The following is borrowed from an experimental text i am currently writing on trans*grief and that will be featured in a book we are co-writing with Clovis Maillet on transfeminist ecologies. It consists of one short extract, to which I’ll add some introductory and concluding thoughts, as well as a reconstitution of the Q&A. Each of these have numbers. When i read the text in public, i mentioned that these numbers could be an occasion to stretch, take a breath, look away, change posture, anything that can remind us that we have a flesh, suggesting that grief is not an easy topic, and that it might be good to remember to breathe. This remains true now.

1°

As you probably have already heard too many times, about 10% of all known species have disappeared since the beginning of modernity/coloniality 500 years ago. For many (including me), this scale of destruction is so vast that it is sometimes virtually impossible to bear witness to it, to grasp the meaning of that figure, or, if i manage to grasp it, to not be crushed by its weight.

We probably cannot avoid being crushed by what has been lost and by what keeps being lost. But the question remains: how do we survive the crushing?

In the recent hirstory of trans* activism, there is, as many of us know, a tradition of honoring the dead in the form of public mourning, the TDoRs. The TDoRs, or Transgender Day of Remembrance, are one rare politization of public mourning, where people gather annually to name and grieve for trans people who died from the dire consequences of transphobia.

But, as with many (trans* and non-trans*) things, TDoRs are traversed by ambiguity. As C. Riley Snorton & Jin Haritaworm have remarked in their foundational 2013 paper “Trans Necropolitics”, TDoRs have a tendency to fetishize trans-of-color deaths: Black trans women in particular are systematically cast as martyrs of a cause that, in the end, forgets about them, to focus on the advancement of whiter and/or more normative trans & queer lives¹.

These trembling grounds of trans* necropolitics provide a potent context to think with grief, including grief for other species. They allow to ask: could we learn to grieve without fetishizing our dead (human or more-than-human)? Could we spend more time with our dead without making them into “steps” in the advancement of other causes?

2°

It begins with an image. The last photograph i took of Winnipeg Monbijou, a giant snail* that for almost a decade was the partner of my friend A. Livingstone. Winnipeg (and their human kin) was visiting me over winter and had taken up residence above my desk, among all the books. In the photo, you can see Winnipeg approaching Meeting the Universe Halfway by Karen Barad, a philosopher who thinks a lot with quantum mechanics but also with inter-species contact, with entanglements of matter and meaning, and with intra-action between the dead and the living.

Winnipeg became compost not long after this picture was taken, buried at the foot of a tall beech tree in a Berlin cemetery – the Alter St.-Matthäus-Kirchhof – which played a key role in AIDS activism and has become a hub for queer and trans lives, especially since, as a Protestant cemetery, it features a cafe at its entrance, the Finovo (from fin & novo, “ending and new beginning”) where mourners can meet together differently, have a drink, laugh and sing. But if I’m talking about Winnipeg, it is not only because they are now a queer ancestor.

No, if I’m talking about Winnipeg, it’s because they were a friend, by which i mean, even if i didn’t know them well, we had spent quite a bit of time together, especially in dance studios, where they taught me how to adjust my slowness in order to go at the speed of their attention; to understand what it is to be the way they are in front of everyone – at least as much mineral as animal, at least as much male as female, at least as much foot as stomach.

They say, on the islands of Hawai’i, that snail*s sing. That the wind curls inside their shells, or that they emit sounds from their footstomachmouth. Scientists still don’t really know how to account for the presence of snail*s on these volcanic islands in the Pacific. Appearing only fairly recently from the depths of the sea, the Hawaiian Islands have no connection to any mainland; and yet, before the arrival of the first humans, they were full to the brim with the most diverse species of giant, tiny, colorful and striped snail*s – and in almost total absence of other animals apart from birds. One theory is that they flew over, either by nesting their tiny, tiny shells – as big as a speck of dust – in the wings of migrating birds, or by simply letting themselves be carried by the wind. Either way, the inhabitants of the Hawaiian Islands say that, even though the snail*s’ song is heard less and less since the arrival of white settlers, it is still there.

When Australian philosopher Thom van Dooren asks Hawaiian linguist Puakea Nogelmeier about the snail*s’ song, the latter replies with a story. Many years earlier, Auntie Edith Kanaka‘ole, the renowned composer and kumu hula, told him and a group of her chant students that scientists had taken her to their lab to explain how impossible it was, biologically, for a snail to sing. He continued: “Auntie Edith’s take on that was: ‘Isn’t that sad, they won’t sing for the scientists.’”²

How can we listen to the dead? Following colonization and the introduction of a cannibal species onto the archipelago of Hawai’i, the great diversity of Hawaiian snail* species’ dropped dramatically. As for everyone else, modernity/coloniality for snail*s means fewer differences. And therefore, fewer songs.

Snail*s tell us stories of listening. Creatures of slowness and the in-between, they teach us that there is feeling, and then there is feeling. The traces of slime they leave behind are full of information: those left by the younger generations are often ignored, while those left by the older ones are willingly followed by those that come upon them. Do i know how to do that, too? Find the ancestors who have left behind  traces i can slide myself in? Choose which ones i want to follow?

What i know is that i never tire of hearing your voice, you who have no organs to speak with. You who wear on the outside what is hardest in you, and let the movements of your blood show through your skin. Yes. You sing. And i promise I’ll try to listen.

3°

Yesterday, after C. Riley Snorton’s talk on “Mud”, we gathered with a few people and conversed on something he said, almost in passing: “you see, i am a trans maximalist.” We had different versions of what that meant and, as far as i could summarize it, it meant for me what Emi Koyama says in her definition of transfeminism as a movement of trans liberation that requires “the liberation of all women, and beyond³.” (And that “and beyond”, in my view, does a lot of work, which is to point to the unending mission of trans* studies to uncover.)

For me, it means (in the mode of the Combahee River Collective statement): for trans people to be free, we would all (and that includes marine mammals, electrons, swamps, and snails) have to be liberated. Which means that the fucked up things that are said and done to other creatures are intrinsically connected to the fucked up things that are said and done to us.

Or put in other terms: i can’t grieve for us if i can’t grieve for you. This is trans*grievability at its core. You and me, we are way more entangled than i sometimes wished we were. And, you and me both, this is where we are: in the struggle to grieve with and for each other in spite of terrible forces of separation.

4° Q&A. Question 1.

Speaker 1 says something along the lines of: this is a question concerning your use of the word martyr? i wasn’t sure if you were excluding it from any positive investment. Especially thinking of the way the Palestinian struggle against genocide has been reinvoking that term, it feels important to make room for its spiritual/political force. – And a side question: you’ve positioned yourself as a white person; and you mobilize a lot of non-white perspectives. Could you say little bit more about your way of reading theorists and artists of color?

What i think i responded: Thank you so much for these questions. About the first one: yes. The way i phrased it was: could we allow for trans-of-color lives not to serve as martyrs for a cause that ultimately forgets about them? And in that sentence, the word martyr is not the problem, but definitely the fact that this martyrdom is misused, or disconnected from its fonction which is: to make us see, to bear witness to brutality. So, yes, i think we need think and feel with the potent spiritual/political charge behind the word martyr. Martyr: a Greek word that means a witness, a person caring for memory, a reminder. Trans* and queer-of-color movements definitely need martyrs in that sense, especially in the face of forces of forgetfulness that keep misremembering, that keep blanking/whitening their lives, that want to move on, that keep moving away from their deaths.

Now concerning your second question. Like many of us here, i have been called many names: boy, girl, straight, gay, bi, fag, dyke, cis, trans, neurotypical, neurodiverse, but also white, european, able-bodied; these terms are a troubled site from which to speak of trans* especially in a museum in switzerland, a country that (like, France, where i live) profits from the ongoing occupation of lands everywhere in the world; for the most part, i think with non-euro, non-white-centric frame, especially those of Black feminism; i do it not untroubled and out of a sense of an unpayable debt (pace Denise Ferreira da Silva) that my life as a white trans girl, and the lives of so many people i love, owe to the shapes of struggle that Black feminism has invented, and especially to this sentence of the Combahee River Collective: “if Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.” i read this freedom that requires the destruction of all the systems of oppression as a call to trans*categorical alliance—one of the meanings of intersectional approach.

5° Q&A. Question 2.

Speaker 2 asks something along the lines of: Could you say a bit more about how electrons are a question for trans* studies? What do you mean when you say that electrons need also be included in the movements of trans* liberation?

My response is shorter than what follows, but here’s what i would have said if i had had the time: Thank you, yes. This is an argument that Karen Barad has beautifully made in their paper “Trans*Materialities: TransMatterRealities and Queer Political Imaginings⁴”. In short, their idea is to trace the way electrons, like many creatures that populate the field of quantum field theory, defy binary notions such as presence & absence, self & non-self, past & future; instead, the way quantum field theory describes them tells us of modes of un/being that hardly find room in our grammars, that require us to do all sorts of acrobatics (in our languages, but also in our ways of behaving with them) in order to bear witness to their peculiar modes of existence. Maybe you recognize already something that is true of you, how your existence sometimes defies ways of seeing and ways of telling stories about people, and that is partly Barad’s point: the difficulties encountered by quantum field theory to describe ontological indeterminacy might help us figure out the difficulties we encounter to describe our(non)selves.

But things go a little further, or rather, they go also the other way. As happens, in the field of physics, there’s also quite a lot of prejudice that gets woven in the description of these creatures: some of their behaviors are called “a perversion of the theory”, some of the mathematical models that are used to comprehend that perversion are called “normalizations”. These terms, like for humans, are hurtful. Not in the same way (meaning, they do not necessarily lead to the brutal exploitation of exposure to premature death⁵). But still, they come in the way of being truthful to these creatures, which is the stated orientation of physicists in the first place. So much so that it is then Barad’s contention that quantum physicists need queer theory, to observe the entanglement of their prejudices in their ways of conducting science.

Now there’s yet another path, and i will conclude on this, where trans* maximalism carries us. And that’s what happens to your imaginings of who you can be when you open books of physics, or books of marine biology, or books of forestry, and where you find yourself confronted to the same kind of discourses that say that your life is impossible, that it doesn’t exist. Our lives are not impossible, they do exist, and human(centric) sciences are not the only place where this gets affirmed (or effaced). As with medieval cases of gender variability, cases of genre, gender or binary-bending creatures are, whether we want it or not, entangled with our narratively constructed sense of trans*⁶.

Trans* liberation requires the undoing of the wrongful descriptions and actions that trans-antagonism projects, not only onto humans, but also onto electrons, and forests, and starfish. In Undrowned. Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, poet and self-defined aspirational cousin to all sentient beings Alexis Pauline Gumbs describes this gesture regarding her orientation towards marine mammals guidebooks: “I just wanted to know which whale was which, but i found myself confronted with the colonial, racist, sexist, heteropatriachalizing capitalist constructs that are trying to kill me—the net i am already caught in, so to speak. So how can i tell you who and what I saw⁷?” This is part of the work of trans* (ecological) studies. To tell each other who, and what we see.

1. C. Riley Snorton and Jin Haritaworn, « Trans Necropolitics. A Transnational Reflection on Violence, Death, and the Trans of Color Afterlife », in Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman et Silvia Posocco (eds.), Queer Necropolitics, London: Routledge, 2014.
2. Thom Von Dooren, A World In A Shell: Snail Stories for a Time of Extinctions, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2022, p. 76.
3. Emi Koyama, « Transfeminist Manifesto », in Rory Dicker and Alison Piepmeier (eds.), Catching A Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the Twenty-First Century, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003 ; quoted from http://eminism.org/readings/pdf-rdg/tfmanifesto.pdf, p. 1.
4. Karen Barad, « Transmaterialities: Trans*/matter/realities and queer political imaginings », GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 21, no. 2-3, 2015.
5. See Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s definition of racism as “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” (Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London:Univ of California Press, 2007, p. 28).
6. The idea that the biological, since Darwin at least, forms a crucial aspect of the narratively constructed sense of the Human in the West is one key argument of writer and philosopher Sylvia Wynter, in particular in On Being Human As Praxis (Katherine McKittrick [ed.], Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). This entanglement is the basis for strongly fixist and reactionary descriptions of the good life, and is one of the many reasons the work of the transfeminist (counter)mythographer cannot do away with the non-human when trying to think trans* otherwise.
7. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, Chico: AK Press, 2021, p. 6.