Today in the UK, the Labour government extended indefinitely the NHS’s ban on puberty blockers for teenagers who want to transition. A lot of us have been talking for a while about the dangers of ontologizing transition along the lines of the gay “coming out” narrative that was the centerpiece of so much gay liberalism in the last century. Here the UK health secretary, the baleful Wes Streeting, maliciously applies that narrative to trans people in order to equate “being trans” with “being gay.” But “being trans” is not a thing: transition is a thing—what I’ve tended to call “a socially-situated practice of self-becoming”—and you are preventing people from doing it. (I also don’t think “being gay” is a thing: I think fucking, communing, and desiring are all also socially-situated practices of self-becoming.) Even worse than the state repression of transition—the logic of which is already implied by its state medicalization and regulation—is Streeting’s loathsome scripting of dissent: the “one day you will be able to be who you are” bullshit. No. You, Streeting, are preventing people from making decisions about their own bodies, on the basis of your speculative beliefs about the kind of sex they should be having. It is truly grotesque.
To Stock, Rowling, Cass, and all the other ghouls applauding this decision, I would say only this: you are extending state control over the bodies of teenagers, and expecting them to thank you. They will not.
For anyone interested in the liberation of sex, gender, embodiment, and desire, the moment is more complex. This is what reliance on state liberalism has gotten us. The most morbid advice I have for anyone at the moment would be “don’t come out; just transition. Nobody deserves to know you, and when you let them, you give them power over you which they are likely to abuse.” At the very least, we need to reactivate our love of transition for its own sake, not as compensation or necessity, but as creation, play, self-fashioning, strength, libido, vitality. Fuck the melancholy of the state, fuck Wes Streeting, and fuck the Labour Party in perpetuity. We have each other. That’s it.
