The Unicorn: Liminality, Transmisogyny, and Numinous Synthesis
Two wandering poets undergo a pilgrimage to the highest mountain in the world, where they find a unicorn, beautiful and powerful. The experience was numinous-- that is, it referenced and amplified the presence of something spiritual, even more beautiful and powerful than itself-- and it changed both poets' lives irrevocably.
One poet says to the other: "That was unlike any other experience. I am now convinced that this unicorn was created by a different god than the rest of the animals." The second responds: "I feel the opposite! I have an expanded appreciation for the gods who created this earth, now that I know they created this unicorn too."
Both poets bristle. How could the other poet deny their experience, seeing this beautiful and powerful object? Aren't they listening?
Words like jazz, pain, and capitalism are also beautiful and powerful. We have numinous experiences with them when we classify music as jazz, generalize about what is painful, or become oppressed under capitalism. When we discuss them, we embody these poets, and in my experience our conversations become difficult, but generative. This is because, in embodying these poets, we step into the limen between generation and reclamation, between expanding categories like "god" or "jazz" and creating new, exciting ones.
Is fusion jazz? Is pain pleasure? Are all taxonomies capitalist? This limen is powerful and comfortable because when presented with a beautiful powerful word, we are not forced to collapse the ambiguity that gives it power. Outside the limen we lack this privilege.
Is Duchamp's "The Fountain" art?
Poet 1: "Denying that 'The Fountain' is art undersells the expansiveness and power of art."
Poet 2: "No, saying that 'The Fountain' is art co-opts the word art, turning it into an empty signifier that means little more than 'good'."
Both poets in this case, right or wrong, are arguing that the other is not respecting the numinous power of the word "art". Whether the poets can explain it linguistically or not, they have an intuitive sense of the power of the numinous word. Thus no compromise can be made if either party feels the power of the numinous word has been diminished (would you consider a proposition whose premise you believe to be disproven by your experience?). Thus, the understandable reactions of "meeting in the middle", "making our positions more nuanced", or "taking things to the marketplace of ideas" are not enough. Neither is simply concluding "the more expansive definition captures more nuance", "we need words to mean something", or "two things can be true, you know" on principle. We are after bigger game, thank god.
No, in situations like this, where we're squabbling over numinous encounters we've had with ambiguous words, we must realize that neither poet makes sense without the other, in order to affirm a greater spiritual connection with the force from which they both stem. This isn't a claim about correctness, but a claim about comprehensibility-- after all, "0=0" and "0=1" need each other to make sense, but only one is true in any functional mathematical system.
I'll say it again-- Our goal is not greater nuance, but understanding how neither poet makes sense without the other, in order to affirm our spiritual connection with the numinous.
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In the same way I ask "Is pain pleasure?", I also ask:
Who is affected by transmisogyny?
The naive belief is that only a subset of trans people are affected, creating a group of "transmisogyny exempt" people that require a host of language like "TME" to describe them. It's natural for people bluntly hurt by transmisogyny to want language to discuss it. However, I strongly believe that the language of "TME" and "TMA" is harmful nonsense. My instinct is to just say so, and leave it at that-- but this would be destructive.
The issue is that both of us poets have had a numinous encounter with the word "transmisogyny". This word arrived, like an angel, to help us make sense of our lives, relate to one another, and ultimately love one another. It gave us the tools to explain our lives, which we started to view as part of our bodies like skilled metalworkers view the hammer as an extension of themselves. Surprising as it may seem, the word "transmisogyny" is beautiful and powerful like the unicorn.
Thus when we argue, we embody the poets, and I am embodying the second. The issue is that "How dare you disrespect the gods who created the unicorn?" very easily spills into shutting out any new conceptions of the gods. Even worse, I have coerced myself into underselling the word transmisogyny's beauty and power in order to relate it more easily to familiar conceptions of the word "god"-- and if I do that, anyone would be right to be mad at me.
So what should I, as the second poet do? I might talk about experiences I've had where "TME" language enshrines a false logic of "women are more oppressed than men; therefore trans women are more oppressed than trans men". I might talk about how deciding whether a person is "TME" co-opts people who seemingly have authority over such things (transfemmes, for example) into a degendering, all-reducing force. And I might talk about how I've seen the same tools and seeds of transmisogyny weaponized against the supposedly-exempt-- even against cis people! In summary, I would talk about the beautiful powerful word "transmisogyny" and my experiences with it.
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And now, remember our goal-- we don't politely compromise, we don't argue about whether the numinous word is important, and we most certainly do not talk in circles for an hour, self-congratulating about how reasonable and nuanced we can be while our ideas pass in the night. We have faith that neither poet makes sense without the other; how is that true here? Of course now it's obvious-- the numinous word. When we ponder this, we poets come to understand why we hold our beliefs so intensely, and why we would be upset at one another over them.
And with some thought, hopefully we come to graft one another's experiences into our own understandings of transmisogyny. And while we may continue to discuss specific things like whether "TME" is a helpful term (and I might maintain my belief that it isn't!), we've entered a safer space to talk about the harms we've experienced. We no longer risk offhandedly saying (or pressuring ourselves into believing) that the numinous word is not as powerful, as a reaction to the other poet. We're no longer signaling that our values aren't just butting heads, but forever incompatible due to the strength of our beliefs. And over time, our bodies might come to recognize that there's no need to spend their energy worrying about whether they will be excluded talking to the other poet.
And if in the end we poets really disagree about jazz or "TME", we actually know what we've disagreed about. If we hadn't, we would be fuming over something that didn't happen-- the nerve of the other poet for not listening to you.
And maybe now, with this spiritual experience further amplified, we can start writing the poetry we wandered all the way up this mountain to write.