Rage

"This thing is constantly aspiring to be a man or a woman, and never achieving it—here, surely is death, but death strung out over a whole lifetime; here, surely is life, but life that death congeals before abolishing." - Simone Weil

"Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief." - Anne Carson

"there is no way for you and me / ever to love each other or be friends" -Achilles to Hector, The Iliad, trans. Emily Wilson

"To be outside a situation so violent as this is to find it inconceivable; to be inside it is to be unable to conceive its end." -Simone Weil

"I wonder who I am making. Will she ever be free?" -Tess Scilipoti

Do cis people know how much rage comes with being trans? If you're cis and you have a few trans friends, maybe you're wondering why they seem angry so much of the time. Or maybe right now you're thinking that they don't actually seem angry at all. I wonder if you realize how hard it was for them to get there. How hard it is to stay there.

I'm not saying every trans person feels angry all the time. I'm saying that for all the trans people I know well enough to assess, rage is part of the water that we swim in. If you do not see it on us, if we are not drowning in it, that is only because we have learned how to swim.

You are on the phone with your mother. She can tell that for the last few years you've been angry. You try to hide it, but it erupts in ways that make the people you're with think it's about them. Your mother asks why you are angry.

Since the reelection of Trump, I've been hearing a lot about the importance of self-care. We can't plug in all the time, we have to take time off and do the things that are more therapeutic or enjoyable. We have to recharge.

You are at the grocery store. You reach past an old man in the refrigerated aisle to grab a container of the brand of pickles you like that he's standing right in front of. He looks at you and something registers on his face. He stares at you without moving until you move on to another aisle.

The term "self-care" was coined by medical professionals in the 1950s to refer to practices of care for people with long term illnesses and medical needs. Its contemporary usage began when the Black Panther movement took it from this medical context and politicized it. Specifically, black women like Angela Davis and Ericka Huggins adopted various mindfulness or wellness techniques with the specific intent to take care of themselves in a world bent on their destruction. Radical militant activism is a rewarding but taxing vocation.

You open the news. The governor of the state you live in has started a podcast, and in his first episode has interviewed a notorious transphobe, and discussed at length their points of agreement on "the transgender question."

The point of a politics of self-care though is that it makes the rest of your activism sustainable. If your self-care is only to heal from the trauma of watching the news, you are very far from Angela Davis.

Three months after you start hormones, you're having a silly argument about feminism with a friend you've known for a decade. She starts to laugh and says, "are you mansplaining feminism to me?" She will later apologize for how that made you feel.

In The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire describes what he sees as the problems with the standard methods of education, which treat students as mere piggy banks for the depositing of information by the teachers. This version of education is oppressive. It dehumanizes. It turns its students into objects. He explains that for education to be liberatory, it should be a process of conscientization. Sure, teachers know something that students don't, and the process of education involves that knowledge being imparted, but the process of education has to be understood as directed in large part by the students, and their desire to learn in order to affect the world around them. Education matters not only for how it transforms the student but for how it empowers the student to transform their world. You cannot learn anything, whether music, mathematics, history, by simply being instructed. You need to be empowered to experiment and explore. The body acts, the mind perceives the action as it spirals out and back, and the mind acts differently. That's how we learn and grow. That's how we become humans.

A woman who you never met in person is dead. One who is like you. One who you only saw online, but ze inspired you to be more yourself. Ze showed you that it is possible for someone who does what you do to be trans. Ze wasn't someone you knew or interacted with in any meaningful way, even in the limited ways that are possible over social media, so you're not sure why you're so upset about it.

Many trans women, before transition, are lonely. They're disaffected. I was lonely. I was disaffected. I thought I'd fallen victim to the "male loneliness epidemic." That was wrong. There was something in my brain that wanted to be perceived differently. There was something that wanted to feel differently. I was perceived wrong, and the way I acted felt wrong, so I disconnected. I was like a car engine that wouldn't turn over. At some point I realized I needed some different clothes, a different concoction of chemicals in my body, some adjustment to my social routines, and everything started humming along. I could feel again. I could act and feel the action spiral out and in. There was a new feeling.

At some point you learn what V-coding is. To paraphrase Anthony Bourdain, once you learn what V-coding is you will never stop wanting to beat transphobes to death with your bare hands. V-coding is the practice of housing transgender women with aggressive cisgender men to placate them and keep them satisfied. It has been described as "a central part of a trans woman's sentence." A 2021 study in California found that 88% of trans women in men's prisons had been forced to take part in a "marriage-like relationship."

It's hard to know what to do with rage. It simmers. Sometimes you complain to other women about it and they just tell you "welcome to being a woman" which is basically code for "shut up." You see this rage in cis women too. Even for them it is called "being an angry bitch." It's turned into a joke. Women are angry. Trans women are angry. It's not clear when the anger overlaps or when its different. Or when it gets to be rage.

Your mother can see your simmering rage because she can see when it erupts. She wonders if it is about her. She worries that because you live closer to her in-laws than to her, maybe they've gotten to you in some way. This isn't exactly fair, but in order to assuage her fear you decide to come out to her. You tell her you are trans. You tell her that you are transitioning. You tell her that spending time with her means spending time with your brother who thinks that people like you are causing the collapse of western civilization. She agrees that he is "hard to take." She voices her disapproval of his orthodox religious observance, which she sees as the root of his transphobia. She blames this on her in-laws. She just wants to make sure that you're not taking their side. She has forgotten that his homophobia predated his orthodox observance. She has forgotten that back when he could sit at the same table and eat the same food as you he still would repeat slogans like "it's Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!" You tell her that you are upset that she is brushing over the fact that you've just come out to her. She tells you that you're both adults and you can share what's on your mind but you have to be open to be hearing what's on hers.

I'm not saying all trans people still have this rage. But if they don't, in my experience, it's because they figured out how to deal with it. Not because they never had it in the first place. To be trans means among many other things to have a vision of how the world could be, and to see the gap between how it could be and how it is. To be trans in the world today means not to have the power to implement that vision. Sure, some do. There are wealthy trans people who can afford all the gender-affirming care they want, and can afford to only interact with those who respect them, and maybe even selfish enough that they don't feel the pain of those around the world who do not have that access, but for most that isn't true. The cis world doesn't always think a world that includes us, one where we can play games, get healthcare or use the bathroom, is one worth living in. A sizable voting bloc in the country I live in thinks that a world where I am allowed to use a bathroom in public safely is one which has been tainted by the devil. And that voting bloc exercises more power than my sisters and I do. Their actions spiral out far more easily and broadly than mine. They don't even always spiral back.

The billionaire who has somehow installed himself as shadow president of the United States starts talking about how people like you are on average more violent, about how something needs to be done.

One of the books that helped me a lot early transition was Hil Malatino's Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad. A lot of people think that there's basically one way in which being trans feels bad, which is dysphoria. Or even if they know its more complicated than that, they primarily think of being trans as essentially, a way of feeling bad. Hil Malatino examines all sorts of ways that being trans can feel bad, and thinks through some of the ways to deal with those feelings. The first chapter is about waiting. About the fact that so much of being trans, and especially early transition involves waiting for things to happen that haven't happened yet. More generally this kind of disaffection happens because trans people want things to change, but don't have the power to make them happen, or to make them happen quickly enough. A remedy for this, he proposes, is being t4t. Here he cites the Torrey Peters novella, "Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones" which expounds on this notion of being t4t as a way of getting though post-apocalyptic dystopia, or really, the present conditions for trans people. The notion is that you might hate another trans person, you might want nothing to do with her, but you have to help her. You have to realize that you are fighting the same fight, you are in a community together, and often you have the ability to help her in ways that you can tangibly see.

A right wing student group at the university you work at invites a right wing ideologue to come and speak. Among the many hateful things he says is that trans people should be eradicated from public life. He is protected by armed campus security. It is your first birthday after starting hormones.

One of the best pieces of art dealing with rage is The Iliad. The poem opens with an invocation to the muses, sing about rage. The rage of Achilles. The Iliad is also about what it means to be a good man. In a culture where, according to the men, women weren't people properly speaking, this sort of means that The Iliad deals with how to be a good person. To the extent that a work of fiction can deal with such a theme. It's certainly not a guide.

About a year after starting hormones, you try to update your shirtless photo on your dating app profile, and for the first time it gets flagged as indecent. You've learned to laugh at the odd mixture of feelings that accompanies facing discrimination as a woman. At least for something this low stakes. You share this with a cis friend of yours. She tells you, "personally, I don't think misogyny is that funny."

When we meet Achilles at the beginning of the poem, he is wronged. The thing about Achilles is he knows how he is going to die. His mother prophesied that if he went to war he would make a name for himself that would live throughout history, but that he would die young. The rest of the soldiers are there tied by social bonds, with long lives and lineage to contend with. Not so for Achilles. His legacy will be his glory (Achilles in fact has a son, but he doesn't seem to care much for him—he is mentioned once in the poem, by Achilles, who refers to him as "godlike Neoptolemus, if he is still alive.") It's probably therefore a bad move politically when Agamemnon takes his war prize (a woman named Briseis) at the start of the poem. Threaten Achilles' glory, and there's no reason for Achilles to fight, and he doesn't. In fact he calls on his mother Thetis to call on Zeus to curse the Greeks and make them suffer, which Zeus does. There's something here: a man who is fighting only for heroism, only for glory, ends up being not so heroic. Ends up being kind of an ass.

A few months after you try to accustom your mother to the idea that you wear dresses now, she recommends a book to you. It's a novella that's been all the rage in some literary circles, and it's been lauded for its exploration of misogyny and sexism in society. You read it and it just doesn't click for you. You don't really vibe with the writing. Your mother tells you that you'd probably understand it better if you were a woman.

On the other side we have Hector. Hector is the greatest warrior for the Trojans. And he has a wife and a kid. He has a son who will inherit his position, who will have to carry on his name and his work. One of the most touching scenes in the poem involves Hector's son, a toddler, seeing Hector in his helmet and armor. He cries. Hector laughs and removes his helmet. There is a tension between Hector the warrior and Hector the father. His wife Andromache wishes that he didn't have to fight. She is scared that he will die, and he is all the family she has left. Without him, she and his son will be alone. They will be in danger. He explains that he has to fight, in part for his son. His son could not live if Hector dishonored himself. Hector the father must be a brave warrior.

Eventually you come out to the rest of your family. You tell your grandparents that you're changing your name to Helen. Your grandmother, who has already complained about how hard it will be to switch pronouns, tells you you are making it even harder on her. Your grandfather asks, why not [feminized version of your deadname]?

Achilles spends most of The Iliad in a sulk. It turns out that the rage of Achilles largely consists in the frustrated whining of Achilles. He watches as the Greeks start to lose. He watches Hector drive the Greek forces back to their ships, and he starts to set fire to the ships. Nothing can get him to rejoin the fighting. Achilles was fighting for glory, and Agamemnon has tarnished that glory. Glory is a thin pretext for a social bond.

You are telling your friend about your grandparents' reactions. You understand why they said that though right? You explain that yes, you do understand why they said that. They are considering their comfort and their convenience over your dignity. She agrees. You say that you expect better for yourself. I just think you're asking too much of them.

Okay, I'm a queer person writing about The Iliad, so yes I'm going to address it: was Achilles gay? The answer is sort of complicated, but mostly not. The real full answer is that relationships, even normative man/woman relationships back then were so different, that to understand any ancient Greek as either gay or straight made no sense. To refer to a wife as a partner would have been unthinkable to any of these characters, whether they were attracted to women or not. Gender and sexuality were social constructs then just as they are now, and they were constructed differently back then, and any neat mapping of any of our contemporary terms, normative or not, onto the past is fraught. Of course that isn't an easy answer. The past was different, but it eventually became the present. Our current conception of who we are has a lot to do with who we think the people in the past were, and that evolved in some way out of how they conceived of themselves. So that's the complicated answer. In her essay, "On the Iliad," Rachel Bespaloff contrasts Hector and Andromache with Achilles and Patroclus and says "For Achilles, self is at the center of love. What he adores in Patroclus is his own reflection." I feel like I've heard that one before.

When Achilles is told that Patroclus, who went to go fight in his place, has been killed, this is what happens:

At this, a black cloud of despair engulfed
Achilles. With both hands he scooped up fistfuls
of soot and dust and poured it on his head,
and rubbed the dirt across his handsome face.
Black ashes settled on his scented tunic.
He stretched his whole long body in the dust
and lay there. With both hands he tore his hair.
The women whom Achilles and Patroclus
had captured and enslaved were struck by grief.
They screamed and wailed and ran outside, surrounding
the warrior, Achilles. With their fists,
they pounded on their breasts, limbs weak with shock.
Antilochus was sobbing, shedding tears,
and holding tightly to Achilles' hands
so that he could not use an iron knife
to slit his throat. Achilles groaned, heartbroken

Seems pretty gay to me.

After the candidate who spent millions of dollars campaigning on the eradication of people like you wins the election, you go looking for more trans community. You find a trans climbing group that meets twice a week. You start going. You realize among other things that your past aversion to exercise had a lot to do with an aversion to your body. Climbing with other trans people, you are treated like a woman. There are several of you there, and no one fucks with you.

Achilles clearly loved Patroclus. Whether that was a romantic love in the way we would conceive of it today is a more complex question. What we can say is that after Achilles realizes that Patroclus died and he wasn't there by his side fighting, he is ready to die too. This is what breaks him out of his rage. He knows that once he kills Hector he will die soon after. But he must kill Hector. He doesn't care to live anymore. "I provided / no light or help to him or anybody." He is full of grief now for Patroclus. He sees clearly that:

... Even the wisest people
are roused to rage, which trickles into you
sweeter than honey ...

I have heard this part summarized that Achilles forgets his rage consumed by his new rage for Hector, but this is not so. He decides to "let it go, though I am still upset. / I must control these feelings in my chest, / and go look for Hector, who destroyed / the one I loved the most, my head, my life. / Thereafter, I will welcome death." Achilles is not forgetting one rage for another. His new rage, borne of his grief for Patroclus, overpowers his old rage for Agamemnon, but it is an overpowering that he wills.

In his rampage he starts to choke the river Scamander. The gods fight over what to do. A lot is made of what is meant by the gods in The Iliad. Probably Homer literally believed in gods. How literally did he believe in their depiction in the poem? There's no clear answer. Where we draw the lines between fiction and history, between natural and supernatural, probably didn't exist for Homer. What we can say is that Achilles is described as godlike throughout the poem. His greatness consists partly in his ability to transcend the realm of human affairs. He is "godlike Achilles" in part because he can act in a way that affects the gods. Achilles makes the gods get involved. He operates in a sphere higher than most of his mortal peers. This is not necessarily a good thing. The gods are not role models. The gods, being immortal, can't face consequences in the way we mere mortals can, so they are not responsible for their actions. They cannot be. No matter how things shake out, their lives will continue basically unchanged. Free from consequences, they turn the lives of real people into a game. Achilles manages to get the gods fighting with each other, when the river swells and threatens him. Hephaestus and Athena come to defend him, and the river himself has to go and make a complaint to Hera. She immediately realizes that she is outside the rules of the game. She orders Hephaestus to stop. "It is not proper for one deathless god / to tussle with another, for mere mortals."

You're at a big family dinner. Your uncle with a PhD in Economics starts telling you about a columnist for the New York Times opinion section that he particularly likes. You recognize that columnist for having had a series of particularly stupid takes years before. You are a little drunk and can't remember the details when your uncle asks you why you don't like the columnist so you just say you don't remember. He presses that isn't fair. You do a quick search and find that his most recent column is praising the intellectual bravery of a junk science investigation into trans healthcare for children that will surely be used to restrict the rights of trans kids (indeed, as of writing, it has.) You say that this is the kind of shit you mean, but your uncle rebuffs you that it isn't fair to judge the article without reading it. "You can't do that. That isn't playing the game."

"The true hero, the true subject, the center of The Iliad is force." So begins Simone Weil's essay, "The Iliad, or the Poem of Force." She sees in The Iliad a clear-eyed depiction of the effects of force on the human soul. Force, for Weil, is "that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing." For Weil, humans have souls. Reading her essay it seems it might even be closer to say: humans are their souls. What force then does (noting that she is very particularly not talking merely about violence) is turn humans into things. It turns souls into bodies. In its most extreme form it turns humans into dead bodies, but the exertion of force can be less extreme and turn souls into objects with souls in them. Examples abound in The Iliad. The slaves captured as "prizes," people begging for their lives having lost a battle. If someone loses a battle, is disarmed, completely helpless, and "throws himself on the mercy of a warrior, he is not, by this very act, condemned to death; but a moment of impatience on the warrior's part will suffice to relieve him of his life." In Weil's vision, such a person is no longer, strictly speaking, alive. They exist only for and at the pleasure of another. "[The soul] was not made to live inside a thing; if it does so, under pressure of necessity, there is not a single element of its nature to which violence is not done." This is part of the true horror of force. "To lose more than the slave does is impossible, for he loses his whole inner life."

You go to therapy. The doctor who prescribes you hormones recommends it. Transition can be stressful, and having someone to check in with can be a huge help. The only therapist you are able go get in to see is quickly is one who specializes in cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT. This wasn't what you initially wanted but you decide to try it out. There are some things you want to work on. You could talk through strategies for being more self-actualized. In the last session with your therapist you are talking about your family. You've come out to your mom, but she isn't using the correct pronouns yet. She wants you to come out to your brother. She thinks it will be helpful for him, that it will make him more open-minded towards trans people, if he knows there is a trans person in the family. It could be a learning moment for him. You tell your therapist that you aren't interested in being a learning experience for your brother. You tell your therapist that because of your brother's autism, growing up you were occasionally required to function as a learning experience for him. Your relationship has been a place where he learns what is and isn't acceptable when it comes to how to treat another human being. You tell your therapist that this isn't something you want to do with your transness. You are only just starting to understand yourself and your gender and what it means, and you don't want to have to open it up to your brother, who you have heard spew horrific transphobia already. You aren't sure what to do. Your therapist tells you that she understands your frustration, but she thinks your mother has a point, and that if you came out to your brother it would be good for him.

The effect on the victims of force is only half its horror, for Weil. "Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims." Force intoxicates; it blinds. When you can act and your action spirals out from you uninterrupted, you become drunk with that power. People wielding force in this way "have no suspicion of the fact that the consequences of their deeds will at length come home to them." The Iliad, Simone Weil points out, is not split up into the conquered and the conquerors. Everyone has a turn under the heel of force, and those who wield force do so blind to their fate as future victims. "This retribution, which has a geometrical rigor, which operates automatically to penalize the abuse of force, was the main subject of Greek thought." Wielding force against another blinds you to their humanity, and therefore to your own. "Those who use it and those who endure it are turned to stone." "The conquering soldier is like a scourge of nature. Possessed by war, he, like the slave, becomes a thing, though his manner of doing so is different."

The federal government announces that they are rescinding millions of dollars of funding from a university because they allowed a woman like you to participate in sports years before, one who no longer goes there.

The only way out, for Weil, is grace. We must learn to recognize how force subjects our souls to matter. We must exercise our virtue and our generosity. For Weil the Christian mystic, The Iliad is, big surprise, a passion narrative. It shows "that a divine spirit, incarnate, is changed by misfortune, trembles before suffering and death, feels itself, in the depths of its agony, to be cut off from man and God." What Weil wants us to realize is that "he who does not realize to what extent shifting fortune and necessity hold in subjection every human spirit, cannot regard as fellow creatures nor love as he loves himself, those whom chance separated from him by an abyss. ... Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love and justice."

More women die. Many women die. You don't know all of them personally. Some of them you followed on social media. Some you just learn about on the news. A teenager who's been bullied for a while is eventually killed. The authorities determine that its not a hate crime.

Simone Weil's reading of The Iliad is wrong. I don't mean this in some abstract way, but that quite literally her summarizing, her quoting, is factually inaccurate. The scenes she describes don't always happen exactly the way she describes them. The passages she quotes are ever so slightly misquoted. And the differences between what she quotes and the real passages are crucial for her analysis. After Hector is slaughtered by Achilles, Achilles refuses to return his body to the Trojans to allow them to perform proper funeral rites. Priam comes to the Greek camp to beg for Hector's body. Weil makes much of a moment when Achilles pushes Priam away. In this moment of his power, Achilles doesn't have to consider Priam's humanity, he is able to freely and uninterruptedly exert his power. This isn't what the poem says though. Here's the Emily Wilson translation:

... This made Achilles yearn
to mourn his father. With his hand, he gently
took hold of the old man and pushed him back.
They both remembered men whom they had lost.

This is a moment of shared humanity for them. Priam reminds him of his own father, and it causes him to weep. Later he goes to fetch Hector's body, but he first makes sure to have it cleaned and made presentable, outside the vision of Priam. He doesn't want Priam to see Hector's body in a dishonored state because

the sight of him might make his grieving heart
unable to contain his rage, and then
Achilles would himself be roused at heart,
and kill him, and transgress the laws of Zeus

Achilles has measured the dominion of force. Achilles is not intoxicated by power but knows always what will happen to him. At the beginning of the poem, he knows he will die young. By the end, he knows he will die soon. After he hears of Patroclus' death, he tells his mother Thetis that he has to go kill Hector. She reminds him "as soon as you kill Hector, you must die."

Swift-footed Lord Achilles, in despair,
told her, "I want to die right here and now,
because I could not save my slaughtered friend."

These are not the words of a man blinded by force, who rushes on with "no suspicion of the fact that the consequences of [his] deeds will at length come home to [him]."

Early in your journey of questioning your gender, you are at dinner with your mother and your brother. Your mother shares that she read an article earlier that day about a man who came out as gay right before he died, saying he didn't want to die in the closet. Your brother scoffs and says he doesn't understand why anyone would stay in the closet these days. Gay people have it so easy. If you come out as gay or trans, you're celebrated. Everyone is forced to celebrate you. You share that this isn't true, in fact just earlier that day while you were walking down an empty street, a car drove past and a man shouted "FAGGOT!" at you. Your brother immediately says, "Well, that's not a hate crime."

I would not object to Weil's misreading simply for being a misrepresentation of the text. Who among us has not twisted around a text in order to make a point? I don't mind that she is misreading The Iliad. I do object to the nihilistic pacifism that arises from her misreading.

Democrats don't challenge a bathroom ban because it's important to pick your battles.

First of all, Achilles' rage does not lead to the use of force, at least early on. When Briseis is taken from him and his glory is threatened, he becomes enraged, but he does not go on a rampage. He refuses to fight. But he isn't therefore innocent. He calls on his mother to intercede with the gods to ask for the Greeks to face destruction and defeat in battle. He prays for their downfall. This is not the blinding of an embodied force, this is thought out and intellectual. He works his family connections. Then he hangs out at camp and plays music all day while his comrades die.

Democrats don't challenge a ban on trans athletes participating in college sports because it's important to pick your battles.

Weil makes much of the scenes of the Greeks begging Achilles to reenter the battle. Because of his power, he has the ability to turn the tide of the war, to prevent their defeat. Because he is strong, he can say no. He holds their lives in his hand, and he sends them towards defeat. Supplication subordinates, and it is within the power of force to refuse the supplicant. Even if this were so, and granted it is true that Achilles acknowledges that he savors the feeling of power that comes with refusing the Greeks, it remains true that he isn't fighting. He is not exerting the force of his body, he is exerting the force of his goddess mother, and the sway she has on the gods. He is using family. He is not intoxicated by a momentary feeling of flexing his power. He is intoxicated by what he imagines is his life's purpose.

Democrats don't challenge a trans youth healthcare ban because it's important to pick your battles.

Indeed, purpose is something that seems to trouble Weil more broadly. In all her images of devastation, or suffering, she sees the individual moment of a man pleading for life, or of a supplicant denied. Do we really buy that a slave loses "his whole inner life"? When Achilles or Hector or any of the warriors move towards their death, they have their reasons. Weil claims that "war effaces all conceptions of purpose or goal" but this is certainly not true for the heroes of The Iliad. Hector faces Achilles and certain death knowingly. He does it to protect his home and his honor. For Weil, anything that draws you away from the pacifism of grace is one of many "temptations to falsehood," part of the blinding allure of force. Achilles slaughters Hector, ensuring his own death, not because he thinks he is immortal, or because it makes him feel good to feel that power, but because he would rather die than live in a world without Patroclus. He craves justice, and it is not just, in his eyes, for Patroclus to be dead and the man who killed him alive. You may think this is foolish, but it is not the narcissism of force that Weil describes.

Republicans move to eliminate all trans-related healthcare from medicaid.

There is a famous story about Simone Weil and the only conversation she ever had with Simone de Beauvoir. Weil insisted that the only thing that mattered was the coming revolution that would feed all the starving people on Earth, de Beauvoir insisted that the problem was not to make people happy, but rather to give their lives meaning. Weil told her "It's clear you've never gone hungry." I've always liked the Weil in this story, but I suspect that she was still, a decade later, in this essay, troubled over this question of meaning and food. Which is really a question of souls and bodies. Reading her essay, I feel that something about her is affronted by the body. Her problem with force is that it turns us into bodies. It turns us into things when we should be souls. The solution then is to always insist that we are souls, and receive our suffering and grief with joy.

The Supreme Court rules that a trans youth healthcare ban that specifically restricts only trans youth from receiving care that is available to cis children is somehow not discriminatory. The New York Times publishes a big opinion piece about how this is the fault of trans people, who don't know how important it is to pick your battles.

Of course the problem is that we are bodies. We are things. To answer Weil's Christian reading of The Iliad as a passion narrative, I offer the possibility of a Zen Iliad. The most heartrending scenes of desolation in The Iliad do not deal with bodies suffering the infliction of force, or the deprivations of the body. They are the scenes of grief over a loved one. After Achilles slaughters Hector he brings his body back to Patroclus' grave and drags it around. He performs a wild frenzied perverse version of funeral rites. Finally, he is tired and he sleeps.

And then the shade of Patroclus came,
looking just like him, with his lovely eyes,
his height, his voice, clothes like the ones he wore.
The spirit stood above his head and said,

"Are you asleep? Have you forgotten me,
Achilles? When I was alive, you never
failed to take care of me—but not in death.
Please hurry, bury me and let me pass
the gates of Hades. I am all alone."

Patroclus' soul cannot move on, because his body has not been properly cared for. He tells Achilles he is not allowed to cross over. He begs Achilles for his hand, and asks Achilles to ensure that their bones will be buried together, so they will be together in death as in life. Achilles answers that he will do all this, and tries to embrace Patroclus once more, "for just a little while, and have the joy // of grief and lamentation." But it is no use.

he reached his hands to him but could not grasp him.
The spirit vanished underneath the earth
like smoke, with just a little squeaking cry.
Achilles was astonished and jumped up
and clapped his hands and shouted out in sorrow,

"So there are shades and spirits down in Hades!
And yet they have no substance, none at all.

We are bodies and souls, not separate but not together. We are a oneness in duality. We are not one and not two.

Once Achilles has returned Hector's body to Priam, he asks him to stay for food.

Remember, even noble Niobe
took thought of food, although she lost twelve children—
six daughters, six strong sons inside her house.
Apollo shot his silver bow and killed
the sons in anger at the woman's boasting,
while Artemis, who takes delight in arrows,
destroyed the daughters, because Niobe
compares herself to Leto, who she said,
gave birth to only two, while she herself
had mothered many children. Then those two,
small as their number was, destroyed them all.
Nine days the children lay besmeared in blood,
with nobody to bury them. And then Niobe took thought
of eating. She was tired of shedding tears.
Now on the lonely peaks among the rocks
upon Mount Sypylus, where goddesses
have their abodes, or so they say—the nymphs
who dance around the River Achelous—
great Niobe, although she is a rock,
consumes the sorrows sent her by the gods.
Come then my lord, let us remember also
to eat. Then later, you will take to Troy
the son you loved so much and weep for him.
Certainly he will cause you many tears.

Patroclus dies, Achilles mourns, Agamemnon must convince him to eat, finally Achilles sleeps. Hector dies, Priam mourns, Achilles has to convince him to eat, Priam sleeps. Our eating and sleeping, our care for our bodies, is both a respite from and a part of our grief. No matter how much sorrow the gods send our souls to consume, our bodies must also eat. Thank the gods for that.

Through the climbing group you meet more trans people. You start to be able to socialize more than once a week with at least half a dozen other trans people.

One of the traps that we are constantly stuck in with regards to discourse about any queer identities, whether we are talking about gender or sexuality, is the question of whether we this is something we choose, or whether we are "born this way." The fashionable answer has been for a while that this is something we are born into, that it is innate. There is an even broader consensus that our gender and sexuality is not something we choose. The hard thing here is that there is a very real sense in which transition is something we choose. As a trans person you have to actually make the decision to transition. But this is not the same thing as saying you choose to be trans. The gold-standard here, the value which is actually real, which we genuinely have to support not out of some kind of virtue-signaling or political correctness or whatever the fashionable term happens to be, is bodily autonomy. We get to choose what happens to our bodies. We have the autonomy to make decisions about our bodies. This has not been politically true, but this is the bedrock for any ethics that has anything to do with being human. Fundamental to the notion of autonomy is the notion of choice. Transition has to be a choice. There is no other way out, no other way to make trans lives possible. There is no magic test you can administer to find out if someone is trans, and then force them to undergo some sequence of medical interventions. Transition is not a medical issue. It should have free use of the tools of medicine, but being trans is a question of identity. It is a question of how you relate to yourself and those around you, and this is not fundamentally something that can be understood in purely medical terms. I know that it is the ardent wish of so many young transsexuals that someone will come and take that choice away, will force them into transition. Tragically, in today's society, forcefemme is only available for AFABs, and forcemasc is only available for AMABs.

One of the things you want to work on with the therapist is the process of coming out to your family. You aren't quite sure what is preventing you. You know that your family will not disown you. You know they won't try to convert you, you're too old for that anyway. You tell your therapist that you don't feel ready to come out, but you aren't sure why. It was something you felt weird about. All she can really tell you is that when the time is right, you'll feel it.

At the end of Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, the narrator realizes that the whole notion of living t4t was a sort of front, at least for Lexi, its originator. What Lexi really wanted was just attention from the narrator. She wanted to do cool stuff with her. And the narrator realizes that in a way all of her anger and frustration with Lexi has been anger and frustration with herself. The narrator had a lot of shame about herself and her transness that Lexi didn't. Lexi embraced being trans, and embraced other trans women. There wasn't really a radical philosophy of "being t4t" there was just letting go of the shame of transness.

Is this really what you're mad about? You're sad that your parents weren't perfect? You're sad that a friend was inconsiderate? You had a shitty therapist? Your uncle can be a little obnoxious? You talk about V-coding and other political consequences, but what have you, personally, faced? Sure, you're on medicaid, but you could afford DIY hormones. Besides, you didn't tell them about the ways your parents did support you. And you didn't tell them about your mom's cancer. You didn't tell them about why she can't come back into the country.

"You can't just spend all the time reading the news and dooming, you need something to take your mind off it." This is one of those ambient ideas that I seem to encounter a lot. I think most recently I read this in an interview of George Saunders. Apologies to George Saunders, I do like your writing. The problem with George Saunders' idea is that fundamentally, the government isn't after him. He can go out into the world and walk around and he is George Saunders. If he goes for a walk, and half a dozen old women give him weird looks that he doesn't quite know how to interpret, he would probably consider that a bad day. For me, and for many other trans women I know, that would actually be a pretty good day. I'm not trying to say that my main concern is weird looks and bad vibes, that disapproving glares from strangers are a big concern in my life, or even to be honest, any concern. But that's because I know how to ignore them, not because they don't happen. On a slightly worse day, maybe someone yells "faggot" at me on the street. The problem of course is that staying home is worse. If I stay home then any external input is mediated either by the news or by social media. People say much worse shit on there. So the remaining option is I could pick up a hobby and become a recluse. That probably has some psychological cost as well. The point of this is that this model of self-care, picking up something to distract you, only works if you are not inside the problem. This is not the self-care of Angela Davis, the self-care that knows that they might come for you any minute, that you can never get outside of the struggle for your own liberation, that distraction is impossible. This is a self-care that separates you, that indulges some fundamental perverse comfort that can come from recognizing that you personally are not in real danger. It is a version of self-care that rests on never knowing truly how bad things really are.

You tell your therapist about the right wing ideologue coming to speak at your university. You tell her that it feels extra bad coincidentally falling on your birthday. You tell her that you feel stuck. You tell her that you feel this irrational urge to go get yourself hurt on purpose at the protests. All she can say is that you shouldn't do that. You have to take care of yourself. You have to prioritize self-care.

One of the things about t4t sociality as a solution to trans disaffection, especially the problems of early transition, is that once you are further along, you might decide you don't need it anymore. You might decide to go hang out with cis people instead. I have seen this referred to as "reentering society." There are many reasons why a community built around and for early transition trans people might feel bad for someone further along in their transition. Sometimes early transition trans people come to believe that they are owed endless support and care from those who are further along. It often takes time to learn how to let go of the shame of transness, and how not to project it on other trans people. There is a difference between a community and a support group. But sometimes, also, to be trans means to be a staging ground for other trans people, or a break from their real lives.

You eventually come out to your dad, and it goes pretty well. You sort of slip it into a conversation, say, "by the way, I'm using new pronouns." A few days later he tells you that he has some questions, but he's had enough experience to know that it's possible to say the wrong thing without meaning to. He will ask his questions, but wants to preface by saying he respects your autonomy and the account of yourself you are giving, and you don't have to answer anything that you don't want to.

You look in the mirror. The mirror doesn't understand you. You go out in the world. You manage to convince a doctor to give you a prescription. You are patient. You learn about the prescription, how it works. You learn how to explain to the doctor when they are wrong, because a lot of the doctors are wrong in the same ways. You are patient. You manage to convince a surgeon to talk to you. You are patient. You manage to get the surgeon to agree to give you surgery. Slowly but surely you change. The doctor does not understand you and the surgeon does not understand you but slowly the mirror understands you. You are patient. You meet others like you. You have a vision of how the world could be. You see children like you. You imagine a future for them very different from the future you had when you were their age. There is something like joy there. You are patient.

Your mother asks why you are angry.