A Generation in Transition, part 1 by Adam Lehrer
In this three-part essay series, Adam tries to understand how so many male artists of the '80s and '90s have transitioned into being women in their near retirement years
One can’t deny that there’s something deeply strange and difficult to trust about the notion that several male artists and writers, all from the same generation and even having some thematic overlap in their work or ideas, all spent their adult lives feeling “trapped” in their male bodies. I find it difficult to open this text, because I don’t want to sound judgmental. I can’t put myself in these artists’ minds. I can’t channel their experiences. I’d like to remain open minded to the truth of their realities… I’d so very much like to believe them….
Just kidding! I find this all to be fucking absurd – a truth so strange that not even the fiction of the likes of Lovecraft or Robert W. Chambers couldn’t compete with it. How is it that so many artists from the same decade all decided to become women a few decades later? Is transgenderism an authentic expression of a femaleness that they’ve suppressed, or is the totality of transgender ideology and its omnipotence a force from which these artists projected a more banal alienation unto? I’ve often doubted that transgenderism was real at all, to be frank, and this trend hardly assuages that skepticism. And yet, all that cynicism inside of me doesn’t feel good. Flatly denying the existence of something is too a vulgar expression of ideology, and we’d all be better off attempting to understand all the explosive social forces at play here. So, here we go…
Postmodernism – we all sort of know what it means, but at the same time none of us really know what the fuck it means at all. Despite my perpetual confusion towards the condition that we refer to as postmodernism, I can’t help but think it applies here. All of the artists and thinkers that I’m about to reference, you see, are products of it. Of postmodernism. They used it as both an analytical lens and as an aesthetic. One could now argue that they’ve become victims of it; that they let the logic of it infest their insides like a parasite – a tapeworm that they could never manage to rip out of their proverbial assholes.
Frederic Jameson believed that the emergence of postmodernism was “closely related to the emergence of this new moment of late, consumer or multinational capitalism.” As much as I hate to chalk up all social ills to the economic system that dominates the world, it’s hard to argue with the crux of the sentiment. If you’re mired in the logic of postmodernism, then universalist ideas have lost weight for you. Objective reality? There is none. Morality? That shit is relative. Reason? The pursuit of up their own ass fools. Truth? It’s relative, baby. Identity? Well, that’s just the way you’ve decided to perform yourself. It isn’t real. Nothing is real.
Surprisingly, to myself perhaps most of all, I don’t disagree with these sentiments; as nihilistic as it all sounds, it undeniably applies to our culture and society. The totalizing apparatus of information and ideology tends to wash out any chance at objectivity we might have. This is why an artist and academic can harass students and deny their rights to free speech and assembly over her hostility towards their anti-abortion stance, hold a machete to a reporter’s throat, be caught on camera both times, and still enjoy the support of a large percentage of her political allies in the art world. You see, ideology — abortion must be defended at all costs — overrides the basic universal pedagogical principle. It’s not that I like that this is how it is. I hate it, actually. It just is how it is. What can you do? The Internet was invented and whatever binding force that guided humanity was fragmented into billions of bits of information, all of which contradict one another. Ideology, it seems, is most powerful when presented through ideas that seem to conflict with one another. We are told one thing, and then another thing that negates that, and then another thing that negates that. In that process, our ego dissolves and we are left hypnotized, totally at the mercy of the information war. There is nothing at the center of things holding us together.
So, one can see why these formerly old men and now trans women made their fateful decisions. Perhaps they were feeling alienated. Aren’t we all? And while Lucy Sante, formerly known as Luc Sante, has claimed that she felt like a woman since she was 11-years-old, would she have made such a drastic decision at this stage in her life without the social fabric disintegrating effects of postmodernism? You see, men and women alike have transgressed the traditional characteristics of their birth assigned sex for millennia. There are cave paintings of transvestites. But the idea of transgenderism — the belief that a human born man can LITERALLY, not spiritually, be a woman — is one utterly unique to the postmodern position.
I’ve written about the “Generation X dilemma” before. Most of these artists belong to that lost generation. Even if some of them are technically boomers, the sentiment of their work belongs to Generation X. Generation X prided itself on a kind of apoliticism that they cultivated by living at a time of supreme Western prosperity. They fostered a sense of irony and distance from political realities in their work, and the art of Generation X was saturated with a nihilism borne of that distance. This was great for art, for a while. But the world has changed so much, and politics are now near impossible to avoid. Political propaganda and ideological messaging quite literally is jammed into the glowing information orb that you keep in your pocket and check every time that it vibrates. There should be no shock then that someone like Steve Albini, who made his reputation with juvenile shock tactics and references to rape and child murder, has become such an insufferable libtard in his political persona – the information apparatus has successfully made him feel immense guilt and alienation over his deeds from the past. He can’t reconcile it. It should also be no surprise that the artist I’m about to write about who all, to varying degrees, prided themselves on transgression and the deconstruction of identity, have made themselves vulnerable to the potency of gender ideology.
R.D. Laing said that the schizoid sees himself as a “split”: “as a mind more or less tenuously linked to a body, as two or more selves, and so on.”
Now, we all are split into different psychic parts according to the criteria for psychosis that Laing set forth in The Divided Self. We are the self, we are the digital projections of ourselves, and sometimes we have many versions of the digital projections of ourselves. We are all the divided selfs. We are all schizos.
It only makes sense then that the men who grew up at the dawn of the information age but before the digital revolution would be so extraordinarily fragmented by the rhythms of Internet life. The most common characteristics of male to female transgenders are autism and over-consumption of the Internet. But with these older guys, it’s likely that the Internet has made them autistic. It’s over-exposed them to information and surreal conceptions of themselves that would have never occurred them before the psyop metastasized. When the ego dissolves like this, one longs for rebirth. Transgenderism is a kind of rebirth, but one that is institutionally approved and heavily propagandized for. These male outsiders find themselves as “female” insiders, their alienation has been controverted into an energy that a system — the media, politics, and the pharma and medical corporations that stand to make trillions from all of it — has no problem absorbing into its matrix and narratives.
So, if an artist from the earliest phases of postmodernism finds themselves irrelevant now in the later stages of it, what better way to get back in front of an audience than by inhabiting the logic of postmodernism all together? Perhaps you find it cynical to assert that someone with gender dysphoria would ever be making these kinds of social calculations, and I’d respond: do you not realize how fucked up we’ve become as a species? If nothing matters and nothing is real, we still strive to be seen. And there’s no more assured way of being seen than by becoming the logic of the very lens that we use to look at the world.
In all these artists’ work, you will find hints of esotericism, the occult, the nonsensical, and the deep alienation of contemporary life given form. Though most still fail to reconcile with this truth, transgenderism and gender ideology is a cult. In all the famous cults, empirical fact and biological reality is problematized by some irrational belief inculcated by the cult leader to the detriment of the followers. Jim Jones had his followers offer up their lives so they could live together in “paradise” after his paradise on Earth failed. Scientologists believe all our problems are caused by space ghosts that infect us, the only way to rid ourselves of them is to pay the church hundreds of thousands to cleanse our souls of them. And in gender ideology, he born a man or she born a woman can literally be in the wrong body, and all you have to do is let doctors mutilate and hack you up and you can alter your own alienating reality. Like all cults do, transgenderism offers up a utopian promise: take these drugs and mutilate yourself and the alienation will be gone. The pain will be gone. The dysphoria will be gone. But we know that’s not true – many post transition trans people still experience dysphoria and many go on to regret their decisions. There is no medical solution to a spiritual problem. In fact, there is no solution to the spiritual problems that we face at all. Therein lies another dilemma: the cultist perpetually looks for simple solutions to problems so cosmic that there are no solutions. The cult leader offers that solution, steals their minds, and turns them into slaves.
In an essay “The End of the End Times”, Sam Kriss writes: “In cults, everything is far closer. The leader receives his messages, from God or from outer space, and sooner later they all say the exact same thing.” In transgenderism, the Internet is the God and the prophet delivering God’s word. The message is so omnipotent and constant that it’s almost shocking we all haven’t been brainwashed into it. But not only is transgenderism a cult, it is an institutionally backed and mainstreamed cult on a mass scale. You not only earn the devotion of your fellow cult members, but the undying support of the world’s most powerful forces. So, for artists of a certain era that have fallen out of favor, transgenderism likely presents as a powerful dual force: transgression from social norms and wide cultural acceptance all at once.
“The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim,” writes Aldous Huxley. “ To him the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free. That he is not free is apparent only to other people.”
These trans artists who all started their transitions late in life are earning more praise and attention they ever have in their life while still deriving the thrill from the illusory breaking of social codes. But they have enslaved themselves to a most pernicious and medicalized ideology. They worship at the alter of an algorithm that can’t feel what they feel, and doesn’t care about the destruction it has wrought. But the schizoid logic of postmodernism has fragmented our psyches, and we are all looking for something to put those pieces back together.
Those behind the transgender ideology know this, and offer a cosmic glue of identity: in transgenderism, you will be whole again. But you will not be whole, and the parts of you that you gave to the ideology no longer belong to you. This is why I can empathize with all of these artists, to a degree. I understand what it’s like to feel disoriented by a world that has replaced reality with its simulacra, truth with information, values with ideology. Madness. Hysteria. Chaos. These terms no longer refer to isolated social breakdowns – no, they have become the norm. Not everyone knows how to adjust to that reality.
READ PART 2 HERE
READ PART 3 HERE
ILLUSTRATIONS:
1. art by Genesis P-Orridge
2. Shellyne Rodriguez
3. Rapeman Two Nuns and a Pack Mule
4. Jonestown
5. trans woman power lifter