Queer Disability Day: Transliterature Returns to the White House

"There is no way we will ever achieve justice
without recognizing these intersections...
that are written all over our bodies, our souls, 
our minds, our life experiences"

Finn Gardiner

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History

Today, July 28th, 2016, I sat beside my partner and listened to Sarah McBride become the first transgender person ever to address the Democratic National Convention. While she marked the significance of this moment in history, her primary concern was to call on Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton to keep to her promise to bring the nation back from the deep hatred being directed at the transgender community, "in our laws and in our hearts." An important part of McBride's address was the intersection of disability and transgender in her family's life and politics. During McBride's short speech, she remembered her husband, a transgender man, who died of cancer only days after they became married. For them, the terminal status of illness compounded the terminal status of being transgender in America. This is their truth but also the truth of countless members of the LGBTQ and disability community. Each of these cultural identities and circumstances come with social prejudice as well as needs that require a wider community for support. By the end of the address, lasting only a few minutes, both my fiance and myself were fighting tears. We understood first hand how the intersection of transgender, queer, and disability politics on the national stage has the potential to change history, policies, and community.

A month ago, on June 27th, 2016, I was handing my identification to secret service personnel at the gates to the White House as they pulled up my invitation for the Forum on LGBTQ and Disability Issues, nicknamed LGBTQ Disability Day. In many ways, my return to the seat of the Federal Government was an uncanny replay of my first invitation. I was trying hard to maintain a professional, confident look while being wracked by uncertainty as I waited in line, asking myself, "did the White House really mean to invite me to discuss the state of the country?" In other ways, this second visit was substantially different both in terms of the event and my role. In my first meeting, Champions of Change, I was invited as an author and literature critic to discuss my story and the stories of other transgender persons among a room of writers, filmmakers, and television professionals. This time, I was invited as a scholar and consultant on the intersection of transgender, queer, and disability issues, to share ideas and tactics with policy makers and community leaders. The freshly of the experience for me was echoed by the event. This was only the second time that such a forum was being held at the White House. It is only recently that the President's White House would call for such an event where transgender and disability are given such a central place in discussions of the Federal Government.

Marking the recent breakthroughs in the politics of LGBTQ and Disability communities, our forum also served to mark the President's declaration of the Stonewall Inn as a National Monument.  This was the first time that a specifically LGBTQ site was honored as an United States monument. Furthermore, the new status meant that  as a part of the national park service, the site would be preserved and curated by a specially devoted staff for perpetuity. This ensured that the progress towards justice was not just full of moments but enacted an ongoing movement connecting the past, present, and future. As the declaration was announced, I looked around at the room filled with LGBTQ and disability activists from across many generations. There were those with friends and family at Stonewall, those who fought for HIV/AIDs research, those who fought over the policies that became the American's with Disability Act, those who pushed for and ushered in Marriage Equality, as well as those fighting for causes in the transgender, intersex, and disability community that are yet to gain wide recognition in the public. It was evident that this is not the room where history is merely celebrated, those in this room make history happen. As a historian myself, I've long felt that a historical perspective is not one of passive recognition but of active participation in a web of ongoing struggles that implicate us across time.

It becomes more certain every day that my children will grow up in a country much different than the one I inherited. As mothers, my partner and I try to curate for them history as it is being made and remade. We will take them to the Stonewall Monument and give it to them as a piece of their history. This will involve assisting them in getting to the site as well as understanding the text they cannot read or images they cannot understand. And we will fight alongside those at the 2016 Forum on LGBTQ and Disability Issues to ensure that such locations continue to become more accessible to peoples with a wider range of embodiments. Because when we are older, maybe not even much older, our children may be taking us to the monument with the hope that their blind mother, hard of hearing mother, or their mother in a wheel chair can continue to experience that history with them. The act of making history is always a collective one. History is reaching across boundaries of time, space, and differences in life experience. In this work, the work of assuring disability access is central to making history. The declaration of a monument is not the end of a road of progress but a commitment to an ongoing collective struggle.

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Policy

The Forum was split into two major topics: policy and community organizing. Speakers were chosen for each half to lead the conversation and introduce main topics. The first discussion to begin was government and business policy regarding LGBTQ and Disability issues. None of the chosen leaders were legislators but all had some direct role in consultation, advocacy, or the writing of laws. The moderator, Curt Decker, Executive Director of the National Disability Rights Network, humorously observed that the discussion was "a little heavy on attorneys... but that's okay." In a couple instances, such as Senior Policy Advisor from the US Department of Labor's Office of Disability Employment Policy, Day Al-Mohamed, their job was to advise the Federal Government, White House and President on issues relating to these marginalized communities. Also speaking was Professor Chai Feldblum, Commissioner of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission who was instrumental in drafting and negotiating the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and the ADA Amendments Act of 2008. Feldblum told the story of the development of the ADA from AIDs Initiatives led by the queer community and the conversations where gay leaders insisted that AIDS legislation could not be effective and just without addressing the disability community. Updates were given on where various initiatives have succeed and where they have failed. This included a variety of resources with the room, including best practice programs and recent research. Statistics were shared with the room, such as the current number of homeless youth that are LGBTQ in general (40%), nearly half, and transgender in particular, (7%). Likewise, the number youth in foster care who are LGBTQ (20%), around one in five. In the world of government, business, and policy, these statistics are powerful in pressing the gears of the system towards change. That is the value of holding a Forum such as this, where initiatives can begin, stories can be told, and these numbers can get to those who can do some good with them.

A moment of silence for those killed and injured at the Pulse Nightclub shooting set the tone for the first half of the discussion. With many of those present knowing members of the community in Orlando, the danger and need was freshly evident for such conversations happening at the highest levels. The leaders recognized how the tragedy and its relate conversations embodied the intersection of LGBTQ and disability issues. On the one side, it is only ever a brief time after a shooting before the media turns to "mental illness" or even "mental disability" as a root cause for such violence. This reinforces stigmas that holds that everyone with mental illnesses or disabilities are therefor prone to violence. Yet it also opens up the possibility to discuss the utter failing of social support and care for those with certain illnesses. What cultural forces may drive a person to consider violence? How might a society that instills hatred (even self-hatred) of queer and transgender persons incite someone to acts of destruction? How might shame around mental illness dissuade someone from getting help? On the other side, because of the shooting, many of those who survive will not experience first hand the intersection of queerness and disability. What does it mean to be gay in a wheel chair? How does one navigate sex with chronic pain? How might homophobia compound recent mental traumas? In any case, the shooting makes evident how support for disability justice is an import part of LGBTQ justice and how support for queer justice is a natural extension of disability justice. Now, more than ever, we need to use collectivity to overcome the symptoms of hate, fear, ignorance, and division.

Addressing the many queer victims of the Orlando shooting who will be joining the disability community for the first time, Feldblum asked, "will they understand their lives are still worth living?" In other words, one can become disabled yet not affirm membership in the disability community or affirming a positive, disability politics. The process of coming out and claiming pride in one's sexuality may now need to be repeated because of one's embodiment. This will begin with attending to the ableism in the queer community and in queer self-perceptions. Many of the speakers noted the long road in policy making that has required significant cultural shifts in order to move forward. Al-Mohamed noted how the disability and queer justice movements "share similar pathways" in the movement of these identities as (1) something (2) to hide to something (3) to fix to something to accept (4) to something to include. These turning points often hinge around the constant need to widen conversations from individual struggles to environment prejudices. LGBTQ and Disability Justice demands that we learn to see violence and marginalization on a systematic level, with interpersonal conflicts existing as symptoms of a wider disease. This means being able to see how systems are built with homophobia, ableism, transphobia and other biases built into how they operate or what their perceived goals are. "You can change all the structures in the world and if the people who make those structures continue to hold bias and animus and oppression and prejudice inside them, they will recreate those systems even if they don't intend to." She called for the redirection of the resources used to fight terrorism oversees to addressing the "body terrorism" in this country being directed at people with disabilities, people of color, bodies that are trans, bodies that are queer.

At the end of the policy section, a colleague of mine stood up and asked, "when will we stop applauding the White House and start annoying it?" It was a question asked out of frustration over the snails pace and often swerving away from justice on the road of change in government. Many in the room echoed the same groans. One response to the question came from a policy maker told his long history of activism beginning in the AIDs Crisis. "We have been annoying the White House for a long time and the change has come at an incredibly slow pace," he admitted, "but we need to keep up that annoyance and we can't despair." Another person responded to my colleagues demand for action but acknowledging the need for partnership between policy-makers who deal with the slow grind of government and grassroots organizers who deal with the immediate needs and suffering of communities. With that reply, the policy meeting broke up and we were able to exchange thoughts and feelings while the Community Organizer meeting was being set up. The question hit at tensions between the two groups: how we speak, who we are, and the rate at which we tend to get things done. The critique issued by my colleague was especially resonant with activists and scholars whose job is to engage with the immediate needs and stories of people outside the walls of government.  While we were lucky enough to be invited into the room where government conversations happen, most of us would have to step back out among our friends and family, those in need and those dying, and we will be accountable to them. We will have to answer for the government we advised and its slow responses. It is our job on days such as this to think the slow thoughts of government but to feel the immediate hurt of society. In the end, it is our job to be annoying and the White Houses's job to continue to invite that annoyance, and do something with it.

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Community

When the leaders of the Community Organizer meeting started, we heard the stories of many different activists, most of whom were transgender (including non-binary, gender queer persons), people of color, as well as crip. All of the leaders chosen to stand and tell their stories evidenced something most of those in the room already knew. Our political fights are intensely personal. A non-binary writer and librarian, Cyree Jarelle Johnson told how their life-sustaining medical care has been many times halted and insurance payments denied because healthcare providers refused to recognize the authenticity of documents that represented the complexity of Jarelle's gender. These systemic fissures around how gender and illness are managed often ignore the immediate costs of those abandoned in the cracks. "Their mistake could cost me my life, what does it cost them?" asked Johnson. Furthermore, Johnson stressed the high percentage of autistic people of color or queer homeless people with mental illness killed by police. These are not statistics on a legislator's one-sheet, these are members of Johnson's community. As another member and advocate in the autistic community of color,  Ma'ayan Anafi, policy consular for the National Center for Transgender Equality, echoed the same intimacy and immediacy. Anafi spoke on the pressing need to address the day to day discrimination of LGBT and disabled people which results in lives lost and lives locked away in a cornucopia of oppressive social mechanisms, "police brutality, mass incarceration, and the school to prison pipeline." Each day we wait to turn silence into debate, debate into policy, policy into laws, and laws into action, more lives are lost. If we seem frustrated or annoying, it is because we come to this Forum with friends and family at home dying.

Too often, misunderstanding the reason behind the anger, those used to the slow trod of government find the intensity of activists to be petty. "There is a stereotype of the crazy trans woman that is used to silent trans women," says Martela, "but it is true that trans women are suffering mental illnesses that is the direct result of the oppression they are faced." This pressing precariousness was repeated in the stories Greta Gustava Martela about her life and the life of others who call her Trans Lifeline network. With between 40-50% of transgender persons attempting suicide, the community does not have time to wait around for incremental change. If 40-50% of cisgender people were dying off, State and Federal governments would not be delaying help or actively worsening the conditions of the community. "Suicide is something that happens in isolation," Martela told the Forum. This means that it is not enough to address the concerns of those invited to a room in the White House. Because most trans people become isolated not by choice, because of mounting oppression, they could never travel to Washington DC if they were invited. "Many transgender people feel afraid to leave their houses," Martela reported. Despite the many travel demands of my word, this was a truth that I have personally experienced when I don't have the energy to risk myself or weathered myself against the antagonism of those I encounter on the streets or public transit, in homes or businesses. We must constantly be considering who is not in the room, who does not have the power or the time to travel and make their voices to be heard. That means going slow and listening when activists and community members speak, discerning the countless silenced voices echoing at their back.

Beyond the intensity of the speech, listening can be difficult because of the many different levels at which a voice resonates. A significant theme throughout the community organizing portion of the forum was about the role of intersectionality in the lived politics of LGBTQ and Disability issues. President of the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network of the Greater Boston Area, Finn Gardiner, recounted the time spent homeless and otherwise abandoned outside government safety nets because he is a black, queer, trans, autistic disabled person. He told stories about being called rational slurs in a classroom for kids with disabilities, discriminated against by black and gay men in a homeless shelter for being trans, outcast from a community because he is autistic. "You think I would fit in," said Gardiner, citing how his many intersectional identities open many roads for shared experiences, yet he is too often marginalized because of other elements of his identity. There is expectations for him to be outgoing because he is black, he confesses Gardiner, but that conflicts with the whole image of who he is. Discrimination never happens because of all his identities at once but neither does acceptance ever cover all of his identities. These labels are often too quick and too small. Intersectionality is a complex word that signifies the complexity of every particular person by acknowledging how all these smaller words exist in a shifting constellation. This lived and every changing complexity means that we need to meet people where they are at and listen better to understand the many places they have been. Only by dwelling at intersections can we hear the many different directions a person is speaking. From this information, we need to make communities and policies with roads forward for each different person.

As the Forum came to a close, the issue of intersectionality exploded the conversation with Forum leaders taking turns to nuance the idea. It is a privilege not to have to talk about intersections, admitted Martela, "to be able to talk about the one thing." This is a privilege not possessed by most of the speakers at the Forum and many of those outside the White House. "I don't think that people are allowed to live at all their intersections," Johnson with a Pokemon reference. "People look at you like you are trying to 'collect them all,' like you have to have all the problems." Adding to this, Anafi warned against the 'collect them all' model of intersectionality, insisting that it does now come into being by merely adding one identity with all its baggage to another. These identities are directly linked. Currently proud to claim themselves as gender non-binary, Johnson recalls being allowed to live as a gender non-conforming person because they were diagnosed on the Autism spectrum at three-years-old. If we utilize these enfolded identities, where intersectionality is central, we can multiply the avenues through which we relate and care for one another. "There is not a sharp line between those calling the [Trans Life]line and those staffing the line... We are creating disability in the trans community by the ways we are treating them," declares Martela. "Overwhelming, the people who are staffing Trans Lifeline are disabled trans people." As a way to close the Forum, this last point strikes across the personal, immediate, and intersectional emotion at the heart of such work. Community Organizing is how a people who are suffering help each other and help themselves. Yet this is not enough, without allies in the policy world who have the privilege to offer different forms of power, these organizations will remain relatively small and contingent on volunteers. Until the local is able to better speak with the global, change will remain unacceptably slow.

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Afterward

It is a few hours later now, McBride has surrendered the stage to presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. If Clinton is elected, her White House will be different than the one to which I was invited. We count on that when that unimaginable thing happens every four to eight years, when one President steps down and another steps up. We count on there being a difference, we count on change. It will be different because she is a white woman and President Obama is a black man. It will be different because 2008 to 2016 will not be the same as 2017 onward. We count on change, we hope for progress. In 2016, we hear the Democratic nominee saying things we did not hear in 2008. We hear a full throated commitment to LGBT justice. We hear more about disability justice. We hear her talking about the hard road to affordable medicine, mental health assistance, and social access. "To make real change happen," says Clinton on the right of disabled children to public education access, "you have to change hearts and you have to change laws." If we believe that voting a person into office matters, we need to believe that the next White House will be different. If President Clinton invites me, I will come back. If it comes to it, if President Trump invites me, I will come back. But whatever the White House, whoever lives and works there, I will not fight to make America *something* again. I want change. I want to make America trans, not cis again. I want to make America queer, not straight again. I want to make America crip, not decry "Crippled America." That was why I went and why I return to the White House, because who enters the room where things happen changes the nature of the room and what happens. And I hear that sentiment, the same sentiments expressed in both of my recent visits, just now be repeated at the DNC with the words, "Americans don't say, 'I alone can fix it,' they say, 'we will fix it together'." That is a mission that I want to continue to be a part.

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LGBT Champions of Change: 

Transliterature Goes to the White House

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Eunuch Facta: Denaturalizing Sex in the Transformation

"If I still could 
have the choice..."

The Transformation

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The following is part 2 of an ongoing series
on Exemplum and Eunuchs
focusing on the Transformation (1994)
a documentary by Susan Aikin

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The Facta of the Eunuch

"Now what's really important is that you need to practice your English," the preacher tells Ricardo in a ministry planning session. "You see, I can tell people what you went through, but you went through it, you lived it. You see what I'm saying? I can tell them about it from my point of view but it's not as good as you." While Ricardo already speaks Spanish, recalling in his the voice of his history as Sara, Terry insists that in order to be a proper facta for his Texan, Christian message, Ricardo must be made to speak his words in English. As in any exemplum, a concept is defined in advanced and then a body is grabbed hold of as an example; then it begins to take shape as its exempla. The body is foreign to the English language of “eunuch” or “transsexual” (or any language) yet by cooperation takes on its shape as it is made readable and as it comes to articulate itself by the expected forms of the genre. [i] This means the body must be inscribed with verbal language (English scientific terms) as well as visual language (male clothing).

By conceding his need for Ricardo to tell his own story, Terry admits the subversive aspect of using exempla that threatens to invert the power dynamics of their relationship. The examplum depends on the inarticulate material facta of the trans body to ground its dicta, yet also needs it to speak back the dicta, the Word, the Logos, that frames and forms it. This agency is nonetheless contingent. The trans body exerts its power by co-operating with the authorities making an example out him. As a part in the operation of sharp-machines, the choices of the facta are dependent on how they meet with their associated dicta. Thus agency is not free, but contingent. It arises along point of the meeting, contact, even the violent edge where authorities work like a knife pressing against the skin of the trans body to carve out the form dictated by the exempla. 

Given that exemplum function as operations in social discourse, the sacrifice of Sara is at once physical and narrative. In one direction, the story of the eunuch cannot be told without the exchanging of finances and material resources. First, Ricardo needed to be brought on board. But moving Ricardo takes further exchanges. "Ricardo, as soon as they actually sign over the deed to the land to us,” says Terry, referring to a facility he is buying to house more trans converts to his mission, “we are going to be traveling to raise money for the buildings.” After Ricardo’s transformation, Terry has tapped a certain stream of resources that need to replenished and expanded if his operations are to continue. More space and more money are going to be needed for Christus Medicus to keep working his supposed miracles on new converts. More converts are necessary, given that Terry was able to convince Ricardo to join him primarily because he took advantage of Sara’s vulnerable physical and social position after finding out she was dying of HIV.

In another direction, the movement of money and bodies are dependent on the effectiveness of the story that Terry dictates and Ricardo evidences. “You," says Terry pointing at Ricardo, "are coming with me so you can tell it from your perspective." The authority he has as a preacher is itself contingent on the continual co-operation of storyteller and audience, preacher and layperson, dicta and facta. Terry cannot move around without Ricardo. This is why it is critical that Terry gets Ricardo on board. "Understand?" Terry asks, "You are going to be traveling all around the United States to tell people where you came from and help us raise money for the buildings. Understand?" The repetition of the question, "understand?" functions at first as an assertion of his authority, as the speaker of the dicta. This insistence also shows his need for Ricardo to consent his power, as facta. The authority needs to be understood. 

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Co-Operating Power

The power of facta is not that they understands repeats the dicta in the same form, if that was the case than the dicta would be sufficient on its own, but that the materiality of the trans body can represent the doctrine in other modalities, especially visually. Terry does not just need people to hear about Ricard's transformation but to see material facts. For this, he not only needs Ricardo to work for him, he needs Sara. "We are going to send out a brochure - do you remember Sara?" Terry says to Ricardo showing him a picture of himself as he appears now. "This is going to be what's on the other side," he says pointing to a picture of Sara. "That's going to blow people away." For Terry's exemplum in the Transformation to work, he needs to show transformation. That means that he does not simply need any body. Terry’s cis-male body is not sufficient. Nor is Ricardo’s body. He needs the trans body to repeatedly perform its trans-formation. The new whole, the eunuch, needs the part that is cast away by the authority, to enact power. Sara must be repeatedly killed in sacrifice and resurrected to give Terry authority as Christus Medicus. 

The power and material resources that buy Ricardo’s cooperation, Terry in turn uses him to procure. "To me this is like a dream. I am a poor man. The poorest of the poor," admits Ricardo. "When I was a transvestite, people would say to me ‘Sara you are so beautiful.’ But they didn’t know how hurt I was inside; how much I wanted a home," says Ricardo. "But now I feel rich… rich in love. I’ve always had love, but life has been so hard on me." Ricardo is rich now, to which he adds (or corrects), “rich in love.” Far from being an abstract, transcendent belief in a cosmic force, Ricardo’s love is manifest in the riches that brought him off the street, given to him by Terry and his new wife, Betty. Ricardo’s new life comes into being out of this exchange of properties. Sara’s love and beauty are sacrificed to buy Ricardo new kinds of love: a home and finances.

Despite the church’s exploitation of Cbristus Medicus’s dicta and Ricardo’s facta, the dangerous contingencies that Terry’s mechanisms view as a threat and try to contain, are embraced by Betty who offers different approach to love than either eunuch or pastor. “Betty, there can be nothing between us,” Ricardo recounts saying to Betty. “Because I was a Transvestite for many years. I even have breasts still. And I am HIV positive.” Ricardo is well aware of the precariousness of his life. Parts of his life, particularly HIV, mark him as a threat to social wholeness. The potential life and love from Ricardo and Betty's bond would be terminal. “Are you sure you don’t mind my being HIV positive?” Ricardo asks Betty before the wedding, stressing the danger of sharing properties, including body fluids. Betty embraces the facts of his life, open to share her resources and allowing him to affect her. They do not have frequent sex, Betty admits. When they do, she too contacts the lasting material and social effects of hormones, heroin, and HIV. 

While not “transgender,” insofar as she binds herself to Ricardo, his vulnerability becomes her vulnerability as she shares in trans experiences of rejection and subjugation. When the couple went to get married, they are told, “you can’t get married in the church." When asked why they are being turned away the church tells him, “because of your past.” “We all have a past,” Ricardo replies. “Don’t you guys say that Christ cleanses us of our sins?”[ii] Like a surgeon cutting away parts of the past, baptism serves as ritual exemplum where the material washing in water signifies the spiritual dicta of being “born again.” Despite baptism’s ecumenicalism, the material facts of trans bodies allows for public challenges to the dicta, what “you guys [Christians] say,” of Christus Medicus’s power to mark an absolute separation of part and whole, of before and after. Opening the body of Christ to the facts of Ricardo and Betty’s love means cooperating with all parts of them.

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Destabilizing Power

Contingency stresses precariousness and uncertainty because it acknowledges that truth is not absolutely in either the eternal, lasting dicta or the immediate, mutable facta. Rather, contingent operations and cooperation function through the contact of different genders, matters, beliefs, and temporalities. The life and love Betty and Ricardo share is not fixed, but are formed and reformed by the transforming contact between persons, past and present, and their mutual contact with Christus Medicus. “Now everything is fine," worries Ricardo, "but if I get sick... I hope you won’t abandon me in the hospital then.” Ricardo’s concerns with Betty’s love stress that the products of cooperation cannot be known in advance. “I know," Betty replies. " But I love you and I want to be with you!” Embracing uncertainty, the contingent facts of Betty’s embodied “faith” and “love” are distinguished from Terry’s rhetorical dicta. By her continual contact, Betty asserts that she is not a docile part of Terry's exploitative operations, but a co-operative with Ricardo.

In contrast to these critiques and abuses asserted by absolute all or nothing dicta, Betty offers a model of love as a radically positive and transformative dicta, the activity of continually stitching together disparate facts of different moments and embodiments. "Love is not just something that just happens in the beginning. Love is something that continues to grow. But love is not just something that’s a feeling either. Love is a commitment … that means when things aren’t going well you are still going to be there." Change, whether it is the shift from Sara to Ricardo, or the inconstancy of health, calls on love to sustain cooperation through transformation, constituting what Betty calls growth. Betty recalls that they have “talked about this [love and mutability] many times” and will continue to have check-ins. This love is not a once and for all dictum, a feeling or essence that a person has or not, but a lived fact between persons requiring risk and collaboration.

In the end, the wholesomeness promised Terry and Betty’s dicta on faith and love depends on the cooperation of eunuch facta formed and narrated to be its antithesis, the embodiments of fragmentation, inconstancy, and contingency. “I repented for my past life [as Sara]," says Ricardo narrating the Transformation’s final scene in a drive back from Texas to New York. "Now when I think about everything I lived I remember some of it as beautiful. Because the real truth is that I enjoyed it. That’s what I would have liked to be: a woman.” This contingency leads Ricardo to consider how he might reclaim the abandoned part of his life and return to living as Sara. Yet this change would likely involve ending his life as Ricardo, as Terry’s eunuch, and Betty’s husband. As Ricardo or Sara, the trans operative life is defined by castration, a “trans” position between separated parts of life that love might hold together if our sense of wholeness might be transformed. 

Before title screens announce Ricardo’s death, his final words leave viewers with the sense of the trans life’s precariousness. “If I could still have the choice, if I could change my life right now,” says Ricardo, “even now that I have my wife and everything, I would chose to be a woman.” While Ricardo imagines a free life, “if I could still have a choice,” he knows that the facts of his life are checked by contingency, by dictated limits set between his body and will. Undoing the change enacted by Chritus Medicus is impossible, only more changes, more castrations, more cuts; perhaps in the form of film cuts that slice together lives separated by time, circumstance and operations. Sacrificing parts of his life as Sara and Ricardo an exempla with competing presences and powers, the eunuch’s life stories implicate the audience as cooperative in the narrative. Choices still exist, but now shift to the hands of those who share in the eunuch’s story. All become eunuch-makers, implicated in crafting what becomes of the future of his pasts.

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[i] Whereas most of his interviews occur in his Cuban Spanish, Ricardo uses the English terms "homosexual" "transvestite" and "drag queen" for sexuality and trans embodiment. Even by the 1990s, the scientific term "transsexual" was still fighting for legitimacy and use in the public, while another scientific terms, "homosexual" and "transvestite" were being considered expansive enough to include a wide variety of embodiments. Indeed, the trans body seemed to be so elastic so as to be able to pivot between a wider variety of exempla on both gender and sexuality. 

[ii] (Aikin & Aparicio). 

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Eunuch Dicta: Naturalizing Sex in the Transformation

"You have stuck him 
in the Devil's face and said,
'Look what I can do'"

The Transformation

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The following is part 1 of an ongoing series
on Exemplum and Eunuchs
focusing on the Transformation (1994)
a documentary by Susan Aikin

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The Dicta of the Eunuch

“Let’s talk about Ricardo,” says Terry at the film’s opening, over a black-screen introducing the preacher as the primary narrative, the source of the dicta that will grab hold of Sara/Ricardo's body in order to narrate it into an exemplum on eunuchs in the 1990s. “Let’s talk about Ricardo,” he repeats as the film cuts to him sitting in a white room, on a white couch with a photo-album in hand.[i] As if acknowledging this absent presence, the scene ends with fading back again from the white room to a black-screen announcing the film’s title. This movement from white to black plays with notions of death and heavenly light. In these spaces suggest that Terry is speaking a metanarrative dicta from outside of Time. Terry's principles are associated with scriptural dicta, a priori, and then the body is produced as facta to demonstrate it. The "talk about Ricardo," depends on the showing and looking as key to the operations of power, yet depend on laying hands on Ricardo's body in order to grab him and shove him in people's faces.

Wrestling with the splitting of these two forms of the exempla by the 1990s, Terry works to turn Ricardo, understood as a “homosexual” or “transsexual” back into an eunuch and thus reclaim a public discourse into religious, locating the medical authority with Satan in order to hold up the scripture. Public and sermon authorities, function as different dicta that differently frames the factum of the eunuch body around which he pivots. This is the necessary turn in an exemplum where the dicta must give way to the power of the facta. Yet in all these cases, the authority of nature, religion, or medicine is exterior to the body it defines. In turn, the exemplary bodies are called upon to present their bodies as facta for the Christus Medicus proses to make incomplete bodies, taking control of them, in order to “make themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom.”

"First of all, you can probably focus on this," Terry says opening up his photo album, on the right a picture of Sara and on the left a picture of Ricardo. "Find Ricardo in here, so everyone is on the same page. This is Ricardo. When I met Ricardo he was Sara." Holding Sara and Ricardo's images as illustrative facta, Terry sets himself as the authority of the exemplum that will both not only verbal but visual. He orders the engagement, tells the audience where to focus, and defines the terms. "The thing that makes him unusual," says Terry, "he is enormously charismatic. He attracts people. He has power, he has presence. he has a personality." While Terry positions himself as the authority, but he needs Ricardo as factum in order to provide the physical "presence" in order to attract people to his message. For medieval audiences examples were highly persuasive, but for modern audiences steeped in scientific empiricism and materialism, the physical facts of a eunuch are indispensible to keep these sharp machines operational.

In order for the eunuch to be a proper operative, operations cut out parts of their body and history, in order to make it fit into the Church’s sexual regulatory operations. As such, Terry must renarrate Ricardo’s history to contain and cut down Sara’s presence. "Ricardo was there on that first night [the Church visited]" Terry recounts. "Sara," he corrects himself. "Sara was there on that first night." This slip is significant. It places Ricardo before Sara; a narrative it has Sara collaborate when the film cuts to her account of living as an unhappy man in Cuba before traveling to New York to live as a woman. Ricardo is the origin and the ending, while Sara is an interruption in the middle. "There was something missing,” Terry of Sara, “He never knew what it was to be a man.” Sara becomes the non-masculine part that is always already cut away, in the story an eunuch, lacking and castrated from birth, a pre-op subject for Christ’s reparative operations.

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Naturalizing Authority

Ricardo’s latent “power” and Sara’s lingering “presence” in the film, however, remains dangerous to authorities and narratives that try to contain them. Holding images of Ricardo in his hand as he narrates the film, a mise en scène figurative of material dependences, Terry asserts the dominance of his dicta to frame and authorize the facta of the eunuch’s life story. Positioning himself as Christus Medicus, a kind of surgeon, Terry excuses laying hands on trans images and bodies by establishing a state of crisis that requires him to resolve. The poverty of trans women, the physical need for nourishment and medical care, becomes evidence of the supposed to lack of meaning without the dictum of the Church providing structure. This is especially true in cultures, medieval and modern, based on a “Gospel of Wealth” or “Prosperity Gospel” where financial success or failure is supposed to reflect degrees of God’s favor and wholesomeness.

Given the power of physical facts, the transformation of material circumstances is then key to defining Sara’s life as defined by a lack of resources and sexual wholeness and positioning Ricardo’s post-op life on the side of social fulfillment. This is done in part through the insertion of flashbacks to choice interviews with Sara from the Salt Mines. “I couldn’t wait to come [to the US],” says Sara in one talking head, “but now I am sorry I came. Because here if you have no money you are nothing.” The nothingness that Sara references is the absence of power and presence that money provides. Thus despite the promise of “the land of the free,” because she is denied material resources, she is not free to live as she will. As Sara says these haunting words, the screen freezes and the distinct voice of “Ricardo” from another scene speaks over the image. In a frozen moment before the change, we see the woman who is supposed to be “nothing” in this place linger as if to affirm that she remains an absent presence throughout the film. 

Indeed, a persistent irony of the eunuch transformation narrative is that its post-op “power” (Ricardo) is dependent on repeatedly invoking the “presence” of a supposedly erased and empty part of the pre-op past (Sara). In this, nothingness reveals itself not to be a state of non-being but rather the result of continual emptying to divide undesirable parts from the desired whole. Because nothing and being, part and whole, past and present are all operations in the same shape machine, the difference is not ontological but functional. While remaining intermeshed, the prior is made to be the unseen background to the latter’s foreground. This exchange is evident in when the film catches up the voice of Ricardo in the post-transformation time and space, where the still of Sara is replaced by the actively swaying Ricardo and the subtitle “Ricardo” appears on the bottom of the screen. “Dallas, Texas” appears on the screen as it pans over a dark room with dark furniture, where a Terry’s church thanks God for bringing Ricardo (into being) there. 

Through the ritualized operations of Chritus Medicus, Sara is made “nothing,” the missing something, to serve as a background for Ricardo’s thingness. Despite the dark enclosure that remains around them during the prayer, Terry calls the place where he brought Ricardo out from “a deep and dark hole.” This is where Sara worked the streets at night as a prostitute, injected drugs and hormones. Then, as later, she becomes a (penetrated) hole for the sake of her survival, but here she does so for pleasure as well. Sara’s location is indeed deep, as blood, semen, make-up, salt and semi-tangibles like love and community saturate each other, leaving traces of them in her blood. It is a dark space, relegated to the margins, taken off the street until the night work.[ii] It is this place, in the form of HIV/Aids that Sara carries deep in her body even as she migrates to Texas, remaining as the haunting material cause for Ricardo coming (into being) there. 

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Spiritualizing Authority

While Christus Medicus’s authority depends on asserting the essential naturalness of the post-operative trans body, the exemplum needs to continually show the scars of the operations in order to evidence its power. There is a kind of double-meaning when Terry stands beside his church with Ricardo, thanking God for his transformation, praising, “You have stuck him in the devil’s face and you have said, ‘look what I can do’” The words are telling. The material facts of Ricardo’s new body and circumstances are perpetually being shoved in the face of Christians so that Terry can effectively tell them “look what I can do.” Rather than merely disturbing established gender discourses, the materiality of the trans body grounds scriptural rhetoric in a sense of physical realness. Rather than hiding the fault lines of reconstructed gender, the scars of trans bodies were showed off as a tool of social control, even as they offered their own forms of resistance.

Sometimes the scar that is erased and shown as part of the operation of sharp machines are not enough, the exemplum occasionally needs to open wounds as a reminder of the dangerous facts of living without the security of its framing dictates. “HIV affected [Sara/Ricardo’s] mind,” recounts one of his trans friends in an interview. “He grew afraid of dying alone on the streets. The Church was the only way out.”[iii] It is perhaps too easy to paint Sara's life on the streets as free and uninhibited. Yet it was physical and social operations already acting on Sara that drove her into the hands of Terry's Church. Sara had long been trained to trade her body for what she needed. She traded her skin as a prostitute in order to gain the currency to exercise limited claims over her body: paying for food, clothing, hormones and heroin; each operating between violence and pleasure, necessity and choice. At HIV’s arrival into the network, however, this machine became unlivable and Sara came to desire the closed system of the Church.

The gated community of Terry’s Born Again Church allows admittance only at a high price, yet promises to give life and future as it takes away another. “I thank God that I have AIDs,” says Ricardo in an interview, sitting comfortably in a plush chair and warm sweater, “I wouldn’t have come off the street, and I wouldn’t have devoted myself to God. I’m not a fanatic, I just love the way God loves me.”[iv] Nowhere in the documentary does Ricardo claim that he is fully gave himself to the church, although he participates in it. He says that God participates in him through the care he is given. He does not say he loves God (or His Church), but how God loves him. Across in the exemplum of the eunuch, sharp machines reveal the contingency of parts and wholes, dicta and facta working together with the promise of mutual benefit. In this way, even as it makes its trans operatives to be docile, it teaches them a critical tool for exploiting systems. This practice of cooperating in ways that at once erase and sustain, subjugate and empower, builds into the trans operatives a powerful capacity for contingency.

Along these scars and contingencies lie fault lines where the cooperative trans body always keeps one foot out of the door, never fully deployed in any form or machine in which it participates. Those eunuch machines, those transgender operations, freed from the yoke of pre- and post-op demarcations become trans operatives (like double agents) who may use the feature which is most used to subjugate them, their mutability, to effect changes on both sides of supposedly strict divides of gender and faith. Such operatives may effect wider change that offers a greater variety of livable lives and in a new sense of Christus Medicus, to “love the way God loves.” Yet even as exemplum position its exemplary bodies to potentially open up the meaning of dicta, it is not an easy slash and burn. Changing machines, especially those working towards love, require cooperation.

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[i] (Aikin & Aparicio). 

[ii] Despite this failure to establish closure, once and for all, enclosure appears to be a pivotal desire for both Terry and Ricardo. McRuer notes that Ricardo’s environment is particularly closed-off and he is almost exclusively shown indoors, in houses, in Church or in a hospital (McRuer 116-119). Becoming sick from Aids, Ricardo appears anxious to exist in the supposed closed systems of church, house, and care.

[iii] ”(Aikin & Aparicio).

[iv] (Aikin & Aparicio).

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Eunuchs for the Kingdom

For there are eunuchs, 
that were so born from their mother's womb: 
and there are eunuchs, 
that were made eunuchs by men: 
and there are eunuchs, 
that made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom 
of heaven's sake.

Gospel of Matthew 19:12

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The following is a transcript from the "Hauntings" panel

at the 19th Century Upstate New York Religions and Their Heirs

the Annual Meeting of the Eastern International Region

of the American Academy of Religion

at Syracuse University, May 3-4, 2014

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In a key scene in the 1995 film, the Transformation -- documenting Sara, a trans prostitute, who, after contracting AIDs on the streets of New York, converts to Born Again Christianity and adopts the masculine persona "Ricardo" -- when the preacher, Terry, presents a reading of his pupil that brings transgender into the fold of scripture. 

“There is nothing that is in the Bible that isn’t covered. Jesus said in Matthew 19:12… ‘some are born eunuchs, some are made that way men, and some make themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’… what he is speaking of is that there are people who are born without the desire for the opposite sex, but that doesn’t mean that they are same-sex motived. Satan says you are man, woman or gay. God says that you are man, woman or eunuch.” (Aikin & Aparicio).

Previous trans theory and scholarship on the Transformation has paid little interest in Terry’s Biblical typologies of gender, accepting the preacher's own flat reading of Matthew 19:12. Yet, while Terry’s invocation of eunuchs stresses the idea of sexual repression, performing what Eve Sedgwick calls a "reparative reading" of the preacher’s scriptural citation could cite manifold historical roles of eunuchs as the representative of the departed, as the cauterized embodiments of absence, and as sex slaves. What if we take scripture to mean (and allow) more than one of its readers intends? How might Born Again Christianity better allow for the transformation of trans bodies than neoliberal identity politics? Why stop the queer drive for appropriation, gaping openness and unnatural love at the Church doors? These are not just abstract questions, but a critique generated by Ricardo/Sara as she trans-formed the language and properties of Christianity to allow for a more a livable life.

In this paper I unpack Christ's words in Matthew 19:12, using different readings and translations (e.g. the Latin Vulgate, American Protestantism, Terry's paraphrases), to demonstrate how the Transformation uses the three eunuchs of scripture to offer three different histories for gender change (I. Woman, II. Man, III. Self), that speak with and against three neoliberal modes of codifying transgender in the mid 1990s as an identity (I. Original, II. Progressive, III. Individualistic). By offering manifold images that contradict one another, these eunuch narratives disturb attempts to define and homogenize trans bodies by playing different essentialisms against one another. Through this dialectical approach, the scripture and film moves us towards an orientation to "the Kingdom" that is neither absolutely natural or social, natural or super-natural, but widens the gaps in these delimited discourses to allow for properties to flow between delimited bodies. The Trans-Eunuch uses their place in the threshold, always between and across communities, to sustain the contradictions that bind desire and abjection, presence and absence, life and death.

There remains a pressing need for transformation in contemporary trans studies. “Born This Way” politics and models of transgender as artificial, man-made men, don’t escape Matthew 19:12, and the paranoid imperative in queer culture to cut ourselves off from a Christian past in order to move forward depends on the logic of castration and baptism. However we slice it, the eunuch still stands in the dark, haunting our queer kingdom with uncomfortable trans Christian narratives, demanding a yet more gaping openness and more unnatural love, without promises that we’ll survive such contingent alliances fundamentally unchanged.

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I. From the Mother’s Womb

Trans bodies in the Transformation compel desires for origin stories by disturbing the sense of constancy by which neoliberalism makes its promises for coherent identity by embodying mutability. Lacanian psychoanalysis calls this crisis and desire the search for the Mother, a pun with a search for the capital-O "Other" (with God, or the Law of God, as the Other par excellence)  that promises an objective Real to undergird and generate our slippery subjectivity (Zizek, the Sublime Object of Ideology). The arrival at this metaphysical Womb in a sense promises to bring signifier and signified together, ending the free play of language as a series of specters of meaning, a Tomb, a figure-head that can be understood in religious terms as Apotheosis, the (M)other of a Trans persons essence (Zizek, the Monstrosity of Christ). When Terry signals that some eunuchs may be made, “de matris utero sic nati” (born from the mother's womb; Gospel of Matthew 19:12, Latin Vulgate), he gestures to the very desire for “Born this Way” origins that the film, and perhaps himself, desperately wants to assert for Sara, but ultimately denies. He is constructed like the historical eunuch, the dark body standing in the shadows, unnoticed until he is invoked to stand in for the departed Lord. He cauterizes a gap in power and meaning, representing the Law and presence of the absent Other. His manhood at once allows him to take this position, while his castration announces that he holds this position unnaturally, provisionally, partially.

The Transformation (1995) follows-up on Aikin’s and Aparacio’s previous work, the Salt-Mines (1990), documenting a community of “transvestites,” as they prostituted and propagated in warehouses, where New York kept its salt for winter. By the time of the Transformation, the salt mines were cleared out by HIV/AIDs. Into the remnants of this community enters Terry and his church, offering these trans bodies a place in Texas where they will be transformed into Christian men. Terry targets Sara, soon after she contracts HIV, promising housing and care as well as a place in heaven for eternity; if she is willing to be “Born Again” as Ricardo. Here The film meshes footage and interviews from different contradicting points (of view) in Sara / Ricardo’s life without settling on an original.

“Let’s talk about Ricardo,” says Terry at the film’s opening, over a black-screen., and then again “Let’s talk about Ricardo,” he repeats as the film cuts to him sitting in a white room, on a white couch with a photo-album in hand (Aikin & Aparicio). Opening it up, Terry describes and compares two images. On the right, a picture of Sara, and on the left, a picture of Ricardo, one that Terry narrates is from “right after he came off the street.” This repetition, of images and words, makes Sara and Ricardo present in this space, even when he is not there in the flesh. As if acknowledging the irony of power of this absent presence, the scene ends with fading back again from the white room to a black-screen and, and the appearance announcing the film’s title. This movement from white to black plays with notions of origin and finality, death and heavenly light.

When Terry’s narration continues, he is speaking over images of Sara from when she lived in New York, the subtitles “the Salt Mines, New York” printed on the screen (Aikin & Aparicio). “Ricardo was there that first night,” says Terry as the video pans onto her Sara sitting around by a fire putting on her make-up. “Sara was there that first night,” Terry corrects as “Sara” appears on the screen to identify her, helping to fix the disturbance of invoking both Ricardo and Sara with the origin position of the “first night.” 

The audio cuts over to Sara’s voice-over, lingering over the is image of her by the fire. “I am from Cuba… my name is Ricardo, my nickname, Sara” she says, speaking, alone, surrounded by white snow and concrete, repeating a physical context that resonates with Terry’s introduction (Aikin & Aparicio). As Terry brought us back to Sara in Sara in New York, Instead of Terry introducing Ricardo through Sara’s past locations, Sara, in a heavenly blank space, narrating Ricardo’s past. In these spaces, the figures take the position of the Womb/Tomb framing as though from without Time, the shifting narrative of a life of transformation.

“I couldn’t wait to come [to the US],” says Sara, “but now I am sorry I came. Because here if you have no money you are nothing” (Aikin & Aparicio).

With those haunting words, the screen freezes and the distinct voice of Ricardo (from another scene) , distinct from the tone of Sara, speaks over the image. before In this frozen moment before the change, we see the woman who is supposed to be “nothing” in this place linger as if to affirm that she remains an absent presence throughout the film, even as the documentary moves forward into the space of Ricardo in Texas. The central irony of the eunuch, is that his identity depends on a fertile masculinity that is invoked, only to be dismissed, but which lingers as a haunting presence. Who is Ricardo in Terry’s story, and the film’s story, if not at once the original image that Sara disturbed, and the tomb that Ricardo must constantly reference to narrate his conversion? She is made a “nothing” in order serve as an absent background for Ricardo’s thingness, the abjected image for his assertion of essence.

When the video catches up the audio, the still of Sara is replaced by the actively swaying Ricardo and the subtitle “Ricardo” appears on the bottom of the screen. Then “Dallas, Texas” appears on the screen as it pans over a dark room with dark furniture, where Terry’s church thanks God for bringing Ricardo (into being) there, in a dark room, thanking God for bringing Ricardo (into being) there. Despite the ironic dimness of the room, Terry calls the place (of Sara) where he brought Ricardo out from, “a deep and dark hole.” (Aikin & Aparicio).

Robert McRuer has connected this "darkness" to Sara’s  a place of deep interiority, related to her feminine space in New York City, the womb and tomb that gave birth to her transfeminine life and brought it to a close (Crip Theory 119-120). This is where Sara worked the streets at night as a prostitute, injected drugs and hormones; consumed meat cooked over a small fire, and opened herself up to a host of other environmental penetrations. Sara’s location is indeed "deep" as blood, semen, make-up, salt and semi-tangibles like love and community saturated each other’s holes, leaving traces of themselves on the street and in their blood. It is this place, in the form of HIV that Sara carries deep in her body even as she migrates to Texas. The search for the eunuch’s origins, serves to underline the specters of the past alive in the present. In this way, darkness is not negativity, but overflows like shadows in the night. It does not contain, but harbors Sara's radical openness that drives Ricardo to flee to the metaphorical castration and supposed closed ontology of the Church.

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II. Made that Way by Men

Antithetical to the matriarchal “Born this Way” model that makes up the first part of the Transformation, based on foundational essence, or origin, that continually withdraws from full presence, the later part of the film concentrates on the trans eunuch as an artificial creature, made in the act of castration that distinguishes the past from the present, the old from the new, via temporal cut, a never ending series of presents. According to cinema theorists, Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, film is poised to perform this model of time, replacing conceptions of being with the process of becoming, with a succession of images in film operating in time with a perpetually varied insistence on a new “now.” Film serves as another technology to create transsexuality (clothing, hormones, surgery) to create the new eunuch, “facti sunt ab hominibus” (made by men, Gospel of Matthew 19:12, Latin Vulgate). 

The logic of castration in the film becomes bound up in the Christian doctrine of Being covered in water, Bbaptism, where a is said to wash away past acts, allowing for a kind of death from which the person emerge person is submerged in in water, marking the end of the past as one is Born Again. Holding hands in a house, Terry leads thea prayer: “You have stuck him in the devil’s face and you have said, ‘look what I can do’” (Aikin & Aparicio). The praise is telling. Ricardo’s body, his new house, his household, and his Church is perpetually being shoved in the face of audiences so that Terry can tell them “look what I can do.” Terry becomes paranoid to constantly mark Sara’s transformation into Ricardo. 

Sick from Aids, Ricardo too appears anxious to exist in the supposed closed systems of the Church. “HIV affected his mind,” accounts one of Sara’s friends, “He grew afraid of dying alone on the streets. The Church was the only way out”(Aikin & Aparicio). Despite the openness of the streets, once HIV had made its circuit through the community, it formed a closed system that Sara/Ricardo wanted to escape. Impending death prompted a desire to be Born Again.

Despite the common affirmation of Baptism across Christian faiths, there are often different understandings and doubts around the power of such events to demarcate an absolute before or after, evidenced by what happens when Ricardo and his bride attempt to get married: “When I went there, the parish secretary said to me: you can’t get married in the church. When I asked her why she said: because of your past. I said: we all have a past. Don’t you guys say that Christ cleanses us of our sins?” (Aikin & Aparicio). When Ricardo’s voice-over arrives at the moment where he begins calling out the secretary on her past, the video cuts back to Ricardo in a chair being interviewed, gesturing to the camera and back at himself. Dressed in a hyper-masculine suit and holding an umbrella for his wife as they enter another church, Ricardo admits that this doubt over his change almost sent him back to New York, “to live as a woman, what I most wanted.” Even after being Born Again, Ricardo doubts the power of change in the face of a past that will not wash away.

Queers as well can be suspicious of the possibility of real change supposed by “facti sunt ab hominibus” model of transgender. Neoliberalism comes to essentialize gender and sexuality as much as their Christian counter-parts. The paradox at the heart of change asks for miracles or leaps of faith that many, like Jovanna, another of Sara’s friends, are not willing to affirm. 

“Ricardo’s transformation? If ‘he’ says, and he truly believes, that he is reborn and god made a miracle on ‘him’. But I guess in this day and age, that’s true: a miracle… I don’t know. I can’t accept that. So if you are asking me if I believe? Me? Personally? No. I don’t… How can you be a homosexual, a transvestite … and then you come back and tell me that you are no homosexual anymore?” (Aikin & Aparicio).

However difference marks the body, real change remains regarded as fundamentally beyond the power of man. The medieval adage: God makes and man shapes appears adapted to secular logic.

The Transformation takes on the uncertainty of castration-logic in how it intercuts scenes from the past, over-lapping sound and video from different moments, allowing Sara and Ricardo , to allow them to speak to one another. The effect is disturbing. It is is unsettling exactly when is the scene is we are watching and to whom should we should be listening to more closely? By cutting up the Salt Mines and the new documentary scenes, detaching and stitching together different video and audio tracks, the film-makers are able to demonstrate their own abilities to shape the identity of Sara and Ricardo through there positioning of interviews.

This cinematic surgery is especially. evident and ethically implicating in the final scenes where Ricardo admits that Sara’s past remained present for many years in Ricardo’s present. Driving down the road before his death, Ricardo re-narratesgives the last word of the film.

“I repented for my past life... now when I think about everything I lived I remember some of it as beautiful. Because the real truth is that I enjoyed it. That’s what I would have liked to be: a woman. If I could still have the choice, if I could change my life right now– even now that I have my wife and everything- I would chose to be a woman”   (Aikin & Aparicio).

In this confession, Ricardo does not deny any of the particular moments of his life: all pasts exist together. The scene fades to black as white text announces Ricardo’s death. This name above two dates separate by a line points to the multiplicity of times he existed in, past presences haunt the line in between. In this moment, the film itself reveals itself as a tomb stone, an apparatus summoning up the departed, not only Sara, but Ricardo. Ricardo’s desire for Sara is checked by contingency: “if I could still have a choice.” Overruling change is impossible. In this way, Ricardo joins Sara in the dark absence of the past. Only more changes, more castrations, more cuts, films cuts, and scars that never close. Choices still exist, but shift to the hands of those who shared in the eunuch’s transformative story. We become eunuch-makers, implicating ourselves in crafting what they become and the future of their pasts. 

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III. Eunuchs for the Kingdom

From the open womb, to the open wound, we are left with the open grave of Ricardo, one he faces down when he becomes what Terry invokes “sunt eunuchi se ipsos castraverunt propter regnum caelorum” (making one’s self a eunuch for the Kingdom; Gospel of Matthew 19:12, Latin Vulgate). What if repression turns into surrender, as trans-formation moves from the act of a nature, from the act of an external corporation, into an act in which all our selves are implicated? What potential lives and dangers might come of this opening up form to transformation? What vows must we let go to allow an even more gaping unnatural love?

“I thank God that I have AIDs,” says Ricardo, sitting comfortably in a plush chair and warm sweater, “I wouldn’t have come off the street, and I wouldn’t have devoted myself to God. I’m not a fanatic, I just love the way God loves me” (Aikin & Aparicio). Ricardo never claims that he does not fully give himself to fully given himself to Christianitythe church, although he participates in it. The Church and God in turn participate in him,him; through thehis disease and the reception of a home and the care he is given. Ricardo connects this exchange as forming a contingent alliance. He does not not even say he loves God, but that he lLoves how God loves him. While a change in location and time has passed, Ricardo remains tied to Sara through the properties (the disease, desire, faith, love) that runs flow between through both of them. The relation between economic “property” and qualitative “property” is no mere accident of words. A being’s claim (or access) to a given mechanism determines the degree to which that thing operates in their life. 

Ricardo testifies how He surrenders his gender, sexuality, location and name for the manifestation of other desires. Once again sitting in his comfortable chair and sweater, Ricardo keeps self-narrating:the exchange of properties literally transforms Sara’s dream into his reality: “To me this is like a dream. I am a poor man. The poorest of the poor. But now I feel rich… rich in love. … When I was a transvestite, people would say to me ‘Sara you are so beautiful.’ But they didn’t know how hurt I was inside; how much I wanted a home” (Aikin & Aparicio).Ricardo is rich now, to which he adds (or corrects), “rich in love.” 

Ricardo’s love is manifest in the riches that brought him off the street, given to him by Terry and by his wife Betty. This alliance operates in the background of the scene, literally, as Ricardo’s men’s clothes and house repeats the same white colorations that originally marked Terry’s first narration. These trappings, if not the exact same objects as Terry possesses, reflect his standards of masculinity, race and sexuality. Ricardo comes into being out of this exchange of properties - bearing the cost of acquisition. 

The contingency of Ricardo’s properties are visible in his closest contacts. As much as Betty, his wife, functions to perpetuate the activities that distinguish Ricardo’s life from Sara’s, she nonetheless becomes an operative between these identities. Opening not only her resources to him but allowing him in to effect her through his experience, love and disease. Following a piece from their wedding video, Ricardo addresses the camera in an interview on how Betty negotiated a relationship with her now husband. “Betty, there can be nothing between us,” Ricardo recounts saying, “Why not? She asked “Because I was a Transvestite for many years. I even have breasts still. And I am HIV positive.” She said, “I know it all, and I don’t care”  (Aikin & Aparicio). This negotiation emphasizes the unnaturalness of their union and exchange of properties. Betty is not a pre-given part of Ricardo, or a mere tool in his transformation, but an intentional operative in a shared life. 

In becoming Ricardo’s wife, she embraces not just him as a person but also his body. They do not have frequent sex, Betty admits, but when they do, she would contact his breasts and, potentially, HIV+ semen (Aikin & Aparicio). “Are you sure you don’t mind my being HIV+” asks Ricardo before their wedding, stressing to Betty the danger of sharing properties (and fluids) between their bodies. 

B: “I love you & I don’t care about your AIDs…We’ve already talked about this many times, & you know I have great faith in God. But I love you & I want to be with you!” 

R: “Now everything is fine, but if I get sick… I hope you won’t abandon me in the hospital then.” (Aikin & Aparicio).

Ricardo’s uneasiness around the promise Betty makes to him dwells on the instability of properties in the body, (especially the HIV+ body). 

Transformation, if it produces something new, cannot be known in advance. Knowing these dangers, Betty’s “faith” and “love” distinguish from Terry’s biblical predictions. Betty recalls that they have “talked about this many times” and will likely continue to have check-ins. Unpredictability requires promises and love be committed not to eternal forms but to all the possible changes that body might undergo across time. Love, she says, is not once and for all, because like any alliance, it is contingent on work. 

“Love is not just something that just happens in the beginning. Love is something that continues to grow. But love is not just something that’s a feeling either. Love is a commitment…. that means when things aren’t going well you are still going to be there.”  (Aikin & Aparicio).

Love in this sense, is not natural. That Betty will “love” Ricardo even when “things aren’t going well” or if he “get[s] sick” evidences that they constitute an operative alliance, continuing to work at it over time. Every exchange between Betty and Ricardo add a distinct property to their shared being: memories, joys, and promises. This ability to sustain through change constitutes what Betty calls growth, adding things unnaturally together at the point of contact and love. Things do not grow in the one direction forever, but branch off from one another, even as they share roots. Remember Ricardo’s final statement of the film, that he would live as a woman “even now that I have my wife and everything.” The growth of the disease positions Ricardo “on the way out” and leaves him surrendering to all the unnatural and inextricable alliances that pull at his body: time, change, gender, sexuality, life, death.

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Works Referenced

Aikin, Susana and Carlos Aparicio. The Salt Mines. PBS. 1990.

Aikin, Susana and Carlos Aparicio. The Transformation. PBS. 1995.

Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, trans. London: Burns Oates and Washbourne, 1920.

Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1907.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: the Movement Image. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press,

McRuer, Robert. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York: New York University Press, 2006.

Munoz, Jose. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minnesota: Minnesota Press, 1999.

Sedgwick, Eve. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2003.

Scholz, Piotr O. Eunuchs and Castrati: a Cultural History. John A Broadwin and Shelley L Frisch, trans. Princeton, UK: Markus Weiner Publishers, 1999.

Taylor, Gary. Castration: an Abbreviated History of Western Manhood. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Tougher, Shuan. The Eunuch in Byzantine History and Society. New York: Routledge, 2010.

Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. New York: Verso, 1989.

Zizek, Slavoj and John Milbank. The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic. Creston Davis, ed. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2009.

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