This passage is speaking to me. It's from Susan Stryker's famous essay “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage.” I bolded a part in the middle that feels important to me right now. Frankenstein's monster knows itself, understands that someone else has made it who it is, understands that this makes other people perceive it as a monster, and can tell its own origin story as well as how it feels about it. This describes how transphobes are forever pointing out that trans-ness is a construction, and trans people say, Yes, and? Cis-ness is a construction too. So? In this essay, Stryker makes roughly that point, three decades ago.
"While hiking on the glaciers in the shadow of Mont Blanc, above the village of Chamounix, Frankenstein spies a familiar figure approaching him across the ice. Of course, it is the monster, who demands an audience with its maker. Frankenstein agrees, and the two retire together to a mountaineer’s cabin. There, in a monologue that occupies nearly a quarter of the novel, the monster tells Frankenstein the tale of its creation from its own point of view, explaining to him how it became so enraged.
These are my words to Victor Frankenstein, above the village of Chamounix. Like the monster, I could speak of my earliest memories, and how I became aware of my difference from everyone around me. I can describe how I acquired a monstrous identity by taking on the label 'transsexual' to name parts of myself that I could not otherwise explain. I, too, have discovered the journals of the men who made my body, and who have made the bodies of creatures like me since the 1930s. I know in intimate detail the history of this recent medical intervention into the enactment of transgendered subjectivity; science seeks to contain and colonize the radical threat posed by a particular transgender strategy of resistance to the coerciveness of gender: physical alteration of the genitals. I live daily with the consequences of medicine's definition of my identity as an emotional disorder. Through the filter of this official pathologization, the sounds that come out of my mouth can be summarily dismissed as the confused ranting of a diseased mind.
Like the monster, the longer I live in these conditions, the more rage I harbor. Rage colors me as it presses in through the pores of my skin, soaking in until it becomes the blood that courses through my beating heart. It is a rage bred by the necessity of existing in external circumstances that work against my survival."
— Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage” (PDF). GLQ, Vol. 1 (1994). This passage is from pp. 243–244.
The anger is an important part of this too. When you're marginalized and also told that you can't possibly know who you are, what other emotion is appropriate?
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