Self-Organizing Men

The essay, like my life, body, and sexuality, calls for a practice of what I’m calling in-coherence for trans men, white trans men in particular. These spaces of identity in which we live-whether they be boi, lesbian, butch, trans man, invert, and so forth- are historically shaped (what is practiced now may not have been thinkable thirty years ago), intersectional (informed by many discourses such as race, class, ability, nation, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation), but neither are any one of these reducible to the other in terms of definition (to be a trans man of colour means facing very different issues than a white trans man, even inside of our home communities).

In order to move beyond lip service to difference amongst us, I suggest we instead seek out in-coherence, which is the productive failure to cohere as a self, as a gender, as a race, as a community. This sense of failure need not be dangerous. It can be one very important way of challenging assumptions that somehow we have enough in common to form a we to begin with. Before we can be posited, we must first seek after an elaboration of the ways that we as trans peoples are not only different from each other but, to echo Audre Lorde, are the very site of difference itself.Lorde’s imperative reminds us, especially white trans men, that instead of assuming that our political work is over once we arrive in our chosen genders, we rethink our relation to power. We must, instead, posit that our political work, as whatever kind of men we may find ourselves becoming, is only just beginning. (pgs. 149-150)