Snemolyshilling

“This is how things appear, and it’s going to be necessary to face them: if I don’t accept defining myself as a transsexual, as someone with “gender dysphoria,” I must admit that I’m addicted to testosterone. As soon as a body abandons the practices that society deems masculine or feminine, it drifts gradually toward pathology. My biopolitical options are as follows: either I declare myself to be a transsexual, or I declare myself to be drugged and psychotic. Given the current state of things, it seems more prudent to me to label myself a transsexual and let the medical establishment believe that it can offer a satisfying cure for my “gender identity disorder.” In that case, I’ll have to accept having been born in a biobody with which I don’t identify (as if the body could be a material given that is there before linguistic or political action) and claim that I detest my body, my reproductive organs, and my way of getting an orgasm.

I’ll have to rewrite my history, modify all the elements in it that belong under the narrative of being female. I’ll have to employ a series of extremely calculated falsehoods: I’ve always hated Barbie dolls, I’m repulsed by my breasts and my vagina, vaginal penetration makes me sick, and the only way I can have an orgasm is with a dildo. All this could be partly true and partly nonsense. In other words, I’ll have to declare myself mentally ill and conform to the criteria established by the DMS-IV, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition, of the American Psychiatric Association, in which, beginning in 1980, transsexuality was designated as a mental illness, just like exhibitionism, fetishism, frotteurism, masochism, sadism, transvestism, voyeurism . . . just like almost everything that isn’t straight reproductive sexuality and its binary gender system.”
― Paul Preciado