Trans Literature: Transgender as a Trope in Cisgender Stories

"I see you shiver with anticipation...
I'll remove the cause but not the symptom"

Dr. Frank N Furter
Rocky Horror Picture Show

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Introduction

Part 1 of this three part talk will consider "Transgender as a Trope" in cisgender stories in order to provide a background for the norm into which trans literature has arisen and also to articulate the particular limitations and failures that make trans narratives and trans methods of reading necessary. Admittedly, there are stories told by cisgender people where the trans person is more fleshed out but these are rare exceptions and will be discussed more in the next section as they represent early participation in trans literature as a literary archive. As will be seen, for most history even trans literature about trans folk was rarely written by trans folk. Thus, the focus of this section is to consider the ways that trans figures typically appear when they do appear in cisgender stories. 

In each case, there is often a pornographic or fetishistic erotica that epitomizes each trope as trans characters are frequently invoked as figures for body genre narratives. Body genre narratives are those that excite the body in some way: horror (fear), comedy (laughter), thriller (anxiety), or porn (arousal). Thus, there is an apparent bent towards the gothic, the fantastical, the comedic, and the pornographic in how trans tropes are constructed and used by cisgender narratives. 

Additionally, each trope has evident connections to hierarchies of power, especially between the sexes. This makes sense, because trans tropes are typically used in the service of cisgender stories. The trans figure and trope is thus primarily or merely a device to move the story forward in some way. Because most narratives depend on conflicts of power in some way, trans tropes are often used as ways of humbling, changing, or empowering cisgender people. Also, there tends to be a sustained power differential between the cis and trans person as a way to explain why the story is not and should not be taken over by a trans figure no matter how charismatic. Indeed, those trans figures who tend to be the most charming and powerful are typically those imagined with malevolent intent, because they are a danger or threat to the integrity of the cisgender narrative.

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It's a man shouts Ace Ventura at the climax of his detective story

as he strips naked the villain, revealing her tucked genitals

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The Trap

A staple of cisgender stories that require a dramatic twist, "The Trap" is the name that cis folk have given to transgender people who pass as their identified gender until the moment that the narrative needs to reveal their trans-ness and reassert their birth gender.

In crime stories, "The Trap" provides both a red-herring and a last minute twist. Early in the narrative, the trans person may be included as a suspect or accomplice but will be discarded because the detective and audience do not clock their trans-ness. Midway through the narrative, they are put into the background. Then, at a dramatic climax, the protagonist and audience discover the trans person's trans-ness, allowing certain pieces of evidence to click into place: semen samples, lip-stick, or a deep voice. Going back to the trans person, the confrontation is usually performed as an unmasking, Scooby-Doo style, where the wig is removed or the dead-name is named. The trans person gets angry, often breaking gender norms in some way that signals to the audience that the trap has been disarmed.

"The Trap" is usually found in detective stories but may be present in other narratives to provide melodrama or comedy. For instance, Ace Ventura famously has a trans "trap" villain who is not only revealed at the end but publicly stripped naked and ridiculed. Even more "classy" comedies like Frasier include an episode that involves the protagonist being arrested for picking up a woman he did not know is a sex worker and did not know is trans. In this case, the "Trap" is sprung midway, complete with her suddenly using a deeper voice and her large manly muscles unveiled once she is brought into the full light, so Frasier can be doubly embarrassed by his friends and family for daring to help a trans woman out of the rain.

To this day, "The Trap" remains a common term of derision for trans-folk. Often they are framed as threats to heterosexual men's heterosexuality, acting like folk-lore which teaches them to maintain the power and integrity of their manhood so they do not get "trapped." "Trap" porn is also a popular sub-genre that positions sex with trans folk as an act only ever performed when the trans person is so passing as to be indistinguishable and also the sexual aggressor taking advantage of the cisgender man, who wouldn't sexually engage with them otherwise. This way, cis het men can have their manly man cake and eat some trans cake too!

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Ursula the Sea Witch was famously based on the performer Divine

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The Mystical Drag Queen

The mystical drag queen is in many ways inspired by the tradition of mystical black men and women. This is not accidental as drag queens have long been associated with gay and trans folk of color. The mystical drag queen is framed as a kind of shaman, a being that exists between the normal world and the queer extraordinary world. 

Within cisgender narratives, mystical drag queens tend to provide advice, threats, or services for the cis protagonists. Typically, when the mystical drag queen is framed as a figure of danger, she will exist somewhere dark and secluded where the cis hero must seek them out or else find themselves by accident. She will often broker some deal with the hero to help them along on their path or back on their feet. This may involve some level of sacrifice, change, or embarrassment. After all, the mystical drag queen is a figure of transitions and liminality. She always takes with one hand as she gives with another. The more benevolent mystical drag queen on the other hand may be found out on the streets, usually harassed and marginalized by the wider community. Because she is a humiliated figure, she is also humbled, asking little from the cis protagonist beyond the bare level of respect and kindness.

The Mystical Drag Queen is found in fantasy and horror, especially in the nefarious role, but may be akin to a gay best friend in more realist narratives, especially when she takes on the humbled benevolent. Among the pseudo-villains, some of the most famous examples include Dr. Frank N. Furter from Rocky Horror Picture Show and Ursula from the Little Mermaid. Both figures occupy dark haunts and draw the heroes into a world of sorted sexual and moral transgressions. They bring them across some threshold of normative limitation, before setting them back on the road transformed. Benevolent mystical drag queens include the cast of To Wong Fu Thanks for Everything Julie Newmar, Wanda from Neil Gaiman's A Game of You, and Sophia from Orange is the New Black. In both these cases, the trans woman or drag queens of color (admitting one white leader in the case of the former film) arrive into the lives of the put upon white woman. They provide advice and kindness, helping them rediscover their womanhood and even their sexuality before disappearing into the background. Above all, it is made clear that this is not the story nor even the world of the mystical drag queen, who must be content to exist on the margins of the story as a threat or helper.

To this day, even as trans folk are beginning to be included in more media they remain side characters who exist in a world that touches upon but is not wholly the same as the other cisgender characters. In some cases, they have replaced the role of the gay best friend as the gay or lesbian characters are upgraded to more complex fleshed out roles or excluded entirely with the trans person taking on the representative weight of all LGBTQ people. After all, the mystical drag queen is fundamentally a signifier of a wider darker more morally complex universe that exists just outside the fairly normative scripts of the main story.

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Google "sissification" or "gender transformation" without Safe Search

and be prepared for a massive archive of erotica

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The Sissy

The Sissy is an old staple character within narrative for the reason that most literature has been produced by men within various forms of patriarchal hierarchies. The sissy represents the failed or corrupted man, the man turned woman. The sissy has been studied by feminists as a symptom of patriarchal definitions of gender that set men opposite and above women, with the sissy being any man who demonstrates a trait shared with women. The sissy has also been studied by queer theory as a symptom of homophobic power structures that demand the performance of hyper-heterosexuality and toxic masculinity and eschew gayness as sissies who embody a disorder or failure in this system. Yet on the face, the Sissy is a definitively trans character, a man who has become a woman, often against his will, making him a victim of women, gay men, trans-ness, or even communism, liberalness, or higher education.

Because the sissy as a target made up of feminine men (i.e. non-hyper masculine men) and gay men has been so extensively studied, I will consider the particular form of sissy trope that tends to involve some sort of overt trans identification, even if this identification comes only after harassment, abuse, seduction, or some sort of literal or metaphorical castration. The most overt example of the sissy appears in pornography or erotica, usually involving a domineering woman or domineering women who decide to punish or curb the man into a sissy. In this case, the sissification embodies the loss of the man's power, represented by his loss of man's power. Often, the domineering woman will eventually leave the sissy for a "real man." At a certain point in this process of depravity, the sissy learns to embrace the new life given and submits to the role of woman, often become the subordinate to some other men as well. Yet the process of sissification need not always be overt as pornography makes it out to be. Some sissies are marked as feminized by subtler signs, such as wearing a frilly cooking apron, crying at romantic comedies, speaking in a higher voice, or some other feminine affectation. These sissies likewise loss their manhood because they lost their man's power to women. They cook because their wives make them. They get called "mom" because their wives are working out of the house. Their wives "wear the pants in the family" and because of hetero patriarchal assumptions, this demotes the man to the role of the woman or sissy.

The non-erotic sissy is often represented in narratives that understand themselves as operating under realism with a progressive bent, usually framed by comedy as a way to defuse tensions or as a way of self-consciously apologizing to conservative audiences. Indeed, the sissy is often represented within more conservative narratives and media as a way of marking liberal men (now called "lib cuck" men) who have lost their proper masculine traditions and thus regressed into the women they increasingly resemble. Yet even when presented by liberal or progressive media, the sissy is still presented for laughs because although there is a desire for diversity or for virtue-signaling, the cisgender story tellers are not comfortable with this diversity or are not confident that their audiences will be comfortable. An example of this comes also from the comedy Frasier which includes a couple scenes where trans characters are referenced (but rarely shown), especially by the eccentric liberal woman of the core cast (Daphne) when she references having dinner with her "transvestite uncle." When asked whether the "uncle" lives as a woman full-time, she says, "oh no, his congregation would never stand for it." This wording and exchange, concluding in a laugh-track, demonstrates how even when a narrative is trying to signal diversity and even compassion for trans people in their networks, they often cannot help but undercutting the virtue move with a joke at the expense of the trans people. The sissy in this way is the acceptable trans person only because the sissy represents that shameful part of the self or of the family, which we want to include but not without reminding everyone of the proper patriarchal pecking order - pun intended.

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The Cast from To Wong Fu

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Next up: Transgender as Text

Okay, so we can see many of the problems that have come from letting cisgender people, especially cisgender men, tell the stories of trans people, especially trans women. One of the evident responses to these mischaracterizations, reductions, and caricatures is to allow trans people to tell their own stories or at least to put the trans person at the center of the narrative. What happens when trans people become the subjects of trans narratives? How does transgender affect narrative? How do different narratives affect how transgender is structured and understood? Stay tuned to find out!

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Chandler's "Dad" from Friends

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The Cisgender Turn: The Scribe's View of Eleanor Rykener

"...pro seperali examinatione coram dictis maiore et aldermannis super premissa fienda et audienda etcetera."

The Interrogation of Eleanor Rykener
London 1394

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Introduction

On December 11th, the scribe of the Plea and Memoranda Roll A34, m2, observed and composed the interrogation of Eleanor Rykener and John Britby. Unlike John Britby who only recounts his turn upon Rykener, the scribe maintains a longer gaze and records multiple turns in her life story. The scribe is not named within the text but his presence and actions are made evident by the document he composes.

Considering the scribe as a viewpoint given for Eleanor Rykener is important in two respects. First, it acknowledges that the document which records the interrogation is not unbiased and neutral. The text has a subjective view point, embodied, composed, and facilitated by the scribe. It is likely that the scribe would have been male and would have been cisgender. Even if he was not, his text demonstrates features that follow cisgender conventions. The scribe participates in and reinforces the cisgender turn even if he himself was not cisgender. Second, by marking the scribe as an active subjective cisgender viewpoint, this brings the habits and alliances of subsequent scholarship by cisgender medievalists into a new light. For instance, if the trans woman calls herself Eleanor but the cisgender scribe calls her John, then generations of scholars call her John, this suggests an impulse among cis scholars to take the word of a cis scribe over that of a medieval trans woman.

Just like the scribe writes himself out of the record, the scribe also participates in unwriting, unspeaking, and un-transing transgender from the medieval record. By considering the relevance of the unspeakable vice, the "nephandum," we can understand how medieval trans lives are made inarticulate and insubstantial by scribes and scholars that articulate cis history (cistory) at the expense of trans history.

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Un-Speaking

Cisgender history (cistory) has made much of sodomy and transgender being unspeakable, what the scribe calls, "nephandum." Yet the inability for speech and language is not essential to either the sexual acts or gendered being of Eleanor Rykener. Rather, this silence demonstrates the way in which trans language has been disabled by the cisgender turn. Cisgender history (cistory) is thus a work of composition which comes into being as much by what is selected for inclusion or articulation as what is excluded. In this way, cistory is like the image of the woman picking dicks from a tree in another infamous medieval manuscript. Such an image represents how the cisgender turn sees all fruit as penises ripe for the picking but ignores both the other fruits, the other possible interpretations of the strange fruit, and the pickers who is forgotten in favor of penises they pick. Everything looks like a nail from the point of view of a hammer. Everyone with a penis looks like cisgender men from the point of view of a cisgender man, including a transgender woman. Such a perspective and account must then be considered not as an unbiased and neutral recording of history but as the subjective construction of cis history through the un-transing of trans history which is rendered unspeakable.

In the first case, the cisgender turn cannot articulate language for transgender because of a certain surprise which indicates both disgust and desire. This surprise is evident in the various genres in which transgender tends to be represented in cisgender media, all of which incite the body in some way, called body genres: horror (fear), detective stories (anxiety/suspense), pornography (arousal), and comedy (laughter). We see how this impulse is present both in the presumably cisgender scribe and cisgender scholar of Eleanor Rykener when Carolyn Dinshaw argues that the Plea and Memoranda roll has all the characteristics of a "fabliau." In cisgender literature in the Middle Ages and today, it is a given that there is something funny about realizing that one's sexual partner is a trans woman. Yet the courtroom setting of the interrogation also suggests something of a crime procedural and detective story, as the scribe records how the cis man and trans woman were detected, "detectus," by law enforcers. This suggests a sort of anxiety or suspense which the confessions will resolve. Yet the sexual exchange at the center of the interrogation also reflects the pornographic genre of the text. Not only is the unspeakable vice being named, it is being elaborated to an extreme degree by Rykener's prolonged confession wherein she names her numerous partners. The scribe's recording becomes something like the writing of an erotica as he puts Rykener's numerous unspeakable acts into language. Indeed, even the interrogation of her gender as a trans woman demonstrates the cisgender turns unspoken interest in her embodiment. Does the scribe look at her and describe her with anxiety or fear? His choice of Latin suggests an ambivalence in regards to pronouns, as Latin allows him to compose her story with minimal references to her gender. Is he aroused by her speaking the unspeakable? Is he amused or laughing? If the word unspeakable, "nephandum," is truly central to the scribe's view of Eleanor Rykener, then it is a word that defines how the cisgender turn often stands wordlessly stunned and affected by the transgender body.

In the second case, the cisgender turn composes the transgender life as unspeakable because cis scribes and scholars do not want to have to find a way to speak (or read) trans life. Transgender is made unspeakable, "nephandum," in cistory. Then insofar as it finds its way into cistory, transgender becomes un-transed. The scribe participates in this un-transing by identifying Eleanor Rykener primarily by her deadname, John Rykener, "Johannes Rykener." Although she introduces herself into the record as Eleanor, "Elianoram," the scribe choses to name her previously as John and then to repeat the name John no less than twenty-five times. Thus, despite the ambivelence that the scribe records regarding Rykener's gender and pronouns, the name, "John," is unambiguously decided upon by the scribe. It might be argued that the scribe was compelled by the societal norms and language, giving him no extant alternatives. Or that the scribe was compelled by the professional and legal demands of his job to refer to Rykener by her name of record. Yet that defense would only further emphasize how the scribe's view of Eleanor Rykener participates in the cisgender turn. The suggestion that the scribe was compelled by preexisting conditions which default to cisgender standards and erase, exclude, or correct transgender facts demonstrates how the cisgender turn is a powerful idealogical force. Transgender people in the twenty-first century still have to deal with medical and legal authorities referring to them by their deadname because of the excuse or compulsion to use the given name of record. A trans person's deadname is given to them first and their chosen transgender name is given second. Chronologically, the cisgender name gets its turn first and the transgender name gets its turn second. But the insistence on the deadname even after the trans person corrects the record, such as when Rykener names herself as Eleanor for the court, demonstrates how the cisgender turn is an active force that distorts the facts in order to bring them in line with cisgender standards. Eleanor Rykener is un-transed by the record into being John. Cisgender scholars, even queer cis scholars, further participate in the cisgender turn by following the naming conventions of the scribe, likewise calling Rykener, "John," despite Eleanor's recorded act of self-naming. Cistorians prefer to follow the pattern of cis authorities and scribes rather than follow those offered by trans persons. This is why cistory is not merely history written by cis people. If history is the ideal presentation of the past as it was, this is not what cis scribes and scholars do by manipulating facts and narratives to fit into cisgender norms. Rather, the warping and un-transing of the past to accord with cisgender stories and histories is not history but cistory. Perhaps the transgender turn likewise presents a subjective view-point in contradicting and correcting the cisgender turn, yet meeting turn for turn will be necessary if we are ever to begin to see the ways cistory has warped our collective histories and made our past unspeakable.

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Beyond Male and Female: On Transgender & Non-Binary Genders

“We have always existed, 
and we will continue to fight 
until we are all safe and free.”

Laverne Cox

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Course Description and Outcomes

Gender is personal and political. Gender is not just a set of physical or mental characteristics but an ongoing social conversation between identities, expressions, and relations that fight to order how we define bodies, how we divide bodies, and what roles or values these bodies will possess. Histories and narratives form and repeat when readers follow debates on gender in society. These narratives influence cultural imagination with tales that reflect and resist public concepts of gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, disability, and class. In this seminar, we explore how rhetoric and worldviews have worked together to form diverse genres of texts and embodiment that have come to be collected under the name, “transgender,” as well as other forms of gender beyond the binary categories of “male” and “female.” By tracing a cultural genealogy that spans the western Middle Ages to today, we map how texts in the history of gender reinforce and resist mechanisms of control. This course asks: how is gender not just something you have but something you do? How does the doing of gender shape your embodiment? How do the lack or existence of disability access and gender-neutral bathrooms create and enforce divisions without active intentionality in the community that occupies the place? As part of the course, participants will engage with a variety of religious, scientific, and cultural texts, including selections from the Bible and Greco-Roman mythology, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), films such as the Danish Girl and the Transformation, as well as the biographies of Caitlyn Jenner and Jazz Jennings.

Course Objectives (Reflecting SAGES Learning Outcomes)
By the end of the course you will be able to

• Sympathize across multiple perspectives in academic conversations 
• Analyze ethical debates and offer critical inquiries 
• Research relevant historical contexts and scholarship 
• Argue in written and oral forms according to the dialectic method 
• Honor the diversity of genders and be communicate them clearly

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Selections from the Reading List

Beyond Male and Female (or as my students say the B[a]MF seminar) is divided into two primary sections: the Binary and Beyond the Binary. The first half of the class focuses on the history of the gender binary, where does it come from and why do we use it? These questions are tackled over two subsections focused around Religion and Science. Throughout this section, students analyze the arguments historically made in support of the binary and learn to see the cracks in the argument as well. In the second section, Beyond the Binary, the course focuses on issues in the Intersex and Transgender communities. The intersex section begins with mythic origins, moves through modern science, and then concludes with two memoirs. One memoir tells the story of a non-binary intersex person and the other one tells the story of a "trans" woman intersex person). The final weeks of class are spent examining transgender and its intersections with disability, class, race, and age. How does being transgender influence how we experience other parts of our lives and how do other parts of our identity influence how we experience transgender?

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Section 1: the Binary

Religion

• The Bible, 
• “Genesis 1-2,” 
• “Leviticus 21-23,” 
• “Isaiah 56,”
•  “Matthew18-19” 
• Nicholas Constas (Trans.), The Life of Saint Marinos 
• Susana Aiken and Carlos Aparicio (dir.), The Transformation (1996) 
• Caitlyn Jenner, Secrets of My Life

Science

• Heldris of Cornwall, The Romance of Silence
• Dylan Scholinski, The Last Time I Wore A Dress
• Tom Hooper (dir.), The Danish Girl (2016) 
• Leelah Alcorn, Transgender Queen of Hell 
• Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5) 

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Section 2: Beyond the Binary

Intersex and Non-Binary Identities

• Plato, “Tale of Aristophanes,” 
• Ovid, “Tale of Hermaphroditus” 
• Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body, 
• “Dueling Dualisms” 
• “Do Sex Hormones Really Exist?” 
• Hida Viloria, Born Both
• Thea Hillman, Intersex 

Transgender and Intersections of Disability, Race, Class, and Age

• Eli Clare, Exile and Pride 
• Janet Mock, Redefining Realness 
• Jazz Jennings, Being Jazz

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Trans Saints: Imitatio Christi in The Last Time I Wore A Dress

“The more I talked to Jesus, the more I liked him, 
and the less crazy he seemed. ”

Dylan Scholinski
The Last Time I Wore A Dress

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Imitation as Counter-Reality

Imitation is not only a matter of performance but embodiment and circumstances. In "Body Talk: Gestures of Emotion in Late Medieval England," Paul Murphy writes on how Christ fashioned the model by which the Imitatio Christi would follow in later generations. For Christ too, this was a process of engaging with and reacting to the world, to the point of suffering and death. "The cross forces Jesus to take on the shape of the cross," observes Murphy, "and as such, humankind are to be considered exemplars of that shape just as they are to imitate Christ's example" (Murphy 2016). Our bodies take on the shape of our sufferings. Imitatio Christi then is not only how we respond to God but how we respond to the world. The figurative cross-section is visible in how the Imago Tranvesti can move toward the Imago Dei at the same time that it is set apart and marginalized by the Imago Mundi. As a result, while postmedieval generations of trans persons may find themselves living outside of Christian community and faith, nonetheless they can come to share in the suffering of Christ (or Christ figures). In this way, while occupying a point in the modern era, trans persons can find themselves within a living narrative of medieval continuity. Murphy observes that for late medieval Christians, "It did not suffice to imitate Christ in his moral teachings, but rather it was demanded that a sensual and emotional activity be completed to better understand the sufferings of the Passion" (Murphy 2016). Unlike models of Christianity that emphasizes otherworldly purity, the Imitatio Christi of saints emphasize sharing a lived position of suffering and opposition to an unjust world. In this vein, one does not become a saint by excelling in worldly virtue but by opposing the norms of the world in ways that bring one closer to the suffering of others, particularly the suffering of Christ. Following this tradition within the hagiographic genre, Dylan Scholinski's memoir, the Last Time I Wore A Dress, surprisingly makes an overt move toward affirming an Imitatio Christi from within the secular circumstances of the mental hospital. For Scholinski is gifted with a chance to relate to a living Christ figure in the form of a fellow mental patient who believes himself to be Jesus Christ himself. Through their shared sufferings by a world that rejects them, the two form a conjoined Imitatio Christi and Imiatio Transvesti that gestures back toward a medieval tradition of imitation even as it responds to very modern circumstances.

Imitation gives a sense of counter-reality or non-reality. The madness of a man who claims to be Jesus Christ is diagnosed as disordered in this sense. It is not-real that he is Christ, therefore to live as though he is Christ is sick. Likewise, the "girl" who lives like a "man" is regarded as imitation of the same non-reality. Imitation as a form of fakeness is then the justification for the asylum locking up youths. Scholinski's memoir however argues against this understanding and argument on imitation. "Even if we'd looked up Gender Identity Disorder, I don't think anyone would have tried to fake it," Scholinski writes. "We knew the rules: pacing, screaming, hallucinating and vomiting were okay. Not okay was walking around with a scarf in your hair, for a boy, or being like me, a girl who never felt comfortable in a dress" (24). A man knows that he is not to say he is Jesus Christ unless he is Jesus Christ. A youth knows that he is not to live like a man unless he is a man. The rules are evident and understood. The other things Scholinski lists are also understood as unacceptable but for different and related reasons. Pacing, screaming, living out visions or fashion statements, even vomiting are all forms of resistance. They are ways that those incarcerated for being fake and unreal assert the reality and transgressive power. In screaming and vomiting the body literally unleashes their internal disgust with the reality being shoved down their throats. In pacing, as will explore shortly, the body walks and may even cross the limits of freedom. Imitation may be counter-real in another sense than non-real. Imitation may be a way of changing reality, asserting alternative ways of being, living, and relating.

The movement of people within the mental hospital causes unexpected relations to occur and over time patients and staff began to imitate one another. Indeed, at first Scholinski tried to assert a level of superiority and distance between himself and other patients. In this way, in his first encounters he imitated the role of staff more than fellow patient. "Being in a mental hospital was a boon for my counseling skills," writes Scholinski, "although after a while I got confused." Over time of meeting the personalities of the hospital, Scholinski began to like them and even began to question how alike they were or could be. A trans youth incarcerated with persons with different diagnoses put them all into similar positions, made similar demands, and forced them into similar routines. Likewise, as with many friendships, relationships with the other patients as peers brought Scholinski to regard himself more as an equal with them. Yet the more he began to associate and imitate other patients, the more the divide between himself and others, trans and mad, began to dissolve. He began asking how he appeared to others. "Maybe I don't know I'm insane," Scholinski wondered. "They don't know they're insane, so why should I know?" (20). After reflecting how life in a mad house made him question what madness actually is, Scholinski describes how the system reacted to such discussions arising between patients like him and Jesus. "The staff discourage this sort of questioning," writes Scholinski. "They liked the line between sane and insane to be perfectly clear" (19). The act of turning someone into a saint can be a transgressive move. In the eye of society, those who have been set apart are marginalized because they resist normative traits and values. The work of re-narrating the mad house into a place where one may meet Jesus Christ (or one representation of Him) and the mad as perhaps worthy of imitation turns the system of madness inside out. 

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Imitation as Solidarity

"'I am Jesus,' he said. 'I Know it's hard to believe, but I am Jesus.'" What draws Jesus and Scholinski together is that both of them believe themselves to be persons that other people do not believe them to be. In the case of Scholinski, the butch soon-to-be trans man is isolated by a world that insists that he is (and should be) a girly girl. Jesus's case is more specific. Jesus is isolated by the world because they deny he is Christ. Ironically, the world also denied that Jesus Christ was who he said he was. In both cases, it is as much the belief of the patient as much as the disbelief (or alternative belief) of the doctors that set them apart from the rest of society. Despite the differences between Scholinski and this modern Jesus (or the biblical Jesus for that matter) there is a shared subject position: men who believe they are other than the world believes. Over time, this shared physical and social position turns into a shared ethos of resistance and support. They began to believe in each other. Scholinski writes, "the more I talked to Jesus, the more I liked him, and the less crazy he seemed. Zealous, but not dangerous. I could imagine him in the outside world, preaching. He'd probably help some people." The argument that Scholinski employs here is a traditional one in the transgender community as well as Christianity: 'so what if you don't believe what I believe? If it makes my life better and doesn't hurt others, what harm is it in letting me be?' Jesus offers the trans youth a way of believing in themselves and affirming others. Beyond their ontological claims, these assertions for alternative networks of care and support when the authorized system turns against those under its care. If the world regards them as disordered sinners, they will be saints for one another.

Sharing in the discourse of Jesus, the trans youth begins to imitate him in various ways, forming a unique kind of Imitatio Christi. A signature feature of this Jesus (much like the Jesus of the Bible) was that he was an unstopping walker. Jesus would walk the halls to the limit of his capacities. In this walking, Scholinski followed Jesus. "A couple times I paced with him, down the long corridor and back, for exercise," recalls Scholinski. "I wanted to help him. I was always this way, helping my friends. I thought of myself as a roving counselor. It kept people a nice distance away from my problems." Scholinski finds that by helping others he is helping himself. Maybe by saving others (in a way) from the harm of this place, he could save himself. Regardless of why he did it, the walking itself taught the trans youth a valuable way of liberation. The walking was a sign of transgression against beging caged. It helped them imagine and prepare themselves for the day that those walls would not be able to contain them. "Escape was something we all talked about," admits Scholinski. "It was a sign of sanity; it was a statement, I am not one of these people, I am not a mental patient" (51). By imitating this mad Christ's physical actions, the mad trans youth imitated his mental actions as well. In the walking was the statement that they could not be contained. They could not be contained forever by physical walls, nor could they be contained by the walls of diagnosis and marginalization. Like a form of prayer, even if this habit did not magically give them what they wanted instantly, it did prepare them and instill in them a form of resistance. The walls and staff kept them bordered yet within these restrictions they could exercise a degree of freedom and life. Set apart from the world, they could create their own world and walk every square inch of it. While they could not cross the boundaries that separated them from those outside, they could at least cross the boundaries that separated them from each other.

The saner Jesus seems to Scholinski, the more mad he fears he has become. Scholinski considers this dillemna without coming to a firm conclusion. He asks, "If I thought he was sane what did that make me? Mental hospitals are rife with this kind of debate. Are people like Bob [a.k.a. Jesus] simply more sensative than the rest of us? Bombarded with information, the delusioned find it hard to function in the world, but is that their fault or the world's?" Deconstructing the definitions and boundaries of madness, the trans youth becomes habituated to skills that will indispensible in preserving his own sense of truth. Are transgender persons insane and disordered or are they simply more sensitive than the rest of us? Bombarded with information, the dysphoric find it hard to function in a world of fixed and binary genders. But is that the fault of the trans youths or the world? This alternative way of thinking and living is attractive for those set apart by society. Scholinski admits to imitating Jesus even to the extent of claiming to sharing in his visions. "I used to hear voices," Scholinski told him. "That wasn't true, but I didn't want him to feel alone. Plus, I wanted to fit in" (19). Rather than making fun of him through sarcasm or trickery which assert the non-reality of Christ's understanding of himself, Scholinski's claim of sharing in the visions of Jesus is rather an attempt at solidarity. The trans youth wants Jesus to know he is on his side; and, he admits, to try to get Jesus on his side. By reaching out to Jesus, Jesus reaches back towards Scholinski. Much like the Jesus Christ of the Bible, the Jesus Christ of the Mad House challenges others to cross borders and identify with the isolated and marginalized. Whether either Jesus was right about their personal ontological or metaphysical claims, this does not mean that their ethical and social critiques are not valid. The Jesus that Scholinski meets offers him a way of life to imitate that could lead him to make the world a more sensitive and just place.

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Imitation as Resistance

Whereas the Imago Dei affirm the diverse creative power of God, the Imitatio Christi affirm the agency among persons to transform their lives and that of their community. The work of imitation brings alternative forms of life and community together, the authorized systems will exert the supremacy of their definitions and boundaries. By affirming the same in the other, imitation can be an act of solidarity and resistance. While often tolerated, the subversive defiance of Jesus's continuous walking was did not go unnoticed by the hospital workers. Scholinski recounts one night when the conflict between patients and staff burst into violence, challenging the contingent alliance established between Jesus and the trans youth. Scholinski explains, "they went after after Jesus because he wouldn't go into his room at bedtime. He kept pacing" (33). The physical control and isolation of patients was an exercise of power whereby the normitizing establishment worked to control and isolate disruptive spirits. "Three guards held him down on the floor and Jesus whipped his body around, screaming and crying. This guards swore at him. It was nasty," recounts Scholinski (33). Each movement of Jesus's body was an material act of resistance much like his continued assertion of the man he is was an internal act of defiance. Yet the force of putting him on the ground as well as the shoving around his body showed how the medical system could curtail even these movements. The dangerous persistence of the system was that it could be in one moment fixed and in another moment fluid while retaining a degree of control on the body being disciplined. Jesus could yell and twist but we could not escape the firm hands of the hospital. The battle to put Jesus into his room was an assertion that the staff could put the man in his place in a variety of ways and senses. The momentary restricting of Jesus relates to the logic of the asylum as a whole: the hospital has a right to hold the bodies of patients and to assert ever more isolated control. The time specific enforcement of power (asserting a bedtime) likewise related to the overall authority of the hospital to remove the patients from the general population for a given amount of time. The removal from public time and community is imitated in the removal from the time and community within the hospital between patients such as Jesus and Scholinski.

The attempt to isolate and divide Jesus and Scholinski from each other are met by resistance between the bond formed during the regular walks prompts the trans youth to stand in solidarity with his companion. "Another patient, I don't remember who, ran over with me to help Jesus. We yelled, Leave him alone, he's not hurting anyone," recalls Scholinski (33). Ironically, the demand to "Leave him alone" reflects the goal of the staff in one way. The hospital intends on isolating Jesus from the others, inhibiting his ability to walk and talk with them and inspire their imitation of his transgressive spirit. Yet in another way Scholinski's demand inverts the meaning of the isolation. While the hospital removed Jesus and the trans youth from the general population, setting them apart, it also allowed for them to form an alternative community and become saints for one another. Indeed, this night, they would become momentary martyrs for Jesus. "A guard with huge arms wrestled me to the floor and put his black leather boot on my head," recounts Scholinski (33). Because the imitation of Jesus did not stop at walking and talking together, the trans youth's decision to stand by his friend results in him receiving similar punishment. While subdued, the act of resistance forced the hospital to extend their energy threefold.  Scholinski admits that the hospital staff spoke their message louder. "He stood over me for a long moment to make sure I understood who held the power," Scholinski recounts. "I understood. 'Shut up, you fucking crazy queer,' he said" (33). Much like the tradition of imitating Christ by "turning the other cheek," the act of others taking and multiplying the punishment was a way to shame the medical staff. The imitation was a message that there are alternative ways of living, understanding, and enacting power. While Jesus and the trans youth were insane by the standards of the medical staff, the staff was out of line by the standards of the patients. As Scholinski repeated several times in various ways, Jesus being Jesus, like the trans youth being a trans youth, wasn't hurting anyone. "So what if Jesus wouldn't go into his room?" Scholinski asks. "He was peaceful until they arrived" (33). In this moment that the hospital staff was asserting the supremacy of their Imago Mundi, the Imago Transvesti and Imitatio Christi worked together to offer a peaceful alternative. Who are the ones that need to be physically restrained: the ones going for a night walk or the ones beating children?

The scene demonstrates the way and the cost of Imitatio Christi for transgender saints. Yet it the narrative also opens up for others to join in the imitative act of solidarity. The invocation of a nameless other person, "Another patient, I don't remember who, ran over with me to help Jesus," works much like the unnamed "Beloved Disciple in the Gospel of John" wherein the reader can imagine themselves running to Jesus's aid (33). The Imitatio Christi of Dylan Scholinski is not without dangers nor is it normatizing in the way the Christ of his wider society has become. Standing beside one another can be taking blows meant for another. "The next day my neck and shoulder were so sore the nurse gave my Tylenol," recalls Scholinski (33). In a hospital where medicine is regulated, especially for those with recorded drug transgressions, the gift of pain killers is both an act of care and erasure. The medicine is an act of forgiveness but also a reward for a patient who has returned to following the rules. Just as how the removal of pain smoothes over the materials consequence of the defiance, the act of care works to reassert relations between patient and hospital, oppressed and oppressor, after a swift blow to divide the relations between patient and patient. The immediate force of the violence followed by the lingering memory of the pain can secure the system in silence. "In the meeting we didn't mention Jesus being beaten up" remembers Scholinski (33). Nonetheless, Tylenol is not a very powerful drug. Nor is the act of care able to make all things right and peaceful again. The pains will persist and the memory will be retained until a time that voice can be given to both of them. In this way, through the trans hagiography the veil of silence is lifted. Old wounds are reopened and at last the pain is able to speak. Years after Jesus and Scholinski were divided, the pattern of their relationship continues, offering a model of imitation for other oppressed groups to follow. Even if one is not Christ or a trans man, one can embody the same form of resistance and community through a shared suffering in the Imitatio Christi.

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on Transgender Saints

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Trans Saints: Imago Transvesti in The Last Time I Wore A Dress

"I stared in the mirror at the girl 
who was me, and not me:
the girl I was supposed to be."

Dylan Scholinski
The Last Time I Wore A Dress

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Imago Dei and Imago Mundi

On this All Saint's Day, I return to the question of what and who makes a saint "a saint." Is it being an exemplar of values held by the Church? The values of the World? Are saints the embodiment of all things society holds as ideal and normative? This is how saints are often regarded. In the Imago Mundi, saints are those who fit into the picture, in opposition of those sinners who do not fit. A careful examination of medieval hagiographies demonstrates that the conventional vision of saints as Imago Mundi are inaccurate. Saints were saints because they were set apart. Saints did not fit in much like sinners. In fact, by the standards of the world in which they lived, many saints may have been regarded as sinners. The marking of these saints inverted the value systems of the world and God. Saints could be and often would be Imago Dei that were set apart because they directly opposed, reformed, or resisted the Imago Mundi. One typical case that represents the subversive creativity of the Imago Dei was the Imago Transvesti of transgender saints. These trans saints are recorded in trans hagiographies as often existing on the edge of society, in places such as monestaries, where they offer an alternative image of like and an alternative habit of life. A more detailed investigation of the Imago Dei and Imitatio Transvesti in the Life of Saint Marinos the Monk on previous articles. In these medieval trans hagiographies, the trans saints faces oppression but is vindicated in the end. Because these trans lives were celebrated, they became honored as saints in the Orthodox and Catholic Church. Here, I wish to examine modern secular stories of transgender lives that do not end with celebration and canonization. What do transgender hagiographies look like when the Church no longer authorizes new trans saints and indeed has largely adopted the Imago Dei's exclusion of the Imago and Imitatio Transvesti? Who are our trans saints today and how are they made?

To explore how the Imago Transvesti works in modern secular hagiography I will examine one its the genre's genealogical descents: trans memoir. In form, trans memoirs share many generic features with hagiographies. In short, they tell the life of a trans person. A more complex answer is that they seek to make a misunderstood life of someone who is set apart from the world better understood by the world. Often, these trans memoirs come with the ethical imperative (implicit if it is not overtly stated) that the reader and the world need to transform themselves if they are to better integrate those reflecting the image of the trans life as well as to save themselves from the sins of sexism and transphobia. In other words, whether they state a moral or thesis, many trans memoirs today compel the same ethical changes in a reader's life as trans hagiographies must have medieval readers. Furthermore, an often unstated or understated goal of trans memoirs (or any memoir) is to garner a certain level of vindication, understanding, and even fame for its subject. Just as the trans saint functions as a generic image of a population calling for social change, the memoir also presents the image of a particular person. The effect of becoming familiar with the person, learning their story, and the oppressions they faced has the effect of making that person special in the mind the of the reader. That the memoir would be written, circulated, and read is honor enough for many. Yet an effective memoir, like an effective hagiography, draws readers to regard the subject life as set apart and significant if not an ethical role model. Yet even if the subject of the memoir does not offer ideals, they may yet be a guide for readers experiencing or seeking to understand and oppose the challenges faced by the particular trans person. In this way, trans memoirs resist the modern binary of saint and sinner. Medieval saints could be both and so too their modern counterparts.

Toward the end of examining trans hagiographies in a modern form and context, I will close read Dylan Scholinski's The Last Time I Wore a Dress. The memoir recounts the years the author spent incarcerated against his will in a mental hospital, in large part because of a diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder. The book details the extreme lengths the hospital enacted in order to erase the Imago Transvesti from the young trans boy and inscribe the Imago Mundi, the image of a normative heterosexual cisgender girl. An additional reason for this study comes from a shared personal context. The town that Scholinski grew up in and the hospitals in which he was incarcerated exist within the same Polish community in which I lived. Just outside of Chicago, Scholinski was a transgender teen a number of years before me, yet if he had been allowed to receive public education it would have been entirely possible that we may have graduated from the same high school.  In many ways, the life of Dylan Scholinski recalled in the memoir reveals an alternative image of how my life may have developed. The particulars of his life draw sharp distinctions between us, yet this ability to see parts of one's self reflected in the Imago Transvesti of another is a function of the trans memoir and hagiography. Just as the cloister of Saint Marinos reveals something about the medieval Imago Dei and Mundi, so too mental hospital of Dylan Scholinski reveal much about the image of transgender and normativity in our world. In order to better understand these images, this examination will occur in two parts in order to counterpoint the study of Saint Marinos's medieval hagiography. First, I will examine how the memoir presents the conflict between his Imago Transvesti (as a particular form of the Imago Dei inscribed in his "soul") and the Imago Mundi of the hospital. In the second part, I will attend to the relations and habits formed between Scholinski and another mental patient who believes that he is Jesus Christ. The practices of alliance formed between the patient who acts too much like a man and the patient who acts too much like Christ form a secular, mad, modern form of the Imitatio Chrisit. 

To begin, it is necessary to understand that images are not always visible with and through the eyes but can be constructed and consumed through a variety of media, including narrative. The Imago Mundi that is imposed on transgender youths is just as varied as the Imago Transvesti it is supposed to replace. Just as the Imago Dei is supposed to be present in every human life and yet each life is distinct and ever changing, there is something diverse and dynamic about images. The Imago here concerned are moving images. In this respect, narrative may be better at capturing the living Imago Mundi than static photographs. Thus, without needing to give photographs or fixed details, Scholinski is able to communicate what the Imago Mundi was for him and how it was imposed on his trans life in the mental hospital. "Every morning I lowered my eyelids and let Donna make me up," he recalls. "If I didn't emerge from my room with foundation, lip gloss, blush, mascara, eyeliner, eye shadow and feathered hair, I lost points. Without points I couldn't go to the dining room, I couldn't go anywhere, not that we were going many places to begin with. Without points, I was not allowed to walk from the classroom back to the unite without an escort.... Either choice I hated: makeup, or a man trailing in my shadow" (IX). From the memoir, readers are not given a specific image of girlhood being forced onto his body, yet by listing the tools of inscription a generic image of cisgender femininity is invoked. The color of the lip gloss did not matter so much as the application of makeup. The Imago Mundi is more about the power of execution, the authority of the world to dictate how his gender is embodied more than any specific feature. The point system emphasizes the abstraction of the Imago Mundi as a value structure to be inscribed and imposed. Just as there may be many varieties of transgender saints within the Imago Transvesti, the Imago Mundi which opposes it is able to transcend time period and gender norm as a force of marginalization that at one moment sends one youth to a monastery and at another moment sends another to a mental hospital.

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Images of the World

Icons of saints are set apart because they are Imago Dei and not merely images of the world. The transformations of appearance in many hagiographies show audiences how divine truth can exist just on the edge of what the world can see, on the horizon of understanding, or just beneath the mundane. While transgender transitions are often imagines by the public as a form of disguise or drag, covering up the identity of the person, for trans saints this transvestism, the Imago Transvesti, reveal in visible ways what society has long covered with its own designs. Scholinski recalls looking at himself done up in the mirror of the mental hospital where he was held and forced into feminine clothes against his will. "I stared in the mirror at the girl who was me, and not me: the girl I was supposed to be" Scholinski writes(IX). The mirror scene is a traditional mechanism of transgender film, art, and narrative to show disjunctures between the outside and inside. The duplication of the images represents competing images of the trans person themselves. Which will win out? The image the world sees or the image inside the trans person, written, as Scholinski describes, in their soul? "The staff was under orders to scrutinize my femininity: the way I walked, the way I sat with my ankle on my knee, the clothes I wore, the way I kept my hair. Trivial matters, one might say. But trivial matters in which the soul reveals itself," Scholinski writes. "Try changing these things. Try it. Wear an outfit that is utterly foreign to you... See how far you can contradict your nature. Feel how your soul rebels" (IX-X). As in a mirror, one image faces off with another. Another critique waged against trans persons, especially transvestites, is that they are too changeable. Yet Scholinski's resistance to the gender forced on him demonstrates that his soul is fixed even while his body changes. The Imago Dei is made of things unchanging if unseen while the image of the world is mutable if empirical. 

When society cannot dig out the transgender soul, it suffices to control the person's embodiment down to the skin. Scholinski recalls that when he was first brought against his will to the asylum, he was forced to strip off his clothes. "A clerk went through every pocket of every pair of my torn-up jeans, unrolled the cuffs of my socks, put her hand in the silky lining of my suitcase," Scholinski records. "I'm certain I had to take off all my clothes down to my bra and underwear" (7). Once inside the hospital, Scholinski's clothing and gender will be closely controlled by the medical staff. At the threshold to this isolation, the medical panopticon cuts through the layers of the identity that Scholinski had built for himself. When social construction is reduced to systems, the creative work and agency of the trans life (and its Creator) can be take out of the equation. The trans person is imagined as only a social construct, without its own internal choice or image. Trying to control the changes of the the trans life, the medical hospital works to strip Scholinski down to the core and then rebuild. The system excuses this extreme invasion of the trans person's body on the grounds of healing. They claim to seek out unhealthy or toxic elements on the body (drugs, weapons, contraband) in order to exert changes in the body (behavior, mindsets, beliefs) because of the danger the trans person poses to trans exclusive society. By reaching down toward the transgender soul, the medical system turns the trans life into an embodiment of a disease to be quarantined and set aside from the general population (thereby justifying the systems existence and force); the negative or inverse images of cis society. 

Altering the visual image of the trans person is not enough, systems construct narratives that turn them either into a sinner or a saint. In medical systems, sin as a spiritual disease (an illness of the psyche, or soul) is replaced by the diagnosis of a physical or mental disease. For many trans persons, such as Scholinski, their lives were pathologized and seized through the imposition of a diagnosis for Gender Identity Disorder. After being processed, reclothed and given a room wherein he will be kept, the doctors begin in on Scholinski to tell him the medical justifications for his isolation. "[The Doctor] said the other diagnosis was something called Gender Identity Disorder... He said that means you are not an appropriate female, you don't act the way a female is supposed to act," recalls Scholinski (16). The "supposed to" here reflects an implicit command in society that the medical system here makes explicit. Instead of religious commandments, "thou shall" or thou shall not," which are supposed to have divine authority and authorship, medical discourses follow social assumptions and norms without easily definable origins. Often, cis society defined itself by how it set apart and controlled trans society as its negative image. Cisgender became not-transgender. Scholinski was not affirmed as a trans man but as a "not... appropriate female." The invisible truth of the transgender soul or image is recast from a thing unseen into an embodiment of negativity. Transgender is treated as the dis- to the cisgender's -order. Without context or narrative, Scholinski's trans life would not be recognizably diseased. Yet forced within the discursive and physical frame of medical institutions, Imago Transvesti are set apart as a dangerous alternative to the ruling image of the world.

In the negative construction of the Imago Transvesti, environments, narratives, and images work together to set apart trans lives. Scholinski recalls what may one of the earliest moments that an authority told him that he embodied the wrong picture of himself. The moment occurred when an educator brought Scholinski aside in school and ran through ideas of what professions he might like to have one day. "She held up cards with pictures of a policeman, a farmer, a construction worker, a secretary and a nurse, and said which ones I'd like to be: police officer and construction worker. She looked at me with a curious face like a mother robin. She was the first one who said I had a problem with my gender" (30). Likely, the genitals of the images are not visible yet the gender of the figures are supposed to be apparent. Police are supposed to look like men. The nurses are supposed to look like women. In turn, these socially dictated images are supposed to reproduce themselves. Implicitly, a girl sees an image of a female secretary and so becomes a secretary. The oppressed can be an instrument of enacting an oppressive system. A mother robin works to create a little robin, even if both will remain caged. Yet Scholinski was not only choosing jobs considered "inappropriate" for women but positions "inappropriate" for any marginalized person. Police officers enforce the law, enacting the power of systems on society. Construction works on the other hand enact the literal power to shape the image of the world. What would the world look like is women were in charge of the legal and physical structures of the world? What would it look like is transgender persons could claim that authority? Or intersex or disabled persons? Evidently, by choosing images other than those assigned to him, Scholinski is following another image, an alternative image, an Imago Transvesti that may be an "inappropriate," disordered, and problematic choice. In the end, Scholinski will be isolated and set aside because of following these Imago and not the image of the world.

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Set Apart

Isolation is no safe haven for the trans saint. The exclusionary system of the cisgender binary allows for no mixtures and movements between categories. Expelled from one space by choice or force, trans saints are often not allowed entrance into the other. As a result, trans persons medieval and modern often find themselves caught between chairs, homeless. This sense of homelessness began for Scholinski early in his life, when he was shopping with his father and needed to use the restroom. "On the door it said: WOMEN," recalls Scholinski. One his way out however, he encountered trouble, "a balding clerk with wet produce stains on his apron gave me a look of raw hatred. He grabbed my hand. He wanted me to know who my parents were and I said my father was in the aisle. We looked down each one until we saw him pausing before the cereal. The clerk hauled me over and said, ' We found your son in the women's bathroom.' My father said calmly, 'That's not my son.'" (106). While he was sent to the mental hospital in part to make him accept his place as a woman, spaces for women were often not safe for Scholinski. His presence and performance of identity alienated him from women's spaces. Yet neither was he accepted as a man among men. It is true enough for his father to say, "that's not my son," yet his actions in committing the child to a mental hospital was enough to say, "this is not my daughter." Trans youth often find themselves placed in the dangerous no-man's-land by the enforcement of gender binaries in spaces like bathrooms. Here the privacy of cisgender persons is protected not by merely isolating trans persons but by ensuring that they don't have even the same privacies to relieve themselves in peace. In other moments, Scholinski recalls going to and being assaulted in a bathroom, "a group of them followed me in and said 'are you sure you're a girl?' Sitting in the stall I waited until the laughing stop and I heard the door close behind them" (106). These acts may seem like the innocent misunderstandings of a Clerk or a few youths but they reflect a wider systemic oppression of trans persons. The pressure put on the Imago Transvesti will not release until no space is left free from the mark of the Imago Mundi. Trans saints are made to be set apart for a special place in the tapestry in Creation but as an excluded and erased smudge that is at home no place.

There is no place in Imago Mundi for the Imago Transvesti. Rejected from communion with his family, school, or wider neighborhood, Scholinski finds himself at the medical hospital without any other place to call his own. When Scholinski first arrives, he insists to a member of the staff that the asylum is no home for him either. "I told her I didn't need to be here. 'Uh-huh,' she said" (13). The response is sarcastic, a dismissive reply to crazy person who does not know they are crazy. Yet it is also ironically true. This hospital will not be a home for him. Recording various observations of various medical staff during his time in the care of the hospital, one doctor observes, "Patient has no sense of home" (35). The young trans man has a residence. He dwells -against his will- in asylums for several years. Yet this place of isolation is a physical embodiment of his marginalization and separation from the world. This is a place he is set apart and not merely set somewhere else. He is sainted not by becoming an exemplar of acceptable norms but by being unacceptable. If the trans man makes sense, this meaning and orientation is not of this world. Indeed, the function of the medical isolation is in part to ensure that the trans man does not become at home. When Scholinski is moved to another hospital, he finds that he is again being disoriented through his gender as he is placed (as a girl) among a male-only unit. "All other units were co-ed, a mix of psychotics, violent types and regular depressed people," Scholinski explains, "so there was no reason to throw me into the all-male unit, they could have shifted a depressed boy around. I suppose they thought throwing me to the boys would encourage my girly-girl side" (138). The move is supposed to shock him, emphasize his girlhood and thereby reorient him towards men in a sexuality and not gender identity. While Scholinski was able to form an alternative community in his last hospital, this move is intended to further throw him off his center. In this way, the memoir emphasizes the sainting of the trans youth by showing how the world continually functions to displace him, set him further aside until he comes to embody that sainthood.

The crux that many saints face is what to do when there is no place in the world exists for them and the image of another world remains unclear or uncertain. Too often, escape from the isolation the world imposes on trans life is death. Scholinski recalls how the medical process of chipping at his Imago Transvesti layer by layer changed his appearance but made him a soul with no life left in body. "My new self was pleasing. My new self: girly-girl dead stranger" (120). The image of the girl being fashioned was not only an artificial construct, it was an unlivable life. Rather than embrace a trans image of life, the medical staff preferred instead to turn Scholinski into an image of cis girlhood even if it killed him. The face of a girl was for the trans man the face of the dead. One way or another, liberation or isolation, transition or death, the girl in the mirror was no long for the world. Leaving nowhere left to run in the world or in himself, Scholinski considered suicide the final option. Better death than an unlivable life. Yet this final act of self agency, this final corner where the medical staff could not get at him, death, was painted for the trans man as an unfair rejection of the world. "Suicide is a selfish act," said one of the medical staff after Scholinski's suicide attempt, "Do you know that?" (73). In a place where no personal decisions (that did not follow the medical systems guidelines) was considered selfish and aberent it is not surprising that suicide would be among those personal decisions that the staff condemned. For a system only concerned with the appearance and mechanical functions of life, an unlivable cis girlhood was preferable to escape by death. Ironically, such condemnation and how it was responded to only served to demonstrate how this "selfishness" and isolation was in fact constructed by the medical environment. After being chastized for his suicide attempt, Scholinski was brought into a private room to think about what he had done. "Why the hospital would lock me in a room by myself when I felt so sad I wanted to die, I don't know" writes Scholinski (73). By leaving the suicide alone in a room after his attempt, the statement is made: you cannot escape even by death. The temptation to try again is teased and yet thwarted by the stark reminder of the  recent failure. The lesson is made: life and suicide both lead to isolation. Without escape all that is left is submission.

The mechanisms of mental hospitals not only inscribe the Imago Mundi over the visible Imago Transvesti but carve itself into the inner life of the trans saint. While the hospital could and would regulate his outward appearance, Scholinski protected his inner life and truth as his final holdout. "I like to be in control," admits Scholinski, "to keep what was inside my brain inside. It was the only form of privacy I had left" (85). While the hospital insisted that he embody to image of femininity and a sexual orientation toward men, in his mind he maintained the Imago Transvesti as a hidden truth as well as meditate to himself, particularly in his journal, about his experienced attractions to girls in the hospital. This tactic worked for some time, or seemed to work, until one day Scholinski found that even in isolation he was not free. The doctor called the young trans man into the office and discussed with him details of his "disordered" feelings toward women, encouraging him to instead adopt a heteronormative relationship with men. That is when Scholinski realized, "They had read my journal" (98). While in isolation after his suicide attempt, it seemed as though being alone was the final line for the treatment. If he could submit to being a trans saint, set apart because of his diagnosed pathology, then in that sacred cloister he could be free. The trans life of the Imago Transvesti could survive if only within a small hidden frame. Yet this was to be. The World is a jealous God and will permit idols to no other. Over the course of years, Scholinski survives the isolation and treatments of his forced incarceration. Yet when the time comes for him to leave the physical walls behind (coinciding with his approaching legal adulthood) the test of the Imago Mundi was whether it could function to isolate and control Scholinski when he was on his own.  "No one was watching me. Nine months of survellience: I'd survived seclusion, I'd hugged the males, I'd walked around with globs of blue on my eyelids, and now I was here" (127). For years afterwards, Scholinski recalled feeling the eyes on the back of his neck and an inscribed sense of shame that kept him from fully living out and showing his Imago Transvesti. He experienced depression and relapses into suicidal thought. Yet as he carried with him the chains of the mental hospital, practices of liberation and creation developed within the asylum helped him finally break free and reclaim an authentic image of his life - an Imitatio Transvesti built upon a queer and mad Imitatio Christi.

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Coming soon:

Part II: Imitatio Christi in the Last Time I Wore a Dress

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