Suspended Between Worlds: Science Fiction, Trans Identity, and Liminality
This is a transcript of the talk Suspended Between Worlds: Science Fiction, Trans Identity, and Liminality, edited for clarity.
I want to open this talk with a story about an experience I had talking to a therapist when I was starting to think about physically transitioning—that is, starting a low dose of testosterone. I was very panicked about the whole thing, because it’s a big step—even though once you start, especially if you’re on a very low dose, the changes that happen are extremely gradual. It’s more a mentally big step, an acknowledgement that you are going to go somewhere you have never gone before.
Moreover, because I am genderqueer, or nonbinary if you like, my relationship to physically transitioning has been pretty strange. I have no end goal in mind; I don’t really know what it is I want out of this or where I want to go with it. When a friend asked me what part of transitioning I was most excited about, I could only tell her that I was searching for a certain kind of feeling.
So I spoke to people I knew about it, I started trying to collect information about it. If you have ever researched gender transition you may know that there is very little information out there; there is a considerable but by no means overwhelming amount of research and studies on trans men, but there is almost no available information about taking lower doses of hormones with the aim of achieving a less binary goal. So after exhausting what I could find of published research, I turned to other places: the blogs and youtube channels of other trans and genderqueer people who were documenting and sharing the changes in their bodies, their minds, and their feelings about both. I called up the trans people who had gone on hormones that I knew, as well as the ones who hadn’t. And that was where the wealth of information came from—just by finding other trans and genderqueer people who were talking about their own experiences.
Which brings me to the illuminating conversations I had with a nonbinary therapist about transitioning. There are two main concepts I took away from my conversations with Therapist Brooks Bull. The first came about because I was going through the process of trying to justify, not only to myself but also to the world at large, why I was doing what I was doing. Because the truth is, I didn’t feel like I *needed *to do it. I don’t have unbearable gender dysphoria. My friends and loved ones are respectful and accepting of my identity. Moreover, any body can be a nonbinary body or a trans body, so why did I want to try changing mine? It felt almost frivolous to be considering this, when the need to do it was not overwhelming. I felt like I was only doing it because I *wanted *to, and that didn’t feel like enough to justify doing it.
Therapist Brooks Bull introduced me to the term cis-sexism—a term that, more specifically than a word like transphobia, highlights the implicit hierarchies between cis and trans existence and ways of seeing the world. That is, I was looking at the whole situation through a lens bent in the direction of cis-ness; and neither cis people, nor a cis perspective, are going to understand why *I *want to transition. Using a cis perspective, I [realized I] would never be able to validate or even fully articulate these bodily desires. In order to understand myself, I had to come to see the world—my body included—in a way particular to me. And that is not only a trans or nonbinary perspective, but also a perspective that’s very unique, and one that I would have to build on my own, using my own experiences and thoughts and ideas and obsessions to create—my interests in stories, magic, in fantasy, in the unknown, in ghost stories, in the uncanny, and in science fiction. And so this is what I started to do as I began low-dose testosterone. I began the work of building my own mental models and systems of thought to understand—at least in part—what I was doing, what I wanted to do, and why I wanted to do it. To queer and trans my gaze, so to speak, of the world at large and my own self and body; to see myself from a perspective that was all my own.
The other idea that Therapist Brooks Bull introduced me to came about when I began talking about the so-called “irreversible effects” of transitioning. This is something that the medical literature and doctors love to explain over and over before you go on hormones: there are things that will change when you go on hormones, but will revert back to their original state if you stop. For example, body fat redistribution. However, there are also irreversible effects that you won’t “get back” if you go off the hormones, like hair growth for example—if you’re on testosterone for a while and then stop, you may always have to shave your face. Another one is male-pattern baldness. Once that hair is gone, you won’t grow it back if you stop taking testosterone.
So to some extent this is useful information, but I can tell you from personal experience in medical settings and from reading the accounts of other trans people that it is over-focused on to the extent that it tends to devalue the patient’s own feelings about wanting to transition, presupposing a cis perspective—obviously a cis person wouldn’t want these changes to happen, so they are overly concerned about being able to backtrack. It’s a perspective that seems to think that the trans person will magically realize they are not trans, and want to reverse the process—which only happens very rarely, and there’s a good amount of research on this. It’s a delicate topic, and fraught moreover because many—especially trans-nonbinary people—decide to go off hormones after achieving certain affects they want, such as a lowered voice or body hair which help their gender expression to be more in line with what they want, such that they don’t need to continue with hormone treatment. So the conversation is very complicated by gender nonconformitivity and that’s not usually something that, say, a medical professional who isn’t trans is going to understand very well.
In sight of all of this, I complained to Therapist Brooks Bull that I felt like they wanted me to focus on the wrong thing—these irreversible qualities—rather than the actual meat of what I was doing: this crazy and interesting mental and physical experience of morphing my body into something different, something that might set me at ease and reflect some inner plane of existence a little better—but also something where I didn’t know what the hell I was doing or how the hell I would feel afterward or what I would look like afterward.
Therapist Brooks Bull said, “What I like to take is the Science Fiction approach.” Already, my ears were perking up. They said, we live in a world of technological and biological wonder. If you don’t want hair to grow in a place, get laser hair removal. If you get top surgery and then regret it, get breast implants. If you start losing your hair and you don’t like that, get hair plugs or wear a wig. We as trans people already know that the body is malleable, and there are and have already been so many leaps and blocks to overcome to get to the point where we could change our bodies via hormones and surgery; why do we need to accept this insistence on “irreversible changes?” Take a science fiction approach. What doesn’t seem possible might not actually be so impossible. We as trans people see the world in a different way, are even able to move through and inhabit multiple worlds and spaces between worlds, and perhaps we can celebrate this and use it to our advantage.
So this is what I want to do now: I want to take a science fiction approach. I want to examine a couple science fiction works of art that speak to me as a trans person and as a queer person, and think about how the worlds we inhabit contain multitudinous possibilities and spaces between them—when we break them, when we reach borders and boundaries, when we experience the porousness of our own limiting definitions. I’m going to talk about two pieces: Ghost in the Shell, the 1995 anime film directed by Mamoru Oshii, and Blade Runner, the 1982 film directed by Ridley Scott.
Both of these stories have some obvious resonances in terms of transness. They both feature androids or bodies that have been manufactured, usually by some large private corporation which has ties to the state; in both, these characters contemplate what that means for who and what they are, and what makes them human, if they do indeed even identify as human. Another thing I want to point out here is that both of these stories explicitly treat these people as minorities, or as people who have particular life experiences that the general populace doesn’t have and doesn’t understand. There are a lot of science fiction stories that concern whole races that have a different sexual or gender system, be that culture or physical—The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula le Guin is the one that most readily comes to mind for me, which is a wonderful book—but I generally find while those stories are really interesting, they are unable to easily tackle the alienation that trans people experience in society, which is partly why these are the pieces I’ve chosen. [A final similarity:] both the main characters in these stories are law enforcement of some kind, hunting for entities that are deviant and transgressive in some way, who are breaking down the boundaries of society.
I. Ghost in the Shell
First I’m going to talk about Ghost in the Shell, because though it came out after Blade Runner, I find it a very mysterious and difficult-to-penetrate piece of art. I also find it to be more specifically relevant to a trans and nonbinary perspective. It was initially considered a box office flop before it developed a cult following—it was cited by the Wachowski sisters as one of the inspirations for the Matrix. But it’s somewhat easy to see why it was an initial failure, at least from an artistic standpoint: this is not a film that tries to make itself easily understood by its audience.
The film throws us into the thick of a futuristic city in Japan set in 2029, where the human body can be augmented or replaced down to the brain with artificial parts manufactured mostly by a corporation called Megatech, and people can access the “net” with brain implants. We follow the main character, Major Matoko Kusanagi (or “Major”), who is almost entirely synthetic; all she retains of her human body is a “ghost” or soul that resides in the “Shell” of her fabricated body. She works for a government security group called “section 9,” which is investigating the movements of a mysterious criminal nicknamed the “Puppet Master,” who hacks into peoples' brains in order to manipulate them into doing his bidding.
Major’s primary conflict in the movie isn’t the action that is surrounding her, which she is just blowing through with an amazing ease—it’s a peculiar irreconcilability of her body and her mind. She seems anomalous in her world; not many people are as fabricated as she is. She tells her coworker, the only mostly-unmodified person on the team, “If we all reacted the same way, we’d be predictable. And there’s always more than one way to view a situation. Overspecialize, and you breed weakness. It’s a slow death.” This indicates that she holds great value for her own perspective as a highly modified individual, though that doesn’t stop it from being a source of confusion and strife.
For one thing, her body itself is state-funded: she and her other modified coworkers are unable to quit their jobs because their bodies were created for their jobs. The parts the government commissioned from Megatech Corp will be recollected if they leave, which would leave Major only her ghost. She says, “I feel confined, only free to expand myself within boundaries.” This is not only physical, but mental and emotional. There is a social, transactional currency held in the body: follow certain rules, and you will be able to retain your status as a human and be able to move [relatively] freely in the world. Break those rules, and you will have that freedom revoked. Major’s thoughts about this are amplified by the investigation into the mysterious puppet master, who floats freely through the net, seemingly unbounded and outside the confines of the law.
As she says to her coworker and confidante Batou, “Sometimes I suspect that I’m not who I think I am. Maybe I died long ago and somebody took my brain and stuck it in this body. Maybe there never was a real me in the first place, and I’m completely synthetic. … That’s the only thing that makes me feel human, the way I’m treated. I mean, who knows what’s in our heads?”
Batou responds, “it sounds to me like you’re doubting your own ghost."
To which Major says, “What if a cyber-brain could possibly generate its
own ghost, create a soul by itself? And if it did, what would be the
importance of being human then?”
She deals with her uneasiness around her self and body by diving into the ocean at night, though her expensive and heavy android body could be damaged if something went wrong. Batou asks her, “What the hell is it you see at the bottom of that darkness?”
She tells him, “I feel fear, cold, alone. Sometimes down there, I even feel hope. …When I float weightless back to the surface, I’m imagining I’m becoming someone else. …It’s probably the compression.”
Major’s trappedness is very real, in that her whole body is held by the state—yet, the unknown beyond is still deeply frightening. Throughout the movie she grows ever more ready, through tracking the mysterious movements of the puppet master and reflecting on her own body and consciousness, to make that step into darkness—away from what is known, and away from her own socio-political and physical confines. This to me has deep resonance with the process of readying oneself for transition: reaching the cusp of a life-altering decision, and the frightening quality of knowing you want to press into something beyond your current world but not knowing what is on the other side.
Indeed, Major and the other characters are forced to reckon with the frightening unknown when faced with the Puppet Master’s power, as he hacks into people’s minds and manipulates their memories. In the face of a man who has been “ghost hacked,” Batou says in wonder, “That’s all it is: information. Even a simulated experience or a dream is simultaneous reality and fantasy. Any way you look at it, all the information that a person accumulates over a lifetime is just a drop in the bucket.”
This is the crux of it, in a way: Major realizes her own capacity for both imagination and malleability, for the possibilities she cannot yet imagine, and at the same time, the irrelevance of her life to anyone else’s, and the fallibility of holding onto one narrative of the self. She begins pursuing the Puppet Master for altogether different reasons. And it turns out the Puppet Master has also been searching for her. The climax of the movie is a kind of transformation. The Puppet Master, it turns out, has been seeking Major because he sees something in her of himself, a connection, and Major also recognizes this. He proposes joining their ghosts, melding their identities to become something wholly new and unprecedented. Major is at first apprehensive: “You’re talking about redefining my identity. I want a guarantee that I can still be myself.”
The Puppet Master answers, “There isn’t one. Why would you wish to? All things change in a dynamic environment. Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you.”
This not only sums up Major’s fear of this transition, which will change the course of her life indelibly, but also brings Major’s particular, peculiar experience into a much larger scope—that of the fundamental human relationship to change. In this way, the Puppet Master is doing what Major could not; he is expanding his self-conception into infinitude and enveloping all of human experience into it.
At this point this is not even a metaphor. The things Major says in this movie are almost word for word things I have heard my trans friends say and have thought myself. The movie captures the magical and mysterious quality of transitioning in a way I’ve rarely seen in anything else. She literally is transitioning—she is actually trans in a very basic sense.
In Freud’s “The Experience of Love,” love is a melding of the object and the ego—that is, the self and the object of love, which merge to create a new being. He calls that love Eros. This is playing out explicitly and supernaturally in Major and the Puppet Master’s relationship, and also carries the beautiful message that transition is an act of love—which is something that I feel is so obvious, but that can get lost in all the complicated thinking that goes on around it.
II. Blade Runner
Blade Runner is probably one of my favorite movies in a cinematic sense—I mean, that’s part of why it has its place in culture and why it’s so famous. But the visuals are crazy, the soundtrack is amazing and mesmerizing, and the world that it evokes is so vivid and potent.
A lot of people are probably familiar with the premise of this story. It’s based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? By Philip K Dick, but it deviates a lot from the book. In both, the central figure is Rick Deckard, a retired police officer whose job as a blade runner was to “retire” rogue bioengineered humanoids who are manufactured by a big corporation called the Tyrell corporation for off-world slave labor. These humanoids are called replicants, and they seem to be almost biologically indistinguishable from humans. One difference is that they have shortened lifespans of only four years, a feature built into their physical mechanism and biology. They seem to have some extra physical abilities, and they also have fabricated memories of their past. But the only way to tell a replicant apart from a human is by doing a test in which they zoom in on someone’s eye, and measure their biological responses to provocative questions. Deckard is brought out of retirement to hunt for four replicants who have escaped back to earth after working off-world, and that kicks off the action.
The Voight-Kampff test, as it’s called, is something like a Turing test, but it’s also like a test for sociopathy or psychopathy, or for a sort of ill-defined social perversity.
So already there may be some things you might be picking up in a queer reading such as this. The replicants are a persecuted group who, if they find themselves in general society, have to playact as humans—not, as many alien and android villains who impersonate humans do, for the sake of attacking humans or bringing about their demise, but to protect themselves—to survive.
From a paper by Robert Yeates called “Urban Decay and Sexual Outlaws in the Blade Runner Universe,” “[The replicants] are…androids in drag enacting the performance of being human. Intent on hiding their real identities, these characters are forced to lead double lives, performing the roles of acceptable members of society while bearing secrets that would see them rendered criminal.”
Their classification as inhuman is very nearly arbitrary, given how difficult it is to discern who is and isn’t a replicant. But they hold a kind of allure over people—as of an illicit, dangerous appeal. The Voight-Kampff test itself strikes me as very similar to the frenzy going right now amongst bigoted groups to achieve the impossible task of identifying trans people on sight, and figuring out what facilities we are allowed to use or whether we get to participate in sports.
This parallel is present early in the film: Deckard visits Eldon Tyrell of the Tyrell Corporation to learn more about the replicants he’s hunting, and Tyrell has him demonstrate the test on a woman named Rachel. During one of his questions, about what her reaction would be to finding a picture of a naked woman in a magazine, she asks him, “Are you testing if I’m a replicant or a lesbian?"—making the connection between the social deviancy of replicants and queerness explicit.
Furthermore, to broaden things out a little bit, to me there’s always something a little gay about almost anything set in a futuristic setting—you have people wearing crazy rave outfits, everything is very flashy and kind of slutty. And that’s all very queer to me. And the people who are acting the most are the replicants. I see them and I think, look at these people, those are gays! They are slinking around, they are vibrant, they are living these vivid lives. Especially Batty and Pris, the primary replicant villains, seem disinterested in catering to a “human gaze”—they are disinterested in assimilating to the norms of society, unlike some of the other replicants, or the replicants of the sequel film, which seems to me far more preoccupied with the question of assimilation. These replicants are living life to the largest that they are able.
This isn’t at all out of line with the history of Hollywood and cinema, which loves a queer-coded villain. Queer-coded villains are often flamboyant and performative, and they’re often meant to be off-putting or strangely alluring to a mainstream audience. Ursula’s character from the Little Mermaid, for example, was developed by a queer man and is based off of the drag queen Divine. Sharon Stone’s murderous character in Basic Instinct is explicitly queer, flaunting her relationship with her girlfriend in front of Michael Douglas' enamored detective. In the movie Rebecca, the villainous housekeeper taunts the main character by comparing her to the glorious and beautiful now-dead Rebecca; there’s a great scene where she slides some lace Rebecca once wore over her hand, saying, “It’s so sheer. You could see everything under this lace.” The purpose of all of these characters is to make you think something isn’t quite right here; they can also be an easy foil a literal straight-man hero.
Suffice to say, Blade Runner uses the trope consciously and with great intention. AIDS finally became a nationally-recognized issue in the States in 1981, just a year before the movie came out, and there are some striking parallels to that epidemic. The obvious one is the replicants' shortened lifespan, which is their driving motivator through the story. They are trying to figure out a way to stay alive past this marker, which they mostly ultimately fail to accomplish. This comes to a head when Roy Batty goes to visit his literal maker, Eldon Tyrell, in order to try and negotiate the terms of his existence. They have a back-and-forth which demonstrates how well Batty has studied and understood his own biology. Eldon Tyrell dismisses Batty’s proposals:
Eldon Tyrell: You were made as well as we could make you.
Roy Batty: But not to last.
Tyrell: The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and you have burned so very very brightly, Roy. Look at you. You’re the prodigal son. You’re quite a prize!
Roy: I’ve done questionable things.
Tyrell: Also extraordinary things. Revel in your time!
Roy: Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn’t let you in heaven for. [The doomed Batty kisses Tyrell and then kills him, poking out his eyes in the process.]
Eyes are a hefty symbol in the movie. It’s one of the first images we see: the closeup of a replicant’s eye during the Voight-Kampff test. Batty makes note of eyes several times. They visit the man who manufactures replicant eyes for Tyrell Corp, and Batty tells him, “If only you could see what I’ve seen with your eyes.” Here he is at once embracing his own perspective and way of moving through the world, while disavowing a connection to socialized humanity. He recognizes that he doesn’t have ownership even of his own eyes; he doesn’t identify with humans, and he doesn’t have a desire to convince them that he is one of them. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t want respect, or that he doesn’t think he deserves to live—much the opposite.
So all of this convenes at the climax of the movie, during the final fights between Deckard and first Pris, then Batty. Katherine Hayles, a literary critic, writes that in Dick’s novels “androids are [often] associated with unstable boundaries between self and world”. The replicants have this perceived effect on society: they make people question their own humanity, and thus are a threat to civilization that must be eliminated. This is a critical part of what takes place in these final battles. First, Deckard finds Pris disguising herself as a doll in a room full of animated dolls, in a scene that just completely tickles me—it’s so quaint and eerie, very reminiscent of much older stories like the Sandman and the Nutcracker, both stories by ETA Hoffman [that feature dolls coming alive or people pretending to be dolls.] But this scene is jarring in its shift from the futuristic urban world of LA we’ve so far been exposed to, to a decayed, decrepit forgotten building full of magical toys that feels almost like a Victorian dreamscape—like Deckard is walking into a whole other world. I think it also hints at an unknown and unspoken history of replicants, one that they might be more inclined to claim than their own false, implanted memories of humanity—something that stretches back far further than a mere four years.
After Deckard defeats Pris he is confronted by Roy Batty, who—though his own body is failing—immediately frightens Deckard and puts him off-balance with how off the wall he is. It’s like Batty isn’t following the regular rules of a fight—he’s yelling encouraging challenges to Deckard, like “You better shoot straight!” and he’s stripping down instead of arming up as the fight progresses, exposing himself more and more as the scene goes on. Another quote from [“Urban Decay and Sexual Outlaws in the Blade Runner Universe” by Robert Yeates, quoting Scott Bukatman]—“The ‘performative side of Roy Batty breaks down traditionally-drawn distinctions between the authentic and the artificial, or theatrical,’ enacting ‘a performance of self that becomes an implicit challenge to Deckard’s stoic desire to preserve the ‘real’.” One of the first things Batty does, as Deckard hides around a corner from a doorway, is to grab him through the wall. He moves through the environment in a way that’s totally alien and deeply frightening to Deckard. This in turn forces Deckard also to transgress his usual ways of moving, climbing up a set of shelves to break through the ceiling onto the floor above. Deckard drops his gun in doing this, but significantly to me, he’s already running scared before that even happens—he’s armed and running away from Batty, while Batty pursues him in nothing but a tiny pair of shorts.
To quote the same paper, “[Batty] treats the building as, in Michel de Certeau’s words, ‘a space of enunciation,’ expressing himself through his navigation of physical space … Batty forgoes the established routes of the physical environment (doors, hallways, and stairs) in favor of spatial transgression, in a way that evokes his daily transgression between secret identity and public performance.”
Their reversal of roles—Batty as the hunter and Deckard as the hunted, as well as, I would say, Batty as hero and Deckard as villain—also evoke another mystery of the story, which is the unanswered question of whether Deckard himself is a replicant. And he probably is—I’m pretty sure Ridley Scott basically has said so. but I don’t find it particularly relevant. The point is that there has only ever been a tenuous and porous boundary between replicants and humans. Humans are so frightened of replicants because of replicants’ perceived abilities to infiltrate and upend peoples' concept of the stability of humanity. So in this way, Deckard isn’t losing this fight because he is a replicant or he isn’t, or because he’s actually suffering any loss of real strength or power. He’s losing because a new mode of thinking and seeing the world is forcibly intruding on his way of being. Whether he’s a replicant or not, by engaging Roy Batty, he is being forced to understand what it is like to be a replicant—and so the bounds of his previous thinking are being annihilated, and a new world is awakening in him. [And in the end, this new world is the one he chooses.] I think this bears some similarities to Ghost in the Shell: the thread of transformation, and of entering a new, frightening and dangerous but exhilarating space of greater freedom and possibility.
[I would encourage anyone interested to go look up Batty’s final monologue “Tears in Rain,” one of the most beautiful moments of the film. It’s gorgeously performed, and he leaves us with the image of his life slipping away like tears in rain—an image so similar to Batou’s observation of memory, like a drop in a bucket.]