When I was first asked to write a reflection on Carly Everaert and Selm Wenselaers’ Institute for Trans Pleasure and Trans Activism I was struck by my desire for the opportunity to spend some time in a trans world and my discomfort with this yearning. I was hungry for the chance to spend some time in a world where trans could be pleasurable, important, powerful. Yet, I could not separate this from my own longing to feel the warm embrace of being normal and safe. Who would not want a space where people are not constantly body scanning you, where teen boys do not scream and throw permanent markers on the bus, where access to health care or government services is not impacted by how your body aligns with their notion of gender?

Yet, I fear the seduction of normal. I fear its inseparable relationship to violence and even more its siren’s call. There are too many examples of LGBT people of privilege choosing normal over solidarity with less acceptable queers for me to sit easily with it. Yet I cannot deny that when I’m invited to a trans-exclusive space a part of me wonders: will I get to feel normal? 

Along with the workshop, I was invited to a two-day workshop for trans-artists led by Raoni Muzho and Lux ​​Sauer. Becoming a Tiger is Lux’s project exploring transitioning through, well, becoming a tiger. The workshop was great and challenging. Lux works a lot with somatic exercises and guided us through a series of embodiment activities into a chance to play with finding/becoming our own tiger. As Carly later described it, the workshop was a chance to experience your body from the inside as an animal, decoupled (a bit) from human gender. Offering the possibility that how we experienced our bodies could be different, which of course is a bit brutal. To open to possibilities outside the norm, especially as sensed through the (material and social) body is to in some way be faced with the gendered body, the violated body, the gazed-upon body. The body that is essentialized while lacking material coherence, for what the cis-gaze sees is not the body as it is, but the “human” reflected in through or against normative ideals.

The second workshop was on moaning, a practice Raoni Muzho has been building for several years. I was struck by the care Raoni took to initiate a space of sharing. He began by informing us that, in fact, we had made it, we were present and that was enough. There was nothing to fix and the things we experienced during the workshop could be just for us. He then asked us three questions: “What is your relationship to the voice?” “What does liberation mean to you?” and “whom or what else would you like to sound for?” After a chance to write on all three questions we shared. 

In my mind there is a powerful directionality to these questions. There is the I as it relates to voice, which is about outward, bridging me and not me, or you (all.) Then there is liberation which widens the circle. For me, at least, there is no way to think of liberation solely for the self. Thus it becomes an I in an us. Finally, who else do we want to do it for, which while not necessarily ancestral, was for many people a question which brought in people over there and back then.