"Where the hypocrites at?
What community feel they the only ones relevant?"
~ Kendrick Lamar
"Queer liminal," enticing words which glow in front of me and pulse in my body. The image accompanying them is of a translucent winged fairy, lavender in color. Its head is the skull of a warthog, a few pieces of rotting meat still attached, maybe an eyeball. Horrible beauty for a horribly beautiful time between worlds. I sense a place between two estuaries, where the inherent intercategorical liminality of queerness and the liminal web can meet and play. Violent and refreshing, fecund and gorgeous.
Being queer seems to have some kind of resonance with the shamanic, with being a "shamanoid" per Alexander Bard. But then there are "straight acting" people, who have unusual sexualities or sense of their own sex/gender, but who otherwise seem geared to normie life. And then there are some of us for whom sexual queerness blends in its murky depth with queerness of personing, who consistently fall out of boxes and live in the margins, the membranes. I would love more of us in this corner of the internet, keeping it weird enough so that all the sensemaking doesn't choke on its own boring overgrowth. Bringing fresh noise to the signal to cast it in new light and new magics.
This is a double challenge. To walk this margin means to give up the ostensible safety of queer identity as established by DEI protocols and hardened by Culture Wars. Someone who cancels Dave Chappelle for transphobia (love you Dave!) is unlikely to have the philosophical grit to stick it out here, but many of us have been conditioned into excessive fragility. I've had to decondition myself, which is sort of challenging given real threats in the world. Meanwhile, the tenor of the liminal web can paradoxically be overly Apollonian and regressive in its search for security and the good ol' days before any of this queer shit came around. And there are those here who would erase our existence outright. They have declared a blood feud, and it would be unwise to ignore this fact, however one responds to it.
So what we need are those willing to be lovers and fighters both, and most of all to give and receive in the dance. Those who are not seeking acceptance, but to kindle and tend their little monstrous fires which also add color and warmth to the room. These people may need help removing their Culture Wars flak jackets to regain their sense of humor and remember what it was that drew them to realize themselves in the first place, a profoundly beautiful and mysterious magic.
"There's a brave new world that's raging inside of me," as punk tranny Laura Jane Grace sang. The same cognitive flexibility and tolerance for ambiguity which led us to be true to our own future selves may also serve the wider community and negotiate between the bouncing bubbles within it. In the meantime, this means less defensiveness and more willingness to be offensive, to let the freak flag fly like a Jolly Roger, to no longer police the exact usage of 846 different gender and sexual identity flags, and to sometimes let the claws come out. But for me it also means generosity of spirit, assuming good faith until proven otherwise. We can come bearing gifts.
So where is our little monster now? Just getting its legs under it, I think. The time seems ripe, the buds are emerging. There are pockets of vibrant discussion around these issues such as the Intellectual Deep Web, as well as more mainstream academic figures like John Vervaeke who have helped open up space for conversation. Meanwhile, I think a lot of the shamanoid queers who would be interested don't know this place even exists. We've been turned off to things like "philosophy" for good reason. But many of us have also been turned off to the outrage clown circus in our own circles, and self-exodized from "The Community" (as we are wont). There could be more blossoms to attract these strange and solitary insects, some witchlight to gather us, so we may disperse into these fields.
There was a time for me, leading up to gender transition, full of dazzling pain and dark murky beauty. Little glows swam at the bottom of the night sea. There was magic but it was obscure. I searched my soul, I asked my dreams for answers. I would be awakened at night, the moon singing in through the curtains, calling for a tide within me, but in a place which was just a dry sea bed, a dry rot pain aching. I rubbed my feet because I knew that our brain housed the sensations incoming from the feet and the sexual organs next to each other, and it was soothing for a while. This was long before I began to learn to guide the energy from this phantom sex up through my body to my heart and third eye. It was just pain and pain's subsiding back then. No answers but somehow a silent promise from the moon.
Much later now, a friend takes me to see an action film called Monkey Man. She's trying to cheer me up after an illness, and tells me there are some "badass trans women" in it. Watching it, what strikes me is the presentation of hijira as keepers of a temple dedicated to Ardhanarishvara, Shiva and Parvati together in androgynous being. They fulfill roles as healers and inspirers for our testosterone-rich protagonist. And this is something real to me, this isn't the further isolation into ever-more-special atomized and alphabetized identities that I keep seeing, the narcissistic co-dependence of flags and vocabulary spinning around nothing. This is belonging.
Of course we're different, that's the whole point. Our differences give to each other. This isn't the starched desexualization of sexual and gender identity that has characterized much of the recent LGBT rights movement - "Look at us, we're exactly like everyone else except for this one little thing that doesn't matter anywhere except in bed." No. When you transition genders, you realize how much the electromagnetism of sex is everywhere, in crude or refined forms, powering or gumming up our interactions like neon syrup. It's unavoidable. India seems to have figured out some of the reality of difference thousands of years ago, and said, those of you cursed by the moon, there is a place for you but it may be different. You are the walkers between worlds, not belonging to either, but you can work together and facilitate diffusion between them.
And after the movie, I remember a phrase that came to me a year ago, The Temple of the Starving Moon. Somewhere in a desert with a starry sky, a place of beauty and death, and a dark joy. A place to worship that which is hidden, liminal, monstrous. Our culture forgets both sex and death, while shoving cheap versions of both in our faces. My transition showed me deep grief, the ability to see grief to the end until time bent into curvature around a hidden inhuman peace. There are things we could perhaps offer, as modern hijira - the reflection and empowerment of sociosexual electromagnetism and the stillness in the heart of grief.
This is a new time, we can't rebuild ancient temples, this is a networked society with new needs. And we are new as well, we are cyborg, with implants and exogenous hormones. What can we do? Let go, let go of the obsession with identity, learn to swim, follow the fey current, find the hidden places. And then come bearing gifts for the others. But first of all, let go.
Great piece, but if we can’t get past this “shamanoid” label I’m going to freak.
Neon syrup, I love that ✨⚡️