Today I heard that Ana Mardoll works for Lockheed Martin, and while I couldn't care less about where some internet kweer works, it did dredge up some old discourse that seems to never die. Like other people within this sphere of Online, I remember the shitshow that happened in January 2020, though with everything that's happened since then it feels like a lifetime ago. Like many others within this sphere, I remember making all the Takes about it, how it was yet another instance in the same vein of Porpentine's Hot Allostatic Load of trans women being disposable – available, like women in general, when they can be used for something, and thrown away afterwards. As I have said elsewhere, trans women suffer from an even more extreme susceptibility to being disposed of since unlike cis women, their productive potential is far more limited. Trans women do not and cannot have a place within a traditional nuclear family since they cannot be exchanged as property from father to husband.1 So for those who are already in the know, it was both disappointing but not surprising when everything happened with the Attack Helicopter piece in 2020.
Maybe it's because I have no expectations of anyone anymore and already understood why things went down how they did back then, but after some initial outrage which was motivated by my investment, at the time, in a baeddel-adjacent form of tranny identity politics, it was something that I stopped thinking about. The situation sucked, but this is our lot in life as trannies and it will never change without some kind of radical change in which the most othered don't have to be constantly sacrificed to maintain the ontology of the dominant classes of society. This has not stopped people from continuing to bitch about it on social media, however, and engage in incessant discourse about it. I find this ironic considering that the person in question who was harassed off the internet by radlibs chose to avoid being in the spotlight after everything that happened, probably because social media is a mental illness intensifier and she wisely made the decision to just leave and go do something else instead of pointlessly dying on this hill.
It's probably ironic for me to even be writing about this, but the discourse over this continuing to drag on has always bothered me. It felt like old news and felt like something that shouldn't surprise anyone, but I realized today that what bothers me about it is that it really only proves me point that the disposability of trans women is so baked into the forms social interactions can take. I can't tell if it's worse for radlib TMEs2 to burn Isabel Fall at the stake or for people two years later to continue parading her charred corpse around to make a point on social media and get clout points. But either way, the whole situation to me has come to seem like two sides of the same coin, where everyone (including other trans women) is incapable of seeing trans women as unique individuals deserving of being treated as such. They are only ever seen as the stores some kind of social exchange value, and so they get to suffer the experience of being both cancelled by radlib TMEs who are probably fundamentally virulently transmisogynistic, and then they get to not even have their wishes respected of just being left alone after the fact. Allies and other trannies have to continue to make a point to a different audience at the expense of the person who is victimized.
This post doesn't need to be very long. It would really defeat the point if it was. All I really want to say is that I wish people would just move on from this thing that happened in the past and respect the wishes of the person who was victimized to be left alone and move on with her life. I say this as someone who continues to suffer the psychic damage of people being unable to move on from things that have been written in the past, who continue to obsess over the same old shit in either an approving or disapproving way, gossiping like high schoolers instead of ever contributing anything of value. If you care so much about what happened, maybe you should instead try to focus on the trans women writers and artists who are on the fringes and being marginalized by the mainstream and support them in some way. Maybe if you are a trans woman, you should instead create bold works of your own, prepared with the knowledge that you too can and will be disposed of by everyone, and that this is all the more reason to create things.