"Terre Thaemlitz: Reframed Positions", Halle für Kunst Lüneburg, 2023, Ausstellungsansicht

Eine konstruktivistische Identitätspolitik geht davon aus, dass Identitäten nicht essentialistisch gegeben sind, sondern aktiv durch politische (Sub-)Kulturen und Bewegungen hergestellt und praktiziert werden. Entsprechende Prozesse - wie die Subjektivierung, Artikulation und Repräsentation - spielen eine Schlüsselrolle im Werk von Terre Thaemlitz, deren jüngste Überblicksschau Mine Pleasure Bouvar hier in den Blick nimmt. Die Besprechung der Ausstellung mit persönlichen Erinnerungen verwebend führt Bouvar Theamlitz' dezidiert institutionskritische Praxis mit der eigenen Lebensrealität als trans* Person eng und verweist damit nicht zuletzt auf die Dringlichkeit, die die künstlerische Auseinandersetzung mit komplexen Repräsentations- und Kooptionsmechanismen nach wie vor hat.

Erstmals stieß ich 2015 auf Terre Thaemlitz, unter ihrem Alias DJ Sprinkles. Mein*e damalige*r Mitbewohner*in und ich hörten ihr Album Midtown 120 Blues rauf und runter - damals noch davon überzeugt, junge Männer und später mal als DJs selbst erfolgreich zu sein. Wir waren begeistert, wie sich das Album dem entzog, was als "Deep House" gerade in den Clubs en vogue war, und suchten fasziniert in den Vocals von "Sister, I Don't Know What This World Is Coming To" und "Grand Central, Pt. I (Deep Into The Bowel Of House)" nach den universellen Botschaften der House Music.

1 Aus dem Intro-Track von Midtown 120 Blues (DJ Sprinkles, Mule Music, 2009).

"There must be a hundred records with voice-overs asking, 'What is house?' The answer is always some greeting card bullshit about 'life, love, happiness'. House is not universal. House is hyper-specific. The contexts from which the deep house sound emerged are forgotten: sexual and gender crises, transgender sex work, black market hormones, drug and alcohol addiction, loneliness, racism, HIV, ACT UP, Tompkins Square Park, police brutality, queer-bashing, underpayment, unemployment and censorship - all at 120 beats per minute."¹

Mit "Reframed Positions" luden die Kurator*innen Lawrence English, Elisa R. Linn und Ann-Kathrin Eickhoff die multidisziplinäre Künstlerin, Autorin und Aktivistin Terre Thaemlitz zu einer ortsübergreifenden Retrospektive ein. In der Halle für Kunst Lüneburg bot eine Überblicksausstellung Einblick in Thaemlitz' vielfältiges künstlerisches Werk, in Berlin wurde er ergänzt durch ein DJ-Set in der Panorama Bar, die Premiere der Performance Deproduction (2023) bei Callie's und einen Live-Talk mit Lawrence English in der Volksbühne. In Thaemlitz' Arbeiten sind Fragen nach der Konstruktion von Identitäten in Relation zu kapitalistischen Produktionsweisen und den neoliberalen Diskursen, die diese stützen, zentral. Begehren, Geschlecht, Rassifizierung, Zugehörigkeit und andere Kategorisierungen werden im Kontext von Klassengesellschaft und globalen Hierarchien seziert. Dabei reflektiert Thaemlitz auch kritisch die eigene Position als Künstlerin und die Rolle der Räume und Institutionen, in und mit denen sie arbeitet. Im Gespräch mit Lawrence English in der Berliner Volksbühne meinte sie beispielsweise:

2 Terre Thaemlitz/Lawrence English, "Reframed Positions - Terre Thaemlitz in conversation with Lawrence English", 13. Mai 2023, S. 1 (letzter Zugriff: 14. August 2023).

"I began referring to all art as 'critique affirming its object', because no matter how precise and harshly critical one's analysis may be, when it is funded by the same corporate or federal agencies one is criticizing, it all goes to show the benevolence and open-mindedness of the sponsors. [...] I can understand the right to federal funding as a utopian democratic concept, but it also strikes me as a position of tremendous compromise."²

"Terre Thaemlitz: Reframed Positions", Halle für Kunst Lüneburg, 2023, Ausstellungsansicht

3 Ebd.

Dank eines umfänglichen 22-seitigen Transkripts, das im Onlinearchiv der Halle für Kunst zugänglich ist, bleibt die im Gespräch geäußerte kritische Positionierung auch nach Ablauf der Retrospektive nachvollziehbar.³ In Lüneburg nimmt die Kuration auf Thaemlitz' Institutionskritik Bezug: Die Ausstellungsfläche ist abgedunkelt, ihre Wände sind geschwärzt; sie teilt eine deckenhohe Wand aus dunkelgrauen, an Beton erinnernde Schaumstoff-Kuben, um die ein Rundgang führt. Der Raum drängt sich auf. Alles setzt sich ab vom klassischen Kunstausstellungs-Setting in weißen Räumen, die vorgeben, sich der Aufmerksamkeit der Besucher*innen zu entziehen, um Platz für die Rezeption der Exponate zu machen, die aber oft genug in der Performance bourgeoiser Eleganz verhaftet bleibt.

4 Chaser: Kurz für "tranny Chaser", heterosexuelle cis Männer, die trans*weibliche Personen fetischisieren und ihnen sexualisierte Avancen machen, sie im Gegensatz zu cis Frauen aber nicht als mögliche Partner*innen in Betracht ziehen, sondern nur als sexuelles Abenteuer.

2018 verglich mich ein "Freund" mit DJ Sprinkles. Er sagte, wenn ich auflege, müsse er an sie denken - "der [sic] trägt auch manchmal Kleider beim Auflegen". Sein Unverständnis für trans*weibliche Lebensrealitäten hielt ihn jedenfalls nicht davon ab, auf mein trans* Coming-out mit seinem Outing als Chaser⁴ zu reagieren und mir bei einem Auftritt wenig später unangenehm nahe zu kommen - tranny life goals.

5 Vgl. Thaemlitz/Englisch, S. 5. 6 ACT UP, https://actupny.com/ (letzter Zugriff: 14. August 2023).

Thaemlitz fordert dominante Diskurse um das Thema Queerness heraus.⁵ Sie selbst stellt sich entschieden gegen die neoliberalen, essenzialistischen Diskurse, die sexuelle Minderheiten zu repräsentativen Aushängeschildern des westlich-humanistischen Fortschritts machen. Im Gegensatz dazu macht Thaemlitz deutlich, wie umkämpft die Arenen sind, in denen Körper gemäß vergeschlechtlichten Vorstellungen von Produktion und Reproduktion, Familie und Bürgerlichkeit normiert werden. "Reframed Positions" fokussiert diese Kämpfe. Mit Betreten des Ausstellungsraums in Lüneburg fällt der Blick auf Fuck Art (2020), einen großformatigen Digitaldruck aktivistischer Straßenposter von 1989 im Rapport, auf denen zu lesen ist: "AIDS IS KILLING. HOMOPHOBIA IS KILLING"- ein Zeugnis der Beteiligung Thaemlitz' an den radikalen Widerständen von ACT UP⁶ gegen den bürgerlichen Status quo und den Massenmord an Schwulen, trans*Frauen, armen Menschen, Sexarbeitenden und drogenabhängigen Personen durch staatlich verordnete medizinische Vernachlässigung in der AIDS-Pandemie der 1980er und 1990er Jahre. Das aktivistische Engagement wird im Rundgang der Ausstellung etwa auf der Hälfte erneut in Erinnerung gerufen, durch Happiness is ... Choice und Happiness is ... Women Loving Women (beide 1989), zwei Motive für T-Shirt-Designs, die Thaemlitz für den March for Women's Lives anfertigte.

"Terre Thaemlitz: Reframed Positions", Halle für Kunst Lüneburg, 2023, Ausstellungsansicht

7 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?", in: Can the Subaltern Speak? Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak/Estefania Penafiel Loaiza, Afterall Books, London 2020, S. 18. [8] Spivak spricht in dem Zusammenhang von "gender and development United Nations style", ebd. S. 9f. 8 Spivak spricht in dem Zusammenhang von "gender and development United Nations style", ebd. S. 9f.

In der Ausstellung kommt mir Gayatri Spivaks Ausführung zur mehrfachen Lesbarkeit von Repräsentation in den Sinn, nach der diese Möglichkeiten aufzeigt, wie bestimmte Positionen für politisch, kulturell und sozial mächtige Institutionen sichtbar gemacht werden können bzw. woran dies scheitert. Repräsentation im Sinne politischer Vertretung - "with stronger suggestions of substitution"⁷, also Unterwerfung unter die Logiken der institutionellen Apparate. Spivak beschreibt, wie Minderheitengruppen, gerade im Kontext globaler Hierarchien, oft abhängig sind von der Vertretung/Repräsentation durch Personen oder Institutionen mit mehr Deutungshoheit und somit Gefahr laufen, dass ihre Anliegen kompromittiert werden oder deren Erfüllung beispielsweise Hand in Hand geht mit letztlich imperialistischen Politiken.⁸ Thaemlitz' Beschäftigung mit Logiken der Repräsentation ist komplex. "Reframed Positions" gibt dieser Auseinandersetzung in den audiovisuellen Stücken Deproduction (2017) und Soulnessless (2012) großzügig Raum. Deproduction erzählt unzählige Geschichten von Schicksalen im Graubereich reproduktiver Gerechtigkeit, häuslicher Gewalt und vergeschlechtlichter Marginalisierung durch das Versagen eines durch Austeritätsprogramme und Privatisierung geschwächten Sozialwesens. In Soulnessless ist ein ganzes Kapitel philippinischen Immigrant*innen in Japan gewidmet, die durch ihren undokumentierten Status nahezu rechtlos der Überausbeutung ausgesetzt sind. Thaemlitz legt zudem offen, wie sie als Künstlerin in der Verantwortung steht, die Anonymität der Interviewten zu wahren, um sie vor den japanischen Behörden zu schützen. Sie arbeitet sich am doppelten Boden repräsentationaler Politiken ab, erkennt die Notwendigkeit von Repräsentation an, ohne die bestimmte Personen ohne Stimme bleiben würden, und fragt kritisch nach der Rolle der eigenen privilegierten, repräsentativen Position. Die in "Reframed Positions" gezeigten Arbeiten unterstreichen, wie wichtig die Darstellung von Partikularitäten verschiedener Perspektiven ist angesichts der Gefahr der Überschreibung oder Verflachung durch generalisierende Repräsentation: Die Frage, wem eine Stimme zugestanden wird, wird umgekehrt zu der Frage, wer zuhört. Ausstellungsbesucher*innen müssen bei Laufzeiten zwischen 60 und 90 Minuten ihre eigene Bequemlichkeit konfrontieren, wenn sie sich der Aufgabe des Zuhörens stellen wollen.

"Terre Thaemlitz: Reframed Positions", Halle für Kunst Lüneburg, 2023, Ausstellungsansicht

Ich begegnete ihr das erste Mal in einem Café um die Ecke. Sie erzählt mir, wie sie aus der Ukraine fliehen musste. Ich muss daran denken, wie LGBT+ in der ukrainischen Armee als Verteidiger*innen der westlichen Demokratie gefeiert und gleichzeitig diejenigen völlig vergessen werden, die in der cisnormativen Logik der Generalmobilmachung das Land nicht verlassen konnten und Angst vor der Rekrutierung haben mussten. Ich schlucke, überlege, ob sie eine der trans*Frauen ist, denen ich letztes Jahr geholfen habe, das Land zu verlassen.

9 Thaemlitz/Englisch, S. 6. 10 Angesichts des trans*feindlichen Kulturkampfes stellt die US-amerikanische National Association of Social Workers Ressourcen zur Verfügung, um gefährliche Mythen, wie die angebliche Gefahr pubertätsblockender Medikation, zu dekonstruieren. Siehe hier (letzter Zugriff: 14. August 2023).

In "Reframed Positions" wird Thaemlitz' treffende Kritik am liberalen Verständnis von Sichtbarkeit und Repräsentation als Mechanismus der Aufrechterhaltung imperial organisierter, globaler Marktverhältnisse deutlich. Gerade deshalb hinterlässt ihre Äußerung zur Transitionsmedizin im Talk mit English einen bitteren Beigeschmack.⁹ Die Kurator*innen verpassten hier ihre Verantwortung, zu intervenieren, als die eingeladene Künstlerin unwidersprochen Argumente trans*feindlicher Desinformation zur angeblichen Gefahr pubertätsblockender Medikamente echote.¹⁰ Thaemlitz' antimedikalistischer Ansatz ist zwar verständlich, bleibt aber dennoch eine ideologische Verkürzung, die die materiellen Verhältnisse von trans* Personen mit dem Bedürfnis nach adäquater Gesundheitsversorgung übersieht. Das schmerzt mit Blick auf die miserable Versorgung trans*geschlechtlicher Menschen vielerorts und auf die Tatsache, dass aktuell regressive Kräfte mit der systematischen Verschlechterung dieser Situation an den antiqueeren Massenmord durch medizinische Vernachlässigung anzuknüpfen versuchen.

11 Terre Thaemlitz, "Statement of Purpose. Zur Wahrnehmung gesellschaftlicher Inhalte in japanischer elektronischer Musik", in: Gendertronics. Der Körper in der elektronischen Musik, hg. von club transmediale/Meike Jansen, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/M. 2005. S. 122.

"Umgekehrt wäre es naiv und problematisch zu glauben, dieses Loslassen [von westlich geprägten, essenzialistischen Diskursen; Anm. d. A.] könnte uns die ideologischen Scheuklappen nehmen."¹¹

Bevor ich das Handy an meinem letzten Arbeitstag zurückgebe, erreicht mich eine Nachricht von einer Person, die ich im Rahmen meiner Arbeit als Beraterin* für queere Gesundheit begleitet hatte: "Thank you so much! You will forever be in my heart. Without your work, I'd never had the chance to get medical care and come to the point where I am now."

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To the Editor,

This letter is in response to "Depresentation: Mine Pleasure Bouvar Über Terre Thaemlitz In Der Halle Für Kunste Lüneberg," a review of my exhibition "Reframed Positions" written by Mine Pleasure Bouvar, which you published on September 1, 2023.

Regarding a comment I apparently made during a public performance/talk in association with the exhibition that the reviewer disagreed with, I was appalled to read what can only be described as art journalism advocating for curators to actively censor their exhibiting artists in real-time, as follows: "The curators were negligent in their responsibility to intervene when the invited artist echoed unchallenged arguments of anti-trans* disinformation about the alleged danger of puberty-blocking drugs. (Die Kurator*innen verpassten hier ihre Verantwortung, zu intervenieren, als die eingeladene Künstlerin unwidersprochen Argumente trans*feindlicher Desinformation zur angeblichen Gefahr pubertätsblockender Medikamente echote.)"

I believe the reviewer and your publication have every right to disagree, criticize and thoroughly dissect my work and words. (It's a pity the reviewer didn't bother to take better notes of what exactly upset them so deeply.) However, I emphatically oppose any call for censoring intervention, whether it is aimed at myself or anyone else - including those whose views I may staunchly disagree with. For a journalistic exhibition review published in an established art journal to reprimand curators for failing to actively disrupt and censor an artist in the midst of an exhibition-related talk strikes me as far more offensive than anything I might have said. I would have previously presumed it out of line with your own publication's standards against censorship. You have completely discredited yourselves in this field.

The reviewer provides no exact quote or additional context to what I said, and I am also unable to fill in those details because I have no memory of the topic arising, and the talk was undocumented as is my common practice. However, within the context of the exhibition and its themes of gender and sexual variance, I find it hard to imagine my intentions could be so easily mistaken for the kind of reactionary "anti-trans* disinformation" implied. Was I responding to or elaborating upon something said or asked by someone else? Was I speaking in reference to a particular project of mine that specifically deals with medical malfeasance, such as Interstices? Could the fact that I have spent my adult life openly trans and actively generating culturally critical work around trans issues also perhaps inform a broader context - or at least provide a benefit of the doubt - worth considering before publishing a statement that I engaged in some form of transphobic hate-speech requiring curatorial intervention? To be clear, even in the event of hate-speech, my personal views on censorship and freedom of speech would still be opposed to any such intervention, in favor of emphasizing an ability for others to analyze and respond. In that regard, my talk was followed by an audience Q&A session, and yet I have no recollection of your reviewer or anyone else taking that opportunity to ask me about the topic in question. (Or if they did, it was unmemorable and an apparent non-event at the time.) What I do know is that it would be highly unlikely for me to mention something like puberty blockers on their own, without such a reference being part of broader observations about the social devaluation of feminist education for children facing gender crises, such as I wrote about in the text to my project Deproduction:

Most parents have very low levels of awareness around gender issues, starting with their own internalized binary identifications. This is true even within queer communities. When this is combined with the active and often intimidating coaching of medical professionals, it is no wonder that children expressing discomfort with their gender-branding are more likely to be given pills than basic feminist tools. Tools to help them understand that, yes, of course it makes sense for people to feel unhappy about their imposed gender identifications within binding patriarchies. Of course! This isn't difficult to comprehend. Every little girl who kicks and screams when forced to put on a dress is already halfway there.

Regardless of the lack of journalistic detail, I ask you, what absurdist theater in the name of censorship would have placated your reviewer? Should the Australian curator with whom I was in discussion on stage stopped me mid-sentence, brandishing me in public for my views and assuring the audience he does not share them, followed by an official statement of zero-tolerance for anything deviating in the slightest from mainstream LGBT agendas? Should the two German curators have done similar, standing up in the audience and demanding I apologize before making me leave the stage? Should the sound engineers have cut my microphone? When publishing your review of my exhibition, did any of your editorial staff even take a moment to consider how your reviewer's suggestion might play out in reality? I imagine not. I imagine it all just read as good, liberal banter - which is precisely how liberalism unwittingly cultivates "leftist" cultural acceptance for the very acts of "rightist" censorship it claims to oppose.

I would be remiss not to address how the reviewer interspersed their criticism with an italicized personal tale of a friend's positive transitioning experience. The purpose of this creative gesture was to lead the readers to conclude I am pathetically out of touch with the reality of transsexual and transitioning experiences - which the narrative example reassures us are overwhelmingly positive and successful. It also misleadingly implies my views expressed that day had the ability to inhibit medical access, making such a success story impossible. It is a hollow and manipulative narrative tactic. I can say this with certainty because it is the same technique of high morality wrapped in journalistically neutral storytelling that I used critically and sarcastically in the first half of Deproduction (in that case, on the topics of incest and child bearing). In my case it was a constructed voice of neutrality ultimately called into question by the more subjectively manic, analytical text of the project's second half. However, your reviewer deploys the technique with a flair of sincerity, leaving the review ending unchallenged on that lingering note with no other strategic motive than to pull heartstrings. It is the opposite of critical engagement, an emotionally exploitative decoy to soften a call for curatorial censorship. That says a lot about the differences between our critical approaches.

While I am unable to contextualize - let alone identify - the quote to which your reviewer took offense, perhaps I can contextualize this cultural moment giving rise to your publication's call for the active curatorial censorship of exhibiting artists - a call that not unimportantly centers around issues of transgenderism. There are two distinct yet inextricably entwined cultural phenomena enacted by your review. Firstly on the culturally major level, as an established journal of artistic review your publication has now aligned itself with dominant cultural calls for increased censorship. Until recently, censorship and attacks on free speech were overwhelmingly associated in most peoples' minds with far-right conservatives. Such conservatives would justify the inherent problems and restrictions arising from their acts of censorship as public sacrifices that were necessary to protect "traditional values," such as nationalism, capitalism and family. (I realize that within Germany this paradigm of censorship coming from the far-right is somewhat complicated by certain forms of censorship mandated in response to the nation's history of fascism, as a means to restrict the far-right. Even so, it is my understanding that this is understood by liberals as a necessary exception to contemporary Germany's commitment to freedom of expression, and until recently the overall image of pro-censorship advocates was still that of conservatives.) However, over the past two decades we have witnessed a shift in the West as to how dominant cultures defend censorship. Today it is increasingly deployed by governments and corporations in the name of liberalism, and under the guise of defending minorities. Looking back to the start of my career, the cultural sites from which I expect calls for censorship have definitely moved and expanded. Experiencing these movements through the years has only affirmed my longstanding nihilistic view that life is a perpetual motion machine of struggle, and what is presented as "progress" is never more than an attempted momentary displacement of one's own sufferings upon others elsewhere. It affirms the most helpful social analyses are not about left and right, but top and bottom.

The contemporary shift to "protective censorship from the left" is not by chance, but is a cultural redirection that is necessary for selling the public on ever-escalating agendas of cultural surveillance, ideological policing, and the regulation of bodies. Today, liberal moralism is at the core of things such as online censorship bills. Censorship has been repackaged as an ethical duty of the left. As a result, it becomes increasingly foreign to conceive of morality as a cultural force that should always be treated as suspect, both as an outgrowth of existing power structures and a reflection of their biases. That was a much easier observation to make when morality was more associated with the pulpit and radical conservatism. Now, morality is the sword of liberal justice. But make no mistake, at its core this is still all about the defense of conservative agendas such as nationalism, capitalism and family. Simply take a look at dominant liberal LGBT agendas such as same-sex marriage, military enlistment, child rearing, financial investing, home ownership, and so on. Through the witting and unwitting editorial moves of established media, audiences are hypnotized (in the case of social media, literally) into complacency around our own roles as participants in calls for increased censorship and social controls - all the while under the delusion we are fighting a tide of conservatism. In reality we are all pulled by the undertow. Accordingly, it seems your publication has also quietly shifted away from anti-censorship art criticism in favor of advocating for increased cultural controls. But it has not gone completely unnoticed. In case your editorial staff was itself hypotized and unaware of their shift, consider this a wake-up call.

Simultaneously, on the culturally minor level, your review displays inter-LGBT power dynamics that are rarely spoken, not only due to their complexity but also the likely cultural repercussions of doing so. Your reviewer writes in a way that insinuates I was expressing views that put me in alignment with people who would endorse "anti-trans* disinformation" - a position outside LGBT solidarity and experience. To the contrary, I was expressing views as an insider. Beneath the power play of the reviewer's misrepresentation lurks deep and ongoing intra-LGBT cultural tensions - things that a transsexual friend of mine has cautioned me over the years are "conversations to be kept in-house." As your reviewer rendered invisible the context from which I was speaking, let me take this opportunity to try and bring it into focus.

While the majority of people in this world have come to equate "transgenderism" with medically realized "transsexuality," there are actually a wide variety of transgenderisms beyond transsexuality - many of which are not necessarily in political or experiential harmony. For example, whereas transsexuals traditionally turn towards medical industries for help in resolving their gender crises, intersex people traditionally tend to be skeptical of medical interventions as a result of being subjected to procedures against their will during youth. Even among transsexuals themselves there exist radically diverse cultural views. In defiance of LGBT preconceptions of transsexuals as inherently progressive, one need only consider Caitlyn Jenner - a literal MAGA-hat wearing right-wing political endorser and financial elitist who regularly spews mind-bogglingly conservative views on womanhood. This diversity of views can also at times be related to the different experiences that result from treatments, depending on which gender one is transitioning to. For example, it is common knowledge that hormone therapies for masculinization tend to amplify sex drive, whereas those for feminization often result in sexual dysfunction and a loss of drive. Considering feminizing procedures began at a time when the chemical suppression of sex drive in gay men was still regular medical practice, it was surely no mere coincidence that similar side effects among transsexual patients came to be easily dismissed as inevitable - and in many cases still are, particularly internationally. These changes not only affect how people physically experience their sexualities, but how they come to understand those experiences - the latter having direct implications in the spheres of culture and politics. I often recall someone I knew who was suffering from her loss of sexual function and orgasm as a result of hormone therapy. It was at the start of the 90s, when struggles to give voice to women’s sexuality had finally gained widespread visibility in pop culture (think Madonna’s Erotica). The only way she could come to personal terms with her sexual loss was to reframe it as “part of the experience of womanhood.” She embraced traditional views on women’s sexuality as all about a sublimation to male desire, taking pleasure in giving pleasure without reciprocation, and a naturalization of women's sexual experiences as devoid of orgasm. All of this was further complicated by the fact she was economically dependent on sex work to pay her medical bills. To this day I regularly think of her experience, and how it came to be that it was more difficult for her to confront an adverse reaction to a medical treatment than it was to excuse that adverse reaction through conservative mores - mores that are integral to sustaining the social processes of capital, profit and the patented ownership of biology around which contemporary medical industries and research revolve. In these ways, even between various types of transgendered people there can be highly oppositional and nuanced views - including on topics such as puberty blocking drugs - all of which is overwritten by broad-stroke writing like that in your review. Rather than engaging with such questions, your reviewer has taken the dangerously common route of dismissing any deviations from mainstream LGBT talking points by claiming they "echo" right wing talking points.

While today's cultural moment does come with its own characteristics, the actions of your reviewer are nothing new. To the contrary, such things have been a frequent topic in my work over the decades, including deconstructing the prioritization of transsexuality above all other forms of transgenderism. If in doubt such a prioritization exists, and as I mentioned earlier, simply consider how most people consider the two words synonymous. This prioritization comes with tremendous power, both cultural and financial. As I have discussed in various projects and texts since the start of my career, a key reason for the mainstream prioritization and visibility around transsexuality in particular is its underlying conservative preservation of dominant gender binaries. It is about responding to gender dysphoria through an attempted reconciliation with one of the two gender options on offer by mainstream cultures - the "journey" to female or male. In this sense, despite the notion of medical intervention appearing horrifyingly radical to the gender reconciled layperson, transsexuality's core aspiration can be interpreted as one of conformity. (To be clear, I am referring to dominant cultural dynamics around transitioning, and not suggesting all those who undergo transitioning are conformists.) As I have said countless times, societies will always find it easier to physically alter a minority of bodies than to structurally alter the foundations of gender bias upon which patriarchy rests. The propensity for conformity can be seen in everything from the increasingly self-absorbed, affirmation-based language around medical transitioning, to the visual aesthetics and beauty standards physicians aspire to deliver. All of this is aimed at emphasizing the ideological bourgeois ideal of individual self-actualization. It comes at the expense of a collective ability to discuss how these clinical procedures and chemical therapies function within systems of social relations.

The new language around transsexuality is all about concealing any sense of things "being done to" a person. There must be no suggestion of any outside coercion in one's decision making with regard to treatments. It must all appear as a simple process of support networks aiding in the external manifestation of something pure and preexistent within the transgendered body. In a Marxist sense, one might say the greater the social acts being done to people, the greater the ideological inversions required to conceal those acts from consciousness. For over a decade, this has included a ban on the term "transgendered" itself, in favor of "transgender," because according to organizations such as GLAAD and others the "-ed" supposedly makes people feel disempowered through its suggestion that gender is externally acted upon the individual, rather than something under their direction that emerges from within. Of course, acknowledging that gender is culturally enacted upon us, and that process of imposition is an inherent part of the construction of our individual sense of conscious consent or dissent around one's own gender, is precisely why I continue to use the term "transgendered" to this day. In reality, the process of internalizing gender norms under patriarchy is restrictive and uncomfortable for many people in this world, not limited to those who identify as LGBT. To presume we can (or should) all find comfort and empowerment within those restrictions, and that it could be done without further capitulating to the very systemic biases that already destabilize our sense of gender in the first place, strikes me as outlandishly illogical. For such presumptions to be pushed by transgendered people upon ourselves enters into the realm of camp.

Meanwhile, in an absurd twist, a majority of essentialist queer and trans people who go along with such ideological directives have come to justify their faith in "personal choice" by incorrectly invoking the non-essentialist concept of "gender as a social construct." They seem to think it means gender is simply a matter of choice independent of the physical body, perhaps not even "real." This cultural emphasis on agendas of affirmation and choice culturally overwrites material struggles faced by transgendered people regarding things like violence, employment, health insurance and identity documentation. In the mainstream, such topics become sidelined by a sense of urgency around the placation of personal feelings. It is not unlike how the same-sex marriage movement has been reduced from material struggles around partner access to health insurance, housing and medical decision making, down to "people should be free to marry whomever they want." Culturally directing people to focus on self-gratification through personal identity is a classic strategy for keeping us busy with the illusion of social engagement. It guarantees our alienation from the actual socio-material processes of oppression affecting us, to the point most people can no longer even name them. It replaces solidarity with a demand for emotional validation and mirroring, making broad and collective social movements across ideological divides impossible. I understand it also makes the materially rooted solidarity I offer unrecognizable to certain people, apparently including your reviewer. It is easier to project all of the bad feelings conjured by hearing a decontextualized key-word such as "puberty blockers" upon the person accused of saying it, regardless of intent. In fact, it is one of the most common mechanisms through which intent is erased. We are so easily divided and conquered.

As a non-essentialist, I can state with certitude "gender as a social construct" actually refers to the ways in which gender emerges from the external social relations that condition and restrict our capacities for choice. I suppose the common misunderstanding that this in some way implies "gender is not real" emerges from the fact that the reality of gender - albeit related to the body - is not one of physical tangibility like that of a body's sex. Rather it is the reality of a political site - a body's unavoidable placement within social relations that construct its cultural meaning. It is about how social mores are projected upon bodies, and the ideological processes through which we come to internalize and naturalize a given culture's rules for what constitutes a "woman" or "man." The result is a contextually localized sense of gender that appears natural, universal and devoid of contextual bias or boundary. In reality, cultural bias is an inevitability, extending to even the most personal of choices being filtered through internalized norms - as characterized by my earlier example of the person struggling with her medical-related sexual dysfunction, and how her personal understanding of that dysfunction was facilitated through gender and sexual norms to the extent that the chemical-based dysfunction itself was perceived as a natural extension of her newfound gender.

The concept of gender as a social construct took off in the 1980s, and was important to non-essentialist critiques of identity politics because it provided a materially grounded means for identifying the processes through which heteronormative gender binaries were culturally constructed. It also gave language for dissecting the cultural mechanisms through which those binaries are naturalized across a public, often times to a point of collective disbelief in even the slightest possibility of anything outside a binary. It becomes a form of mass formation psychosis. As the mainstream LGBT movement developed within those oppressive conditions and today finds representation through dominant cultural media and economies, it is not difficult to see that mainstream LGBT's intolerance for ideological diversity, and its ridiculous insistence that disagreement is equivocal to violence, is a symptomatic mirroring of this larger cultural dynamic of mass formation psychosis.

For me, an ability to dissect the naturalization of culturally specific gender norms was vital to understanding the lack of tools available for unraveling my own experiences of sexual and gender variance - both of which called into question my "manhood" from an early age, in the eyes of others as well as myself since we were all responding to the same dominant expectations around such things. By understanding dominant cultural systems function in ways that strategically excluded the possibility for thinking through my experiences in other-than-binary terms, a space opened up for strategizing responses to those systems. What had previously only been comprehensible as a private and existential nausea became politically grounded. I came to understand how a sense of gender is constructed over time, in response to social relations that condition our abilities to perceive meaning in bodies - whether by compliance, ambivalence or rebellion. It is a grimly realist view that undermines the foundations of bourgeois individualism and the promise of self-determination. Therefore, it is no surprise that major educational institutions dedicated to the perpetuation of bourgeois ideals are committed to disarming the concept by misrepresenting it. They have diffused it through accredited queer studies programs, turning it inside out and crudely reducing it to a catch phrase, until "gender is a social construct" signifies little more than a belief in the ability to manifest oneself into being. Beneath this belief lurks an ideological reconciliation with the workings of privilege.

One of the unsurprising results of the privilege held by transsexuals above other types of transgendered people is the cultural naturalization of medical transitioning. This results in tremendous pressure placed upon non-transitioning trans people to begin therapies. When we do not - even without expressing anything negative about such things, but simply existing as we are - we more often than not find ourselves ostracized from mainstream trans cultures and support networks. This is particularly painful considering many of us have already faced ostracism from families, church, employers and other spheres of dominant culture. The intra-LGBT ostracism is worse if we vocally deviate from anything other than total support of dominant transsexual agendas. I have also seen friends who decided to stop mid-transition face ostracism for not having gone all the way. As many of us who live with gender variance know, these unspoken and unadvertised internal social dynamics between transgendered people are certainly reflected in mainstream liberal LGBT cultures' demands for all peoples' total and unquestioning support of transsexual agendas. (In fact, I would estimate half of the complaints I have received over the years around my non-essentialist views on trans issues have come from non-trans queers speaking on behalf of transsexuals out of a perceived sense of duty, most of whom have an affinity for labeling this trans person "transphobic." Perhaps one might argue they are phobic of my particular form of trans?) It is a sad complication that those agendas happen to revolve around medical industries with highly questionable legacies.

As I said before, none of this intra-trans tension is new, and trans people voicing concerns around medical transitioning has existed as long as the practices themselves. In Wendy Carlos' 1979 interview for Playboy, she broke her silence around transitioning with unexpected openness, concluding with a heartfelt statement I suspect your reviewer would brand "transphobic":

I don't want to become a proselytizer. I don't want this interview to champion the cause. I think it's very important that my condition be acknowledge as very rare, so that it's seen as a highly unlikely solution for other people with an unhappy life, or suicidal impulses, as I had. The fact that there were some "successful" transformations doesn't erase the many tragic cases in which an operation was not the full solution for particular individuals. No one should follow this hellish path if an alternative exists. Try other options first. [...] Sure, it was necessary for me. But I don't think it's been positive at all. I feel that what I achieved is the removal of one very large negative in my life.

Those old enough to remember the 1990 film Paris is Burning may also recall the ensuing scandal when ballroom queen Pepper LaBeija was branded "transphobic" for saying she would not undergo gender transitioning nor encourage others to do so. In my own history as a New York ballroom DJ of that era, I was always disturbed by the "cancel culture" outrage and moral admonishment directed at her. Based on my own experiences within that multi-generational ballroom scene - experiences that informed my personal embrace of non-transitioning - I understood Pepper's words did not echo the chastisement of transsexuals spoken by outsiders, as those who claimed outrage painted them to be. Rather, I heard them as an insider's response to the endless pressure to transition placed upon her. During my DJ residency at the predominantly transsexual sex worker club Sally's II, the regular harassment I witnessed transsexuals giving non-transitioning queens was so intense that it kept me in the closet about my own transgenderism, only coming to work in male drag. In testimony to that experience, to this day my performances as DJ Sprinkles continue to be done almost exclusively in male drag.

For people of my generation and earlier, the granting of unquestioning space to transsexuals began as an expression of solidarity, understanding and compassion for the particularly hard struggles they faced. Under the conditions of the day - which involved far more severe restrictions on access to medical care than most people today can imagine - we respected a transsexual consensus that the particular combination of social, economic, physical and psychological challenges they faced left no room for acknowledging doubt or regret. Extending unconditional support in a moment of crisis was understood as a means of averting suicide and saving lives. But as the decades have passed, and dominant liberal cultures have found ways to channel LGBT energy into increasingly heteronormative movements with the power to enact moral censorship, the negative social consequences of being enablers to a culture of unconditional support are becoming more and more overwhelming. Even the radical pharmacology movement that rose against the regulatory injustices of mainstream medical industries, such as that discussed by Preciado in the 2008 manifesto Testo Junkie, has collapsed into a new normalcy of alt-cultural body modifications. With time, many such people who start out in rejection of traditional transitioning ultimately go down the same road of gender reconciliation shared by major pharmacology - including Preciado himself. In both sanctioned and unsanctioned practice, medical intervention has become overwhelmingly commonplace.

My concerns about such issues should in no way be interpreted as advocating to deny or restrict medical access from those in need. Nor do I want to interfere with access for those who don't associate with "need," but simply wish to undergo body modification. This has always been my stance. However, I have also always simultaneously taken issue with cultural shifts driven by medical industries that deliberately conceal their workings, including pushing for the censorship of people who discuss those workings. From my position, I would argue it is in fact your reviewer who stands in league with dominant cultural forces and "echoes unchallenged arguments." I can only trust that my decades of work, writings and interviews document an approach of critical minded advocacy for medical accessibility. Part of that approach remains a refusal to restrict myself to one-dimensional discussions of extremely complex issues. A "with us or against us" mentality such as that promoted by your reviewer only leads to more suffering and repressive silence. It also makes historical materialist analysis impossible.

I do have what I - and I think many other transgendered people - consider conspicuous concerns about medical industries with overwhelming economic interests in cultivating "subscription" patient bases who require a lifetime of treatments and interventions. This can have particularly grave consequences - economic, physical and psychological - for people without guaranteed health insurance or socialized health care. As someone originally hailing from the US, a lack of guaranteed health insurance has always played a large role in my sense of these issues (the wealthiest nation in the world, yet they will never approve socialized health care). Based upon the well documented history of medical abuses suffered by intersex people, there is no doubt that these industries have a tradition of pushing easily manipulated gender-normative parents into subjecting their children to difficult-to-reverse or irreversible treatments before reaching an age of consent - all in the name of "protecting the child." The notion that these same undercurrents continue to play a role in contemporary transsexual therapies for children - albeit in somewhat different argumentative forms - cannot possibly be a surprise to anyone. To the contrary, I find it difficult to accept it is not a common point of discussion and investigation among transgendered people first and foremost. Then there is the very real phenomenon of transsexual "regretters," who find themselves consistently silenced within mainstream LGBT culture and often times lose their support networks, including physicians who refuse to continue working with them. All of these issues are further complicated by the fact that the West has not historically been the economic center of transitioning medical marketplaces. The largest transitioning economies have actually been centered in Thailand and Iran, both of which have unspoken and spoken traditions of using transitional therapies in response to homosexuality (in Iran, gender transitioning is literally state sponsored as a way of eluding the fatwa on homosexuality - turning a person's "homosexual desire" into "heterosexual desire" by switching their gender). Given that "curing homosexuality" has overwhelmingly fallen out of favor in the West, such international contexts behind decades of medically refining transitional therapies is something that the Western market does everything in its power to distance itself from.

I do not raise these issues to suggest such problems and abuses are the definitive sum of all that transitional therapies can be. To the contrary, as a trans person interested in reducing harm and violence, as well as improving treatment conditions for those in need, I feel it would be irresponsible not to raise such topics publicly. If they seem overwhelming, that should be all the more indicative of an urgency to lift internal and external LGBT taboos around these deep-rooted topics. Your reviewer's desire to silence me for even the most passing mention of medical concerns in my talk, with no follow-up or elaboration during the Q&A (at least none I can recall nor any noted in the review itself), effectively only leaves the floor for discussion open to actual anti-trans people. People who would surely take joy in seeing us silence one another. I reject your reviewer's attempt to give whatever small power my voice may have over to such people by implying my statements and theirs are one and the same. And I emphatically reject the call to censor anyone. In its place, I encourage discourse.

In case your art critic skills have not already picked up on it, my length in discussing inter-LGBT dynamics is intentional, and stands in deliberate contrast to the vagary and brevity of your reviewer’s reported reasoning behind their call for curators to enact censorship against me. My length on the topic is an insistence upon having an unwelcomed conversation. Perhaps most importantly, it is symptomatic of the ways in which power is granted the luxury of brevity when passing judgment, whereas culturally minor voices must labor endlessly when attempting to become comprehensible to others - only to surely still be purposely misunderstood. To borrow a phrase from Laurence Rassel, it is an obligatory "useless movement."

These are precisely the kind of nuanced cultural problems I am committed to analyzing and dissecting in my work. Your review - and its calls for proactive curatorial censorship - performs this multitude of cultural problems ranging from artistic censorship to transgendered censorship perfectly. However, as that performance comes at the unfortunate expense of your professional credibility, as a courtesy I shall refrain from thanking you for proving my point.

- Terre Thaemlitz, October 1, 2023

Terre's 'Letter of Correction to the Editor' (Part II)
An addendum to Terre's previous response, sent to Texte Zur Kunste (DE) and posted on comatonse.com, November 16, 2023.

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To the Editor,

This is a correction to my letter of October 1, written in response to your review of my exhibition "Reframed Positions" published on September 1, 2023. Given the length of my previous letter, it is not my intent to needlessly dwell on things. However, after much confusion, I have identified the quote causing your reviewer's discontent. I now realize it did not happen during my talk at the Volksbühne as previously thought, but was taken from an exhibition-related interview published in 2020. Although this does not invalidate the overall analysis of censorship in my previous letter, it does nullify certain specific things I said based on that misunderstanding of venue. I am also now able to directly address the quote in question.

Your reviewer's concerns about the content of my "talk" with chief curator Lawrence English ("Gerade deshalb hinterlässt ihre Äußerung zur Transitionsmedizin im Talk mit English einen bitteren Beigeschmack. [Fn. 9: Thaemlitz/Englisch [sic], S. 6.] Die Kurator*innen verpassten hier ihre Verantwortung, zu intervenieren, als die eingeladene Künstlerin unwidersprochen Argumente trans*feindlicher Desinformation zur angeblichen Gefahr pubertätsblockender Medikamente echote.") refers to a passage from English's privately held interview with me that was published in 2020 as part of the first installation of "Reframed Positions" at The SubStation, in Melbourne. ["Reframed Positions: Terre Thaemlitz in Conversation with Lawrence English," http://comatonse.com/reviews/substation200424.pdf] Although I had previously seen your reviewer's footnote "Thaemlitz/Englisch [sic], S. 6," I could not place it at the time because page six of the printed interview only speaks about my days in art school. This, combined with the public talk at Volksbühne being mentioned earlier in your review, led me to conclude the "talk with English" referred to the one at Volksbühne. In my limited German, I therefore dismissed "S. 6" as some kind of internal editorial marker of your publication. However, a German colleague who was also initially confused by this section of your review managed to trace the quote in question to page eleven of the interview. (In the pdf version, both pages eleven and twelve of the physical publication occupy the sixth page of the digital file, hence your reviewer's mistaken footnote.)

The quote is as follows, with the sentence referencing hormone blockers italicized here for clarity:

Today we shudder at the outdated notion of medical institutions attempting to "cure homosexuals," and yet today’s gender transitioning therapies are literally a financial redirection of those very research funds away from sexuality to gender. It is increasingly commonplace to give children experiencing gender crises damaging hormone blockers, rather than feminist tools for coping, organizing and living within an unsatisfactory and limiting gender binary. We are still being duped, still being experimented on, cut, physically and chemically deprived of sexual function, deprived of the ability to orgasm.

And despite how many of us may embrace these limitations, and attempt to reinscribe them with Pride^TM-ful notions of self-fulfillment, it is undeniable that on the culturally macro level these limitations are continuing a long tradition of dominant culture medically debilitating - not manifesting - our sexualities.

I suspect your reviewer's description of my statement as "echoing unchallenged arguments of anti-trans* disinformation" hinges around my use of the word "damaging." In retrospect, the sentence would have held its primary intent even if "damaging" had been omitted altogether. For simplicity's sake, that is likely how I would choose say it today if given the chance. (Although, perhaps your reviewer would still have their same objections.) In my view, the problem with my quote is not so much the term "damaging" in and of itself, but the fact it was not better framed so as to explain what kind of damage I was referring to (social? medical? physiological? psychological? economic?).

Thinking back to the time of that interview, I suppose the assertiveness of my word choice was in part an adverse response to an ever-escalating climate of cancel culture in which I was aware that directly expressing any concerns about the risks of hormone blockers - even as a trans person - were likely to illicit backlash from mainstream LGBT institutions and pundits. Like many people, I do have a history of words coming out a bit too bluntly when struggling to find words in the midst of feelings of repression, even though such circumstances demand more care. My two letters to you are also framed by this same climate of repression, the ongoing reality of which is materially substantiated by your call for "intervention" itself.

I do not say these things in an attempt to eschew personal responsibility for my original word choices, nor do I apologize for those choices since: 1) your reviewer's response to my quote has already overwritten any personal intent I held with a politic of us-versus-them in which I feel no representation; thus 2) any such apology would only give power to that politic's ability to divide and conquer, in which the only voices that culturally retain a semblance of stability are those of radically anti-trans advocates on the one side, and on the other side those advocating for blind faith in the safety and efficacy of transitional therapies. For example, consider the Swedish politician and YouTuber Mia Mulder, whose stance can be paraphrased as, "I'm not a physician, and yes there are known risks, but get over it." ["Puberty Blockers Are Safe, As Far As We Know. Get Over It," https://youtu.be/C7XYfffLMEQ?si=ToFktlPcBcaEq9CO] What is between is missing.

My statement in the interview was part of a longer rebuttal to a comment by English about audiences - and societies in general - becoming more open with the passage of time. My response touched upon a lot of topics, but this specific quote was speaking to the overlap of transgendered medical interventions and sexuality. As I wrote in my previous letter, I do place the sacrifices of sexual function typically associated with many gender therapies within a larger history of the clinical sexual suppression of homosexuality and other sexual variance. My response to English included a passing reference to hormone blockers because puberty is obviously an important phase in sexual development, and popular transitional therapies for youth such as hormone blocking GnRH analogues do have the common side effect of inhibiting the physiological capacity for arousal and orgasm. As a result, it seems sensible to have concerns about the possibility for negative physical and psychological effects on sexual development.

These drugs were originally developed to delay precocious puberty in children, and have been widely used in that manner since the 1980's. It is my understanding that hormone blockers were first given to transgendered teens in 1991, but this alternate usage did not really become commonplace until the 2000's. Notably, the control of precocious puberty - which rarely presents physical health risks - is entwined with social sexual mores. A chief concern is how untreated children - particularly girls - become negatively stereotyped and socialized by both peers and adults as hypersexual, promiscuous, deviant, etc. So we once again quickly find the material history of these drugs - their development and deployment - is inextricably linked to the medical control of sexuality.

Whereas the effect of sexual suppression in children with precocious puberty is deliberate and understood as a benefit, in transgendered teenagers and young adults it can complicate the course of development for sexual expression and identity. While it offers the child with precocious puberty a greater chance to socially and sexually fall in sync with peers, among transgendered teenagers and young adults it knowingly places them out of sync by design. While medical professionals encourage us to place our faith in their guidance when evaluating benefits versus risks, the impact of hormone blockers on sexual development in transgendered people remains overwhelmingly unstudied. In my experience, attempts to research this topic have only turned up statements acknowledging this historic lack of study rather than any useful information on the topic itself - and even those acknowledgments remain few and far between.

If I may interject some dark humor, I can also honestly say that in my experience as a teen who never turned to alcohol or drugs to help manage the miseries of daily verbal and physical harassment from family, peers and adults, there were definitely days when masturbatory release saved my life. Developmental complications resulting from hormone blockers can also present psychological and physiological challenges to those who choose not to transition after stopping hormone blockers (referred to by clinicians as "desistance"). Socially and psychologically, it is a very different thing to go through puberty as a young adult rather than as a teenager. Furthermore, despite medical industry claims that the effects of hormone blockers are fully reversible, adults undergoing delayed puberty are often left with signs of reduced physical growth.

There are radically varying statistics regarding the number of people who discontinue puberty blockers and do not go on to further transitional therapies. When I say radically varying, I mean radically varying - from 2% to 94%. I personally consider both extremes questionable. The lowest rates usually refer to individual, hyper-specialized clinics whose success rates do not reflect the industry as a whole - despite their data being picked up and misquoted by major online news sources that make it appear to be a global average. Conversely, the highest extremes tend to appear in articles with obvious anti-trans bias, and thus seem plainly exaggerated. Over the years, the rates I have seen mentioned most often within articles that I felt did not demonstrate extreme bias in either direction tended to fall between 60% and 70%, which is also in line with accounts of the experiences of children from parents I personally know. Make of that what you will, but amidst all of the contradictory data, that is why I tend to consider those numbers the most likely to be credible on a wide scale.

Researchers who reference lower rates of desistance tend to argue that studies showing higher rates are typically flawed because older diagnostic practices have a tendency to statistically incorporate people such as "proto-gay boys" who were never transgendered to begin with, but were simply brought to clinics by parents upset over their children not conforming to gender norms. That sounds like a reasonable explanation for the wide statistical divide. It implies that statistics showing low rates of desistance can be trusted because diagnostic practices across the medical industry are becoming more honed, and treatments are increasingly only being given to the appropriate people. Following this logic, which also relies on an assumption that the actual base median need for such treatments within a given population is typically stable regardless of misdiagnosis, one would assume that the total number of teens receiving hormone blockers should currently be in notable decline as a result of better contemporary diagnostics ensuring fewer are getting them needlessly. This should hold true regardless of today's exponential annual increase in diagnoses of gender dysphoria among minors.

Such a decline in the prescription of hormone blockers should be easily provable by looking at annual insurance claim data for a drop in the number of youth with diagnoses of gender dysphoria who go on to initiate hormone blocking treatments. Potential data bias would likely fall in favor of generating artificially low rates of desistance based on a possible undercounting of hormone blocker treatments not covered by insurance, or practitioners prescribing blockers without logging a gender dysphoria diagnosis. In other words, any error in data should make those claiming low rates of desistance look all the better, and alleviate my skepticism. However, using statistics from a report in Reuters pulling US data for the years 2017 to 2021 from Komodo Health Inc. as a typical example, the percentile relationship between diagnoses of gender dysphoria and hormone blocker usage among youth between the ages of 6-17 over those five years shows no significant drop, steadily fluctuating between 3% and 5%, or one in every twenty-to-thirty subjects. ["Putting Numbers on the Rise in Children Seeking Gender Care," https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-transyouth-data/] Even if one were to optimistically argue that the rate of hormone blocker usage might naturally increase as public information improves and treatments become more accessible, a corresponding increase in associative diagnoses of gender dysphoria should offset any artificial percentile inflation of base median need. Thus we should still see a drop in the percentage of trans youth given hormone blockers.

While this exercise does not help us verify a current overall percentage rate for hormone blocker desistance, it does seem to disprove a decline in their prescription that is fundamental to the logic of those defending the veracity of lower rates. I consider this a critical observation because, although most queers and trans people have enough lived experience to quickly recognize the bias of a religious fanatic or political conservative citing high rates of desistance, it is far more difficult to demonstrate to that same audience how advocates for medical transitioning therapies come with their own biases. These difficulties are only exacerbated by calls for censoring intervention such as the one in your review, which uses a one-dimensional claim of transphobia to virtue signal which topics are and are not permitted among liberal good company.

It is a misery that, all things considered, I continue to see no reason to relax my skepticism or be less cautious about medical practices that are aimed at altering bodies exhibiting and enacting gender and/or sexual variances. This misery compels me to defend the rights of people to speak openly on such topics, regardless of how they may support or contradict my own views. Seeing how strongly your reviewer reacted to my mere passing mention of hormone blockers indicates the cultural hostility faced by trans allies who are far more committed than I to researching their risks. Your reviewer seems to fear the act of listening will inherently lead to the act of agreeing. I assure you, that is a flawed premise. Your reviewer did not propose that the curators ask me to elaborate on my point so that they and others could better understand and judge it for themselves. Rather, they called for curatorial "intervention (intervenieren)," which remains nothing more than a politely phrased call for censorship by asserting that authority figures (i.e., curators) had a "responsibility (Verantwortung)" to interrupt me (or others in my position) and unequivocally reject my position in front of, and on behalf of, the public. The result can only be an undeniable silencing of the weaker voice in that context - i.e., the artist's status as the curator's employee.

It is not fear mongering to state factually and without hyperbole that there are many known short- and long-term health risks associated with hormone blockers. Most are clearly listed on the pharmaceutical companies' own informational websites. As with any drug, it is not conspiracy theory to admit there is a high possibility that other known side effects are being hidden by pharmaceutical companies, their public discussion being relegated to user testimonials that are often discredited on the basis of their information not coming from a clinical source. And still other risks can only be revealed over time with more extended usage. I think most people understand these circumstances are not in any way unique to hormone blockers, and apply to most any drug available in today's pharmaceutical market. So much so that I find it odd for anyone to attempt to stifle discussions and analyses around medical treatments of any kind. To foster the ability to question a treatment's risks and efficacy is not to invalidate the treatment itself. To the contrary, it is necessary to furthering research and reducing medical injury.

Any personal anger I may hold regarding the abuses of medical industries that came across in the curtness of my statement to English should in no way be construed as anger towards people undergoing transitional therapies of any kind. They all have my solidarity, compassion and best wishes for favorable outcomes. Like your reviewer, I am sure, my concerns over these issues are informed by struggles I have personally witnessed, heard about through friends and comrades, and found in documents I have stumbled upon over the years. I will share one story with you from this latter category, which reflects cultural dynamics found in Japan and several other Asian societies.

About ten years ago I was watching television here in Japan. It was Pride^TM month, and the Japanese national broadcaster NHK had a roundtable program featuring queer and trans youth. To be specific, there were several queers plus one FTM trans youth. His trans experience - which was intended as a feel-good success story - began when entering middle school (junior high), which is the age when most Japanese schools require students to start wearing uniforms. This means skirts for girls, and pant suits for boys. At that time still identified as a girl, she adamantly refused to wear a skirt. When her parents insisted, she refused to go to school altogether. School administrators advised the parents to put her into counseling. By the student's own account, based on his stubborn refusal to wear a dress he was ultimately diagnosed with gender dysphoria, placed on hormone blockers, and as of the show's taping was preparing to begin taking testosterone. When asked by the program's cheerful host if he had always felt like a male - fishing for an obligatory essentialist "born this way" moment - the student good-naturedly smiled and said he liked sports. For sure, one of the reasons that teen left such a deep impression on me was because in that moment they did not reflexively parrot an essentialist narrative, despite not having the opportunity or perhaps not even the language to express a non-essentialist take on their experience.

Compared to how similar programs might play out in Germany, I am sure this all sounds cartoonishly superficial. I assure you I am conveying the entire program segment as it happened. I would like to think that the reality of his experiences leading to diagnosis and treatments within this land of hyper-conformity was far more nuanced than what was shared with us viewers. Perhaps. Although, having lived here for almost a quarter of a century now, I can also say with solemn sincerity, most likely not. We can never know the reality of his experience, but ultimately we are not meant to know. You see, the real point of this story is not the teenager, but the social document generated about them by the national broadcaster of Japan. Representing the cultural interests of Japanese society, NHK sold its audience the notion that transitional therapies are a completely logical response to children who refuse to wear gender-coded uniforms. In a classic demonstration of ideological inversion, what was purportedly a program celebrating Japan's liberalism and cultural openness was, at its core, a document of its conservatism and desperation to preserve rigid gender divides.

Like the teenager himself, we were not pointed to alternative solutions such as schools making exceptions to dress codes, or encouraging parents to place such children in schools without uniforms, or doing away with dress codes altogether, or a hundred other possible solutions that would not involve medical intervention. The teenager was not offered any history lessons about indigenous Japanese struggles for gender equality. They were not told about global struggles for women to wear trousers, or how in many European countries women used to be required to obtain special trouser permits from the police, or how women were not allowed to wear trousers on the US Senate floor until 1993, or countless other such facts capable of instilling a sense of solidarity while revealing the absurdity of the moment they were caught up in. All of these omissions were literally by design, as the early 2000s saw Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi order then Education Minister and future Prime Minsiter Shinzo Abe to put an end to Japan's burgeoning "gender free" movement in public schools. Abe went so far as physically removing books by Japanese feminist authors from public libraries. We still live in the conservative aftermath of that cultural campaign, under which a full generation has now grown up.

Writing from within this cultural context, I will leave you with a rare bit of local good news that happened just this past October 25. After years of failed legal battles by trans advocates, the Japanese Supreme Court has finally ruled that the government requiring people to eliminate their reproductive functions if they wish to officially change gender constitutes a human rights violation and is unconstitutional. This is a major step toward Japan allowing legal gender change for people who are living socialized as a different gender, but who wish to avoid the risks and suffering associated with procedures such as phalloplasty and vaginoplasty. Currently, gender documentation is required for everything from housing to full-time employment. Without matching documents, people are relegated a life of struggle with inadequate housing and part-time income. The court's ruling is particularly important since the Japanese medical system does not offer good support for transsexuals. People are currently required to commit to an extremely regimented ten-year course of therapy and resocialization before possibly gaining access to genital surgeries. Out of desperation to socially stabilize their lives sooner, many Japanese end up getting operations done quicker and cheaper in nearby countries like Thailand and Singapore. While they are able to legally change gender upon their return, they are typically sent to the back of the line by Japanese physicians when seeking required ongoing medical maintenance. The court case has in no small part been won by the repeated willingness of people who underwent transitional therapies to testify openly about the physiological and psychological difficulties they face, and how contemporary Japanese law fosters unnecessarily high rates of post-transitional regret. I wonder if your reviewer might also be inclined to describe this scenario, which I consider an incredibly compassionate undertaking, as "echoing unchallenged arguments of anti-trans* disinformation?" Needless to say, this country is still far from revising the requirements for legally changing gender, but it is an unexpected and important legal victory.

All of these topics are pieces of the broader contextual puzzle that led me to say to English, "It is increasingly commonplace to give children experiencing gender crises damaging hormone blockers, rather than feminist tools for coping, organizing and living within an unsatisfactory and limiting gender binary." Admittedly, that brief statement within a larger interview on a wide range of topics did not reflect my intentions or motivating thoughts well. It could not. That requires elaboration such as I have attempted here, in opposition to your call for silencing "intervention." You and your staff are welcome to disagree with my views. After all, my opposition to censorship is ultimately a defense of the ability to disagree.

- Terre Thaemlitz, November 16, 2023

 

Mine Pleasure Bouvar's response on behalf of Texte Zur Kunst
Letter forwarded by Christian Liclair, Editor-in-Chief of Texte Zur Kunste (DE), on December 6, 2023.

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Dear Terre,

Thank you for both your letters regarding my review of your retrospective at Halle für Kunst Lüneburg. I have to apologize for not writing sooner, as I have been overwhelmed by work and a dynamic political situation in Germany that has me very involved in resisting the liberal instrumentalization of trans and intersex self-determination as window-dressing for an increasingly racist, imperialist politics. I hope you can forgive my late reply.

First of all, I want to clear up a major misconception that let to this whole situation. It was never my intent to call for your cancellation, or censorship, or anything like that. In German the word "intervenieren" is not to be equated with the English "to intervene." In German, and more specifically in the context of the particular passage of my review, it is better understood as "to inquire deeper for details" - by the interviewer, Lawrence English, in that case. So, my intention was never to hope for a kind of "absurdist theater" that robs you of a platform because of a carelessly chosen word or some similar thing. I would have hoped the context of my review made this clear. After spending about 1200 words giving a detailed description of how impressive your work is, in that it finds artistic expression for anti-essentialist, materialist analyses of identity production, the last bit of my text is more like an aside. I don’t see my job in writing a review only to tell people what I like, but actually - and I hope you agree with me here - to give a fuller picture of the whole, and therefore also mentioning what I might criticize. The fact that this critique is limited to the smallest portion of the text is because it is really that: a minor critique, meant as an aside to round out the overall impression of my review.

In order to clear up what I can only describe as a misunderstanding, I want to give you my perspective. I mentioned that specific part of your talk with Lawrence English because it stuck with me, as I have several years of experience of advisory work for trans, nonbinary, and intersex people seeking medical treatment. I had been working for the past few years in an LGBTQIA+ community center, in a peer advice position, and one of my main goals has always been an emancipatory approach to queer health. As you mention, much of the institutional, mainstream approach to transitional health follows normative, cis-centered ideology of what a body has to look like and how to limit the ways of queer self-actualization. Particularly in working with trans migrants (I don’t know the situation where you are, but German health care plus asylum requirements and bureaucracy are hell if you don’t have active support), every day I took it upon myself to challenge misinformation in order to allow people to take informed decisions. In this position I share your skepticism toward mainstream medicalization of transness, pathologization of queerness, and normative approaches of medical professionals to the detriment of genuine trans and nonbinary self-expression. This informed my approach to your admittedly brief mention on transitional health. Puberty blockers are a deeply contested topic and my only point about this was that I’d wished for an opportunity for you to explain more thoroughly what you said so briefly in the talk with English. Your short mention of the dangers of hormonal and/or hormone-blocking therapy was what I found reminiscent of gender-critical talking points, which reduce the whole matter to "transitional healthcare is bad and endangers our children." I wholeheartedly agree with the points you made about of Pubertas praecox treatment and GnRH Analoga in your second letter. And that’s exactly the point - in this second letter you took the time for explanation, whereas in the talk it was just a short sentence that without context can be misconstrued. That’s why I asked for the curator to "intervenieren," in the sense of intercede to ask for clarity.

To your points about liberal identitarian critiques of "choosing only the right words," I have to say I am totally on your side. My position, which I also center in my day-to-day work as a political educator, is first and foremost a dialectical-materialist one. My main focus is an anti-fascist and socialist approach to the wave of anti-trans movements that are at the forefront of general attacks on reproductive rights at this historical moment we are living in. Part of my work is to analyze how materialist frameworks, for example in feminist discourses, have become vulgarized and reduced to anti-minority sentiment, since many of the rhetorical tools wielded by the current anti-trans (and, for that matter, anti-sex-work) actors are reworked material from these discourses. If you are interested, I think the brilliant Brooke Beloso gives a good introduction on this loss of materialist class analysis in feminist circles since the 1990s in her seminal "Sex, Work, and the Feminist Erasure of Class." Part of this development is transmisic cis feminists, frothing about how we need feminist education instead of medical care for trans youth, using that argument as a dog-whistle for preventing young trans people to live their truth. The language of feminism becomes perverted into a call for conversion therapy. That is not to say that I think there’s no need for feminist education. On the contrary, and as you also pointed out, it is paramount for giving young queers the means to a healthy self-image. But in my experience it is, in reality, not the case that young queers get access to affirmative health care too quickly or are forced into medical transition. In my years of working in the field, I supported parents and their kids who had to fight against the resistance of medical professionals in order to access adequate medical help. At least in Germany, the situation is, more often than not, that trans people go through the torturous experience of a puberty they themselves don’t desire without either a feminist education or medical support. In most cases, GnRH Analoga come to be used as a stopgap, either because parents don’t support their trans kids or doctors prevent them from HRT proper. In many cases the puberty suppression is then a way to enact an artificial waiting time for a person who is already better informed than anyone making the decisions for them. An affirmative care rather than a preventative one would, with the help of HRT, open the possibility of a "normal" puberty at the same time as their peers of the same age and therefore allow for a proper sexual development from the get-go without unnecessary suppression of puberty in the first place. If the medical field in the US or wherever else looks different, and doctors give out drugs as candy, I am totally with you that this is not in the interest of the well-being of queer youth, which can only be ensured by ensured by access to information and critical education, as well as the right to self-determination. However, as this is not the case in Germany, the context from which I am writing from, perhaps this difference in reference points was a possible source of disagreement.

I also want to point out that my review was bound to certain formal criteria such as limits in word count. With this in mind I hope you understand that I abbreviated my minor nitpick about the passage in question from your talk with English in order to fit it in the last paragraph. Maybe if I had 100 extra words to illustrate what I meant in the last paragraph more extensively, it would have circumvented this whole misconception. But to be honest, since that comment was an afterthought in the context of the whole text, it is more likely that I would have spent any extra word count write about parts of the exhibition that did not fit into the limited amount of space I had. So, in the end, we can say there was lack of more detail in explanations on both ends, which led to an unfortunate situation. I also want to thank you for clarification about the quoted interview with Lawrence English. The transcript was handed to me as if it was the transcript from your live talk in Berlin. Any hint that it was a transcript from another occasion was also totally lacking in the way the Halle für Kunst Lüneburg presented it as additional material related to the exhibition. And as I unfortunately didn’t manage to attend the talk in Berlin, I was thinking it was the transcript of that talk. This is the reason why I wrote in my review as if you said that statement in Berlin. I will ask the editors of Texte zur Kunst if there is the possibility to correct that wording in the text to prevent similar misunderstandings.

In the end, I cannot help but point out the irony of this whole incident. Me writing a meagerly paid, overall positive review about how a trans artist of international renown puts class analysis back into identity discourse, which led to a misunderstanding and an extra day of unpaid work on my part as a precariously self-employed trans person, to read through your letters and formulate a response - I shall not refrain from thanking you for proving my point about the necessity for a class-conscious trans and queer politics.

Best wishes and solidarity,   Mine Pleasure Bouvar, Berlin 16.11.2023 [received December 6, 2023]

 

Terre's 'Synopsis of Events and Conclusions' (Part III)
January 26, 2024 (comatonse.com), revised January 31, 2024.

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Although it is beating a dead horse, and I already look like a total maniac given my long-windedness up to now, I wish to draw to a close my recent exchanges with Texte zur Kunst regarding their review of my exhibition "Reframed Positions" by providing a synopsis of events, as well as outlining some conclusions I have drawn from the experience. Unlike my previous letters, this text has only been posted on my website and not directly forwarded to Texte zur Kunst for reasons that will be discussed below.

1 Mine Pleasure Bouvar, "Depresentation: Mine Pleasure Bouvar Über Terre Thaemlitz In Der Halle Für Kunste Lüneberg," Texte zur Kunst (DE: textezurkunst.de, September 1, 2023).

Timeline of events:

• September 1, 2023: Texte zur Kunst publishes a review of my exhibition "Reframed Positions" by Mine Pleasure Bouvar, in which I am accused of spreading "anti-trans* disinformation,"¹ and the curators Lawrence English (Room40, The Substation), Ann-Kathrin Eikhoff (Halle für Kunst Lüneburg) and Elisa Roguszczak (Halle für Kunst Lüneburg) are accused of negligence for failing to intervene.


• October 1, 2023: I send a letter to the editor via email objecting to both accusations.


• October 6, 2023: Editor-in-Chief Christian Liclair responds via email stating he and the reviewer Mine Pleasure Bouvar are working on a joint reply.


• November 16, 2023: Presuming Texte zur Kunst is still working on their reply, I send a second letter of correction to the editor upon identifying the precise statement I had made that was at the center of Bouvar's accusations. The actual quote had previously gone unidentified due to Bouvar's trifecta of failure to include the quote, mistaken descriptive journalism, and an erroneous footnote.


• December 6, 2023: Liclair forwards me a letter of response written by Bouvar only, predated November 16, 2023.

Without attempting to speak for any of them, it is my impression that English dismissed the review as so poorly written that it did not warrant any response beyond what I had already done. He also felt over the past few decades the topic of censorship in curation had already been thoroughly discussed and digested to a degree that removed any urgency around that particular point in the review. Meanwhile, Eickhoff and Roguszczak were basically caught by surprise with my letter. We then had a period of crossed wires in communication. They initially did not respond for over a week, which led me to read into the silence negatively. Some days later, when sending them a separate message regarding administrative issues, I asked if they had received the letter. They replied to that message on October 10, saying they fully supported what I had written and were available for discussion if so desired. However, given the brevity of their statement and the absence of any specific comments on either the review or my response, in that moment I read their words as likely just a courtesy elicited by my previous email's inquiry. When I eventually asked for everyone to speak together after sending my second letter of correction to Texte zur Kunst, scheduling issues on the Lüneburg side pushed things into January, and so on. It was an unfortunate period of confusion on all sides, and we only really understood each others’ experiences and solidarity after the group meeting. It was during that conversation that Eickhoff and Roguszczak explained they had been holding any response until after the anticipated reply from Texte zur Kunst mentioned in Liclair's email of November 6, but by the time it did come in December it felt like the train had already left the station.

In my opinion, the review attacked the curators' practices at least as much as it did mine. In fact, it is Bouvar's implication that the curators failed in a civic "responsibility" to intervene that transforms what might otherwise be read as a reviewer's direct criticism of something I said into an art journal's public call for content control. For me, that statement is at the center of all of this, and is what drove me to react. I feel it would have been a benefit to hear responses from voices more professionally invested in curating, and possibly offset the emphasis on LGBT issues in my letters written from the position of "the artist" whose actions were under scrutiny. Although I have deliberately avoided any direct call for others to chime in out of concerns about "cancellation" previously mentioned, and do not challenge their decisions (nor mean to imply such concerns are even part of their decisions), I confess a degree of disappointment with the overall lack of curatorial engagement. Regardless of the editor's and curators' reasonings, it is impossible to ignore the reality that until now the only actual voices involved remain Bouvar and myself, all of which I fear publicly reads a bit like management keeping their hands clean.

2 Bouvar, letter of response on behalf of Texte zur Kunst, received December 6, 2023.

An optimist might interpret this as a premise for functional solidarity between the two of us. Bouvar claims an interest in labor issues, and even ends their belated response with "best wishes and solidarity." Yet, looking at their concluding paragraph - a failed attempt to snap back with my own words from the last paragraph to my first letter - they characterize me as a lofty "trans artist of international renown" whose letters thoughtlessly imposed "an extra day of unpaid work on [Bouvar's] part as a precariously self-employed trans person."² For Bouvar, and by extension Texte zur Kunst, to suggest my letters were a basis of labor exploitation is probably the greatest closure to the doors of discourse I have ever encountered. Therefore, I see no point in directly sending them a copy of this text since doing so would apparently be perceived as an act of class warfare. In terms of any official exchange between Texte zur Kunst and myself, I grant them the last word.

3 Ibid.

In reality, I did not impose anything upon Bouvar. To the contrary, I was responding to their outrageous claims of my involvement in "anti-trans* disinformation," and their calls for curatorial intervention to shut me down. That is, intervention beyond the already institutionalized processes of censoring, selection and exclusion that are "curation." It was they who prompted me to defend my own practices and those of the curators. I spent well over a week writing my two letters, which were both unpaid and unpublished. Oh, and guess the fuck what? I am also a "precariously self-employed trans person." Just as Bouvar's initial review was written in a way that lead readers to conclude I am out of touch with the reality of transitioning practices, their follow up response painted me as some lofty artist-type who is out of touch with the class experiences of working people... sorry, of working trans people... of which I apparently have no point of entry for understanding. It makes me wonder what kind of life they imagine I live. Do they think I wrote my letters just to idle away my days amidst the tedium of life as an art world elite? What artist fee do they imagine I received from the Halle für Kunst Lüneburg for hosting my solo retrospective exhibition spanning over thirty years of culturally minor and independently produced works? (Hint: less than a single pre-COVID19 fee for a live presentation of just one of the video works on display.) I am currently fifty-five years old, and it is only in the past six years that I have achieved a humble degree of financial stability amidst years of unpredictability. And much of that is owed to a dry lifestyle of frugality and thrifting. If, as Bouvar writes in their response, I put "class analysis back into identity discourse,"³ they have completely thrown it back out.

4 Ibid.

Speaking on behalf of Texte zur Kunst, Bouvar appears to be left to take personal responsibility for the publication's delayed response. The letter opens with a lot of virtue signaling regarding a lack of time due to "involvement in resisting the liberal instrumentalization of trans and intersex self-determination as window-dressing for an increasingly racist, imperialist politics."⁴ Yeah, we're all busy. Bouvar continues:

5 Ibid.

It was never my intent to call for your cancellation, or censorship, or anything like that. In German the word "intervenieren" is not to be equated with the English "to intervene." In German, and more specifically in the context of the particular passage of my review, it is better understood as "to inquire deeper for details" - by the interviewer, Lawrence English, in that case.⁵

Regarding the term "intervenieren," I can only say that the German curatorial team and several other native German speakers I know read the review as I did. However, even if we take Bouvar's intended meaning as one of "pushing for inquiry" rather than "intervention," it does not alleviate the political problems presented in the broader sentence:

6 Bouvar, exhibition review.

Die Kurator*innen verpassten hier ihre Verantwortung, zu intervenieren, als die eingeladene Künstlerin unwidersprochen Argumente trans*feindlicher Desinformation zur angeblichen Gefahr pubertätsblockender Medikamente echote. (Translation: The curators were negligent in their responsibility to intervene when the invited artist echoed unchallenged arguments of anti-trans* disinformation about the alleged danger of puberty-blocking drugs.)⁶

Bouvar clearly asserts curators have a social responsibility to publicly step in - in this case reprimanding the curators for not pushing an exhibiting artist to elaborate on a statement that Bouvar took personal issue with. (Of course, by extension of the mystical properties of essentialist identities, this translates into Bouvar taking offense on behalf of all trans people... excluding myself, that is.) The implication remains that what I said was inappropriate, and cultural mores dictate that the curators needed to shut me down. Any claim Bouvar might make as to inviting an open-minded inquiry was eliminated the moment they chose to describe my words as having "echoed unchallenged arguments of anti-trans* disinformation" - without even providing a quote, nonetheless.

Again, I am left with the question as to how this would play out in the real world. Bouvar clearly has an expectation that all curators are to be held responsible to a socially agreed upon moral code. This code conveniently aligns with Bouvar's own morality. But how would curators absorb such a code in order to be able to act upon it in the timely way Bouvar expects? Is it a universal moral code we should already have internalized? Is it something Bouvar might describe as "common sense"? Whatever it is, it all seems to function suspiciously like the moral workings of dominant culture. Bouvar claims innocence as to how offensively authoritarian such a presumption is, and naive to the cultural implications of enforcing such ideological hegemony. Ultimately, their writing is symptomatic of today's LGBT moment that is obsessed with the social administration of ethics and morals, rather than participating in what I consider a more vital historical struggle to complicate the relationships between morality and power through which our collective and individual perversities are defined and punished. I am sure Bouvar would never admit this, but they sound like someone who shouts "Fuck the police!" at a demo, then calls the cops the moment they feel uncomfortable - with no hint of hypocrisy. As if to demonstrate this flip-flopping, Bouvar claimed I echoed "unchallenged arguments of anti-trans* disinformation." I think having a major German arts journal publish such a statement constitutes a "challenge" to whatever I was talking about. That challenge becomes all the more biased by not even including my quote in question, nor the context in which it was made. Readers are left with a floating accusation that naturally takes on an air of validity via the weight of Texte zur Kunst's cultural reputation. As for any possible counterweight of my own reputation, that was undercut by framing my statements as anti-trans. I have been policed, yet I cannot imagine Bouvar ever conceding this.

7 Bouvar, letter of response. 8 Ibid.

In Bouvar's response they attempt to diminish the statement in their review by calling it "an afterthought in the context of the whole text," and "maybe if I had 100 extra words to illustrate what I meant in the last paragraph more extensively, it would have circumvented this whole misconception."⁷ Yet, as I pointed out in my first letter, the review's structure literally builds around the anti-trans accusation via the italicized insertion of personal anecdotes that situate Bouvar in relation to myself in strange ways. I am pitted as an "other" lacking any understanding of the struggles in Bouvar's world of authentic trans-heroism. Towards the beginning we read a tale of Bouvar's fetishization by a tranny-chaser who says Bouvar reminds him of me. By the end, following the part in the review declaring I am spreading anti-trans disinformation that damages peoples' access to health care, we find Bouvar receiving a message of eternal gratitude for their work as a queer health consultant from a trans-person who attributes Bouvar with their ability to access medical care. At that point, the reader can only assume it is medical care they were lucky to get despite people like me unwittingly stopping people from getting the treatments they want. As readers, we see my "fan" portrayed as a fetishistic tourist, while Bouvar's "fan" is the real deal. I find it a bizarre series of positionings between Bouvar as protagonist with myself as antagonist - personally, even a little creepy. It is as though Bouvar felt compelled to write themselves over the subject of their review. These anecdotes take up more than two hundred words and over ten percent of the review. All of this contradicts Bouvar's back-pedaling claim that, "the fact that this critique is limited to the smallest portion of the text is because it is really that: a minor critique, meant as an aside to round out the overall impression of my review."⁸

9 Ibid.

Bouvar then attempts to represent my second letter - a fairly thorough elaboration of my views on hormone blockers, their history, how I arrive at a mathematical conclusion that they are likely overprescribed, how local Japanese national media agencies generate propaganda endorsing their usage to medically reinforce gender conformity among non-gender-reconciled youth, etc. - as a positive example of performing the kind of 'intervenieren' they called for in their review. Bouvar concedes many of my points, stating "that’s exactly the point - in this second letter you took the time for explanation, whereas in the talk it was just a short sentence that without context can be misconstrued. That’s why I asked for the curator to 'intervenieren,' in the sense of intercede to ask for clarity."⁹ And yet, the review did not invite me to clarify. Rather, it "clarified" for the readers that what I said was echoing anti-trans disinformation. So much so that the curators failed in their civic duty to identify my words as dangerous. The review then went on in the following sentences to describe me as overlooking the material conditions of trans people struggling to gain access to transitional therapies. I interpret all of that as the opposite of an invitation to conversation. There was no gracious offer to grant me space to explain myself, as Bouvar manipulatively claims. If there was any implied request for clarification at all, it was in the direction of Bouvar as an entitled customer judgmentally demanding that my employers make me explain my bad behavior. The jury was already back, and I was declared anti-trans. An anti-trans trans, to be specific. Taking things to the next level, none of my letters to the editor were written at the invitation of Texte zur Kunst. None of them were published. To the contrary, they were strategically ignored. There was no offer to bring my clarifications before the public to whom Texte zur Kunst has described me as anti-trans. To top it off, Bouvar directly stated my attempts to clarify via letter constituted an imposition of unpaid labor - the definition of being a burden. Again, all of this contradicts the back-pedaling claims in their response.

10 Ibid.

Bouvar then goes into academic mode, suggesting readings so that I might familiarize myself with the concepts of materialist feminism and the decline of feminist class analyses since the 1990s. Humbling. Not to say I don't always have more to learn, but I kinda feel like that betrays a lack of familiarity with my work, my historical relationships to both Marxist and feminist praxis over the decades, my ongoing real time critical analyses of the emergent Pink Economy and the corporatization of Pride^TM since the nineties, or my numerous collaborations with materialist-feminist Laurence Rassell. In any case, Bouvar tells me my language perhaps inadvertently sounds like things said by TERFs and racists - none of whom are named, of course, because they are just, you know... everywhere and everyone. I am supposed to go along with Bouvar's vagary, just as the readers of the exhibition review were to go along with the vague claim that I was disseminating anti-trans disinformation. The saddest part of all is that I sense Bouvar truly does not see a problem with this. For them, to say something critical of hormone blockers while advocating for feminist education is apparently "a dog-whistle for preventing young trans people to live their truth."¹⁰ This is Bouvar's filter through which Texte zur Kunst felt "Reframed Positions" should be reviewed, which reveals something about the editorship itself. I apologize if I sound a bit cavalier, but in my experience, the biggest dog-whistle is a closet liberal using the term "dog whistle" to discredit actual leftist critiques as right wing talking points. Bouvar seems sincerely clueless to the fact that their review and following response to my letters perform the very cultural alignments with rightist power and privilege they claim to disdain.

11 Ibid.

While I am aware of the transphobic phenomena being conjured, I am also aware of many people who have been unjustly branded TERFs simply for speaking and writing with precision about biology and the cultural differences between living one's entire life gender reconciled versus transitioned or irreconciled. I am leery of unsubstantiated accusations of Bouvar's sort, and understand the necessity to grant a benefit of the doubt to people accused of such things until I am able to draw my own conclusions. This is in no small part because I have never forgotten the role mob mentality played when I was being repeatedly fagbashed in my youth. It is easy for people to quickly sign on to things before grasping the violence they may be unwittingly inflicting as a result. And as an adult, over the course of my career I have also been accused of transphobia and misogyny for analyzing and discussing the different cultural indoctrinations and dynamics experienced by MTF's, FTM's, women, and men under patriarchy. Discussing such material differences was invariably reduced through the essentialist arguments of my critics down to my "denying the experiences of trans women as the same as women." I've even had someone email me with accusations that I was MAGA and a Trumper! Of course, such claims are generally preceded with something equivalent to, "Huge fan!" So when Bouvar ponders how I could infer such negative intent within an "overall positive review,"¹¹ let's just say it is customary. I understand these inane statements are typically coming from people overwhelmed by the ideological distortions of their own contexts of reception, leaving them incapable of understanding their interpretation may be a gross overwriting of my intentions and contexts of production. They fool themselves into believing we inhabit the same space - invariably their space. In the case of Bouvar's review, which was written as though they were at the public discussion between English and myself at Volksbühne in May, 2023, and were upset by something I said there, it turns out they did not even attend the event and the notorious quote in question was from an interview I did three years prior for The Substation in Melbourne.

12 Ibid.

When called on that point, Bouvar writes, "I will ask the editors of Texte zur Kunst if there is the possibility to correct that wording in the text to prevent similar misunderstandings."¹² Unfortunately, in this era of digital publishing I suspect such a correction would not take the traditional form of publishing a corrective addendum, but more likely be an invisible and undocumented online alteration to the original review. This seems implied by the phrase, "to correct that wording in the text," as opposed to something like, "to publish a note of correction." The important difference is that the former performs an Orwellian act of erasure (not only of their error, but of the material record of the foundation for my response), while the latter allows the past and all the discourse it has generated to exist in a mappable form.

13 Thaemlitz, letter to the editor of Texte zur Kunst, October 1, 2023.

All of this ties into my first letter, in which I spoke about how on the culturally major level Texte zur Kunst has "aligned itself with dominant cultural calls for increased censorship," while on the culturally minor level Bouvar's writing "displays inter-LGBT power dynamics."¹³ Once again, I sense Texte zur Kunst's leaning towards mainstream journalism's propagandistic practice of altering previously published articles and headlines without notes of correction. It is an act of selective erasure and reconstruction designed to manipulate historical archives in the service of power, and obstruct historical materialist praxis. All of this also resonates with contemporary mainstream LGBT culture's fanatically unforgiving stance on "deadnaming" - particularly in relation to celebrities and historical figures - as if all trans folk agree the best way to preserve our histories is by mandating we exterminate our pasts. When acts of erasure culturally come from above they are inherently aligned with censorship, and therefore a very different thing than the culturally minor workings of the closet and secrecy as self-defense. So, understanding that Texte zur Kunst has already committed to a path of not openly engaging with my letters, I sincerely hope Bouvar does not ask the editors to correct any wording, as I suspect it would only serve to improve their image while making me appear to have imagined things.

14 Bouvar, letter of response.

Even when Bouvar attempts to address our differences of context, it is done dismissively. For example, after my second letter's painstaking look at statistics regarding the prescription of hormone blockers, Bouvar patronizingly quips, "If the medical field in the US or wherever else looks different, and doctors give out drugs as candy [emphasis mine], I am totally with you that this is not in the interest of the well-being of queer youth. [...] However, as this is not the case in Germany, the context from which I am writing from, perhaps this difference in reference points was a possible source of disagreement."¹⁴ Bouvar clarifies their context while intentionally recasting mine as absurd. Once again, I am portrayed as aloof, and detached from the reality of even my own contexts.

15 Lawrence English and Thaemlitz, "Reframed Positions: Terre Thaemlitz in Conversation with Lawrence English" (Australia: The Substation, 2004), p.11.

When I say something like, "it is increasingly commonplace to give children experiencing gender crises damaging hormone blockers, rather than feminist tools for coping, organizing and living within an unsatisfactory and limiting gender binary,"¹⁵ I am not under a hysterical delusion that physicians are dolling out meds like candy. I believe my second letter very pragmatically detailed how I arrive at what I consider to be the most plausible statistics around the usage of hormone blockers, in response to which Bouvar offered absolutely no interpretation nor opposing data. By recognizing that the number of youth on hormone blockers is a small subset of those dealing with gender issues, my point is that youth are still more likely to be presented with that medical option before feminist tools - more specifically non-essentialist, materialist feminist tools to unpack the indoctrinations of gender under patriarchy.

Childhood is a period of extreme susceptibility to peer pressure. It is also well known that peer pressure plays an enormous role in LGBT cultures. Historically, our subcultural patterns of conformity emerged in reaction to the absence of a sense of place in mainstream societies. The more one becomes immersed in those LGBT patterns of conformity, the greater the sense of peer validation and inclusion within a community. A need to overcome traumas of sexual and gender exclusion from society at large are precisely why it is so easy for us to overcompensate and go strikingly deep into the mimicry of physical and behavioral codes that have been communally deemed authentically LGBT. The histories of LGBT peer pressure and conformity are also entwined with safety, particularly in times and places where sexual and/or gender variance puts people at physical risk. Like a secret handshake, adorning and conforming one's body to the LGBT passwords of the day is a form of identification as friend. For decades, the "hanky code" (colored bandanas in rear pockets) indicated sexual preferences. White gay boys from the late '80s and early '90s were called "clones" because they consciously looked and dressed alike. The same could be said of butch dykes, although they are now under ever-increasing absorption into FTM cultures via the boom in top surgeries. I would say top surgery and transmale identification are the greatest peer pressures faced by non-femme lesbians today. The greater these peer pressures become, the more we are collectively ordered to turn a blind eye to their crushing weight upon our psyches. In the individualist West, we distract ourselves from our loss of self via conformity with myths of individual self-actualization. That is simply how peer pressure works. We internalize and rationalize our decisions to succumb to it via narratives of coming closer to understanding our "true selves" - which, ironically, can only be seen when reflected back by the collective. It is a way of comforting the self by being the least oneself. In this way, peer pressure is a gateway to social acceptance that is inseparable from the dynamics of mob rule. When peer pressure becomes institutionalized, such as through the emergence of the Pink Economy and Pride^TM, it can trap us in what is called a "mass formation."

16 Ranjit Hoskoté, "Documenta Resignation Letter," November 13, 2023; and Simon Njami, Gong Yan, Kathrin Rhomberg, María Inés Rodríguez, "Documenta Resignation Letter," November 16, 2023.

Mass formation psychosis is most commonly associated with the group-think that enabled German Nazism, but is not limited to that. Today it can be seen in the myopic cultural rallying behind the US and NATO's proxy war with Russia via Ukraine, and strict silencing of those expressing opposition - going so far as imprisonment and execution, such as US journalist Brent Renaud. It can be seen in public acquiescence to the institutionalized punishment of those expressing opposition to Israel's decades of Zionist-driven apartheid against Palestinians, including opposition voiced by countless Jews themselves. Within the arts, this includes the official directive order coming from the German Ministry of Culture that says funding can be cut if artists, curators or institutions express political opinions that are not government approved. For example, multiple attendees at the welcome party for the new Director of HKW, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, privately reported the German Minister of Culture was explicitly clear that the minute Ndikung says anything pro-Palestinian or anti-Zionist he is out of a job. In other words, they have hired as the HKW's Director a German-Cameroonian person of color with a history in organizing anti-colonial projects, yet forbid him from addressing one of today's greatest colonial crises. This is how a mask of liberalism is culturally deployed to hide the mechanics of radical conservatism at work in this era of DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion). The shadow of mass formation is felt in the manner Ndikung's colleagues sympathetically discuss his conundrum, but in private. These same pressures were behind Mumbai-based poet and curator Ranjit Hoskoté's resignation from the selection committee of Documenta 16 after being accused of anti-Semitism for signing a pro-Palestine petition, as well as the ensuing resignation of the remaining curators. Their different workings can be seen in Hoskoté's resignation letter that directly named the Israeli-related political issues at hand; versus the joint resignation statement from fellow curators Simon Njami, Gong Yan, Kathrin Rhomberg, María Inés Rodríguez which deliberately danced around any mention of Israel in order to protect their future employment prospects.¹⁶ Hoskoté became a clear dissident. Meanwhile, any solidarity on offer from the others was diluted down to liberal posturing through the way they appeared to reject the mass formation while strategically preserving their individual abilities to float within its cultural currents.

Belgian psychologist Mattias Desmet has also used mass formation psychosis to explain the emotional intensity behind public compliance with the fascistic cultural divisions and social restrictions that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic. That includes the strict censorship and deplatforming of physicians and scientists whose grounded research challenged mainstream narratives, and the firing and ostracism of people who chose to either remain unvaccinated or stop with boosters for any number of valid reasons. In a recent conversation with US comedian and cultural analyst Jimmy Dore, Desmet summarized mass formation psychosis in a way that I think also applies to the social workings behind dominant LGBT organizing, and explains what fuels the fire behind cancel culture - including Bouvar's knee-jerk categorization of my words as anti-trans. Desmet makes it clear that a mass formation can only take root if a population is in pre-existing anguish - something we are all familiar with as an emotional hallmark of most people who experience sexual and/or gender variance. Furthermore, participation within mass formation is experienced on the individual level as an essentialist human-identity affiliation:

17 Mattias Desmet, "How COVID Turned People Into Fascists - Explained By Psychologist!" The Jimmy Dore Show, May 14, 2023 (27'48"-29'45").

The origin of mass formation is the terrible psychological state the population is in before the mass formation starts. This means they feel lonely, struggle with lack of meaning-making, suffer from all this anxiety, frustration, aggression... Then the mass formation emerges, and it seems as if all these things disappeared. They feel connected again. They have a new meaning in life, like to fight the [COVID-19] virus. All their anxiety is connected to an object. They can control it, and they can direct all their frustration and aggression at one point. If they meet someone who doesn't agree, and who tries to show them that the narrative that led to the mass formation, just, is absurd, they feel threatened - because they feel that if they allow that person to speak to them, they will wake up and they will be confronted with all this pre-existing misery again. So that's why they try to make the dissonant voice shut-up. That's why they just can't stand the dissonant voice. At the same time, they consider it their holy duty, because they feel this person that does not go along with the masses, who doesn't go along with the narrative, must be an egoist. He lacks solidarity. He lacks this new citizenship which is so typical for the masses - because [those in the formation] feel connected again in the masses, they feel a lot of solidarity, and they feel a new citizenship. And if there is someone who doesn't go along with them, this must be someone who is not really a human being, and who should be destroyed in the end - who deserves to be destroyed.¹⁷

I am confident that many readers can recognize those same dynamics at work within the more fanatically cultural-policing wings of LGBT organizations, if not also echoed in the behaviors of some people they know personally - even if only secretly admitting so to themselves. To admit this is not to villainize trans and queer people, but rather to recognize how the liberal humanist institutionalization and capture of LGBT agendas has resulted in mainstream LGBT cultures mirroring the fascistic tendencies of dominant liberal humanist cultures in general. I would argue that one of the reasons liberal humanist cultures were able to do so in such a quick and thorough manner since the late '80s because we generally carry an excess of negative social experiences that leave us vulnerable to the lure of mass formation. It all reveals the fundamentally symptomatic disposition of LGBT Pride^TM-based identities, which so many desperately wish to believe are not simply more of the same.

The alternative lifestyles supported by the overwhelming majority of LGBT organizations are most often nothing but a bait and switch for the same degree of peer pressure and heteronormativity we already find unbearable in other spheres of dominant cultures. Yet their seduction of "community" and "living one's truth" is strong. That power of seduction is amplified in youth between ten to twenty-five years old. It is the same phenomena of age-based ideological susceptibility that Evangelical Christians call the age of conversion. It was also what empowered the Hitler Youth, and the Chinese Red Guard. It is a stage of brain development every person passes through, regardless of politic or praxis. And its mania can only be understood by the individual upon reaching the light of day at the end of that emotionally dark tunnel. Some of us never see light.

I can say unequivocally, in all of my years (which has also included educational teen outreach and community work with homeless trans youth), I have never once encountered or heard of a trans-youth advocacy program that wasn't quicker to programmatically rally behind young peoples' desires for medical transitioning, than to first take time to walk those young people through a deconstruction of the social-material processes and marketplaces through which their youthfully charged desires to transition were likely formed. In my experience, the latter might actually offer them a different "pro-trans" vantage point from which to critically view their miseries, as well as view those roads of possibly lifelong dependency upon costly and risky medical interventions. As I said in my text to Deproduction:

18 Thaemlitz, Deproduction (JP: Comatonse Recordings, 2017), C.027.

What if one refuses to celebrate normalization? What if rather than responding to the violence of being forced to self-identify as ill with a demand to be recognized as healthy, one responds with a politicization of the desire to be recognized as healthy? What if one allows themself to remain disturbed by the unavoidable anti-feminist compromises of binary gender transitioning under patriarchy? What if one's entire relationship to gender variance is one of collapse? Of unbecoming? Of time, but not of a journey? Of change, but not of transition? Of struggle, but not of achievement? What if one responds to shame by strategically refusing Pride^TM?¹⁸

Sadly, these are questions you will never find trans-youth advocacy programs seriously discussing or organizing around. To the contrary, they are a sure-fire way to lose funding, as well as communal support. As Bouvar's initial review made abundantly clear, any such questions are presumed hostile.

Texte zur Kunst and Bouvar strike me as incapable of considering that, in the eyes of someone like myself, perhaps their published cultural alignments are also "preventing young trans people to live their truth." No, I am just kidding, of course. From my perspective "truths" are only bullshit to be dismantled, and certainly never replaced with other "truths" - particularly ones fueled by affect and desire. The notion of advocating for people - any kind of people - to "live their truth" bears the ideological hallmarks of a conman. Or a proselyte. Bouvar does not strike me as having the malice of a conman.

Honestly, on a personal level I feel pretty shitty for putting Bouvar's review and response through the wringer like this. At least I can take solace in the fact my responses are only posted on my private website, so they will never receive the wide exposure of Texte zur Kunst's unwarranted accusation that I am a spreader of anti-trans disinformation, or their warning to curators that they had better stop letting me get away with it - all of which, of course, is not about myself, English, Eickhoff or Roguszczak, but is a message to others like us and those who might employ us. Responding on behalf of Texte zur Kunst, Bouvar downplays all of this as just a silly misunderstanding. Clearly, I do not buy it. It does not match their strategic delays, nor their failure to take standard journalistic actions such as issuing a formal retraction, making a public apology, or publishing my letters to the editor. The social implications of their actions have not been publicly acknowledged or addressed from their side in any way - all of which is at odds with an honest desire to make up for an innocent journalistic error. The alternative is to believe they see their publication as being of so little consequence that they have no need to consider their content as having actual cultural implications, and that I am simply making a mountain out of a molehill. Again, I do not buy it, both because Bouvar and Texte zur Kunst do not strike me as people who take themselves so lightly, as well as the reality that statements published in an established art journal of their stature do carry weight. Were things so simple as they feign, then it's unfortunate the review was published as it was. Maybe an editor like Liclair should have 'interveniert' with some advice or something. That's not the same as calling for curatorial intervention. It's literally what editors are paid to do.