pelouse

I’M NOT TRANS IN THE FOREST
Loup Rivière

(translated by Deborah Birch)

TRANS is the name of a hole. It’s the name of a rift, a gap.
TRANS is the name of the distance that separates me from a set of fictions that failed to deal with my case.
It’s the name of a space that’s just there, around me, between my body and the success of heteropatriarchy.

TRANS.
This word/space sometimes plays the role of a wholesome firebreak, a kind of magnetic shield, a post-quantum technology that can protect me from a milieu that doesn’t fit my modalities of existence.
A self-managed Pokeball whose cellular membrane practises osmotic diplomacy but can just as easily become a scary border wall.

TRANS is the name of a buoy, a satellite, a tram cruising the city edges, an asteroid belt, the veil of pesticide on the skin of a slightly suspect apple, the moats of a castle processing its own vulnerability, the ethereal body of Beyoncé as she’s taking a break, the sound of the neighbours downstairs having a party—it feeling like a cosy techno cradle.
It’s not me.
It follows me, surrounds me, it rubs against me, it marries me, it turns me on, it keeps me warm in the river’s springtime waters, it wanders my skin, but it’s not me.

TRANS is the name of a relation between the world and me. The name of a beacon signalling ‘not this way,’ a Trigger Warning, a sign that says ‘mind the step.’

It’s kind of my best friend, my paid guardian angel, the ticket inspector on the train who decides not to fine me without ratting me out to her colleagues.

TRANS is the name of the animal that swims/runs/flies/crawls with me in the street to warn that lady to keep her question to herself.

It’s the name of a mediation technology capable of invoking the stories we learned not to tell at school.

I’m not trans in the forest.

I am trans as long as you continue to make the correlation between genitals, a pronoun, a geography of hairs and a social role.
TRANS is the name for what you see in me as long as you don’t learn to see me for myself.

It’s a beautiful name. A name of fire and sacred serpents.

TRANSssssssss

It’s the name of the breach between me and what, frankly, would have been simpler, what really would have suited everyone.
It’s the name of the sceptical blank installed between me and what was already asked of me months before I was born.

TRANS is the name of the difference between the strange moving and unfinished thing that I am and the quite ambitious project of bringing together the teeming multiplicity of animal lifeforms into two dubious categories. It’s the name of a structural defect of the imagination.

This distance, this hole, this gap, between the norm and me, only exists in relation to this norm. If the norm disappears there is no more in between, nothing to exist outside of, there’s no more gap, nothing more to name.

I’m not trans in the forest.

In the forest
I am a thing that becomes other things, that dies.
That sometimes sings a little, thinks a little, dances sometimes, sometimes cries, sleeps sometimes.
I have nothing to prove to sylvan politics.
We transition together.

The becoming-forest of the world is a bit more than a pile-up of biomass that allows a gang of lovesick heterotrophs to breathe.
Perhaps it’s closer to a radical disidentification, from the roots.

I am trans with you insofar as you aren’t up to the friendship of trees.

And I need you in the forest.