Origin is the Goal

01/06/25

Some reflections on body politics, health, visa discourse, natural disasters, transgender advocacy, HIV, and settling into the bay

Just recovered from the flu and I’m so fucking sick with wisdom teeth complications and pericoronitis. Like my fever and lymph nodes swelling so bad im bed ridden. I just got back in SF after cleaning up the rest of our ruined home in South Carolina, sorting rubble and relocating precious items, repainting my mother in law’s house after she went broke repairing the collapsed roof and floor which spilled conifers and fiber glass laden water on us when this all started. A gf out to visit after Christmas anticipating moving herself with some other gals In February. I’m working on moving as many other friends out here from SC as I can.

But im just so tired. I quit working at the worst job of my life which I needed so bad. It was my first electrical engineering job. I am a transgender woman without a degree from South Carolina, which translates to a life of miserable minimum wage jobs washing dishes, general contract construction, working gas station kitchens in rural hell if not technicalization. I finally quit follow over a year of unresolved complaints regarding harassment following being assaulted by my coworker, who worked in the same lab as me. I would have stayed longer, but I couldn’t handle the continual mental deterioration anymore. I had been warned from other women in my lab of a history in my lab of failure to address such things, but I did everything right, went to HR over and over, went to my boss. I knew conceptually the odds of being taken serious, even after supporting documentation from a state accredited rape crisis center delivered to my employer, was near zero. And still I was just in disbelief. I got married a month after leaving, following 3 weeks of the most grueling and intense long hours I’ve ever done in my life working on my first independent PCB contract. The hurricane came the night I finally shipped my first PCB. Our cat oedipus was out, and we haven’t seen her since. I miss her so much. Days before our wedding, Helene destroyed our home, our wedding venue, my car, most of our stuff. FEMA assistance and disaster shelters are inaccessible to non citizens and will negatively impact any future immigration filings (such as a greencard application). A gf was nice enough to let us stay in her 1br along with the majority of our stuff that survived, but it was a miserable situation. The SBA did not/does not have money to loan me to replace the equipment which was destroyed, which I relied on for further contract work. It’s hard to find words for the feeling. I don’t even really remember anything from this period. I do remember my wedding. Despite it all it was beautiful. My wife was beautiful. We had a guerrilla wedding at a food court in downtown Greenville, SC. It wasn’t what I had hoped for but I wouldn’t change a thing.

We left quickly. My wife rented a car and we drove 5 straight days from SC to SF right after our wedding. we didn’t have anywhere to live in SC, but we were already planning an eventually SF relocation down the line. Our future roommates were totally fine with us moving in earlier than we originally planned, we arrived in beautiful Mission-Delores. It was the most magical experience of my life driving across the country. I understood the scale of America and the stakes of our history for the first time. But it was so hard, and the arrival was even harder. My wife overexerted herself to her limit getting us here. So did I. But neither of us were willing to slow down and process what had just happened yet. We were initially hyperactive. We picked up hobbies and events left and right, like skateboarding. My wife fell bravely taking on a half pipe week one, and developed a debilitating hematoma and nerve injury for the majority of our initial period in sf in October and November. we do not have a car here and rely on BART, buses, and trolleys (also currently under assault by the city), so any kind of prolonged standing sitting was painful, much less walking. All this is to say, it was a very traumatic period, and it was very difficult to adjust. But the threads were weaving together. I rediscovered my obsession with Benjamin’s theses on the concept of history. I wrote in a journal entry shortly after I arrived: “Ziel: terminus. Origin is the goal. The substance of our past will be discovered through the struggle to make ourselves a future here.” I didn’t understand what this would actually look like at all yet, but the sense of the possibility of meaningful political engagement here began to take shake in me. I saw horrifying degrees of dehumanization, analogous and similarly motivated as the transphobic, anti-migrant, and climate violence we’d fled. Often this old-new violence still targeted transgender women, but now under the guise of the proactive policing of homelessness and drug addicted rather than open queerphobia. “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the emergency situation is the norm of history”. Despite it all, I love it here. We aren’t leaving.The myriad of crises ravaging San Francisco also contain the elements we need to build a more humane world, with the capacity for kindness and compassion we need to prepare for the inevitable continual escalation of such climate crisis, housing crisis, and over policing. The election results were scary, but expected and factored in to our plan well ahead of time. But the instant change of tone in the discourse was unexpected. Don’t be confused into thinking California is generally more tolerant. The tolerance concealers a deeper meanness, a highly evolved and generalized form of exclusion and destitution. The struggle is the same everywhere, the foundations of our emancipation are the same every, and the dynamics of our struggle share the same outlines everywhere.

Returning to SC was hard, but there was a calm. I had a new appreciation for it with the space to get out from under its suffocating influence. It’s a bittersweet feelings to not have a home in the place you were born anymore, but we will again someday after we finish the work to do here.

My wife slipped a disk in early December, and so has been more or less bed ridden following her recovery from her leg injury. We got back on the 25th, and the gf in town was sick fell ill. i got sick after, but recovered quickly, and took care of them both till she left. Finally, my roommate also got sick, worst of all. I took care of her, only to again fall ill as she began to recover.. I have a canker sour beside the decaying gums around my wisdom teeth and I feel like I can barely stand again 😭

And there is so little time. Shortly after arriving I received a fellowship whereby I can work on open source projects of my choosing. I began working on a myriad of Lora mesh, micro solar,ow cost braille cells, and low cost geolocation tags utilizing the find my network (I am sorry oedi, I miss you). I move again to another apartment in SF in February and need help coordinate with gals coming from SC, plus find another job to sponsor my wife’s green card. I’m so scared of the visa/work permit discourse. Im so scared I can’t find a job here. My wife has been in this country since she was 7 years old. She entered the country legally and received DACA. She went to fucking Yale on a full ride (she’s a genius) and studied American constitutional law and international grand strategy and still we have to pray that the immigration system will not punish her. And then she’ll only be one of a few lucky ones. Rubble falls unceasingly at her feet. And still we are lucky.

I feel so lucky I’m not sleeping outside. The feeling of having a storm take everything away and being unable to even collect basic aid is so surreal. It broke my heart seeing the sweeps my first week here. People robbed of everything they had left. This is not tolerable. This is not the way a civil society responds to crisis. It is terrorism. It is cruelty for the sake of cruelty. It’s just such a nakedly cruel place here in the bay. It’s so proudly antisocial. And I feel like I’ve just gotten more and more feverish. The physical ailments represent both an exasperation and symptomolgy of a level of chronic intense stress and trauma I think. And I understand how it makes one so scared they are willing to mobilize whatever violence taken to be necessary to reinstate “safety” and “order”. But this sort of crisis is the rule, not the exception and each historic “solution” only exacerbates the state of crisis. Like yes, I just need mouth surgery, but the auto immune response and failure to recognize it before it hit this level if severity (and numerous other likely related infections and illnesses the last few months) is a reflection of a more general failure of neuro-regulation. My nerves are fried wires. I’m so tired. We are so close to a kind of calm and safety I’ve been holding my breath waiting to wake up to, yet each attempt to zone out and wait for things to feel normal only intensifies crisis. This is instructive, and represents the general condition facing us in the years ahead.

I hope that I can find a way to stay sane and true to this awareness in the bay. This is such a monstrously cruel and inhospitable place. The level of violence unleashed on the unhoused and on drug users here is horrifying in a way the eerie, architecturally and politically reified, infinitely diffused suffocating racist and bigotry of South Carolina. It is a vital and active form of exclusion that necessitates an array of disassociations.

Everything burns twice.

It is important to not lose one’s “spirit of sacrifice” which furnishes our the consciousness that this is not a tolerable world. We cannot resolve ourselves to calm and look to the future. The future is only ours insofar as we can seize our past. And not as some transhistorical substance of transgender identity, as the sensuousness and fullness of our lives in the here and now from which we will inherit the past and the future. Socialism represents the only hope for our collective future. Any alternative represents our infinite disappearance and fragmentation. “We need history, but we need it differently from the spoiled lazy-bones in the garden of knowledge.”

The handling of aids here both exposes the limit and highlights the hope to be found here. I did not know about prep like that and I’ve never once had a positive experience with a doctor before coming here. No one in South Carolina told me you could take prep/pep as needed and get full coverage, no one explained how ar risk I was, no one told me the highest rates of occurrence are in trans women 18–24. No one explained to me that transgender women are the single most at risk category and something like 30–40% of us have HIV/AIDS. And again I was so lucky to have survived my tumultuous and housing insecure early adulthood. I was amazed by the accessibility of services here. I initially went for HRT related healthcare, but the experience I had at the SFAF was the most positive one I’ve ever had in my life. This is an institution which represents piles of bodies of dedicated activists, and a struggle for their memory. We have to honor it in our own community with more effective education, particularly for trans women.

But no matter how effective and numerous our organizing effort, we cannot win this struggle without a broader confrontation with the mode of production. The miraculous recessions of the HIV crisis broadly is a victory “we” (the undifferentiated gay community) won for ourselves. Winning it involved a struggle over who “we” are, and what we can be. And we won, through solidarity and transversal struggle for our liberation, against homonormativist assimilation. Today, the same tired dynamics haunt the discourse surrounding the accelerating backslide of transgender people into freak hood. the crisis continues. It was never really won, it still reflects in the internal struggles for our own identity against the generalized “Trans People”. Our worsening conditions out as at each other throats, as the intersection of trans existence with chronic forms of state and economic violence (including climate related displacement, anti migrant violence, violence against drug users, housing crisis) continually curtail the efficacy of even the most inclusive and accessible programs. This speaks to the fundamental impossibility of localized reform. We didn’t simply fail. Trans women will always be subjected by the collective destitution climate genocide, housing crisis, and hostile drug policy represents. There is no solution for us in disassociating from our status or condition, and only so much hope for us in. the pre-political subsistence driven efforts for “community power” (be it educational subsides,work programs, trans housing, etc, though all of these things have their place in our movement for liberation). But I believe that we will win. We have the means. We have blessed magic pills to eliminate HIV risk, we have the means for housing, education, we have antivirals, we have unprecedented organizational means. We have to use them to seize “A moment in danger”. We must meet transness in its material circumstances, not wish for a more even distribution of the crises our system continually unleashed. Transness as such is no historical constant, but our roots are firmly planted wherever we find ourselves. We excel not simply because to survivorship bias, but because we are uniquely capable of seizing and defining a life for ourselves, as demonstrated by our struggle for self realization rooted first in our own living bodies. We have seen the power we have through the campaign waged by groups like Act Up to win our memory for ourselves, at a time when the culture told us we deserved death. And many have died in this struggle, and many will continue to until we achieve our liberation. But each and every one of us continues to struggle for a world fit for us. Not just through our subsistence, but in our refusal to stake our claims to life in the territories of this world. Each transition is a psychopompous journey through the depths of our own cultures, our own histories, our own personage, and a testament to immanent beauty of our forms of life. Nothing we have was given to us, and we do not need this world’s systems or channels to continue in our struggle for liberation. Our struggle begins in ourselves and extends outward to see the I at the base of each historical moment. The eternal return of the same.

But the goal is not simply to survive. We must struggle with the dissonances embedded in our own forms of subsistence. We must find a way to see ourselves in each migrant and homeless person and police murder, no matter how far we advanced ourselves and how much power we win. This is not our world until it is everyone’s world. In each instance, our struggle begins with seeing ourselves in the base of each crisis, and in responding the aid and means we can to enable the socialized remediation of ruins. This is a formula familiar to many transgender people, who are all too accustomed to spending our young adulthoods as the nurses our of friends’ sick and broken subjectivities, to build ourselves our own inner space, new communities, walls of defense from a world which we don’t belong to. The result of this, as Gleeson pointed out in her transgender Marxism collection, is that all us come to be resentful (understandably) of “the trans community” to which be belong. We find ourselves more and more wounded as the walls surrounding the communities we built to piece together lives for ourselves begin to crack. some attempt to remedy this with various compromises with the powers that eat away at our bodies, begging for a relief from the general misery represented by perpetual capitalist crisis and political chaos. We become hyper competent, we become whores, we become things for people who will use and discard us.

This represents the whole challenge ahead of us in seeking genuine liberation. Our program must be committed to the common welfare, empowerment, solidarity and love for the whole we were denied. We have to realize, for ourselves and for the whole of humanity, what we are meant to become for ourselves. This was always the program. Our existence is not a crisis, it is the realized self awareness of the rubble at the base of universal history

Origin is the goal