Dysphoria

I’ve been having some Gender Trouble.

I’ve always been somewhat marginal to masculinity. In some ways, this can’t really be helped—I drank milk three times a day, every day, for all of my childhood, but I still ended up 5’4". There’s only so much participation in and access to masculinity you get if you’re 5’4".

At the same time, I’ve also come to enjoy the feeling of operating in a liminal space of gender—wearing my silly little tube tops and long flowy skirts, having a little eyeliner here and there every once in a while, getting my ambiguous enby mullets. There is joy to be found in confusing people, in seeing the cogs behind folks’ eyes turn in real time while they try to run the gender algorithm on your body.

For a while, I was content doing that within the confines of he/him-ness. I identified myself as a cis man, fully on the he/him grindset, but as someone who exceeded what he/him-ness offered. I didn’t want to give up my boyhood or reject the possibilities of masculinity.

More recently though, as I’ve been looking for meaning and identity, I’ve switched into a they/he nonbinary-question-mark era. Honestly, I was hoping that this would solve all my problems. I’ve been feeling disconnected from and unsure of myself recently, and the hope was that formalizing my tenuous relationship with masculinity would make me feel more settled, more authentic, more me.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m actually secretly a trans woman. I try to imagine what that sensation of gender would feel like. Would the realization be sudden? Would I one day wake up and realize that the body I inhabit is not one of my own? Or would it be a more gradual, frog-in-boiling-water kind of situation? Would I simmer in gender, day after day, until one day when I look back and realize I’ve been living somebody else’s life? Or maybe I wouldn’t ever be able to tell? Maybe I would just internalize that sense of discontent and frustration, taking on the heteronormative voice of society as my own. Maybe I’d cajole myself into the closet: “it’s better to live like this, because there’s no other way to be.” Am I living that life right now?

I’ve heard arguments that the they/he’s and they/she’s of the world occupy a kind of gender rest stop—a liminal space where the gender-confused and -repressed pause and ponder on their way to eventually embracing transness at its fullest volume. The theory is that nonbinary folks are either just trans people too afraid to give up the trappings of heteronormativity, or they’re cis people too afraid to contend with heteronormative privilege.

I don’t know if I fully buy the idea, but I can see some merit in it. There is a kind of privilege of operating in gender confusion, of getting to choose when you perform they and when you perform he. If I’m meeting new friends, I get to be a queer person of color. But if I’m eating home-cooked phở, I don’t need to correct my parents if they call me a boy. Scary, permanent questions around gender-affirming surgery or medical treatment can always remain someone else’s problem. And if a fascist president decides to sic ICE to fight the “trans agenda” or whatever, I can fade away unseen.

I imagine there is a clarity in capital-t-Trans existence. You’re in the closet, or you’re out. You’re living as you were born, or you’re living as you choose. You’re living according to heteronormativity, or you’re living according to a radical queer tradition. And so I sit, and I daydream, and I wonder what it would be like if I were living, out, as a trans woman. I imagine the internal struggle that I’d have gone through to recognize my inner, truest self. And I ask myself if that struggle is what I feel now. Maybe that is me, but I’ve pushed it so far down because it’s more convenient not to recognize it?

I just want to be normal: to not have to choose between society and myself, to not have to go through the scary work of coming out to parents, to not have to fight my body and others’ perceptions to feel like myself. To live without pretenses and to feel accepted, all the same. To feel completely unexceptional. To feel like I belong, as I am.

In some ways, nonbinary existence feels like regulating my queerness—a kind of trans discipline. I place my queerness under constant surveillance. I choose the situations in which I am they and those in which I am he: when I want to be confusing and when I want to be invisible.

Discipline

I’ve also been having some Job Trouble. I think I have job dysphoria.

I came into the PhD with big dreams of doing transdisciplinary (or interdisciplinary or antidisciplinary or disciplin’t or whatever term du jour you want to use) work. A big shoutout to my friend Sunnie here, both for reintroducing transdisciplinarity and imaginativity and futurity back into my lexicon, and for generally helping make this piece what it’s become! Our shared experiences and struggles are such an animating force for this writing I was going to combine computer science and ethnic studies. I was gonna do woke programming languages, something that totally has never been done before, because I’m not like the other computer science majors! I did a humanities degree, and I have an eyebrow piercing and tattoos. I’m special! I’m not like the other girls!!!

Of course, the day-to-day of doing this work is much less spectacular. You spend a lot of time networking, meeting with other faculty and grad students. Sometimes you’re doing things that are incidental to “the real work”—presenting your work to fundraise or taking mandatory coursework. Some folks would consider teaching also an “incidental” part of the job. I’ve been lucky to get to teach a subject that’s within my wheelhouse and that I find somewhat interesting, and to be compensated reasonably for that work. I also think it’s cool getting to interact with the youth and help support folks in their academic journeys :^) In this time you also come to understand how un-novel and un-special you are. There have been many people asking interdisciplinary questions about programming and about computing. The PhD is a confrontation with ego: dreams of grandeur and fame and being well-liked. Wanting to be known as a Big Thinker who thinks Big Thoughts.

Most of your time is spent being misunderstood. The PhD is the practice of learning how to ask a research question, and in that process you offer yourself to be misunderstood over and over and over again. Every conversation is an act of profound vulnerability—you try to make yourself known, and in the process maybe the other person gets you, or maybe they don’t get you at all. Maybe you confuse yourself even more in the process of trying to explain yourself. When this process fails, we risk rendering ourselves illegible: not just to others, but to ourselves. That’s fucking terrifying.

There have also been lots of bad habits I’ve accumulated over the years that I thought I could skate by with. During my Ethnic Studies undergrad times I constantly skipped assignments and readings, and so I didn’t properly develop reading skills. These questions and habits, I had in the back of my mind as I came into this work. I thought that these things would be magically solved by the time I was like halfway through the PhD. It hasn’t.

Part of my struggle has been articulating the kind of work I’ve find interesting. I’ve done my fair share of academic reading; most of it is inscrutable or downright boring. Maybe that makes me un-academic, but for a lot of texts I just can’t get into them.

But there are some pieces that I find irrestible; pieces that resonate viscerally, that give me the language to describe and understand my lived world.

A lot of my favorite work gives language to phenomena that seems obvious in hindsight. Reading Border and Rule in undergrad felt very formative here: a concise text that straightforwardly connected histories of settler-colonialism and white supremacy to the invention of the nation-state and the technology of bordering. Engaging with Sami Schalk and reading Bodyminds Reimagined helped me contend with the ways that Blackness and (dis)ability co-constitute each other.

These texts are necessarily imaginative and rooted in futurity. To acknowledge the social construction of borders is to insist on a future where freedom of mobility is quotidian. These texts are unafraid to imagine the world as it ought to be, and not simply as it is. My friend Florence and I have had lots of conversations about the expansiveness of theoretical work, especially in a world where large-scale societal change can feel so grinding; thinking of our conversations of how theory can make “leaps and bounds” in ways the real world just can’t. Imaginativity and futurity necessarily demand ambition and play—a willingness to fuck with words, ideas, disciplinary boundaries. These are political, muscular theories: theories with teeth, rooted in action. Theory that speaks to what minoritized folks experience and and what we can do about it.

My favorite work is also deeply personal. A lot of folks come into theory to understand their own experiences. Here I’m thinking of Jina Kim, who draws on the sutures of queer, Black, and (dis)ability studies to dream of the infrastructures of care she wishes she could provide for a passed friend and life partner. To be fully honest, I literally have just read the introduction to Care at the End of the World at this point. But reading even just that introduction and seeing the earnestness and vulnerability and imaginitivity of that text—that was enough to fill my cup. I think about Fred Moten and Stefano Harvey and their work drawing on the possibilities of fugitivity in making visible the undercommons: the everyday work that we do in to survive in the academy.

These are folks who live and breathe theory, because they see theorizing and imagining happening in the lives of themselves and their communities. My favorite academic work is tied so desperately, intimately, inextricably to the people who create them: theorists who draw from their positionalities and their own tales of craftiness and survival to give us new tools to call out this fuck-ass society for what it is and imagine new ways of being.

At the same time, these texts feel like they’re speaking to me directly. They give me language to contend with my thoughts, my feelings, my own reality. These texts give me language to see and describe a future that I want to live in. A world of shared liberation and queer existence—where we can all come and be normal, as we are.

And then I look at the last research paper I submitted, and I see an impossible gulf between these two worlds.

By and large, the academy is not built to support life-affirming work. Many disciplines, from STEM fields to law, still maintain intellectual commitments to beliefs around positivism and empiricism. And academia as a whole maintains epistemological commitments to orthodoxy and tradition. They demand we dedicate our entire emotional and intellectual selves to this labor, and yet reject work that is too personal or not objective enough. The academy demands I centralize my energy with it, instead of with community or passions or art or organizing. And yet those activities are what give me life, that make my academic work possible and give it meaning and tempo. This is what Moten and Harvey write about—even though the university depends on the creativity and the imaginativity of minoritized folks’ creative labor, it still actively stifles and suppresses it. This labor is always made fugitive.

The corrosiveness of these academic spaces show up in overt ways too. Computer science is notorious for being overtly sexist and racist. My PhD cohort has ~50 students, but I’m still looking for a single other Viet PhD student here. If you are a Vietnamese PhD student in EECS, hmu. We should hang :^) When I take the elevator up to meet with my advisor every week, the first thing I see out the elevator is the Lockheed Martin Meeting Room. I’m deadass. Soda Hall, 6th floor. Being in this place makes me feel out of my body: a constant performance, a constant internal trans discipline.

In many ways, this PhD feels like it’s disciplining me, over and over again. I think of work and I imagine the teacher at the front of the class, ruler in hand. Bad thought? Whack. Ideas not legible enough? Whack. Project that wouldn’t be fundable? Whack.

It’s hard to know why I’m here, why I put myself through this. Why put myself through all this when I could just… not? Why not switch to another program? Why not look for a job? Why not move to Bushwick and go to techno warehouse raves every weekend?

Why suture myself to dysphoria?

I don’t think there has ever been any pursuit in my life that didn’t involve some amount of discipline. Doing anything meaningful requires doing things you don’t like. Pain is the process.

During my childhood I did two main extracurricular activities: I received a classical piano training, and I did wushu. More specifically, I trained in traditional Shaolin martial arts with some folks from the Shaolin Temple! Training and practice were always grueling tasks for me. A lot of it was endemic to the task; I remember my wushu coach throwing his phone at one of the students because she was fooling around too much. But part of it was also my personal commitment issues. I was so bored by the delayed gratification of drilling piano pieces that I started covertly scrolling on Reddit while I practiced my pieces. I kept my phone behind my sheet music, then when my dad wasn’t looking and when the time was right, I’d scroll just enough to see the next few comments, and I’d keep playing.

The worst part of this process was the lack of any internal motivation for practicing. It was always my dad telling me: “this will be a good idea. You’ll see. Give it 10 or 20 years, and you’ll understand.” Always working for an authority figure or some abstract future version of me. Never here, never me, never now.

I eventually got pretty good at both of those activities. I’ve spent over a decade of my life practicing each, and from this point now I can be grateful to my past self for pushing through, for gifting my present and future selves these creative and cathartic outlets. And so maybe there is some inherent misery and masochism necessary to getting truly good at anything.

I don’t know anything about Kim or Moten or Walia’s lives, but to me it seems the personal-ness of their texts could have only come from a commitment to their work that involves all of their being. A belief that extends beyond rational justification and into the mythological and the devotional. A spirituality rooted in an expansive love of self—of one’s community, one’s sense of place, one’s grounding values and beliefs. A belief strong enough to make you read inscrutable philosophy from the 19th century, strong enough to steel you in an academy and society that wishes you didn’t exist.

Transing

I don’t know if there’s anywhere else I could go where my work would leave me happy and fulfilled. Maybe that’s just cope, but it does seem like folks in other places are share similar grievances. Go to a nonprofit, spend your time fundraising from rich people at galas. Do an Ethnic Studies PhD, risk material precarity and fascistic threats to write papers that nobody will read. And fully tbh, I don’t know if I’d have the discipline to do an Ethnic Studies PhD. My attention span is shot as it is; having to read book after book, even if it’s cool theory, would still be tough for me I fear :,) Be an artist, commodify yourself and be forced to do two jobs at once to do what you love while paying the rent.

Maybe this is the reality of living in capitalism. We scrape by and find what we can tolerate; we look for people and communities that fill our cup beyond the workplace; we don’t dream of labor.

And so these days I think a lot about queerness and the closet. I think about trans discipline and transing disciplines. I think about how tired I am of being strong or brave. I want to be lazy, and soft, and tired, and tender, and earnest. I want to be normal, and I want feel normal doing me.

This blog post has been the sum total of the past half-year or so of couch talks, bar nights, and rant sessions over co-op dinners. The thoughts and ideas of so many different friends and community members are interwoven throughout this piece, and I’m so thankful to all y’all for the time and space we get to share together. Y’all are the reason I’m still here <3

A special shout-out to my dear friend Florence for inspiring me to write this out! I hope I can speak to the early 20s feelings of confusion and self-(re)discovery as poignantly as she has.