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New Flesh, New Struggles

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Michelle O’Brien, January 2004

I wrote this essay as a submission for Bound to Struggle, an anthology my friend Simon is putting together on kink and radical politics. He hasn't yet had a chance to read it, but he gave me permission to put it up on my site. At least on the surface, it's definitely the riskiest piece up here. Porn and kink aren't exactly controversy-free topics, even among my fellow revolutionary trans feminists. Oh well. I hope you all enjoy it.

I spent the winter of Y2K in Minneapolis. The winter was cold, as they always are. Vicious winds whipped through streets and sidewalks, grabbing our bundled bodies, leaving the tiny ice scars on the surface of our faces and eyes. It was an exciting time. I had spent the spring before traveling in anarchist and communist squats on the continent in Europe. In Rome, an autonomist told me to link arms as we charged a US embassy, hitting a line of the squat Carabinieri vans. In Barcelona, I watched police cars turn and drive away, as we spread out across a blocked highway, chanting "You take our homes, we take your streets!" in Catalan. In London I sat with Greek anarchists for days behind a high barricade of classroom desks; watching the campus security guards outside parole our student protest turned siege. When I returned to the States, things were changing quickly. N30 hit in Seattle, and for the first time I began to seriously imagine the ways street militancy might allow us to seize, hold and defend our dear, beloved cities.

Through that winter I organized street protest trainings, teaching kids the tactics I had learned in Europe and Seattle. We practiced breaking police lines, sucking people back into crowds, staying linked and staying strong. We were preparing ourselves for A16 in DC, for the upcoming May Day in Minneapolis, for fantasies of mass street insurrection.

We were training our bodies to protest. Our trainings were rooms full of bodies ­ but not just any bodies. These workshops shared the demographics of too many of the protests of that year -- they were mostly white kids, the young middle class that could afford an arrest or two, able-bodies who could run if it came to that, bodies that were not visibly trans or queer. We trained rooms full of bodies to stand against the police and defend each other, to meet power with a certain privileged, almost naive courage.

We enlisted our bodies for high-profile battles of street protests, while less visible wars waged across other kinds of bodies. During 1999 and 2000, construction workers were building a new downtown Hennepin County jail; not to house protesters, but the bodies of young black, native and Latino men. One Minneapolis public school librarian, a trans woman named Debra Davis, faced the wrath of transphobic parents and administrators over her right to use a bathroom. Within the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local 17, immigrant activists led a successful campaign to change the national AFL-CIO’s official stance on the rights of immigrants; while they fought off a brutal alliance of the INS and hotel owners. And in the streets of Minneapolis, like in cities across the world, many faced daily harassment regardless of any protest. Sex workers, trans people, drug users, homeless people and others fought a constant battle for survival, against poverty, hatred, violence and police harassment. Wars over bodies: their survival, their control, their movement, their visibility, and their worth.

While organizing street protests, jail solidarity and lock downs, I was also in another struggle; one I wasn’t talking much about. I was dating, and at 21 had one of my first remotely functional sexual relationships. At the time, most read me as a fag, a boy, and a bit odd. My girlfriend was a butch queer woman who liked me, in part, because she read me as femme. In our sex, our day to day moments together, I began to unravel years of confused anxiety, a tangled mess of incomprehensibility that wrapped itself around my body. Slowly, I began to heal from years of trauma; from an alienation from my body and self so massive and deep I couldn't begin to grasp it. I found new ways of understanding and reading my body, new possibilities glimpsed in a pleasurable caress, in our flirtatious exchanges. Sometime early in that winter I began to seriously consider the possibility that I was a woman.

As that winter gave way into spring, I moved out of Minneapolis. I soon came out as trans, and began a different trajectory of struggle and resistance. Every day I fought to make sense of my body, to sort through years of accumulated self-hatred and fear. I kept working with anarchists ­ joining protestors through another two May Days in Portland, doing prisoner solidarity organizing with an anarchist collective, finding myself from one punk house to another across cities and years.

Slowly, I tried to understand the ways my self-hatred, my lack of connection to my body and my extreme discomfort with my sex and gender informed and structured the kinds of organizing I chose to do. My work in militant street protest, I found, was linked within me to my desperate, confused desire to connect to something, to somehow be present in this flesh. My fantasies of armed struggle, I realized, were connected to my lack of desire to live and my basic fear of this life and body of mine. As I withdrew myself from some forms of organizing, new ones opened up. The real battle felt like it was on the surface of this flesh. It was a struggle to come to terms with a new way of being in the world with this body that was so very wrong.

Eventually I started hormones and it became clear I didn’t want to go to jail again. I started valuing my own life, and visions of violent revolution became more complex and difficult. I stopped being willing to play the game of legitimacy of gender and politics against sexist male activists. I began to realize that if I was going to be a part of a revolution, I’d have to begin by figuring out myself. I’d have to begin with an understanding of this body that exceeds my words, that eludes their categories, that demands a world beyond my imagination. For this, kink was absolutely crucial.

The languages I had learned to describe my body were hopelessly useless and self-hating. I needed to find myself, connect to myself, reimagine myself -- I desperately needed a different way of marking and mapping this flesh. I saw how deeply unsustainable my organizing had long been. I wanted to find ways of being true to myself, and hence true to revolutionary struggle. In staying strong in struggles against genocide and domination, it became clear, I needed to heal myself. It was through kink I began to let go of this trauma, and find physical languages to understand this body that opened onto new, liberating ways of being and healing.

It was in sex, more then anywhere, I learned about myself. My repulsion from most genital-based sex began to make sense, and I started to sort out other forms of desire and possibility. If my body would never be normal, never have quite the right genitals, never fully fit into the regime of properly sexed humans, what could pleasure mean? I needed new languages of sensation and intimacy to understand how I could be attractive, how I could give and receive pleasure, how I could live my body with others.

My sexual practices in BDSM taught me ways of being with my body that wasn't about normative gender. They offered sexual codes that weren't reducible to genitals, that didn't immediately write my body in codes that made no sense. They helped untangle me from the criss-crossed maps of self-hatred and self-destruction that stripped my body from myself. In transforming my flesh and my desire into a complex landscape of unexpected pleasure, BDSM offered a means of loving myself as trans, in loving my body as genderqueer. In the intensity, desires and passions of bondage, pain and domination, I found that I was sexy and beautiful, capable of connection and joy. I found that I could heal, and with that healing return to the world proud and strong.

In kink I learned ways of loving and appreciating my new, changing body. I developed the confidence it took to start hormones, to be out as trans, to demand my space as a woman. In leather I understood that I could be an extraordinary, incredibly hot dyke creature that had no need for a body that rigidly conformed to gender expectations. This confidence and the changes it brought led into new kinds of organizing, into different ways of linking my body to politics.

I only occasionally take the streets these days, and only when the risk of arrest feels remote. Instead I’ve spent the last year organizing around health care access for trans people. Slowly we’ve been trying to build cross-racial and cross-coalitions among Philadelphia’s trans communities, linking this to struggles waged by prisoners, sex workers and active drug users. From reforming the shelter system to supporting the needle exchange, from speaking on anti-trans violence to writing about self-determination in health care choices, I’m finding ways of building movements that allow the complexities of my body and identity to be fully present.

At some point, I am sure my struggle will bring me back out into the streets. Our movements and world are changing quickly, and the day will come when I again place direct action centrally to my work. When it does, I will return to those tactics with new strength, new grounding, new understanding and new courage. I am coming into a space where my militancy is founded on deeply knowing and loving myself, on the complex terrain of this new flesh and its strange pleasures.

As my sexual practice has taught me ways of loving and reimagining my body in its myriad of contradictions, I’ve strove to bring the awareness, clarity and pleasure of kink to my organizing.