a cartoon bunny head and beeped annoyingly. It beeped louder and more frequently as she reached Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville Intergalactic. Her watch said something stupid in a cartoon voice she didn’t hear over the station switch on her headphones. As soon as she entered the restaurant, “Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes” started playing. Chemically charred Hawaiian shirt bodies piled the bar, faces planted into the husks of what were once very soggy cheeseburgers in paradise.

She jumped over the bar dykely, only knocking a couple things over. She grabbed a bottle of ancient earth tequila and tucked it into her belt. She made her way to the back and found a dramatic emptiness where the mega-mixer wasn’t. She kicked a nearby fridge too hard with her magsteel boot and accidentally did some serious damage, which made her jump. She began to take a photo with her watch and collect the “FAILED DELIVERY” default, but then she heard a bang bang banging from the freezer.

Something was back there, and the closer she got, the more her watch beeped. She pulled a big multi-ratchet off her D-ring and switched up the machete-sized boxcutter, before kicking open the door. Blue mist sprayed out of the freezer before it turned green like everything else, and a huge hunkering leather fucked up something hung its sprawling face all over the nozzle of the mixer. It had giant, round wings with tiny, spiked wyvern claws at the end, a weird little doo-hickey tail with a bunch of bulbs on it affixed to a big plastic-bag body which inflated and deflated rapidly, and the red headlamp illuminated a massive proboscis ball head with compound eyes and little roach antennae rubbing pheromones all over the Margaretta nozzle, soaking in that summer lovin.

The moment the creature was exposed, it scattered around the room in an instant, like a house centipede, before grabbing onto the mixer with shitty little dinosaur legs and flap-flapping its wings on out of there. Bri made a startled slash at the critter, which did a whole lotta nothing but get her suit caught on the razor-sharp danglings on the whatever’s wing, and horrible World War One style burning started necrotizing the open spot on her arm. The big bat drunkenly flew out of the bar, and Bri bolted to the nearest first aid kit, grabbed a trademark “Jimmy Buffer” and injected it into her arm, before wrapping it up to-go in a stump with a finger condom specially made for Plus-Plus-Plus sized frycook goliaths.

She tracked the critter out with her watch. It was struggling with the mixer, but wasn’t gonna let it go. She started to chase it the same way you do when a dog you’re watching gets out. Slowly, kinda playfully, like you’re not really chasing it, trying to trick it uselessly while it runs block after block away from home and into traffic. As soon as she got close, she sprang for it, but couldn’t grab it with just the one hand. The thing started flapping its wings so hard she got knocked down, and it shot through the air like a dragonfly, the mixer dangling by its legs like another dragonfly it was fuckin’.

The beeping started to fade. She didn’t have enough time to get to her ship and chase it, and she didn’t snap a photo, so she wouldn’t get the default either. She could shoot it out of the sky like her papa taught her, no problem, but regulations stated no guns, plus the OSHA-PETA bonus she would get if she minimized animal harm on the job. Luckily for her, she didn’t have to strike it down, cause the poor thing banged its head hard on the unbroken part of the dome, sending it, and the mixer, into the water below.

She walked out over to the pool, the biggest on the resort. Fried bodies and pool toys lay out on the horizon of the water under the dome like abstract shapes on a surrealist skyline. The Whatever drifted toward the deep end of the pool, floating like a Band-Aid, and the mixer sank straight to the bottom. She’d have to get in.

She waded forward, carefully, but with little success, as the suit was far too heavy. She moved like a zombie underneath the water, big light glowing like the eye of a colossus. She’d have to do something she’d never done before, and unfortunately, she was too broke to make the decision out of growth or courage. She had no choice but to strip everything but her helmet. Her pasty, scrawny, unacceptable limbs, wide masculine fingers, tight, spongy stomach, distant cone breasts, and long, hairy legs pulled out of the rubber, leaving behind a cargo shorts transsexual starfish in a gas mask.

She paddled out toward the mixer; she hated her nakedness. She felt the rich white cis bodies around her judging despite their lack of eyes or their mouths’ inability to retain teeth. She drifted past hair and bones and jerkied organs and the occasional Q-tip, knowing if she gets to the surface for any reason, the atmosphere will burn the flesh off her skeleton. She worried that the future anthropologists of planet Kokomo would misgender her charred remains.

She got to the mixer. It was too heavy to pull out of the water herself, but she was able to empty two of its tequila canisters, and that gave her just enough buoyancy to pull the mixer up. Only problem was, it also meant the mixer was buoyant enough to float STRAIGHT up, and it was about to shoot her to the surface. Just as she started making peace with the gods above, the mixer collided with the beige flesh of the blacked-out bat.

The skin of the creature seemed to fare just fine in the planet’s atmosphere, and she realized she might have to work with this thing if she was gonna make it out alive. She waded the mixer and the dragon out towards the concrete stairs and out of the pool. Before she could get back to her suit, the tinny roar of speakers erupted through the park. Wood blocks, slight Percussion, bass, the names of tropical places. It was the Beach Boys. Bri looked at her watch, sure enough, 5:00. The only thing that muffled out the sound of the music was a great thunderous rolling, like a hundred bowling balls tumbling down cement stairs. Something was coming, probably the something that broke the dome.

“AT THE FLORIDA KEEEEYYYYYS”

A massive purple, damp, and heavy tangleweed kaiju muppet swamp thing with a million bright pink beach-ball-sized eyes emerged from the pool water ocean. Kokomo was his alarm clock. Bri couldn’t see the full behemoth past the leathery flaps of the bat, but she got the picture that she was fucked if she stuck around long enough to get a better look. She made a break running on the pavement, even though the signs all around her told her not to, but the lifeguard had been boiled alive by the atmosphere, so he was too busy to whistle at her. Her legs started to broil, like corrosion on a battery. She bolted, dragging the mixer behind her and the bat over her head.

A bunch more bat things shot up out of nearby pools and headed for the hills. The pool monster caught a couple out of the air and ate em like jalapeno poppers. The drunk critter finally woke up to the sound of its brethren being eaten alive, and started to break for the sky. “FUCK!” Bri grabbed onto the creature’s tail and wrassled the mixer in her melting legs. The things we do for minimum wage.

She took off, she couldn’t get the thing to land, but it was about to pass her ship and head for the great cyan beyond. In a panic, her shaking, burning legs sprayed margarita mix everywhere, and the bat immediately dove for the globs of slushy that rained onto the ground. Fucking drunk.

She fell hard on the concrete floor, broken only by the bat’s sour attempt at landing, and ran straight for the ship. Parts of her bones were exposed. She got to the airlock and little robots covered her burns and started spraying stem-paste all over them. She tossed the mixer to the back and stumbled to the cockpit, turned on her ship, and began the takeoff ritual.

Burning bright thrusters like magenta upsidedown geysers shot the truck up skyside, before thrusters of a similar color and texture pushed it foreward. She was safe, healing up, and employed. She pressed through menus on her phone to confirm pickup, and limped over to the mixer to take a picture, when she saw the swamp thing through the rearview, still on the ground, picking off bats. It had a fistful of ready-to-eat alien dinosaur nuggets, and it was heading towards our FUI culprit, who was still lapping marg mix off the ground.

Bri thought about letting the autopilot pull out into the sea of stars, taking the photo of the mixer, and clearing out, but she owed that thing on the ground her life, and wasn’t about to watch its family get devoured. She propped up the mixer and affixed it to the old fertilizer, poured the tequila from her belt into the engine like nitrous, and slammed the hatch open. She figured the mixer had to be in one piece, but the juice inside wasn’t in the order details.

She flew over the dome, spraying lemon-lime margaretta slurry over the park like it would terraform the dessimate vacation spot into a Jimmy Buffet conservatory. Like great big plastic palm trees would sprout to beget pina colada coconuts and aperol sap. The bats swarmed to the cloud of booze, a flock of spiritual step dads, retirees, and Latina soccer moms followed the ship to safety, and the pool monster was too slow and sobriety-pilled to get close.

She drifted slowly across the planet, guiding the migration of bats to a new, monster-free island, and dispensing the rest of the juice into a puddle, leaving the little alcoholics to it. Guided Migratory Specialist and Margarita Forest Ranger were jobs she felt much better suited for than contract refrigeration transport, but what is a girl to do?

“My head hurts, My feet stink, and I don’t love Jesus.”

She pulled out of orbit and headed for MVI headquarters, Legs patching up nice and a wad of fresh dip in her mouth. A job well done. Her watch started beeping at her again, this time in a tune she hadn’t heard. 10,000 TEX, a huge bonus from OSHA-PETA for saving the bats. She shot synthetic backwoods juice across her teeth and moved the wad over to the other cheek. Maybe she’d put a down payment on a better truck. Or maybe she’d get moved to a system with planets that could sustain real crops. Get herself a piece of farm land, maybe even something by the water.

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Goodbye school days, you wicked, wild, boring, and nauseous something. I am complete with you. No more homework! No more teachers!! No more big sack lunch or meat slopped from a tray, extra dry sponge rolls, and chocolate milk. Here’s your cooky, ma’am. I am parting of and between you, this chapter of this book, and many others. I will never be assigned to read something ever again. I will only be able to read what I choose, which is infinitely less interesting. Oh nice! Congratulations! One hundred thousand dollars around your neck, yanking a chain or piano wire across you. I tap the piano wire with my keys and make soft, hard melodies. Is out the other side. Wanting waiting. I got a new phone to keep me from distractions. The screen is so tiny it’s impossible to do anything on. But what am I not distracting myself from? Now. my tiny phone is an inch and a half wide and full of lasers. It has a tiny ghost that endangers one’s soul. Ghosts that endanger one soul. I WILL FIND A WAY TO JERK OFF WITH IT!!! Perhaps a day will come when dog food grows on trees. Poor guy hates the cans he’s getting, hasn’t shit too much in three days. Can’t afford more because Mama needs to spend forty dollars every day. Blood and guts in high school in my back pocket. The guy on the train yells at me for wearing too much Carhartt. I realize he just thinks he’s talking, he has music in listening. I’m not wearing any Carhartt, just brown clothes. All my clothes are brown, pretty much. Fat guys wear brown clothes, at least the labels seem to think. Brown clothes or Hawaiian shirts, and if you’re a woman? Nightmare Before Christmas. All fat women love Nightmare Before Christmas, or at least that’s what the labels say. I fucking hate that movie, but these are some comfortable underwear. I wanna get an orchiectomy just so I can sit comfier. This morning, I ran up the stairs and crushed my balls slightly to catch the train, and spent an hour wanting to dry heave. I’m ready to say goodbye to them, but not to what they do. Right here, baby? Right here? No? Right here? Right here? How about here? Right here? Get your fingers out from in there, honey, you’re not touching nothing. Criss-crossing legacies surround my neck and body. I want to go home, but then home I’ll stay.

Cloying calling green and translucent destiny, or rather, past. The ghost of your grandmother is much kinder than the ghost of the present. Your friend pretends to like you and has a party without you, and they spend the whole time talking about how shit you are. Shitty fucking stupid ghosts. I wanna take a blessed AR-15 with mirror bullets and flash photo banging to the lot of them. Fuck ghosts. Ghostbusters patch on my arm like appropriated Punisher skull. “Actually, Venkman wasn’t a fascist against ghosts, and he hated cops”. Fuck the source material, man, I’m the author now. In my world, ghost busters ride in elevated trucks and take their buster cannons into their workplace and post offices and post offices, and campus bell towers. They sit and wait and guzzle beer. Whom shall I speak to? Anyone, I damn well please. You see this jumpsuit?! I fought and killed for this jumpsuit man. I beat the past brother. I killed 50 ghosts, and I’ll kill 50 more. Fuck Slimer, bro. I’ll fucking kill every slimer I see. I’m the Chris Kyle of killing fucking every fucking slimer I see. They’re gonna name a highway after me. “Slime the slimer”. You like that? Yeah, I bet you do faggot. I had this T-shirt especially made for my weird body. My knuckles say “fuck gost,” and my teeth are silver just in case that repels ghosts. I’m pretty sure it does. That little doll that has a ghost in it that kills people... Anabel, I think. Fuck man, she’s scary as fuck. They’re gonna let her teach in schools pretty soon. Fuck they are. Not when I get a say in things. Need a ghost hating president need a ghost hating president. When we had a Catholic president, it was all over. Those fuckers love ghosts. Not me though, and I ain’t afraid of em neither.

Record the name again so we don’t fuck it up at your graduation, it says in the email. I listen. But I don’t know if I’ll do it. I guess I only get the one, so it would be good to do it right. I couldn’t give a damn about the graduation, but I’m excited about a succulent Chinese meal after. I’m gonna go to Emperor’s Choice and get the biggest sweet and sour shrimp you’ve ever seen. Big as your fist, these shrimp. Big as a still pretty small penis these shrimp, but if you said “shrimp dick” you’d be thinking about different sized shrimp in relation to the size of a penis. She gives me a handjob, which is awesome, but I’m a dog these days. I wanna be on top again. I get nauseous, though sometimes what with all this fat falling victim to motion. I try my best. Making strange lateral sex motions like 80s porn, like scuba diving. I’m excited to get my master’s robe and wear it during sex. If not, that’s okay too, I’ll just keep it in the closet alongside so much crap. This is my last in-class assignment. Everything else is me now if I’m the teacher. I hope I am. I look at my portfolio, and it’s all about sex, and not the hot kind either. All about tranny rape and being treated like a dog (neglect, not furry). I don’t think any of the normal schools will want to take me now, which sucks because I don’t know how to get my foot in a door. Idle hands next to mine. Everyone’s stopped typing. I only break to sip diet coke or pick my nose. Everyone is a slug but me. Everyone is a slug but me. Everyone is a slug but me. I’m like really fucking smart. Writing on your phone is for shitheads. Everything else from now on will be with intent at my own “pace”. I hope I don’t forget how to be a psychopath that can’t take care of themselves. I hope my next place is still a bit terroristic in atmosphere.

I’m gonna be the smartest, most degreed, most artistic, and interesting girl at the death camp. Archeologists are gonna tell which corpse in the tranny mass grave was mine first because I’m the smartest one. In the underfunded museums about us, I’ll get a special section because I’m so sweet and funny. They’ll remember how seductive I was and print out the contents of my notes app and Substack and put it on walls or an interactive touch screen so kids can learn about everything but the redacted sex life I had. Not a day goes by where I don’t make it about me. Where I hide behind the excuse of fear to play pretend marginalization. “They’re gonna round up the furries.” No, you idiot, no, they’re not there’s actually so few of you, and old people don’t know what that is yet, so they’re not going to do anything about it. Do you think they’ll make my parents pay off my student loans if I die by firing squad still? I suppose they will if there isn’t a successful insurrection shining in that darkness of the black of the glass in the palms of our hands. The Revolution Is Gonna Be More Like Minecraft. I wanna watch more movies my friend made and never go to a show or a screening or an opening unless it’s a buddy of mine. I don’t have the time to support my friends and listen to anything new, so I’m picking the better option. Geese was an industry plant all along. Carefully centered algorithms and curated digital portfolio tracking your actions and leading you to Cameron Winter. All signs point to guy yelling atonally over Beatles-style string sections. I can’t wait to tell all the girlies in line at the spiked pit we all get thrown off into about how that guy is a fucking fraud, hahahahahahhaha, or really just the label or whatever, I’m sure he’s actually normal, and the songs are pretty good. They’re gonna build a Disneyland over where we’re all buried.

I need to remember to make my own isms and sayings if I’m ever going to be liked as a teacher. If I am so lucky to teach classes, if they don’t make it illegal for me to be in schools, then it’s really important for me to come up with a bunch of funny things to say, and also not project my frustration with the college system into weird mind games. I had a professor who gave me Cs on all my assignments until the last one, where he gave me a glowing hundred, so my average would be a B, but I’d be scared shitless until I graduated. I made the best work in the class by a long shot. The kids who did well all got Cs until their A, and the kids who did bad all got As until their C, so we all got Bs. Fucking stupid, who cares. Who needs to sweat like that? Just fail the morons and move on. Or don’t fail anyone. School literally costs a million dollars; no one can afford to fail, and it’s not like we’re training to be doctors. Most of these pieces of shit will just go back to working for a relative. I got a degree in explaining what my degree is to my future father-in-law. Everything about myself confounds him in ways that frustrate both of us, no doubt. I’m scanning all my debit cards, the both of them, onto my new bullshit tiny phone so I can buy stuff even if I forget my wallet at home. I don’t remember any of the numbers or where Venmo thinks I live. I got so sick this morning, I had to swallow a sausage biscuit whole, not to throw up all over myself. I ate it while walking. God, I’ll miss eating while walking to class. I love eating in transit. Is that over? Is the rush ending? Will I eat every meal sitting down now? I don’t think I’ve gone a week in 8 years at least where I haven’t walked while eating too much cheap food. Now that’s over. No more seven-eleven burgers at 6 or 3 am, or maybe even no more seven-eleven burgers at all? God, this is bullshit. I need to speak to my manager or get one.

The last big gulp of the academic semester is full of Diet Coke and a little bit of Slurpee.

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Being masculine and trans and over five years on hormones means that most people think you’re FTM, which is to say that medical professionals treat you like a woman, which, in a roundabout way, is correct, but not how they go about it. Despite the unknowing of the staff at what exactly is in my pants, they manage well and not unhelpfully, trying to determine what the searing pain in the lower left quadrant of my abdomen is.

I enjoy hospitals, generally, but they often don’t know what to do with people like me, and I suspect it’s because there aren’t many of us. I’m a girl who looks like a boy who looks like a boy that looks like a girl, and it’s very frustrating for myself, my parents, and the staff of this hospital.

My favorite part of this visit is standing on a scale and learning that I’ve become 20 pounds more lesbian, as I do not own a scale and would never step on one unless a medical emergency requires it. Or unless I want to go down a waterslide. In the spaces between visits to the ER or Hurricane Harbor, I have evolved into a three hundred and forty five pound spite-fueled, hypersexual, ultra-violent, she-wolf dykezilla with the stench of melted steel beams and hairy pussy on my breath. I stepped off the scale, Chicago’s Kaiju; They will have to send a thousand tanks, a hundred planes, and a beautiful blonde with Italian beef and imported coke in hand to seduce me off the dueling spires of Sears Tower.

While pain boils within my internal organs, a nice Lydia-like woman named Lydia asks me about my hedonistic lifestyle. If I’ve had anal sex in the last six months, if I’ve done any hard drugs, if I smoke, if I drink, if I sleep with both sexes, and if I’ve had any surgeries. I answer yes to all but the last, as I’ve yet to take the plunge into total sexchangedom and currently doubt if I ever will. At the moment, I’m quite pleased with my dick, except for the shard of piss glass which cauterizes the inside of my body like a rogue kyber crystal.

Another separation from the typical and immediately visible trans-feminine archetype embodied by I is that I engage in penetrative sex with my penis in various holes and wet things and don’t hate it, nor is it a manifestation of hatred at or within myself. I hate with my words, my mind, my language, and every other fiber of my being and breath of my soul except for my hard transsexual American she-male dick, which roars only love. And at this moment, I do not wish to cut it down the middle and transmogrify it; Though I likely will when pills become required just to get blood through it, or if these kidney stones start to become a regular thing.

Brimstone roils within me and cuts deep like Kronos scythe on a large eggsac filled with the new generation of trans dykes, spilling out and all over between time’s legs like wild spiders are born. Maybe it’s the titan’s blade which reaps within my loins, and not a new anthropocentric sediment of Diet Coke and microplastics, and perhaps because of this, I am transported a small matter of days into the future, after whatever passes passes, and I continue to not.

Me and my co-conspiritor, CC, walk down the shores of North Chicago on down to Montrose Beach from the rocks of Hartigan. It’s a long walk for a girl as big as me, but we’re on a bulb and a half of mushrooms, breaking sweats and chaffing chafe I won’t feel until the morning. We loudly echo our plans of world domination, magick-induced chaos, and rapid thought acceleration among the Chicago populace across the apartment building exteriors of various gayboys that live near Hollywood’s public sex grotto.

We’re tired of everyone around us making terrible art that sucks and responds to nothing interesting, and this emerging idea that art “doesn’t have to mean anything”. And that art that means something and has ideas behind it and isn’t an iPad drawing of two dog people kissing is fascist. You dumb fucks, the fascists loved drawing stupid, meaningless pictures of dogs doing nothing.

(Albright-Knox Art Gallery © Estate of Giacomo Balla / Artists Rights Society / SIAE, Rome)

Anyway our plan involves getting a bunch of trans girls together to read Burroughs and Kerouac and then a lot of 90s feminist “post-punk” rebeat stuff like Acker and Despentes and get them really into abject representations of gender and the body and trick everyone into getting really annoyingly feminist again and stop being polyamorous and start having paths in life that aren’t stupid or dependent on “randomly recivieving 30 million dollars” if a horrible white relative dies before they do.

We’re gonna use the front of drugs and psychedelia and 70s free love dynamics and the theater of American protestant proselytization and some classic Thelema sex magick and Dianetic brainwashing just so we can get the masses to put down their phones for ten seconds and pick up a book that isn’t fanfiction. Or this is what we talk about while we’re both on mushrooms.

We go to meet a girl on a pier by one of those tiny lighthouses that beeps, not blares, who said she’s gonna kill herself, or rather get so drunk she passes out on a beach, which is a form of suicide if you’re a trans woman because someone will kill her if she does that. We stumble our way toward the underfunded, shattered concrete dock towards the lighthouse; I trip down onto my knee and twist my body, but nothing hurts because I ate a small broccoli of a star god. CC tells me “You can’t fall off a mountain,” and that that’s from The Dharma Bums, which I haven’t read because CC probably sent it to me as a PDF through a text message, and I refuse to read anything long off the 4-inch monitor of the crack-pipe security camera I and everyone else are addicted to. We see Lily. She’s drunk and standing on a tiny gap between the lighthouse and abyssal waters that our leather jackets couldn’t survive the sting of. If she falls, we’ll have to disrobe before we jump in or risk dying ourselves, and who knows how long that might take before her drunken body gives up. Luckily, you can’t fall off a mountain.

We get her down unclimatically. Lily acts drunk. She is drunk, but she acts more drunk than she needs to. I believe in alcohol poisoning, and I believe in dizziness and drowsiness, but the slurring of speech and the slipping into voices and the stumbling about across the boundaries of other people is an act that’s not as socially excusable as Shakespeare or Texas legislature has taught us it is. This is to say, ultimately, that Drunk words/actions are sober thoughts/will, and I refuse to believe otherwise.

I say this because everytime I took off my jacket, Lily staired at my breasts headfirst like a cartoon character and at one point asked to “cop a feel” because it was her birthday, to which I must remind my audience that girls, of all kinds, can still be creeps even though we don’t talk about it, and alcohol gives anyone permission to act like a man the same way that weed gives everyone permission to be stupid. A point me and CC disagree on as she thinks weed is at least valuable as the ultimate aphrodisiac, and I vastly prefer coffee and writing or drawing on each other’s bodies.

That reminds me of an essay I saw the headline of recently and didn’t read, which was titled “Why are muses always women?” Look around. Listen to yourself speak. Look around again. What possible inspiration could you derive from a man or his pathetic body? You may as well ask why don’t people swim in wells.

The Three Muses walk up North Simmonds drive on toward bus station on toward Taco Bell.

As we walk, Lily complains about how every birthday is the same, and how she hasn’t let herself have something as narcissistic as a birthday party in years. About how she feels disconnected from the trans community here because everyone does all their thinking with their dicks and none of the girls in this town are interested in friendships, just incestuous power dynamism and submission under or dominance over each other. Then Lily says something about just wanting ot be someone’s dog for the rest of her life. She’s conflicted, and like a lot of girls I’ve met and been or been inside of. She wants the community she’s been promised, and she doesn’t want the onus of constant objectification, but at the same time, she wants to fuck everyone around her and be objectified constantly.

She’s also obsessed with passing. It’s guised by the concept of escaping the harm and neurosis of being witnessed at all times in public, but behind that mask is a desire to be validated and accepted and wanted and desired by the same eyes which stab daggers into you. So much of transition in the minds of so many of us always comes down to putting our need to be loved and wanted in the hands of everyone that wants to kill us. It’s the “well, sure, my friends use my pronouns but not strangers at the gas station” approach to being miserable for no reason that a lot of these girls obsess over. Strangers are not your friend and never have been, You transsexual Blanche Dubois.

There’s something I’ve never understood about “passing” as a concept, especially wanting to pass as a gorgeous skinny cis woman, because doing so will just make you a target of a different violence; The kind of violence that all women encounter, but especially gorgeous and thin cis women, who if you ever talked with one would tell you about how horrible it is to be made to feel like a piece of meat everywhere you go. Part of me feels like a piece of meat everywhere I go with this girl after she asks to touch my boobs, but she’s escaped this particular criticism because she’s my sister in the gender wars and because she’s “drunk” and because it’s her birthday.

We get to Taco Bell, and I get a lot of food, which includes their new shitty chicken nuggets, which repulses Lily because it’s inauthentic. This is a Taco Bell, I tell her, it is not a Mexican restaurant. They sit at the booth, I can’t sit for no reason. It’s the mushrooms, certainly, but I get anxious about the idea of getting on one of those high stool things and decide to squat in place at the table over a chair from a different table. I look weird. I look like a pervert, and I am.

I alternate between sitting and standing wildly. Every time Lily speaks, me and CC interrupt with anecdotes cited from art history, magickal canon, feminist theory, new wave science fiction, gender politics from the internet, and King of the Hill. That last one was my favorite. I likened lily’s dependency on an eventual lawsuit or a financially advantageous family death to that of the character Boomhauer, who has just enough money to sleep in all day in his paid-off two-bedroom house in Arlen, Texas, drinking in the alley every day and advancing spiritually not at all, trapped forever in the Preta-gati of “Yep”, “Yep”, “Yep”, and “Mmhmmm”. This is to say we’re being crazy and unhelpful, but eventually she gets tired of talking about killing herself and goes home to sleep on CC’s couch.

As I walk home, I brew on a theory. I think about why I stopped transitioning in the same way as everyone around me at around year four of my medical transition. I took estrogen and spironolactone at a medium dose, which took to my body like chip dust and snot to the sides of blue jeans. My already intersex body filled out quickly as I was already fat, and my body had been waiting its whole life for the right hormones.

I was told by other girls I needed to go on progesterone because it would keep my sex drive up, and it would pump more fat into my ass and tits. I was told by different girls I needed a breast reduction because my chest sagged too much, and if I “settled” for double D, then they’d perk up more.

I’ve been told what I should do to my face, and what I should laser off my body, and that I should shave my legs and my bush, and that I should learn to raise my voice so I sound more feminine. I tried these things, all of them, but to a point I started to ask myself what I wanted out of my body, and what did I want the purpose of my body to be?

For the longest time, my body was a temple to the hedonistic pleasure of others. My fat flesh writhed pinkly and moaned loudly. I allowed myself to be pushed and pulled and twisted and bruised and pulverized at the hands of women and men who didn’t give a shit about me, and some of them paid me so they wouldn’t have to pretend to. I prioritized external validation over all else, and rarely took time for myself or to work or to find friends. I was a whore, and I was flunking my sculpture class. Then I had a disastrous foursome in a disgusting apartment with three other trans girls who were extremely annoying, and I decided to start taking my life seriously.

I wore nothing but deeply unpleasing jump and flight suits and cut my hair short. You experience a phenomenon in the trans community when you do something like this. Every trans girl says you “look like Ripley” because they’re worried that if they say you look like a man or you look butch, your heart will explode. I stopped having sex for about nine months and began focusing on my art to the extent that I’d be at the studio right as it opened and leave when I couldn’t keep my eyes open. This was before any real experimentation, so I just drank a ton of black coffee from Denton’s Jack In The Box, which was the only 24-hour restaurant I could afford to go to.

Eventually, my body stretched into something new; a vehicle for my practice, more so than something immediately identifiable as a “woman” or “girl”. My pronouns stopped mattering to me as much, and I stopped caring if I was misgendered, especially by strangers, because the only thing I required from an audience of any kind was attention to my work. And while I’ve come back in full force to regular sexual escapades and lovemaking, wearing whatever clothes I want, doing more drugs than just coffee, and cutting my hair even shorter, much has stayed consistent with what I learned.

I don’t care what anyone thinks I am, because only I mostly know what that is, and I don’t need to be attractive to anyone but my lover. I hate men, so I don’t need to appeal to them, and I’m mostly self-employed, and even when I’m not, I’m mostly employed by queer women. So it works out that way. Every day passes the Bechdel test, why do I care if I look like a woman to another girl who also doesn’t look like a woman? Why do I care if a man on the train doesn’t want to sleep with me? Why do I care if he does?

These days, I have found that womanhood as a label is mostly as irrelevant to my day-to-day experiences as is passing physically as one. On the Greyhound bus, I’m a fat ghost you can’t sit next to. In universities, I’m a professor. At the deli, I’m “boss”. To my lover, I’m “Gene”. to some friends, “Gina”. To CC, “Gren”. To the covers and spines of books and the credits of experimental tranny films, “Gren Bee.” To the pharmacist, XXXXX, and Sir. To you? And to anyone who asks, I’m just a writer. All of these labels have become more important to my day-to-day than anything I could come up with or aspire to be.

An individual is a part of no community, and the requirement that everyone treat you or see you completely differently than you are is to be treated as an alien. To demand that everyone see you across a finish line before you have tied your running shoes is to ask for placation and deceit. To ask to be lied to is to be met with those who are comfortable serving you dishonesty, and my sisters wonder why we are so often trapped in the stupidity of polyamory and therianism.

Clear placebo, nothing, and bullshit non-opioids are funneled into a hole in my arm. My piss came back normal, my blood still mortal, and I am discharged from the hospital with a prescription for Aleve and an unknowable debt. They can’t figure out what’s wrong with me, and I can’t afford to be scanned. On the walk back home, I buy a patty melt and fried okra from a man on the other side of a cage and bulletproof glass. It tastes a little bit like home, and mostly like frustration.

I go home. Still in pain, and go to sleep expecting anything to be different. I sleep for a full day, and then half of another. It turns out I was wrong. I didn’t have a Kidney stone, I just hadn’t slept for more than 4 hours a night in two weeks, working on some bullshit short story about a dyke terminator going back through the recesses of her mind on a hunt against the memory of her surgeon, her rapist, her molester, and her father. No one will ever read it, and that knowledge trapped itself into a temporary rock and drove itself into where my uterus should be.

My womb continues to bear nothing but fire and ice.

I put on my shoes and walk to meet CC on the beach. A girl she knows needs help, and she’s gonna have to settle for us.

Picture of what wasn’t in my body.

The Smartest Dog In The World puts on his readers and examines the paper because he's the smartest dog in the world he loves physical media. It's the onion. Poor smartest dog in the world. He thinks that's the funniest thing in the world because he's the smartest dog in the world but still a dog and still just left of liberal which is pretty smart for the smartest dog in the world. He reads the paper at the human park because he's the smartest dog in the world and the dogs at the dog park are hard to talk to. The other dogs don't wanna talk about Burroughs or Acker or Vonnegut because they're too busy running and chasing and smelling and eating their own shit. Poor dumb dogs, the smartest dog in the world thinks. The smartest dog in the world thought maybe he could put them on to Kurt because of the whole asshole thing and the other dogs love those but it doesn't work because the smartest dog in the world is the only dog who can read. The smartest dog in the world doesn't have any powers, he doesn't save the world, and he has no political ambitions. The smartest dog in the world is an accountant and a responsible investor and he does a lot of reading which is pretty smart for a dog so he's the smartest dog in the world. He likes experimental fiction and stories about bikers and tough and strange women and cigarettes GOD he wish he could smoke a cigarette, but the smartest dog in the world has tiny unclenching paws and an inability to create suction with his lips. One day they'll invent a pipe that can be lapped up just so the smartest dog in the world can look even smarter. He'll be the most dignified dog in the world too, a title currently held by a much dumber dog. 

He can't make friends with humans at the human park no matter how much he tries because they all try to pet him or throw things for him to collect. He knows fetch is a racket and only got fooled once because they just throw it back out into the world again for the smartest dog in the world to go pick up. What do they think he is the dumbest dog in the world? The smartest dog in the world finds dating unethical because all the women in his life can't talk or read to discuss or debate and they don't have jobs except for cops and the smartest dog in the world hates cops. The smartest dog in the world wants to date a beautiful human library woman but he can't because she's kind and won't fuck dogs and the women who would fuck dogs are all unkind and strange and want him for his dogness and not his smartness. There's just no luck for the smartest dog in the world. When he talks to someone with the same interests they're too amused to really listen, and they see him as novelty only. When the smartest dog speaks they say "look! He can speak!" And listen not to what he has to say. He picked up on that fast because he's the smartest dog in the world.

 "Look at my masters degree" barks the smartest dog in the world! "What a smart dog!" Says his "best" friend.

 "Will you read my dissertation?" barks the smartest dog in the world! "What a smart dog!" Says his "best" friend. 

"I've got my PHD! I'm going to become a professor!" barks the smartest dog in the world! "What a smart dog!" Says his "best" friend. 

"Okay class, let's take a look at the reading for next week" barks the smartest dog in the world! "What a smart dog!" Says his students. 

"I'm putting on a one dog show about how nobody has ever really listened to me" 

barks the smartest dog in the world! "What a smart dog!" Says his audience. 

What a smart dog what a smart dog what a smart dog what a smart dog what a smart dog what a smart dog what a smart dog.

Nobody will ever understand the smartest dog in the world. He's on another date. He wines and dines a new poodle in the neighborhood with water and soft kibble. He tells her about a new discovery he made on his second read through of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. She sniffs his balls. Yes they have sex. He tries to put on a record but the percussion of Paul Simon's rhythm of the saints reminds her of thunder and they have to cease their humping. 

The smartest dog in the world is the least lucky dog in the world. He also hates the trend of dressing up like a dog or pretending to be one. He hates that stuff. Other dogs are too dumb to be offended but your costume is the smartest dog in the world's culture. He would write an essay about it, but who would read it? Not his target audience of fellow dogs who he does not find the camaraderie with he so desperately seeks. Fuck the smartest dog in the world. Please? Someone? 

The smartest dog in the world seeks cheap company. He walks the strip with hundreds in his mouth looking for street women and massage parlors and bright red beating lights of the under city but the beautiful women in tiny clothes geek with joy when they see him, the novelty that he is, thank him for the money and pet him all over, except where he wants them too. Man, the smartest dog in the world could've just gone to a retirement home and saved so much money. The smartest dog in the world knows that his strongest virtue is retrospectiveness. He knows because he's the smartest dog in the world. 

Poor smartest dog in the world, reading his silly onion newspaper because he thinks it's funny. Because he wants change in the world and he thinks this means something. Just because he's the smartest dog in the world doesn't mean hes the smartest anything in the world.

The smartest dog in the world has a secret. He has a journal of drawings of a man he'd like to be, but he can't hold the pencil in his mouth so the book is crowded with strange and bizarre figures and beings and none of them are right. He doesn't know how to articulate what he wants to look like. Stupid smartest dog in the world can't even draw a stick figure. Dumb dumb smartest dog in the world. Bad boy. Bad stupid boy. 

He pays a woman to pee on her carpet and she spanks him. He knows better. He can use a toilet or let himself outside because he's the smartest dog in the world but he won't. He's a sick fuck and she knows it. Bad boy bad boy bad boy bad boy bad boy bad smartest dog in the world you're so dumb you shat and peed everywhere dumb fucking stupid fucking stupidist dog in the world. Just as dumb as every other dog and just as companionable. 

The smartest dog in the world goes to the vet regularly just so he gets a thermometer up the ass so he can feel something. The most intimate a women is willing to get with him, mapping out what's inside of him and procuring data, a kind of listening. He fucking loves the vet. He loves reading in the lobby and he loves the attention he gets and he pretends to aggress when they give him shots so they strap him down. He can bite what he can't have and nobody will send him to jail. Smartest dog in the world has found a loophole. 

When the smartest dog in the world dies they'll bury him under a name that's not his under a shitty paw print plaque that says "mans best friend". 

He is no friend to man. Stinking writhing man. Fuck man. 

His grave should say "American poet and intellectual" but it won't because he's the smartest dog in the world, and isn't that more interesting than that stuff he likes whatever it was. 

At the ripe old age of 13 the smartest dog in the world has a funeral and lots of people come. What a crazy fancy funeral! Must've been one smart dog. "He was the smartest dog in the world" says the priest of a faith the smartest dog in the world didn't practice. "It was so funny and awesome how smart he was and we all loved him because isn't it awesome that a dog could've been the smartest dog in the world?" Everyone agrees. 

We love you smartest dog in the world, you'll be missed smartest dog in the world. 

The smartest dog in the world arrives in dog heaven. A big golden field full of other dogs and no books. Jean-Paul Sartre was wrong, hell was this and the smartest dog in the world was the only one who knew it, because he was the smartest dog in the world.

Extra special thanks to for getting super in everyone’s faces and making this video what it is :) Ur the best! And we have a new movie in the works. Stay tuned!

I have never truly seen myself on screen until I put myself on one. The closest thing I ever saw to anyone who looked like me growing up in any form of media was The Penguin in Tim Burton’s “Batman Returns”. Oswald Cobblepot, portrayed by Danny DeVito under heavy prosthetics, is a mutant human/penguin hybrid man who lives in the sewers of Gotham City with a militia of eco-terroristic, anti-capitalist, circus clowns and performance artists. “The Penguin,” as the city names him and as he ultimately chooses to name himself, appears as a short-statured being with a plump, apple-like body and small limbs, dark and sunken eyes, a long, hooked nose, long and scraggly black hair that’s always wet, and, most important to me, a pair of large gynecomastic breasts. We never see The Penguin naked (though he does attempt to entice Michelle Phiefer’s Cat Woman character with the offer to reveal his full form), but I suspect we would look very similar based on how our respective bodies impress through fitted formal clothing. The Penguin is not a trans character, but his character’s arc within the film, to me, is extremely transgender. Upon discovery by society, the public does its best to get him to attempt to find himself a place in public life, and use his physical differences to garner sympathy from the city at large to embiggen the pockets of the wealthy. They take this person with bizarre natural and sexual characteristics, who behaves asocially and dedicates his life to the terroristic dismantling of the city’s economic power structure, and try to sanitize his existence into a caricature of sputtering desperation who begs for the approval of the masses that he once menaced. After he is revealed by Batman to be the villain everyone once suspected, he returns home to his sewer lair of carnies and declares:

“My name is not Oswald! It’s Penguin! I am not a human being! I am an animal. Cold-blooded!”

While tearing his clothes off, which is not an easy feat, because the nature of his round body and his large breasts and his small arms make the task difficult, but he does so anyway, and he does so with unexampled fury.

I always cry when I get to this scene, because this character at this moment looks so much like how I look and feels so much like how I feel, and half of the tears are out of our shared emotion, and the other half are out of the frustration and anger I feel when I remember that the only movie I’ve ever seen where a character looks and acts like me is Tim Burton’s avante-garde Batman sequel, and that the character is not meant to be seen as a fat intersex trans woman, but is instead a horrible, sewer-dwelling, sex pest who pulls apart raw fish with his flipper hands and sharp tiny black teeth.

It’s films like these, and portrayals like these, that serve to remind me that I, and people who look like me, are society’s monsters, and that attempts at pulling ourselves out of the sewer will only result in further humiliation and dehumanization.

Batman Returns is my annual Christmas movie of choice, and I’ve watched it consecutively every year since I was twelve years old.

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Fat Transsexuals Looking At Each Other Sexually:

The Liberation of The Personified Lens and The Compound Gaze In Emerging Trans Cinema

Throughout my entire career as a filmmaker, which officially began in the second year of my undergrad at a Texas college’s new media program (unless you count my 6th-grade debut as a LEGO stop motion animator), I had really married myself to control of the camera until last year. Most of my films have been made by myself or with exceptionally small crews. Most of them star me and involve terrible and specific things happening to me physically or psychologically, and rarely do I want to get anyone else involved unless I really need to (I’m not trying to make anyone an accomplice to my own self-destruction). Most of my early film and video work was shot by setting the camera up on a tripod or just setting it on the roof of my car, and then acting or speaking in front of it. This approach is how I shot my first feature documentary, Dogs Are Forbidden, which was officially released in 2024 but was made and screened during a semester in 2023. The documentary is an architectural study in nature and explores the architecture of my deceased transgender ex-girlfriend’s hometown of Nevada, TX, a desolate landscape full of police officers and their families, and zero trans people, at least not anymore. My “character” in the documentary has a quest, which is to find where my ex-girlfriend is buried, as she was buried under the wrong name, and it was a name I never knew her by. As far as I can tell, our entire relationship was a secret to her family, and nobody contacted me when she died. I just thought she disappeared.

Because of the nature of how this film was shot (personal documentary with a crew of one), I was in full control of how I appeared on screen, and I’m still not happy exactly with the way I look or am portrayed. There is something to be said about implicit bias and gaze and how it worms its way from our eyes and into our hands and into the cameras we wield. I’m not oversexed in my documentary, and I think that’s a good thing, because it would be really weird if I looked really hot in the documentary about scouring graveyards in a desolate texas landscape to find my dead ex-girlfriend, but I do think it’s interesting that I make myself out to look kind of unatractive, and I don’t think that’s unintentional. When I set out to make this work, I realized that this would be the first feature film to center around someone with my body; Fat, transgender, Intersex, with a mix of feminine and masculine characteristics, a low voice, and always a little bit of discomfort in my own skin. I think it was this discomfort that I carry constantly, the discomfort of the situation and environment at hand, and the frustration and disgust I felt toward myself and my body at the time of filming that led to the portrayal we arrive at, which is a fat trans woman disheveled and distressed, searching desperately.

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Dogs Are Forbidden was not the first time I had been on camera; however, it was just my first feature. The first film I directed and starred in was “FREAK FREAK!” (2021), and it taught me a lot about how I would make films for the rest of my life, even before I quite understood what I had uncovered. Because it was a narrative film, and because I wanted to make something outside of the realm of personal documentary or performance, for the first time in any film I had ever made, I was not behind the camera. For this project, I had enlisted the help of videographers Micah Heller and Nat Lavish, two experienced amateur pornographers I knew from a small network of sexworkers I belonged to in Denton, Texas, who were trying to find alternative revenue streams as the pandemic made our usual in-person work particularly difficult. In a way, the amateur pornography boom of the early twenty-twenties, due to mass unemployment and layoffs in the wake of a global pandemic, was a blessing in disguise for cinema; Everyone was becoming a filmmaker. A trans filmmaker.

In FREAK FREAK! I play an intrepid party girl who’s being chased and stalked by a Myersesque archetypal slasher through Ray Roberts Lake State Park. I’m killed several times, and every time I’m stabbed or maimed or beaten or torn open, I express an extreme amount of sexual gratification, and I don’t die. Eventually, the slasher gets sick of my immortality and tries to leave. I, frustrated, push him up against a tree, where he gets impaled by a branch, and I fellate it. The film is underscored by an original song by my at-the-time drag/prostitute alter ego, Marcilla Dmanisi. This film is an important one to me because it was the first time I thought I looked good on camera. Not only was my performance strong, and my outfit was well-selected, but this was the first time I looked like I had confidence in my body. And at the time, I don’t think I did, but I think that the expertise of Lavish and Heller, two experienced camera ops with a deep sexual appreciation for fat trans people, really helped a lot in my favor. I wasn’t being subjected to the male gaze, but I was being objectified. Because my body is neither male nor female, it’s difficult to express what the male gaze would “do” to my own portrayal. That being said, out of all my work, men seem to like this one the most, as it’s frequently screened and exhibited by male curators, and in the immortal words of SAIC professor Chris Sullivan during a private zoom call “What stands out about the film to me, is that you’re giving that branch a really good blowjob. Like you’re really going for it”. But I don’t believe that I was shot through the male gaze, regardless of whether or not men are partial to the film as a whole. I think I was shot by fat transsexual lesbians who like fat transsexual lesbians, and the phenomenon of a new sexual gaze that is not centered around men, but trans lesbian desire, has yet to be studied in cinema outside of the pornographic.

Without completely sidetracking from pornographic cinema, however, I want to discuss a shoot from just a couple of months ago, in October of this year (2025), when I was gathering footage for my graphic novel, New Hole, which comes out next year. The premise of the book is half autobiographical, and centers around me in the summer of this year, after breaking up with my long-distance partner back home and self-inducing a manic episode by intentionally not taking my medicine until I was starting to have vivid hallucinations as a kind of punishment for hurting someone I really care about. In one of these hallucinations, I receive a package that is allegedly from a pornstar in the future that looks exactly like me, containing a zine that’s half porn, half manifesto, all revelatory text about the new orifice we receive after a worldwide catastrophic event that physically tears everyone a new hole. However, my character in the book is too sexually frustrated to focus on the fact that the zine contains potentially earth-shattering information from the future, and instead decides to focus on the fact that someone else is having more and better sex than she is, and continues on her war path of self-isolatory misery. After passing around a few test copies at the end of my third semester of grad school, the one question that I kept getting was “where did these pictures come from” as the parts of the graphic novel that are supposed to be from the future contain several nude and highly sexualized images of myself with a new genital. And the answer I always give is that “I took them”.

This is not entirely true, but I live to scandalize. The images of the new genitalia are obviously fake, as I do not have a new orifice on my back, but the images of my body are real and largely unaltered. While discussion of a graphic novel doesn’t often fit into a conversation about filmmaking (unless that conversation is with me, or any of the other thousand filmic cartoonists), New Hole offers a rare exception because in the making of the “fake porn” in the book, a whole lot of “real porn” had to get made, and there now exists several minutes of video and film that will never be seen by eyes that aren’t my own, but are worth talking about anyway, because they changed my life. While I did take many of the photos myself, most of the footage was shot by my friend and fellow art pornographer Kora Dzbinski, who is also an accomplished researcher and volunteer archivist at the Leather Archives Museum right here in Chicago. While maintaining an incredibly professional presence on set, Kora held a camera and told me how to pose and what to do and how to get fucked while they took still photos and videos using a Canon G10 Powershot and an off-brand 15-frame digital video camera (two of my favorite staple cameras). This was the first time I had shot porn in about three years, but it made me remember a familiar feeling that I hadn’t quite remembered since shooting FREAK FREAK!, which was that I loved being objectified in the right environment and by the right fat trans dyke.

While the subject matter of Carlotta Guerrero’s work doesn’t often involve fat lesbians, I do connect with her research angle, and while working on New Hole, I really connected with her notion of controlled objectification, and I have often strived to feel the empowerment her work conveys through my own work. On the subject, she’s said, “I always felt a big responsibility in being a woman photographing women, and growing up, I needed that. All women needed that; in our generation, we deal with the impossible beauty standards, the constant objectification and sexualization driven by men. Being able to change the narrative from the inside is beautiful.” and while I find this idea of insider objectification radical and deeply exciting, I also jump a few steps ahead to how this idea can be used not to resist objectification, but to re-imagine what objectification can mean, especially for someone like me who has never been sexually objectified on the same scale as thin cisgender women.

And don’t get it twisted, I’m not jonesing for that kind of treatment in my day-to-day, but it would be refreshing to see someone on screen who looks like me and is intentionally portrayed to be sexy. In research for this paper, I tried to find a film that contained a fat femme love interest. Not even a trans or intersex fat femme, just a fat femme, and I couldn’t find anything that wasn’t meant to be comedic or didn’t involve the fat femme losing an extreme amount of weight. And this hole in our media landscape creates a strong desire within me to fill it, and therefore I played the fictional pornstar from the future, “Mags Manson”, whose fat transsexual body can be found photographed by another fat transsexual in my new book.

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I have yet to play a sexy fat woman with lines in anything, even my own narrative work, but that’s changing very soon. In the meantime, I played a closeted trans woman who presents as an intersex man in my new film “Trans Panic!” which comes out early 2026.

Trans Panic! is a narrative mockumentary about a trans woman named Sara Jordan (Played by Mia Sabine) who is a hyperpop rapper and Christian fundamentalist who was recently pardoned for their involvement in the January 6th Capitol riots and is in love with Vice President JD Vance. She has teamed up with incel student filmmaker “Yung AJ” (Played by me), who agrees to help her blow up the tenth floor of the Maclean Building of the Chicago Institute of Arts (an alleged headquarters of wokeness) because he’s desperately in love with her. AJ, who spends the whole movie grappling with their very fragile identity, is very uncomfortable in their gender identity, as they were born with gyneocomastia, and is the same type of intersex as I am (MAIS). Though instead of getting really into dyke comics and feminist film at an early age as I did, AJ found community in alt-right online spaces, and his transgender homosexual tendencies manifest in an unhealthy fascination and fetishization with trans women, making him an extremely dangerous sidekick for Sara, who spends the film keeping AJ at arm’s length.

Gender exploration aside, what I found really fascinating about working on this film had nothing to do with the premise and everything to do with how it was shot. Because the film is a fake documentary shot by the characters it’s centered around, the cameras are in the hands of the actors the whole time. Moreover, the actors are in the hands of the characters. The cameras are divorced from their usual omnipotence, and the audience is placed directly within the toxic dynamic of Sara and AJ. AJ is in love with Sara, so obviously he holds the camera in such a way that ensures Sara looks gorgeous. He’s constantly complimenting her, both verbally and with the lens, but more than just complimenting, there’s also a fetishistic angle. Mia, who plays Sara, is physically taller than me, so I had to point the camera up at her, whereas she had to hold the camera down on me, revealing my exposed roots, my large nose, and my scraggly, unkempt hair. In the scenes where I’m partially nude, Mia’s angle of my breasts shows them to sag down to the floor, whereas if they were shot head-on or below, they’d be better flattered. Mia shoots me intentionally to look disgusting because Sara is disgusted by me, and our physical heights and implicit internal biases also play small parts. And just for the record, I asked Mia to shoot me poorly on purpose. She’s a very talented videographer, and she thinks very highly of me when she isn’t playing Sara Jordan.

My portrayal of myself in Trans Panic! was successful in my goal of portraying incels and the alt-right as sputtering and pathetic fools, but I, the trans intersex actor, got dealt a bad hand by myself, the trans intersex director. I realized about halfway through the filming process of this movie that I was done degrading myself on camera and that if I was going to be debased in the future, I had to look awesome doing it. I have a rule on set, which is that I never typecast. If you get cast to be a disgusting freak in one project, you get to play a beautiful, cool person in the next, and vice versa, but I’ve never applied this rule to myself. While I do feel much of Trans Panic! To be successful, I worry that I may have done a bad job in physically representing myself and people like me, as an intersex person, on screen, but they’re a total loser. In my next film, which is currently called “Strike Me With Your Lightning”, I play a hot intersex dyke who’s falling in love with a gorgeous intersex alien drag queen, and I think people will be more into my next intersex character. I certrainly will be.

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Regardless of the representational messiness of Trans Panic!, I learned a lot about how I want to shoot all my work going forward. Mockumentary or not, putting the camera in the hands of the actor is invigorating and is something I cannot not do. To not only give the actor the agency of how they want to be seen, but to give the actor the ability to infuse their performance with the way they hold the camera, unlocks an entirely new way to tell a story visually. Instead of posing a woman’s body in front of a man in a sexual manner and positioning a camera to accentuate “desirable” features so that the audience knows “This man sees her sexually. He’s turned on, and so am I”, what if we focused entirely on the performers and what they saw? What if we didn’t see the desiring figure at all, and we simply placed the camera in the hands of the actor, and had them point it at the woman? Then, in character, they hold the camera, and we see what they see, and not only what but “how” they see. Then, we, the audience, won’t have to be told what is being felt, because we’ll be feeling it, kinetically, with the movements of the camera.

Two things. If we want to use this technique, but escape the male gaze, then we can only put the cameras in the hands of women, and therefore the desire in the scene described above is innately queer (oh no!). The second thing, putting the camera in the hands of the actors, requires the actors to know at least the basics of camera operation. This means that you either have to teach actors to use cinema cameras or shoot on cameras that are more accessible to operate. To test this theory, I made a film called “OBLITERATOR” where we do the latter.

OBLITERATOR is a film about a gender ambiguous alt-right talk show host, Tessa Lee, who’s garnered a serious amount of political power in the near future. As soon as they take office, an anonymous polycule of hackers exposes them for soliciting trans sex work, and Tessa Lee goes on a rampage against transsexuals in the woods where trans witches supposedly meet. I don’t play anyone in this movie, and stayed behind one of four cameras and spent the shoot directing actors instead of directing myself, which was a delight.

I worked with a crew of eight people, with the exception of the occasional friend or sibling who would show up for an hour or two to run snacks or move things around, and we shot the film in my hometown of Denton, Texas, in the historic and ever-haunted “Goatman woods”. I made it a point that everyone who is on camera, at some point, also holds a camera. At themselves or at each other, and while they’re filming, I asked them simply to kinetically follow the performance of the characters and to stay in character while filming. We were working with a diverse cast of different races, body types, and sexual and gender identities, and I wanted to ensure that my internal biases did not prevail over anyone else’s. So instead of pretending that these biases of the actors and their characters didn’t exist, I just made sure they all had a chance to shine. My goal here was to cloud the screen with a variety of gazes, and ensure that the personification of the camera from Trans Panic! was still present, but instead of cutting between two lenses, I could cut between three or four or five at once. Instead of two eyes, we had a swarm of them, and when edited into one body, the final film results in one picture that is closer to how an insect sees, through a compound of lenses.

I’m very early in my filmmaking career, but have shot my first feature film and several shorts over the last five years. It wasn’t until wrapping OBLITERATOR, though, that I realized I might have something to offer. I’ve always made films as a trans woman, and so all of my films prior have implicit trans themes and codes, but after finding the Compound Gaze through the Personified Lens, I think I may have found something to offer to filmmaking at a larger scale than my own work and my own themes. After presenting this topic and my work in my Feminist Film Theory class, my professor Dr. Erens emailed me and said “I personally think that beyond the films, your thoughtful working out of a new aesthetic is very provocative and could work for a new kind of cinema that goes beyond trans issues, horror films and porn.”, and personally, I agree, but would never want to be a part of that beyond. I love trans horror and making porn, and I think I’ll stay at least one foot in that grave while I continue to make films, but I was encouraged that my techniques could have a use outside of my intention.

We currently live in an absolutely abhorrent time for trans people, but a really wonderful time for trans cinema, which is that there’s enough of us making movies at all levels that there can be conversation between contemporary “elite” trans film and underground trans film. Chicago has a community of trans underground filmmakers that I’ve worked with in the past and will continue to work with for as long as I live here. I’m especially delighted that most of them are terrified of the internet and their phones, and host experimental film screenings in their backyards and in basements with crowds that always fill the tight space to the brim like liquid. And during these screenings, there are tons of films, and they’re all mostly totally different from each other; that great conversation is happening between them, and I’m excited to be a part of this conversation.

In my manifesto, “Through The Whale Teeth, Unto Demise And Prosper,” which likens filmmaking as a trans woman in a male-dominated industry to swimming in a herd of krill against the maw of a massive whale, I write this: “Our narrative is their food, and they don’t deserve to eat. We fuel the next generation of filmmakers by feeding each other, feeding ourselves, and starving out the old world. We do not, under any circumstances, bash ourselves against the teeth of our oppressors to become their protein…when you go down this path, dedicating everything you are and can be to the killing of the whale, you lead a hungry life, and those waters which are unknown to the whale are unknown to most, and to make and work and live in these waters, and to live for these waters, is to abandon the glory of the high seas. The reward, however, is to be truly, and utterly, fulfilled, but fulfilled in secret, which not all are prepared to allow themselves to do; as many will choose to die starving with many eyes upon them in the congruent mash of digits and legs in the pursuit of prosper and fame than to die surrounded by love at an accomplished age with no one to witness or tell of their death. It is your choice, hunter, what you decide to make of the whale teeth dilemma, but know this: The new world of trans filmmaking is a difficult path, but it is not a lonely one.” And after a year of reflection, I still agree with this conclusion. Making work for and by us, and putting the cameras in the hands of people like you, redefines everything I thought possible about what it can mean to be represented on screen. The future of trans cinema will not follow the vision of a single trans artist wielding a single camera, but rather it will follow the collected vision of a dozen trans artists with a dozen cameras filming the same present, and when those shots are edited into a singular vision, it is then that we will achieve an image that is closer to the truth. To be represented accurately, not perfectly, and to be seen how we truly are, through the eyes of many, is to be represented as human beings, which is all I’ve ever asked for or wanted.

How I photograph My Lover

How My Lover Photographs Me

How We Photograph Each Other

Bibliography

● Waters, Daniel, et al. Batman Returns, 1992.

● “Carlota Guerrero’s Photography Embraces the Ethereal Woman.” W Magazine, 20 Feb. 2024, www.wmagazine.com/culture/carlota-guerrero-photography-interview.

● Bee, Gren. Through The Whale Teeth Unto Demise And Prosper, 2024.

Gren Bee

2026

Let’s kiss let’s kiss let’s kiss

Let’s make furious love together!!!!!

Like a hive of bees swarming together and vibrating against the skin of a bear who tried to pilfer honey. Buzz Buzz! Boil harshly this fat this blubber and end its life with song of wing and dance with many legs.

Bite into my eyes ! Like saber tooth tigers crack heads open like cola cans!

Scratch the bark off my tree and make paper to write letters

Write sermons.

And strip my leaves down to insulate your hovel.

Let litter my startling fruits on the forest floor and let beetles and small things carry them away to holes and burrows

And let my flesh be devoured in these holes across the wood. And let the animals be hunted so that my body may fuel the birds and hawks of the sky and the four legged furry sharks of the bush.

Let us gorge ourselves! Let us make love in the stomachs of all manner of beasts and let them shit seeds down down down into under the dirt to make more more more trees and fruit and bushes and things.

Eat me in every life! As every animal! Take my everything into you and create caloric power for your body, wings, and motor.

Again! Again! Still. And again!

He spoke this unto her ears and she faltered, unamusedly. His eyes, big, shuttered starkly, and his heart wrang out a howling hark at her silence.

“Thanks.”

She said, and his leg started shaking.

“That’s your present!”

He beamed at her over plates that once contained more sushi. Fried shrimp tails stood hard, desperate, and upright like starving cocks, ripped from their seaweed and rice condoms because he forgot she was allergic. They laid next to the aftermath of the “pizza rolls”, tomato-incarnate bones, which he happily spared from his otherwise eager inhalation.

“cool.”

She was on her phone again. He thought they had agreed she wouldn’t use her phone. He preferred more classic ways of receiving conversational degradation. Especially during an anniversary scene. He liked when women looked around the room while he talked. He liked when women stared at him with blank frustration waiting for him to shut up. He liked when women looked his naked body up/down once then sighed and laid on their backs. He liked when women looked tired, not busy with something else.

She was on her phone. On instagram. She felt like she had more power than he wanted her to have. He wanted her to feel obligated to listen but intentionally ignore, but she had a whole world more intriguing than him in her fingers. He liked it when people ignored his what he called “genius”. He wanted her ignorance of him to be out of her supposed stupidity and unappreciativeness. Not his lack of interest or anecdote. If he wanted a girl to ignore him while he spoke by staring at his phone, he’d go back to teaching high school.

“Did you get me anything?”

He asked.

A red light activated within her. Signal. Signal. Signal. Steam bellowed out from pipes and automatic switches sent magic through the wires in her brain.

Target acquired.

Her red and black-tipped sharp nails turned her phone around slowly, but her fake gold bangles stayed in place.

LAUNCH!

“No. But you can just fuck me.”

She said it harshly and loud enough to alert anyone at the table next to them if they too, were unplugged from their conversations.

Notice the “No.” at the front because fucking is not a gift for her. Notice the “But” because to her, contact with him is a concession. Notice the “Can” to imply permission, which he never knows if he has. Notice the “just” to imply that this concession is enough for him. Notice the “fuck me” and not “have sex”, “Make Love”, “sleep together” because it is not a two person game. Not when they’ll do it. Because he will stand over her and sweat and buck and bark and slobber with his mouth hanging open staring at her eyes, begging them to meet his. And she will look blankly elsewhere and lay back, with her legs spread barely and her dress and bra still on, thinking about her vape.

“Oh-Okay sure! If you want to! Sure! Should I get the check? Sure!”

“Uhhhh. Uh-huh.” Acting as if she already forgot what she had offered. Striking, beguiling, A generational talent from the Juilliard school of being mean to older guys. Leave them wanting more, and she does. That’s all she does.

They leave. 6 PM in winter: a Chicago 9. It’s wet outside, but she isn’t. He fumbles with her black fur coat. Minx maybe. He wasn’t a “””fashion guy”””. But he knew it complimented her nails and matte lips. He fumbles because his fingers brushed against the maroon polyester of her dress. Fuck he thinks. He hasn’t touched a girl like this - not just in years - but ever.

They get to his car. Rented for this occasion. It was tough, but he found the only car in the lot that still had a CD player.

“Skylarking. Know it?”

“What?”

“XTC! They are gods to me.”

“Oh. Molly? Do you have any?”

“What? Oh. No. Sorry. Um. No.”

It had never occurred to him that XTC might have chosen their name about drugs.

They drove in silence for a couple of minutes. It had started raining again, but the combined anxiety and golden voice of Partridge kept him from noticing. She pulled back her phone from some mysterious pocket. He sighed. Genuinely.

“Um. Sorry I thought we said no phones.” He said secretly, almost to himself, like he was peeking behind the curtain.

“Hmm? Did you say something?”

She heard him. He knew that.

“Wow, she’s so method” he thought. “So meta.”

“Hey check this out. This is the best transition in music history.”

It was. A myriad of chirping and humming and green wind whistling and strings and the majesty of electric fucking guitar filled the air between “Summer’s Cauldron” and “Grass”. It contrasted harshly but beautifully with the cold cold rain. She placed the back of her hand against the passenger window. She felt it. She felt the chill of the glass, and the warmth of pure unadulterated sonic heat. Like the condensation of Sweet iced tea in Texas. Like putting your head in the freezer on the hottest day of the year. Like a popsicle doing what popsicles are made to do. An experience once reserved for touch, now electric, and vibrating in the bones of her ear.

She took her hand off the window and went back to her phone.

“Um. Can I put something on?”

She was good.

How could she ignore XTC? How could she not feign even the slightest bit of impression. FUCK that was hot. FUCK he was horny. She didn’t give a FUCK about him. Their differences couldn’t be tallied. A generational canyon divided them. He was a professor, and she was - well he didn’t know. He didn’t think to ask her. Maybe she had a masters. Maybe even a PHD. Maybe she went to his school. Who knows. He didn’t care. She was young enough to be his daughter, and liked him just as much. Maybe she was a performance artist. Maybe there were cameras. Hidden. Maybe she would turn all of these experiences into a memoir. Maybe a graphic novel. Who cares?

Her value to him was simple, but the way he explained it to himself was much more convoluted, drowning in faux intellectualism. He had spent 20 years working on a pen and paper animated feature film, based entirely on ancient Irish folklore. CURSE THE SECRET OF THE KELLS, he thought, which had beat him to the punch. The project “drained” him of his “juice” and he needed an “outlet” to “re-exhilarate” himself. He asked her to be “harsh” to “try not to care” because he needed an “unbiased ear”. She’d have to “pretend” because how could she, or anyone, not find him amazing. He paid her 500 dollars from his meager tenured salary to listen to him talk about his work over dinner, not care, and then fuck after. The price and how it ruined him was part of the humiliation. The humiliation that he refused to acknowledge but was all a part of it. Her disinterest. Her un-amusement. Most guys want a girl to pretend he’s irresistible. “Your cock is so big.” “Fuck me harder. Harder.” “Right there. Right there.” But he was a professor and his whole life was people pretending he was interesting. Or it had been. Not so much anymore. He liked the new generation of students though. They were different. They didn’t care about the prestige of the university or what connections he might afford them. They didn’t even care about their degree or even their work. Most of them refused to call themselves “artists” and certainly not “filmmakers”. They were all wealthier than he would ever be and the older he got, the younger they became. They could get away with not giving a fuck. They’d turn in plagiarism or ask their mechanical homework slaves to generate their papers, sometimes even whole films, and they refused to make revisions. He couldn’t afford to fail the amount of students who deserved it, as they’d stop renewing his classes, and he couldn’t arbitrarily choose between students that were all equal failures, so he passed them all every year. They had finally beat the system. They had unionized under extreme laziness completely absent of input between each other. School Drools. Burn The Nerds.

She was 25, in that immortal way that all men who pay prostitutes think the prostitutes are. He was 50 or 60 or 70, and according to his students, it was all the same. She knew him to be exactly 57, divorced, and with kids that never called him.

They kept driving quietly. He was driving to his condo in Rosemont. They were listening to something called “Charlie X Sea X”. It played directly off her phone speakers because her phone didn’t have an auxiliary port. “She probably didn’t even notice when they took them out of phones” he thought to himself. That turned him on tremendously. A song he thought was called “party girl” echoed terribly across the plastic seats and walls of the vehicle.

“Hey, how far away is your place?”

“It’s not too bad. Just outside of the city by O’hare!”

“What- Fuck no. I’m not going that far.”

“Wh- Well it’s no problem, I’ll drop you off wherever you need to go after. Promise.”

“No dude. Just bring me to a hotel.”

“Sorry, I can’t really afford one right now.”

“Yeah fucking figures if you have to live by the fucking airport.”

God i’m pathetic. God i’m pathetic. God i’m pathetic. God i’m pathetic.

“Just pull over.”

“What?”

“Pull the car over. Let’s get this over with.”

“But that’s illegal!”

“Are you being serious?”

He pulled over near a quiet dark construction site. Large hollowed out concrete cylinders partitioned the two from the highway. The car drug over the gravel like a tourist’s suitcase arriving in the countryside of France; another time he was an outsider; another time he was suddenly aware of his decadent western pudgyness; like a WW1 doughboy.

He remarked something about how the large structures of steel and cement reminded him of Sera, of Smithson. How the Large tunnel-like structures recalled his sabbatical in Marfa. She wasn’t listening, and honestly he was only half talking. The excitement of real sex was overwhelming the excitement of the ‘ignored intellectual’ shtick.

“Can we turn the music down?”

“Hchgh. No.”

Who The Fuck Are You I’m A Brat When I’m Bumping That Now I Wanna Hear My Track Are You Bumping That Til The Windows Crack I’ll Be Bumping That No I Never Go Home Don’t Sleep Don’t Eat Just Do It On Repeat Keep Bumping That.

She threw her fur coat in the back seat. In a bundle.

“Aren’t we going back there?”

“No. Start taking off your pants”

She gracelessly slid over the arm rest.

He pulled his pants down, but kept his white boxer-briefs on in the occasion she’d take them off sexily. She didn’t.

She bunched her dress up over her waist. No underwear. He could see her stomach, slight, healthy, plump, like a lowercase consonant. He thought about how it was actually really cool of him to not care about that kind of thing. To be aware of women’s body issues, their diversity, and to not require a “flat stomach”, the acknowledgement of which only reinforced the ideals he secretly subscribed to.

“Can you suck my dick first? Just to get it started?”

“Are you not hard?”

He had taken a viagra generic at dinner and she was the hottest girl that had ever let him have sex with her so he was as hard as he’s ever been.

She took his startled silence for confirmation of hardness and slipped his dick out of the hole in his Hanes, finally satisfying the curiosity to him as to what exactly that hole could be used for.

“Can I take off my shirt?”

“I’d rather you not, but do whatever you want.”

He started unbuttoning, but she slid it in while he stumbled around his collar. He let out a “hHagh!” As she took him in. No condom, and she started fast. She felt - not quite wet, but still lubricated, and cold like the green and silver internal organs of a squashed lizard. Like the texture of a tomato if you’ve ever fucked a tomato. She stared directly at him, not his eyes, but at his face, with something that combined pity, rage, and frustration. Her mouth didn’t move, she didn’t moan, she didn’t let out even a sigh. She just breathed and shuffled up and down. He released bizarre sounds in serial formation like freaks released from curtains at the circus, like cryptic spiritual dice which showed symbols instead of numbers, like the rotation of acts at an open mic. He went to touch her breasts, which rolled like a tongue behind a cheek two dimensionally under the faux-satin of her dress. She moved his hands away and let out a grunt at the suggestion of being touched more, her first sound. He stared up at her. At her unfeeling eyes. At her unmoving perfect lips. He felt sick, Like he was being fucked by a zombie, and worse for liking it. Suddenly, her emptiness turned to abject, furious, disdain.

“Aren’t you going to fuck me even a little? Do I have to do all the fucking work here? Move your fucking hips!”

He came.

A hhahh

U gh hnn

Hghh hhhah

h !

H. Hah.

.

She slid

Off.

Keep Bumping That Keep Bumping That Keep Bumping That Keep Keep Bumping That Keep Bumping That Keep Bumping That Keep Keep Bumping That Keep Bumping That Keep Bumping That Keep Keep Bumping That Keep Bumping That Keep Bumping That.

She bent over the armrest, revealing her ass to him. Her dress slid up more and she became the most nude he’d ever see her. He wanted to touch her. Or he wanted to be the person who wanted to touch her. He wanted to be the person who would want to spank her. But as soon as the thought crossed his mind, anxiety began to well inside him. Decision paralysis set in, but it didn’t matter, because she had already sat up, vape in hand. She jerked off of his body with a slight violence, Knee digging into thigh, foot pushing off of knee. He had barely noticed she was barefoot, and had taken her shoes off before climbing over. Must have been when he was talking about earthworks and the sun tunnels. God what a night. He had never done it without a condom before, not since his ex-wife.

“OH FUCK. UM. I. UM. You forgot about the condom!”

She sat silently, and dug out an internal condom from her insides. Wet and white like a hollowed out chipotle tortilla after you’ve picked out the al pastor. She dropped it in his still naked lap. The Wet Slap Startled Him. But what startled him more was that he was still hard. Medicine is a miracle.

“Um. I actually paid for the whole hour so would we be able to-”

“Uggggggggggh. Hold on.”

She dug through her coat, which she had now brought to the passenger seat. She hunched over it, pulling out a small pinkish reddish vibrator egg out of the fur, like a harpy ripping the heart out of a slain dog.

She slid down, and splay her legs out comfortably and without emitting visual pleasure.

“Don’t talk. Don’t make any noises. Don’t make it obvious that you’re looking at me. Don’t touch yourself loudly. Cum on yourself.”

“Right.”

She pulled out her phone to try and pull up lesbian porn, the only kind she could stomach, but there was no signal.

“Fuck. ummm… hhhhh. Okay, yeah.”

She pulled up a private folder from her downloads, and found a personal video. It started playing. It was an amateurly lit video that appeared green and purple from the angle the professor watched from. The light filled up the car. Poorly recorded laughing sparked from the phone’s speakers, and echoed like that “party girl” song had. The couple in the video were talking, but it was impossible to make out what they were saying, but she knew every word, and they sounded happy. The video was POV, from the perspective of a girl on her back, and the person you could see the face of was…………………………… Lets see……………………………… Another girl.

Tall and angular. Strapping even. With a long face and pointed cheeks. Hair that swept down messily from either side of her head. Brown. Big smile. Charming pursed lips. Midwestern. A girl who could’ve harvested much corn in another life but was now, by the looks of it, better suited for DJing. The two moved in ways that were unclear in the video, but eventually became fucking. The vibrator turned on, and he realized that he should start touching again.

“Um, could I have some spit?”

He held out his hand.

She spit generally his direction. It landed half in the cupholder and half in the corner of her seat, which was crusty with unvacuumed crumbs. He delicately picked up the cupholder spit and rolled it on his cock. He looked at the girl’s cock in the video. It was much bigger than his. She was sliding it in and out. Teasing gently with every thrust. Taking it all the way out and putting it all the way in. Slapping the tip gently on the Director of Photography’s clit. He recognized from her stomach that it was her. He had always wanted to fuck someone like that. To fuck her like that. The big girl pulled the director’s leg up and over her shoulder. Stretch. Slide. Grip. Pull. Velvet. Crush. Mix. Water. Water. Water. Water. Immense. Remember. Running. Psychic. Fragmented Eruption. Blood Pumping. Violet. Lilly. Rumination. Words that came to him that aren’t supposed to come to you when you watch porn, or that’s how he felt anyway. It reminded him of Dani ReStack’s work, a filmmaker he has always taught but never really understood. Now he did.

He looked up from the video, and saw her mouth move, and her eyes locked onto the screen in a way she had never focused on him. She was aroused. At pictures moving. At memories. At being fucked hard by a girl.

He cocked his head up to try and see her touch herself over her leg, which she immediately caught and raised.

“Knock it off.”

“D- Do you mean stop stroking?”

“I don’t care what you do.”

He came.

“Start driving.”

“But you’re still-”

“Take me home.”

“Well I’m only halfdressed and my hand is covered in-”

“Start driving.”

He wiped his hand off, mostly, on the seat. It’s a good thing he got the insurance, though he wasn’t sure that there was anything about semen in what he signed. He pulled out of the construction site and back onto the highway, still with his pants down, but with his dick put away. She kept touching herself. She was really starting to get going.

“Can you put on some music?”

“Um. Sure. Is Skylarking still okay?”

“I don’t care, just turn it up.”

“Ok.” he said Gen-X-edly as he got permission to play XTC. He turned up The Meeting Place.

She became more laxed. She turned up the volume on the video. She started breathing heavily. She became turned on. He pretended not to look, to focus on the road. She rubbed and rubbed and rubbed and rubbed. The vibrator harmonizing with the groaning backing vocals. The chime rang, like summer fairies calling in the lightning bugs. He’d always wanted to fuck to this song. He’d always wanted to fuck someone like the girl from the video. He’d always wanted to make a girl moan. Moan like she was just then. To hear the moaning and the music in tandem. He hadn’t had that in so long. Fucking to music. He remembered a time early on in his marriage where he had. They met in grad school. They had their first dance at his studio apartment. When they danced to Paul Simon. The Rhythm of The Saints. The record had just come out. She taught him how to move together. How to improvise. They clicked so well even though they hadn’t before. They made love to the whole record. They stopped only to manually loop the disc since his autoplay was broken, then went back to making love. They really used to loved each other. Then came the bitterness. Then came the jobs. She got tenure. He didn’t. She had exhibitions. He didn’t even have festivals. She had publications. He didn’t even have papers. She had a retrospective. A retrospective?? What about his film! What about his animation! He had drawn it frame by frame for 17 years! Curse that Secret of The Kells. They completely ripped him off! If it hadn’t come out, it would be HIS retrospective. Sure he had tenure now, because her job opened up when she stepped down. When you sell work and get grants I guess you’re better than working. Not me. No. I’ll never stop working! I’ll never never never never stop working! They got into a fight about a piece of her work. An abstract star she had painted on a massive yellow canvas in lapis paint. He said, with malice, it looked like Vonnegut’s asshole, and she couldn’t decide which made her more angry, the vulgarity or the notion she had been unoriginal. They had a massive fight in the gallery and she declared their divorce then and there. In front of everyone. And people at the college still talked about it.

And One Million Teacups I Bet Couldn’t Hold All The Wet That Fell Out Of My Eyes When You Fell Out With Me Now I’m Crawling The Wallpaper That’s Looking More Like A Road Map

To Misery Oh, Oh Misery

“Hhhahhh… Hahhh. Hahhhhh. Hahhhhhh.” She panted. Exhausted. Slippery.

How Can You Smile And Forecast Weather’s Getting Better If You Never Let A Girl Rain All Over You.

“Did. Did you cum?”

“Uh-huh.”

“That’s good. So did I-”

“Can you turn down the music a little? But keep playing it I like this song.”

He turned excitedly to her.

“You know it!?”

His hand, still covered in cum, shifted wetly like slop and steered the car into the other lane. She grabbed a hold of the ceiling handle. You know, the handle on the ceiling. I don’t know what it’s called, but she grabbed it. The car skid into the black water and ice pooled on the asphalt and slammed headfirst into a guardrail. In an instant, the two jerked forward with immediate, violent, irreversibility. Like terrible chance. Like the cruelty of the ocean’s storm on a wooden ship. Like accidental damage to a library book. Deliverances not of fate but of nature, falsely attributed to GOD’s indifference. He shot forward, hands in front of his face, sliced open by the windshield. His rapture interrupted by the force of the steering wheel stretching open his stomach in a blunt brutal puncture. He spilled open and out like a squished rotted&seeded pulpy fruit between the fingers of the dashboard and the roof.

One Thousand Umbrellas Opened.

Two Thousand Umbrellas Opened.

Ten Thousand Umbrellas Opened.

To Spoil The View.

Epilogue.

Shitty fucking stupid rental car didn’t have a shitty fucking stupid airbag. Was the first last thing he thought. The second last thing he thought was “maybe my movie will live on an unfinished masterpiece”. Then, as the song from his body left his lips and became aether, that aether looked down and said “oh wait. Fuck. Is she okay?” Before joining the endless burning passion of unjudging choruses beyond.

She was, in fact, not okay, But was alive, and would stay that way. The highway dopplered and the sounds revelationed around her, like terrible un-earthing trumpets. And to her, in that concussed moment, the world was over. She took off her bangles, which had torn and stripped skin off her dislocated wrist, throwing them to the ground like a captured emperor divulged riches.

She picked herself up. Vape and phone in hand, its screen shattered and flashing the bright pink and green of her girlfriend’s cock inside her, shimmering and changing and decaying like memory. The vibrator was broken and abandoned. She took her fur coat, and covered herself in it like a shock blanket. Mascara and tears and blood and rain and blood running down her face. Her bare legs and feet stuck out of the fur and carried her down the road like Baba Yaga’s house.

She had to leave the scene before the cops arrived. They wouldn’t suspect murder, so they probably wouldn’t check for her DNA, which there was plenty of, but the pigs would probably laugh about the oversized internal condom and the vibrator and the pantless corpse of the dead & defenestrated. In the event she did get a call for whatever reason, she’d say she was his student. He was a professor right? She didn’t make that up? A film professor. Right. He was an animator. She wanted to ask more about that but in the arrangement she wasn’t allowed to. She liked being a bitch on the clock because it allowed her to be tired at work and put on less of a face, but she didn’t actually like being mean. When she was mean, she liked to go all in and domme, but jobs like this weren’t like that. Don’t get it wrong, she hated this guy. He didn’t want her to feel or enjoy the sex between them. He probably would’ve preferred it if she was dead. Fuck that fucking guy, but blessed is this life which has carried her for 34 years of danger dance and tribulation.

She waddled, ankles sore, and stretched her clawed arm to the sky and shrieked.

Alive.

Distraught.

Victorious like the bob-cat ensnared in place of the rabbit who would become almost soup. Who springs from hunter’s curse, those trapped teeth of steel, of industry, and yikes away with broken leg and rib and yet still. Still. Still. Her three wild legs and better half fastly carry.

The CD still cries, in and out, but still all the same, as a child’s voice bellows out from the stereo, cursing the lord.

END.

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To me,

It is this demand,

This want,

To be worshipped unspiritually

To be yearned for

And written about

In the way that I yearn for

And write about

To be thought of as beautiful

In the way that she's beautiful.

To not be called a princess

But to be secretly thought of as one

To have to be worried

That I will only ever be seen

As a prize to be won.

The medieval romantic dysphoric past presence

Of the knight who wishes to be jousted for.

A soldier who wishes to be the picture

Under another infantries helmut.

To be the flower picked for a girl and to be the girl who recieves the flower,

Not the girl who picks it.

To be the rose written of at the end of johnny Cash's song.

"And give my love, give my love"

To me.

I write this from the bathtub,

Of which I do not quite fit inside

My left leg sticks out

To make room

For the rest of my body to confide

In

This plaster white casket of conformation

Makes me loath to be cleaned.

To me:

It is this discomfort with you

With my truest, rawest, abjection,

That I define our reality.

Although we want nothing more,

Than to be kissed,

A frog,

And made into something beautiful

That you could love

And be proud to love

And she could love

And be proud to love

But we are to be nothing more,

When we are kissed,

A frog.

And it is in this frustration.

This swamp, this hairy water,

This stew of ourself.

The vitriolic despair

Of the tight, white, casket.

Full of hot water

Which boils us alive,

That I am reminded I'm a part of something

; To me

It is this insatiable need to be seen as something that I am not

And never will be

And to be loved in such a contrite way

And to be witnessed under the light of a sun which does not burn for me,

On a planet which is not mine,

In a system which I'll never see,

And to be lit up and basked under

Like an arrangement of light and shadows

From the cracks of sunrise onto a natural cavernous formation

Which sheds colors against a mountain side

And inspires awe and celebration

In a solstice like occurrence

Simply for it's placement

and presence,

And it's size,

and it's inherent majesty,

And it's being there,

Just

it's being there,

That I know I am,

And connect most to,

The girl I want to be.

SLAG first debuted at SMASH YR FINGERS, an independent film and video festival hosted by DD Bentl. It was shown alongside several other works including Bee and King’s Nothing Good On, which you can also find on this substack.

THE WHALE TEETH DILEMMA

To know the maw of hell is to know hell itself, That dreaded vestibule. To

peer into char black, brimstone-lined halls of a beyond ancient tunnel which

radiates with vermillion shivers of light and heat from flames so far into the

distance you cannot quite see them; But the faint flicker of agonizing voracity and

far away screams do not exactly present themselves to be a beacon of hope that

one should flee to. And behind you, the smell of ash, and dark, unknowable,

woods, which conspire with whispering from every corner, only to be interrupted

with the ever-encroaching clicking and siren-like roars of beasts which resemble

naught of the make of a divine creator, but rather a being made by something

older and more primordial than any god you could possibly recognize. This is

your hell, and the only difference between it and the hell of the gospel is that you

started here. You were born of this world. You had no opportunity to fail or fall out

of the light of the redeemer. You simply were made, here, and here you will

remain, eternal. "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate", "Abandon all hope, ye

who enter here", is carved across your back upon the moment of your

conception; written where you cannot see it, for eyes in a body that will never see

light, and will therefore never bestow you the experience, the opportunity, to see

the writing for yourself, read it, and discover that you were only to know doom

from your humblest and earliest beginnings.

Perhaps you are not versed enough in prose of hell and damnation.

Perhaps the weight which has been conditioned to burden my soul is not a

universal experience, and so in order to understand where it is I am attempting to

take you in this metaphor, I will trade my talks of sulfur and the un-divine for that

of the sea and for the massive beasts beneath it which have defined

contemporary, literary, classicism. Pick the leviathan of your choosing: The

serpent, the megalodon, Spielberg’s interpretation of the great white, the

Lovecraftian giant squid, or the white whale of Herman Melville; Beasts of

unknown maneuverability, moving beneath us with unmatched dexterity,

unexampled, intelligent malignity, and enormous, unknowable and

incomprehensible, mass. For the interpretation of my own prompt, I will choose

the humble baleen whale. Unlike the other examples, baleen whales are

specifically known for their kindness, gentleness, compassion, and even

playfulness toward beings that the animal cannot eat. This is because the teeth

of a baleen whale are not made for biting down on large prey like humans and

other seafaring mammals which we can better identify with. The baleen whale’s

mouth is composed of teeth, or plates, which are made from collagen and ivory,

and are used to filter feed massive quantities of krill and other tiny prey. So yes,

to larger creatures, the baleen whale is a gentle giant, but to the krill, the baleen

whale is a machine of near-instantaneous genocide; one which is as big as the

world, whose speed, to the krill, is completely unimaginable.

A being of immense size, which is only rivaled by its intelligence; A

creature that can communicate with its kin from thousands of miles away in a

language both guttural, primal, and unknowingly complex, like that of the ancient

gods which the krill must believe to have existed and cursed them to an endless

punishment of eternal evasion under the pursuit of ultimate demise. As the krill

swim faster and faster away, utterly and hopelessly, they are rapidly pulled

between the massive spires and columns of the baleen’s mouth, which must

appear to them as some kind of beautifully cruel architecture that functions the

same way an open door on a space shuttle operates; pulling them into a vacuum

of black, empty, vacant, despair. And when they are finally sucked into the whale

teeth, their bodies are crushed, into the teeth, into each other, or against the

eight thousand pound tongue of the cruel god; Binding their tiny bodies into a

massive collective of legs, and eyes, antennae, and guts, which twitch lifelessly

in a great horde of flesh. Families, mothers, fathers, children, schools, dreams,

and memories of the most delicious phytoplankton, or the sweetest embrace of

one another in the furthering of the krill species, destroyed in an instant. Any

trace of identity, distinguishment, or sentience, are devoid in fractions of seconds

at the behest of the baleen to become protein for the predator.

And this is what it is, to be born into hell, and this, too, is what it is to be

marginalized, and to be transgender, in the world of cis white men; to know only

the fear of being consumed by your oppressors, and to be told by those larger

than yourself that which hunts you is kind, and gentle, and compassionate, and

even playful when you know them only to be capable of unexampled, intelligent

malignity. And this is the whale teeth dilemma; To see your oppressor in all its

eclipsing mass, know that it will reconstitute your insides and your flesh into one,

and to choose whether or not to swim against it until the end, or embrace your

demise. But there, too, is a secret third option, which is to decide you love the

whale, worship the whale, and find validity in your existence as a congruent,

indeterminate, speck, in a writhing mass of identity-less protein that serves only

as food for the beast that aims to decimate everything you are and could be.

YOU, THE HUNTER; FORSAKEN KILLER OF BEASTS.

You, the trans filmmaker, are a hunter of beasts. Not in the way that a

trapper hunts and kills bears for pelt and fur, because you fight with a great and

inherent disadvantage. The bow, or the rifle, or the javelin, make the trapper and

the bear equal, and to an extent, the spike trap often makes the trapper into a

deadlier adversary. Instead, you are a hunter in the same way that a cricket who

is dropped into a sanctuary with a live frog is a hunter; Your destiny, now, is to die

or to find a way to kill the frog. To make art and to be removed from the ilk of the

historic, patriarchal, systems that have been conspired against those who are like

you is a Sisyphean task akin to pushing a boulder up a hill eternally, only the

entire time you push, the boulder is actively trying to kill you. And those who

choose to work with and for the industries that suppress us, are actively carving

the boulder sharper, more jagged, and into a stronger opponent.

To be marginalized and produce films for those who want to kill us is to

constantly have the lens of your camera pointed at the barrel of a gun and not

know if the chamber carries real or fake bullets while it keeps firing directly at

your eye. Because more likely than not, you are not being subject to a chance of

death or survival, but simply to a waiting game that always leads to death. So

know this, you may not be able to defeat the boulder outright, but it is better to

not push at all than push until the boulder takes your life. But enough about the

boulder, as the boulder is not a beast. The boulder is too passive; It might kill you

because pushing it is dangerous, but a beast, which is what we are truly out to

defeat, is capable of unexampled, intelligent malignity, and works and has

worked to systematically destroy us before we even have the opportunity to

carve primitive tools to defend ourselves. The beast, the whale, or the cis-gender,

white, male, descendant of wealth, well-connected, director, producer, production

company head, advertising agent, or other signified machine head, is and should

always be on the other end of our knife, and we should never be on the other end

of its fork. Because whether or not we choose to accept it, transgender

filmmakers are not allowed to be only artists, but forced to be hunters of

monsters. Not because we have chosen to specialize in the craft of monster

hunting, but simply because there are monsters and no one to hunt them for us.

And the worst beast among them all holds a vice grip around every aspect of our

ambitions; From inception, to writing, to production, and to distribution. So how

do we defeat it? How do we, the krill, hunt the whale?

Defeating the whale looks different to everyone. As someone who has

lived as both a queer man and later as a trans woman, I have identified different

weaknesses from both angles. For the queer or marginalized man, the whale is

defeated when you stop worshiping it. The moment you realize that you do not

want to grow into a whale and the moment you realize you no longer wish to

become the thing that hates you or serve it with your work, is the moment the

whale is defeated. To realize that even the whale’s mere approval of your taste

does not matter and should not be considered is a large part of this overcoming.

For women, the white whale is defeated when you decentralize its approval

completely, and dedicate yourself to making work that does not serve the white

whale, and actively aims to displease it. You also share the burden of having to

tell everyone about the white whale and having nobody listen to you. If you’re a

marginalized man who wishes to defeat the whale, the first thing you can do is

listen to the women around you, who already know how to defeat it.

And to everyone, what you must understand, ultimately, is that the whale

cannot be defeated from the inside. To pass through the whale teeth is to be

stripped of any tool or identifying quality that we could ever use to harm or even

escape the whale. Once you try to “defeat the whale from within”, you knowingly

enter the maw of your oppressor and become protein; Because no matter the

state of the protein, be it resilience, passivity, or zeal, protein is still protein. So in

order to defeat our oppressors through our craft, we must never cross that barrier

into their industry. Two more strengths that we, the krill, will always have over the

whale, are number and narrative. There are simply more prey than predators, but

that doesn’t mean that, in our current state, we are able to overtake the whale

even if we all band together. The whale is still a whale, and we have been born

into a system that establishes us as disadvantaged and innately weaker than our

oppressor. This is why narrative is so important because our stories are one thing

that we will always have over the whale. We see the world differently than the

whale, and our disadvantages, the things that only we can see and the fact and

reality of our births, make our stories richer and inherently more interesting. This

is why the Whale feeds on us specifically; Not just because we are made into

easier targets for our oppressors, but because we define their taste. They would

not be the size they are, dominate the seas, or even evolve to consume us at the

rate they do if it were not for our meat. So in order to truly defeat the whale, we

must starve the whale, of our stories, of our narrative, of the divine things which

make us different, and of the so-called “content” of our soul which feeds the

whale and allows it to continue its brutal raze upon us. And to starve the whale,

we must swim in different waters; waters that the whale cannot access, and

cannot understand. We must become, unwaveringly, inaccessible and

incomprehensible. And so the harpoon, of which we will use to defeat the whale,

is not a harpoon at all, but a new sea altogether.

AND I SAY, UNTO THE HARPOON, GO NOW AND SPEED WELL // DEFINING

THE KILLING BLOW AND EMBRACING THE VOLCANIC BIRTH OF A NEW

OCEAN.

To define the harpoon is to define and create a new genre, or anti-genre,

that will resist the whale and create movies completely inaccessible to the white

patriarchy. It is to lean into the means of making that the whale so desperately

hates and to utilize bygone, cheap, and filthy ways of filmmaking that the industry

despises. To embrace the harpoon is to embrace what the industry considers to

be poison to film, and work with no reverence to cinema or industrial standards.

And if you are worried about your film not being accepted into the world of the

whale, not because you want the approval of the whale, but because you don’t

want your film to go unseen, then consider making your own places and

programs for them to be viewed. Valuing academic and well-established

achievement and acclimation over that of the independent is an internal conflict

and one that can only be solved by the revaluation of your own self-worth. This

manifesto cannot help you radically accept yourself, nor can it teach you to put

your own work on the same shelf as work made for millions of dollars by your cis

patriarchal counterparts, but it can tell you outright that your work carries more

inherent substance than works that reach the highest levels of industrial success.

And if you will not listen to me, then ask yourself why independent film has a

massive audience and a massive amount of people who dedicate their entire

selves to it. Is it because they’re all just desperately trying to reach the upper

echelon of elitist filmmaking, or does part of them know that what they’re doing is

just inherently more worthwhile? I think that the answer is yes; what we do simply

matters more than what they do, and as trans filmmakers especially, our narrative

becomes more and more valuable by the day and audiences only become more

and more starved for it. So how do we feed our audiences while starving the

industry that wishes to seize our means of storytelling and production? This

brings us to the harpoon.

ANATOMY OF THE HARPOON:

Resist the “Hollywood look”, embrace amateur filmmaking and make B movies.

Work with the equipment you have, the actors you know, and the locations

you have access to, and just embrace how it will look. Make the highest quality

work you can but not at the expense of your beliefs or your integrity. Do not hire

people who do not stand where you stand, and do not spend your money on

anything that benefits the industry we wish to fight. If you need a Steadicam, and

the only person you know who is selling a Steadicam is someone who associates

with the industry, or who will use that money to further the success of the

industry, then hold the camera in your fucking hands. Do not think of these

sacrifices as compromises to your vision, adjust your vision to make room for

these sacrifices. Hone the style of your craft into one which not only exhibits your

adversity but depends on it, because your adversity will always be a part of your

filmmaking for as long as you are trans. Embrace video art over cinema, and

utilize techniques from our fLUXUS predecessors and the prolific women and

non-binary video artists like Stanya Kahn and Sadie Benning who came before

us. Even look to the early 20th century, with German expressionism utilizing

literal smoke and mirrors for practical effects, and allowing dramatic performance

and quality writing to take the stage while simultaneously allowing the stage to be

made primarily of painted cardboard. Or look to the horror filmmaking of the late

70s and early 80s, where my heart lies, and admire how they build their own rigs

out of wood and PVC; filming complex and horrifying sequences with a single

camera and painted rubber Halloween masks. Not only will allowing yourselves

to make work that defies the industry standard, or the “Hollywood look”, allow you

to make more freely and with more expression, but you will also make work that

actively makes the white patriarchal systems, which conspire against us, cringe

outright and reject our work altogether. And this is a good thing because our work

should be for us and not for them, at all costs. Importance and substance often

work in contrast to industry success and approval, and what white men in power

defy or are unable to understand is often what makes up the conceptually richest

bodies of work. Ask yourself, are you making work for yourself and your

community, or are you making protein for the whale?

Make movies for as cheaply as possible and as quickly as possible.

This aligns heavily with the previous tenant, but know that making film as

cheaply as possible is not entirely motivated by stylistic, intentional, defiance.

Making movies as cheaply as possible is also motivated by survival, as

financially crippling yourself at the behest of your vision is ultimately going to

harm the trans filmmaking movement more than your film is going to add to its

power. If you make a film, but starve yourself in the process, lose your home, or

have to sell your car, then you are inhibiting an actual trans person for the sake

of trans narrative, which is counterintuitive. Making your film for less money and

feeding yourself for more money also feeds the independent industry, and allows

you to live longer and make more films. Like with any kind of revolution, a dead

revolutionary is the least helpful kind of revolutionary. But you don’t have to

compromise the integrity or quality of your work by spending less money on it. If

you go to a university or have a friend who goes to a university, then use their

equipment. If you can find cheap or free equipment online or in estate sales, buy

it; Remember, if the white male you buy camera equipment from is already dead,

then it's ethical consumption. Also remember this: being a good writer and a

good editor costs nothing but practice. Write and edit constantly, not only at the

behest of your vision but out of motivation to not embarrass yourself and your

community. You can’t always control how your film will look, and you can’t always

control how your actors will perform your script, but you can always control how

well your script is written and you can always control how your film is edited and

assembled. This is how you will maintain quality no matter the budget of your

film. Also, making movies as cheaply as possible ensures that you will be able to

make more movies. You will become a better and more prolific filmmaker by

working cheaper and more efficiently than you will if you are to pour yourself into

a single, technically brilliant, and well-funded production. I have seen many films

that looked terrible but live wonderfully in my mind and heart, as I have seen

many great-looking and sounding films that I wish I could unsee. Know that false

quality and true quality are different, and that true quality comes from your soul

and not your wallet.

Submit your work to festivals and events that embrace your community and are maintained by your community.

We will never grow to be the artists we want to be without cultivating

community. This is a lesson that I learned in Denton, TX, as a

performance and video artist trying to exhibit works in predominantly

cis-white gallery spaces and museums in Fort Worth and Dallas. These

spaces love to advertise that they work with trans artists, but they make

every step of working with them extremely difficult and adversarial. These

cis curators of well-established institutions will go round and round with

you on the presentation of your work, the content of your piece, and even

the way you dress and present yourself on the day of the opening.

Remember, as a trans person, you are often more valuable as a credit on

the bill or poster than as a real-life, flesh and blood, person and artist, to

institutions outside of our community. When I decided to stop only

performing and displaying my work in the industrial art scene and moved

on to playing music and showing video at trans punk and DIY spaces, not

only was I treated with more dignity and respect than anywhere else but

my work was received on a larger scale, and I made connections that

made me into the artist and performer I am today. This applies to

filmmaking too. Microcinemas, both online and in person, are a great way

to share your work and meet other like-minded people in your scene. If

spaces like this don’t exist where you live, or the microcinemas near you

aren’t trans-inclusive, then make your own. Trans filmmakers and video

artists need places to screen their work, and the more microcinemas and

DIY spaces there are for our community, the more power we gain over

spaces that aren’t trans-inclusive. And if the majority of spaces in your

area become trans-inclusive, and if the majority of works people can see

are trans works, then you shift the focus of independent film in your

community to center trans narratives, And this is what will starve the

whale. But remember this: Trans-inclusive and trans led/owned are

different things. You can be included as a trans voice and still have that

voice used against you due to the tokenization and fetishization of trans

art and artists in “inclusive spaces”. They want to make their circus more

entertaining, but the circus does not care whether or not the elephant has

enough room to sleep or if the lion is eating the right amount of food. This

is why it’s so important to prioritize making our own spaces instead of

finding and converting the spaces that already exist. Creating your own

microcinema is the only way to ensure that the space that caters the most

to your needs and the community that you want to cultivate can be

achieved. Remember, it is impossible to kill the whale from inside it; you

have to build your community in different waters outside of the whale teeth

altogether.

Work with no reverence to cis men; Do not express influence from cis men or their art. Embrace work made by women, and if you are influenced by work made by cis men, never give them credit. I don’t care if a cis man-made your favorite movie.

I don’t care if

your favorite director is a cis man. I don’t care if you have cis men in your life who

are kind, or supportive, or if they got you where you are today. Don’t talk about

them, and don’t give them credit even if you think they deserve it. They don’t, and

they will not benefit or be harmed by your inclusion of them or lack thereof. If they

are really allies, then they will understand, and if they aren’t, then it still doesn’t

matter because we’re decentralizing them from our practice completely. In writing

this manifesto, I have placed it in the hands of two cis white men to review and

make suggestions on. In December of this year, I will present this manifesto to a

panel of professors, most of whom will be male, white, and cis. They will

probably, to varying extents, offer insightful commentary that will help guide this

piece into the polished draft you’re reading right now, and their insight may even

affect my craft and my filmmaking going forward. I will not, under any

circumstances, credit them for the inspiration derived from their criticism, nor

speak their names in regards to this work or others that they may help with; and

their careers will not be impacted either way because of this. If you are worried

about this treatment of cis men being unfairly harsh, or that this complete refusal

to acknowledge the influence of cis men on our work is somehow dishonest,

remember that cis men are the ones who are killing more and more of us every

year. Remember that cis men are the ones who are attempting to vote us out of

existence, and remember that cis men who make films are the ones who depict

us as serial killers, pedophiles, and monsters when they decide to include our

existence in their work at all. Remember that the cis man, specifically the white

cis man, is the whale, and aims exclusively to devour us whole even if they have

their “good moments”. If you’re worried that your style of filmmaking depends on

cis men too much, whether that be because your circle/crew of fellow filmmakers

primarily consists of them, or because your work is heavily influenced and

derived by the work of cis male filmmakers, consider surrounding yourself with

other trans people and women instead, and prioritize watching films made by

women and trans people instead of cis men. Not only will you gain influences

from work that you may never have previously encountered, but also because

you will better understand what makes our voices so much richer than the voices

of cis men, and you will also understand just how much can be gained from

decentralizing our craft from their influence and the patriarchal systems and

privilege that inform their work. Remember, it doesn’t matter if you saw a man do

it first; this is your shot, this is your line, this is your idea, this is your film. If the

concept derived from a cis male source, no it didn’t; that’s your idea. Revise the

history that informs the craft you want to make. Stop worshiping the whale,

worship what’s in front of you, and construct your own idols.

Work with no reverence for yourself.

Remember that films are not made by the

directors, and these stories are not told by merely one writer.

Reverence to your oppressors is one hurdle, but overcoming reverence to

yourself is an entirely different obstacle. What I mean by reverence to yourself in

this case is not necessarily a literal, narcissistic, reverence you hold for your

physical self, but rather a reverence of your vision, your craft, your body of work,

and your abilities over the vision, craft, work, and abilities of your community and

crew. Remember this, no film is made solely by an individual, even if you’re

literally working with a crew of just yourself. You were influenced by someone, or

something, or an event, and you’re shooting on cameras you did not invent, on a

location you did not build, on an earth that evolved into being over the course of

billions of years without your influence or permission; All you did was plan around

a moment and capture it. And more likely, if you are working with a crew of

people, no matter how small, remember that this film only exists out of the

collective collaboration of your team. “Your vision” is no longer your vision when

you put it in the hands of others; embrace this. Films that come from the trans

community do not only come from trans directors and trans writers; They come

from trans actors, trans PAs, trans DPs, trans cinematographers, trans editors,

trans sound artists, trans mic operators, trans-SFX artists, and trans musicians

who score your film with beautiful and strange music. We will not survive in this

craft if we insist upon ourselves, and your work will become much better and your

voice will grow richer if you allow yourself to be reverent to those around you

instead of merely yourself. Work irreverently, but not only in regard to god or to

systems of power, but also irreverence to the ego. This is how you prevent

yourself from growing into a whale, and how you prevent yourself from becoming

the thing you hate. Remember, the goal of diverging from the status quo of

filmmaking and the rigid abuse and disposal of trans bodies and voices is to

make a better world for the current and next generation; Not to keep our

community in the box it has always been in.

Work within your community, and as close to exclusively within your community as possible.

Hire inside our community as often as possible, and work on crews within

our community as often as possible. And if you aren’t for whatever reason doing

this already, hire old and young trans people, hire black and brown trans people,

hire indigenous trans people, hire disabled trans people, hire international and

immigrant trans people. Any opportunity you have to allow a trans person to work

in film, is an opportunity that you owe yourself and your community to take. Your

craft, in addition to filmmaking, is bolstering the resumes of your community

members to get trans people into positions to be fed with regularity and at a

never-before-seen volume. This will mean that many of your crew members will

be amateurs, and It is your job to make them professionals. As a director, you

should make it your mission to know every piece of the machine of a film; you

should, generally speaking, know how everything works on your set. Maybe you

can’t operate recording equipment, but you should at least know how to hold a

boom mic. Teach what you know to those who don’t know, and seek out the

experts in your community to fill in where you can’t. And don’t be afraid to get

unconventional with your crew assignments and casting. Hire experimental

photographers to work cameras, hire noise musicians to do sound, hire video

artists to be editors, and hire poets to be script supervisors. Assemble a crew of

sex workers and cast independent porn actors. Resist the crew of one, as often

as you can, and fill your team with trans people whenever possible. This will

result in other trans filmmakers filling their teams with you, with the people you

hired, and with new people that they know, and the trans community of

filmmakers becomes larger and skills become shared further and farther and

craft becomes, universally, honed, until your community becomes a beacon of

trans filmmaking and exemplary creativity. And begetting begets begetting, and

that begetting begets more begetting. This is where the new sea emerges, and

this is where we thrive; unthreatened by the whale and able to feed safely and

provide food for each other. But now that we’ve created this trans utopia, how do

we preserve it? How do we protect ourselves from the whale?

Practice weaponized esotericism and radical inaccessibility of narrative. Your work should be accessible to your community and borderline unwatchable to western white men.

The way we maintain safety in our trans community of filmmakers and in

the work we make together is by making said work inaccessible to those who

wish to harm us. This realization came to me while observing actual krill in a

narrow canal near Tortuga Bay. While diving in this canal, I saw krill for the first

time and realized that they are truly much smaller than you might think. These

were plankton krill. I first took them for cracks in my goggles but realized I was

swimming directly into a small cloud of them, and they ricocheted off of my face

and gear like rubber bullets on concrete. Some of them disintegrated against my

body, and I felt a great guilt, as I was in their home and they had specifically

chosen to inhabit this area because large predators like myself were usually

unable to cross through the rigid rocks and coral without great effort. It was here

that I observed that this was, ultimately, the way to survive as a trans person in

creative industries built normally by those who wish to bring our demise. We build

our communities in places that are inaccessible to predators, and we maintain

that inaccessibility by how we inhabit the space. For trans people, this means

leaning into parts of our narrative that we know won’t necessarily make sense for

audience members who are not a part of our community. Our stories are filled

with layer after layer of rich detail that a cis person will likely never experience,

and instead of dampening our stories to make them more digestible for a cis

audience, we must make them harder to consume, stranger, and more esoteric.

You must starve the whale, no matter what. Make films for trans audiences and

only trans audiences. Our trauma does not need to become cis tears, our

romance does not need to beat the drum of cis hearts, and our fears do not need

to become the shadows that haunt the peripheries of cis eyes. These are our

feelings, and our stories, not theirs. For filmmakers reading that do not speak

English as a first language, do not be afraid to leave your work untranslated.Let

the audiences that exist outside your community simmer contemptibly in their

misunderstanding of your reality. Do not be afraid to make work that is fully

incomprehensible to men or the white West; They do not deserve to comprehend

you in the totality of your complexity. We are not for them, and neither is our

work. Lean into what makes your work authentic, and disregard anyone or any

voice that tells you that you may be misunderstood by any audience other than

the one that you have worked to cultivate.

Do not resist the surreal.

Embrace the horror of our known experiences and do not be afraid to

make something that only you, or people like you, could understand. But do not

make the same mistakes of the cis white male surrealists who come before you.

To truly embrace the surreal, and to properly utilize surrealism in your work, not

only to better understand yourself and the themes expressed in your work but to

drive a wedge between your work and audiences that don’t deserve it, is to

explore more than merely the subconscious alone. This is the problem of white

and cisgender surrealism, both modern and contemporary. Dali, Ernst, Ray,

Lynch, all of these names which are considered geniuses in their respective

worlds made work that explores the subconscious mind, but only at the most

surface level. White men who explore the subconscious mind explore it simply for

the sake of itself, which is uninteresting and profoundly lacks any sort of greater

appeal. This is what happens when you don’t have an identity or experiences of

value to work from; your work, no matter how obscure or obtuse, lacks flavor, and

your explorations of the surreal become inaccessible for inaccessibility’s sake.

When you approach surrealism from a place of societal marginalization, the

flavor of your lived experience seeps through tremendously. Take afro-surrealism

for example, a term coined in 1974 by Amiri Baraka. Afro-surrealism doesn’t

strive to only explore the horrors and incomprehensibility of the subconscious,

but rather the horrors and incomprehensibility of the black and African lived

experience, and communicate these horrors through the only language that holds

space for that level of incomprehensibility; The surreal. Surrealism is a powerful

tool and is one that can be used to explore our narratives deeper and more

meaningfully than ever before. When we work from a surrealist perspective, not

only do our films become deeper, richer, and more layered, but they become

even less accessible to the cis-white patriarchy. You do not owe cis people

didacticism. You are not the sole teacher of your lived experiences. Being trans

does not make you a reluctant professor of trans identity and expression to a

class full of cis students. You are the artist, and it is up to the audience to divine

and interpret their own meanings from your work. You are not the revelator,

receiving visions and messages from angels and the divine, plighted by

knowledge and the burden of revealing truth to the unenlightened masses; You

are God herself divining revelations to those whose minds and spirits are open to

receive them. Cis audiences are not owed your coherence, and they are not

entitled to the reality of your vision; they must cope, seethe, and drown eternal, in

the bog of transgender surreality.

AND THE LORD COMMANDED THE LEVIATHAN, AND IT VOMITED JONAH

ONTO DRY LAND // ENLIGHTENED BUT FOREVER SCORNED.

If we continue to make and work from a new genre of explicitly trans

surrealist film, our audiences will have no choice but to develop a taste for it.

They will learn how to read and understand our work and they will be allowed to

explore the complexity of our experience in a way that has never been explored

before. And as this taste develops, so will the hunger, until the only thing that

audiences want to watch or engage with are trans narratives, directed and

produced by trans teams of filmmakers, in trans theaters and microcinemas,

made without the influence of cis men and made entirely outside of the range of

cis male comprehensibility. And this is how the whale is killed. This is how the

whale is starved. And this is how we gain our complete, decentered, emboldened

independence, from the world of cis white men and their bullshit movies. These

tools birth into existence the new genre, or anti-genre, or mobilized, militant,

movement of communal trans identity and artistry that will kill the contemporary

industry of filmmaking, and bring forth a new era of trans cinema that will be

beautifully horrifying and horrifyingly beautiful as it is radical.

Instead of using our work to get as close as we possibly can to the world

of white men, who may I remind you, hate us, we must make our own world and

deprive theirs of our work. Our narrative is their food, and they don’t deserve to

eat. We fuel the next generation of filmmakers by feeding each other, feeding

ourselves, and starving out the old world. We do not, under any circumstances,

bash ourselves against the teeth of our oppressors to become their protein. But

know this, hunter of beasts, when you go down this path, dedicating everything

you are and can be to the killing of the whale, you lead a hungry life, and those

waters which are unknown to the whale are unknown to most, and to make and

work and live in these waters, and to live for these waters, is to abandon the

glory of the high seas. The reward, however, is to be truly, and utterly, fulfilled,

but fulfilled in secret, which not all are prepared to allow themselves to do; as

many will choose to die starving with many eyes upon them in the congruent

mash of digits and legs in the pursuit of prosper and fame than to die surrounded

by love at an accomplished age with no one to witness or tell of their death. It is

your choice, hunter, what you decide to make of the whale teeth dilemma, but

know this: The new world of trans filmmaking is a difficult path, but it is not a

lonely one. If you can sacrifice the burden of the filmmaker’s ego, then you can

bask in the opportunity to be a part of something bigger than yourself and bigger

than the vision of those who never saw you as anything more than food for a

whale. Conspire, Resist, and Indulge; In shadows, in solace, and in numbers.