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.