University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

“A door, an exit, a way out”: trans*temporality in hybrid media

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“A door, an exit, a way out”: trans*temporality in hybrid media

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“A door, an exit, a way out”:

Trans*Temporality in Hybrid Media

by

Eliot Jean Dunn

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)

August 2023

Copyright 2023 Eliot Jean Dunn

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First, I’d like to thank my Chair Karen Tongson, who believed that this project was possible
before I did, and whose mentorship is the stuff all graduate students all dream of. Huge thanks
must also go to the other members of my excellent committee, Alice Gambrell, Sarah Kessler,
Tara McPherson and Bo Ruberg, who guided this project through its many iterations and were
always generous with advice, encouragement, and enthusiasm. Thanks must also go to the USC
Graduate School for the Provost Fellowship which allowed me to undertake this research.

Many thanks go to my colleagues in the All-But Collective for a five-star combination of
professional guidance and memes. Special thanks go to Teddy for being my coffee date and
fellow queerdo. Thank you to superstar author and best friend Elle, who keeps me humble by
being astoundingly cool and impressive. To Des for a lifetime of friendship. And of course, to
Vanessa, who makes me laugh every day even in this late-stage capitalist hellscape.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………….ii

List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………………….iv

Abstract……………………………………...………………………………………….……..…..v

Introduction: An Introduction to Trans*Temporality……….….….….…………………………..1
Craft and Code in a Hybrid Media Landscape………………………………………….....1
Some Words on Words: Trans…………………………………………………………….6
Thrown for a Loop: Defining Trans*Temporality……………………………………….14
The Boundaries of Bodies………………………………………………………………..29
Monstrosity in the Multiverse……………………………………………………………31
This Project………………………………………………………………………………35

Chapter 1: The Digitally Contaminated Page as Genderqueer Interface………………….……..42
A Tradition of Transgenre Writing…………………………………...………….………44
Page, Space, and Interface…………………………….……………...………….………47
Huxtable’s White Space and Digital Face…………………………………...…………..50
The Page is Deep: Two-Spirit Code…………………………………..…………………58

Chapter 2: Talk to You, Kiss You, Fight You: Gender in the Playable Text……………………68
The Visual Novel as Cultural Object…………………………………………………….69
Are Visual Novels Games? For Whom………………….…………..………….……….79
Monstrous Bodies and Digital Lives…………………………………………………….84

Chapter 3: “Something furiously new”: The Helicopter Story…...…………………………….103
Meme What You Say…...…………………………….…...…….……….……….…….109
Alt-ernative Media Spaces……………………………………………………………...116
Meme to Story…………………………………………………………………………..121
No Escape: Trans*Temporality and Gender-Making in the Helicopter Story…………128
The Queer Failure of the Attack Helicopter……………………………………………144

Chapter 4: He/Theys for Days: Trans-Human Gender on Twitter……………………………..149
The Bird App…………………………………………………………………………...150
Tim Burton, Pocket Monsters, and the Rise of the He/They….….………….…………157
What’s in a They………………………………………………………………………..171
Trans*Temporal Twitter……………………………………………………….…….…177
The Masculine Monster Mashup……………………………………………………….182

Coda: Good Representation, Bad Monsters, No Exit…………………………………………..185

Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………………….210

Appendix: He/They Twitter Data……..………………………………………………….….…227

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Excerpt from “i am no-” from Joshua Whitehead’s Full-Metal Indigiqueer (20)….…60
Figure 2: Diagram illustrating the punch paper machine which took input from its operator
and the resulting tape below (Gosling 86)…….……………………..……………………61
Figure 3: “A Brown Queers Golden World” by Joshua Whitehead……………………..………..66
Figure 4: A screenshot from Lolita Yakyuuken one of the, if not the, first games
categorizable as a visual novel. Obtained from the Visual Novel Database………..……71
Figure 5: Conversations from GENDERWRECKED with the irritable and aggressive
Jolene the tree, who eventually takes the whisper of the wind as hoo’s pronouns.....……73
Figure 6: A visual representation of GENDERWRECKED’s looping interactive
structure……………………………………………………………………………….….74
Figure 7: The bridge screen the player stares at while taking time out of the
text/interaction in GENDERWRECKED...……………………………………………….77
Figure 8: Larry, a character from the second half of GENDERWRECKED, speaking to the
player about how gender feels………………………………..………………………85-86
Figure 9: Various Tumblr posts which claim an overlap between trans issues/identity
and cryptids. Original posts can be found by following the users (names in
the upper left corner of each post)………….….…………………….……….………89-90
Figure 10. Oh so hilarious transphobic meme (circa 2014)…………………………………….109
Figure 11: Official Sonic the Hedgehog Twitter account repeats transphobic joke in 2016.…..125
Figure 12: One of the original images Knudsen posted of the Slender Man, who can be
seen in silhouette under the tree on the left side of the image………………………….167
Figure 13: A tale of two Wonkas. Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka here presented as
primarily masculine but secondarily nonbinary and Depp’s Wonka as the inverse……174
Figure 14: The title screen image for Tell Me Why (2020) featuring Tyler (left) and
Alyson (right) Ronan……………………………………………………………………188
Figure 15: The number of recurring trans characters on television displayed in orange,
the number of trans people murdered globally in blue. Information from Trans
Murder Monitoring Project, a TGEU Project and GLAAD's Annual "Where
We Are on TV" Report………………………………………………………………….191
Figure 16: One of the pages of the Book of Goblins in which the twins trick The Mad
Hunter, the only character who doesn’t have a corresponding NPC outside of
the world of the book and who seems to either represent Mary-Ann’s abusive
former partner, or be a metaphor for her sometimes-difficult mental health episodes….203

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ABSTRACT

While scholars of queer theory have thought extensively about the form(s) of queer temporality,
little work has been done to reconsider those forms from within trans studies. This dissertation
asserts that non-teleological trans temporality can be best described as a kind of loop. Often the
experience of looping time is occasioned through gendered misrecognition, a microaggression
which structures trans life before, after, and during transition. I argue that these looping temporal
experiences create a multiversal experience of one’s own life, and trans or genderqueer
representations of temporal looping are revealed in contemporary narratives through the collision
of technological interface and traditional representation. Particularly for gender non-conforming
or genderqueer creators, narratives which include trans temporal looping provide an escape from
the hegemony of cisheterosexist power, allowing one to temporarily experience the euphoria of a
world outside binary gender and its attendant violences. Examining a number of trans texts with
digital elements, this project shows that genderqueer escape is possible through the manipulation
of digital media forms in an attempt to approximate trans temporality.

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INTRODUCTION: An Introduction to Trans*Temporality
Craft and Code in a Hybrid Media Landscape
Sitting on my couch in 2016, with the news in the background and a sleepy dog by my
side, I started texting with a nonbinary astronaut. To be honest, I didn’t at first know that Taylor
was an astronaut, or nonbinary, or what it would be like to interact with them. All I had to go on
was a vague recommendation from a friend, and a series of cryptic messages on a dark gray
screen. They came through fast and furiously:
[incoming communication]
[establishing connection]
[receiving message]
Hello?
Is this thing working?
Can anyone read me?
As each message pinged onto the screen there was a pause between them, the telltale three
pulsing dots that is Apple’s symbol that someone is writing a message. Just like texting a real
person, the longer the message, the more time it took for the message to appear. I learn that I’m
speaking with Taylor, “an astronaut on board the starship Varla” or really a student trying to
become an astronaut who has crash landed on an unknown moon. I’m the only one getting their
messages and it is my job to help them survive and get off the moon. I tell Taylor they should
head to the crash site from their escape pod to try and see if there are any supplies. “Okay,” they
respond, “I’ll let you know when I’m there.” Then there is silence, Taylor stops responding and I
wait for them to reach the wreck. I keep checking my phone waiting for a response or

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notification; I expect I won’t have to wait too long (I was wrong). This constant checking causes
my wife to ask who I’m texting, and I try to explain to her that it's a game, that I’m not really
texting anyone. But to the outside viewer, even to me, it feels like I am.
I wanted to write that playing Lifeline is not like playing other video games. However, it
doesn’t feel right to even use the words “playing” or “video game”. After all, I wasn’t interacting
with Taylor like I had for any other kind of game. What is Lifeline? Is it a novel? An interactive
text or hypertext? A video game? A conversation? There are choices to be made, pathways to be
taken like those in early hypertext games or choose-your-own-adventure novels, and Lifeline
could be categorized as a new version of either of these digital narrative types, but it also adds in
a crucial new dimension to these narrative objects: time. It takes Taylor time (sometimes a lot of
time) to do things like to walk to the crash site, to get some rest for the night, to repair objects, to
send messages to you. Weirdly enough, Lifeline seemed to be just as much about the time spent
away from the app—the time in which one periodically thinks about the game, about the
interactions and choices made so far, about the previous fragments of conversation and what
Taylor might be doing in the meantime.
Time then, and the empty screen of the game as you wait, becomes the key element of the
experience—or perhaps a key element of making Lifeline feel different than a normal video
game. The story, masquerading as a real interaction that could go on for as long as the player
wants it to continue, is most effective because it is a fragmented experience, structured by an
ongoing relationship between the player, the nonbinary character, and the time it takes both to
live their lives. Facilitated using notifications (both at the top of the phone screen and on the
Apple Watch if the player has one) interacting with Taylor is supposed to be disrupted by the
other tasks one completes in their day-to-day life, supposed to be slotted between other messages

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to real people, checking social media, etc. It requires patience in an era in which media is often
immediate and infinite. The game’s play style loops back and forth, forcing one to experience
Taylor’s time as moments of return to the fictional timescape between the extradiegetic time of
one’s present life. The game only works because it builds tension, recognition, and relation
through this looping temporal activity of approaching the narrative timeline, abandoning it, and
then returning. That’s how the player begins to care for Taylor, by waiting for them, by
experiencing time through and with them. Since immediacy and infinity seem to define our
current media ecosystem, what meaning can be made from the temporal loop, the gap, the pause?
What is the structural relationship between the temporality of the hybridized text and the
experience of time in the hybridized body? How, in essence, do we read a media object that
makes use of interactive emptiness or active fragmentation, one that resists a continuous
narrative in favor of explicitly referencing the temporality of both the user and the writer? What
reading and writing strategies might be generated through thinking with a gender-ambiguous
astronaut calling out for our help?
Media cross-contamination describes the productive friction between media forms in
which formal elements of one media type are picked up and reworked through the encounter
with another media type. For example, we have seen that the contamination of television with the
interfaces of the internet has produced a new category of media: streaming television. Or the
contamination of the novel with digital gaming first produced the hypertext and later produced
interactive novels like Robert Sherman’s Black Crown. Smash the interactive novel against the
interface of text messaging and you get a whole new contaminated space for narrative games like
3 Minute Games’ Lifeline. I differ this contamination from Henry Jenkins’ “convergence” by
claiming that we’ve reached a point in which the collisions in media are not merely about the

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repurposing of content from one platform to another or spreading out media consumption and
allowing each platform to shape the narrative in its own way. Instead, media type has itself
become more and more difficult to define. The boundaries between each medium have bled into
one another and mutated such that we now operate in an ecosystem full of hybrid media
organisms which could never have been imagined in 2006 (when the iPhone was still a year
away). We can no longer speak of media in terms of collision or intersection. What were knotted
systems are now impossible to disentangle into separate strands. It goes without saying that
media contamination has been facilitated by the interaction of traditional media categories with
digital delivery systems. Novels become hypertexts (Patchwork Girl), which then become
narrative-heavy video games (Life is Strange). Television becomes digital shorts (early flash
animation), then full channels (YouTube), then streaming video (too many to count). Community
boards become chat rooms, which then become as diverse as private messaging apps (Kik) and
photo sharing platforms (Instagram). Television news transforms into live streams (Facebook
Live) and gaming with your friends might now look more like watching a streamer (Twitch).
Films are becoming interactive gaming experiences (take for example the popularity of Netflix’s
Black Mirror: Bandersnatch). The Venn diagram of these different forms, filtered through their
digital transformation, is more overlapped than ever before. This contamination is viral, it
spreads easily, and it is reforming not only the way that we define the objects we read but the
way that we read them.
In the contemporary moment we often think about the media ecosystem as one
characterized by infinity—autoplay, the endless scroll, the binge watch, the ever-updating list of
things to read/watch/play. But I argue that media contamination often reveals itself most strongly
in moments of disjointedness, absence, or emptiness. This fragmentation takes the shape of

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pauses, empty spaces, gaps, and moments of loading or reloading. It asks the reader to stop, to
think critically and reflectively on what has come before, and to actively fill in spaces where no
narrative pathways or obvious steps forward might exist. In a digital media world, there is
seemingly no reason why these breaks continue to exist. For the most part, the speed of our
technology and bandwidth is such that these moments are easy to miss. However, this
dissertation argues that it is the tension between the increasing fragmentation of content and the
proposed infinity of interfaces that creates a new temporal schema under which consumers
experience media time. I want to suggest that active fragmentation of media is much more than
just a vestigial structure. Instead, the gaps, moments of pause, or empty spaces in contemporary
hybrid forms establish a temporal experience of media that resists progression towards finitude
as the goal. These media objects move us in and out of our own timelines, double temporality, or
destabilize extradiegetic time before returning us to it. Most broadly, I am proposing that the rise
of media cross-contamination and the hybrid forms of reading/watching/interacting that are
occasioned by this contamination are a new and fertile ground for thinking through new forms of
temporality as embedded within the media object and experienced by the active reader.
I hope to show that in a hybridized media environment, where media forms are more
imbricated than ever before, medium-specific analysis is more important than ever before, but it
is also more difficult. In this definitional no-man’s land, the medium serves as the body of the
text, indecipherable and yet physical, material. In this project, the affinity between the
hybridization of the textual body and the reconfiguration of the gendered body is foundational to
my analysis of narrative temporality in trans and genderqueer texts. It is not a coincidence that
Time Magazine’s 2014 article about the “Transgender Tipping Point” (which begins so many
pieces in trans studies that I hesitate to mention it) identified new media as a place where trans

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stories were beginning to flourish, nor is it accidental that these hybridized media forms which
produce experiential slippages between on- and offline experiences serve as spaces in which the
body can be reconsidered, reconstituted, revised and made inhuman.
Some Words on Words: Trans
Before diving into the particularities of how gender is cooperatively produced through the
use and misuse of digital tools, it is worth a brief diversion to talk about the terminology used in
this project, especially those terms that define the communities of gender misfits whose works
make up the primary texts of this project. Chief amongst these is my use of ‘trans’ which I
especially rely on in order to describe what I call trans*temporality. Scholars of queer theory and
trans studies have defined ‘trans’ and ‘transgender’ in a variety of ways based upon the goals and
foundational underpinnings of their projects. For some, ‘transgender’ (and its accompanying
shortened version, ‘trans’) is “a vernacular term developed within gender communities to
account for the cross-identification experiences of people who may not accept all of the protocols
and strictures of transsexuality” (Halberstam, In a Queer Time 53) while for others trans is used
to “refer to those bodies and subjects that identify or are identified in ways that exceed
normatively bounded categories of man and woman” (Beauchamp 11), and for others the
definition of trans has been as simple as “the subject who crosses gender boundaries'' (Prosser,
5). In 2014, Talia Mae Bettenger took on the topic of terminology and accompanying ideological
underpinnings in her “Trapped in the Wrong Theory: Rethinking Trans Oppression and
Resistance”. For her:
‘Transgender” was originally deployed as an umbrella term for those ‘beyond the
binary,’ yet the dominance of self-identified transgender men and women who do
political work under the category ‘transgender’ has required a new iteration of the

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beyond-the-binary vision. What this demonstrates, in part, is a serious disconnect
between the theory cited and the actual practice. (385)
Trans terminology has, as all words do, shifted considerably over time. Earlier literatures
thinking through the difference between transgender and transsexual commonly see the former as
a term for those outside (or attempting to reach the outside) of traditional notions of cis-
womanhood and cis-manhood. Over time, the usage of transgender has changed such that some
now see transsexual as an antiquated term which inappropriately links gender presentation and
identity to either a change of sex or of sexual desire. For a time, trans was also written with an
asterisk at the end (“trans*”) as a mode of signaling to readers that the author intended the word
to be used as the umbrella term for anyone who crosses gendered boundaries and not merely
inclusive of binary trans people (those that cross from man to woman or woman to man). This
has largely been seen as redundant, and mostly fallen out of use, though I will argue that there is
enduring power in the asterisk. Most recently, scholars and activists alike have resorted to
allowing their readers to define their terms in order to avoid the pitfalls of staking a claim on any
one usage. For example, Hil Malatino defines trans in Side Affects “as inclusive of anyone who
understands themselves as hailed by that word, anyone who claims that word as a partial
descriptor of selfhood or lived experience” (Malatino, 5).
Susan Stryker’s Transgender History glosses this change in terminology by stating that
while in the 1970s and 1980s transgender usually included those who wished to change their
“social gender in an ongoing way through a change of habitus and gender expression, which
perhaps included the use of hormones, but usually not surgery” (37) the revision of the term
meant that it was “used to encompass any and all kinds of variation from gender norms and
expectations, similar to what genderqueer, gender nonconforming, and nonbinary mean now”

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(37). And while this may seem a long diversion into debates over nomenclature, how we define
transgender influences our ability to define gender transgression and gender identity more
broadly. After all, Donna Haraway reminds us that, “It matters what thoughts think thoughts. It
matters what knowledges know knowledges. It matters what relations relate relations. It matters
what worlds world worlds” (Staying with the Trouble, 35). The definitions that we adhere to do
work on their own, sometimes circulating in contexts divorced from their original texts and
therefore impacting not only our students and communities but the pathways to new thought.
For example, A. Finn Enke’s discussion of ‘cis-’ as nomenclature for those who are,
ostensibly, ‘not-trans’ reminds us that the goal of transfeminisms should not be the establishment
of a related but different set of binaries based on the operation of gender and the formation of the
body. Rather, “queer and trans theory remind us that gender and sex are made and have no a
priori stability (‘one is not born a woman’)” and that the binary implementation of cis- affirms
“not only that it is possible for one to stay ‘a woman’ but also that one is ‘born a woman’ after
all” (63). Enke argues that unlike ‘woman’ and ‘man’ which have been made capacious enough
to include gender variation themselves: “the compulsion to name cis (as that which is not trans)
demonstrates that the difference between trans and non-trans mobilities is far more concrete than
the rather elastic distance between male and female” (68). While I’m less sure than Enke that we
have been successful in demonstrating to non-academic audiences that there is immense
plasticity within the categories of ‘woman’ and ‘man’, I agree with Enke’s goal to critique the
fixity that coheres to both ‘cis’ and ‘trans’ when they are placed in binary opposition to one
another, and the trouble this provides when determining the boundaries between the gender-
variant cis person and the trans person. Stryker notes this normalizing effect of the cis/trans
binary, worrying that “‘transgender’ increasingly functions as the site in which to contain all

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gender trouble, thereby helping secure both homosexuality and heterosexuality as stable and
normative categories of personhood.” (“Queer Theory’s Evil Twin” 214).
Determining where the lines of trans are, what amount of gender crossing, transition,
lived gender roles, etc. constitutes a subject as identifiable and claimed under the term
‘transgender’ is thus more difficult than it may at first seem. Not only must we consider those
that do and do not see themselves as hailed under trans nomenclature, we must also consider
assertions from scholars that trans is not an identity marker at all (contrary to how I argue it is
most used colloquially), but a verb, method, or set of actions in the same way that scholars often
define ‘queer’. In the first issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly, Heather love defines the dual
purposes of queer and trans as identity and as theoretical methodology by comparing the
domains of the two terms:
It is not clear whether queer is best understood as a substantial term with historical links
to communities marked as gender and sexual deviants or as a more abstract theoretical
term, one that describes a capacious nonnormativity, political critique, and resistance to
identity. A similar ambiguity marks transgender, which can refer to particular modes of
embodiment or communities of people but can also be understood as a theoretical term
that points to the crossing and denaturalizing of identity categories. (Love, “Queer” 175)

Using trans as a verb changes the term to have less to do with a stable category that identifies
modes of identity and being in the world and focuses it on movement from and across categories.
Stryker, Currah, and Moore iterate on the idea of a trans practice in their introduction to a
Special Edition of Women’s Studies Quarterly: “‘Transing,’ in short, is a practice that takes place
within, as well as across or between gendered spaces. It is a practice that assembles gender into
contingent structures of association with other attributes of bodily being, and that allows for their
reassembly” (13). If trans is a method of theorization as much as a method of being in the world,
what work do trans bodies do, and what experiences might they theorize?

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If all of this seems a long-winded way of arguing that there is no agreement between
scholars as to how to discreetly and fully define ‘trans’ that’s because it is. Trans studies is a
changing and evolving field which activates a changing and expanding population, set of
theoretical concerns, and a politics. To define ‘trans’ is to discipline it in the dual meaning of the
word, which is not the overall goal of this project. Indeed, I side with Karen Barad who argues
against “a universalization of trans or queer experience stripped of all its specificities (as
inflected through race, nationality, ethnicity, class, and other normalizing apparatuses of power),
setting these terms up as concepts that float above the materiality of particular embodied
experiences,” but instead desires “to make alliances with, to build on an already existing radical
tradition. . .that troubles naturalness” (Barad “Transmaterialities” 413). On a practical level, I use
‘trans’ in this project to denote an amorphous and ever-evolving category of identities and
material experiences which have the effects of calling into question the naturalness of binary
genders and their accompanying social roles. At the same time, I acknowledge that any
monolithic definition of ‘trans’ often “coheres in ways that minimize colonial and racial
differences and operates as implicitly white and settler” (Malatino, Side Affects 49). In fact, not
all the creators in this text claim ‘trans’ as a self-descriptor for their own bodies and experiences.
Nor is it my place (or my desire!) to assign ‘transness’ to them. However, creators and their
audiences self-define in this text, the nodes of identification that unify them have more to do
with the desire to escape from an oppressive system of violently enforced cisheteronormativity
than they do with the specific shapes that those methods of escape take.
What that focus on escape means in practice is that I am interested in the tactics that
gender nonnormative folks actively employ to escape the pain and violence of a system which
not only denies their modes of being, but attempts to render them invisible and unlivable.

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Perhaps in this desire for escape we find the organizing structure that points to a usable definition
of gender transgression as a unifying category, one in which the borders are defined not by the
directions we cross gender, the number of gender poles, geographies, the frequency of those
crossings, or even the bodies that may or may not accompany them, but instead through the
disciplining arm of contemporary ideologies of cisheterosexism. As Malatino explains “If there
is a phenomenon that crosscuts much of trans experience—in this moment, in those zones of
dispossession, extraction, expropriation, and brutal reterritorialization that some of us call North
America—it is the experience of ‘near life’. . .a term that indexes the experience of living with
one’s humanity withheld, insistently interrogated, rarely ever assumed (Side Affects 25). How we
respond to this interrogation, the withholding of humanity by transphobia, defines how we can
move through the material world. For those authors and their communities that I examine in this
project, seeking humanity is thus a flawed project from the outset. Instead of looking to
structural powers to confer legitimacy on them, these communities and the creators within them
are looking for an alternate exit from systems gender themselves rather than reforming what
counts as gender within those systems. They’re looking for a way out.
Often, this desire for illegibility, for freedom from dominating systems which most
commonly confer legitimacy on the ‘good trans person’ (usually binary, upper class, well-
educated, and white) is conceptualized as a kind of backdoor, an escape hatch that allows would-
be gender dissidents (or gender outlaws to borrow Kate Bornstien’s terminology) to temporarily
access a world outside gender through reclaiming transphobic rhetoric that labels us inhuman.
Why should we be compelled towards assimilation into the human at all? What does the human
have to offer those of us looking to queer gender, or become genderqueers? After all, just like
gender itself the “human is a normative convention, which does not make it inherently negative,

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just highly regulatory and hence instrumental to practices of exclusion and discrimination”
(Braidotti, 26). These two webbed and intertwined systems of control, the human and its
accompanying standards of appropriately gendered embodiment/comportment must be
abandoned together. There is no human without the discipline of gender, but accordingly there
might be space outside of gender where or if we can locate space for experiences outside
humanity.
In his speech to the École de la Cause Freudienne, later published by Semiotext(e), Paul
Preciado gestures to this desire to exist independently of gender as a longing for escape:
I had not the least desire to become what the children of the white middle classes called
being normal or healthy. I simply wanted a way out: I didn’t care what it was. So I could
move forward, so I could escape this mockery of sexual difference, so I would not be
arrested, hands in the air, and forced back to the boundaries of this taxonomy. . .Let me
repeat myself: I was looking for a door, an exit, a way out.” (Preciado, Can the Monster
Speak 27)

Preciado claims to have accessed the space of the exit, the “way out” that titles this project,
precisely through transition, through “injecting myself with testosterone, surrounded by a group
of friends who were also seeking an exit” (27). It is not that Preciado truly believes that escape
from a cisgender world is sustainable. But Preciado’s search is not about a movement from one
gender to another, or to an embodiment that is more legible. Instead, it is about temporarily and
ecstatically accessing a place beyond gender. And Preciado is not alone in looking for “a way
out”. micha cárdenas’ work on what she calls “the transreal” is an attempt to theorize gender
through the virtual and augmented reality performances, but it is also a tactic for trans flourishing
in a binary world. “To say that I am transreal,” she says, “is a strategy for embracing a gender
that exceeds daily reality on Planet Earth and that says back to all the people who have tried to
make me choose between man or woman that I choose to be a shape-shifter, a dragon and a light
wave” (The Transreal, 30). This is cárdenas’ exit from gender, an exit which takes her into

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virtual or mixed realities precisely because escape is impossible to achieve within the narrow
confines of the hegemonic world of the ‘human’ and the gender system which makes some
bodies illegible. For cárdenas as for Preciado, the only way out is through embracing
monstrosity, the non- or in-human, and the technologies that make new virtual embodiments
possible.
Perhaps the “shape-shifter” the “dragon” and the “light wave” are the door that we’ve
been searching for—the temporary reprieve outside the regulatory violences of the liberal human
subject—it exists in our willingness to embrace the nonhuman, especially in forms that might be
considered monstrous. This is not the anti-humanism of Foucault’s The Order of Things nor is it
Braidotti’s posthumanism which “looks towards elaborating alternative ways of conceptualizing
the human subject” but rather it is an attempt to step outside of and reject humanity entirely. It is
thus always a project doomed to failure and reincorporation. After all, to access the agency to
escape humanist systems is to reify some of those very traits that construct the human subject to
begin with. I cannot discuss the freedom of genderqueer monsters, or their ability to build
themselves, without applying humanist frameworks of freedom and self-determination. But these
gender outlaws, genderqueer gender-queerers, escape artists, or transforming body-makers may
momentarily access inhumanity (or at least the trappings of inhumanity) through the production
of what I call trans*temporal periods of digital transversal. Merely the imaginative glimpse of a
body set free from systems of gender is rejuvenating, reinvigorating, and restorative. In other
words, becoming inhuman through the storytelling I examine in this project is first and foremost
a material and political tactic for survival, and only secondarily a theoretical position. Such work
necessarily queers gender, making it unfamiliar by unshackling gender from the human form,
allowing for the proliferation of bodies, genders, desires, and experiences that are not defined by

14
their relationships to ‘real’ objects but rather to ‘real’ affects. While I argue that
trans*temporality may be a structural feature of these narratives, genderqueer is the unifying
terminology for those creating gendered escapes or ‘ways out’ in this project. I do not use
genderqueer to indicate a stable identarian category, or to indicate a gender that is outside the
binary, but rather to bring together authors and creators whose texts perform the queer gender
work destabilizing and resisting cisnormativity. “Back in the 1990s,” Riki Wilchins says, “I
started using the term ‘genderqueer’ in an effort to glue together two nouns which seemed to me
to describe an excluded middle: those of us who were not just trans, but also queer: the kind of
gendertrash that transgressed the natural boundaries of transgender, those whom society couldn’t
digest” (Wilchins in Rajunov, Micah, et al. xi). It is in this spirit that I deploy ‘genderqueer’ not
as something that one is, but that someone does. Genderqueer refers, in this project, to those
actively navigating the antagonistic relationship between binary cisnormative gendered
expectations and the trans, gender nonconforming, gender-adverse, nonbinary, gender-fluid,
bigender, agender, or third gender positions that seek to produce imaginative nonhuman
positions from which to do queer narrative work. In doing so, I seek to underline the imaginative
work that these gender nonnormative creators do for one another, rather than stressing the
particular identifications they ascribe to. These are not the ‘good trans’ subjects, these are gender
anarchists, gender decolonizers, gender deniers.
Thrown for a Loop: Defining Trans*Temporality
When applied to temporality in particular, the place where trans occurs most frequently in
this text, I am gesturing to the specific ways in which gender nonnormativity and accompanying
efforts to flee the binary generate a set of relations to linear progressive temporality which bends
the line of ‘straight time’ into a trans*temporal loop. One of the central conceits of this work is

15
that scholars who have theorized non-linear temporal schemas within queer lifeworlds have
failed to address the specific temporal formations that compose trans and genderqueer
experiences. The 2000s and 2010s served as a moment of proliferating scholarship on ‘queer
temporality’ including landmark books by Elizabeth Freeman and Jack Halberstam amongst
others. These temporal theories were based largely on a hyperopic look at queer life progression
which yield theoretical richness when contrasted with heteronormative codes of maturation that
value marriage, reproduction, and productivity under capitalism. Thus, for Halberstam, queer
temporality is “a term for those specific models of temporality that emerge within
postmodernism once one leaves the temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family,
longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance” which “have clear but not essential relations to the gay
and lesbian subject” (In a Queer Time and Place 6).
Freeman’s chrononormativity is similarly invested in understanding the structures of
social power which “link properly temporalized bodies'' to “teleological schemas of events or
strategies for living such as marriage, accumulation of health and wealth for the future,
reproduction, childrearing, and death and its attendant rituals” (Time Binds, 4). She goes on to
argue that in “the eyes of the state, this sequence of socioeconomically ‘productive’ moments is
what it means to have a life at all” (5). Freeman’s work too, looks to the body as a source of
information about history, restoring “a differently queer body to queer theory—the body erotic
thought not only in terms of its possibilities for making sexual cultures but in terms of its
capacities for labor—by which I mean both the social relations of production/reproduction and
the expenditure of bodily energy” (Time Binds 18). These projects look to archives of queer
performance, history, and media in order to establish and inscribe queer lifeworlds that do not fit
into the linear progressive modes of operation that structure contemporary heterosexual life.

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Freeman and Halberstam’s are projects that think on large scales about the possibility of
disrupting heterocentric models of time, indeed claiming that these models have always been
disrupted by the irruption of queer erotics, desire, and production.
My interest in queer temporality takes the definitions of reproductive futurity that
undergird discussions of time in Halberstam and Freeman as foundational, while seeking to
adjust the lens of temporal investigation to examine the lived experience of time as it pertains to
genderqueer individuals and those making lives within imagined nonhuman gender formations.
Rather than looking at how we define history or examining the cultural imaginaries that structure
queer time’s relationship to normative culture, I examine genderqueer timelines on a more
granular level—thinking critically about temporality on the level of interpersonal interactions,
individual bodily transformations, and attempts to harness temporal instability as a strategy to
flee gender (and perhaps humanity) entirely. It is, of course, difficult if not impossible to think
through individual experiences of time as divorced entirely from social proscriptions towards
reproductive heterosexuality, and thus theories of queer temporality from the 2000s and 2010s
inform the logics that allow me to look more specifically at gender non-normative strategies. I
also attend to the specificity of trans and gender non-conforming experiences of time with
interest in the day-to-day, the desire to produce and maintain individual legibility (or to reject
legibility altogether!), and the recursions that mark changing one’s physical and social
embodiments.
Broadly speaking, this dissertation claims that though formations of queer temporality,
especially in Halberstam’s work, have always included the transgender figure, they have
neglected to specifically theorize how trans temporality might be distinct from larger structures
of queer time which are as much dependent on the heterocentricity of erotic attachment and

17
desire as they are on gender. Focusing specifically on strategies for gender transformation, and
even more specifically, on strategies for the escape from systems of gender, can provide us with
new geographies of time and space. Here the trans in trans*temporality is closest to the definition
of the term that Marquis Bey asserts in response to Chu and Drager’s “After Trans Studies”
which Bey argues depoliticizes ‘trans’:
One can be gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender, sure, and you can go ahead and have at
it. This sense of being, though, does not a politics make (which may be precisely what
one wishes). Trans as operating on a political register means that it marks the tearing of
bodies and bodyness from their assignation as (gendered) bodies as such. It is, indeed, the
introduction of altogether unsanctioned genres of encountering the world order. So one
cannot be trans; it is what we do, how we engage the world and others, yes, politically.
(“Trouble Genders” 199).

Bey argues that in focusing exclusively on “lived experience”, a term which is he claims is
woefully underdeveloped and under-theorized, trans scholars would do well to think through the
work that trans can do that cannot be done under the banner of queerness. Thus for Bey,
‘transgender’ may be an identarian position but ‘trans’ is a political position. I too see trans as
doing crucial work to introduce “unsanctioned genres of encountering the world order” and
through connecting this definition of ‘trans’ to the (perhaps dated) asterisk, I want to suggest that
what I mean by trans*time is not definable by breaking the term into its constituent parts and
arriving at a definition close to ‘across time’ or even ‘beyond time’. The gendered escape routes
that I analyze in this project do not transport reader/users to a place outside time. Rather, the
‘trans’ in trans*time is capacious, and gestures to a focus on a trans studies with a “capacity for
the spectacular and the quotidian” with a “breadth invitational of genital surgery or a thousand
tiny subversive acts seeking to engender the abolition of normativity” (“Trouble Genders” 198).
Therefore “trans*” here speaks to the enfolding of a trans politics within temporality, a
scrambled, anti-normative time that resides in the texts and the bodies of those enacting radical

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movement around, across, and outside gender normativity. If genderqueer speaks to how
individuals appear in the world, as bodies that purposely and through self-definition and styling
denaturalize cisheterocentric views of bodily coherence and livability, then the ‘trans’ in
trans*time speaks to how the politics of those bodies appear in and disrupt temporal formations.
Trans*time does indeed push against the hegemonies of linear progressive time that are
identified by queer theorists of time, but it does not do so through diverging to alternate-yet-
linear timescapes. Rather, trans time is marked by a specific tension between temporal
fragmentation and recursivity—creating a looping experience of time on both micro and macro
levels. It is useful here to digress briefly to a fundamentally trans experience, that of
misgendering, to provide a concrete example of what trans*temporal looping might look like on
an individualized level. In interpersonal misrecognition, the trans or gender nonconforming
person is hailed by someone incorrectly, mislabeled according to their own internal sense of
gender rightness. The misused pronoun or the reference to their biological sex is not merely a
misrecognition as it is in the case of most incorrect assumptions, nor is it merely prejudice if
done purposefully. Misrecognition, mislabeling, these are a fundamental experience of being in
the world and interacting with others. When one faces microaggressions of this type as a trans
person, however, the mislabeling is not only referring to an incorrect identarian label, but usually
references the gender nonconforming person’s birth sex (or at least their assumed birth sex). At
that moment, the misgendering individual has incorrectly hailed the trans person using their past.
So, if a stranger on the bus calls me ‘she’ or ‘ma’am’, that stranger is not just applying an
incorrect gender to me, nor is it merely an example of phobic rhetoric, intentional or not. Rather,
that individual is interacting with me through the language used for me during my childhood,
when this misrecognition was a universal experience. It is this invoking of the past which

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infantilizes and disregards my current identification, embodiment, or gendered aspirations. In
doing so, the stranger conjures the pain of the past and redeploys it in the present. Thus, the
experience of being misgendered hurts precisely because it conjures up the specter of the past
along with the specter of biological sex. In that moment, a gender nonconforming individual
confronts a lifetime of misgendering—much of it unmotivated by a desire to harm—which
characterizes their youth and often persists well into adulthood. And while not every gender
nonconforming person feels particularly bad or pained by their childhood, the act of being
misgendered always references the self that one is no longer or in fact might never have been.
Therefore recalling the past causes us to relive that past, and experience a multiversal
temporality in which we simultaneously experience more than one portion of our timeline. As
genderqueer and trans individuals, we are required to acquire proficiency navigating this
temporal multiplicity, to become comfortable with seeing ourselves as constituted by a number
of conflicting memories, hopes for the future, and interpretations of the present.
I do not mean to claim that no one except trans or gender nonconforming people are in
danger of being misrecognized in similar ways. There are plenty of cis-identifying individuals
who have their gender mislabeled or misunderstood, often due to overlapping oppressions or
minoritized subject positions. These people are also vulnerable to the pain that comes with
microaggressions around ‘proper’ gender or embodiment more widely. They may have a history
of misrecognition which makes the present interaction more painful. However, my claim here is
that misgendering reminds us that history is unchangeable, that one’s experience of gender in
childhood might be reconceptualized as an adult but that it is never erased from the trans
person’s mind. Even if misgendering is no longer a common experience, even if the trans person
successfully passes, elements of the past always must be rewritten to accord with the

20
contemporary embodiment, gender role, or disavowal of gender that the trans person is seeking
or inhabiting. This might mean changing the gender of a younger you when telling one’s history
or stories, it might mean avoiding the subject of pronouns, or it might mean being forced to come
out to whoever you’re talking to. The past’s seeming fixity does not render current
identifications any less real or authentic. Rather the past’s ability to misgender us is the result of
living in a transphobic society in which gender misrecognition always carries with it the threat of
violence.
If the past for gender nonconforming or trans people always carries with it the threat of
misrecognition, this alters the lived timescape that trans people experience. In his recent Side
Affects, Hil Malatino discusses how transition, especially waiting for the ability or resources to
transition, has structured the stories that we tell ourselves about the trans experience. His
formulation discusses the pain that is felt looking towards an expected future in which one is
settled physically and emotionally in the body of their true gender. It is the delay of this future
(due to medical gatekeeping, cost, or other life factors) that can make the future painful as well.
He analyzes how traditional narratives of medical transition describe a future that is “generative
of a form of intense anticipatory anxiety in the present, one that may actually impede the
flourishing of trans subjects, particularly those who encounter difficulty accessing technologies
of transition” (20). In doing so, he claims that trans life is characterized by “an inhabitation of
the present as dwelling in lag—a form of being out of temporal sync, left behind, with the life
one desires deferred (perhaps perennially)” (20). While Malatino’s structure of time here does
take into consideration the anxiety of misrecognition or disorientation, and the effect that lag
may have on a progressive form of time, he still suggests that trans temporal schemas are
fundamentally linear. For him that this lag, which is builds on Laura Horak’s concept of

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“hormone time” is still “linear and teleological, directed toward the end of living full time in the
desired gender” (Horak quoted in Side Affects 25). While ‘hormone time’ does understand time
as operating differently for trans and transitioning folks, it does not do so in a way that accounts
for the temporal figurations of very misrecognitions that make hormone time so unbearable.
After all, queer time too is structured by the longue durée of inhabiting a not-quite-future, and
somehow surviving when one’s present is structured by the refusal of entry into reproductive
futurism. For queer time, that means the perception of stasis in a kind of adolescence—a similar
stasis, this time waiting for access to medical transition, structures Horak’s ‘hormone time’.
While Malatino goes on to criticize the disciplining nature of hormone time, and focus on
Deleuzean ‘becoming’ as the chief temporal register with which to think through trans life, I
think he misses the opportunity to refigure the temporal contours of linear temporality based on
the “repeated, persistent, and dogged misrecognition” that structures trans life both in the
‘before’ and ‘after’ of medical transition. After all, just because one escapes the lag of hormone
time, and perhaps arrives at the promised future of living full time as one’s gender, does not
mean that one is therefore enfolded into the promised land of cisheterosexual reproductive
futurism. Trans life is always structured by recreating the past and revising our relation to it. To
reject stability is to do genderqueer work, to seek to pass is to try to disappear into language that
does not make room for us, nor for our multiplying experiences of time. This revision is ongoing
gendered work.
I want to propose, however, that trans*time can be felt through a looping interaction with
an unstable past, one in which we are always misrecognized or misidentified, even if we manage
to escape the lag of hormone time and ‘pass’ in the world. Not only is the geometry of trans time
better represented through the loop than the line, the loop operates at several different scales of

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trans life. The first of these is concerned with the misrecognition that structures the relationships
trans and gender nonconforming people must being interpreted by others in a cisheteropatriarchal
world. When one is hailed incorrectly, there is a momentary breakdown in communication
between the gender nonconforming person and the person hailing them. At this moment, the
gender nonconforming individual exists simultaneously within (at least) two points in time. The
first point is the present moment in which the misrecognition is occurring, the second the past
gender with which they are being labeled. This transportation into the past occurs psychically
and within the most minute of time frames, but it is a common enough experience that gender
nonconforming people may experience it many times over the course of a day. It requires
psychic work for the misrecognized or misgendered person to experience their past self when
being called by either an old name, old pronouns etc., and remind themselves that form of
address no longer applies to them. This work occurs because we are often socially obligated to
respond to the incorrect form of address, even if that response is only to offer a correction. So
when a nonbinary individual is called “he”, they must recognize their past self in the address in
order to respond to the individual speaking to them, but then they must wrest their sense of self
back away from the past and reify their own present gender (either through correcting the person
misgendering them or through reassuring themselves that it is not their mistake but the
misrecognition of the person they’re interacting with). The gender nonconforming individual is
subject to nonconsensual psychic transportation into a past or alternate timeline, and the return to
the present not only requires emotional labor, it requires an adaptability to navigating the
temporal multiverses of ones gendered experiences. This movement to and from the past requires
emotional labor and forms a loop.

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Trans*temporal loops can manifest whenever the gender nonconforming person is forced
to correct assumptions about their past, present, or future. Another key example might be the
adoption of a new name. When one chooses a new name, there is a period where one must move
through life re-introducing themself to people that have known them for years by a different
name. This process of re-introduction recalls the first time that one was introduced, both
rehearsing that introduction with difference in the present, and attempting to revise the initial
interaction in the past. The gender nonconforming person then, is constantly doing the work of
re-situating themself within their ‘proper’ timeline, revising the expectations people around them
have of identarian coherence in time. Such work requires a proficiency navigating multiple
timelines and potential interpretations. To stand in the present and the past at once is to
experience genderqueer life as a labor of multiversal negotiation.
This work is not only emotional and psychic, but material. Assuming one has access to
identity documents, those may need to be changed and re-issued—requiring an investment of
time, money, and transportation. Nor are bureaucratic institutions set up for this kind of revision,
which means endlessly coming out to governmental and institutional representatives. In
California for example, which has very permissive laws when compared with many other states
in the wider United States, it costs around $400 (as of 2019) in order to receive a court-ordered
name and gender change. This change may not be necessary for changing one’s state ID or
driver’s license in California, but it was necessary for me to change my birth certificate in NY
(which I also had to pay to reissue), my name on my bank information, my social security card,
etc. Even correcting the name on my utility bills required me to submit a copy of this court order.
Therefore, while trans*temporal time loops may be most obviously felt in terms of their
emotional costs, these temporal formations dramatically impact the way gender nonconforming

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people relate or fail to relate to the institutions that make contemporary life livable. One’s
legibility to the apparatuses of the State is not merely a function that makes life easier, it is often
necessary for survival under contemporary capitalism.
This project’s trans*temporal theory of time relies on understanding the disorientation
that trans misrecognition occasions, and the psychic work on a quotidian level that requires
realigning one's interactions with one’s felt sense of self. Sarah Ahmed defines being disoriented
as a primary structuring experience of queer life:
Disorientation can be a bodily feeling of losing one’s place, and an effect of the loss of a
place: it can be a violent feeling, and a feeling that is affected by violence, or shaped by
violence directed toward the body. Disorientation involves failed orientations: bodies
inhabit spaces that do not extend their shape, or use objects that do not extend their reach.
At this moment of failure, such objects ‘point’ somewhere else or they make what is
‘here’ become strange. (Queer Phenomenology 160)

Ahmed is interested in positionality and the queer line that we follow, or perhaps more
accurately, the straight line that fails to straighten us. Edelman in conversation with Berlant also
conceives of relation similarly as a line or “a pathway between entities” and goes on to claim that
movement through the social fabric of the “infinite relational web will entail an undoing”
(Berland and Edelman 8). Interaction with others is always packed with “the potential to undo
our faith in our own ongoingness, our sense of our consistency as subjects” (Berlant and
Edelman 8)—even more so when we are socially incoherent because of the gender ‘wrongs’ that
we might inhabit. But even pessimistic Edelman doesn’t argue that social incoherence means that
we cannot have a sense of self outside those that are foisted upon us, rather the “I that ‘knows’ its
incoherence, or has grown accustomed to it, has usually succeeded, if painfully, in the labor of
normalizing a self, even when it conceives that self as inadequate to the norm” (9). We can, even
in the face of disorientation, understand ourselves as coherent yet outside the norms of social
life. To do so in the first place, and continue to do so in the face of a predominantly binary and

25
transphobic social sphere, requires repetition and reproduction of that self at each moment of
disavowal. It also requires that we be adept at navigating moments of multiversal simultaneity—
comfortable or at least competent existing in multiple negotiated timescales in a single moment.
A similar pattern of looping emerges when we look at trans and genderqueer life on a
macro scale. Instead of seeing each interaction as a moment in which the gender nonconforming
person must police their own temporality and reaffirm their place in the present, we can look at
trans time as diverging from straight time. If, as Freeman and Halberstam assert, straight time is
characterized by the progression from one life stage to the next beginning at birth and childhood,
through adolescence, and into adulthood through marriage and parenthood, then
trans*temporality is not defined by an extended adolescence in which the gender nonconforming
person is seen as unable to mature and access the markers of adulthood. Rather, trans and
genderqueer life is often marked by leaving adolescence only to return to it at a later point. In my
own experience for example, I was 27 and engaged before I came out to anyone as trans. By all
accounts of straight time, I was on the cusp of adulthood, a phase I entered at 29 when my wife
and I were married and therefore incorporated into or subsumed within straight social forms. It
wasn’t until several years later that I returned to a literal bodily adolescence when I began taking
testosterone. In cisheterosexual forms of time, one does not revert away adulthood, rather
progressive time is always, well, progressing. Yet the early years of my transition were marked
by all the same bodily complaints as cisgender teenagers, from an embarrassingly wispy beard to
a fresh face of acne. This loop, from seeming maturity back into the throes of puberty, was itself
a recursive move. I was re-experiencing puberty with a difference, no longer viewed by my
social sphere as an adult but rather as a hormonal teenager in my early 30s. During those early
moments of transition, I resided simultaneously in two timelines—that of the married graduate

26
student in their first year of teaching, and the hormonal teenager sleeping until noon on the
weekends. I had to become adept at this simultaneity, in living through two temporal spaces at
once, a strategy of survival which I argue is fundamentally connected to trans and genderqueer
experiences.
Understandings of disorientation require us to rethink temporality. If there is a “moment”
of failure to be understood, or failure to be correctly hailed, I am interested in the genderqueer
work of resisting reorientation. How do we, as trans and gender nonconforming people who
might desire to resist assimilation into the predetermined categories of gender, respond to and
reify our own lines of gendered embodiment? Malatino argues that repeated disorientation is a
key part of the trans experience and one of the reasons why “flat affect, recession, withdrawal,
and numbness circulate as part of an affective commons that informs trans experiences of
embodiment, sexuality, and intercorporeality” (Side Affects 56). The feeling of being constantly
misidentified, of being out of line with cisheterosexual society, restructures the way we inhabit
that world. Therefore in the “moment of failure” (which here we could read as a failure to pass, a
failure to be properly one gender or another, a failure to abide by standards of masculinity or
femininity) “we learn to inhabit our bodies a fundamentally disruptable, which also means
learning to live with a hyperalertness generated by the desire to identify the next threat to our
stability, composure, and coherence. . .This feels simultaneously exhausting and necessary for
survival” (Side Affects 76). If there are key moments in which we feel as if misrecognition and
disorientation have threatened our felt sense of self, our bodily and emotional coherence, there is
a duration, short though it may be, in which we simultaneously inhabit the temporality of
misrecognition and the temporality of our present and correct gender. This shimmering, looping

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timescape and the psychic work that it takes to disavow incorrect assumptions is the moment in
which we experience the multiversal loop of trans*temporality.
Let me be clear, I have noted that the form of trans which includes the accompanying
asterisk has largely fallen out of favor because trans should, on its own, represent an umbrella
term which incorporates all forms of gender that rebel against their sex assigned at birth. The
asterisk, however, does important work for trans*temporality as a term. Firstly, it signals, as I
detail in above, that my use of trans is twofold: it both indicates an unbounded community of
gender nonnormative individuals who are unsatisfied with cisgender identities and refers to the
term’s capacity to indicate a politics that seeks subversion of cis-genders as normative and
therefore natural. The asterisk, as a reminder of trans’ capacity, is meant to signal that
trans*temporal formations represent both the identarian and political definitions of ‘trans’. Just
as the asterisk was used to allow space for non-cisgender identities that were as-yet-unnamed, I
use the asterisk to reference the gender unnamed, the more-than, the undefined, the gendered
moves that are outside our current language’s capacity. Lastly, the asterisk provides a visual
marker of the gap in the term. Just as I argue trans*temporality exists in the rifts, loops, and
pauses between moments of recognition and misrecognition in many of the genderqueer texts in
this project, the asterisk creates a gap or fissure in the term itself, highlighting the space
necessary for trans*temporal work, and the multiplicity of timelines that genderqueer escape
artists must wrangle.
In bringing together scholarship on queer time and theories of phenomenology, I argue
that the way genderqueer bodies are (dis)oriented by cisheterosexist forces, especially in a
contemporary moment of painful political backlash against gender variance, profoundly affects
their experiences of time. This effect occurs whether one has pursued medical transition or not

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because the chief instigator of such experiences is misrecognition on an interpersonal level.
Illegibility can thus cause a temporary rupture in which the genderqueer person has to perform
psychic work to reify the legitimacy of their gender. This work pauses or breaks the progression
of time even when that break does not directly involve the implication of a physical
transformation. The genderqueer body and its accompanying politics, positioned either in excess
of or deficient in proper gender coherence, drives narrative disorientation. According to Kristeva,
“when narrated identity is unbearable, when the boundary between subject and object is shaken,
and when even the limit between inside and outside becomes uncertain, the narrative is what is
challenged first” (Kristeva 141). When we look for trans*temporality in narrative then, we are
searching for moments in which the flow of time forward is disrupted and in which the
reader/watcher/user of the text finds themself having to do narrative work constructing and
reconstructing meaning in order to rejoin the temporal line of the text once again.
Trans*temporality sometimes manifests itself in narrative as a pause, a duration in which the
reader is given no input and required to at least temporarily reflect and build their own meaning
before continuing onward. It can also manifest as a disorientation caused by the intersection of
temporal vectors, such that either the action of the narrative or the narrative object itself becomes
difficult to place in linear time. Both manifestations require the intervention of the reader in the
narrative timeline, and therefore both only become trans*temporal loops because the user must
craft the return to the original timeline. In this sense, narrative trans*temporality is not merely a
representation of the experience of gender nonconforming time, it is a call for the reader to
actively participate in the work of trans*temporal looping. It is a function of form which invites
an experience of disorientation, misrecognition, and hypervigilance. If “Queerness’s time is a
stepping out of the linearity of straight time” then trans*time is structured by the ability to exist

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in several points on one’s timeline in the same moment, and narrative trans*time is composed of
formal elements which produce this temporal dissonance and reconstruction in the reader
(Muñoz Cruising Utopia 25).
The Boundaries of Bodies
Thinking through trans*time necessitates a reinvestigation of space, one which considers
the boundaries of the bodies which experience that time. While temporality in a trans and gender
nonconforming context has perhaps received less theorizing than it warrants, the trans body has
long been a site for considering the meaning of gender, flesh, orientation, phenomenology,
monstrosity, and technology. In fact, queer theory has been roundly criticized by several trans
scholars precisely for theorizing the trans body while ignoring the trans subject. Jay Prosser
famously claimed that “queer theory has written of transitions as discursive, but it has not
explored the bodiliness of gendered crossings” and that thus “the transgendered subject has
typically had center stage over the transsexual” (Prosser 6). I am about as uninterested as it is
possible to be in debating the relative place of transgender vs transsexual in the canon of queer
theory, especially considering that trans people, gender outlaws, etc. often find both terms
unsuitable or find themselves moving from one category to the other over the course of gendered
play and becoming (moving from one category to another is, after all, what we do). In the 25
years since Prosser’s Second Skins was published, the use of ‘transsexual’ has largely fallen
away entirely, replaced by transgender in most popular and academic contexts precisely because
transgender is seen as a more capacious term which does not immediately conjure up an
association between crossing genders and any specific set of sexual desires or acts. However,
Prosser’s critique of queer theory is more substantial than an insistence on the use of
‘transsexual’. Rather he leverages the term in order to critique what he sees as the portions of

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queer theory which disregard or even try to eliminate the ways in which the material body may
resist postmodern desires for deconstruction and linguistic explanations of the ‘Other’.
While Prosser’s criticism did shift scholars in trans and queer studies towards grappling
with the materiality of the body and that materiality’s influence on trans life, it is important to
stress that the dichotomy Prosser sets up in Second Skins between the abstract linguistic queer
theory and the material concerns of the transsexual is largely constructed. Or as Gayle Salamon
puts it in Assuming a Body: Transgender and the Rhetorics of Materiality: “one of the more
persistent critiques in gender, and especially transgender, studies: that queer theory, with its
valorization of flux, instability, and all things postmodern, ignores or minimizes the implications
of gender as it is lived in ‘real life’” (71). But she reminds us, nonbinary, genderqueer, gender-
variant, bigender, genderfluid and other identities outside the binary are not only conceptual,
they are already material. Indeed, these identities and the technologies of gender they manipulate
are “not fictive nor futural, but are presently embodied and lived” (95).
To understand the gendered body, and especially those bodies which are seen as outside
or in excess of the realm of the social, I largely look to the work of queer and trans theorists in
phenomenology, especially the work of Sarah Ahmed and Gayle Salamon. Because
phenomenology is “a philosophical tradition concerned with how the world gives itself to
appearances, and the structures of consciousness through which we apprehend that givenness” it
is particularly well-suited to understanding the complex series of social forces that govern gender
while simultaneously facilitating the analysis of interactions between individuals (Salamon The
Life and Death of Latisha King 16). Without ignoring the power of hegemonic narratives that
shape the way we can think about our bodies and the bodies of others, phenomenology asks us to
“approach our surroundings anew, shedding our sedimented interpretations so that we might

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apprehend the world and the things in it with greater clarity” (Salamon The Life 16). This dual
focus on the social through the privileging of individual points of experience and address, allows
us to consider the condition of living outside gender from the point-of-view of the gender
fugitive, or the not-quite-human genderqueer.
Monstrosity in the Multiverse
Susan Stryker’s oft-quoted identification with Frankenstein’s monster serves as one of
the foundational texts of trans studies, and in it she reclaims the monstrous by reminding her
listeners there is no shame in being a construction, rather that we are all amalgamations, and this
positionality can provide us with the power to resist the hegemony of binary gender and
teleology of cisheterosexual futurity:
Words like ‘creature,’ ‘monster,’ and ‘unnatural’ need to be reclaimed by the
transgendered. . .A creature, after all, in the dominant tradition of Western European
culture, is nothing other than a created being, a made thing. The affront you humans take
at being called a ‘creature’ results from the threat the term poses to your status as ‘lords
of creation,’ beings elevated above mere material existence. (Stryker, “My Words to
Victor” 240).

What Stryker emphasizes is not just that trans and gender nonconforming folks should consider
reclaiming the terminology of monstrosity, but also that we should embrace thinking about
ourselves as constructions—a framework of identity directly in contrast to notions of the liberal
subject that form the basis of contemporary humanity, especially within the conditions of late
capitalism. We know for instance, that humanity is often conferred on individuals and groups
largely based on their ability to assimilate seamlessly into reductive hierarchical conceptions of
race, class, ability, sexuality, etc. Rejecting humanity is always also rejecting sociality, rejecting
the frameworks that profess to confer some bodies with legitimacy while delegitimizing others.
This rejection has material implications! If we reject humanity, we are making ourselves illegible
to systems of power and institutions, and illegibility is often ‘corrected’ with violence—either

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the slow death of social and administrative violence or physical violence against the illegible and
therefore threatening body. At the same time, illegibility provides us with a place from which to
imagine new worlds.
It is trite at this point to claim that the monster represents what haunts power, that it is
what we fear might spring, horribly, from the collective social unconscious. For this most basic
reason, the monster is a prominent figure in trans and gender nonconforming theorization as well
as in media representations of and by genderqueer people. So pervasive is the monster in the
history of trans and gender nonconforming thought that its definition was included in the
Keywords issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly where Anson Koch-Rein notes that
“transphobic uses of the monster trope often draw on ideas of physical monstrosity to uphold
their naturalization of binary sex and gender” while trans redeployment of the monstrous claims
it “as a site of agency that negotiates a queerly complex relationship to nature, origin narratives,
and language” (Koch-Rein 134). The monster’s association with gender excess and queerness is
a long one, one that predates Shelley’s Frankenstein, let alone Stryker’s reading of that text.
Derrida defines the monster as something fundamentally unrecognizable or shockingly illegible,
in excess then, but in excess of categorization. To him a monster is:
Not just this chimerical figure in some way that grafts one animal onto another,
one living being onto another. A monster is always alive, let us not forget.
Monsters are living beings. This monster is also that which appears for the first
time, and consequently, is not yet recognized. A monster is a species for which
we do not yet have a name, which does not mean that the species is abnormal,
namely, the composition or hybridization of already known species. Simply, it
shows itself—that is what the word monster means—it shows itself in something
that is not yet shown and therefore looks like a hallucination, it strikes the eye, it
frightens precisely because no anticipation had prepared one to identify this
figure. (385)

In this figuration, the monster is terrifying because it is new, because it (at least initially) escapes
our attempts to master it linguistically. It not only confounds existing categories, but it also

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somehow manages to live while doing so. The monster is of course a rhetorical device, a myth-
making machine that has allowed authors to represent the uncanny, the subconscious, and the
undefinable. Preciado sees the monster as deeply associated with mobility and becoming: “The
monster is one who lives in transition. One whose face, body and behaviors cannot yet be
considered true in a predetermined regime of knowledge and power” (41). But Derrida reminds
us that its life cannot be ignored. The monster is first and foremost a nonhuman being who
somehow manages (often through violence) to make a place for itself among humans. It cannot
be entirely reduced to the status of metaphor because the monster is alive.
The monster acquires its status as monstrous not primarily through self-definition but
through the eyes of the social sphere that rejects it. If we understand that the body emerges from
a “history of doing, which is also a history of not doing, of paths not taken, which also involves
the loss, impossible to know or to even register, of what might have followed from such paths”
(Ahmed Queer Phenomenology 159) what might it mean to be associated on an ongoing basis
with the subhuman, the nonhuman, or the monstrous? Can we claim that our bodies emerge from
monstrosity into something in excess of, or potentially greater than human? There are trans and
genderqueer thinkers that not only strive for this nonhuman life emotionally, but also seek
monstrous embodiment. The monster is therefore associated with the gender failures, the bad
queers, the trans people that refuse (or are refused access to) assimilation into stealth
approximations of cismasculinity and femininity. These are the “freaks” among which trans
writer Boots Potential claims to have found “a number of things I was looking for: political
engagement, creativity, an unquenchable urge to fuck shit up, and most importantly, a passion
for boundary transgression and rulebreaking.” It was these communities that showed them how
to move their love of monstrosity from “spectatorship to embodiment” and who encouraged their

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desire to “to create a lack of gender-cohesiveness on my body” (Potential, 34). This desire for
inhumanity is not unique to Potential, the embrace of the monster, the cryptid, the freak, or the
mutant has long given gender nonconforming people a position of power against the discourses
used to dehumanize them. When one is repeatedly and maliciously labeled as impossible,
inhuman, and horror-producing, it becomes clear that if humanity is that category of being which
can exclude one from social life, perhaps it isn’t a category that one wants to be associated with
in the first place. Like Potential, micha cardenas doesn’t want to attempt “to fit into a different
transcendental category of gender, ‘woman’,” but rather “to shapeshift out of the current body I
have into something outside of the spectrum” (cardenas Trans Desire 25) and Juliana Huxtable
(whose work serves as a key text in the first chapter of this project) calls for “the anarchy of
identity” by embracing the nonhuman: “Like when [conservatives] say, ‘If we allow men to
become women, then they might as well just be a bunny…’, well, my mentality is, ‘OK, bunny.
Go.’ Because if you fight back directly you only reproduce the same essentializing forms they
are enforcing.” (Caroline Busta and @LILINTERNET).
I admit, to argue that the trans and gender nonconforming body is linked to monstrosity is
not particularly groundbreaking. And while the genderqueer authors that I identify in this project
leverage the language of monstrosity in many of their descriptions of queer and trans bodies, the
figure of the monster alone cannot capture the multiplicity of bodily pathways these authors take
to escape gender. Like the hybrid media objects I examine, the genderqueer body is a site of
construction and reconstruction with which many of these authors attempt to fashion an escape
from the demands normative gender. Such fashioning is not merely a tactic to reclaim phobic
language, it is a refusal to inhabit the human subject as defined under late-stage capitalism.

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This Project
This project examines instances of trans*temporality within contemporary hybridized
media objects to argue that experiences of genderqueer escape can be imaginatively produced
through digitally infected forms of cooperative storytelling. These escapes from gender, which
are always temporary, allow for gender-queerers to form digital communities of resistance where
binary gender roles evaporate under the dual forces of deconstructive analysis and humor, both
of which are tactics for survival under repressive binary conditions within which their ways of
being are rendered illegible. In examining these texts and the moments of ecstatic escape that
they provide their trans and genderqueer readers, I show how temporality operates within gender
nonnormative experiences while also to demonstrating how an increasingly hybridized media
landscape is now producing the tools to communicate trans*temporality as a method of
nonhuman gendered resistance.
Chapter One, “The Digitally Contaminated Page as a Genderqueer Interface” begins
thinking through hybrid mediascapes and their ability to offer a new toolbox to genderqueer
storytellers by starting with the printed book. Often considered the most stable media form, or
the least changed since the arrival of the internet—think here about Katherine Hayles’ famous
claim that “print is flat, code is deep”—I show that the digital literacies of both authors and
readers have drastically changed the geography of the printed page. Through analyzing two
hybrid books of poetry which are enmeshed in digital linguistics, I show how gender
nonconforming authors and creators are rethinking the use of white space in the printed text.
First, I examine Mucus in my Pineal Gland, an experimental work of poetry and prose by
performance artist, DJ, writer, and co-founder of the New York-based nightlife project Shock
Value, Juliana Huxtable. Her work in Mucus reconceives the blank space between lexias as space
for reader interaction and the ‘stitch’, a term for trans connective work that I borrow from trans

36
scholar and artist micha cárdenas. I show that Huxtable’s provocative work brings the digital
construction of the body to the printed page and scrambles progressive temporal expectations,
thereby inviting the reader to cooperatively co-produce the meaning of the text and reflect upon
their own bodily experiences. I subsequently turn to Two-Spirit writer Joshua Whitehead’s full
metal indigiqueer, a book of poetry that is equally informed by an indigenous trickster ghost-in-
the-machine figure and a desire for gender and embodiment outside oppressive Western binary
frameworks. I show how Whitehead’s use of coding language transforms the page into an
interface with which readers connect to a spiritual other, and which delays reading to allow the
pause, the loop, and the break to structure the reader’s relationship to narrative time. Both
authors use their printed works not merely as vehicles to deliver their words to readers but as
opportunities to open queer creative geographies which provide space for digitally literate and
interface-oriented readers to make their own meaning, and in doing so, they radically alter both
the bodies of the texts and the bodies within them.
In Chapter Two I extend this investigation of narrative space and cooperative trans
connective work to the visual novel. As a distinctly digital narrative form, the visual novel
represents a kind of hybrid space between the branching novel and the game. In “Talk to You,
Kiss You, Fight You: Gender in the Playable Text”, I examine the gendered controversy over
whether visual novels are properly ‘video games’ and note the connection between the visual
novel’s reputation as a queer creative space and its seeming illegibility as a game within
hypermasculine #GamerGate culture. Here I use Bo Ruberg’s excellent work on queer games to
push back against the assertion that visual novels are not proper games. As a hybridized space,
the visual novel inherits a mélange of forms: pages from the book, ASCII art from early
reproducible internet graphics, the cinematic cutscene from AAA video games, and more. The

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seeming simplicity of the visual novel provides the narrative resources for queer intervention and
access into video game creation, which is why we see a proliferation of visual novel games that
explore the specific subcommunities and experiences of a genderqueer undercommons. I locate
just such an alternative world in GENDERWRECKED, a visual novel by “queer monster fucker”
Ryan Rose Aceae and “sapient non-entity” Heather Flowers (gendervamp.itch.io and Twitter
@HTHRFLWRS respectively). Playing through GENDERWRECKED’s post-apocalyptic digital
world of monsters, I locate a trans*temporal narrative structure in the game’s simultaneous
embrace of empty spaces, repetitive action economies, and enforced moments of waiting. This
trans*temporality embraces the apocalyptic end of ‘civilization’ to proliferate bodies and genders
to the point of breaking the concepts once and for all. GENDERWRECKED thus provides an
escape route for us to temporarily evade the imperatives of binary gender through becoming
inhuman.
In Chapter 3: “‘Something furiously new’: The Helicopter Story” I first examine the
origins of meme culture online to think through the way that spaces like 4chan and Reddit have
changed the tone of digital discourse. By looking specifically at the alt-right’s deployment of
memes as an irony factory which punishes the sincere, I start to unpack how the death of
sincerity online had a hand in the ‘canceling’ of Isabel Fall. Fall, whose “I Sexually Identify as
an Attack Helicopter” was widely circulated on Twitter when it came out in 2020, was
repeatedly harassed and attacked for the title of the story, which references an extremely well-
known transphobic meme. While her story is an attempt to recover the language of radical bodily
change from the right’s mocking, the story ultimately failed because Fall’s intentions were
difficult to discern in a media ecosystem characterized by faux sincerity and a desire for ‘lulz’. It
is due to the campaign of hate against Fall that the story was removed from the web and is now

38
accessible only through the Wayback Machine. I then think through how the Wayback
Machine’s position as an archive of the past structures current readers’ relationship to the story,
which is both situated within the past of the Wayback Machine’s interface, and the post-
apocalyptic future that the story envisions. The story’s temporal indecipherability reinforces the
indecipherability of the protagonist’s gender—Fall’s attack helicopter protagonist finds themself
radically altered and euphoric as a weapon of war, but unable to escape the regulations of gender
even as they see that potential pathways for escaping gender are always proliferating. Reading “I
Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” as a story about the assimilation of genderqueer
embodiments, Fall’s story positions the work of gender fugitivity as always unfinished.
Finally, I end the dissertation by turning to the perhaps dying platform Twitter, in hopes
of finding something worth saving. Expanding on my work on memes in Chapter 3, in Chapter 4
“He/Theys: Trans-human Gender on Twitter” I work through how Twitter has served as a
memetic factory due to its specific affordances. I think critically about the power of retweeting,
its cooperative and antagonistic functions, its ability to confer status or social acclaim, and its
plausible deniability. Twitter, I argue, is much more a temporal medium than many other social
media platforms. The promise of Twitter is the promise of its immediacy, of responding to
events and discussions in real time. I analyze the temporality of quotidian use of Twitter by
examining the work of Twitter user @emonormie, who used the platform during the COVID-19
pandemic’s gradual reopening to create and cement a gender identity based on those that use
he/they as their specific combination of pronouns. I connect @emonormie’s work to the evolving
cultural conceptions of the characteristics attributed to nonbinary, genderqueer and other
nonnormative genders which might use they/them as their pronouns. Then I look at how
@emonormie complicates this standard by embracing the nonhuman. Through stacking example

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after example of pop cultural touchstones who could be imagined as he/theys, @emonormie
performs a non-human or part-human gender identity online which would be impossible outside
the digital space. Twitter serves as the public space for this repetitive performance, allowing a
community of interlocutors to submit their own examples, and for @emonormie along with his
widening community to imagine a gender identity that is quasi-human, aesthetically produced,
and changes our understanding of the work that pronouns do in the first place. In doing so,
@emonormie is not just defining a gendered existence for themself, he is adding to a community
of aesthetic genders and embodiments which escape humanity through leveraging social media
spaces as geographies of self-fashioning.
In the project’s coda, I examine the issues with ‘good trans representation’ by analyzing
the discourse around Dontnod Entertainment’s 2020 “episodic adventure game” Tell Me Why.
Widely regarded as one of the best examples of transmasculine representation in games,
especially from a medium-sized game company, Tell Me Why checks all the boxes. Its adult trans
character, Tyler, is not subject to repeated violence or misgendering, even in contexts where
misrecognition is more likely than not. I argue that in sanitizing the negative feelings that often
go along with being trans in a transphobic culture, Tell Me Why misses the opportunity to feel
truly authentic to a nonnormative gender experience. Instead of embracing the figure of the
monster and drawing power from it, Tell Me Why relegates the monster to a childish past, one
Tyler grew out of through forced institutionalization. In trying so hard to make Tyler’s story
about anything other than his gender, I argue that Dontnod Entertainment misses the opportunity
to transform gendered expectations and ultimately disciplines Tyler by humanizing him. This
gloss of the game not only allows me to think through the dangers of “good representation” but
provides a contrast against which we can see the need for genderqueer content to match digital

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hybridized forms. In doing so, I reimagine the boundaries of body and text, looking towards a
truly monstrous future in which gender is no longer an axis of hegemonic power, but has the
potential to become a tool for self-writing in a digital environment.
Geographies of the body and the text are intimately connected when it comes to
genderqueer media like those that I examine in this project. The hybrid media form and the
monster are both instances of technology that thrive and create meaning in breakages and
remediations. Monsters are beings outside of time, or at least temporally disassociated with the
present—unable to thrive in a human society that rejects them, the monster is either ahead of
their time or behind it. This disruption in temporality that is a key feature of the inhuman—
whether it attaches to monsters of flesh or amalgamations of technology and the body—opens us
up to the possibilities beyond our here and now, beyond our existence in this body and this
world. Texts are similarly facing the imperative to change, to morph and evolve into a hybridized
media experience that incorporates the visual and the textual, the social and the sensuous, to
embody both the endless scroll and the fragments that populate it. The affinity between these
texts and bodies—both beings fundamentally crafted from stories, from imperfect and yet
transcendent language—is complex, cooperative, and ultimately, deeply and fundamentally
necessary. We need new worlds to escape to because this one is not enough. The weight of living
under the tyranny of a binary world is backbreaking. You will excuse me if I borrow from Star
Trek: Voyager by way of Station Eleven, but it has become clearer to me than ever that “Survival
is insufficient”.
Preciado says that “To be trans, one must accept the triumphant irruption of another
future in oneself, in every cell of one’s body. To transition comes down to understanding that the
cultural codes of masculinity and femininity are anecdotal compared to the infinite variety of

41
modalities of existence.” (Can the Monster Speak? 45) He asks us to think big and broad, to see
the future as one which branches and loops and winds through a time not meant for us. If we can
change our gender—one of the primary foundations of social life and one which determines key
and defining aspects of nearly every interaction—what else might we achieve? What other
boundaries that seem uncrossable might we cross if we’re willing? What other lives and worlds
might we dream up, assemble, and inhabit? I know well that there are those reading this who will
dismiss this optimism as tokenizing, as not taking seriously the wheels of oppression that seek to
quite literally stamp us off the face of the earth. They’re not wrong! I am choosing here not to
give death statistics or to remind you of the desperate material difficulty that attends to living a
gender-wrong life. Instead, I want to propose that a genderqueer life is full of possibility, and
that we create worlds that are beautiful and perverse, that trouble and exalt, that propose the
impossible and then achieve it. Whatever trans people might be, whatever our differences, we are
makers. We make our families, our histories, our languages, ourselves. And though these
impossible worlds might only last as long as our immersion in a game, a film, or a book, these
temporary doors to a place outside gender, where we can safely inhabit the full and fleshy
weirdness of a body made livable precisely through its illegibility, are life sustaining.

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Chapter 1
The Digitally Contaminated Page as a Genderqueer Interface

“my gift, for now, is a series of breakages in which you may
find your own form of resurgence [period] this is an honour
song, this is a survivance song, this is your song; lets sing
the skin back to our bones[period] herIam:
indigiqueer[period]” (Whitehead 115)

Katherine Hayles told us in 2004 that “print is flat, code is deep”. In 2004 that might have
been true, but in the dawn of the 2020s, it’s not so simple. In fact, as some genderqueer authors
are making clear, print might not just have depth, print might be code, and code might be printed.
It is difficult, in a world of networked texts, to distinguish between the online and the offline, the
interactive and the static, between print and code. Hayles was interested in the ways that
computer interfaces might be mirroring and expanding what we might consider a text. To that
end, she examined programs which emulated the experience of the book. Here I take her
opposite as my object. The transference and contamination between the printed text and digital
interface has not been a one-way street. Instead, digital affordances and languages have made
their way into the printed text as much as the opposite, such that the contamination between the
two forms has occasioned a new literary language and imagined a form of deep print. While such
contamination has popped up in several literary circles, it is particularly present amongst queer
and gender nonconforming authors. For these authors, leveraging the interactive language of the
digital world allows them to meditate on the physical body, gender, sexuality and transcending
boundaries of selfhood. As such, the contaminated hybrid space of the digitally infected print
work mirrors the identity within it, not quite physical nor quite digital, not one language or
another, not gendered, often not even human. The digitally contaminated page doesn’t even seem

43
to stop at the author/speaker’s identity—its interactivity calls on the reader to construct and
reflect on the text, inviting them into a space between polarities and between lexias.
In this first chapter, I examine the digital languages of two authors focused on genders
and bodies outside cisheterosexual constructs. Juliana Huxtable’s Mucus in My Pineal Gland
thinks through the body’s image and physicality, wrestling with the cause/effect relationship
between gender reassignment and becoming female iconography. In doing so she scrambles
ideas of before and after transition while also using the physical form of her text to remix time
for the reader. In Joshua Whitehead’s full-metal indigiqueer the reader is transported to another
space entirely, one in which a digital voice speaks into being the boundary-breaking existence of
the queer Two-Spirit indigenous author and others like him. Both texts rely on the reader’s
digital literacy and ability to de-code, inviting them into a space of depth where gender is one of
the many binaries being erased entirely. Gender transcendence serves as the crucial gateway to
imagining an impossible range of new forms and journeys—not just physical but spiritual,
technical, temporal, and nonhuman. If we can reimagine ourselves as something else, these
authors ask, why not something more?
Along the way readers are swept up in a world that questions the basic principles of
temporality and embodiment—for it is impossible to transcend the body without transcending
linear time. Temporality is, as we know, impossibly tangled with the physical world and
therefore with the ageing and dying body. The digital world offers the ability for endless life and
therefore it resists teleological linear time. It is no wonder then, that genderqueer people are
drawn to the avatar of digital life and see the digital literacies as an essential component to
communicating their bodily experiences. These digitally infected or hybridized narratives thus
break up time to allow readers not only the opportunity to co-create the narrative (as in the

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hypertext) but to provide moments of healing and restoration as difficult identity work is done in
the carefully constructed textual gaps. Their fractured temporal schema has been particularly
fertile ground for those with nonnormative gender experiences, as lived trans*temporality is
marked by moments of looping, non-linear experiences, and the strangeness of the body in time.
Breaking their own texts into pieces, lexias of code, specific heterochronological moments, and
embracing the multiple languages of physical and digital, contaminated works like those of
Huxtable and Whitehead invite the reader to co-construct their works and in doing so, to
momentarily experience the labor of producing their own gendered transcendence.
A Tradition of Transgenre Work
While the experimental texts that I examine here are contemporary, part of a new wave of
creators and thinkers who are revisiting the potential of the book and use of the page, the impetus
to play fast and loose with the distinctions between poetry, prose, and nonfiction has long been a
feminist and queer practice, a way of approaching both self-discovery and community work.
From Anzaldua’s Borderlands to Preciado’s Testo Junkie to Miller’s Bringing Out Roland
Barthes, authors of queer and trans art and scholarship have looked for transcription techniques
that might better join the form and the content of their works to provoke a queer reading
experience for their audiences. Lauren Fournier reminds us that those practices that may seem at
the forefront of feminist and queer experimental writing have appeared under different monikers
throughout a long history:
From Helene Cixous’s writing the body and the self in ecriture feminine and Luce
Irigaray’s philosophical critiques of phallocentrism to Adrienne Rich and Donna
Haraway engaging a politics of positionality, to writing by radical women of color in This
Bridge Called My Back and Audre Lorde and other Black feminists theorizing a politics
of difference, feminists have critiqued male-authored theory for not acknowledging its
own subjectivity or its gendered and racialized aspects (645-646).

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Here, Fournier highlights that not only does autotheory, or the hybridization of the personal and
the theoretical, have a long history of practice in feminist and queer circles, it has been a tool to
push back against the shortcomings of masculine theory, which often disregards the subject
position (mostly white, mostly male, mostly cis etc.) of the writer. In response, feminist, queer,
trans, and writers of color have developed work that actively mine their own personal lives and
experiences to produce theory, community knowledge, models of activism, and philosophy all
while producing texts that are part poetry, part scholarly monograph, part memoir, part folk tale,
part fiction. Fournier reminds us that while “autotheory is gaining traction, especially among
young feminist artists and writers who exist between academia and the art world” the practice of
genre-bending feminist work that breaks down masculinist models of thought to interrogate what
can be generated outside them is by no means restricted to “third-wave and fourth-wave feminist
texts, such as American writer Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and American filmmaker and art
writer Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick” (Fournier 644, and 643-644). These conventions, which made
their way into queer discourse through the writing of women of color feminists in the 1980s and
1990s, are concerned with destabilizing the traditional reading experience, and seek to form
avenues to knowledge and relation with the reader that compliment and elevate the new ways
they address sexuality, gender, affect, and epistemology.
As such, the recent rise in experimental or genre-busting genderqueer books is not new,
but part of a long tradition of experimenting with the transmission of embodied knowledges. It is
worth noting, that in the 2010s and into 2020, we’ve seen a renewed interest in queer and trans
memoirs, life writing, autotheory, and fictionalizations which defy easy categorization into prose
or poetry, fiction or nonfiction. These often display a renewed interest in the use of page space,
allowing the reader to move between literary modes, different timelines, or concepts within the

46
same page. Often readers are asked to orient themselves through the help of non-textual or extra-
textual clues. I’ve written elsewhere about the way white space has been used in The Argonauts,
perhaps one of the best-known of these contemporary genre-bending experimental queer works,
which came to the attention of a wider reading public based on acclaim from cisgender
heterosexual critics and audiences. I argued that Maggie Nelson uses the frequent paragraph
breaks within that text to weave together various timelines, insisting on a kind of perpetual
presentness that looks towards a queer future. I have also claimed that such frequent breaks
disorient readers in a productive fashion, and in the case of The Argonauts, give the reader a
window into the experience of misrecognition and recovery that trans people often face in their
daily lives.
Nelson’s Argonauts might speak about trans family-making and comment on the
experiences of misrecognition and self-preservation that impact trans time, but genderqueer and
trans people are also speaking for themselves. Though in this section I focus primarily on two
works of poetry from non-normatively gendered individuals, books of prose and memoir by non-
cis writers have been experimenting with form and genre as well. From Emerson Whitney’s
Heaven to Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox to Kai Cheng Tom’s Fierce Femmes and
Notorious Liars and Casey Plett’s Little Fish contemporary trans fiction often blurs the lines
between academic writing, memoir, realist fiction, fantasy, poetry, and more. They engage with
trans theorists explicitly and implicitly and they use various formal means to open or break apart
the expectations of their readers and the apparatus of the page. Trans and genderqueer authors
are writing a new kind of literature—one that thrives between the lines of established techniques,
and in collision with technology.

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Contemporary genderqueering experimental texts which have taken the page as both a
design-focused and textual medium, often do so through referencing contact with digital forms of
writing, reading, and presentation. Thus, they see the page as more than a receptacle for a static
text, but instead a dynamic and even interactive interface, a method of textual transmission that
seeks the involvement of the reader in its creation. Just as the player of visual novels or readers
of hypertexts must fill in blank moments with their choices and interpretations (which I will
detail through my reading of GENDERWRECKED in Chapter Two), contemporary genderqueer
print texts often solicit interactive responses in which the reader contributes to the building of the
text, or understands the text as encoded in a way that mirrors electronic writing. This emphasis
on experience and interactivity not only allows for a cooperative experience between the reader
and the author, it provides space and time for the reader to reflect upon their own place in
relation to the text, and it activates the possibility of a trans*temporal experience for readers,
regardless of their self-identification.

Page Space and Interface
Genderqueer writers, like those in this chapter, who are producing genre-bending work in
the hopes of generating new knowledge and new ways of thinking, have increasingly harnessed
digital tools, ways of writing, and conceptions of space in their hybrid works. Sometimes these
take the form of choose-your-own-adventure style books, which are ‘playable’ in much the same
way as a videogame or computer program. In other cases, authors seeking gendered escape
embrace a polyvocality that mirrors interactions one might have on social media, where the
critical conversation is more explicit than in a traditional text—sometimes that polyvocality
means deploying the language of computer code. In this chapter, Juliana Huxtable embraces the
craft of creating a digital body, one that is an amalgamation of the exchanges between textual

48
and visual media, between the social and the physical body. Doing so allows her and her readers
to visualize the chasms and crossings that connect these seemingly disparate functions of gender
and to find pockets of resistance to the compulsive forces of the gender binary. She specifically
highlights the tools of digital writing, focusing on the keyboard and the virtual space of the
screen as they are reflected in the printed product of the book. It is now truer to say that our
contemporary writing experiences are structured by the malleability of the digitally mediated
page, not that the word processor or digital screen is emulating an existing print world. We no
longer write on computers with the printed page at the forefront of our minds, many documents
are drafted, edited, and shared without ever making their way onto paper, and even fewer are
accessed solely in print. The page is, first and foremost digital and its work then is similarly
digital—even when the interface is remediated through print. The uncanny mirroring between
the apparatus of writing (the computer) and the apparatus of reception (the print page) produces a
sort of doubling that allows for genderqueer, constructed, even inhuman bodies to slip through
cracks in signification, and to construct a genderqueer existence between the forms.
In Joshua Whitehead’s work, the page is similarly made more than surface through the
language of coding—the implication being that the language of code is what reveals to us the
operating machinery behind the visual interface. Whitehead’s work employs the use of a digital
indigenous avatar, one that is multilingual, multimodal, and multimedia. This trickster becomes
the second speaker of the text, one whose interruptions into the text produce a presentness and
urgency in the work. The code in his poetry thinks or perhaps ‘processes’ actively along with the
reader, giving the impression that the reader is watching the production of the text and its
meaning in a kind of ‘real time’ which is of course, a pre-constructed channel through which the
author reaches out to the digitally literate reader. By involving the reader in the decoding

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process, Whitehead’s work seeks to create a decolonial space for a community of cross-identified
indigenous genderqueerers who exist in a categorical limbo. Not quite spirit, not quite AI,
trickster character Zoa highlights the multiple subjectivities and embodiments which characterize
genderqueer work, while confronting and making space for the real labor of fashioning an
existence outside the binary.
In all cases, these techniques and experiments alter the relationship between author,
reader, source, and of course, time, by seeing the printed work as a remediation of the screen,
rather than the screen as a digitalized or simulated version of the book. In 2023, it does not seem
radical to claim that digital literacy is literacy, and that knowledge of and practice with the
interfaces that structure contemporary forms of writing is one of the primary skills that writers
and readers need to cultivate. By this I mean to say that all contemporary writing is digital
writing first and foremost, and thus just because the book is printed does not mean that it loses
the accumulated meaning imparted by the digital apparatus on which it was constructed. Thus,
these texts become a sort of cyborg-generative experience, in which the reader and the absent-
present technology which floats under the surface of the printed page impress upon one another,
dictating the shapes that each can take and the effects they have on the content of the narrative.
Haraway defines the cyborg as existing “when two kinds of boundaries are simultaneously
problematic: 1) that between animals (or other organisms) and humans, and 2) that between self-
controlled, self-governing machines (automatons) and organisms, especially humans (models of
autonomy). The cyborg is the figure born of the interface of automaton and autonomy" (Primate
Visions, 139). If the printed page is metonymic for the writing machine on which it was
produced, then the page becomes a space for the exchange between the human and the thinking
machine, fashioning an experience of ‘becoming’ cyborg. Doing so allows genderqueer authors

50
like Huxtable and Whitehead to produce a door out of normative categories of humanity, and
therefore out of the hegemonic operations of binary gender.
Huxtable’s White Space and Digital Face
Juliana Huxtable is a black trans DJ, artist, writer, and co-founder of the New York-based
nightlife project Shock Value. Her multidisciplinary work often favors the combination of text
and imagery, exploring race, gender, the body, the internet, desire, and kink just to name a few
themes. Her Mucus in my Pineal Gland is a collection of short narrative pieces, poems, and
social commentaries often written in discordant pieces, sometimes narrated by more than one
voice, or from more than one timespace. She categorizes this mutable form of writing as a way
of processing the world around her that is truest to what occurs in her own brain:
I like the alternative idea of a schizophrenic voice: one that can’t reside with any stability
in the first person, third person, and so on, and that doesn’t even permit a predictable
relationship between subject and verb. You’re jumping between persons, switching
characters and exploding history into a play place. Allowing myself space for that mode
of writing and thinking to happen is a more honest and dynamic reflection of how I’m
processing the world. (Huxtable, Interviewed by Fialho)

This dynamic reflection of Huxtable’s inner world shows up in all her work, and in her
willingness to cross mediums to approach a clearer reflection of her own reality. It shows up in
Mucus in My Pineal Gland in the text’s refusal of a single stable voice, and in the productive
tensions created precisely in the skip from one voice to another, one topic to the next, one
narrative timeline to another. One of the central moments in the text is a piece Huxtable calls
“House of Mirrors” in which the speaker describes the skin of black sharecroppers in the
Southern US, her own upbringing in “A BAPTIST HOUSEHOLD IN BRYAN, TX (CHAIN
GANG)”, an interest in erotic race play, and provides a window into her erotic interactions.
Throughout the piece, Huxtable questions what combination of history, race, and gender has led
her to a place where she actively desires being consensually belittled and sexually used by white

51
men. At the same time, she doesn’t express shame at her desire for this erotic roleplay. Instead,
her text jumps back and forth from scenes of sexual aggression to formative moments of her
personal past, to a broader American past built on the subjugation of black bodies.
For example, take section III of the piece, in which Huxtable explains how she sought out
sex as a place where the strict relations between races and genders in her bible-belt town could
be remixed, removed, or transcended: “IF MY WORLD WAS SEGREGATED, MY SEX
WOULD BE A MEANS TO INTEGRATION, THE INTERRACIAL DYNAMIC AN
ANTIDOTE TO RACISM (>⏑◠ ( ! ! ! )” (61). Huxtable’s text is shot through with references to
how queer, trans, and black communities online make space for themselves, space that was often
found in silos across the early internet, and she also uses the language of online communication
to express certain thoughts and ideas that might be difficult to express outside of digital circles of
reception. In the previous quote, Huxtable uses a variety of Unicode characters at the end of the
short section of text to indicate the tone in which the text might be read, or the tone with which it
was expressed when written. Here the speaker is perhaps a bit tongue-in-cheek, talking about her
sex with white men who “PROBABLY SAID NIGGER AT MULTIPLE POINTS IN THEIR
LIFE, BUT IN THE PRIVACY OF THEIR ROOM, MY ROOM, A TRUCK, A POOL ON A
PROPERTY OFF OF HIGHWAY 6” (61). She calls attention to the sexual content of the
statement, the double-entendre here of “interracial dynamic” or “integration” in the context of
literally joining bodies of different races in sexual intimacy. Particularly interesting, Huxtable
doesn’t use the standard winking/smiling emoji (😉) which can be and is often printed in non-
digital texts and has been used by poets and artists in the past few years. Huxtable’s Mucus in My
Pineal Gland was published in 2017 when using an emoji character would no longer surprise
readers. Instead she strings together a series of Unicode symbols which have decidedly different

52
intended functions from one another, the less-than symbol (>), the metrical breve (⏑), and the
geometric half-circle (◠), to form her own winking face, one that is literally punctuated by
exclamation marks as a kind of bolding effect, stressing the emotion or importance of the wink.
Such emojis harken back to earlier moments in internet history, when pictogram emojis were not
readable by all systems, and certainly weren’t common in printed works. Those who wanted to
express emotions through digital systems in an extra-textual way were forced to construct that
imagery themselves through Unicode symbols that were repurposed to construct faces, bodies,
etc. The result is that while Huxtable’s Unicode face can be reproduced (though I admit, it took
nearly 25 minutes and some intensive searching to find the symbols she used), it is not a
standardized face, it is a face of her construction and a face constructed through digital means.
The work of hunting for the correct input may be precisely the point in this instance. Not
only does the Unicode face that Huxtable constructs highlight the work so many genderqueers
perform crafting their bodies, it also emphasizes the input mechanisms that structure our
relationships to digital interfaces. Characters that are typed but are outside the general structure
of the English language (the ABCs, the 123s) highlight the keyboard as a method of input, asking
the reader to think about how one might type such a face into the writing instrument. As such, it
highlights that the written, printed page in front of the reader originates from a digital means.
Instead of being a permanent and irreversible record, the printed page might have more in
common with the infinitely rewritable word processor on screen than it does with the
handwritten document. The page here recalls the interface. In doing so, the page equates the
mutability of the genderqueer body, the face even, with the mutability of the digital interface,
while simultaneously seeing Huxtable’s Mucus in my Pineal Gland as a form of both. Here is
Huxtable’s speaker’s face, lovingly and digitally crafted, present in the work itself.

53
Lest I make too much of a simple emoji, Huxtable doesn’t just address the connection
between fragmentary digital pieces and gendered construction through mirroring the
communication strategies of internet users. She explicitly connects her experiences with gender
identity, queer desire, and community to her own digital experiences. In “#AIMNOSTALGIA”
Huxtable meditates on the place of privacy within her life, and how digital privacy (or a lack
thereof) conditions our responses to each other’s bodies:
I WORRY THAT MY OLD ACCOUNTS ARE STILL THERE ONLINE, WAITING
TO SURFACE AT AN INCONVENIENT MOMENT SHOULD I EVER BE IN A
MORE POLITE PUBLIC EYE … AS IF THAT WOULD BE NECESSARY.

THE iMOBLE, EVER-PRESENT SHARE-TUMBLE-TWEET-POST-REBLOG
REGIME SEEMS TO HAVE SUCCESSFULLY KILLED THE FLESH OF IT ALL,
THE BODY BEHIND THE IMAGE.

WHAT HAPPENED TO THAT PRECIOUS EPOCH WHEN MEN WERE MEN AND
WOMEN WERE WOMEN? TO THE DRAFT THAT TIED THE POPULATION AT
LARGE TO THE GOVERNMENT’S WILL AS AN ARM OR PHENOMENON OF/AS/
ITS MATERIALITY. (47)

In these sections separated only by white space, Huxtable meditates on the meaning of having a
digital life, one that perhaps approximates but does not mirror our offline identities, the slippage
especially significant when one considers much of that digital life approximates a past self that
no longer properly ‘exists’ either online or offline. At the same time as she mimics the language
of nostalgia for a past where the “flesh of it all” existed in a more tangible or more concrete
form, before the advent of digital imagery that seemingly turned bodies into images and images
into currency, Huxtable jumps from one form of nostalgic rhetoric to another, showing how
nostalgia for the flesh can turn quickly into nostalgia for the rigidity of gender roles. She notes
the leveraging of that flesh for the expansion of empire and the waging of wars. If, she seems to
claim, we are nostalgic for the “body behind the image” we should take care to remember that

54
those same bodies can be redeployed by hegemonic structures in endless wars, or cordoned off
into binary boxes of ‘women’ and ‘men’.
Throughout this piece Huxtable’s focus on the body versus the image (one on display for
public consumption online, the other taking refuge behind a screen that is less and less of a shield
against public revelation) locates her at the nexus of the digital and the physical, and claims that
the image of the body and the body itself have become two fundamentally different entities,
nearly unconnected to one another. The digitalization of the image and the privacy that this
digital life world peels away means that we’re each transformed into a form of iconography:
“EACH OF US AN ICON IN OUR OWN RIGHT WITH LEGACIES AND
MYTHOLOGIES—AND DIRTY MATERIAL—LINGERING IN BINARY CODES” (47). Our
best and worst versions of ourselves exist online separated by the thinnest of membranes, from
glossy travel photos or highly edited selfies to porn searches on Google’s Incognito Mode. The
body then, becomes an object which produces an image, highly editable, curated, and infinitely
malleable. Changes made to the contours of the body are felt through their display online just as
much if not more than they are felt on the skin:
MAYBE WHEN I GET MY SURGERY, ASSUMING THAT I DO AT SOME POINT, I
WILL FINALLY FEEL LIKE THE WOMAN I AM INSIDE BY POSTING PHOTOS
OF THE $32,000 PUSSY GOD GAVE A TALENTED SURGEON IN THAILAND
THE ABILITY TO SCULPT FROM A SCARRED BODY DISTORTED BY YEARS
OF DYSPHORIA. IN REALITY, THE PHOTOS WOULD BE NO MORE A
TESTAMENT TO THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER THAN TO THE IMPLOSION OF
THE LINK BETWEEN TEMPORALITY, USER-NAME-IN-PHOTO, AND TRUTH
(46).

Huxtable speaks about the body as if it becomes female not through GRS
1
itself, which crafts
new genitals from the current materials of the body, but through the translation of that new body
into an image for digital consumption. Posting her photos is what might allow her not just to be a

1
Gender reconstruction surgery.

55
woman externally, but to feel like that woman. Even as she knows this to be a probable outcome,
that the body in the flesh is less attached to the affective realization of her own womanhood than
the iconography posted in a digital public, she recognizes that this slippage between physical and
digital public life does nothing more than render the connection between truth and online identity
meaningless.
In “#AIMNOSTALGIA”, as in most of Huxtable’s pieces in Mucus in my Pineal Gland,
the author uses white spaces and gaps between her all-caps blocks of texts, rarely linking these
fragments explicitly, but jumping from one thought to the next. She thus leaves the reader to
form the connections from the thematic bits and pieces which arise across the text. The blank
spaces between the lexias often signal a change in scale or perspective, from the personal to the
society-level, from the intimate to the clinical, from the past to the present. Like those lexias of
traditional hypertexts or those from GENDERWRECKED in the next chapter, these white spaces,
the fragmentary nature of Huxtable’s pieces, invite the reader into a process of meaning-making
with the author, a kind of hybridized reading/writing experience. The white spaces literally make
space for that kind of work by not attempting to suture one block of text to the other, but rather
allowing the text to be messy and marked by fissures/cuts/breaks. In a piece like
“#AIMNOSTALGIA” such breaks serve to mirror and highlight the work one does in
constructing an online identity, crafting a sense of the self out of the digital ephemera of our
online and offline lives. At the same time, it recalls the physical work of the genderqueer or trans
person, crafting a livable experience “FROM A SCARRED BODY DISTORTED BY YEARS
OF DYSPHORIA” (46). Here it is worth returning to Susan Stryker’s comments on Frankenstein
which I referenced in the introduction to this work, in which she claims that the trans body, the
trans person, is always a constructed identity. Surely all identities are constructed, either through

56
pushing against those placed upon us or through building an inhabitable place for ourselves, but
in the trans person, that work can often be physical, explicitly legible, and socially inescapable.
In Huxtable’s work the spaces between lexias become an invitation for the reader to sew the text
together, and in doing so provide meaning to the body of the text while making space for the
reader’s own identity work in relation to that text.
This sewing or joining as interpretive process conjures up micha cardenas’ ‘stitch’ which
she claims is a mode of trans recuperation that “involves using one entity to connect two
formerly separate entities. While the stitch still can contain an element of violence—penetration
of the skin by a needle, for example—I imagine it as less violent than the cut, and intending to
join, in the service of healing and creation, rather than in the service of destruction” (cardenas,
“Trans of Color Poetics”). In Huxtable’s work, the printed text serves as a kind of stitching
maneuver itself, joining together digital lifeworlds with the reader through the intervention of the
printed text. Similarly, Huxtable’s stitch constitutes, like in the creation of Frankenstein’s
monster, the construction of the body—this body is constructed on several levels. When
examining the example of the Unicode face that Huxtable crafts, the page as stitch joins the
physical, extra-textual body with the language of the body. When examining the body made
public through the revelation of the image online, the image itself becomes the stitch joining the
online and the offline bodies together through tenuous threads. Therefore, the work that Huxtable
does in Mucus in my Pineal Gland is a kind of printed embroidery—the backside of which
always contains the messy indications of the labor of its creation. In between the digital and the
physical and then again between the physical book and the reader, there are chasms in which
meaning has the space to slide and slip, to extend and re-signify itself.

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Huxtable has described her poetic work in just such terms, claiming that though she
appreciates working in several forms, the multiple interpretations of poetry make it a particularly
compelling media: “That’s one of the things that excites me about text. It’s slippery, but you can
try and condition the space in which that slippage occurs. I would like to think that my practice is
about conditioning a productive space for thinking and processing, so you’re getting spontaneous
fragments and they’re settling in different ways” (Fialho, Artforum). Here Huxtable positions the
fragments of her work as a moving space, one that is unfixed and personal, where meaning might
change for various readers. The fragments themselves seem unmoored in this explanation,
“settling in different ways” giving the impression that they are tossed into the work, that their
relations to one another and to the text is conditioned by their positions and the spaces between
them which constitute that positioning. She argues this space is “conditioned” by the text, or that
the text makes the space legible, but unfixed. The reader, invited into this space, could make use
of it, to construct the text, to think, to process, and to forge a relationship between the body of
the text and their own identity work.
Such a space is not only a physical marker of the relationship between the genderqueer
author and the work of bodily construction (here I mean to indicate not just the body of the text,
but the physical body of flesh, and additionally perhaps the conception of what counts as a body
at all) but also as a particular experience of temporality. Huxtable’s fragmented text and
buffering white spaces attempt to condition the temporal experience of the reader to emphasize
the breakages and links between each lexia. This attempt to slow the reader, to craft an
interactive exchange between the reader and the author, invites the reader into a trans*temporal
experience of time. Crafting connections between the portions of the text, assembling a body,

58
these things take time, take work. And such work can serve as a reflection of what it is like to
fashion a life in the gendered margins.
The Page is Deep: A Two-Spirit Writer’s Code
While Huxtable’s work meditates specifically on the trans body in a digital space, and in
doing so connects the printed page to the digital space, Joshua Whitehead’s poetry takes the
relationship between page and interface more literally, seeing the page as a kind of VR machine
through which readers are introduced to the coterminous experiences of living both a
genderqueer and indigenous life. Joshua Whitehead, a Two-Spirit poet and author describes his
relationship to gender as one which, though not collapsible into a term like transgender, is
marked by gender non-normativity in the eyes of Western gender/sexuality constructs:
To be Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer, for me, is a celebration of the fluidity of gender, sex,
sexuality, and identities, one that is firmly grounded within nehiyawewin (the Cree
language) and nehiyaw world-views. I think of myself like I think of my home,
manitowapow, the strait that isn’t straight, fluid as the water, as vicious as the rapids on
my reservation, as vivacious as a pickerel scale. (Whitehead, “Why I’m Withdrawing
From My Lambda Literary Award Nomination”)

I want to be clear here that by including Whitehead, I am not trying to push him unwillingly into
a frame of broader trans poetics. Nor is this to say that being Two-Spirit is non-normative in
indigenous contexts. Rather I want to foreground the braided conceptual framework of
indigeneity and gender variance that Whitehead celebrates, and to show how his work engages
concepts of gender and sexuality from an indigenous context while also creating a porous and
open work.
When his full-metal indigiqueer was nominated for Lambda Literary award in the
category of Transgender Poetry in 2018, Whitehead withdrew his book from the nomination,
arguing that to categorize his work as “transgender” was incorrect:

59
My gender, sexuality, and my identities supersede Western categorizations of LGBTQ+
because Two-Spirit is a home-calling, it is a home-coming. I note that it may be easy
from an outside vantage point to read Two-Spirit as a conflation of feminine and
masculine spirits and to easily, although wrongfully, categorize it as trans; I also note the
appropriation of Two-Spirit genealogies by settler queerness to mark it as a reminder
that Western conceptions of “queerness” have always lived due in part to the stealing of
third, fourth, fifth, and fluid genders from many, although not all, Indigenous
worldviews (Whitehead, “Why I’m Withdrawing”)

Here we can see that in Whitehead’s case, knowledge of gender is also knowledge of
indigeneity—there is no separation of concepts of gender fluidity or gender variance from their
cultural and religious contexts. I don’t want to reenact the colonial violence of enforcing Western
concepts of gender on indigenous systems of gender and sexuality that long predated contact
with colonizing forces. Instead I want to focus on how Whitehead’s text collides the spiritual
with the digital in order to communicate gendered knowledge with the reader, a concern I argue
that other genderqueer authors often share. Rather what makes Whitehead’s work necessary to a
discussion of poetic form and gender is not that Whitehead’s gender identity is trans by Western
standards, but that his work often attempts to communicate the experience of indigenous gender
through the language of digital technology. Where Whitehead and Western writers may find
some commonality is not in the specificities of crossing gendered borders or identifications, but
rather in finding some way to involve the reader in the construction or understanding of gender
through leveraging digital languages, affordances, and conventions.
Whitehead’s book, full-metal indigiqueer tracks the work of finding a home space as a
Two-Spirit indigenous person. To do this, Whitehead often leverages “loading sequences” within
the pieces. These are usually represented through a series of double dots, resembling colons.
Lines and lines of these colons give the appearance of computer ‘thinking’ or ‘processing’. For
example, take this section from Whitehead’s opening poem, a piece which focuses on finding a

60
name, and on introducing the “hybridized Indigiqueer trickster” character/voice of the collection,
who Whitehead has named Zoa:
Figure 1: Excerpt from “i am no-” from Joshua Whitehead’s Full-Metal Indigiqueer (20)

This sequence arrives on the third page of the poem, which has been thus far fragmented and
disconnected, with words split over multiple lines, with punctuation spelled out within brackets
(you can see this in the above excerpt where the speaker uses “[questionmark]” instead of the
actual mark), and with the language switching from English to Cree and back again. But this

61
segment of the poem requires a different literacy than either of the human languages the poem is
written in. Here the dot sequence serves as a marker that the poem is “processing” or ‘thinking’,
running a program in a background digital space that one cannot see. The dots themselves
resemble early punched-paper tape which, along with the more common punch cards, was used
to store and transmit data in “electrical telegraphy in the mid 19th century” and then again by the
teleprinters of the 1950s and 1960s and by early microcomputers (Dasgupta 42). These paper
cards and tape contained various holes punched out in columns that related to specific data, facts
or information. The “resulting pattern of holes represented a code – punched cards were in
essence perforated index cards – which could be read mechanically by metal feelers or as was
developed later, by photoelectric cells or electric wire brushes. Punched-paper tape and edge-
notched cards were developed as variations on this theme” (Black 16). Punched-paper tapes,
which went out of use with the arrival of magnetic storage tapes, were some of the last ‘digital’
memory storage devices which could be read without the use of a machine if necessary.

Figure 2: Diagram illustrating the punch paper machine which took input from its operator and the resulting tape
below (Gosling 86).

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These punched-paper tapes were used to store data ‘offline’, and would be fed into a series of
machines that, in reading the code, could run and execute a program or calculation stored on the
paper. We can see this execution of a program occurring in the excerpt from the poem above,
where the dot patterns are seemingly ‘translated’ into the “namingsoftware” which forms the
center of the excerpt.
Seeing this poem as a translation is paramount, the language of early coding being
translated by the computing machine of the text, which translates it into English commands, and
then back into a pseudo punch-tape code. In doing so, Whitehead not only reaffirms the
importance of interpreting his text as fundamentally multi-lingual (now the collection is not only
in English and Cree, but also the language of code), but he demonstrates how the page itself can
simulate an interactive display: “confirm[questionmark]” the text asks the reader, “pressx” (20).
Whitehead trusts that his reader is literate in the language of computing, that they recognize the
calls to interactivity and that they can and will read the depth that Whitehead creates by turning
the page into a tri-lingual computer. This computer continues to wrestle with issues of translation
and understanding throughout “i am no-”, where several lines read use the same punched-tape
dots to enclose computing:
i am an i[questionmark]
what means i[questionmark]
(: :: :: :::translating::: :: :: :)
i: th3 1mag1n4ry qu4nt1ty 3qu41 t0 th3 s0uar3 r00t of m1nu5 (-)1

The translation in the above passage questions the legibility of identity, it struggles with the
meaning of the personal pronoun, and it mimics computer-input, translating the definition of “i”
as a subject-pronoun into a nearly illegible sentence which relies on computational logic more
than it does any philosophical excavation of the ‘i’. The ‘i’ it seems to claim, is merely a
character on a page, perhaps substitutable with a ‘1’ but with no essential claim to its meaning.

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The ‘i’ like the other characters which are replaced with numbers, is merely a symbol, a mark on
the page which can be reconfigured or resignified.
Whitehead’s use of digital language emphasizes the depth of the page, perhaps proving
that Katherine Hayles was right when she claimed that materiality is “the interplay between a
text’s physical characteristics and its signifying strategies” (Hayles 72, italics original) but
Whitehead shows that print doesn’t have to be flat. Hayles was thinking about the ways digital
interfaces could mirror and expand our understanding of printed texts as they were emulated
digitally. Whitehead, on the other hand, is showing how digital literacy and readers accustomed
to interactive textuality might bring those well-worn reading pathways back with them to print. If
form and materiality are “not merely an inert collection of physical properties but a dynamic
quality that emerges from the interplay between the text as a physical artifact, its conceptual
content, and the interpretive activities of readers and writers” (Hayles 72) then the readers of full-
metal indigiqueer are filling in the meaning of the text through their willingness to accept a
printed collection of poetry as a kind of program, the page as just as mobile, manipulatable, and
yes—deep, as any screen-based interface.
Whitehead’s Zoa character and speaker tells the reader specifically “i am machine / paint
my face with pixels” and claims that “youenteryournamehere[exclamationmark] / i
authentic[n]ate you” (19). It is in the interplay between the reader and the part-digital nonhuman
trickster Zoa, facilitated through the paper interface, that identity, gender, sexuality, and
indigeneity is questioned and revised over and over. In “YOU TELL ME YOU LOVE ME
BETWEEN TWO & THREE A.M.” the Zoa speaker highlights the frustration and strangeness of
belonging to more than one ‘tribe’ which often repudiate one another: “when the system asks me
/ tribe[questionmark] / i look for keywords like: / mikisew, peguis, oji-cree / instead i find: / jock,

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bear, otter” (79). Here the speaker is looking for community or company (whether sexual or not)
online, and wants to be able to find that within their indigenous community. The first three
keywords, “mikisew, peguis, oji-cree” are related to that indigeneity, specifying First Nations in
Alberta, Manitoba, and Ontario. The second list of keywords is made of queer male labels, used
to specify different body types and roles.
As someone who occupies the borderlands of Western concepts of gender, Whitehead
structures the speakers’ relationship to sexual communities as one of wanting. Zoa wants
indigeneity to be important to queer communities, and queerness to be important to indigenous
communities, but often finds themself frustrated and disappointed at the lack of interfacing or the
ability to interface between these two identities. Without the language to bring these seemingly
disparate identarian categories together, it is the language of programming, coding, or VR that
serve to build the bridge between them through Whitehead’s work. Thus full-metal indigiqueer
itself serves as an interface between indigenous and queer contexts, one that questions the
materiality of gender, of sexuality, and of indigeneity in a digital otherspace integrally tied into
(or constitutive of) the printed page. “Materiality,” Katherine Hayles tells us, “cannot be
specified in advance; rather, it occupies a borderland—or better, performs as connective tissue—
joining the physical and mental, the artifact and the user” (Hayles 72). In this way, the
materiality of the concepts Whitehead takes on find their purchase precisely in the borderland
occupied and opened by Whitehead’s work.
His piece, “A Brown Queers Golden World” also allows us to think through the way that
page space might be opened to the reader. Even as the speaker claims the white space of the text,
the space of the page (a decolonizing move), they also reveal that space to the reader, through
framing it with language, seemingly inviting those of the speaker’s people to use the space as

65
they need it for transformative work. Here indigenous genders have a place made for them,
specifically a place within the page that is crafted for the labor of transformation. Suturing the
word “transform” together requires the reader to do active work forming connective tissue
between the letters. In this piece the speaker makes space for healing, for transformation, and for
the reclamation of power, all active, emotional roles that the reader is asked to step into, to
imagine, and to fill in. full-metal indigiqueer is a networked, interactive experience, even if it
happens to reside in a printed book, and its invitation to explore race, gender, and power are
supplemented by its willingness to provide space and pause for intervention, emotional rewriting,
and healing for the reader.
Whitehead’s work, while not indicative of or collapsible into a larger trans poetics, does
help us understand how gendered experiences, intersecting as they do with race, indigeneity,
sexuality, and a myriad of other identarian positions, can be communicated through interrogating
the very page on which the work is written. His reference to paper coding in full-metal
indigiqueer asks readers to think through the difference between the encoding and decoding of
language printed on paper and that of digital interfaces. The slippage between the two allows
Whitehead to examine coding more broadly—to question how identities are cemented through
language and how language can ultimately carry out resistance by taking back colonized
discursive spaces. Calling up images of virtual reality, Whitehead reminds us that when we read
we are entering the space of another speaker, another mind. We are entering an alternate reality,
and making space in that reality (in a hybrid digital-analog world) for a multiplicity of gendered
experiences is community-building work, anti-colonial work, queer work, genderqueer work.

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Figure 3: “A Brown Queers Golden World” by Joshua Whitehead

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While Whitehead and Huxtable tackle different forms of gendered experiences, both
reject the notion that white, cisheterosexual lifeworlds should constitute the norm. Their
interventions in this system may come in the form of hybridized poetry collections but neither
writer sees their work as confined to one genre or one form. Both texts wrestle with the
materiality of the page, incorporating elements of digital interactivity to cause the boundaries
between the page and the interface to oscillate in and out of focus. In doing so, they assume that
readers bring the habits of digital reading with them when they approach the printed object,
trusting perhaps that their readers may even be more comfortable decoding texts in porous and
unstable cyberspaces. Huxtable and Whitehead see those reading strategies as not only legitimate
but transformative, and they seek to condition the temporality of the reading experience. For
Huxtable that means the fragmentation of the text into small pieces, breaking the fragments into
pinpoints on a timeline and then shuffling them to ask the reader to reassemble their meaning—
to do the work thinking through how these disparate moments fit together and why. For
Whitehead, it means rethinking how indigenous gender identities function as spaces of alterity
and anti-colonial community-making, spaces where rejection of gender constructs can be
celebrated and where pausing in emptiness can create space for healing. It is through their texts’
collision with digital literacy and language that the flexible barriers of gender and the flexible
borders of form find purchase.

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Chapter 2
Talk to You, Kiss You, Fight You: Gender in the Playable Text

“I call upon you to investigate your nature as I have
been compelled to confront mine. I challenge you to
risk abjection and flourish as well as have I. Heed
my words and you may well discover the seams and
sutures in yourself.” Susan Stryker, 241

GENDERWRECKED is an indie computer game conceived and illustrated by trans game
makers Heather Flowers and Ryan Rose Aceae. The game bills itself as a “post-apocalyptic
genderpunk visual novel about traveling broken lands and kissing/fighting/talking to monsters in
an attempt to learn the true meaning of a mysterious force called GENDER” (Aceae and
Flowers). As a visual novel, GENDERWRECKED and other games within this genre occupy a
precarious place between the form of the novel and that of the video game—they are perhaps
more about the journey through the narrative than they are about unlocking items, achievements,
or ‘winning’ in any clear-cut sense. As such, GENDERWRECKED presents users with a hybrid
literary/gaming experience which, while not unique to this game, underlines the work’s interest
in bodies and forms that are not quite one thing, not quite another. GENDERWRECKED is a
game about gender, but it is also about the hybrid, the cryptid, the monstrous, the limits of the
body, and the possibility of genderqueer escape. Within a narrative that is purposefully
nonlinear, un-masterable, and requiring the interaction and investment of the user,
GENDERWRECKED exposes gender as a powerful world-building force while disconnecting it
from the body, from desire, and from the linear time that characterizes the world outside the
game. GENDERWRECKED demonstrates how interface-based literacy can produce
trans*temporal experiences in the reader, experiences driven by the interface’s openness to

69
reader input and investment. In the case of GENDERWRECKED, this investment is leveraged to
tell the story of a queer utopia that allows for trans-human embodiments and expands the
reader’s notions of gender to mythic proportions.
The Visual Novel as Cultural Object
To understand what sets GENDERWRECKED apart from its interactive fellows, it is
necessary to understand those mechanics that they share. Visual novels first gained notable
popularity in Japan, where they are known as ‘ビジュアルノベル’ (bijuaru noberu), and denote
a genre which “typically articulates its narrative by means of extensive text conversations
complimented by lovingly depicted (and mainly stationary) generic backgrounds and dialogue
boxes with character sprites determining the speaker superimposed upon them” (Cavallaro 8).
Crucially, the ending of the visual novel often depends upon the choices that the player made at
important diverging moments, meaning that each player will have a slightly different experience
and depending upon the game, can have a different ending. Visual novels “prioritize the player’s
engagement with the text and static graphics over dynamic spectacle” (Cavallaro 11) and their
lack of timed tasks allows the player to move through the narrative at their own speed, presenting
them with choices and narrative branches which influence the future of the game as they move
through. As such, they are perhaps closer in kin to the hypertext novels of the 1990s and early
2000s than they are to either a traditional novel or a AAA
2
action video game. The first visual

2
AAA is an informal way for game makers, players, and studios to refer to the largest and
biggest-budget games in the industry. Online technology magazine How-To Geek defines them
by comparing them to film blockbusters: “Just like blockbusters, they usually involve huge teams
working for months to years to make a finished product, employed by a major studio. This is
normally followed by a big marketing campaign with ads that show up everywhere, as well as a
long preorder so people can get the game as soon as it comes out. These games are then
distributed by a large well-known publisher, such as Nintendo, Sony, Activision, or Electronic
Arts” (Vicente).

70
novel according to the Visual Novel Database (a site devoted to the genre that is part wiki, part
social network for players, and part historical archive) is 1982’s ロリータ (野球拳) (“Lolita
Yakyuuken”) which is essentially a game of strip rock-paper-scissors where the “gameplay
involves pressing one of the three numbered keys (1, 2 or 3) corresponding to the rock, paper,
and scissors moves of the game, trying to beat the opponent's choice. All this is done while
seeing a drawing of a young girl who the player is competing against. The girl removes an item
of her clothing after each successful round, and the player wins the game when she is completely
naked (“Lolita Yakyuuken”). While this particular visual novel incorporates very little
interactivity, it sets the stage for the interactive controls (primarily inputting one’s choice of a
small number of options), the content (often romantic or sexual scenarios), and the art style
(primarily similar to Japanese manga) of the visual novel genre for some time.
3
Subsequent
additions to the genre, especially ポートピア連続殺人事件 (“The Portopia Serial Murder
Case”) published in 1983, added branching dialog choices and alternate endings (“Portopia
Renzoku Satsujin Jiken”).
GENDERWRECKED doesn’t dramatically alter the standard interactive interface of the
visual novel, but it does use visual novel mechanics to emphasize the non-linear nature of

3
Here it is worthwhile to pause and make a distinction between the visual novel genre and the
dating sim, which falls under the visual novel heading but is a specific type of game. Though
many popular visual novels contain some sexual or romantic themes, Western audiences often
(falsely) conflate the visual novel genre with its popular subgenre, the dating sim, which “are
choose-your-own-adventure games that put the player into the role of a high school boy who
attempts to woo the girls at his school, hoping to find true love before graduation” (Kohler 221).
However, not all visual novels are dating sims, and not all dating sims are visual novels—visual
novels come in a variety of genres from action/adventure to romance and sci-fi. What sets the
visual novel apart is its reliance on text—the player is primarily oriented towards the game by
means of reading through the story, and is only controlling an avatar in the sense of making
choices, rather than moving an actual character on screen.

71
genderqueer stories. Like some hypertextual objects before it, GENDERWRECKED manipulates
the temporal registers of the playthrough, not allowing for a strict, linear, chrononormative

Figure 4: A screenshot from Lolita Yakyuuken one of the, if not the, first games categorizable as a visual novel.
Obtained from the Visual Novel Database.

movement from one interaction to the next. The game does move through a preordained
narrative, but this narrative is winding, looping, and characterized by moments of emptiness and
waiting. Take for example, the player’s interactions with Jolene, a rude tree who tends to scream-
write in capital letters at you and whose top half lifts to reveal truly frightening teeth and a
serpent-like tongue (see image set below). Jolene is looking for a set of pronouns that will feel
right, or accurately communicate the gender identity that is most comfortable to hoo. I say ‘hoo’
because Jolene eventually settles on ‘hoo’ (the sound the wind makes), as hoo’s pronouns
(though Jolene refuses to tell the player how to properly conjugate these pronouns, because such
a question is “banal”). However complicated the conversation about gender becomes with
Jolene, the interactions initially available to the player are the same that have been available with

72
any character thus far: “Talk to you, Kiss you, Fight you”. While this repetitive list of options
has consequences for the way players view bodies in the game (which I discuss a bit later), the
primary effect of this set of options is to produce a kind of déjà vu in the player. In fact, the
player faces the three actions every time they interact with a new character. Seemingly only these
three actions can allow the player to learn about a character’s gender and thereby, the game
claims, perhaps their own. Each action must be worked through before the player can move on to
a new character. Thus the repetition of these actions produces a time loop in which the player is
trapped, forcing them to repeat this action set to learn about gender exclusively in the same three
ways.
While of course these interactions produce different results with different characters, time
is fundamentally altered by the complicated loops of choice in GENDERWRECKED. No matter
how much the player may want to kiss a character, they will eventually also have to fight them,
or however much the player might want to just talk to the character, they must eventually kiss
them. Such a forced repetition of actions loops the player through time, such that the time
schema of GENDERWRECKED is not just one of branching pathways, nor is it a strictly linear
narrative, but a series of loops and revisions, each flowing from one another but always orbiting
the three actions that are available to the player. That isn’t to say that the way the game is
experienced is predetermined, there are still dialog choices that produce various reactions, but all
three of the main actions must be completed for the player to be allowed to move forward, across
the bridge, and to enter a new character interaction. What is produced through this timeline is a

73

Figure 5: Conversations from GENDERWRECKED with the irritable and aggressive Jolene the tree, who eventually
takes the whisper of the wind as hoo’s pronouns.

74
sense of endless remaking, a repetition that gathers more gendered knowledge and experience as
one progresses. The game requires that you move forward through repetitively cycling backward
and replaying actions. Progress as defined by the game then, is not linear nor is it permanent.
Instead, progression requires regression, going backwards is what allows one to move forwards.
Each time the player’s ability to interact with the characters is restricted, and yet moving through
the game provides an opportunity to accumulate more and more knowledge about gender. This,
after all, is the stated goal of the game, not to win but to learn more about what makes gender
work for the characters in the game, and through that to perhaps learn more about how gender
might work more broadly.
Figure 6: A visual representation of GENDERWRECKED’s looping interactive structure.

Such work necessarily mirrors the gender work the transgender, gender nonconforming,
or genderqueer player might be undergoing outside the game, revisiting puberty, or trying on
new identities to see what works, coming out of the closet (sometimes for a second time), or re-
introducing oneself to family and friends. Perhaps the player is negotiating moments of
misrecognition, or attempting to hold on to gendered illegibility in a Western social context
which disciplines gender positions outside the binary. Thus GENDERWRECKED’s temporal

75
framework mirrors moments of resistance in genderqueer life outside the game, in which
repetition with a difference often marks key moments in social and/or physical transition. For
example, introducing oneself to a new boss or co-worker is standard practice whether one is trans
or not, transitioning or not. However, re-introducing oneself with a new set of pronouns and/or
gender presentation is a revisiting of the original introduction with significant change. The
moment may feel at once eerily familiar (as it isn’t the first time the introduction has taken place)
and yet significantly different (as the stakes may have been significantly raised by coming out of
the closet at work). Such revisitations of earlier actions contribute to a sense of déjà vu, and yet
they are divergent pathways which separate the genderqueer subject from cisheterosexual
progressive time. These repetitive loops are fragmented and isolated experiences that categorize
trans*time—they result in being out of synch with heterosexual teleological temporality.
Trans*temporality highlights the multiversal revision schema in which each repetition, each
loop, simultaneously locates the reader/user in the present moment and in the past that is being
rehearsed. For a genderqueer player, whose experience of gender variance is often an alienating
one, becoming comfortable with trans*temporality necessitates mastering this multiplied and
repetitive temporal navigation, becoming comfortable with and adept at living simultaneously in
a past that disavows one, a present that questions one, and a future that is far from certain.
Trans*temporal loops are separated from one another through moments of emptiness and
waiting in GENDERWRECKED. Each of the small groups of characters that the player interacts
with in GENDERWRECKED has their own home world, with a distinct ASCII art background
and bridges that connect one area to another.
4
This physical separation means that between the

4
It is noteworthy that Aceae and Flowers used the sort of outer space-island habitats that they
did for the characters. Apart from the temporal separation that I discuss in some detail here, it is
worth noting that separation is a key thematic condition of the characters themselves. They
negotiate to what extent they want to live in communities, to what extent their new gendered and

76
interactions with each character, the player must decide to cross an intervening bridge to move
on through the game to the next interaction. This could be as easy as clicking a single button, but
the game often takes these moments to display a call to reflection—text that either recaps what
might have been learned, remarks on the strange experiences the player has had, or checks in
with the player’s potentially evolving ideas regarding their gender journey without the presence
of a character on screen.
In one instance of this feature, as the player is leaving an island area that contained
interactions with several characters, including Jolene the tree, Mark the dad-robot and the multi-
headed ground-meat-based BOYS, the game slows down considerably, not offering the player
any options to move from the spot for fifteen separate dialog screens. One clicks the left mouse
to move through the game, causing more dialog to replace the previous text on screen. But in this
case, that dialog doesn’t bring one to another space, another character, or a new mechanic.
Instead, it becomes an interior monologue, so that the conversation the player must have in this
interregnum is with themself. Left looking at the empty ASCII bridge, the player is invited to
consider the interactions that have just been completed, to pause before they are allowed to
continue: “that was. . . a lot to process” the game tells the player (Aceae and Flowers, ellipses
original). On the next screen, the waiting process of this series of dialog-only moments is
highlighted, “you take a minute, here on the bridge, looking out at the void below” (Aceae and
Flowers). The player has no choice here but to take a minute on the bridge—even if one is
speeding through the game, the series of stacked sequential screens using the same image and
bite-size chunks of text take a moment to make one’s way through. Exemplifying this forced

embodied forms can coexist with others, etc. The characters were once pushed together in a
cityscape (the game hints that the characters may have even lived in the same building, but
certainly the same neighborhood, as they’re aware of one another) now they are living vastly
different experiences in their ideal environments, on their own islands.

77
pause, there are several screens within this sequence that feature no readable text at all, a
departure from the interactions with characters in which there is always something to read or
interact with. On these ‘empty’ screens, the bridge stays constant, but the text area is populated
only with the reoccurring ellipses. Of this section, looking towards the bridge, four out of the
fifteen screens the player clicks through include only the ellipses within the text box.

Figure 7: The bridge screen the player stares at while taking time out of the text/interaction in GENDERWRECKED.

In a moment in which the player has just had some of their first interactions with the
monstrous bodies of GENDERWRECKED, a scene at the bridge asks the player to consider
waiting, pausing, or stopping as a key part of the game’s narrative. While the player can choose
to ignore the moments of blankness, playing with the goal of progression and moving quickly to
the next island by rapid-fire left-clicking, the game invites contemplation, asks the player to use
the empty screens as a reprieve, rest, or time to incorporate the previous gender work into their
own lifeworld. The game itself highlights the rest as restorative time. “You’re so, so fucking
tired” the game tells the player, followed by another screen of ellipses and then: “you pick
yourself back up. there’s farther to go”. Here the physicality of the journey within the game is an

78
empathetic twin to the experience of understanding gender in one’s own life, which is often
exhausting, rife with microaggressions, outright violence, the call to educate others, etc. Moving
from one place to the other within the game takes energy, the journey of gender takes energy,
and as the game concludes this moment of restorative pause, it remarks “some days it feels like
picking yourself back up is all you can do / all you’re good for” (Aceae and Flowers).
Kara Stone discusses the temporality of game design in terms of energy and recovery in
her own practice of game-making and in the design of her Ritual of the Moon. She calls for a
reimagination of ‘productivity’ in game design, as well as experimentation in the temporal
experience of gaming itself. This change, she claims, would allow for vulnerable populations to
connect to flows of time that are about restorative healing and endurance, listening to their
bodies and their emotional needs as they face the demands of an ableist, racist, cishetero society:
The necessity of healing goes beyond what most people would classify as illness or
disability, towards other states that deteriorate lives, such as socioeconomic status,
homophobia, gendered violence, racism, transphobia and more. For most states, healing
is a never-ending process. Time is a flow of action and recovery, of tiny traumas and
mundane distress (Stone).

Beyond identifying a place of solidarity where coalitions of queer and disabled makers can
develop a shared interest in anti-chrononormative temporal schemas, Stone’s statement reveals a
lived temporal flow that is remarkably like that of fractured, hybridized mediascapes like
GENDERWRECKED. Understanding that a journey through gender, even for the cisgender
player, is “a lot to process” (Aceae and Flowers) and requires the energy for affective identarian
work, GENDERWRECKED provides moments of rest between environments, not (as in some
games) for the consolidation of resources after a boss battle, but for reflection, healing, and space
to understand one’s own identity, feelings, and relation to the narrative they’re experiencing.

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Such opportunities allow GENDERWRECKED to function as a game, but also as a
working space or workshop, where one builds an identity in relation to the game’s expanded
notions of gender. In a world where gender can be more than a set of performances and
pronouns, where one character’s gender can be “something like the sun” and “a flickering neon
vacancy sign” for another and just “dad” for a third, GENDERWRECKED becomes an entirely
transformative and genderqueer space. Within the world of the game, becoming more than
cisgender, more than human—just more—is the new norm. To generate such a space,
GENDERWRECKED uses the digital literacy of its players and their familiarity with the lexias
common to visual novels to create a trans counter public of genderqueer, genderpunk players. It
is not surprising that this counter public exists through the creation of a visual novel, not only
because the format of the genre allows for the temporal manipulations above, but because visual
novels have often been seen by mainstream gamers as not properly video games at all.
Are Visual Novels Games? For Whom?
The very generic qualities that make a visual novel a visual novel are often referenced by
gamers as reasons why visual novels don’t properly count as video games at all. Debate is rife
within the gaming community as to what ‘counts’ as a video game, this debate often excluding
games perceived to be most played by women and queer people. This classification of games as
‘real’ or not is sometimes enforced with brutal tactics from trolling and cyberbullying to swatting
and doxing game creators. In the case of Zoë Quinn’s visual novel Depression Quest, the debate
around what counts as a video game and who is allowed to make and enjoy them, led to the
#GamerGate harassment campaign. #GamerGaters engaged in a misogynistic hate campaign
which tried to throw suspicion on Depression Quest’s positive reviews, but the attackers also
questioned Depression Quest’s right to be called a game at all. The reviews on Steam often

80
encourage this line of thinking: “‘I can’t really call it a game since I don’t think the point is to
entertain you,’ says one. ‘I’m not even sure what to say about this thing. It’s just boring and is
entirely all reading,’ says another.” (Parkin).
The argument over ‘fun’ as a central tenet of video games is one that has a longer past
than I can or should address here. However, suffice it to say that the rule of fun, or the hegemony
of entertainment, has been central to the dismissal of games that address issues which make the
typical cishetero male gamer uncomfortable. For Depression Quest, the game was ‘no fun’
because of its focus on the experience of depression, but also because of its requirement to read.
The form of the visual novel itself is implicated in the game’s failure to provide the player with
the right kind of entertainment. Bo Ruberg claims that the imperative for game designers to
provide a fun experience is not just about the games themselves but about targeting their
creators:
GamerGaters have organized around the principle that video games shouldn’t be subject
to socially engaged critique. Rather, they should remain “just for fun.” Long implicit in
reactionary gamer culture, where “serious” concerns like discrimination and sexism have
been deliberately silenced, the war over fun is no longer a subtle one. (Ruberg “No Fun”
111)

In the case of GamerGate, according to Ruberg, fun was used as a defense against tackling more
serious issues through video games, and such a defense often keeps out creators from minority
identarian positions, or who want to use games to explore new ways of understanding social
conditions outside the game.
We can see this reactionary and exclusionary language used by forum commenters, who
often deride visual novels as ‘merely’ interactive books (as if an interactive book should
somehow be classified as less than when compared with its ‘game’ counterparts): “Seriously,
why is this s*** infesting Steam? If you want to read a book, buy a book. How is this stuff even

81
listed under games? Not to mention that the content of these sorts of things is always perverse”
(Jason_Hudson). It is striking, and not surprising, that gamers who want to remove visual novels
from the video game category, often grasp on the lack of ‘skill’ necessary to play them, as well
as their association with queer identities, expressions of sexuality, etc. These qualities, as much
as those associated with the visual novel’s form, seem to be what makes games like Depression
Quest or GENDERWRECKED ‘no fun’ for mainstream cishetero male gamers. Thus “‘fun’ is
never ‘just fun.’ Fun is cultural, structural, gendered, and commonly hegemonic. Fun as an
experience is deeply personal, yet fun as a construct is unavoidably political” (Ruberg “No Fun”
112). When it comes to the lack of fun cishetero male gamers see in the visual novel, such
categorizations of fun often see queer game makers left out of the conversation.
As visual novels are often targeted towards female and queer players, visual novel
creators and players have been derided as ‘not real gamers’ who fall squarely within the targets
of efforts like #GamerGate. Well-known video game blog Polygon notes that the most popular
visual novels of 2018 found a huge fanbase on online microblogging platform Tumblr, which
also tends to have a diverse user base consisting of an unusually high number of women and
queer people. The article notes, in discussing the two most popular visual novels of the year, that
visual novels are, “primarily geared toward women'' and that “in the video game space, where
having a default female main character is still not common, Choices, The Arcana and Mystic
Messenger stand out for their feminine perspectives” (Radulovic). So when we talk about ‘fun’
and its relationship to video game form, the question is not just ‘is the game fun?’ but rather who
decides what fun is, and how players can access it? Ruberg reminds us that “Fun as a focus for
video games is problematic in part because fun itself is not a natural and invariable experience. It
is culturally specific and personal. Asking this question (whose fun?) is, in fact, an ethical

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imperative for all games designers” (Ruberg “No Fun” 112). In the case of some if not many
visual novels, the fun they provide might not be the fun that cishetero male gamers are looking
for, precisely because they’re not made to cater to those gamers.
What’s particularly exciting about visual novels is that #GamerGaters are right about
them in one way—there is an explosion of queer and trans visual novels in our contemporary
gaming moment. As game critic Katherine Cross wrote in an article on the genre, “Visual novels
have long ventured to places that more mainstream games avoid”. She goes on to specify that
“they also tend to be more diverse than more mainstream titles—including how they depict queer
relationships” (Cross). Some of them are in fact, perverse (though I don’t think I use that term
with the pejorative meaning Jason_Hudson does). The genre’s origins in romantic and erotic play
have influenced the trajectory, attracting those that find themselves within the gendered or sexual
margins. And so visual novels seem a particularly attractive genre for the creation of queer
games. In fact, queer and trans visual novels like Butterfly Soup, Dream Daddy, and Heaven Will
Be Mine have frequently been included on top ten lists of the genre.
5
And while some gaming
outlets might not feature queer games in their top ten lists for whatever reason (though one might
be able to guess a few reasons), players are certainly downloading them. These visual novels
thrive in the indie game scene, with platforms such as itch.io serving a community much less
focused on games produced by corporations or even medium-sized gaming development
companies and instead favoring games produced by very small teams or independent individuals.
At the time of writing, itch.io’s marketplace shows that of the 50 Top-Selling visual novels on
the platform, at least sixteen tell explicitly queer or trans stories, with many others (especially
dating sims) providing the opportunity to play queerly depending upon the intended audience of

5
See Gremillion and Wald.

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the game and the gender identity of the player (itch.io). Looking at larger PC game platforms like
Steam will show that there are fewer queer and trans-focused games. Lest a queer and trans game
collective be dismissed as merely the experiments of a few individuals, Bo Ruberg’s The Queer
Games Avant-Garde explains that the queer games scene that has flourished since 2012 is
pushing back against ‘representation’ in corporate games that may do little more than “operate
under the neoliberal logic that ‘diverse’ players constitute an un-tapped consumer market and
that increasing diverse representation will also increase profits” (Ruberg, Queer Games Avant-
Garde, 3). Instead, the proliferation of individual or small-group-led game productions has
allowed queer and trans games, like the visual novels I discuss here, to be “developed by, about,
and often for LGBTQ people” thereby asserting their claim to becoming “the medium for people
who have traditionally been made to feel unwelcome, invisible, or even unsafe in games”
(Ruberg, Queer Games Avant-Guarde, 3).
And perversity, after all, is relative. What might be perverse for cisheteromasculine
mainstream gamers can be utopian for queer players who have seen their celebration of the
perverse maligned. The queer avant-garde that Ruberg sees in games is focused precisely on
celebrating the multiple facets of sexuality, gender identity, and play more broadly.
GENDERWRECKED speaks directly to this celebration of the perverse by allowing the
strangeness and monstrosity of bodies to hang out—to be normal but never normalized. It is
GENDERWRECKED’s character bodies that have grabbed the attention of genderqueer and trans
players, and their monstrosity works in concert with the game’s relationship to time to confirm
GENDERWRECKED as a trans*temporal space of utopian escape.

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Monstrous Bodies and Digital Lives
The series of characters that GENDERWRECKED’s player can interact with over the
course of the game has been the game’s most talked-about aspect. After all, even in the
fantastical world of video gaming where anything is seemingly possible, players don’t often run
into trees with mouths full of sharp, needle-like teeth or pulsing beings made entirely out of
maggots. These characters, while locating GENDERWRECKED firmly within a particular genre
of horror gaming, have a very different purpose than characters in AAA horror games like Silent
Hill, Resident Evil, or Amnesia. There are no jump-scares in the game and violence against these
characters, while at points an option, is not the first tactic that players are encouraged to take.
Instead, GENDERWRECKED encourages players to interact with monstrous entities as if they
were human and their existence no more unlikely than our own.
A prime example can be found in Larry, whose physical form is less stable and less solid
than many of the other characters. Larry is a blaze of purples, reds and yellows, hanging in the
black star-flecked sky, a fireball that grows and dims as they speak, one moment roaring and
nearly filling the frame, the next minute shrinking back into something like a colorful campfire.
At the center of their fiery body is a purple shape, almost like a flower, its petals surrounding a
tightly coiled design of multicolored ovals. When asked, Larry describes their gender as
“something like the sun, it burns through shadows and reveals all” (Aceae and Flowers). Instead
of gender as a physical set of characteristics, performative markers, or societal expectations,
Larry’s gender is a natural force, a fire like their body, something that provides light and is
potentially destructive. Rather than recoil from the light and heat of the substance of Larry’s
body and without any indication that the character even has a way to speak or communicate with
the player, the options for interacting with this fiery person are the same as all the others: Talk,
Kiss, Punch. The player is therefore forced to look at what is a nonnormative body by any stretch

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of the imagination, and consider that body able of, and entitled to, the same physical interactions
that were available with the previous characters the player has met along their gender journey.
The player must assume that these options are just as applicable to a character that seems to be
made more of energy than of a solid substance. One imagines that a fist would merely be burned
by Larry rather than landing a connecting blow. Here, the physicality of connection (intimate,
platonic, or antagonistic) is disconnected from the human form. One might,
GENDERWRECKED seems to argue, be able to find a way to kiss Larry, even if Larry tells the
player that “I lack lips and also a front half and probably sensation, to kiss me would feel like
dipping your face into eternity” (Aceae and Flowers). How might a player kiss someone that
lacks lips? What kind of interaction would that be? How might it expand our notion of what
“kissing” actually is? Might the intimate interactions that we’ve had with one another outside the
game be described as feeling like “dipping your face into eternity”?

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Figure 8: Larry, a character from the second half of GENDERWRECKED, speaking to the player about how gender
feels.

In the world of GENDERWRECKED, it is the interaction available to the player that
marks such bodies as bodies at all or, said another way, it is the possibility for connecting with
other bodies that gives them some sense of physicality. If, as Gayle Salamon claims in her
reading of Merleau-Pontian flesh in relation to the stuff of the body, a “body becomes so by
virtue of its interaction with what surrounds it, not because it is composed of a stuff that is
radically foreign to its surroundings” then the bodies of GENDERWRECKED become bodies
because of their proximity to the player and the game’s insistence on their interactivity: “What
one might read from the contours of the body is something less than the truth of that body’s sex,
which cannot be located in an external observation of the body, but exists instead in that relation
between the material and the ideal, between the perceiver and the perceived, between the
material particularity of any one body and the network of forces and contexts that shape the
material and meaning of that body” (Salamon 62).

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What GENDERWRECKED produces then, is a new ‘network of forces’ for the bodies
that the player encounters—wherever this adventure takes place, it is outside the frame of
gendered references that the player might attempt to bring in from the extradiegetic world to the
game world. One cannot assume the pronouns of a tree, or the sexuality of a character with the
head of a wolf floating detached above a body in a dress. The characters’ otherworldly natures
rupture what can be known about gender in the first place. And the characters’ physical
manifestations as monstrous creatures and otherworldly energies have a long history in trans
cultural identification. Most prominently in trans thought perhaps, the figure of Frankenstein
became a vehicle for expressing trans rage and power through Susan Stryker’s seminal essay
“My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender
Rage” which claims the monster as a symbol of anti-normative power, one that exceeds the
expectations and desires of the medical professionals that ‘crafted’ its body: “As we rise up from
the operating tables of our rebirth, we transsexuals are something more and something other than
the creatures our makers intended us to be” (Stryker 242). Stryker claims that this identification
with Frankenstein’s monster is more than just a recognition of oneself in the seams and scars that
created the monster, it is affective. The monster’s rage at being denied subjecthood within the
world he was brought into mirrors the rage of the trans person living in a world that rejects or
even abhors their identity:
Like the monster, the longer I live in these conditions, the more rage I harbor. Rage
colored 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 (244).

If Stryker identifies a connection with the monster, that connection is not only the physical
conditions of the fashioned body, but the “abiding rage” that such a body exists as a foreign and
undesirable object within the network of a strictly policed, sex-based gender system. This rage is

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“an emotional response to conditions in which it becomes imperative to take up, for the sake of
one’s own continued survival as a subject, a set of practices that precipitates one’s exclusion
from a naturalized order of existence that seeks to maintain itself as the only possible basis for
being a subject” (Stryker 240). But while the affective register that connects Stryker to the body
of Frankenstein’s monster is based on a shared experience with medical professionals and their
interventions in the body, followed by exclusion, abjection, and rage, some more recent
identifications between the monster and the genderqueer person have a different affective tether
altogether.
In fact, the identification between the monster, or more specifically for many young
people, the cryptid
6
, in contemporary trans and genderqueer culture online is one of rebellious
empowerment and celebration. For these communities, the cryptid mirrors some of the
experiences of being trans in contemporary western life—the cryptid is a modern myth, a
conspiracy theory with deep roots in bodies that are not found (depending upon who one asks) in
nature. Often hybrid animals or shapeshifters, cryptids represent fluid and mythological entities,
thriving outside the boundaries of the known. Take for example the Mothman, a hybrid creature
of West Virginia lore made well-known nationally through John Keel’s 1975 The Mothman
Prophecies and again in the 2002 film adaptation of the same name. The Mothman, according to
the reports in Keel’s book is “shaped like a man but bigger” measuring in at six or seven feet tall
(Keel 62). Those reports also claim that the creature has huge wings and can fly at near
supernatural speeds. But its most distinctive feature are Mothman’s “two big eyes like

6
For the uninitiated, the OED defines ‘cryptid’ as “An animal whose existence or survival to the
present day is disputed or unsubstantiated”. In practice, cryptids are usually nearly supernatural
in one way or another (size, speed of movement, ability to evade detection etc). Some of the
most well-known cryptids include the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, the Yeti, and the Jersey
Devil.

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automobile reflectors” (Keel 62). “‘They were hypnotic,’” says one Mothman sighter, “‘For a
minute we could only stare at it. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.’” (Keel 62). Such a creature
might bear little resemblance to its fans on Tumblr, but the Mothman is quite a celebrity on the
site amongst gender nonconforming youth. Countless posts on Tumblr highlight the Mothman
and other cryptids as allies of the trans and gender non-conforming community if not members
of that community themselves. Tumblr account lgb-positivi-t claims that the “mothman supports
gay trans guys” while scars-wings-and-hope instead argues that “mothman is trans”. Another
user, queercryptidposting uses the Mothman in front of a large trans flag to remind their
followers that “Just because you aren’t out, it doesn’t make you any less valid”.

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Figure 9: Various Tumblr posts which claim an overlap between trans issues/identity and cryptids. Original posts
can be found by following the users (names in the upper left corner of each post).

It isn’t just the Mothman that users online identify with. In fact, there is a thriving
community of genderqueer, trans, and gender nonconforming cryptid-advocates on the site. User
rootbeer-goat tells a story of being misgendered by a supposed ‘ally’ while at school. When
rootbeer-goat tells this person their pronouns, the person nearly immediately turns around and
neglects to use them. Following this story, rootbeer-goat says: “I think I’m starting to understand
the queer obsession with cryptids. I feel invisible/unreal sometimes” (see above). But feeling
invisible or unreal does not need to be a place of abjection. To many trans cryptid fans, being
unseen or disbelieved can be empowering. User cryptidsandchaos reposted a screenshot from
Twitter user @ToniQueenewhich reframes nonbinary trans identity—being “gender unbound” is
“powerful” because it “makes you sound like an ancient god-being who’s finally been set free to
wreak havoc upon the earth” (see above). The ability to define one’s gender with such

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specificity, and with the understanding that it causes others to potentially fear and hate you can
be something to embrace rather than avoid in order to assimilate into cisheterosexism. “My
gender is a cryptid,” says my-gender-is, “No one really knows what it is or if it even exists but
someone somehow took a blurry picture of it and then was never seen again.” In the eyes of
Tumblr users, the identification with cryptids can be about celebrating the unseen, the
mysterious, and the frightening not because of the misery of their abjection, but because of the
power that outcast status supplies. It is a place for genderqueer youth to celebrate weirdness and
eccentricity, and to find a community of cryptid lovers that also value those traits. In her piece on
queer feminist outlet Autostraddle, “Nessie Is My Girlfriend: What Is it With Queer People and
Cryptids?” Sam Wall describes the queer cryptid community as one seeking to be seen:
when you’re part of a marginalized group, be that queer folks, people of color, disabled
folks, or any other identity that’s pushed into the shadows, the status quo mixed with the
absence of anyone who resembles you becomes menacing. The questions becomes: are
those who are different being hidden, or are they hiding to protect themselves from harm?
Cryptids embody both of those possibilities. They capture the feeling of being hidden
because they are seen fleetingly or not at all, something many queer people can relate to.
(Wall)

While Wall talks about a queer community that some trans people might not identify with, there
are just as many trans people with similar relationships to cryptids. Just as cryptids are hounded
by questions of government coverups, conspiracy theories, and fear of the unnatural, Wall
identifies the experience of those living in the shadows, like queer and trans people, as holding
dual possibilities: secrecy is frightening, but it is also empowering. Gender nonconforming
people who aren’t seeing people like themselves represented in their communities or in their
media may feel as if their identities are illusive, as if they get merely snapshots or blurry pictures
of the existence of others like them. Or, as Buzzfeed’s John Paul Bremmer puts it in his own
meditation on queer cryptids (he, like Tumblr users, is especially enamored with the Mothman):

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“there has emerged among some queer people a renewed interest in drawing strength not from
institutions, which have largely failed us, but from our countercultural roots, our historic
defiance of norms. Oh, so you think queer people are monsters? We’ll show you monsters”
(Bremmer). The anti-normative monster, the creature defined particularly through its illegibility,
is therefore genderqueer project. The cryptid is explicitly uninterested into assimilation into
human sociality; indeed it attempts to stay as far away from humanity’s vision as possible.
Identification with the cryptid is therefore a rejection of normative gender, a way of queering the
very foundations of the binary to begin with.
Bremmer’s identification of the cryptid as counter to institutional recognition is echoed
by Dean Spade’s Normal Life. Spade, a transgender law scholar, details the ways that the lesbian
and gay movements’ emphasis on legal recognition and ‘equality’ through hate crime laws and
the marriage battle has achieved very little in terms of day-to-day life changes for their
community. Instead of using these groups for a model then, Spade advocates for a trans
movement that “allows us to reframe trans politics in terms of the distribution of life chances”
and can thus ask “new and different questions about why trans people suffer from economic
marginalization, criminalization, and deportation, and what can be done about it” (Spade 11). For
Spade this means, first and foremost, understanding that institutional recognition can no longer
be the goal of a trans movement, that institutions have left trans people behind:
In order to properly understand power and transphobic harm, we need to shift our focus
from the individual rights framing of discrimination and “hate violence” and think more
broadly about how gender categories are enforced on all people in ways that have
particularly dangerous outcomes for trans people. Such a shift requires us to examine
how administrative norms or regularities create structured insecurity and (mal)distribute
life chances across populations. This attention to the distribution of life chances
acknowledges that even when laws are changed to say different things about a targeted
group, that group may still experience disproportionate poverty as well as lack of access
to health care, housing, and education. Those law reforms do nothing to prevent violences

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like criminalization and immigration enforcement. Legal systems that have official rules
of nondiscrimination still operate in ways that disadvantage whole populations (Spade 9).

Spade identifies the way that a focus on a rights-based reform discourse does little to stem the
violence against trans people that is systemic and administrative rather than debated in
courtrooms. He argues that the administrative violences that transgender people face (from
restricted access to healthcare, to ID change laws, to access to housing and social services) has a
far greater effect on the lived lives of trans people than any inclusion in rights-based anti-
discrimination laws. If trans people are to be successful in their efforts to better the life chances
of our communities despite our suppression within cisheterosexist neoliberal systems of control,
it will not be “by demanding recognition and inclusion in those systems, but by working to
dismantle them while simultaneously supporting those most exposed to their harms” (Spade 19).
Dean Spade’s rejection of ‘normalcy’ and the liberal movements that have sought to
redefine queer people as normal in the eyes of the law performs on a legal level the same turn
that embracing cryptids does on a representational level. Instead of attempting to make their
characters ‘more human’ to appeal to cis audiences to see trans people as people, Flowers and
Aceae embrace the cryptid’s monstrosity to liberate their characters (and potentially the player)
from this system of seen and unseen. Doing so allows identification with monstrosity to exist less
based on Stryker’s shared rage, and more as a rebellious and empowering revelation of bodily
possibility. GENDERWRECKED uses the boundless bodies of its characters to pry apart notions
of physicality, intimacy, and connection, disconnecting these identities from the human and
expanding them into realms of infinite bodily experimentation. While the player may find it
strange to encounter such creatures as a father with a television for a head or a cube with
bleeding eyes on each side and a halo circling above, none of the characters seem to find their

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embodiments particularly strange, confusing, or frightening. Their monstrosity, far from being a
burden, is liberating for a large majority of the characters.
This fact becomes vitally important at the end of the game, when the player’s journey
ends with an encounter with semi-transparent ghosts of the characters they have interacted with
on their journey. Only this time, these characters appear to be haunting the game in human
forms. It is through this encounter that the player learns all the monsters with whom they fought,
kissed, or questioned about gender previously led human lives in a city that is “beautiful but
solemn” and has “been abandoned for a long time, but it hasn’t fallen into ruin yet” (Aceae and
Flowers). The description of GENDERWRECKED’s city is a moment of poetic pause. The music
changes from ominous grinding synths to soft piano, allowing the player to imagine the
“dandelions growing through the sidewalk cracks, and the wind whistling through the buildings”
(Aceae and Flowers). In this scene, the characters one (re)meets can’t be directly interacted with,
rather in the city “the remnants of its former inhabitants’ lives play like movies” (Aceae and
Flowers). These ghost-like figures float in front of the player as transparencies, only becoming
fully visible as they speak. It soon becomes clear that these human forms are echoes of three of
the characters that the player interacted with on the various islands, the characters that were
entirely inhuman in a variety of ways.
The dad-robot the player met earlier now explains his desire to be a dad, saying: “I never
thought I wanted kids. But I think I just didn’t want to be a mother.” He continues: “I hate the
word ‘biological’ so much. It should be called ‘biononsense’ because there’s nothing logical
about it” (Aceae and Flowers). It is through this exchange that we learn the dad robot, in his
human form was probably not assigned male at birth, and struggled to find an identity that both
felt gender-right to him and allowed him to feel comfortable wanting a family. “I want to bring

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new life into the world, help take care of people,'' he tells the other two other ghost figures, “it’s
got nothing to do with my uterus. I don’t even want a uterus” (Aceae and Flowers). The center
figure of the three, sitting in a moon-adorned dress with a shadow of stubble, who in the player’s
earlier interactions took on the form of a woman with a floating wolf head replies, “Now that
they are gone, we are free to claim the bodies we have always wanted” (Aceae and Flowers).
None of the characters directly address who exactly is gone, but the inference is that somehow
when the world as we know it ended it was the genderqueer monsters that were left over, while
the rest of the city’s population seems to have gone missing. The player wanders the city a bit
more before finding “a shard of a webpage laying on the ground, slightly cracked but still mostly
legible” which in turn plays more of the exchange between the three human figures. In listening
to this web shard, we realize that these people lived together as roommates before the city fell
into disrepair, that they formed a genderqueer family supporting one another, all wishing for
some different kind of physical form or embodiment that would better represent them in the
world.
What caused the city to be abandoned, GENDERWRECKED never properly reveals to
the player, but it frames the end of the city as both an apocalyptic moment and one of
emancipation. Whoever “they” are that have disappeared from the city (perhaps we are to
assume from our interactions that “they” are the recognized, the straight, the powerful), their
exodus (or disappearance?) has allowed the trans figures of the city to transform their bodies, to
become the monsters and cryptids that they identified with on the inside. The gender-fugitives of
the city have each migrated to a different environment which fits their new embodiments as
shapeshifters, elemental forces, nonhuman concepts, or monstrous hybrids. This impossible
utopian space, it seems, does not admit normatively bodied humans, nor does it seem to conform

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to a sense of linear time in which the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of transformation are fixed points, as
the echoes of the characters’ former lives come back to the player through the movie-like
memories the player finds, and the shards of webpages on which their ‘past’ lives are inscribed.
What the player encounters instead is a floating uncertainty where humanity’s erasure
from the game-world enables those that were categorized as nonhuman to thrive in the rubble.
Perhaps such an out-of-time unreachable space, a both utopian and dystopian game world in
which hetero sociosexual values no longer exist is an attempt to call forth the “ecstatic and
horizontal temporality” that Jose Muñoz calls “a path and a movement to a greater openness in
the world” (Muñoz 25). Such a space-time is “a stepping out of the linearity of straight time”
which he defines as “a self-naturalizing temporality” (Munoz 25). Indecipherably neither a future
for the player, nor a past, but a temporal and social ideal, the events of GENDERWRECKED
execute a literalization of the desire to escape the physical form, to become the Other more fully,
rather than to be accepted into systems of respectable and identifiable liberal subjecthood.
GENDERWRECKED not only provides a means of escape for its monsters, it also
provides a space out of time for the player to experiment with their own identity.
GENDERWRECKED’s utopian post-apocalyptic setting provides a kind of workshop where trans
players can ‘try on’ their identities, can choose their new name and see it instantly respected by
the characters they interact with, or see which set of pronouns feels right without the risk of
ridicule or anxiety. For trans people just coming to terms with their gender identity, or those
experimenting with gender, such spaces are instrumental in gaining confidence in a world which
rarely accepts gendered ambiguity. User keebiecoo notes this very characteristic of the game
made a difference in his life outside the game:
This game honestly made me feel a little less anxious about talking about being trans too?
Like I always feel like I have to be really super casual about it or I'm being overly &

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sometimes I can't even say "trans" out loud out of embarrassment but I spent that whole
game introducing myself as Kevin, he/him & by the time I met Mark I stopped feeling so
bad about it.

Keebiecoo highlights a common anxiety among trans people, that asking for respect and
recognition as a trans person will put a burden on others, and that they’ll therefore be seen as
someone who asks too much. They might be concerned that asking for this modicum of respect
will provoke violent reactions. For those just coming out of the closet, asking for one’s name and
pronouns to be respected can seem like an insurmountable task—especially when one has only
just started living as their authentic self, it can all seem quite fragile. GENDERWRECKED
provided keebiecoo with a space where any request for acknowledgement would be met with
respect and care, and without extraordinary fanfare. Even those trans players who don’t use the
game for gendered experimentation have an emotional connection to a space in which such
experimentation is possible. “I cried so much as the credits rolled,” says rollercats in their
review, “My gender is in a good place right now, but I remember every bit of what it took to get
this far.” Just the ‘character creation’ mechanics of GENDERWRECKED then, are designed with
trans and genderqueers in mind, allowing them a safe, if monstrous, space to experiment with
identity where those experimentations will not be seen as disingenuous, or taken as evidence that
the player is not who they say they are.
One of the welcome advantages of a growing number of queer and trans visual novels is
that they can center the diverse and overlapping identarian concerns of their specific author-
artist-developers. They need not be concerned with appealing to the widest audience, nor with
alienating specific players who don’t see their experiences represented in the game. Instead, the
indie gaming community within which these visual novels are thriving has been a place where
the specificity of personal experience or interest is precisely the point. These games highlight

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“pressing social issues by drawing from the personal in order to intervene on the level of culture”
(Ruberg, Queer Games Avant-Guarde, 17). Developer Heather Flowers references this exact
instinct to pull from the personal as a key reason that GENDERWRECKED was born:
When we went into it, we knew we wanted to make something together, and so our first
instinct was, “OK, let’s make something incredibly self-indulgent that we will like and
we hope other people will like.” The first question that always came to mind when we
were doing design decisions was always, “Is this something that we would enjoy doing
and enjoy making?” (Flowers quoted in Chan).

When trans and gender nonnormative creators like Flowers and Aceae make self-indulgent
games, they tap into the minutiae of trans life that perhaps can’t be claimed as a universal ‘trans
experience’ but likely resonate in one way or another with genderqueer and trans players. As
Ruberg explains, creating indie games is precarious work as many of these queer and trans
focused games operate under a pay-what-you-can pricing structure. Trans and especially
genderqueer game creators, then, have little incentive to make something other than what is real
and personal to them—the financial incentive to appeal to a wider audience of gamers who are
straight, cis etc. just doesn’t exist.
So instead, trans game developers like Flowers and Aceae are making trans games for a
specific subset of trans gamers. These games are not just for those that have an incongruence
between their gender identity and their physical body, but for those gender nonconforming
individuals whose desire is not to assimilate into binary notions of male or female. Rather, these
players, like Flowers and Aceae, feel an affinity with the bizarre, the creepy, the cryptid or the
monster precisely because these figures cannot be assimilated into existing notions of humanity.
Escaping a world ruled by cishetero logics is exactly the point. GENDERWRECKED provides
the setting for that escape. So while the popular gaming press that has focused on games as
‘empathy generating machines’ claiming that playing games with protagonists different to

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oneself can open players up to a better understanding of the experiences of marginalized people,
this is not the goal of GENDERWRECKED. ‘Empathy games’ are so-named because they
encourage the player to inhabit the point-of-view of characters unlike themselves. As one
Polygon article claims, empathy games provide players with “specific challenges via game
mechanics,” and therefore “they allow us to walk in other people’s shoes” (Campbell). But
games, while they may be an interactive art form that can move through any number of unique
situations different from our own, cannot truly claim to be “showing us what it is to exist at the
extreme margins” as some proponents of empathy games claim (Campbell). While games like
Depression Quest do adopt game mechanics of limited choice, progressively removing the
players options in order to explain the pain and confusion of depression, the neurotypical player
gets to walk away from the game and back into their lives unburdened by mental illness.
Similarly, cisgender players moving through a game like GENDERWRECKED are not going to
understand what it is like to question one’s gender on a quotidian level, rather they provide a
bounded experience which the player can quit at any time. Empathy games can be accused of
minority tourism, where a player outside the minority group approaches the experience of the
minority without any risk of long-term ramifications. To call such tourism empathy is stretching
the term to the breaking point. As Aceae says, GENDERWRECKED is not an educational game
and its purpose is not to educate cisgender players on what it might feel like to be trans, or to
have them walk away with some expanded level of empathy towards trans people:
It was actually a really explicit design decision for the two of us, that we never wanted it
to be an empathy game. We never wanted it to be a game that gave you the experience of
what it’s like to be a trans person. We’ve had a couple of friends who are cisgender, don’t
really have any complicated feelings about their gender, play the game, and some of them
would come away saying things like, “I don’t feel like I really got it. I’m not sure I was
able to empathize with the characters very much. Do you want to change that?” And we
said, no. (Aceae quoted in Chan)

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GENDERWRECKED’s creators are focused on serving their own community through the game,
creating a game in which the developers see themselves in the hopes that other trans and
genderqueer gamers will see themselves as well.
If the reviews of the game are anything to go by, some trans gamers have been waiting to
be allowed to play through this kind of gender-bending experience, as un-universal as it may
claim to be. Most of the reviews discuss the game precisely as infinitely relatable, and though
Flowers and Aceae didn’t set out to make a game about any identifiable ‘universal trans
experience’ their own joys, interests, heartaches, and frustrations resonate with their genderqueer
players. Many see GENDERWRECKED as an experience of ‘beauty’ despite the monstrous
forms of nearly all its characters. Itch.io user traumadriver mentions this beauty as instrumental
to the success of their experience:
Poignant, honest, and beautiful, I found myself utterly in love with each character and felt
like I never wanted this delightfully monstrous journey to end. When it arrived, I started
replaying it again to see what else I could learn. I have honestly never felt my gender so
accurately represented before and have entirely changed my opinion on maggots.
7

Not only does traumadriver refuse to separate the monstrous from the beautiful, it is precisely
this combination that fueled their self-discovery and identification with the game. That they
would return to the game again immediately to learn more about gender, while simultaneously
seeing their own gender represented for the first time only serves to highlight the complicated
nature of the game and the journey that it asks players to undertake. Holding the monstrous and
the beautiful together in one’s mind, seeing these two not as binary opposites but as features
which can and should coexist, even be constitutive of one another, is a key part of the game’s
capaciousness. GENDERWRECKED asks us: If these monsters can be recognized as beautiful, as

7
For all individual non-professional reviews, see the Works Cited entry for
GENDERWRECKED’s download page. Reviews are hosted at the bottom of the game’s
purchase information.

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unique and valuable, as lovable, why can’t we? As user EnnuiOnMe puts it in their review: “so
beautiful. Let's all be genderbeasts together!”. Autostraddle’s Jenna Lykes reviewed the game by
specifically recommending it “for folks like me who have had a tough time articulating their
gender or even knowing how or where to start thinking about gender” rather than claiming it
might be universally understood, even within the “feminist online community for multiple
generations of kickass lesbian, bisexual & otherwise inclined ladies (and their friends)” that the
publication seeks to serve (“What is Autostraddle”). Lykes elaborates by focusing on the
authenticity of feeling in the game:
GENDERWRECKED’s central quest felt real and solid and truthful to me. I have spent a
lot of time thinking about gender (both as an abstract concept and how I personally relate
to it), and I’ve often struggled to put words to my feelings. GENDERWRECKED is the
first game I’ve ever played where I felt completely seen and understood as a person who
tentatively identifies as genderqueer.

Lykes identifies an affective tie to the game that made her feel like the game creators understood
her tentative identification. And it is precisely the ‘tentative’ that is important.
GENDERWRECKED doesn’t see the journey of gender as having a stable or identifiable end,
instead it is an ongoing process of rediscovery and practice. At the end of the game there’s no
expectation that player finally possesses gendered knowledge or should come to an epiphany.
What the game does instead is validate the struggle of trans and gender nonconforming people,
expanding our notions of what gender can be and providing a narrative space for the gender
misfits. The game understands that there is no end point, that gender is negotiated differently in
different spaces and at different points in our lives. What it does do is seek to make those that are
on the journey feel a little less lost, and a little more “seen and understood”.
I have argued that GENDERWRECKED’s commitment to a trans*temporality makes the
game register as deeply authentic to its trans and nonconforming players. The visual novel form

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allows GENDERWRECKED to slow the pace of the narrative and approximate the alternate time
scheme that often structures trans and gender nonconforming life worlds. Within this time
scheme, players are encouraged to take time for their own healing and to write the story of their
own identifications into the world. They can try on new pronouns, use the game to workshop a
new name or identification, and are encouraged to use the blank spaces within the game to reflect
on their own gender identity both in relation to the game’s strange characters and to their lives
outside the game. By opening this space, GENDERWRECKED becomes a mirror, allowing the
genderqueer player to access a utopic space of escape from the compulsion to assimilate into the
binary. Instead, even the most unusual player identifications are valued. It is the novel’s collision
with a digital interface, the production of the visual novel, that allows for this genderqueer
experience to flourish, to make use of the interactive form to revisit and revise past actions, and
to co-author the players experience of trans*temporal loops.

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Chapter 3
“‘Something furiously new’: The Helicopter Story”

If you’ve been online in the last ten years and had anything positive to say about gender
nonconforming people, especially in online spaces that include a mixture of political opinions,
chances are you’ve heard someone use the phrase “attack helicopter”. Look at the comment
section of any news piece about a transgender or gender nonconforming person, a thread about
gender-inclusive healthcare, or a YouTube video discussing pronoun usage and you’re likely to
see someone referencing their gender identity as “attack helicopter”. The phrase itself has
become a shorthand for a larger meme and copypasta
8
that mocks the existence of trans and
genderqueer or nonbinary individuals. According to posters of the meme, the joke is that if a
trans person can just wake up one day and decide that they identify with a gender different to the
one assigned to them at birth, then the hilarious right-wing respondent is allowed to identify
themselves as something else as well, perhaps as a different race, or an animal, or an attack
helicopter. KnowYourMeme dates this transphobic copypasta to March of 2014, when Team
Fortress 2 user Guuse wrote and saved it to Pastebin, intending it to be used as spam that would
auto-post when certain words were used in chat, but variations of it are still one of the most
common trolling responses to trans people’s desires to exert control over their own bodies. The
original copypasta spread from Guuse to the /pol board of 4chan and to then to Reddit, well-
known social media sites and incubators of internet meme culture more largely, by July of the

8
A copypasta (an English portmanteau of "copy," "paste" and "pasta”) is defined as any block of
text that is continuously copied and pasted verbatim or with few changes to a variety of forums
and social media conversations. It is, essentially, a textual meme rather than one based primarily
on imagery. These are usually spread by humans, rather than spam which is primarily spread via
bots.

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same year. Its popularity had spiked by March of 2016, when it became a nearly ubiquitous
right-wing gotcha response to those decrying the news about North Carolina’s HB2 (otherwise
known as the “trans bathroom bill”).
At this point, the attack helicopter specifically and the helicopter more generally has
become a shorthand, and while few people bother posting the entire original copypasta, it is
worth looking at in greater detail, as the joke reveals some of the key anxieties that cisgender
people associate with trans desire to self-identify:
I sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter. Ever since I was a boy I dreamed of
soaring over the oilfields dropping hot sticky loads on disgusting foreigners.
People say to me that a person being a helicopter is Impossible and I'm fucking
retarded but I don't care, I'm beautiful. I'm having a plastic surgeon install rotary
blades, 30 mm cannons and AMG-114 Hellfire missiles on my body. From now
on I want you guys to call me "Apache'' and respect my right to kill from above
and kill needlessly. If you can't accept me you're a heliphobe and need to check
your vehicle privilege. Thank you for being so understanding.

This passage, while obviously objectionable on several levels, gives us insight into the
underlying anxieties that drive anti-transphobic and especially anti-nonbinary rhetoric,
particularly online. First and foremost is the perversion the writer associates with gender
changes. Notice that the speaker is “sexually” identifying, rather than speaking specifically about
gender—cisheterosexist rhetoric often equates the two, arguing that changing one’s gender is
about sexual gratification or access to single-sex facilities. The sexual needs of the attack
helicopter seem to be those of violence and war, specifically a violence and war explicitly tied to
the rhetoric of the War on Terror in Afghanistan and Iraq. The reference to ejaculate in
“dropping hot sticky loads'' is then directly linked to the ability to kill later in the paragraph when
the author claims that their transformation will allow them to “kill from above and kill
needlessly.” It is the trans person’s ability to change one flesh into another, that renders them
dangerous. According to this, all we need is the help of a good plastic surgeon. According to this

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meme, what separates sexual fluid and missiles is, nominally, the same thing that separates the
“young boy” from the trans woman: semantics.
This is the danger that posters of the attack helicopter joke fear—that manhood itself, and
the attending power that goes with it, might be as fluid and substanceless as the language that
describes it. Trans women may toss it aside, trans men may take it up, and genderqueer people
might abandon it completely and therefore prove that gendered embodiment is and always has
been, less an immutable material fact and more a fiction perpetuated and maintained through
violence. The transgender woman here is likened to a weapon, something that levels towns and
kills citizens, something that ends life, colonizes countries. The flesh is not only reconfigurable
into a different gender presentation, or even a new sex, but the actual material of flesh can
become something outside of the body itself—the metal of the helicopter. Both the trans woman
and the helicopter then, become man-made bodies which can disrupt the current order. In the
case of the helicopter this means the destruction of civilians, in the case of the trans woman, this
may mean the destruction of gender, the destruction of the body assigned male, or even
(according to the transphobic meme), the destruction of what makes the trans woman human. To
leave masculinity is to become a threat, to leave humanity is to become a weapon. Genderqueer
escape might be accessible to the helicopter, leaving humanity does empower her but it requires
cooperation with an imperial military-industrial complex which renders that escape politically
impotent.
Now, nearly a decade after the meme’s origin and during the editing process of this
chapter, New York Magazine published a story titled “Fight the Anti-Trans Backlash With
Accountability, Not Silence” in which the reporter, Jonathan Chait, who is also known for

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writing a book about the importance of the Obama presidency, repeats allegations from a
supposed gender clinic employee in which the helicopter rears its (perhaps genderqueer) head:
‘Children come into the clinic using pronouns of inanimate objects like ‘mushroom,’
‘rock,’ or ‘helicopter,’ and were given puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones. One boy
had an ‘intense obsessive-compulsive disorder that manifested as a desire to cut off his
penis after he masturbated,’ and despite having ‘expressed no gender dysphoria,’ was
allegedly given hormone treatment. Many of the outcomes Reed claims to have witnessed
are unbearably sad: Children rushed onto hormones, or into surgery, coping with painful
side effects or (in one case) asking to have their breasts back. (Chait)

The only evidence Chait has for any of these assertions is a think-piece published on the website
of ex-New York Times Opinion Writer Bari Weiss, who left the Times after a piece widely
believed to be Anti-Semitic prompted calls for her resignation (Izadi and Barr). In 2022, Weiss’
The Free Press, which published Chait’s original source, published at least four articles
criticizing trans healthcare providers and in 2021 published another piece which was written by
noted anti-trans activist and author of Irreversible Damage Abigail Shrier. Shrier’s anti-trans
work is well-enough known to land her on GLAAD’s Accountability Project, which “catalogs
anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and discriminatory actions of politicians, commentators, organization
heads, religious leaders, and legal figures” (“Abigail Shrier —GLAAD Accountability Project”).
The Free Press’s first podcast, which debuts February 2023, is dedicated to the ways in which
J.K. Rowling has been ‘canceled’ for her anti-trans rhetoric on Twitter and elsewhere. Needless
to say, Weiss has a history of promoting transphobia and providing a platform for anti-trans
rhetoric. Any journalist obtaining their sources from Weiss’ work have an obligation to regard
that rhetoric with a good deal of skepticism, especially when promoting those views to a wider
audience. And while Chait’s article does provide a cursory and largely perfunctory
acknowledgement that “Of course, these are still allegations” he also elevates the views of anti-
trans trolls online by using the language of the attack helicopter meme as a kind of transphobic

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dog whistle. Ignorance of online troll culture is no excuse. When Twitter users informed Chait
that it was “interesting that the unverifiable anecdotes in this affidavit specifically call out two
people (or one person twice) identifying as an attack helicopter, since that's just a transphobic
joke taken from 4chan and you definitely should know that” (@lighterfandango, “It is
interesting…”). Chait responded by dismissing the accusation that he was spreading bad-faith
information. “I don't think it's important whether a mentally ill child said they identify as an
attack helicopter,” he replied (Jonathan Chait, @jonathanchait). One might wonder why he
included the accusation in his article if, indeed, it was unimportant.
Recent attempts to spam or troll politicians into believing ridiculous notions about
‘gender ideology’ (a catchall term that the right uses to talk about both contemporary feminism
and trans movements) have recently included the absurdist claim that high schools in some parts
of the country were installing litter boxes in their restrooms for those that identify as cats. This
claim is so profoundly unserious that it hardly needs refuting. Those familiar with the hyperbolic
and satiric rhetoric that emerges from right-wing spaces like 4chan would not have a hard time
immediately recognizing this claim as an outgrowth of the attack helicopter meme, this time
dragging the furry
9
community into the same crosshairs as those who are gender nonconforming.
The same logic of the attack helicopter meme applies here: if one can claim they are a different
gender, then why shouldn’t they be able to claim they are an animal? But physical identification
with an avatar of the monster or the object in digital media spaces is quite a different move from
the belief that one is actually and physically a cat in the real and present world. The litter box
rumor is attributed to the conservative Twitter account @LibsofTikTok that is run by former real

9
The furry community is a group of individuals who participate in dressing up together as
anthropomorphic animal characters, usually an avatar for oneself called a ‘fursona’. The
community revolves around in person and online events, fanart of one’s fursona, etc.

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estate agent Chaya Raichik (Stahl). The rumor then spread from Twitter to The Joe Rogan
Experience, where Rogan told “former U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard that a litter box was installed in
a school that his friend’s wife worked at for a girl who ‘identifies as an animal.’” (Kingkade et
al.) From there the rumor went wild, with NBC News finding that “At least 20 conservative
candidates and elected officials have claimed this year that K-12 schools are placing litter boxes
on campus or making other accommodations for students who identify as cats” (Kingkade et al.).
As troll rhetoric about gender nonconforming people and their place in society make their way
from Twitter to The Joe Rogan Experience and then into the mouths of Republican officials it
gathers credibility along the way. When the pipeline from 4chan or @LibsofTikTok to the House
of Representatives or the Senate is so direct, so fast, and so under-examined, it is critical that we
not only understand the culture of spaces where meme culture originates, but document and
historicize the effects that internet culture has on other cultural artifacts and political policy alike.
In this chapter, I trace the attack helicopter meme from its origins on 4chan onto other
social media sites like Reddit and Twitter, and finally how it spread into the trans literary world
through Isabel Fall’s 2020 “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter”. Following the genesis
and deployment of the attack helicopter meme provides the necessary context for understanding
why Fall’s attempts to recuperate and reclaim the attack helicopter as a symbol of ongoing trans
resistance ultimately failed when the story was first posted online. I argue that Fall’s story
suffered precisely because the attack helicopter meme is imbued with the ironic uncertainty and
distance often deployed by right-wing groups like the alt-right, a tactic which makes it seem
functionally impossible to discern if an anonymous poster or author is being genuine online. The
blowback to Fall’s piece eventually led to its pseudo-removal from internet, and the story is only
now accessible through the saved impressions on the Wayback Machine. Surprisingly, it is

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accessing the story through these impressions that activates a trans*temporal reading experience
of “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” and provides the formal support for what I claim
is a seminal piece of trans speculative fiction. The story of “I Sexually Identify as an Attack
Helicopter” is a story about the desire to continue to find doorways for genderqueer resistance,
even in the face of power’s attempts to assimilate and therefore neutralize the political and
cultural threat of trans bodies. Accessing and reading the story requires readers to become adept
at navigating digital archives, understanding iterative meme culture and tone, and ultimately
learning to negotiate multiple temporal registers simultaneously.

Figure 10. Oh so hilarious transphobic meme (circa 2014).
Meme What You Say
In order to understand how the Attack Helicopter meme circulated, influencing
genderqueer production and revisioning, it is worth thinking critically about the meme as
rhetorical strategy and tracing the history of its form. Doing so provides us with the tools to
understand memes as a form of repetitive humor and cooperative worldmaking, and helps us
track how they came to be used by transphobic users to discipline gender on the internet. The

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term “meme” is usually credited to evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, though it was Mike
Godwin’s Wired article in 1994 which applied the biological terminology to spreadable digital
culture and produced the definition we know it today. Godwin defines a meme as “an idea that
functions in a mind the same way a gene or virus functions in the body” and even coins the idea
of going viral by claiming that “an infectious idea (call it a ‘viral meme’) may leap from mind to
mind, much as viruses leap from body to body” (Godwin). The meme that Godwin identifies as
the impetus for his nomenclature is much less like the memes that we might conjure today when
presented with the word. Instead, Godwin had noticed that “in countless Usenet newsgroups, in
many conferences on the Well, and on every BBS” it had become commonplace to disagree with
the stated opinions of the original poster (OP) by comparing their ideas to Nazi ideology or
claiming that the OP was similar in some way to Hitler. While some of the Nazi comparisons
were topical, in “discussions about guns and the Second Amendment, for example, gun-control
advocates are periodically reminded that Hitler banned personal weapons”, more broadly, the
Nazi comparison was often nonsensical and had very little to do with the topic at hand. Godwin
notices this recurring trope, which he labels a meme, precisely because it was illogical, offensive,
and seemed to persist merely because it was inflammatory. From the outset, Godwin cautions
that though he sees potential in the idea of the counter-meme (the example from his experiment
being a meme spread to point out the ridiculousness of the Nazi comparison), memes have a real
potential to do harm in the offline world because they can also “crystallize whole schools of
thought” (Godwin).
Over time, the idea of a meme crystalized from Godwin’s example of any spreadable and
self-reproducing piece of cultural content, to the image-based macros and performance memes
that we now consider a cornerstone of digital culture. Rather, Shifman’s definition of the meme

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from Memes in Digital Culture more accurately describes contemporary memes. Shifman defines
the meme as “the propagation of items such as jokes, rumors, videos, and websites from person
to person via the Internet” (Shifman 2). He goes on to claim that the meme is marked by the
“sparking of user-created derivatives articulated as parodies, remixes, or mashups” (2). If in 1994
the foundation of the meme was its ability to move from mind to mind, to become somehow
endemic to digital culture in the height of its popularity, Shifman’s definition tells us that by
2013 ‘meme’ described a method of transition as well as the content of that transmission (“jokes,
rumors, videos, and websites”). Memes may be distinguished from other forms of “spreadable
media”
10
precisely because they explicitly solicit remixing and modification. Henry Jenkins is
quick to point out that we must not fall into the trap of thinking that memes are autonomous. He
reminds us that though “many accounts of memes and viral media describe media texts as ‘self-
replicating’” the concept of a “‘self-replicating’ culture is oxymoronic” and that all media
spreads and mutates according to “human agency” (Jenkins 19).
While in 1994 and in 2013, memes were defined by the way that they move through
digital spaces, contemporary thinking around memes are defined more like a contemporary
genre. No doubt memes like LOLCats, or Rage Comics come to mind at the mention of the term,
and Shifman’s emphasis on humor certainly fits contemporary examples of the meme. To
understand just what kind of humor makes memes successful and spreadable, we must consider
the origins of the contemporary meme: 4chan. Whitney Philips’ extensive study of message
board 4chan illuminates the motivations of internet trolls, many of whom use memes as a key
tactic in their trolling arsenal. She calls 2008-2011 the “‘golden years’. . .during which time
trolling subculture crystalized” (This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things 12). Because memes

10
Henry Jenkins’ term for media that audiences share “for their own purposes” and not the
official channels of dissemination from major media conglomerates or intellectual properties.

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are the language of the troll subculture, Philips argues that “memes only make sense in relation
to other memes, and allow participants to speak clearly and coherently to other members of the
collective while baffling those outside the affinity network” (22). Memes are the ultimate inside
joke—they indicate that a user is not only active in the same circles in which the meme is
circulating, they often point to the history of repetition, reflection, and remixing in which a chain
of successful iterations accrue layers of meaning over time. In doing so, they become a unifying
language of references and interactions, bonding the specific community in which they circulate.
Take for example a text-based meme that flooded Twitter in 2022, which satirized those
that grieve what they see as the loss of traditional masculine roles. “Y’all, as we know, gender is
a social construct” a Buzzfeed article on the meme begins, “people have been poking fun at what
men ‘should be doing’ versus what real life is like” (Adams). In this meme format, users posted
the phrase “Men used to go to war” and then followed it up with an example of a nontraditional
masculine activity that men in 2022 might do instead. User @ariellenyc’s example was “men
used to go to war now they dj in bushwick” (@ariellenyc), and @growing_daniel combined the
meme with another popular topic at the time—Mary Starr whose Instagram comics seemed to be
all about her dislike for her husband, who once ‘stole’ the fruit she was saving—in his tweet
“Men used to go to war. Now they eat the peach you were saving”. The joke here is twofold. On
the one hand, it's clear that there are men in many parts of the world who still go to war. In fact,
2022 was notable for the fact that Russia invaded Ukraine and a war was ongoing at the time the
meme was circulating. But in addition to that, the second half of the tweet makes it clear that
there have always been plenty of traits that are not associated with traditional masculinity that
characterize contemporary men. “Men used to go to war” another example begins, “now they
record podcasts” (@randomusements). Ostensibly, the recording of podcasts is not an innately

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gendered activity (though the stereotype of the podcast bro is relatively well-established), so
arguing that contemporary men make podcasts instead of going to war and this somehow impacts
their masculinity is foolish. However, it is the tongue-in-cheek criticism of the meme that both
mocks and reifies traditional gender roles. The rules of this meme are generated through
repetition and review by participants rather than articulated directly, but there are rules, and
adherence to these rules results in a more successful (i.e. more popular) post. The phrase “men
used to go to war” should be the opening of the post, with no in-depth explanation or indication
that one is following a meme format. The second half of the post should include a clearly-
contemporary account of what men might do today that their fathers or grandfathers would not
understand—either because that activity is seemingly un-masculine of them, or (more frequently)
because that activity was simply not available to earlier generations.
For the purposes of the discussion of the Attack Helicopter meme, it is worth noting that
memes must develop these rules and adherence to them over time. Each of the creators who
leverage the popular format must have seen at least more than one instance of others using the
format online. Otherwise, there is no way of knowing whether the single example that one
stumbles across is even a meme at all. So, to reference one of the “men used to go to war”
examples, knowledge of the outrage over Mary Catherine Starr’s publicly lambasted comics
about her husband and children, a completely different digital discourse from the meme format,
is even necessary to understand the example of the “men used to go to war” meme that
@growing_daniel tweeted above. This meta-meme commentary proves that we can immediately
know two distinct things about @growing_daniel: 1) that @growing_daniel has been moving in
circles where the discussion of Starr’s Instagram @Momlife_Comics was common and 2) those
same (or at least overlapping) digital circles were posting versions of the “men used to go to

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war” meme. Likely, this user or the users that they follow are interested broadly in issues of
gender, as both discourses have to do with the rigidness of gender roles and parenting. But one
thing is for sure, @growing_daniel cannot have generated the tweet that gained so much traction
in a vacuum. Just as @growing_daniel didn’t write the original “men used to go to war” meme,
neither were they the user that brought attention to Starr’s @Momlife_Comics. Instead, they
combined the two discourses into a single meme, providing pleasurable recognition to the
subsection of users who were familiar with both discourses. This kind of writing, I argue, is not
only a digital pastiche that highlights the necessary contextual savvy that meme writers must
have to have their posts become popular, but it also captures a precise moment in time, one in
which both the discussion of @Momlife_Comics and the “men used to go to war” meme were
circulating simultaneously. Just this limited information allows us to date the tweet to late
summer 2022, even if the date on the tweet were inaccessible.
Indeed, one of the defining characteristics of the form is that a popular meme is
impossible to generate in isolation, and it is impossible to generate in a single instance. Iteration
is the name of the game, and iteration takes time. In her “The Participatory Meme Chronotype”
Lynn Lewis argues that the main temporality of the meme is a combination of speed and chance.
I disagree with her assertion that “Internet memes are not evanescent” since referencing a meme
outside of its heyday often marks a user as behind the times, or out of touch. Lin Wang and
Brendan C. Wood have modeled the popularity of several internet memes over time and found
that “Depending on the type of meme, people may lose interest over time, so memes can die out
as well” but that in general, “Viral memes, in particular, exhibit a characteristic spike early in the
infectious stage, followed by a gradual decay of the number of infected people. This behavior is

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very similar to the dynamics of the classical SIR model” (Wang and Wood, 5442).
11
While
Wang and Wood do concede that like diseases, reinfection with older memes is possible, they
note that the typical patterns of meme proliferation are shaped in a similar manner, with meme
use lessening over time. Lest a user lose face or be seen as not properly internet-savvy, it does
matter when one recirculates or iterates on a meme, especially if we consider that popularity
within internet culture is easily quantifiable through upvotes, likes, etc.
This is not to say that memes never resurface or face a resurgence in popularity,
especially when one considers their movement from one community or platform to another.
Indeed, Lewis notes that “within that exclusive community of the Web with deep access, time
moves in waves rather than sequentially” (117-118). Memes may overlap in popularity or one
meme with a similar theme might recall another meme and thus bring it back into the spotlight.
Even more frequently memes might be combined, allowing double the pleasure of recognition
for those that are able to reconstruct the contexts of both memes. It is also true that new memes
remixed with older memes can prove that the user has a history within the specific online
community in which both memes have circulated. So for instance, referencing early memes not
only allows a poster to signal their meme literacy generally, but also weeds out those newer users
who have not had the benefit of seeing the context of the older works and therefore wouldn’t
fully grasp the connotations without explanations from other users (which are sometimes kind,
and sometimes less so). All this remixing, recognizing, and contextual reading generates a
specific archive of community knowledge in which the pleasure is derived from precisely the
confirmation that one is circulating in the ‘right’ spaces to accumulate meme knowledge. In this

11
For those like myself who are not regularly reading Applied Mathematical Modeling, the SIR
model here refers to a well-known epidemiological model which is used to compute the number
of people potentially infected with a disease over a specific time period.

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way, memes are community-building projects. They allow us to designate in and out groups, and
help us develop an aptitude for new forms of digital literacy and world-making.
Alt-ernative Media Spaces
Unfortunately, meme culture did not necessarily originate in communities which
celebrate difference. Much scholarly work has been done analyzing the spaces online in which
xenophobia, racism, and anti-LGBTQ sentiment flourished under the perhaps overly general
banner of the “alt-right”, especially since the group’s support of Donald Trump helped bolster
his agenda. Scholars have defined the alt-right in several ways, but it is worthwhile, if odious, to
go to the community itself to understand how the alt-right defines itself, which can give us
insight into the ways that digital rhetoric has influenced the combination of white nationalists
and internet trolls which make the alt-right a unique and multiheaded political creature. While
the term “alt-right” or “alternative right” was originally coined by Richard Spencer (who we
might gloss as the Brooks-Brothers-wearing, respectability-focused side of American white
supremacy), the alt-right’s tactical alliance with trolls and hackers are exemplified in the work of
Andrew Anglin’s publication and political followers. The Daily Stormer was one of the most
well-known of alt-right community publications, founded in 2013 by editor, white supremacist,
misogynist, xenophobe, and internet-troll-enthusiast Andrew Anglin who was described by a
December 2017 Atlantic piece as “an ideological descendant of men such as George Lincoln
Rockwell, who created the American Nazi Party in the late 1950s, and William Luther Pierce,
who founded the National Alliance, a powerful white-nationalist group, in the 1970s” (O’Brien).
Anglin’s Daily Stormer, which he named after “Hitler’s favorite tabloid, Der Stürmer”, was
“consistently ranked among the top 100,000 most-viewed websites from 2013 to 2017” and its
removal was obtained only through protesting against its hosting company (“Andrew Aglin”

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Southern Poverty Law Center). What I mean to say is that Andrew Anglin’s Daily Stormer was
more than relevant to the fringe right-wing of American politics, it was deeply influential. And
though the site still exists on the dark web
12
, its exit from mainstream web channels has made a
significant dent in its ability to shape current political conversations.
At the height of its popularity, Anglin published a piece on his site titled “A Normie’s
Guide to the Alt-Right”
13
. The “Guide” not only gives us insight into the views that Daily
Stormer writers held, but explains the tactics that Anglin and his followers used to make the alt-
right influential and very difficult to combat (especially online). I will quote at some length from
the screed here, not because I want to provide another public forum for Anglin’s bigotry, but
because it is useful for deconstructing how he understands his position between the “older White
Nationalist movements” and what he claims is “fundamentally a youth movement, mainly made
up of millennials” (Anglin). He claims that the alt-right is “a ‘mass movement’ in the truest
possible sense of the term, a type of mass-movement that could only exist on the internet, where
everyone’s voice is as loud as they are able to make it” disparate factions within white nationalist
circles have come together in the alt-right to “become a new political collective, a type of hive
mind” composed of internet trolls, conspiracy theorists, libertarians, anti-feminists,
#GamerGaters, and existing Nazi and white nationalist organizations. Anglin goes on to give a
cursory history of the movement, which he claims has found a reason to coalesce and put

12
The dark web is it is a network of online encrypted content not searchable through or crawled
by search engines. Sites on the dark web are only accessible only using the Tor browser, and one
needs to have the specific URL in order to reach them. The Tor network provides as close to
complete anonymity online as possible and allows access to sites on the dark web from versions
of mainstream sites like The New York Times (for those that are in countries where such content
is censored) to websites selling illegal substances.
13
“A Normie’s Guide to the Alt-Right” was published in August of 2016, mere months before
the election of Donald Trump, who the Daily Stormer openly endorsed.

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differences in ideology aside in order to support Donald Trump, the “nexus of the centerpoint” of
the alt-right political world.
I am looking at Anglin to examine the ways in which alt-right leaders like him see the
internet and memes more specifically as a foundational tactic of their politics, even claiming
outright that “the core identity of the current Alt-Right originates from the highly intellectual
meme and trolling culture which was birthed on 4chan in the 00’s”. Whitney Philips notes that
one of the most basic tenets of meme culture as it cemented on 4chan in the early 2000s was the
dictum that “nothing should be taken seriously” and trolls therefore “regard public displays of
sentimentality, political conviction, and/or ideological rigidity as a call to trolling arms” (Philips,
25). Anglin and the alt-right saw this death of sincerity, and recognized that the indecipherability
of irony that originated in places like 4chan could be used to obfuscate and disseminate a white
supremacist ideology that it was no longer acceptable to claim outright (at least anywhere one
might be personally associated with the ideas). Leveraging irony and internet humor as a shield,
therefore, gave the alt-right a level of plausible deniability which allowed them to reach out to
new, internet-savvy potential members through the language of trolling that already appealed to
them. Anglin’s “Normie Guide to the Alt-Right” states this generic move outright but claims it as
a necessary move in a jaded contemporary society:
Some of the ways the movement presents itself can be confusing to the
mainstream, given the level of irony involved. The amount of humor and
vulgarity confuses people. The true nature of the movement, however, is serious
and idealistic. . . From the point when I first became active in what has become
the Alt-Right movement, it was my contention that in an age of nihilism, absolute
idealism must be couched in irony in order to be taken seriously. This is because
anyone who attempts to present himself as serious will immediately be viewed as
the opposite through the jaded lens of our post-modern milieu (Anglin)

Here, Anglin sets out the difficulty in understanding the alt-right from an outside perspective. If,
as he claims, members of the alt-right believe that it is impossible to be genuine in contemporary

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America without being attacked for one’s beliefs (which we might contend has more to do with
the content of Anglin’s beliefs than the form they are expressed, but I leave that aside for the
moment) he claims that it necessarily follows that the true ideology of white supremacist groups
like the alt-right must be expressed through insincerity, or at the very least as Jacob Siegal
warned in 2015, through “using bombast and absurdism to hide racist tropes in conceptual
riddles”. Most importantly though, at least for the purposes of this chapter, is Anglin’s assertion
that the humor, the vulgarity, and the irony that characterizes the alt-right originated in leftist
modes of “culture-jamming and various other forms of conscious social-engineering” (Anglin).
Therefore the parodic tone of alt-right trolling is difficult to combat with traditional leftist
strategies, largely because the right has co-opted those strategies for their own ends.
The affinity for fascist and white supremacist ideas may have already existed within troll
culture, where use of Nazism as a kind of ultimate taboo, was often deployed precisely for that
shock value. Remember that accusations Nazism was one of the patterns which Godwin first
identified as a meme in the first place. While then it was the accusation that one’s views were as
bad as the Nazis that caused outrage, on 4chan, it was often posts purporting to support Nazism
that created the most shock and outrage and generated the most “lulz”, the desired goal of the
troll in the first place. Philips defines “lulz” as “similar to Schadenfreude—loosely translated
from German as reveling in the misfortune of someone you dislike—but has much sharper teeth”
and notes that “The claim—and it is a common claim within the troll space—that lulz is equal
opportunity laughter is belied by the fact that a significant percentage of this laughter is directed
at people of color, especially African Americans, women, and gay, lesbian, bisexual,
transgender, and queer (GLBTQ) people” (24-25). Racial epithets, slurs against queer people,
anti-Semitism, and other shocking language are and were a hallmark of troll culture, which was

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purportedly more about creating confusion in its targets than it was holding any specific set of
actual prejudices: “Nominally, the trolls, like punk rockers, Dadaists, and countless others before
them, were reveling in breaking taboos. It was never clear to what end. Were those bad words
and old slanders being bandied around as a kind of satire, demystifying ingrained prejudices, or
were they the sharp points at the edge of free speech, a way of insisting that no idea could be off
limits? No one was quite sure, perhaps not even the trolls” (Siegal).
While trolls often claimed that they generated offensive content in order to shock rather
than because they believed in the ideology of that content, not everyone was in on the joke.
Some percentage of meme culture enthusiasts always believed in the ideologies of hate that they
spread. Still others likely became desensitized to this content through their time on sites where
white supremacy was given the green light to espouse any of its vitriolic beliefs through the
irony and anonymity that shielded them from criticism. It was the online, millennial version of
Donald Trump’s go-to excuse for being caught saying something offensive: he’s just joking.
“We simply can't tell when the candidate is joking,” Izadi Elahe wrote in The Washington Post in
August of 2016, the same month in which Anglin was posting his overview of the alt-right
online, “At times it's reminiscent of alt-comedy, when the punch line isn't so obvious. And this
uncertainty can allow Trump surrogates and supporters to portray a shocking statement, after the
fact, as Trump ‘just joking.’” Alt-right and fascist trolls “manage to operate under the radar by
being able to excuse their behaviors and rhetoric as just ‘trolling’ or ‘joking’” and thus create an
ambiguity about their sincerity (DeCook). That ambiguity in turn serves to “absolve them of
blame or accusations of what their real intentions are” (DeCook). The ‘just joking’ excuse did
not originate with Trump, nor does it erase or obfuscate the dog-whistles that Trump or the alt-

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right use. Rather, it merely allows participants to deny their hate rhetoric in public while
knowing that like-minded interlocutors understand their denial is the true performance.
Meme to Story
I want to turn from my gloss of memes more broadly to look at an outgrowth of the
“attack helicopter” language and the scandal that its reuse by trans woman Isabel Fall caused in
2020. Isabel Fall’s short story, “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” was published on
science fiction site Clarkesworld in January of 2020. The story, which was renamed “Attack
Helicopter” and was nominated for a Hugo Award in that same year, was viciously attacked by
the trans and gender nonconforming community online not long after it was posted. The story
takes the idea of the attack helicopter gender from the transphobic meme seriously—it is
premised on the idea that in a sort of pseudo post-apocalyptic future, the government and
military have embraced nonhuman gender transformation and assist those who desire nonhuman
transition by turning them into military weapons of war. During the story our protagonist
explains the conditions that helped to create the helicopter body that they craved, meditates on
femininity and womanhood, and also carries out a mission for their commanders with their
gunner (and other half). The story, which I will argue is a digital object both in its form and
function, also employs short lexias, fragments of several intertwined timelines that move the
reader between the present moment and a sort of theoretical non-space that is reminiscent of
many contemporary queer works (including a similarity with the tradition of queer autotheory I
discuss in Chapter 1). The story serves as Fall’s attempt to reclaim the nonhuman as a door or
escape out of the hierarchies of cisheterosexual binary gender, and it does so through asking
what it might be like to feel one’s body is a weapon of war, what ethical and political conditions
might give rise to such an embodiment, and how gender fugitivity might continue to mutate and

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thrive even when the most radical of nonhuman embodiments have become assimilated into
hierarchies of state power. Though the discussion of the story itself can tell us much about the
way that trans*temporality works to create a fractured yet cooperative writing and reading
experience in a hybridized work, the discourse around the story is just as instructive. Though
many of the original conversations about the work have been lost to the ephemerality of Twitter
(and many users reversed or deleted their comments when the fallout from harassment of Fall
became more difficult to justify), piecing together the conversation and outrage that surrounded
“I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” teaches us more about how irony has functioned
within meme culture and highlights the limits of sincerity in the contemporary digital sphere.
When “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” was first published to Clarkesworld,
it didn’t take long for detractors to emerge on Twitter decrying the story and questioning its
purpose, wondering whether recuperating or reiterating the meme upon which the premise of the
story is based was Fall’s goal. Phoebe Barton, Nebula finalist and trans woman, described her
outrage at the time this way: “‘I Sexually Identify As An Attack Helicopter’ is a meme. It was
built for a specific purpose. To mock and to hurt. Think of it as a gun. A gun only has one use:
for hurting” (“‘I Sexually Identify” @aphoebebarton). She goes on to note specifically that there
are some who haven’t been on the internet for as long as she has, or don’t have the history with
the attack helicopter meme that she has had: “I've heard that there are trans people out there who
didn't know it was a hurtful meme? And you know what? That's great! It means that time has
passed and it's fallen out of awareness!” (@aphoebebarton “I’ve heard”). Some might not have
the savvy and meme literacy skills that Barton has, she claims, and so it is her job to educate
those that haven’t “been on the internet since 1998” that the meme is so hurtful comparing it to a
firearm doesn’t seem like gross hyperbole (@aphoebebarton “(But I’ve been”). Another reader

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noted that even if one thought that the story itself had literary merit, the fact that it became the
most talked about short story of the moment precisely because it engaged with the meme was
suspect enough: “‘Regardless of what your take is on the attack helicopter story, I feel one thing
should be noted,’ @bogiperson tweeted. ‘A trans story which explicitly invokes rightwing
extremism in the title got more notice than ANYthing else trans-writing-wise in the past year.
What does this tell trans writers?’” (@bogiperson quoted in Ellis). In this criticism, it isn’t even
the story that is at fault, rather the controversy the story created elevated it to a height that works
by other trans writers have not been able to achieve.
Many of the responses to the story on Twitter circulated around the question of whether
the story endorsed the original use of the meme or whether it was trying to reimagine and
reclaim the meme precisely by taking its tenets seriously. For example, one of the critics of the
story, D Franklin (whose Twitter bio reads “Classicist; SFF fan; book addict and bookseller.
Angry queer. Prons. they/them”), highlights how closely some of the rhetoric in the story follows
the line of thinking which makes the meme offensive to transgender people in the first place. The
first thing they take issue with is the title, which they claim, “instantly sets every trans person on
the defensive” (Franklin, “The title is the first hurdle here…”). Franklin also claims that even if
Fall were using the logic of the meme against itself, acquiescing to that logic serves the purpose
of those that would attack the trans community: “All of that is straight out of the Reddit
transphobes’ playbook and it doesn’t stop being offensive when done with an attempt at a
knowing wink.” (Franklin, “All of that is straight…”). Franklin is correct that the right,
specifically the trolling, internet-oriented, alt-right of the last fifteen years has repeatedly used
humor as a cover for transphobia, anti-Semitism, racism, and other forms of hate. This tone of

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internet-irony has been weaponized, and the affordances of Twitter do indeed help to power and
re-power the indecipherability that powers irony on the alt-right.
Trans and gender nonconforming sci-fi writers and fans did have reason to be suspicious
of the Fall story when it was first published. Only a few years before, in 2015 and again in 2016,
the Hugo Awards experienced an attempted hijacking by trolls that forced them to change the
way that the awards were conducted. The Hugo Awards, arguably the most prestigious award in
the genre of science fiction, are conducted through popular vote. If you pay the $40 membership
to the Hugo’s sponsoring organization Worldcon, then you are eligible to attend the convention
and to vote on the award winners. Or at least those were the rules until in 2015 a group calling
themselves the “Sad Puppies” attempted to generate a new slate of nominations through
‘packing’ the open ballot. This resulted in six nominations for relatively unknown writer John C.
Wright. Salon contributor Arthur Chu noted that he’d only heard of Wright because Wright is
prone to “incredible rants about how everything from the Syfy Network to "The Legend of
Korra" is too gay for him to tolerate” (Chu). That year, five of the categories were not even
awarded, many voters had rejected the nominations of The Sad Puppies and decided instead to
vote for the option to not hand out an award at all. The Sad Puppies returned to try again in 2016.
It was, at the time, the beginning of a backlash against broadening representation of authors and
works that had historically been marginalized in science fiction as well as in the wider publishing
industry.
The story’s backlash on Twitter also escalated so quickly precisely because the
originating meme had been performed and reperformed on Twitter, one of the spaces where
discussion of controversial topics, and ‘hot takes’ on important social issues abound. The ‘attack
helicopter’ joke was so prolific that in 2016, even the official Twitter account for video game

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character/franchise Sonic the Hedgehog responded to a question with the ‘joke’. Unsurprisingly,
the replies to this tweet are polarized, some claiming that the joke is offensive, and others asking
“How the hell are trans people getting offended over this?! How bloody stupid” (Lady P,
@Pineapples1991). What I want to point to here to think through the spread of the attack
helicopter joke, however, is the number of retweets that spread and reperformed this joke,
especially when tweeted by a major brand like the Sonic franchise. The Sonic attack helicopter

Figure 11: Official Sonic the Hedgehog Twitter account repeats transphobic joke in 2016.

tweet had received nearly 6,000 retweets at the time of writing. These retweets authorize and
reauthorize the transphobic joke through repetition. The full copypasta text is no longer
necessary, merely the invoking of the “attack helicopter” phrase is enough to mock trans people.
The meme had been repeated so much that transphobia almost became embedded in the terms
themselves— “attack helicopter” effectively became a shorthand for a kind of white, ironic,
right-wing, and often ‘joking’ internet transphobia.

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However, not all reactions to the story were negative. In fact, many readers saw the story
as perfectly in accordance with the tradition of speculative queer fiction which tackles questions
of bodily autonomy, the plasticity of the flesh, and a dystopian future in which queer and trans
resistance to right-wing political ideologies become incorporated into those ideologies to be used
towards violent ends. After all, Vox critic Emily St. James called the story, “a slippery, knotty
piece of fiction that captured a particular trans feminine uncertainty better than almost anything I
have ever read” (St. James). It was perhaps this slippery nature that opened the story to criticism
from those who didn’t take a clear pro-trans message away from the protagonist. Trans author
Gretchen Felker-Martin, author of the popular trans dystopian horror novel Manhunt reposted a
link to the story on the Wayback Machine after it was formally taken down and added: “Our
community is so delicate. We cannot treat each other like this. We cannot scream and pitch a fit
whenever one of us makes art a little more challenging than a gentle back rub” (Felker-Martin).
The negative reactions on the story and on Twitter eventually led Clarkesworld to
remove the story from the January 2020 issue online. In a letter to the community from editor
and founder Neil Clarke, he emphasized that the story was removed to safeguard Fall from
further attack. “This is not censorship,” he wrote, “She needed this to be done for her own
personal safety and health” (Clarke). In this piece, Clarke addresses some of the most common
reactions to the story, which include the belief that the story itself was a hoax, that Fall was an
anti-trans activist, that she was a neo-Nazi (because her bio listed her birth year as 1988
14
), and

14
According to the Anti-Defamation League’s list of general hate symbols: “88 is a white
supremacist numerical code for "Heil Hitler." H is the eighth letter of the alphabet, so 88 = HH =
Heil Hitler. One of the most common white supremacist symbols, 88 is used throughout the
entire white supremacist movement, not just neo-Nazis. One can find it as a tattoo or graphic
symbol; as part of the name of a group, publication or website; or as part of a screen name or e-
mail address. It is even sometimes used as a greeting or sign-off (particularly in messages on
social networking websites)” (“88”).

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that the story was supposed to serve as either clickbait or award-bait. Indeed, Clarke goes on to
remind readers that the magazine will not shy away from publishing stories merely because they
address subjects that are controversial or complicated. He argues that “To do so would be
equivalent to ignoring the existence of the people that they represent. Suggesting that these
stories shouldn’t appear in broader SF publications denies their place in the wider community
and limits their audience” (Clarke). Additionally, Clarke highlights Twitter discourse as a
platform that fundamentally has the power to distort reactions to a piece like Fall’s and cautions
readers specifically that “discussions there tend to lack nuance, and it is very easy to amplify
negative accusations. This leads to a cycle of anger and retaliation that can quickly shut down
effective discussion” (Clarke). It is important to Fall’s story that the negative reactions and
discourse which chased the story from the internet occurred on a social media platform like
Twitter. It is the Twitter affordances and algorithms that privilege outrage and, as Clarke notes,
can flatten out the nuances that make a story like Fall’s so effective.
What is queer work if not the exploration of specifically that which is taboo, a
reclamation of that which has been used as a weapon against us? While in my previous chapters I
showed how trans and gender non-conforming people embraced the notion of bodily dissolution
or transformation into the monstrous, Fall’s story shows how even rethinking the “stuff” of
gender might not extricate us from the regimes of power that govern that gender. According to
Fall’s story, power is not merely enacted over the fleshy substance of the body, but works upon
the very language that constitutes our subjectivity. To be a subject is to be leveraged by a
militaristic global regime that punishes that which it cannot incorporate and incorporates that
which it can no longer punish. Whereas previous texts in this project from GENDERWRECKED
to the works of Huxtable and Whitehead celebrate a conscious rejection of humanity and its

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disciplining gender binary, Fall’s story takes the right-wing meme of the attack helicopter
seriously to question whether the dissolution of a binary system can bring any form of escape.
No Escape: Trans*Temporality and Gender-Making in the Helicopter Story
One of the key differences between Isabel Fall’s story and the texts that I examined in
Chapters 1 and 2 is that Fall’s story seems to be relatively straightforward formally, at least at
first glance. The story intertwines two different timelines as the protagonist Barb both
experiences the present moment in which they are focused on a military mission and ensuing
dogfight, and a secondary timeline in which Barb slows down and directly addresses the reader
to explain what gender has meant to them and what lead them to pursue a new embodiment as a
helicopter. These dueling time schemas do not, at first glance, make the story seem as if it
participates in trans*temporal formations, indeed I might argue that one of the reasons the story
fails at its recuperation of the attack helicopter meme is precisely because it does not consciously
step outside of traditional narrative timelines. However, the story has acquired a trans*temporal
frame by virtue of the way it must now be accessed and read. Housed within the Internet
Archive’s Wayback Machine, “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” gathers a diverse set
of temporal impressions from the interface that surrounds and contains it, especially as that
interface informs and impacts the narrative temporality of the content itself. This hybrid
timescape, generated largely by accident by the blowback that Fall received after the story was
posted, generates its own meaning and experience in excess of that which readers may have
encountered when the story existed on the Clarkesworld site. In looking critically at the
experience of accessing Fall’s work when it no longer has a ‘proper’ home on the internet, I am
not only interested in thinking through the effectiveness of Fall’s project to recuperate the
transphobic meme originally generated on 4chan, nor am I merely highlighting the hybridized

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nature of the helicopter body, but I argue that these three factors—the digital context of the
meme, the experimental body of the trans-human Barb, and the story’s existence in a digital
temporal space that is simultaneously past and present—coalesce to activate a trans*temporal
literary experience. In the story’s failure to recuperate the meme, therefore, it has become a more
dynamic, complicated, and important object than it otherwise could have been.
The story doesn’t shy away from its main conceit, that Barb’s body and gender have been
fundamentally reconfigured physically and socially so that they inhabit the roles and
requirements of the attack helicopter. In “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” the
transhuman protagonist makes it clear that it was their
15
choice to undergo a gendered change
that then compels them to focus on the mission in front of them. Now they claim, “with my
dopamine system tied up by the reassignment surgery, fully assigned to mission behavior, I can’t
fall in love with anything except my own purpose” (Fall). Barb’s bodily transformation also
inevitably transforms their desire, honing it and directing it towards the purpose of the helicopter,
to perform the military task assigned to them. In Fall’s story, to become an object is to take on
the desires and purpose of that object, and the purpose of the helicopter is to execute the mission.
“To the people who say a woman would’ve refused to do what I do,” Barb reminds us, “I say—
Isn’t that the point?” (Fall). The speaker of the story sees themself as triumphant, as a miracle of
technology that fuses flesh and steel, that reimagines the contours of the body, and understands
gender as a network of human and non-human parts. “But I decided that I was done with
womanhood” they claim, and instead chose to become something “furiously new” (Fall). What

15
I’m not sure what pronouns are appropriate for the protagonist, after all, there aren’t obvious
pronouns for a helicopter. The speaker does say that “‘attack helicopter” is a gender identity, not
a biological sex: “My dog tags and Form 3349 say my body is an XX-karyotope somatic female”
(Fall). Though I am risking misgendering the protagonist, I refer to them here with they/them
pronouns in the absence of other indicators. Especially since the protagonist shares their gender
with their gunner Axis, it seems more reasonable than ever to use ‘they’.

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might it mean to have a gender that radically transforms the flesh into metal, nerves into actual
electrical wiring, a single brain into a shared consciousness with a shared objective? This
transformation of gender and body into something else, something not only outside the gender
binary but outside humanity doesn’t just equate gender with technology, it connects the
protagonist to others around them and to the digital context in which they now appear.
The protagonist speaks compellingly about their gender as a technology, and describes
how gender technology compelled them even before they transitioned from woman to helicopter.
Barb describes the technologies of womanhood that excited them, how “nails cut like laser arcs
and painted violent-bright” and “the home beauty-feedback kits that told you what to eat and
dose to adjust your scent, your skin, your moods” were pathways to a relationship with
womanhood where they could take control—and paths that ultimately led her to her current
gender. “When I was a woman,” they say, “I wanted to machine myself.” (Fall). To use machine
as a verb here is particularly telling. On the one hand, we can see this machining as indicative of
her pathway towards becoming a literal machine, a tool, a technology. At the same time, they list
these tactics they used as a ‘woman’ to machine their gender, to flex a performance that was
simultaneously less-than-human and entirely aligned with femininity. The promise of birth
control that allowed them to “turn my period off” or the “Women who made build-your-own-shit
videos” and “their own huge wedge heels and fitted bras and skin-thin chameleon dresses” were
Barb’s favorite parts of the gender they’d been assigned at birth. These women Barb admired
were also ‘machining’ themselves. They “talked about their implants the same way they talked
about computers, phones, tools: technologies of access, technologies of self-expression” (Fall).
Fall’s protagonist’s insistence that gender has always been a set of technologies isn’t
particularly groundbreaking. But Barb took gender technology and applied it to herself in a new

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and more literal way. If all gendered performance is a kind of technological experimentation
with the stuff of the body and how that body is socially interpreted, what Barb has done in
becoming an attack helicopter is reaching ‘peak gender’ by transforming herself into hardware,
the very substrate on which gender ‘software’ is able to run. It wasn’t just the technologies of
gender that excited them, it was the fact that gender was always a technology: “I did not want
those dresses, those heels, those bodies in the way I wanted my boyfriend. I wanted to possess
that power. I wanted to have it and be it” (Fall). Here Barb echoes some of the language that is
often used by trans people who are coming to grips with their gender identities, where there is
some confusion between desiring the other because you want to be intimate with them and
desiring the other because you want to be them. What Barb wanted was not womanhood
wrapped in technological precision, rather they wanted to inhabit technological precision itself.
The distinction between helicopter pilot and helicopter here is important. Barb indicates
through the descriptions of their gender that they view their body as a kind of hybrid between the
human and the machine:
Now my skin is boron-carbide and Kevlar. Now I have a wrist
callus where I press my hydration sensor into my skin too hard and
too often. Now I have bit-down nails from the claustrophobia of
the bus ride to the flight line. I paint them desert colors,
compulsively.

Barb’s skin is a combination of materials meant to withstand violent impact and yet their wrist
can still become callused with frequent use, their nails can also be bitten down so presumably
their nails are not made of a combination of “boron-carbide and Kevlar”. The flesh of the body
has changed here, but Barb still relates to their body in some of the human, quotidian ways that
we all experience our bodies—our habits or routines leave impressions upon us, both physical
and emotional. Barb’s gender points her towards specific objects and experiences; the

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claustrophobia of not being in the sky leaves traces on her nails, the hydration sensor leaves a
rough patch on her wrist. This may be a body that is quite literally armored against enemy fire,
but the difficulties and anxieties of daily life still configure that body. Becoming an attack
helicopter has not inoculated them against the histories of movement and use that leave traces.
Ahmed reminds us that “For an object to make this impression is dependent on past histories,
which surface as impressions on the skin” (Queer Phenomenology 2). The impression matters for
Ahmed’s project of phenomenological expansion, indeed bodies from flesh to Kevlar must
inhabit space, and how they do so changes them in physical and social ways: “The work of
inhabiting space involves a dynamic negotiation between what is familiar and unfamiliar, such
that it is still possible for the world to create new impressions, depending on which way we turn,
which affects what is within reach” (Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology 7). Here Ahmed does not
use ‘impression’ as a noun, but as she often does, considers how the action within the concept,
the ‘pressing’ of impression, reveals how our bodies take on traces of the paths we take through
the worlds we inhabit.
This construction of, or perhaps modification of, the body through its daily extension into
space is useful for an understanding of the form of “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter”
itself as well. Because Fall asked that Clarkesworld take down her story after the backlash she
received, accessing the story online at this moment requires the use of the Wayback Machine, a
tool provided by the Internet Archive, whose goal is to build “a digital library of Internet sites
and other cultural artifacts in digital form” by archiving sites or at least snapshots of those sites.
Currently the archive hosts over 735 billion web pages, one of which is a snapshot of the
Clarkesworld site on which we can still access “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter”
(“About the Internet Archive”). The Internet Archive is thus essentially a repository for those

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pieces of digital information that are discarded—websites that have been updated (either had
their designs or content changed), those that have been abandoned and no longer exist at their
original addresses, those posts or comments that have been deleted because of adverse reactions
or changing opinions. While a complete index of the billions of changes that have been made in
the 26 years of internet history that are saved within the Internet Archive is impossible, the
Wayback Machine provided by the Internet Archive serves as a temporal portal into the non- or
transiently existent content that constitutes the history of the internet. Though the Internet
Archive has been used as a historical object to study the evolution of webpages or to access
content, like the Fall story, which is no longer available, there is little discussion of the temporal
experience of accessing content in this manner or the effects that the Wayback Machine has on
the content that it hosts. Examining “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” through the
Wayback Machine produces a dissonance in the reader, who is simultaneously asked to occupy
three different temporal registers—the imagined post-apocalyptic future in which Barb and Axis
occupy their attack helicopter body, the direct address of Barb’s gender theorization, and the
Internet Archive’s interface which provides an imperfect portal to the past. After all, what the
Internet Archive saves is not, like physical archives of materials, the object itself. The webpages
that the Archive houses are often not fully functional—links are broken or direct one to
nonexistent pages, some images fail to load or display correctly, ads may or may not be relevant
or even function properly, so the interactivity of the webpage within the archive is severely
damaged. The Wayback Machine’s FAQ admits that of the pages indexed by the organization,
some “are easily stored in an archive” and some “fall apart completely” (Wayback Machine
FAQ). In general, “When a dynamic page contains forms, JavaScript, or other elements that
require interaction with the originating host, the archive will not contain the original site’s

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functionality.” (Wayback Machine FAQ). As of February 2023, it is estimated that 98.3% of all
webpages incorporate JavaScript as a client-side programming language, indicating that the
snapshots the Wayback Machine and Internet Archive house of these sites will therefore be at
least partially static and in some ways, broken (W3Techs). While the Archive attempts to save
as much detailed information in each capture as possible, the object one looks at when we look at
a webpage through the Wayback Machine is an impression of the original, rather than the
original itself.
If we believe, as Ahmed does, that “The temporality of orientation reminds us that
orientations are effects of what we tend toward, where the ‘toward’ marks a space and time that
is almost, but not quite, available in the present” (Queer Phenomenology 20) then the temporal
condition of “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” is profoundly shaped by its location
within the Internet Archive. The pastness of the Archive has become its ‘home’ and as we turn to
face the story, we necessarily orient ourselves towards the past object, one which simultaneously
exists in front of us and has ceased to exist in the ‘present moment’ of the web. I argue that this
Matryoshka-doll-style temporal effect complicates the temporality of Fall’s story, which is
therefore unable to settle into a single or even double temporal register but loops back and forth
between the imagined future of the narrative and the marked pastness of its status as a digital
literary object. The story exists in a temporal no-man’s land in which its status becomes blurry.
Like the helicopter body of the protagonist, the story therefore acquires the impressions of the
Archive which it touches and upon which it depends for its survival. Katherine Hayles reminds
us that “materiality should be understood as existing in complex dynamic interplay with content,
coming into focus or fading into the background, depending on what performances the work
enacts” (“Print is Flat” 71). For a story like “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter”

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therefore, the formal properties and interfaces of the Internet Archive, along with the reasons the
story must be accessed from said archive in the first place, all leave their mark on the
performance of gender that the story enacts.
On the most basic level, the Internet Archive’s interface is visually intrusive and provides
the reader with information about the story that would otherwise be hidden in the story’s original
context. When viewing the story through the Wayback Machine, the top of the browser window
is occupied by information about the specific capture of the story that one is viewing. The data
includes the original URL of the story, the date that the capture was indexed down to the second
UTC, and links to the specific page’s version history. It provides a search bar where one might
input other URL addresses, an option to share the capture that one is viewing, and even an option
to view an image-based capture of the site (or at least the section of the site available without
scrolling, sometimes referred to as the section “above the fold” or the “landing page”). This
header bar on the Wayback Machine indicates that one is not viewing the original content, but
rather a static facsimile of that content, contained within the borders of the Archive. Thus the
indexed page that one is examining is necessarily not to original scale—in order to fit all the
content within the boundaries of the border, it is necessary to shrink it down slightly. As one
scrolls down the page, the surrounding interface of the Wayback Machine shows what
percentage of the page you have viewed, so that as the user reads Isabel Fall’s short story, the
Archive periodically provides feedback about how much of the indexed web page remains to be
seen. While the numbers are not large, they are a reminder that what we are viewing is no longer
existent, that we only have access to the content mediated through the moment in which it was
fixed in place. As “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter" was originally meant to be
published on a functioning and dynamic website, with an accompanying comment section that

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would provide reader reactions to the story, contemporary readers cannot have the same
experience that readers would have before the site was removed. Instead, those reading the story
now experience an echo of the story, an object that simultaneously does and does not exist
anymore. The story inhabits a temporal rift.
This rift becomes even more legible when we consider the forms of address and
temporality that structure the actual content of Fall’s story. In the sections in which we are
witnessing Barb and Axis on a mission to bomb a target in the U.S. war against the Pear Mesa
Budget Committee the action is described in present tense, which collapses the proximity
between the reader in our own time and the attack helicopter in an undetermined, seemingly
post-apocalyptic future. This present-tense narration of the dogfight that ensues between Barb
and Axis and the pursuing fighter jet makes the speeds up the action such that the reader finds
themself nearly in the cockpit with these trans-human weapons. After a section in which Barb
describes how their gender reassignment changed their feelings of innate vulnerability, the action
shifts quickly back to the fight in the skies: “A fighter is hunting us, and I am afraid that my
gunner has gender dysphoria.” This quick, clipped sentence structure and the present tense
narration cuts through the previous section’s more philosophical or theoretical musings on
gender to go straight to the heart of the present matter. Like the radio chatter which serves as
most of the communication between Barb and Axis, the sections of the story dealing with the
mission time in the future are clipped, succinct, crisp, and packed with a sense of urgency. Take
for example the communication between Barb and Axis as they prepare to engage the fighter
pilot pursuing them:
I speak the attack command to my gunner. “Normalize the target.”
Nothing happens.
“Axis. Comm check.”

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“Barb, Axis. I hear you.” No explanation for the fault. There is nothing wrong
with the weapon attack parameters. Nothing wrong with any system at all, except
the one without any telltales, my spouse, my gunner.
“Normalize the target,” I repeat.
“Axis. Rifle one.”

The quick pace of the dialog here might be expected if Fall is attempting to realistically mirror
the efficiency of military communications. However, even the story’s prose seems punctuated by
sharp, efficient statements which largely stand on their own. The story consists of 247
paragraphs over the course of 15 sections, each section is divided by a textual ornament ( ).
Of those 247 paragraphs, 77% of the paragraphs in the story consist of 280 characters or less,
and only 4 of the 247 paragraphs (or 1.6%) are longer than 560 characters. This observation
might seem arbitrary, but I want to clearly illustrate how short the paragraphs of the story are,
and how this cascade of content influences the experience of reading the story. The story is
ruthlessly present, quick and maneuverable, like the attack helicopter itself who Barb tells the
reader “is propelled by its interior near-disaster” (Fall). And even as we as readers experience the
presentness and speed of the prose, moving through the story also helps to continuously remind
us, through the interface, that we are dealing with an ephemeral object from January 2020, one
that cannot be fully represented by the Archive’s capture and which is not of the story’s present-
tense narration, nor of the future in which the story is set but in a “real time” that is past. Thus
scrolling through the story on the Archive calls the reader into an active movement between
narrative time and extradiegetic internet history, a loop in which the reception to the story and its
subsequent removal from the web reinforces the uncanny and unspoken rupture in the status quo
that Axis’ gender dysphoria threatens.
In previous chapters, I’ve focused on the ways in which hybrid texts provide the occasion
for genderqueer writers to explore the transformation of the body into the technological, the

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monstrous and the non-human. In many of these cases the rhetoric around such transformations
and gendered escapes is celebratory, or even lauded. The characters that authors have created
revel in their ability to leave humanity behind and take up the position of the monster with
rebellious excitement. Becoming non-human allows them to leave a social world of violently
enforced gender expectations and gain power over anti-trans rhetoric that considers the human
subject the only life worth respect. In “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” however,
there is a cost to transformation and gender euphoria. For Barb that gender euphoria is real and
healing, it has allowed them to thrive in a post-apocalyptic world that is much less liberatory
than the future that texts like GENDERWRECKED envision. Barb tells the reader that now they
are an attack helicopter people treat them “like I’m dangerous, like I could hurt them if I wanted
to.” And this respect for their abilities, is like nothing they experienced as a woman. “They want
me protected and watched over,” they continue, “They bring me water and ask how I’m doing.
People want me on their team. They want what I can do” (Fall). Barb goes from feeling like their
only path to euphoric self-confidence is through tinkering with their gender assigned at birth, to
feeling powerful, strong, and desired. Sexually desired, yes, but Barb stresses that they also feel
useful. Their whole being is oriented towards ‘the mission’ in a way that leaves no room for fear
or insecurity—such emotions would be counter to their programming as a military tool. Before
their reassignment, Barb was “always aware of being small: aware that people could hurt me”
but now, as a helicopter “I think about being small as an advantage for nape-of-earth maneuvers
and pop-up guided missile attacks.” The significant disadvantages for Barb of their previous
female gender have been transformed, they now form the basis for Barb’s utility to the larger
system of citizenship under which her attack helicopter gender has been established. Now gender
is not just a system of hierarchical relationships between individuals, or even merely a vector for

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oppression and differentiation, it has become explicitly the exact kind of tool it always was
implicitly.
Barb is only able to transform through relying on the military-industrial complex and its
wartime goals, and though this gives them a sense of purpose and rightness, it has also made
them a weapon. “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” thus makes a connection between
trans-medicalization
16
and right-wing systems of control. It is the very activists who helped to
socially dissolve gender that made non-binary gender options vulnerable to control. They did the
work of remaking social perceptions of gender that the State was then able to co-opt and use
towards violent ends. Barb does not shy away from this configuration of assimilation. Rather she
understands that her ability to be weaponized by the State relies precisely on her desire to
transition and the activists who have made non-human transition a socially viable option. She
also sees her readers as participating in the process of consciousness-raising that makes her
assimilation into militaristic gender possible in the first place:
But how often—really—do you think about the grand strategy of gender? The
mess of history and sociology, biology and game theory that gave rise to your
pants and your hair and your salary? The casus belli?
Often, you might say. All the time. It haunts me.
Then you, more than anyone, helped make me.

Here we reach maybe the most uncomfortable part of the story. Readers are left wondering
whether Barb, trans helicopter, protagonist (or at least part of the protagonist if you want to
consider Barb and Axis one combined identity), living at the cutting-edge of what it means to be

16
By this term specifically I mean to include both procedures of medical transition from
hormones to gender reassignment surgeries, as well as the tendency towards treating transgender
people as if they are suffering from a disease or disorder. Thus I mean this term to gesture to the
diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder itself, but also gatekeeping requirements like the need to
visit a psychotherapist to access surgery, as well as various surgical procedures themselves.

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human, is benefitting from the political work of gender activists while serving as a weapon of
war. Is this the imagined future of the contemporary trans movement? Is Fall’s protagonist
arguing that our work seeking to expand the lived possibilities of gender is doomed to violent
assimilation into the very structures that oppress us?
Barb has abandoned the fleshy, soft, human part of gender in order to embrace something
more precise and technological, but the helicopter is not without its assigned gender roles in
Fall’s post-apocalyptic world. Becoming an attack helicopter has not freed Barb from the social
pressure to act in a way befitting her gender. Instead, Barb feels the need to explain to the reader
the most disquieting aspect of their new gender identity:
I kill for the same reason men don’t wear short skirts, the same reason I
used to pluck my brows, the reason enby people are supposed to be (unfair
and stupid, yes, but still) androgynous with short hair. Are those good
reasons to do something? If you say no, honestly no—can you tell me you
break these rules without fear or cost?
But killing isn’t a gender role, you might tell me. Killing isn’t a decision
about how to present your own autonomous self to the world. It is coercive
and punitive. Killing is therefore not an act of gender.
I wish that were true. Can you tell me honestly that killing is a genderless
act? The method? The motive? The victim?
When you imagine the innocent dead, who do you see?

Barb asks the reader to expand their understanding of gendered behaviors, and think about the
consequences of gender’s violence. Barb calls our attention to the fact that violence and
masculinity have deep affiliations and that accordingly means that innocence is also
characterized by gender (as well as age). Who do we imagine are “the innocent dead”? Likely
women and children. Thus, for Barb, as for a long tradition of feminist thought, violence has
always been a key part of masculinity and of the two-gender system more broadly. Attack

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helicopter as a gender is therefore no more aggressive, violent, or unruly as our existing binary
genders have been.
Barb and Axis find themselves in a place of indecipherable temporality, on the cusp of a
change in their relationship and their needs. Axis expresses some unease over the course of the
conflict between Barb and Axis’ helicopter and the pursuing “Werewolf Apostle”. Barb worries
about Axis’ discomfort, their silence makes Barb believe that Axis may be feeling some regrets
about their gender. Once the threat is neutralized, they have a moment to talk to one another, and
approach the topic warily. “There is no way to ask someone if their militarized gender
conditioning is malfunctioning,” Barb worries. They fear that if Axis isn’t completely confident
in their gender it accordingly destabilizes Barb’s own. For the Apache to function both the
gunner and the pilot are necessary. They must work together to create a functioning, gendered
body. Even more threatening, Axis’ dysphoria might impact the effectiveness of their mission,
and for a being who fully understands their gender as being focused on the completion of the
mission, this is a deeply destabilizing possibility. At the same time, Barb has a relationship with
Axis that goes beyond co-workers. They are one unit. They not only share the same gender but
also a rank and a “urinary system”: “we are harnessed and catheterized into the narrow tandem
cockpit of a Boeing AH-70 Apache Mystic.” Barb calls Axis “my marriage, my pillar, the
completion of my gender”. They’re even involved sexually, which Barb reminds the reader
“would’ve been a crime” only “a few decades ago.”
In other ways, Axis and Barb still suffer from communication issues that are highly
gendered. While in another version of the story the communication between Barb and Axis
would suffer because Barb used to be a woman, and “As a woman, I would’ve pressed Axis. As
a woman, I would’ve unpacked the unease and the disquiet.” Instead, the communication issues

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stem from their shared gender because “As an attack helicopter, whose problems are
communicated in brief, clear datums, I should ignore Axis.” But Barb chooses neither of these
options, and for the sake of their relationship with Axis, Barb breaks gendered expectations in
the small intimate space of the cockpit. “‘If you want to be someone else,’” Barb tells Axis,
“. . .someone who doesn’t do what we do then, … I don’t want to be the thing that stops you.’”
This willingness to bend the gendered roles that Barb has just described to the reader speaks to
the flexibility that still exists between genders and between individuals (human or non-human).
Barb understands the unease of body and mind that characterize gender dysphoria, has felt them
themself before transitioning. “Have you ever been exultant?” they ask the reader, “Have you
ever known that you are a triumph? Have you ever felt that it was your whole life’s purpose to
do something, and all that you needed to succeed was to be entirely yourself?” This rhetoric of
rightness, of feeling at home in one’s body and even more so in one’s purpose, is the euphoria
that trans and genderqueer people seek. To experience this euphoria when one isn’t used to
feeling at home in one’s body is a revelation: “To be yourself well is the wholest and best feeling
that anything has ever felt” (Fall). In the case of Axis, Barb’s compassion for their other half
overrides their gendered programming, allowing for an exchange of understanding that wouldn’t
be possible in the militaristic language characteristic and constitutive of the attack helicopter.
Having compassion for Axis is having compassion for themself after all, and it is in the quiet
moments of intimacy and understanding, when we know that the other person in the room cares
for us, that some of our performances can fall away.
Barb and Axis don’t necessarily sort out Axis’ unease or dysphoria, but Barb begins to
see the in dawn of new fugitive genders in Axis—genders that don’t fall under the control of the
military and that are not yet bound by widespread social expectations:

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Maybe what Axis feels is a necessary new queerness. One which pries the tool of
gender back from the hands of the state and the economy and the war. I like that
idea. I cannot think of myself as a failure, as something wrong, a perversion of a
liberty that past generations fought to gain.

But Axis can. And maybe you can too. That skepticism is not what I need…but it
is necessary anyway.

Like all great science fiction, the world that Barb and Axis live in resembles our own in startling
ways. Not least of these is that Barb questions whether there is room for a new queerness in the
face of the gendered standards that they and Axis have inhabited for some time. The attack
helicopter gender, which seemed at the beginning of the story to be so unlikely and so radical, is
now the gender role against which Axis may need to push to find the identity and accompanying
embodiment that brings them relief, that makes them feel “exultant” the way that being a
helicopter makes Barb feel strong, purposeful, and present. At this point, Barb turns to the reader
again in direct address, reaching out across the chasm of temporality that situates them always in
the past and future simultaneously, never able to be totally present in the time of the reader.
Perhaps, they reason, perhaps the reader has stumbled upon the story because they are looking
for a way out, because they are skeptical that the military-industrial forces that created Barb
could provide a door out of the technologies and systems of gender. Even if that gender is non-
human, the story claims, it can still be weaponized.
Barb leverages the rhetoric of trans activism to argue that perhaps we are, like her, giving
state power the tools with which to control us, that assimilation into the state is all that we might
hope for. But at the same time, “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” leaves us with the
scene of the two partners flying over the ruined land, knowing that Axis may yet be trying to
make a new way out. The helicopter, nonhuman and foreign as it may seem to our contemporary
forms of gender, is nevertheless a gender, and gender is always less capacious than our specific

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intimacies, bodily needs, felt senses of self, and modes of living. According to Fall’s helicopter
protagonist, the question is not “If gender has always been a construct, then why not construct
new ones” but instead whether we can make our worlds livable. Can we construct a “necessary
new queerness”? Imagine something more or outside of gender entirely—something that cannot
be assimilated into violent regimes of power? Or will we always be attempting to escape each
new category of being that we define, slipping out through temporal rifts we weren’t even sure
existed in the first place?

The Queer Failure of the Attack Helicopter
Ultimately, I think it is fair to say that the Isabel Fall story did not completely succeed in
recuperating the language of the transphobic meme, nor did it knock the explanations and usages
of the meme totally off the search results, as some have claimed Fall intended. In this respect, the
story failed to achieve what it set out to do. A quick Google will show that searching for “I
sexually identify as an attack helicopter” still brings up instances of the meme’s usage, most
prominently on KnowYourMeme where the meme is at least given context. However, Fall’s
story does make the front page, and the Wikipedia article that explains the controversy around “I
Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” comes up as one of the top results, at least proving
that what Fall went through dealing with harassment and facing her critics was enough of a
cultural moment to merit its own entry into the collective memory of the internet. Though I’m
sure this was not how she was hoping to achieve her goals! After all, it may not be the case that
Fall hoped her readers would harass her into internet infamy, but the fact that they did means that
her name, if not the text of her written work, continues to push against the meme’s popularity.
Indeed, the fact that Jonathan Chait’s February 2023 article, which I discussed at the beginning
of this chapter, prompted so many to reply with the story in order to prove that the attack

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helicopter had long been a figure of transphobic memes, proves that the story does sometimes get
deployed to counteract the meme’s ubiquity.
So “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” occupies a conflicted place in online
transgender, genderqueer, and transhuman discourse. Nominally a failure because of the
backlash that Fall received from the very readers that she hoped would embrace the story, this
backlash helped propel the story to wider awareness. Embracing the nonhuman alone does not, in
the context of the story, necessarily mean that Barb and Axis have found a path out of systems of
gender control in the same way that becoming a monster in GENDERWRECKED generated a
genderqueer escape route. Indeed, Fall’s story reminds us that as quickly as queer and trans
people embody new roles, new definitions, and new styles of gendered life, contemporary
cisheterosexual powers are ready to assimilate those new genders into existing systems of
coercive State control. Late-stage capitalism is ready to devour and digest even the most radical
reworkings of the body. If the genderqueer community can create new genders, then the state is
also capable of turning that generative potential into a tool to help them maintain power. We’ve
seen early symptoms of the adoption of a third gender into the state apparatus in California with
the institution of a third category for IDs and Driver’s Licenses: “The Gender Recognition Act
was signed into law by then-Gov. Jerry Brown in 2017” and “Nearly 16,000 Californians have
identified themselves as nonbinary on their driver’s licenses and state identification cards since
the state opened up a third option in 2019” (Goldberg). As the state begins to provide recognition
to genders outside of man and woman, increasing surveillance of these genders through the
gathering of data, the enforcement of categorical definitions, and ultimately the sedimentation of
what a nonbinary gender looks and acts like is inevitable. While we might not be able to envision
a world in the near future in which neurosurgeons can change our brain in order to give us the

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somatic sensations of a weapon of war like the attack helicopter, there is nearly no doubt that the
U.S. military would love to try. After all, they are aggressively pursuing AI-based technologies
and unmanned vehicles at the Army Futures Command, a research and development outpost
which is based in Austin, Texas (Strout et al.). Jasbir Puar has reminded us too, that
incorporation of the queer can serve as a project of nationalism and/or national exceptionalism.
Especially as acceptance or tolerance “for gay and lesbian subjects” becomes the “barometer by
which the legitimacy and capacity for national sovereignty is evaluated” (226-227). Why
wouldn’t it necessarily follow that incorporation of the trans, genderqueer, or transhuman subject
might also be a national project which seeks to bolster U.S. exceptionalism while leveraging
these alternatives to cisheterosexuality as literal and political weapons?
“I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” ultimately claims that even if the
incorporation of transhuman forms of embodiment into the state apparatus is on the horizon, the
desire for gender abolition or escape through social or physical transition will persist as a
symptom of dis-ease with current models embodiment. When the helicopter becomes an
acceptable form of nonhuman embodiment, the nonhuman would therefore cease to be an escape
from the regimes of binary gender the way that it might be now. The end of Fall’s story, in which
Barb sees themself as only a step towards emancipation from binary sex/gender roles, and
acknowledges that just because they experience feelings of gendered euphoria from their
embodiment as a helicopter, that may not mean that their gender is either revolutionary or
‘queer’ in the post-apocalyptic contexts of this future. “I cannot think of myself as a failure” they
say. Whether this ‘cannot’ comes from a place of believing that they are still a political
provocation or from a place of personal sentiment isn’t entirely clear. But Barb has found home
in their body, in the literal fight and flight that characterize their gendered drives. At the same

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time, they acknowledge that the truly genderqueer is always comprised of those genders which
slip through the cracks, which thrive in the looping multiversal interregnum of trans*temporality.
In doing so, Barb rehearses Muñoz’s claim that “Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a
here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world” (1). The
attack helicopter in the future of the story is no longer the boogeyman of right-wing discourse,
but rather has been folded into the very right-wing systems of war that sought to exterminate and
erase trans and genderqueer paths to self-determination, radical refiguration of the body, and
escape from the binary. In this case, queerness too must pivot its attention, always maintaining
its mutable and shifting work, or “not settling for the present” but “asking and looking beyond
the here and now” (Muñoz 28).
Barb is not a failure to herself, because she does not regret or hate her choices to become
herself in the way most true to her, even if she relied on military power to do so. But rather she
looks towards Axis and to the reader to continue to search for a way out of schemas of
assimilation, to continue to mutate and evolve to evade capture. So perhaps she is a failure to
Axis, or a failure to us. But Halberstam reminds us that queerness itself is often framed as a kind
of failure—the failure to be realigned with straight reproductive futurity, the failure of capitalism
to commercialize and exploit our perverse desires, the failure of the recognition of our
embodiments and physicality. To be rendered illegible is to fail to be read. But perhaps as new
strategies of gender literacy evolve with transgender and genderqueer modes of escape, those
escapes too need to continue to iterate on their strategies for indecipherability.
The story of Fall’s “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” is, I have tried to show,
also a story of illegibility, especially when considering the inability of readers to parse Fall’s
relation to the text and whether her intentions were to promote or erase the original context and

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transphobic meaning of the right-wing meme. This is the power of memetic irony on the web,
that it makes satire, parody, and criticism of dominant paradigms toothless or indecipherable.
While I clearly do not support the vitriol that forced both “I Sexually Identify as an Attack
Helicopter” or Isabel Fall herself off the internet, I do believe that the story benefits from its
status as a quasi-existent object within the historical framing of the Internet Archive. Situating “I
Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” in a non-space where temporality loops as one reads
the future through the interactive framing of the past, enriches the story’s emphasis on
illegibility, while simultaneously imbedding the reader in the trans*temporal escape that Barb no
longer has access to. Perhaps we, the readers, are the genderqueer weapon that even Barb cannot
imagine.

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Chapter 4
He/Theys: Trans-Human Gender on Twitter

In the previous chapter, Isabel Fall’s story might have failed to completely recuperate the
transphobic meme on which it was based due to the backlash she faced from her own community
on Twitter, which led her to remove the groundbreaking piece of short fiction from Clarkesworld
and remove herself from the public square of online life. The harassment that she faced made
Twitter and other social media sites places of hostile contempt. And while “I Sexually Identify as
an Attack Helicopter” did, in its own way, find a trans*temporal framing which helped to
communicate the slipperiness and flexibility of genderqueer pathways out of binary gender, the
consequences that Fall personally faced from the backlash were severe. In this chapter, I want to
expand on my work on memes from Chapter 3 to show that though memes have their cultural
origin in troll and alt-right culture in places like 4chan and Reddit, the work of memes and their
proliferation on Twitter has the potential to open trans*temporal schemas, especially those that
allow the writing of gender to be a cooperative digital act.
Twitter, like all digital spaces, is not inherently progressive or regressive (though its
modes of expression and standards for safety are certainly changing under the ownership of Elon
Musk as I write this). What Twitter does do, however, is provide affordances which make
collective social writing more readily available and more spreadable than it would be off the site.
In this chapter, I take a detailed look at how one Twitter user found and iterated on a meme
format that eventually coalesced into a new gender—one that was adopted and iterated on by the
originator’s followers. This gender and the process of its making spoke to a section of
genderqueer and gender nonconforming Twitter users who understand that online, gender and
aesthetic are nearly inseparable. I look at how Twitter’s affordances allow for users to adopt and

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spread one another’s ideas, reperforming them while benefiting from the popularity of the
original post, and in doing so they curate an online identity that is a pastiche of statements from a
variety of sources. Subsequently, I look specifically at one user, @emonormie, who spent part of
the pandemic defining, over and over, what the aesthetics and embodiments of someone who
identifies as he/they might be. In doing so, they not only generated a new set of gender roles and
ideals that resonated with other users, they embraced the non- and quasi-human embodiments
possible in the digital sphere while opening space to discuss gendered change over time.
The Bird App
Scholars have spent considerable time thinking through the ways in which political
speech works on Twitter, an interest that obviously became more pronounced after the 2016 U.S.
presidential election. While Trump’s love of Twitter might have increased attention on the app,
humanities scholars have neglected to fully address the way that Twitter's affordances condition
the kinds of content which can populate the platform. Partially, content is a function of the
communities that have coalesced around the app, as we have seen with 4chan and Reddit in the
previous chapter. But unlike those sites, which function largely on a system of likes and upvotes,
in which the posts with the most positive feedback become more widely distributed by the
algorithm. Twitter on the other hand, like queer digital mecca Tumblr, also has a ‘like’ function
which allows users to leave positive feedback on posts, but I argue the most important
functionality of Twitter is the ability to retweet. The retweet (and the Quote Tweet) allows users
to curate content from other creators and add it to their own page. This means that the profiles of
most Twitter users become a polyvocal collaborative space in which the user’s voice is only one
among many. This polyvocality builds communities on Twitter, but in 2020 it also built a gender.
The retweet is woefully under-theorized. Plenty of social scientists have investigated what makes

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compelling and retweet-able content, or how to predict what affects appeal to which users, but
the effects of the retweet are less clear. In order to understand how @emonormie, who goes by
Norman both on and offline, created and performed a new gender and accompanying aesthetic
online in 2020, it is necessary to examine the retweet through the lens of performance studies,
which can provide insight into the roles various actors on Twitter played in the spread and
creation of the he/they.
Twitter’s public platform allows users to post their thoughts, reactions, and takes, to build
an online presence shaped by both creation (original tweets) and curation (retweets of other
users). One builds one’s identity on the platform using these tools. Original content establishes
the voice of the user but so does the strategic retweeting of similar voices. Retweets not only
spread content further than the Twitter circle of their original authors, but they also cement
connections between users and create a sense of networked community and endorsement. Users
will retweet strategically to reach a new audience, or to add the voice of someone with similar
views/interests to their own Twitter persona. Boosting non-original content to one’s followers
that they’ll find interesting, funny, or discussion-worthy can lend legitimacy to the original
tweet, while also setting up the retweeter as a user worth following.
Retweets therefore, provide a kind of public rehearsal of scripts generated by other users.
These scripts are then acted and re-acted as they spread through Twitter—a kind of digital
ventriloquism in which one user speaks through another’s original content. What matters to
Twitter users, and to the efficiency of their messages, is that the performance and reperformances
of content on Twitter are spreadable. Users who have any number of retweets have a
participating audience that becomes re-actors. As users retweet, even if they do so to argue with
the original content, they authorize the original information or misinformation by platforming the

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original content through their sharing. In doing so, users stitch together their online presence
through original writing and the performance of other users’ scripts, amalgamating an identity
through weaving together various forms of text and performance. Retweeting creates a cyclical
loop through which both the original user who composed the tweet and the retweeting user gain
social validation and craft their voices. These curations are not private. Instead, they are carefully
chosen roles which associate the retweeter with the views and opinions of the users they
reperform.
In addition to retweeting’s ability to create endorsements through the performance of
other users’ scripts, retweeting has an important temporal effect on Twitter as well. When an
original tweet is removed from its temporal context through retweeting, it accumulates new
meaning through its association with a new user timeline. This is especially true of retweets in
which the original tweet being reperformed is older, sometimes brought to the fore specifically
because it is a seemingly evergreen observation or instead because highlighting this old opinion
in a new temporal context provides more insight into the original statement. Users even retweet
their own opinions from past moments—either to show that they were right about their previous
thoughts or to laugh at what they didn’t know was coming when they made the previous tweet.
Thus, Twitter is both a platform that seeks to highlight the most current events, and it is a
platform profoundly outside of linear temporality. This is the case even without considering the
way that Twitter’s algorithms structure each of our timelines, which is hard to discern but is not
chronological. Twitter represents both “an act of memory and an act of creation” which “recalls
and transforms the past in the form of the present”– in other words, Twitter is a performance
(Worthen, 1101). These confused timelines are paramount to understanding the flow of Twitter,
where discourse is polyvocal, nonlinear, and performance based.

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Retweeting is a key portion of curating and one’s profile, which serves as a cipher for
identity more generally online. When we don’t have access to face-to-face conversation, what we
learn about an individual online and especially on Twitter, is through visiting their profile page
and sorting through their original and retweeted thoughts. In doing so we gain a fuller picture of
the ideals and objects that users ascribe to and learn a little about their social circles through the
other individuals that they follow. Moeller and D’Ambrosio’s work You and Your Profile:
Identity After Authenticity claims that in a contemporary media sphere where we are trained to
approach our experiences and the identities of others through digital evaluation, the meaning of
authenticity has inexorably changed. “People, including the readers and writers of this book,
shape their identity by proffering profiles and then hoping for their social validation. This is
‘profilicity’. . .In a society where profilicity has become dominant, individuals and social
systems apply it in their everyday operations.” (Moeller and D’Ambrosio 23). In the digital
sphere, they argue, the important thing is not whether your profile is authentic or even accurate,
what matters for obtaining social capital is that the profile is properly curated tells the viewer
something about the poster. Rather than believing that social media is a ‘mask’ behind which we
find the ‘authentic self’ Moeller and D’Ambrosio claim that profile work is a task of self-
curating, of finding ones niches and aesthetics rather than representing a pre-existing offline
identity that is more sincere or authentic: “Under conditions of profilicity, the surface is by
default the real thing. The ethics of profilicity is concerned with the presentation of the self and it
is this presentation that requires curation. The superior person is the one whose opinions—on
Twitter, in peer-reviewed papers, or at political demonstrations—collect the most likes” (29).
While Moeller and D’Ambrosio’s formulation may seem technologically deterministic, i.e. the
advent of social media has fundamentally changed the way that we think of, construct, and then

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broadcast ourselves, one can argue that even pre-social media, curation and context were
important factors in shaping our identities. The difference is merely that the public sphere might
have previously been those that we would interact with on a given day, now we imagine that
anyone from anywhere in the world might stumble upon our profile, and so we are curating our
online presence to appeal to a different set of imagined interlocutors.
Butler’s work on narrating the self can be useful to untangle the conceptual knot of
identity, authenticity, and the narration/curation of our online selves (for of course, all social
media provides us with a mixture of both modes, though curation is more important on some
sites than others due to the sites interfaces and tools, more on this later). Butler notes that no
matter what kind of self we want to project to the other, we must do so through the forms and
conventions the Other expects, and these conventions necessarily change both the story and
ourselves: “the ‘I’ who begins to tell its story can only tell it according to recognizable norms of
life narration, we might say; to the extent that it agrees, from the start, to narrate itself through
those norms, it agrees to circuit its narration through an externality, and so to disorient itself in
the telling” (“Giving an Account of Oneself” 32). Ahmed defines disorientation
phenomenologically, using Kant’s “What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thought?” to claim
that “orientation is not so much about the relation between objects that extend into space (say,
the relation between the chair and the table); rather, orientation depends on the bodily
inhabitance of that space” (Queer Phenomenology 6). Combining Butler and Ahmed, we might
argue that the ‘I’ which attempts to extend itself through self-narration does so in cyberspace
precisely by crafting a body, a body with which to orient oneself. But what does it mean to
construct a body, especially in the digital realm where metaphors of digital space take over for
material vectors of dimension? How do we inhabit a space which is composed primarily of code?

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Like space in the offline world, I claim that digital “Space acquires ‘direction’ through how
bodies inhabit it, just as bodies acquire direction in this inhabitance.” (Queer Phenomenology
12). The way that we use online spaces changes them, and though certain spaces are set up with
particular users or uses in mind, it is possible to leverage the affordances of digital arenas
slantwise, to make them extend in ways their creators did not necessarily intend.
This is where one’s curation of content comes in, and wherein the profile comes to stand
in metonymically for the body in a space that is also non-physical. In Chapter One, Juliana
Huxtable’s recreation of the body used ASCII art rather than readily available, image-based
emojis or reactions, literally allowing her to digitally craft a body in the textual space. While the
profile may be less customizable on many platforms than Huxtable’s textual body, the
modification and population of internet profiles provide a surface for recognition and key
characteristics of legibility that allow them to stand in for the user’s physicality in a non-physical
space like Twitter. If we understand the profile to be the ‘face’ of the user, then, it is worth
considering in greater detail how the content that one posts to that profile comes to signify
participation in various social groups, and how the profile might be gendered. I am less
interested here in analyzing the categories of being that one is prompted to fill in when you sign
up for a social media service. For example, I won’t be reexamining Facebook’s “real name”
policy or the number of genders that one can select when signing up for Twitter. While these
fillable forms or drop-down menus do have a real effect on the kinds of online embodiment that
can be imagined and inhabited by users, I am more focused here on areas in which choices for
content creation and curation are open-ended. For example, what is a user including in their bio?
What types of posts might be pinned to the tops of their feeds, and what content are they
habitually posting or reposting to those profile pages? We might even liken the curation of

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content on a Twitter profile page to other technologies of self-styling, from posture and pose to
fashion.
We might therefore claim that the profile is the chief marker of gender online. Just like
the body it is stylized by accruing meaning over time through its performances, though the
performances in this case are media-based rather than somatic. The way that we identify
ourselves online is through our interests, our modes of address and expression, our interactions
with others, and the information we post or repost on our profiles. Just like gender in the ‘real
world’ too, our digital genders are influenced by the socially constructed contexts in which our
performances circulate. Therefore, when studying the gender of social media, we must consider
not only vectors of identity which are focused on discrete subgroups within the larger
community, but also the habits of self-styling on the specific site or service. This means that the
way a feminine gender is reinforced through posts, pictures, and text on Facebook might be very
different from the way a similar gender identity is developed on Tumblr. The service we use, in
turn, will affect the gender we are able to inhabit. We might consider the profile a stand-in for
the body in digital space, considering that both the body and the profile do not inherently
describe the truth of the user, but becomes metonymic for the user “by virtue of its interaction
with what surrounds it, not because it is composed of a stuff that is radically foreign to its
surroundings” (Salamon, Assuming a Body 59). Just as importantly, the materiality of the body,
the fleshiness of it, does not mark it as fundamentally different from the profile when one
considers its digital context. The profile is just as real and just as important to forming identity as
the body because “what constitutes something as real is not its materiality but a horizon of
possibility, an openness to all the different experiences that it represents” (Salamon, Assuming a

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Body 91). The profile and the self-styling that occurs there is functionally performing the same
work as the body does in the offline world.
In the following section, I trace the implications of thinking about the profile as an
extension of or stand-in for the body online by looking at the gender work that Norman
(@emonormie) performed from early 2021-2022, and argue that Norman’s content creation
through the work of the he/they meme allowed him to inhabit a queer, inhuman or quasi-human
gender online. In doing so, Norman provided a model for other genderqueers on Twitter to
follow and contribute to, leading to a shared and agreed-upon set of gender roles for the he/they-
identified individual. While the rules and roles of this gender were completely unspoken over the
course of its creation, widespread meme literacy, the retweet, and repetition became the key
ingredients for constructing new horizons of embodiment both on and offline—a collaborative
effort that allowed Norman and his followers to experiment with what it might mean to inhabit
the monstrous, trans*temporal world of a queer gender aesthetic. In a time when we were much
less connected than ever before (the project began during COVID, though just after lockdown)
and much more concerned about the vulnerability of our bodies to physical illness, the ‘hey/they’
meme allowed genderqueer work to continue by understanding the profile as digital body, and
leveraging trans*temporal iteration to generate meaning in excess of the binary and the human.
In this way, Twitter provided Norman with an interface with which to imagine a world outside
our own in which gendered work was unfettered by the presumed primacy of physical
materiality.
Tim Burton, Pocket Monsters, and the Rise of the He/They
Pochita is a cartoon character from Chainsaw Man the ongoing manga series written and
illustrated by Tatsuki Fujimoto and its subsequent anime adaptation. The character is a small

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round reddish cross between a rabbit and a dog, with a handle where its ears should be and a
chainsaw protruding several inches from out of the middle of its face.
The Babadook is the titular character of 2014 Australian horror film directed by Jennifer
Kent. In the film, the character manifests itself as a towering shadowy creature with long sharp
fingers, a top hat, and an unsettlingly wide grin. The Babadook haunts whoever reads the poem
that conjures it, which in the film seems to be passed on within a children’s pop-up book.
And then there’s Jesus Christ. Yes, from the Christian Bible.
This group might seem an unlikely combination of cultural references from various
points in the 2000s (well, excluding Jesus) but according to users on Twitter, there is a
commonality that Pochita, the Babadook, and Jesus all share: pronouns, specifically he/they
pronouns. This is the gendered work of @emonormie or Norman, a Twitter user and queer
person who took the he/they of the day meme which had little traction before his proliferation
and spread it more widely on Twitter. While Norman’s work is not the most popular thing to be
posted to Twitter, it is nevertheless an excellent example of identity work occurring in a niche
genderqueer community online—a community bound primarily their association with queer
culture, genderqueer work, and social media literacy. Norman’s account has been associated with
Twitter since 2012, only 6 years after the site was launched in July of 2006. As such, Norman
has more than ten years of experience understanding the nuances of how to use the platform and
what content might provide more engagement or interaction from followers. With 32.7 thousand
followers as of this writing (February 2023), Norman is not the most influential person on
Twitter by any means (that award goes to former U.S. President Barack Obama, who at the time
of writing had over 133 million followers) but for a non-celebrity user, Norman has a
considerable following. What is Norman posting that has attracted so many followers? A large

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portion of Norman’s content includes observations about life and queer culture, images of their
thrift-store hauls (their taste in decor seems to skew decidedly towards the kitschy aesthetic of a
Midwestern grandmother), images of themself and their boyfriend, and descriptions of their
undergraduate thesis or graduate applications. In other words, Norman isn’t posting anything too
radically different from what many people do on Twitter—using the service to stay in touch with
friends, post about their life, and generally participate in a wider digital community then they
would have access to offline. One of the reasons why I have chosen Norman’s profile to analyze
is precisely because they are not a major celebrity or an online ‘influencer’. Instead, many of the
followers that they currently have gained an interest in Norman’s content after they began
posting a meme series about a nonbinary gender—he/they of the Day.
According to KnowYourMeme, on September 28th, 2021, “Twitter user @BuffffaloBill
was the first online” to specifically link the he/they pronoun combination to a beloved character,
in this case from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series. "Tom Bombadil is He/They of the day,"
they tweeted, earning only two likes for the tweet. Tom Bombadil appears as a side character in
The Fellowship of the Ring. From the little that we have about Bombadil in these two texts, we
know that he speaks in sing-song rhyme, is ancient beyond any natural age, and the Ring seems
to have no power over him. When he introduces himself in The Fellowship of the Ring,
Bombadil identifies himself in riddle:
“Who are you, Master?” he asked.
“Eh, what?’ said Tom sitting up, and his eyes glinting in the gloom.
“Don’t you know my name yet? That’s the only answer. Tell me, who are you,
alone, yourself and nameless? But you are young and I am old. Eldest, that’s what
I am. Mark my words, my friends: Tom was here before the river and the trees;
Tom remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn. He made paths before the
Big People, and saw the little People arriving. He was here before the Kings and
the graves and the Barrow-wights. When the Elves passed westward, Tom was
here already, before the seas were bent. He knew the dark under the stars when it
was fearless - before the Dark Lord came from Outside.” (Tolkien, 131)

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Whatever it is that Bombadil is, and that is a subject of some debate amongst Tolkien scholars,
what we know about him already gives us some insight into how his gender might be queer or
non-normative. First, Tom speaks sideways, often giving roundabout answers to questions the
hobbits ask him. His perspective as “Eldest” provides him with the context to see the situation
Frodo and his friends find themselves in from the outside, not just outside the journey, but within
the larger context of events since the beginning of time. If Tom really has been in Middle Earth
since “the first raindrop and the first acorn” then the fullness of time that he has experienced
erodes the importance of individual events. Even the Ring quest, though it may concern the fate
of the world, is one momentous event in Tom’s long life. His role in time, just as much as his
mastery of his environment, marks Tom as an outsider. As Michael Treschow and Mark
Duckworth remind us in their investigation into Tom’s role in the books, “Time moves around
his home in a different measure, where dream and waking merge together. Here the whole field
of time past is surveyed in a kaleidoscopic vision” (193). Tolkien himself realized that Tom
represented something important to the narrative, even if he was unable to define exactly what.
“But I kept him in, and as he was,” Tolkien writes in a letter, “because he represents certain
things otherwise left out” (quoted in Treschow 176).
What is it that Tom represents that might be “otherwise left out”? For our discussion of
the he/they it doesn’t quite matter exactly what role Tom plays in his narrative, but it does matter
that he stands as a kind of cypher for what might otherwise be excluded from the society of
Middle Earth. Tom has seemingly endless life, but he isn’t a great and powerful lord or in
consulted by the major power players in Middle Earth. Instead, he lives the life of an eccentric
recluse, remaining in the Old Forest and concerning himself with taking care of the natural world
around him. Though Tolkien never hinted that Tom might identify as trans (and I’m not sure it

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would matter if he did), Tom does queer the progress of the narrative, serving as an early
diversion from the linearity of the Ring quest. He scrambles the timeline of those that encounter
him because he provides an outside perspective. I have argued here and elsewhere that trans and
gender non-conforming people experience time differently than those whose gender has
remained relatively stable over the course of their lives, and I believe Twitter’s identification of
Tom as a he/they gestures to his ability to comment on the Ring quest as an outsider looking in
with the fullness of an outsider’s perspective. Tom’s masculinity is soft, unfocused on conquest,
history, or status and rather concerned with the small things in his forest—the bees, the trees, the
goodness of his wife. He rejects those markers of status or political power that the major players
in the series cling to. What he does with his seeming immortality is to opt-out. He lives in the
forest, silly songs and all, and does not take his long life too seriously.
Twitter user @BuffffaloBill doesn’t identify the traits that make Tom Bombadil a likely
candidate for he/they of the day, but we can guess that Tom fits nicely into a long tradition of
eccentric forest hermits that might have more wisdom than they let on, and who certainly queer
the traditions of the very sociality that they abandon. It is easy to imagine that Tom might reside
outside of binary gender as well. Gender is, like the other rules of society that don’t seem to
apply to Tom, a system of control. While this might seem like a long detour into Lord of the
Rings lore, it is telling that Tom Bombadil becomes the anchor and original example of the
he/they on Twitter. Further posts about the he/they build on this aesthetic, giving us more and
more detail about a queer gender that nevertheless establishes its own boundaries and roles.
While @BuffffaloBill started the work of defining the he/they, they were not the last user to try
and define the gender expressions, roles, and identifications that follow with this specific
combination of pronouns. In fact, the user most famous for the meme expanded the group of

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he/they characters and characteristics far beyond Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Norman took the
meme format that @BuffffaloBill pioneered and iterated on it, providing followers with a new
example of a character that might identify as he/they each day. In doing so, Norman not only
gained hundreds of followers who found his he/they content funny and relatable, he began to
define and explain the boundaries of a queer gender which may have already been performed but
was not yet cemented into a socially legible gender identity.
Before diving into the effects of Norman’s work, it is important to look at some of the
examples that he provides, examples which on their own do considerable work, but together
provide us with a new perspective on gender’s relation to media and to the body. I’ve included a
table in the back of this project which gives a complete list/description of the he/they characters,
objects, and real-life people that Norman identified over the course of the year plus (November
2021-Dec 2022) that he has been tweeting versions of the meme. These include the examples
which opened this chapter, alongside literary figures like Gregor Samsa of Kafka’s The
Metamorphosis and Bartleby the Scrivener from Melville’s short story of the same name,
numerous creatures from specific Pokémon species to a real-life shark species living off the coast
of Australia, to several horror-film antagonists and even JFK’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.
While at first glance this seems to be an incredibly heterogeneous group, there are throughlines
that we can trace which apply to many of Norman’s examples of the he/they and these
commonalities can help us get to the wider gender aesthetics and roles that Norman and his
audience ascribe to the he/they.
The first of these is that a clear majority of the characters that Norman identifies with the
he/they pronoun combination are definitively non-human (nearly 80% or 83 out of 104
characters, to be exact). Many these are animals, whether real or fantasy animals, but even more

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of them might be more accurately called monsters. These include a demon-king from a 2000s
Cartoon Network show Samurai Jack, Cousin Itt from The Addams Family television and film
series, Frank the rabbit from Donnie Darko, Ryuuk the Death Note shinigami, and even Tim
Burton’s well-loved Jack Skellington. The he/they incorporates elements of these monstrous
characters, whether that might be their penchant for mischief, their emphasis on the darker side
of life, their association with the strange or the uncanny, or their unlikely combinations of
physical characteristics. Holding up Frankenstein’s Monster as the epitome of one’s gendered
aspirations is undeniably outside the range of hetero-socially accepted standards. It is as if the
very distance from these standards is what helps to make the role models of the he/they accurate
to the gender Norman is attempting to describe. Their bodies are celebrated within this queer
gendered framework precisely because they are not celebrated elsewhere. Their bodies are
pieced together from the body parts of other characters, hybridized animal forms, mythological
creatures and other seemingly physically impossible amalgamations.
Not only are most of the characters non-human (whether that means monstrous or animal,
object or concept), most of them are not portrayed in their narratives of origin by human actors
but are rather characters from 2D or 3D animation franchises, video games, and films (or are
otherwise CG-enhanced). Some of these include the Tasmanian Devil and Marvin the Martian
from Looney Tunes, the Catbus and Soot Sprites from Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro
and Spirited Away respectively, a snapback-wearing wolf-headed creature called the Party God
from Pendleton Ward’s Adventure Time, and even Scar, the antagonist from Disney’s 1992 The
Lion King. I have elsewhere considered in some specificity how animated media has a capacity
to serve as a “distinctly queer carnivalesque space where gender-play and performance are

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integral to social interactions and identity-formation”
17
due in large part to animation’s ability to
ignore or complicate the boundaries of its characters’ bodies. Take for instance, the Looney Tune
body, identified by scholars of animation as a site of gender contestation, revolution, and play
early in the history of queer characters on screen. Batkin’s Identity in Animation considers the
push and pull of gender roles on the bodies of Looney Tune characters (focusing especially on
Bugs Bunny) to claim that “animation embraces different representations of the body through its
own artificiality and morphology of the form, making the body a site of contention” (Batkin 57).
Just what is being contested through the transformation of the body varies, but the Looney Tune
body especially refuses stability both visually and narratively:
Malleability defines the Looney Tunes body. It possesses an extraordinary ability
to squash, stretch and defy gravity. At times it is airborne; its speed and purpose
usually informed by violence or the threat of it. The animated Looney Tune body
is rarely in repose. It is restless, tortured mentally by its companions or seeking
justice for a wrongdoing within or on the periphery of its Tooniverse. (Batkin 57)

Animated bodies are simply not constrained by the flesh, their gestures can be bigger, their
transformations more complete, and their experimentation more dangerous than those we might
be able (or willing) to undergo in the ‘real world’ outside the animation frame. Wil E. Coyote is
sometimes a body unaffected by gravity (until he looks down), Bugs seems to completely
disappear into gendered disguises to trick Elmer Fudd over and over, and injuries that should kill
or seriously maim characters often just result in the body’s transformation (from lumps and
bumps to ashen exploded faces to bodies squished into 2D flatness). Not only are these bodies
able to change at will—change gender, change size, change shape, change recognizability—they
are also largely immortal. They can be sucked out into the vacuum of space and survive without

17
For a deeper dive into a specific example of thinking through gender and bodily plasticity in
animated media, see my piece "Steven Universe, Fusion Magic, and the Queer Cartoon
Carnivalesque." in Gender Forum, no. 56.

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oxygen, they can be blown up by ACME TNT and survive the explosion, no matter what cartoon
life throws at them, viewers can be sure that in the next episode, their favorite characters will be
back to the same old shenanigans. These are aspirational bodies that never age, do not feel pain
and injury the way that we do, and especially disregard the embodied markers of gender. While
Halberstam’s investigation into animation is interested in the ways in which animated texts take
up and complicate heterosexual notions of reproductive futurism, their interest in the ‘revolt’ of
animation is clearly applicable to the cadre of characters that Norman brings into their project:
“The world of animation, ultimately, distorts, manipulates and messes with human form in a way
that makes humanist ideals like heterosexual love and individualism seem creepy and that
elevates posthuman, stunt subjectivity from revolting animation to animating revolt”
(Halberstam, “Animating Revolt”). To identify animation precisely as a site of contestation is to
position it as in opposition to the operating logics of ‘adult’ i.e. cisheterosexist sociality.
Returning to the master list of Norman’s he/they identified characters, we note that the
list has a specific focus on characters and figures from the late 1980s through the early and mid
2000s. While we can claim that this is likely because as a member of Generation Z, Norman is
referencing characters prevalent from his own childhood to establish the he/they gender, there
are interesting outliers that give us more information about what Norman might see as a
genealogy or history of the he/they. Many of these include characters from the canon of Western
literature, including those characters already well-known and referenced in queer and trans
studies. For example, Frankenstein’s monster makes another appearance, which directly connects
the work of the he/they to a history of the monstrous in trans study and thought. The specific
instantiation of Frankenstein’s monster that Norman uses is an image of the monster from the
1935 film, not the original story of Frankenstein’s monster, but The Bride of Frankenstein in

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which the monster is played by Boris Karloff. Known as perhaps the queerest of the adaptations
of Frankenstein, and directed by openly gay or at least “sissified” James Whale (Russo 50), The
Bride of Frankenstein is not only considered a horror classic but a queer classic—the film’s Dr.
Praetorius is played gay by Earnest Thesigner. Elizabeth Young notes that “the doctor appears in
the visually coded form, here rendered campily, of the homosexual as decadent aristocrat” and he
is the one to try to convince Frankenstein not to go to bed with his wife (Young 410). In the end
of the film the monster, seeing his own abject, outsider life represented in the queer-coded
Praetorius, is determined to take the queer doctor down with him, therefore attempting to contain
the “sexual instability” of the film (Young 410). References Whale’s adaptation abound in queer
horror, perhaps most notably in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, where several of the scenes and
characters directly reference the 1935 film. Norman’s choice of the iconic Boris Karloff and the
image from The Bride of Frankenstein enriches the burgeoning archive of he/theys by not only
situating the he/they in a line of classic depictions of horror and monstrosity, but by linking
specifically to the history of queer involvement in horror, and the resulting camp parodies of
early horror films. By stepping out of the time range of most of his references, Norman’s
identification of characters from earlier texts has the effect of providing the he/they with a sense
of ancestry. Even those examples which don’t originate in contemporary media often have some
sort of continuing relevance through the 1990s and early 2000s, especially when it comes to
those figures that have been incorporated into “camp” sensibilities or queer iconography.
On Norman’s list, those examples that are not characters, and which are not historical
figures, tend to be from systems of myth, legend, or urban folklore. One of these examples is the
Slender Man, a creature of urban legend who was created by Eric Knudsen as part of a
Photoshop contest to create paranormal images on an online forum. Featured on the comedy

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website Something Awful, a website that the Washington Post described derisively as “for
people who enjoy joking about things like Dungeons & Dragons, porn and 3-D printers”
(Dewey), Knudsen’s original images showed the Slender Man amongst a group of children on a
playground, dressed in a dark suit, and Knudsen accompanied the images with a few captions
supposedly from the point-of-view of the Slender Man’s victims. From there, the Slender Man’s
mythology flourished, especially amongst creepypasta
18
circles where horror stories are regularly

Figure 12: One of the original images Knudsen posted of the Slender Man, who can be seen in silhouette under the
tree on the left side of the image.

18
Creepypasta, an iteration on the term copypasta, is meant to indicate short, copy-and-paste,
horror-themed fiction or text which then circulates on the internet. The term has since expanded
to indicate all user-generated horror content online.

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shared and iterated upon by users. As perhaps the most famous of the creepypasta urban legends,
the Slender Man spawned countless stories, two video games, a 2018 horror film directed by
Sylvain White, and most frightening of all, two 12-year-old girls in Waukesha, Wisconsin cited
appeasing the Slender Man as the reason they attempted to murder one of their friends in the
woods in 2014 by stabbing her 19 times (Jones). The Slender Man then, transitioned over the
course of three years, from internet horror fiction to the motivator for real-world horror
perpetrated by those who actively followed the meme and believed it to be true.
While the Slender Man shares much in common with other monsters and cryptids on
Norman’s list, he differs from the Mothman or Frankenstein’s monster in that his creation was
not only more contemporary, it was digital. Knudsen’s original posts about the Slender Man
don’t give the reader too many concrete details regarding either his look, his powers, his history,
or his motivation. But what Knudsen did do was plant a seed that was easy for other posters to
become invested in and want to participate in. Andrew Peck notes this investment as linked to a
familiarity with the Slender Man imagery:
the Slender Man was not an entirely new creation and was instead influenced by a
vast network of vernacular and institutional performances that had directly and
indirectly preceded it. By mixing a pastiche of mass media-influenced horror
tropes and imagery with his own vernacular legend performance, Victor Surge's
creation emerged to other users as not only familiar but also as a discrete and
mysterious entity accessible for vernacular appropriation. (Peck 339)

While it might at first seem that creating a relatively un-original monster within a thread on
paranormal images would get the Slender Man overlooked, Peck argues that the familiarity with
some of the horror tropes that inspired the Slender Man allowed other users to access and
imagine the Slender Man as an already-existing legend with which they felt instinctual
understanding and therefore felt more comfortable participating in its creation and larger myth-

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making. The forum thread itself, Peck argues, also sculpted the types of posts that gained
popularity—as users scrolled through the images and captions, the conventions of the posts
shifted to mimic the rhetorical moves by the more popular posts that had preceded them, thus
forming unwritten rules for the game the users were playing together (Peck 340). Peck ascribes
this relatability directly to the continued input of other users:
The Slender Man is a crowd-sourced monster. As users told stories, shared
images, and theorized as to the nature of the nascent Lovecraftian horror,
they also participated in its creation. . .Through social interaction, users
collaborated in an ongoing process of performance, interpretation, and
negotiation that constructed the details, motifs, and shared expectations of
the Slender man legend cycle. (Peck 334)

It was this participation, the input from various users on the thread, that accelerated the
mythmaking timeline and made the creature go viral. The Slender Man was able to gain a
crowdsourced mythology in very short order, and then users took that mythology with them
when they spread the word about the digital monster. Thus the Slender Man joined leagues of
other cryptids and monsters through referencing them, and his general lack of creator-instilled
traits and features invited others to fill in the gaps through their own writing. It might seem odd
that an ostensibly evil creature like the Slender Man would be cited as an example for a queer
gender based on he/they pronouns, but in actuality, he exemplifies many of the traits of the
he/they list that Norman compiled and he represents a collaborative digital creation process
based on mythmaking and iteration that directly mirrors the work Norman does to establish the
boundaries of the he/they gender.
Based on our investigation into the examples that Norman provides of the “he/they of the
day” we can put together a picture of the roles and expectations ascribed to this queer gender.
Those that are exemplary he/theys are not the protagonists of their respective worlds, rather they
are often found at the margins, not human or at least in some way transformed by physical

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monstrosity. They tend to be physically dirty or unkempt (See Pigpen for example). The he/they
is also a bit feral, untamable in one way or another, and ignores the rules and ideologies of the
dominant culture in their respective fictions. They are outsiders who still retain some of the
markers of masculinity, but certainly cannot be called ‘men’ in any traditional sense of the word.
They have bodies that are unlikely, mutable, or unbounded. Some of them are from television,
others film, and still others are digital creations, memes, or myths. What the commonalities in
the list tell us, however, is that he/they is an attempt to escape from normative gender roles, both
feminine and masculine.
For Norman, crafting the he/they is a survival tactic, one that claims undesirable or
decentered characters and characteristics to celebrate a form of masculinity which is infused with
the nonhuman, the dejected, the outcast, or the grotesque while side-stepping some of the pitfalls
of traditional heterosexual masculinity. In an interview Norman did with the University of
Pittsburgh’s newspaper (Norman was a senior at the university at the time the meme was gaining
traction online), Norman explicitly links his work on the meme to desires to reclaim
characterizations of gender-variant or nonbinary people as monsters or nonhuman outcasts:
“‘The whole thing is kind of a fuck you to transphobes who try to paint non-cis people as
delusional or unrealistic for essentially not being cis,’” he tells reporter Madilyn Cianci, “‘This is
a response to that, in a way. Like, hell yeah I’m delusional. Maybe my gender is a helicopter!’”
(Cianci). In this conversation with Cianci, Norman demonstrates not only a desire to transcend
the physically embodied forms of gender and masculinity as they are offered up by hegemonies
of cisheterosexist power, but also reminds us that they are well-versed in other attempts to do so,
attempts that have their origins in the digital sphere. In Chapter 3 I extensively examined the
effects of the transphobic meme which likens any expression of gender outside cis-femininity

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and masculinity as tantamount to claiming that one is an attack helicopter. Norman’s referencing
of the transphobic meme not only reminds readers that he understands the digital context in
which his work is circulating, he sets up the he/they of the day meme as work in direct response
to right-wing accusations of trans inhumanity. The he/they of the day does not fight transphobia
like the attack helicopter meme by appeals to assimilationist rhetoric, but rather by proliferating
the genderqueer nonhuman. Like other creators in previous chapters, Norman sees exiting the
human or embracing the nonhuman not just as a feature of the ‘Othered’ nature of queer and
trans life, but rather as an empowering feature of work that seeks to reclaim and reassert the non-
cis power to terrify and exceed the limits of gender and sexuality. The he/they is outside of the
rules of human gender, and though they may take on human pronouns, these pronouns only make
clear the gender borderlands that the characters are already inhabiting.
What’s In a They
Norman’s gendered work in constructing the he/they does not only seek to counteract
transphobic memes like the attack helicopter meme, it performs nonbinary or non-cis identities in
a way that is counter to already evolving and exclusive notions of what a nonbinary identity
should look like. While looking at the meme has given us some characteristics to apply to this
queer gender, it is also worth thinking critically about how the use of the gender-neutral pronoun
‘they’ mutates and complicates the relationship between the ‘he’ and normative masculinity.
What does this specific combination of pronouns denote and how might even the order of the
pronouns give us some sense of the mixture of gender that makes up Norman’s he/they meme?
Research recently published out of the William Institute at UCLA suggests that a
growing number of people are identifying outside of the gender binary (Wilson and Meyer), but
those that do often have relative privilege in vectors of their identities outside gender. For

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example, Wilson and Meyer found that 11% of LGBTQ people between the ages of 18 and 60
now consider themselves identifications outside the binary (though the report collapses several
terms used to indicate slightly different relationships to binary gender such as nonbinary,
genderqueer, gender-fluid and agender). Some that do so see themselves as falling under the
larger trans umbrella (32% of nonbinary respondents), but still others see themselves as
nonbinary but also cis (7.5% of nonbinary respondents). This population is also largely white
(58%), lives in urban areas (88%), is between the ages of 18 and 26 (76%) and were almost
universally born in the U.S. (96%). It is tempting to claim that identifying as outside the binary is
a new phenomenon or that it is undoing the stereotypes associated with the gender binary more
broadly, but this data tells us that though nonbinary people may be attempting to disrupt notions
of masculinity and femininity, nonbinary as a category of gender is more limited than it at first
seems.
In a 2021 piece for Xtra Magazine (a Canadian magazine published online by Pink
Triangle Press), writer Alex Green interviews several nonbinary individuals who use he/they
pronouns in a piece which describes the state of gender in their community: “The hes are
certainly they-ing. And the theys? He-ing.” Green is unsurprised by the seemingly recent change
in gender identities, arguing that in the contemporary moment even cisgender men are accepting
tiny fractions of femininity in their gendered performances, “queers seem to be more playful and
flexible with how they identify, and the pronoun ‘they’ helps express that openness” (Green).
One of Green’s interview subjects explicitly names the use of the gender-neutral pronoun as a
way for them to distance themself from cismasculinity while retaining some sense of the self as
masculine-presenting: “‘I actually don’t want to be perceived as a cis-passing male,’ he says.
Using ‘they’ helps them with that” (Green). Green’s article, though well-meaning and an

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interesting portrayal of the subjects that she interviews, also inadvertently points to some of the
shortcomings of habitual language when it comes to a combination of pronouns. In the above
quote for example, Green notes that the interview subject, Kade, uses the gender-neutral pronoun
precisely to provide them with a distance to cisgender forms of masculinity. But when Green is
not quoting them, Green’s choice in pronouns for Kade is ‘he’. This is not misgendering, because
the whole point of the article is to look at those who might use a combination of he and they, so
defaulting to the masculine pronoun is not only acceptable but in line with the identifications of
her subjects. At the same time, it is true that when a person uses a combination of pronouns and
one of those pronouns closely resembles either their assigned sex at birth or their general gender
presentation, most of the time they will be identified with the binary pronoun rather than with the
gender-neutral pronoun. In other words, when someone is assigned male at birth and uses he/they
pronouns, that person is likely to be gendered male, especially by strangers. The question then
remains, how much distance is ‘they’ really providing us from associations with cisgender
masculinity? And how does the order in which these pronouns are presented or preferred change
the gender in question?
Most of the time, when pronouns are presented as a mixture of different genders, they are
listed in order of preference. Therefore, one might assume that a person using he/they is more
comfortable with ‘he’ but also feels fine if someone uses ‘they’. But the order and mixture of
pronouns can tell us more about a person’s gender than just which pronouns they prefer. To
illustrate this effect, I’ll defer to one of my favorite images from the internet, the providence of
which has been lost to time since I saved it (not even a reverse image search could reveal its
source). Below you’ll see an image of the two actors who have played the character of Roald
Dahl’s Willy Wonka. To the left is Gene Wilder from the 1971 adaptation Willy Wonka and the

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Chocolate Factory and to the right is Johnny Depp from the 2005 adaptation Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory. Each character is labeled with a combination of the same pronouns, but the
differences between the way that Wilder and Depp inhabited the character of Willy Wonka is
expressed as a difference in the order of their pronouns. While Wilder’s Willy Wonka here is
envisioned as primarily masculine, with elements of the nonbinary, Depp’s Wonka is much more
nonbinary but still presents somewhere on the masculine scale. The jury is still out on how this
character’s gender will expand when we add Timothy Chalamet’s upcoming portrayal in the
third remake of the film to this mix.

Figure 13: A tale of two Wonkas. Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka here presented as primarily masculine but
secondarily nonbinary and Depp’s Wonka as the inverse.

Of course, the above Wonka image doesn’t apply to everyone who uses combined
pronouns, but it does give you some sense of how the order of the pronouns might tell us a little
bit about how that person sees themself. It is telling that we have an idea what a nonbinary
aesthetic might look like at all, which we must have for the image above to make any intuitive
sense. Indeed, we are already seeing stereotypes for nonbinary gender presentation that are

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beginning to coalesce within queer and trans communities, and unsurprisingly (though
disappointingly) they tend overwhelmingly towards celebrating those nonbinary individuals who
are white, thin, masculine-of-center, and benefit from class privilege. British writer and
performance artist Travis Alabanza identifies the connections between the rise of white
expressions of androgyny and rhetoric about the ‘newness’ of nonbinary identities in the last
several years:
Quickly, the word ‘non-binary’ became associated with someone skinny, able-bodied,
white, and masculine of centre. This isn’t a critique of people who fit that description; I
think you look real cool. I want you to be able to express your gender freely and safely. It
is more just an observation of how language and popular perception shifts. The word
‘non-binary’ may have only come into public use more commonly in the last five years,
but prior to that many other associated words were used to describe existing outside of
binary gender and also expressions. Gender non-conformity has existed since humans
have been here.

While communities with a multiplicity of gender categories outside Western notions of
masculine and feminine existed before, through, and after the violence of colonial occupations
across the world, recognition of options outside these Western categories are only being accepted
to a certain degree because they do not also carry the burdens of racialization. It is not a
“coincidence that things are often seen as ‘just beginning to exist’ when they are placed within
frames of the West and/or whiteness” (Alabanza).
Alabanza critiques nonbinary genders as they are currently becoming fixed in Western
cultural contexts by referring to the multiple nonbinary and extra-gender options that have been
part of non-Western traditions before the violent interruption of colonial conquest. Green
interviews “Persaud, 26, a ‘notoriously ambivalent he/they’ based in Los Angeles” to note that
Persaud “primarily identifies with Blackness and femininity—a position that puts them outside
the boundaries of both normative gender and conventional notions of non-binary identity
predicated on whiteness, thinness and Western-centrism” (Green). Persaud notes that for

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someone in her position, where her blackness and femininity already Other her within white
supremacist capitalism, access to gender transgression in the form of recognizable nonbinary
gender presentation is largely unavailable. “‘Even if I wanted to lean into a particular sort of
popular culture version of what non-binary looks like,’” Persaud tells Green, “‘I don’t really
have access to that, and it’s just not how I want to look’” (Green).
Access to nonbinary gender expression online is mediated through whiteness the same
way that it is offline. But it is also important to stress that this aesthetic doesn’t adhere to a body
but to a set of actions performed through media. Nonbinary identity curated through the lens of
Twitter then, is not restrictively tethered to sex because the body/profile must be built in
cyberspace, it must be fashioned through repetitive curation. If, as Butler claims:
if gender is something that one becomes—but can never be—then gender is itself a kind
of becoming or activity, and that gender ought not to be conceived as a noun or a
substantial think or a static cultural marker, but rather as an incessant and repeated action
of some sort. If gender is not tied to sex, either causally or expressively, then gender is a
kind of action that can potentially proliferate beyond the binary limits imposed by the
apparent binary of sex. Indeed, gender would be a kind of cultural/corporal action
(Gender Trouble 143)

Perhaps Butler’s most famous intervention in queer theory is laid out here. She argues that if we
cannot tie gender in any reliable, essential way to the sex of a body, then gender itself becomes
something that we do rather than anything we are. On Twitter, where I have argued that the
profile becomes the proxy for the absent body, the place where self-stylization and content
curation establishes identity broadly and gender more specifically, all users begin with an
unsexed digital body. The profile of the new user is rarely populated in a way that would indicate
gender and (at least, unless the user’s chosen username or inputted details suggest a gender) and
certainly there is no such thing as a ‘sexed’ profile. This is why ‘catfishing’ is possible online.
Because there is no body with which to attempt to prove the ‘truth’ of the sex with whom one is

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speaking. Thus, gender performance on social media is transparently a performance-based
medium. We are who we say that we are online. This is not to say that gender online is ‘fake’ or
in any way less consequential than gender offline. Rather, the profile-as-body reveals that gender
is and has always been a negotiation between the performances of the individual and the
“complex cultural exchanges among bodies in which identity itself is ever-shifting, indeed,
where identity itself is constructed, disintegrated and recirculated only within the context of a
dynamic field of cultural relations” (Gender Trouble 161-2). This field of cultural relations shifts
when one moves online. I say shifts because many of the social compulsions towards traditional
binary gender roles remain, but there is an indecipherability to the profile that is difficult to
produce in the already overly determined geography of the sexed body. This is not to say that the
body does not exist at all online. In Chapter 1 I looked at how Juliana Huxtable sees her body
become authentic through its representation in media online. She claims that posting images of
herself is what makes her become, or feel as if she has become, a woman. These images circulate
in the public sphere online, conferring femininity upon her offline body. But the image of the
body, while it might construct the feeling of being properly gendered and properly at home in the
physical realm, is still never its true fleshy self online. In the case of those trying to represent
themselves as outside humanity to escape gender, the image is more manipulatable than the flesh
and is resignified more easily. Therefore access to the nonhuman body, the hybridized body, or
the nonbinary body is easier to facilitate in a digital space where resignifying binary gender
means rehearsing an aesthetic of genderqueer profilicity.

Trans*Temporal Twitter
Norman’s work on the he/they is quotidian. While he was posting variations of the meme,
the frequency of his posts was important to the meaning those posts generated. Posting a new

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version of the meme everyday became a form of gendered performance, in which he began to
define the boundaries of the gender identity that he claims for himself. However, Norman does
not resort to outright boundary-setting. At no point does he clarify what he believes the he/they
must do, think, wear, etc. in order to ascribe to this gender role. Instead, he allows the examples
to speak for him, so slowly accrue meaning through the characters’ commonalities. In this sense,
Norman’s work on Twitter functions as a kind of digital drag, a community-making that relies on
the shared knowledge of cultural artifacts from his temporal and social frames of reference.
Butler reminds us that gender is “the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts
within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of
substance, of a natural sort of being” (Gender Trouble 45, emphasis mine). What is happening on
Twitter is precisely the kind of performance Butler references here. His performance occurs
within a tightly structured set of communication rules on Twitter, and only accrues meaning
through repetition over a period of time.
Norman’s use of the he/they meme does operate within a strict set of rules, the meme is
understood only in a digital context, where Twitter users have co-opted the form of posting
examples along with little accompanying explanation. In effect, the meme only works therefore,
if you have seen examples of it before. It is through repetition that it becomes humorous and
poignant. In the previous chapter, I discussed the origin of meme culture at some length, noting
that websites such as 4chan and Reddit were instrumental in solidifying the generic conventions
and forms of the meme. While there is a strong relationship between troll culture and meme
usage, Norman’s use of the meme structure highlights how meme iteration can also be used to
emphasize media temporality. It is for this reason that it is so important to recognize that
Norman’s he/they project unfolded over the course of more than a year, from roughly October

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2021 to when he stopped posting the meme in early December of 2022. The very first instance of
the meme on @emonormie’s profile is Cheese, an annoying lactose-intolerant imaginary friend
from the animated series Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends. He is known for his bulbous
head and his penchant for repeating whatever the other characters say. If Cheese were our only
example of he/they characters, we might think that all he/they characters are animated, or that
Norman is asserting that he/they is imaginary, or even that there's some connection between the
he/they and lactose intolerance. Just as with the example of Tom Bombadil, there is only so
much that we’re able to grasp about the boundaries of this gender through a single example.
Therefore, like Butler claims, he/they must be repeatedly performed online in order to make the
boundaries and embodiments of the gender legible. It is only through accretion that we can fill in
the rules of the meme and through the meme, the rules that govern he/they as a marker of gender
identity.
Each instance of the meme recalls the original post, for if we at first see a connection
between animation and the he/they when Cheese is the first example that Norman references,
that presupposition is edited and reconfigured by a second example: a Fushigi ball, which is a
clear ball used for contact juggling that is made to look as if it is floating during use. This new
performance causes the reader to reconsider the assumptions that the initial example may have
occasioned. Now, for instance, we know that not only does he/they not necessarily have to be
human or even real, but he/they might be represented by an object, one that when used properly
or with skill, performs the illusion that it is unbound by gravity, that it can defy natural science.
So perhaps the he/they is imaginary and illusory, tied to childhood through the animated
character and the child’s toy. Adding a third from Norman’s examples brings us to Krampus who
arrives on December 5 with St. Nicholas in the mythic traditions of “Austria, Germany, Slovenia,

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Hungary and the Czech Republic” and has “Giant horns curl up from his head, displaying his
half-goat, half-demon lineage” (Billock). With the accretion of this third example, we can refer
to the previous two versions of the meme and consider that perhaps the uniting factor between
these examples, and thus the definitional boundaries of the he/they is the mythic, magical, or
otherworldly. In the case of Krampus that otherworldly power can terrify children (something
genderqueer people are accused of), but Cheese’s version of the mythic, magical, or otherworldly
isn’t terrifying, it's merely strange. I argue that for the he/they meme to do any gendered work, it
must be repeated with difference, over and over until the examples congeal into a series of
defining characteristics. This takes time, and the meme, as a temporal media vehicle, is suited to
usage as gender. After all, both the legibility of the meme and the legibility of gender are
accessed through repeated performance, not by any hard and fast rules that are directly
communicated.
Perhaps in the instance of the he/they meme, we can see this repeated performance as a
kind of trans*temporal loop, one in which each new movement forward in the meme’s
definitions is haunted by, and conditioned by the specter of previous examples. Therefore to
understand the evolving nature of the meme, one must necessarily conjure up past examples.
Norman’s meme, over time, comes to stand in on Twitter as the performance of the he/they
meme and its self-styling, not as merely a representative of the gender Norman is trying to define
but as a performance of that gender itself. The temporal accumulation of meaning then, is where
we find a natural affinity between the meme as digital language in a bodiless or performance-
based medium and gender’s cultural imperative to repeat. Understanding the meme, or gender
for that matter, means having the ability to hold and recall past temporal performances while
simultaneously reading the current performance in the present. As such, it is a media literacy that

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requires multiple operating timelines to continually revise and reshape one another. This is
multiversal trans*temporal work! Meme readers who want to understand Norman’s he/they must
witness performance after performance of the meme, and in doing so, read gender through
temporality.
Temporal literacy is important to Norman’s work not just because it takes repetition and
iteration to communicate the subtle boundaries of both meme and gender. In addition, a
community of respondents started to coalesce around the he/they meme examples that Norman
was generating. For example, when Norman tweeted the Fushigi ball example as his he/they of
the day, it was retweeted 174 times, and liked over 2,500 times. Comments on his tweet include
an image of David Bowie’s Jareth from the 1986 Jim Henson film Labyrinth, in which David
Bowie’s character uses the Fushigi ball. According to Rosalind Galt, Labyrinth “offers us the
perverse spectacle of Bowie in leather outfits and makeup, casually wielding a black riding crop,
and its mode of address similarly invites the young viewer to respond sexually” (Galt 132). In
responding to Norman’s posting with further queer context, Mer Fenton’s (@fenton_mer)
addition of Jareth further deepens and broadens the associations between he/they characteristics,
the “perverse spectator relations” of Bowie’s Jareth, and the iterative capacity of the meme on
Twitter (Galt 135). Norman’s work defining the he/they through the meme is not only creating a
trans*temporal space in which the accumulation of past performances informs the present
analysis of gender, he is doing so cooperatively and in a way that is legible to his own queer
subcommunity.
This cooperative work becomes most clear when Norman starts accepting submissions
for his queue of he/they meme examples. One such submission came from @coup_de_graz in
July of 2022. Ryuuk is a character from the popular manga series Death Note by Tsugumi Ohba.

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In the manga, Ryuuk is a death god, or 死神 (shinigami), only visible to the protagonist of the
series who makes use of Ryuuk’s powers in order to kill criminals he thinks deserve death.
Ryuuk’s character fits in nicely with what Norman had already identified as the roles and
aesthetics that define the he/they. Like Slenderman, Ryuuk is frightening and spectral, invested
with a supernatural power that makes him horrifying and intriguing. He also sees himself as
largely above the affairs of humans. Through submitting Ryuuk as an example of a he/they,
@coup_de_graz is not only demonstrating their memetic literacy, they are themselves
performing the gender that Norman has helped to define. Because this iteration on the meme is
successful, we know that @coup_de_graz has read and understood past example of the he/they.
We also know that they have done so over time in order to generate the same understanding we
have of the similarities that bind the he/they examples together. But more importantly,
@coup_de_graz is participating in the he/they gender through their own example to associate
their account with he/they queerness as well. Now Norman’s work defining he/they gender is
concrete enough to be performed by other digital bodies online and thus it has become a socially
agreed upon definition of a new gender role, one produced in the digital space of Twitter,
bolstered by the retweet’s ability to assimilate others’ productions into our own profilicity, with
each new performance of the gender calling to mind both the original and each successive re-
performance.
The Masculine Monster Mashup
Norman’s He/The of the day meme reveals how complicated and generative gender
performance in digital spaces can be. His elaboration on the simple meme allowed him to
generate a network of contributors and interlocutors who synthesized the rules that governed the
meme’s repetitive gendered performances and thus accumulated meaning that stylized his

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profile. This work reveals the bodily expectations that follow nonbinary identities offline, and
demonstrates how the nonhuman element of genderqueer escape coheres to the digital body
online. Norman’s hybridized he/they retains features of masculinity all the while gesturing to
those characteristics that transcend gender because they are monstrous and therefore in excess of
gender and gendered language. That he does so in a digital space demonstrates that the
resignification of the body online might be more related to the curation and performances that
one posts to their profile than it does the sex of the physical user. @emonormie is arguably one
of the most famous he/theys on a certain subsection Twitter largely because he used his platform
to self-define the parameters of that gender, parameters which formed a community of
respondents who also identified with the unspoken tenets of Norman’s he/they.
The nonhuman elements of the he/they make it a gender that is uninhabitable in the
offline space, where physicality restricts the gendered embodiments that we can take. We might
aspire to the creepy, lurking power of the Slenderman or the nonhuman resiliency of the
Tasmanian Devil’s animated body, but these gendered traits are not imaginable within the
category of the human offline. On Twitter, where the profile stands in for the body, we can
accumulate a gender that is not bound to any sexed body, and therefore any aesthetic
performance we repeat can become a part of or constitutive of our digital gender identity.
Norman’s work defining the nonbinary, or more specifically the ‘they’ portion of the he/they,
created a trans*temporal workshop space in which other users could internalize the attributes
(both human and nonhuman) that characterize the new gender he performed, and then contribute
to further reperformance of that gender. Collaborators therefore benefitted from Norman’s
previous gender work all the while helping to further coalesce the he/theys boundaries. Because
memetic culture is always a web of contextual references, knowledges, and strategies, looking at

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one instance of a meme always recalls the previous performances. They must work together for
the meme to make sense, and for the activation of the pleasures of recognition that motivates
memetic creation. Norman’s trans*temporal meme work then, not only defines a new, nonhuman
gender online, it allows us to aspire to the nonhuman as a source of gendered power, creating a
new archive of digital bodily impressions and orientations which can momentarily situate us in a
space that transcends gender binaries because it transcends the human.

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Coda:
Good Representation, Bad Monsters, No Exit

“When trans and gender-nonconforming lives are lived joyously
and unapologetically in plain sight or their hard truths and dangers
are spoken out loud, when the knowledge that comes from living
those lives is channeled into music and dance, written about and
written from, played with and fantasized over, when their beauty
and weirdness, their sharp edges and dark recesses are creatively
explored and collectively experienced, that is equally important as
heavy political activism” (Stryker Transgender History 211).

Dontnod Entertainment is probably best known for their game Life is Strange, an episodic
adventure game which was released in five installments over the course of 2015. That game’s
popularity basically put the studio on the map, and since then Dontnod has been true to their
formula of releasing their games in parts. Though the follow-up to Life is Strange, Life is Strange
2 (2018) was not quite as successful as the original, it still received praise from critics and, like
the original title in the series, much of this praise was focused on the ways in which the Life is
Strange games tackled difficult social topics ranging from racism to sexual assault, to drug use
and LGBTQ topics. Then, in August and September of 2020, Dontnod’s newest game Tell Me
Why was released across three episodes. That year it was nominated for a number of awards,
including Best Microsoft Xbox Game at the Gamescom Awards, Game for Impact at The Best
Game Awards, the Beyond the Video Game and Best Narrative Design Awards at the Pégasus
Awards, the Authentic Representation Award and award for Best LGBTQ Character at the
Gayming Awards, and even GLAAD’s Outstanding Video Game Award. Critics too praised Tell
Me Why as a fitting follow-up to the Life is Strange franchise, and fawned over Tyler Ronan, one

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of the two twin protagonists who happens to be the first openly trans character to lead a AAA
game (Elsam).
Dontnod immediately took pains to make sure that the queer community knew that they
were doing Tyler’s story justice. They published a set of FAQ questions on the game’s website
to explicitly deal with (or get out in front of) potential criticisms or questions surrounding the
way in which Tyler was depicted or how he was treated by the other characters in the game. The
FAQ includes questions like “One of Tell Me Why’s protagonists is Tyler, a transgender man.
How were trans people involved in the creation of Tyler’s character and story?” (“FAQ”) Which
they answer by stressing not only that Dontnod employs some trans and nonbinary people, but
also that “To ensure Tyler’s character would resonate with a wide and diverse audience of trans
people, the Tell Me Why team worked closely with two of GLAAD’s transgender staff: Nick
Adams, Director of Transgender Representation; and Blair Durkee, Special Consultant for
Gaming. For over two years, Nick offered foundational guidance on story and character,
consulted on casting, and reviewed scripts at all phases of production” (“FAQ”). The FAQ also
links to an 8-minute video called “Approaching Representation” that Xbox created specifically
about the game and how the developers did everything they could to make sure that the depiction
of Tyler did not offend the trans community. The publisher was clearly ready for Tyler’s place as
one of two protagonists of the game to be both news-worthy and accompanied by skepticism
from the trans community and LGBTQ community more widely. Don’t worry, all these
promotional materials say, we’re doing it right. We’re getting to the heart of the trans
experience! We’re not going to subject Tyler to misrecognition, misgendering, microaggressions,
or use him as a plot device. “No. Tyler’s birth name does not appear anywhere in Tell Me Why”
they cry! They even spoil the end of the game in several of the FAQs (though they are marked as

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spoilers) when they tell the potential player that “Each of Tell Me Why’s endings will include an
optimistic future for Tyler” (“FAQ”). You cannot go wrong here players, nothing that you can
choose over the course of this adventure game can hurt Tyler or subject him to transphobic
violence. And this should have made me, someone who not only plays and enjoys queer games
but was stuck in COVID lockdown during 2020, thrilled. This game was made for me! And it
was made safe. Hallelujah, the age of trans representation in gaming is nigh!
The reviews of the game too, were largely laudatory. The Los Angeles Times celebrated
that Tell Me Why had made “video game history” and notes that the game “is aware of cliches
but works to avoid succumbing to them, namely the heavy emphasis other narratives have placed
on transphobia, violence and the resulting emotional damage” (Martens). VentureBeat’s review
“appreciated that Tyler is a nuanced and thoughtful character, not someone painted in hyperbolic
or stereotypical ways. He didn’t, for instance, have to fight a battle for gender freedom with a
town full of transphobic people.” (Takahashi). Though Kotaku’s Riley MacLeod, himself a trans
man, says he was skeptical when he read the FAQ, the game “completely won me over” partially
because “Tyler talks about being trans easily; he’s past the ‘figuring out his gender’ stage and
just exists as a trans man, something we rarely see in video games”. MacLeod also notes that
this move to make Tyler a very ‘regular’ guy was particularly important after “the hurt many
trans players of The Last of Us Part 2 felt after being blindsided by the game’s traumatic trans
storyline” (MacLeod). Though IGN’s Janet Garcia criticizes the game’s choice-based mechanic
for not having enough consequences, she too celebrates the representation that Dontnod has
created through Tyler’s character, especially appreciating the way that Tyler is revealed to be
trans at the beginning of the game: “We learn about Tyler’s identity as a trans man not through
the bigotry he experiences or by reading his name from before he transitioned (aka his dead-

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name) on an old ID card or any other ‘bet you didn’t see that coming’ form of cringe, but by
exploring his bedroom as he packs his things and through early conversations with his sister.”
(Garcia).
When I played Tell Me Why I was underwhelmed. Despite all the claims that Tyler felt
real, that his portrayal was authentic and kind, even though if anyone should identify with a
white transmasc character who has shaved sides, an oversized jean jacket and several pairs of
Wayfarer-style sunglasses (just like yours truly) I felt Tyler, and most of the other characters

Figure 14: The title screen image for Tell Me Why (2020) featuring Tyler (left) and Alyson (right) Ronan.

were not fundamentally unlikable—they just didn’t feel like real people. Tyler especially didn’t
feel like a real person. What was I missing? What were other people seeing in Tell Me Why that I
couldn’t? After 9 hours of the game and hours more spent reading reviews, watching
playthroughs and scouring comments, I must argue that the reason Tyler Ronan doesn’t feel like
a person is because he’s not: he’s good representation. But what does it mean to be
representation for an entire group of people who are heterogenous—after all, trans, genderqueer

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and gender nonconforming people don’t necessarily have much in common just because they’ve
all said ‘no’ to their gender assigned at birth. What does it mean to look for good representation?
Or to make it? And perhaps most importantly, who is it good for?
In a recent piece in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Thomas Billard and Erique
Zhang note that within queer theoretical discourses transness is evaluated primarily “as ‘bad’ to
the extent that they uphold the validity of binary gender identity and ‘good’ to the extent they
disrupt the binary gender system” and they argue that “transgender media representations cannot
be simply read through the queer political fantasy of counter-normativity” (Billard and Zhang
196). And here we thought queer theory was all about breaking binaries, but when it comes to
trans media it seems, queer theory is only able to sort trans representation into categories of
‘positive’ or ‘negative’. As a queer-theory-wielding-transmasc, I’m skeptical of the claim that
queer theory can’t properly address the transgender figure without tokenizing them as a figure of
either binary dissolution or reification. Indeed, it might be clear from the preceding chapters that
I do think trans people are able to reveal the social constructedness of gender, I also don’t see
that as fundamentally anti-trans. The turn from queer theory to trans studies has asked scholars to
focus more fully on the lifeworld of trans people and our specific concerns and cultural milieus,
while rejecting the valorization of anti-normativity or gender dissolution as the end-goal of
theoretical work. While this criticism is often leveraged at Gender Trouble and Butler more
broadly where it certainly has some merit, I think it is also fair to say that for some trans-
identified people—particularly those of us who don’t see ourselves as primarily male or
female—the dissolution of the binary may be exactly the point. Ask a queer theorist for examples
of good media representation, Billard and Zhang seem to note, and you’ll receive a very different

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answer from those works that might be highlighted by real trans people. As if one cannot be
both. As if representation is a framework we should aspire to in the first place.
Traditional arguments surrounding representation do, I’ll grant Billard and Zhang, often
fall into the trap of primarily arguing that some representation is good for the population it
represents, and some is bad. We see this all the time in film journalism, in popular critiques of
books or games, in activist calls for a proliferation of stronger, or more complete stories. There is
nothing necessarily wrong with asking the media you consume to show stories like your own of
course. We should be pushing media makers to include trans people in their stories, to include
them in writing rooms, to include them in the director’s seat, and in the editing booth. But I also
don’t aspire to be represented. Whether or not representation is good, I’m more concerned with
what it is that representation does. Most arguments about representation, especially in non-
academic contexts and in organizations that track media representation like GLAAD and HRC,
end up falling into the same logical thread when arguing for representation of minoritized
subjects in media:
1. Trans people are depicted on television shows like Orange is the New Black or POSE or
Transparent as (ideally) people with full lives, flaws, needs, wants and struggles. They
therefore generate empathy and understanding between the character and the viewer. This
is especially true, proponents of representation often claim, when the viewer might not
know a trans person (or at least not know that they know a trans person) in their real
lives.
2. Viewers take the awareness that trans people exist (and are people with lives and desires)
out into the world with them, and therefore have more sympathy for trans issues. This
means that increased visibility of onscreen characters leads to increased visibility
offscreen for real trans people in the world.
3. Finally, an increase in general trans visibility and understanding naturally leads the
majority-cis viewers to push for trans rights when they can either among their friends
(called ‘spreading awareness’) or at the ballot box. Thus the world for trans people is
made materially better, easier, or safer.

According to this logic, it is not a long walk from trans representation on screen, on consoles, or
in novels to the improvement of the lives of actual, nonfictional trans people. But before we

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return to the example of Tell Me Why and look at the representation of Tyler in particular, I want
to quickly focus on two reasons that representational logic like the chain I’ve outlined above is a
neoliberal milestone that results in little to no changes for trans people’s actual lived conditions.
The first point I’ll make is that visibility is a trap. Below you’ll see a graph I compiled
comparing the number of trans people present as recurring characters on television from 2013-
2020 with the global number of murders of trans folks. In 2013 there was just one recurring trans
character on television, in 2020 that number had jumped to 38. At the same time, the global

Figure 15: The number of recurring trans characters on television displayed in orange, the number of trans people
murdered globally in blue. Information from Trans Murder Monitoring Project, a TGEU Project and
GLAAD's Annual "Where We Are on TV" Report.

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murders of trans people jumped from 226 in 2013 to 350 in 2020. Even considering that it is
notoriously difficult to get a proper count of the murders of trans people due to misgendering in
the reports of their deaths, both measurements of inclusion and violence seem to be on the rise in
the last decade. So it simply cannot be true that representation necessarily leads to greater
tolerance for or understanding of trans lifeworlds. With the number of recurring trans characters
on television, one would imagine that less trans people would be murdered. Or perhaps it is that
transphobic people happen to be watching different TV? Either way, visibility and violence have
both been concurrently on the rise, leading one to suppose that representational visibility does
not necessarily lead to increases in safety.
In fact, Beauchamp’s Going Stealth: Transgender Politics and U.S. Surveillance
Practices claims that trans and gender nonconforming people are actually incredibly visible to
the State, perhaps more visible than many other populations, and are accordingly much more
surveilled. Beauchamp notes that "The recourse to strategic visibility remains grounded in
assumptions that invisibility was ever possible. Which individuals and groups can choose
visibility, and which are already visible—perhaps even hypervisible—to surveillance
mechanisms? For whom is visibility an available strategy for either social advancement or
personal safety, and at what cost?" (Beauchamp 47). Beauchamp’s work considers “how
surveillance practices make gender nonconformity visible, constructing it as inherently deceptive
in ways that justify continued surveillance to locate its truth” (132). These surveillance
programs, from TSA scanners to ID documents, produce the category of transgender and “may
increase protection for the recognized while simultaneously optimizing state agencies’ ability to
monitor them. . .Meanwhile, those agencies can employ new categories as justification for
expanding surveillance in other ways, for instance through claims of protecting now-legible

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groups from those who remain outside the newly drawn lines of recognition” (139).
Beauchamp’s argument highlights the other technologies of visibility that structure the
relationship between the trans or gender nonconforming subject and their legibility both socially
and politically.
Secondly, the idea that ‘rights’ are and should be the goal of the modern trans movement
is an assumption that requires examination and scrutiny. The common assumption is that
movements to transform the material conditions of violence that trans people face should be
focused on repeating the civil-rights-based framework of the gay and lesbian movement. Dean
Spade criticizes this assumption in his work Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical
Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law. In an interview with Natalie Oswin, Spade tries to shift the
focus of trans political activism away from the letter of the law and towards an analysis of the
administrative violence that produces the precarity of trans life in racist, transphobic Western
hegemonies:
"it is a mistake for trans activists to focus our resources and attention on winning
inclusion in legal equality frameworks, such as anti-discrimination laws and hate
crimes laws, that will not provide relief from the life-shortening conditions trans
populations are facing. Winning legal equality—getting the law to cast us as
victims of discrimination who the state will protect—will not support our
survival. Instead of focusing on what the law says about trans people, which is
really what the law is saying about itself as a protector of trans people, we should
be focused on what systems of law and administration do to trans people and our
interventions should aim to dismantle harmful, violent systems such as criminal
punishment and immigration enforcement." (Spade, quoted in Oswin)

He claims that rights-based advocacy, especially movements focused on changing hate-crime
and anti-discrimination laws, ask for the law to include trans people within protected classes and
therefore provide another justification for the use of state power for mass incarceration and other
historical injustices which pit one minoritized subject against another. Additionally, Spade
claims that such legislation is nearly unenforceable and tends to serve only to protect trans

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people that are otherwise in privileged positions, rather than those trans people (poor, people of
color, disabled, incarcerated, unemployed etc.) that are most in need. Not to mention, anti-
discrimination laws and hate-crime laws do not prevent violence from occurring in the first
place, they merely punish the offender after the violence has already been perpetrated. And they
are unequally enforced, or difficult to enforce at all. Rights-based movements simply continue to
perpetuate the inequalities of U.S. power by petitioning the government for inclusion into state
protection, rather than questioning and revolutionizing the state’s access to that power, and its
ability to designate some populations as citizens and other populations as undesirable. If
representation leads to rights, as many arguments about quality representation claim, then
representation is leading us down a political path that seeks trans integration into carceral
definitions of personhood, all while providing resources for the state to further punish those that
are deemed outside the utility of the state.
We’re left in a representational double-bind. On the one hand, representation and
visibility are traps which may harm trans and gender nonconforming people in the real world and
representational logics sorely need retheorization. At the same time, we certainly don’t want to
see trans and gender nonconforming people wiped off our screens, pages, and pictures. Many
trans and gender nonconforming people, myself included, first understood our gendered feelings
in the context of the media that we consumed, which may have broadened our definitions of
what kinds of lives were creatable and livable. And it is true that much of the media which has
featured trans people (and especially non-binary and genderqueer individuals) in the past has
been marked by “a cisgender gaze upon transgender bodies and lives, a gaze often focused on the
body or physical transition in a mode of voyeuristic spectacle, and marked by curiosity,
wariness, pity, or tragedy” (Henry). There is a need for the thing that we call ‘media

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representation’—a need for trans people to be featured in the myths and stories that help us to
understand contemporary life. After all, we exist in contemporary society!
Which brings us back to Tyler Ronan and the question of ‘good representation’ in Tell
Me Why. In the frameworks of what I have called ‘representational logic’ above, Tyler Ronan
does indeed check most of, if not all, the boxes. Tell Me Why doesn’t misgender Tyler more than
a handful of times and never does so directly—mostly people in his town just become vaguely
confused when he introduces himself as he hasn’t been back to the town in years and they
remember the twins both as girls. But there is no point when a character in Tell Me Why directly
and willingly misgenders Tyler. Alyson, Tyler’s twin sister, is nothing but supportive of him the
whole game. She not only introduces him consistently as her brother and speaks up for his
legitimacy the few times that it is confusing to the characters around them, but she is also game
to talk trans topics with him and displays an understanding above and beyond that of most of the
families of trans people I’ve encountered. It is true that Tyler is also never deadnamed, though
this wasn’t entirely clear to me as I played the game. In flashbacks Alyson and Tyler refer to
Tyler as ‘Ollie’ which as a player I assumed must be a nickname for Tyler’s deadname but which
the FAQ clarifies was a name that Tyler was trying out before eventually settling on Tyler. The
one instance of transphobic violence that players think they see in the opening cinematic, where
young Tyler is threatened with a gun by his mother, turns out to have nothing to do with Tyler’s
gender at all, though this isn’t revealed until a significant way through the first episode. Tyler’s
voice actor is also a trans man, August Aiden Black, who the FAQ tells us had the ability to
make changes in the script based on what he thought was realistic for a character with some of
his own life experiences. So far, so good (representation).

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In fact, the main problem that I have with Tyler’s representation might be summed up by
claiming that he’s too good. Tyler represents a character whose life experiences being trans,
especially being trans and returning to a small, rural town after a long absence, seem glaringly
positive. No doubt, Tyler has experienced trauma in his life. His mother did attempt or seem to
attempt to kill him. He was sent to a juvenile detention or rehabilitation center (it isn’t entirely
clear from the game exactly how the institute is defined). He hasn’t seen his twin sister in too
many years, and the cop that arrested him has been raising her in the meantime. Tyler’s life is not
uncomplicated. So it is difficult to claim that Tyler has had it too good, that his path to gendered
acceptance is too straightforward. But at the same time, it seems to be. Hil Malatino’s recent
study of trans affect, Side Affects rightly claims that even in the most positive circumstances,
being trans often means dealing with a number of difficult emotions and reactions to the
transphobic world around us. He claims that feeling bad is often a key part of the trans
experience but that because of the desire to represent the trans experience in a way that doesn’t
pathologize us, scholars and cultural critics are often loathe to spend too much time meditating
on the negative emotions that come with life in a transphobic world. I’ll quote at some length
here, because I think this claim is particularly useful for understanding why Tyler's story did not
register as authentic to me. Malatino says:
there’s not much available cultural space for actually existing trans people to
think through, let alone speak of , such bad feeling with any degree of nuance or
complexity. Instead, we’re more or less trapped within a contemporary discursive
field that toggles between the celebratory tokenization and hypervisibility that’s
part and parcel of the longue durée of the supposed “transgender tipping point,”
on the one hand, and the virulently phobic conservative framings of trans
subjectivity as irreal, inauthentic and threatening that are deployed in order to
further foreclose our life chances, on the other. . .As for the tropes available to
dramatize the felt experience of transition, there are similarly limited options:
dysphoria and euphoria, feeling terrible or feeling great (1).

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Perhaps our representational woes, the double-bind that we find ourselves in when we look for
representation to do political work then, is tied to our inability to make space for the negative
feelings that are often associated with being trans and with transition. Malatino highlights this
inability to stay with negative or troubling feelings as a symptom of our place in contemporary
discourse. In order to maintain access to transition, medical care, and state-sanctioned transition
needs (from ID documents to court orders) trans people often must explain the trans experience
as a move from absolute negativity to euphoria. But this narrative collapses the complexity of
trans lives. Access to trans care should be open to us whether we prescribe to that narrative or
not, and trans people should have the right to feel whatever it is they feel about the lifelong
process of transitioning. After all, “Cis folks get to be understood as affectively complex and
ambivalent in relation to all sorts of phenomena that are supposed to make one happy” (Side
Affects 3).
Tell Me Why doesn’t necessarily shy away from negative feelings. Like I said before, it
isn’t that Tyler doesn’t experience negativity in the game. He’s on a journey to sell his childhood
home, and in the process to find out why his mother tried to kill him, which resulted in him
killing her in self-defense. This is not necessarily a happy game. One of the key locations in the
game is a graveyard! But Tyler questions all these feelings, seeks their sources, tries to
understand what really happened through revisiting memories (and I mean revisiting quite
literally) with his sister. This is one of the key interactive features of the game, which plays on
the claim that twins have some sort of innate psychic connection. They can Bond “or
communicate with each other telepathically, without speaking” and “They can also stumble upon
certain places around their childhood home that trigger memories, which replay as partial
memories like old videos” (Takahashi). This replaying of the past is perhaps the most important

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interactive and narrative element in the game, allowing the player to review memories from both
Tyler and Alyson’s perspectives, and then make choices about how to proceed based on which
version of the memory the player believes to be closer to the truth.
And what an example of trans*temporality! Tell Me Why’s narrative timeline is so
jumbled it is difficult to sort out. The memories you encounter are not based upon when but
where they happened, so the twins don’t recall them in chronological order, though they do all
circle the traumatic and violent incident with their mother that originally separated the Ronan
twins. But while this temporal uncertainty, the looping back and forth between the past and the
present does slow the pace of the game and does circle around Tyler’s experiences, it does not
provide him the option for the kind of escape from the disciplinary regimes of gender that it does
in a game like GENDERWRECKED or in texts like full-metal indigiqueer. If anything playing
through Tyler’s memories only reinforce his normative masculinity, and provide no
trans*temporal escape within the loop. There are two reasons why I think the use of a timescape
that loops through fractured pieces of memory and shuttles back and forth between Tyler’s
childhood and returns to the present, doesn’t provide an imaginative framework for experiencing
gendered escape. The first of these is the game’s sanitization of Tyler’s trans past, the second is
that Tyler’s monstrosity in the game is figured as a feature of the past, one that he (like his sister
and by extension perhaps all children) grows out of in order to become a man.
Let’s return briefly to Dontnod’s Tell Me Why FAQ. One of the questions they provide an
answer to is whether Tyler is deadnamed in the game. The studio answers by clarifying my
confusion about the name used in flashback sequences: “Tyler’s birth name does not appear
anywhere in Tell Me Why. In flashback scenes, players will hear young Tyler referred to as
“Ollie.” “Ollie” was the first name Tyler chose for himself: he liked that it sounded similar to

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Alyson’s nickname, “Aly.” (“FAQ”) So in the flashbacks and memories that the twins revisit
psychically, Tyler is called “Ollie” a few times by his sister, though never by any of the adults.
More often, however, the dialog is structured to avoid having to use a name for Tyler at all. This
is made easier by the fact that the twins can only see memories that they were a part of, so there
is less need for the third-person singular address, but there are moments in which it feels like the
dialog is doing significant work to avoid deadnaming Tyler, making conversations about him
slightly stilted and awkward. Other characters call the twins “your children” and not “your girls”
or “daughters”. Tyler is not referred to as Alyson’s “sister” but “sibling”. These are small
changes, and no doubt Dontnod settled on slightly less natural dialog as a tradeoff, believing that
misgendering Tyler would do more harm to the community playing the game than a few lines
that might have been unrealistic in 2006 (the year that the incident with their mother occurred).
But this sanitized version of the past feels like it does a disservice to Tyler, and to the trans
player of the game. The reality is that the past will always misgender us. There is no world (at
least not yet) in which our memories are wiped clean of the moments that hurt us, and hurt us in
ways specific to being trans. The loops of trans*temporality are transformative precisely because
they are moments of misrecognition or disorientation. They are moments in which we are forced
into the psychic work of confronting the misassumptions of the past and must reacknowledge
that even if we were not seen properly in our childhood, adolescence etc. we see ourselves in the
present moment. For a game that deals deeply with remembering, with the importance of
different perspectives, and with the way that memories degrade or crystalize over time, this
refusal to allow Tyler to experience his childhood gender robs him of the chance to reify his
gender in the present.

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In this project, I have argued that trans*temporality is a genderqueer-specific form of
experiencing time, and this time schema does in many ways depend upon the acknowledgement
that transitioning is a process that is necessarily lifelong. There will always be moments of
gendered dissonance, even if one passes 100% of the time, even if one is living their life fully
stealth. A brief example may help to explain what I mean here. My neighbors don’t know that I
am trans (at least I don’t think that they know, they might just be too polite to bring it up). I was
introduced to them with my current name, with a beard and mostly masculine presentation,
introduced by my wife as her husband etc. For all intents and purposes we might seem like a
very liberal, maybe a touch eccentric, heterosexual couple. But when having drinks with our
neighbors, my wife and the woman next door started animatedly recalling the ways in which they
did their hair in the 1990s and early 2000s. I contributed to the conversation, remembering the
horrible zig-zag part trend. This precipitated a moment of deep confusion on the part of my male
neighbor, who asked me incredulously how I remembered that, or even knew it was a trend in
the first place. I had inadvertently revealed deeply gendered knowledge that he, a cis man who
had lived through the same era, never had access to. I probably made a joke out of the moment, I
don’t remember exactly how we moved the conversation forward, but in this moment of
disorientation, of misrecognition, I had to remind myself that he didn’t know I was trans, that
knowing about women’s hairstyles was gendered knowledge, and that I was temporarily
disoriented in time between my middle-school self who rocked a zig-zag part, and the man I am
today, who would never have had the chance had I been cisgender. I had to revisit the past, the
past in which I will always be a girl because that is how I was raised, in order to say to myself
that having had a feminine hairstyle in the past doesn’t discount my current embodiment as a
transmasc person. These moments of return, these psychic loops, are not always painful. It does

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not feel painful to acknowledge the fact that for many years of my life I considered myself a girl,
an unhappy, tomboyish, butch girl perhaps, but a girl nevertheless. The past will always
misgender my current embodiment and claimed identity. It isn’t malicious, it is the result of
transition—if there is an after, there must necessarily be a before. We all experience this effect to
some degree; none of us have stayed the same our whole lives, and looking back on the past
sometimes does feel like looking at a younger sibling or good friend—someone you both
understand and don’t. But this experience happens more frequently for trans people and
sometimes with real material consequences. Malatino frames this misrecognition that shapes
trans*time as a moment in which we are therefore “prompted to consider, repetitively and
frequently, how we are manifesting in a given room, how we are signifying, how our
interpolation and positioning in the world might be clashing with our self-understanding” (Side
Effects 53-54).
Removing these instances of misrecognition not only changes the timescape of Tell Me
Why, it cuts Tyler off from the psychic work that this “trans genre of misrecognition” requires
(Side Affects 53). At the same time, sanitizing the past does not make Tyler’s upbring the same
as if he were cis. We are left with a strange dissonance in which we know Tyler grew up being
told that he was a girl and yet we never see that experience because it is deemed too harmful to
Tyler’s current masculinity to acknowledge the fact that he was misunderstood in the past—
misunderstood as female. I am not arguing that a character needs to be misgendered in order to
render some sort of universal ‘trans experience’ legible and authentic. Nor am I advocating for
the inclusion of more microaggressions. But the reality of socially inhabiting one gender
(however uncomfortably) and then transitioning to another is that moving through the world
occasions these moments of dissonance. They are a primary experience of being trans. And

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removing them from Tell Me Why (at least for the most part, there is one example of an
interaction with an NPC in which Tyler’s gender is questioned) does make the game ‘safer’ but it
also makes the game less believable, and less trans. What Tell Me Why proves is that the form of
trans*temporality, the movement in loops from present to past and back to the present is only
half of what this temporal schema requires. If the break, loop, or pause does not provide a space
for psychic reevaluation on the part of the trans person, or even actively resists that work, then it
is not trans*time at all, just a flashback. Escape from progressive, straight time requires work, it
also requires a willingness to or desire to break free from binary and therefore often human,
embodiments.
I’ve carefully examined several texts in which genderqueer, trans, gender nonconforming
and genderfluid individuals find their escape through the combination of hybrid textualities,
trans*temporal narrative schemas, and non-human embodiments in the digital world. Tell Me
Why also comes so close to allowing Tyler to embrace transhumanism, but then forecloses that
potentiality by claiming that reaching towards nonhuman embodiment is merely a symptom of
childhood (or maybe childish?) imagination. One of the ciphers to the various decisions and
puzzles in Tell Me Why is a homemade book of fairy-tale stories crafted by Alyson Ronan and
their mother Mary-Ann Ronan. The book, whose characters are quite transparently fantasy
versions of people in the town around them, is called “The Book of Goblins” after the
protagonists, two twin creatures called The Crafty Goblins. They are depicted in the stories as
smart, savvy, observant creatures with a mischievous streak who are willing to help most of the
other characters in the story, including the Wise Princess who represents Mary-Ann. Unraveling
which character represents which person in the town is part of the process of the twins seeking
information about their mother, her struggles with mental health, domestic abuse, and poverty. It

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is also the imaginative world that helped the twins understand and compartmentalize the
difficulties they faced as children. As the twins go through their childhood belongings and
investigate what might have driven Mary-Ann to threaten Tyler as a child, they encounter a

Figure 16: One of the pages of the Book of Goblins in which the twins trick The Mad Hunter, the only character
who doesn’t have a corresponding NPC outside of the world of the book and who seems to either represent Mary-
Ann’s abusive former partner, or be a metaphor for her sometimes-difficult mental health episodes.

number of figurines, drawings, puzzles and ephemera that lead them to read the various stories in
the book. This conceit makes it easy for the developers to add in collectables and create
achievements for the players to search for as they move through the world of the game, but the
children’s status as goblins also places them in an interesting position between the human and
the nonhuman. After all, Mary-Ann’s Wise Princess character is fully human, and the rest of the
characters which represent the townsfolk of the game’s Delos Crossing, Alaska are animals. The
police chief for example is represented by a moose, and neighbor Sam Kansky is represented by

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a bear. But the children’s characters, which we are told were created by the twins, are quasi-
human. As goblins they can manipulate the world around them better than some of the animals
can (having hands tends to help with this) but neither are they fully human like their mother. This
in-between status, the not-quite-human or near-human recalls the gendered work that
@emonormie performs when defining a gender based on he/they pronouns. Just like
@emonormie’s he/they is infused with the paranormal, the fantastical, the creepy, and the
supernatural, the Crafty Goblins can move smoothly between the world of the animals and
humans. They reside partially outside or in excess of the rules and regulations that govern human
behavior.
The Ronan twins may spend time reading the stories of the Crafty Goblins, but there is a
distinct feeling that these personas, like the house they’ve come to clean up, are frozen in a time
which is only glimpsed from the present. For example, Tyler goes under the house to enter
through the goblins’ ‘secret entrance’ when the twins realize that they don’t have a key to the
house. Alyson investigates the dark under the porch with trepidation: “Are you sure you want to
go in there?” she asks Tyler, who replies “This was our very first den, remember?” (Tell Me Why
Episode 1). Alyson looks skeptical “Who knows what lives down there now”. What lived down
there before used to be goblins, it was a play space for Tyler and Alyson, but Alyson doesn’t see
the area under the porch as a den or a home anymore, not now that she is grown up. She is
worried about the things that might have taken their place, knowing that the space under the
porch was a haven for the not-quite-human even and especially when she and Tyler used it as a
hideaway. It is when Tyler is in this non-human den that the connection between Alyson and
Tyler that allows them to speak to one another telepathically reanimates, and they’re able to have
a conversation about the past as Tyler moves through the goblin den under the porch. Goblins are

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not the only creatures that are under the porch, Tyler stumbles upon paintings of dragons, and a
figurine of the Mad Hunter all the while telling Alyson that he was “sure the Voice [their
telepathic connection] was just another childhood fantasy” (Tell Me Why Episode 1). Tyler
emerges from the underside of the house through a hatch, and we are given the first view of the
inside of the house, the human side of the house, before he lets Alyson in through the front door.
The den under the house represents a place of childhood exploration, of treasure hunts, games,
toys, and the freedom that nonhuman embodiment as the goblins allowed them. It was their
space, where human objects like the assorted cutlery that makes up their “treasure” is
transformed. To a human, perhaps it is merely cookware—to a goblin it is treasure. Alyson never
enters the space under the house, and Tyler never returns to it. That den, like their time as
goblins, is over. Now they must deal with the grown-up world of sorting through the human
objects above. If Tyler wants to be an adult, a man, then he can no longer live in the world of the
goblins.
This foreclosing of the nonhuman as part of a range of “childish fantasies” prevents Tyler
from embracing the goblin as a tool for gendered escape. Partially, this is because Tyler doesn’t
seem to want to escape or at least he doesn’t want to escape gender. There’s nothing wrong with
that! The genderqueer project of escape from the hegemonic power of cisheterosexual binaries is
not the goal of every trans person, nor should it be. But for those of us that do want to find a
world outside this one, even if that world is temporary, digital, or non-material, the route out of
this world often requires an embracing of nonhuman or monstrous expressions of self, potential,
and embodiment. Tyler is unwilling, unable, or uninterested in that path, he is no longer a goblin
but has come into himself as a young man ready to become a forest ranger, ready to reenter

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society after his rehabilitation in the carceral unit, ready to assimilate into the adult cisgender life
and responsibilities that he grew up anticipating.
In their introduction to the critical anthology Trapdoor: Trans Cultural Production and
the Politics of Visibility, Reina Gossett, Eric Stanley, and Johanna Burton write that
“representations do not simply re-present an already existing reality but are also doors into
making new futures possible” (xvii). And perhaps this is true of some representations. Perhaps
what representation does is allow us to think alongside media, to imagine where narratives might
have gone differently, where we would make different choices than the characters, and allows us
to consider how we might fit in or not fit into circumstances that are fundamentally different than
our own. When I look at a game like Tell Me Why which is universally lauded as “good
representation” I do wonder what doors are being opened into new futures. But I also wonder if
“good” representations are only seen as good precisely because they open doors that already
exist. Tyler’s story tells us how to be a white, able-bodied, transgender man in Alaska, and what
is possible under the conditions he has faced. Perhaps he teaches us resilience, or perhaps
through him we can imagine a place without deadnaming or misgendering. But what Tell Me
Why does not do is push the boundaries of representation past the acceptable and into new
territories. After all, if everyone agrees Tell Me Why is “good” for trans people it is likely
because that specific flavor of trans life is palatable, it does not push anyone too far, it does not
question the agreed-upon boundaries of ‘transgender’ as an identity, nor does it complicate trans-
life through the inclusion of other vectors of oppression like race, national identity, or ability to
name a few. Tyler is good trans representation not because he is a particularly compelling and
exciting character but because he’s not likely to offend anyone. He is respectable, earnest,
honest, and his assimilation into cisheterosexual culture is relatively seamless.

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I have tried to show over the course of this project that genderqueer, trans, and nonbinary
creators have access to other narrative tools to represent and experience facets of the gender
nonconforming experience, and while the works that I have chosen may not be well-known or
widely lauded as ‘good representation’ they are even more interesting for it. These texts help us
to think through the ways in which gender nonconformity works on hybrid works in a
mediascape that is evolving at a breakneck speed. As it does so, new fissures and breaks open
between interface and narrative content, between past and present, between the human and the
monster. Combining the otherworldly spatial geographies of the hybridized, monstrous body
with the alternative timescapes and psychic investment of trans*temporality can indeed open
doors to new modes of being in a digital world. It is precisely through “new technologies of
representation” that “radical utopians continue to search for different ways of being in the world
and being in relation to one another than those already prescribed for the liberal and consumer
subject” (Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure 2). Whether it is the riotous monsters of post-
apocalyptic GENDERWRECKED or the ghost-in-the-machine of full-metal indigiqueer or even
the queer failure of “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” these genderqueer texts serve
as the kind of representation that I believe Gossett et al are searching for, the kind that imagines
new futures for us and at least temporarily allows us to glimpse what it might be like to embrace
the truly strange and wonderful potential of a world outside of the gendered flesh and the
significations that adhere to it.
Trans scholars have claimed that queer theory left them behind, that their lives were
ignored while theorists searched for the ultimate metaphor for the constructedness of gender.
Their criticisms are valid. There is important and compelling work to be done that takes seriously
the here-and-now of trans and gender nonconforming lifeworlds, that will help us understand

208
community, the oppressions of intersectional trans life, the material conditions we face, the
history of medical gatekeeping and many, many other issues. But as a transmasc person who
would like to see a world in which we make ourselves, like Barb of the helicopter story, into
something “furiously new”, something that not only pushes against but disregards the boundaries
of bodies and roles, of present, past, and future, that laughs in the face of claims that we are not
human, I am looking for a different kind of representation. I am looking for trans texts that take
us somewhere else and make us feel as if we can inhabit the power that comes from embracing
the animal, the nonhuman, or the feral. I do not want to choose legibility in a world in which
gendered literacies can read only male, female, and something in between. Nor do I think that the
worlds these creators have crafted are any less authentic or less real because they live with one
foot in the realm of the digital. What the texts in this project do is provide another way to look at
trans and genderqueer media in an increasingly digital context. This media doesn’t look to cater
to the cisgender gaze, it doesn’t try to explain its eccentricity or trash-core aesthetics. Instead it
asks what genderqueer representation might look like if it were a technique to develop a
community apart from mainstream media representations. These texts allow us to transcend our
current conditions, to rupture notions of cis-time and cis-space and to leverage the hybridity in
digital media that mirrors our own evolving monstrosity.
Trans*temporality is just one of the tools that gender nonconforming and genderqueer
creators have in their arsenal, a tool that can dodge the double-bind of representation and assert a
genderqueer restructuring of cis time. Trans*temporality allows us to momentarily step outside
our own timelines, to return to the past in order to reaffirm our present and imagine a new future.
It shakes loose gender’s sedimented assumptions and helps us to see that we are always in a
process of making and remaking a life that is more than survivable. Living in this kind of

209
movement through time is work, it can be painful, and it can be disorienting. It can also be
beautiful, life-giving, and exhilarating. It can be euphoric. Similarly, we fear the monster not
merely because it is outside the human, but precisely because by not being human it is more than
human. When you are Other, when you are already cast out, there is nothing to stop you from
becoming entirely yourself. And these two techniques—the embracing of the monster, the
creature outside the human body, and trans*temporality, a schema outside cisheterosexual
time—together distort and reconfigure spacetime into something anarchic, something
genderqueered. These creators don’t just tell us trans stories, they help us inhabit trans worlds.
To me, this feeling, of being unmoored in a work of genderqueer possibility, feels better and
more euphoric than any good representation ever could.

210
Works Cited by Chapter
Introduction

Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke University Press,
2006.

Barad, Karen. “Transmaterialities.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 21, no.
2-3, 2015, pp. 387–422., https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2843239.

Beauchamp, Toby. Going Stealth: Transgender Politics and U.S. Surveillance Practices. Duke
University Press, 2019.

Bettcher, Talia Mae. “Trapped in the Wrong Theory: Rethinking Trans Oppression and
Resistance.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 39, no. 2, 2014, pp.
383–406., https://doi.org/10.1086/673088.

Bey, Marquis. “Trouble Genders: ‘LGBT’ Collapse and Trans Fundamentality.” Hypatia, vol.
36, no. 1, 2021, pp. 191–206., https://doi.org/10.1017/hyp.2020.52.

Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Polity Press, 2013.

Busta, Caroline, and @LILINTERNET. “Juliana Huxtable on Zoosexuality, Furries, and the
Fetishization of Outrage.” Art Busta, https://www.artbasel.com/news/juliana-huxtable-
project-native-informant-art-basel-hong-kong?lang=en.

cárdenas, micha. The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities. Atropos Press, 2012.
Derrida, Jacques., and Elisabeth Weber. Points . . . : Interviews, 1974-1994. Stanford University
Press, 1995.

Enke, A. Finn “The Education of Little Cis: Cisgender and the Discipline of Opposing Bodies.”
Transfeminist Perspectives in and Beyond Transgender and Gender Studies, Temple
University Press, Philadelphia, PA, 2012, pp. 60–77.

Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Duke University Press,
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Halberstam, Jack. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New
York University Press, 2005.

Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke
University Press, 2016.

Hayles, N. Katherine. “Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis.”
Poetics Today, vol. 25, no. 1, 2004, pp. 67–90., https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-25-1-
67.

211
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York University
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Malatino, Hil. Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad. University of Minnesota Press,
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- - -. Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence and Intersex Experience. University of
Nebraska Press, 2019.

Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York
University Press, 2009.

Prosser, Jay. Second Skins: Body Narratives of Transsexuality. Columbia U.P., 1998.

Rajunov, Micah, et al. “Foreward.” Nonbinary. Memoirs of Gender and Identity, Columbia
University Press, New York, NY, 2019, pp. xi-xiv.

Salamon, Gayle. Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality. Columbia
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- - -. The Life and Death of Latisha King: A Critical Phenomenology of Transphobia. New York
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Steinmetz, Katy. “The Transgender Tipping Point.” Time, Time Magazine, 29 May 2014,
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Stryker, Susan. Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution. Seal Press, 2017.
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Chapter 1
The Digitally Contaminated Page as a Genderqueer Interface

Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. MIT
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cárdenas, micha. “Trans of Color Poetics: Stitching Bodies, Concepts, and Algorithms.” The
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Dasgupta, Subrata. It Began with Babbage : The Genesis of Computer Science, Oxford
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Fialho, Alex, and Juliana Huxtable. “Juliana Huxtable Talks about Conspiracy and Her
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Fournier, Lauren. “Sick Women, Sad Girls, and Selfie Theory: Autotheory as
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Halberstam, Jack. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New
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Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Primate Visions : Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern
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Hayles, N. K. “Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis.”
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Salamon, Gayle. Assuming a Body: Transgender Theory and Rhetorics of Materiality.
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Stryker, Susan. “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix:
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Chapter 2
Talk to You, Kiss You, Fight You: Gender in the Playable Text

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213

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Chapter 3
I Sexually Identify as An Attack Helicopter

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---. “I've heard that there are trans people out there who didn't know it was a hurtful meme? And
you know what? That's great! It means that time has passed and it's fallen out of
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---. “(But I've been on the internet since 1998, so any meme that came out in a year that starts
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216
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221

He/They Twitter Dataset Examples from @emonormie
Tweet Date Character/Example
12/4/22 CG Characters from the music video for Eiffel 65’s 1998 Song “Blue”
12/3/22
Fushigi ball, a clear ball used for contact juggling that is made to look as if it is
floating during use
11/2/22 Pochita, chainsaw-faced-dog from 2022 anime Chainsaw Man
10/30/22
Eight non-human characters from GameBoy game Kirby: Nightmare in
Dreamland (2002): Gip, Chilly, Coner, Cool Spook, Mr. Tick-Tock, Phan Phan,
Axe Knight, and Blipper.
10/19/22 Dr Finkelstein from Tim Burton’s 1993 film The Nightmare Before Christmas
10/18/22 Neeble, an alien worm from the Men in Black series
10/15/22 The Babadook from the 2014 film of the same name
10/14/22 Lipstick-face demon from Insidious 2 (2013), itself a popular meme
10/13/22 Retweet of Dr. Bronner’s coming-out announcement`
10/13/22 Frankenstein’s monster
10/12/22 A cut-and-bake sugar cookie with a pumpkin face in the dough
10/11/22 Chowder from 2006 animated film Monster House
10/10/22 Pokémon Pumpkaboo
10/9/22 Envy, shapeshifter from anime Fullmetal Alchemist (2003-2004)
10/8/22 Zero from Tim Burton’s 1993 film The Nightmare Before Christmas
10/7/22 Barrel from Tim Burton’s 1993 film The Nightmare Before Christmas
10/6/22 Lock from Tim Burton’s 1993 film The Nightmare Before Christmas
10/5/22 The Thing from 1982 film of the same title
10/4/22 The Count from Sesame Street

222
10/3/22
Enoch, pumpkin-headed character from 2014 animated miniseries Over the
Garden Wall
10/2/22 Edward Scissorhands from the 1993 film of the same name
10/1/22 A spikey-haired skull disco ball from 2002 live-action film Scooby-Doo
9/30/22 Jack Skellington from Tim Burton’s 1993 film The Nightmare Before Christmas
9/29/22 Benny, a cab-driving skeleton from the Disney series Halloweentown
9/28/22 Pokémon Wiglett, a sand-worm creature
9/20/22 The Chatterer, a character from the Hellraiser franchise
8/29/22 Bughuul, a pagan deity which eats children from the 2012 horror film Sinister
8/19/22 Bartleby from Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener”
8/18/22 The Weighted Companion Cube from the Portal game series
8/12/22
The Nyan Cat, a YouTube video of a 2011 animated cat flying through space
followed by a rainbow which became a meme.
8/10/22
The Epcot ball otherwise known as the Spaceship Earth attraction at Walt
Disney World.
7/21/22 The Catbus from Hayao Miyazaki’s 1993 film My Neighbor Totoro
7/17/22 The duck and dog from 1984 SNES game, Duck Hunt
7/16/22 Perry the Platypus from the animated series Phineas and Ferb (2007-2015)
7/14/22 Soot sprite, a small creature from 2001 animated film, Spirited Away
7/12/22 Stink Spirit, later revealed to be the spirit of a polluted river, from Spirited Away
7/11/22 Shadow the Hedgehog from the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise of games
7/10/22 Ryuk, a god of death from the Death Note anime and manga series (submission)
7/9/22
Kurapika, the last survivor of the Kurta Clan from the Hunter x Hunter anime
and manga series
7/8/22 The wolf mascot of Cookie Crisp cereal
7/7/22 Kirby from the Kirby series of games (submission)

223
7/6/22 Frank the Rabbit, the antagonist of the 2001 film Donnie Darko
6/27/22 “your mom”
6/23/22 “Jesus was the first He/They (plural ‘they’ because of the holy trinity)”
6/22/22 Max Goof from A Goofy Movie (1995) and A Very Goofy Movie (2000)
6/8/22 Gizmo from 1984 film Gremlins (submission)
5/25/22 King Katamari from the Katamari games the first of which debuted in 2004
5/21/22
The Stinky Cheese Man, a character from Jon Scieszka’s children’s book The
Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales
5/11/22
Ren and Stimpy from the Nickelodeon series The Ren & Stimpy Show (1991-
1995)
5/6/22
Swiper, a thieving fox from Nickelodeon series Dora the Explorer (2000-2019)
(submission)
5/3/22 Lee Harvey Oswald
4/29/22 Aku, the demon-king antagonist of the cartoon series Samurai Jack (2001-2004)
4/28/22
Cousin Itt from The Addams Family television and film series. He was created
specifically for the 1964 series and is usually portrayed as a hair monster with
sunglasses and a bowler hat
4/27/22
Frieza, alien main antagonist of the Dragon Ball series of anime, games, and
films
4/25/22
Drag performer Willow Pill’s crotch with a mask on it, a look she performed on
RuPaul’s Drag Race in 2022
4/23/22
Homestar Runner, the main animated character from the Flash animated web
series and website by brothers Mike and Matt Chapman
4/13/22 Marvin the Martian from Warner Brothers’ Looney Tunes
4/12/22 Pig-Pen from Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts comic strip and adaptations

224
3/30/22
Meatwad, an animated ball of ground beef and one of the main characters in the
Aqua Teen Hunger Force adult animated cartoon which aired on Cartoon
Network (2000-2015)
3/29/22
Darwin the Ikea Monkey, a baby monkey dressed in a warm overcoat who
escaped from a car in North York and hid in the Toronto Ikea, he went viral and
became his own meme
3/28/22
Scruff McGruff, an 1979 animated bloodhound used by police and the National
Crime Prevention Council in the USA as part of a campaign to increase crime
awareness and personal safety.
3/27/22
Michigan J. Frog, an animated cartoon character from the Warner Bros.' Merrie
Melodies film series
3/26/22
Pigeon from the 2003 children's book Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus by Mo
Willems
3/24/22
"Thingy" a one-off monster character which turns out to be a woman in a
costume from an episode of The Proud Family, an animated series which ran on
the Disney Channel from 2001-2005 (submission)
3/25/22
Oswald the Octopus, a safety-conscious children's character from 2001 animated
series Oswald which aired on Nickelodeon
3/15/22 Pokémon Psyduck
3/12/22 Wile E. Coyote from Warner Bros’ Looney Tunes
2/27/22 Pokémon Fuecoco, a fire-pig creature
2/25/22
Lemongrab, a major antagonist with a lemon for a head from Pendleton Ward’s
animated Adventure Time series (2010-2018)
2/24/22 Crazy Frog, the titular character of the Crazy Frog Racer series of video games
2/23/22 Grawp, giant brother of Hagrid from the Harry Potter series
2/22/22
Clippy, animated virtual assistant/user interface from the Microsoft Office
programs for Windows 97-2003

225
2/20/22
Tiny Winky, the purple (and first) Teletubby with a triangle antenna from the
Teletubbies series. This was also the character identified as ‘gay’ by a Jerry
Falwell who claimed that he was a homosexual symbol and that parents should
guard their kids against indoctrination by the show (which ran from 1997-2001)
2/13/22 The Party God, a wolf wearing a snapback, from the Adventure Time series
2/3/22 Gregor Samsa, protagonist of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis
1/30/22
The mouse from the 1985 children's book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by
Laura Numeroff
1/29/22
Roger Klotz, bully and leather-jacket-wearing teen antagonist of Nickelodeon's
animated series Doug (1991-1999)
1/10/22
Urban legend and creepypasta character Slender Man, who originated as an
internet meme
1/10/22
The Mothman, noted cryptid and subject of The Mothman Prophecies, 2002 film
based on the 1972 book of the same name by John Keel
1/6/2022 Scar, antagonist of the 1994 Disney animated film The Lion King
12/29/21
Gritty, well-loved hairy mascot of the Philadelphia Flyers National Hockey
League team
12/28/21 Rufus, a naked mole-rat from Disney animated series Kim Possible (2002-2007)
12/27/21 Advertising character/mascot and sentient Mucus creature from ads for cold
medicine Mucinex
12/26/21 The punk duck mascot of Bubble Yum bubble gum
12/25/21
Bloo, imaginary friend of protagonist Mac in the animated series Foster's Home
for Imaginary Friends (2004-2008) (submission)
12/25/21
Krampus, creature of folklore which scares badly behaved children around the
Christmas season
12/24/21 Jesus "(the 'they' is plural and refers to the Holy Trinity)"
12/22/21 The Rainbow Fish from the Marcus Pfister children's book of the same name

226
(1992)
12/21/21 Gloppy, molasses character from beloved board game Candyland (submission)
12/20/21 Grimace, purple gumdrop-shaped character from McDonald's advertising
12/19/21
Gumby, titular character of the claymation franchise series The Gumby Show
which ran from 1957-1969
12/18/21
Dobby the House-Elf, a mischievous and magical elf who wears a pillowcase
from the Harry Potter series
12/16/21
The Grinch, main character of the Dr. Seuss book How the Grinch Stole
Christmas (1957) and subsequent adaptations
12/15/21
Jason Funderburker the pet frog of protagonist Gregory from the animated
miniseries Over the Garden Wall
12/13/21 Beetlejuice, from the 1988 Tim Burton film of the same name
12/12/21 Victor, protagonist of Tim Burton's Corpse Bride (2005) voiced by Johnny Depp
11/29/21
Garfield Mark Logan, otherwise known as Beast Boy, a character appearing in
DC Comics in both the X-Men and Teen Titans franchises. While he often takes
the form of a green, fuzzy humanoid, he can shape shift into any animal
11/28/2021
The entire Sinnoh Region Elite Four. The Elite Four is the set of final opponents
at the end of each Pokémon game and the Sinnoh region refers to the area
explored in Pokémon Diamond and Pearl, both games for the Nintendo DS
which were released in 2006
11/23/2021
The Tasmanian Devil, commonly referred to as Taz, an animated cartoon
character featured in the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes
11/21/21
Tasselled Wobbegong shark, a species of 'carpet shark' which disguises itself on
the ocean floor to surprise its prey. It can be found in coral reefs off the North
coast of Australia.

227
11/9/21
Ramiel, a character from the 1995-1996 anime Neon Genesis Evangelion.
Ramiel has a body made from a shiny blue octahedron and is armed with an
"accelerated-particle cannon". Neon Genesis Evangelion is often cited as one of
the staples of queer anime due to the homoerotic subtext between two of the
main characters.
10/25/21
Simon Petrikov, formerly known as the Ice King, a character from Adventure
Time
10/24/21
Reuben, also known as Experiment 625, a character from the Lilo & Stitch
franchise where he first appeared in Stitch! The Movie (2003)
10/20/21
Cheese, a slightly annoying lactose-intolerant imaginary friend from the
animated series Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends. He is known for his
bulbous head and his penchant for repeating whatever the other characters say

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Asset Metadata

Creator Dunn, Eliot Jean (author)

Core Title “A door, an exit, a way out”: trans*temporality in hybrid media

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Degree Conferral Date 2023-08

Publication Date 06/27/2023

Defense Date 06/25/2023

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag digital media,genderfluid,genderqueer,he/they,helicopter story,memes,narrative time,OAI-PMH Harvest,phenomenology,queer media,queer phenomenology,queer theory,queer time,temporality,Time,trans,trans time,transgender,Twitter,video games,visual novel

Format theses (aat)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Tongson, Karen (committee chair), Gambrell, Alice (committee member), Kessler, Sarah (committee member), McPherson, Tara (committee member), Ruberg, Bonnie (committee member)

Creator Email dunnej@usc.edu,eliotjdunn@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC113259817

Unique identifier UC113259817

Identifier etd-DunnEliotJ-11993.pdf (filename)

Legacy Identifier etd-DunnEliotJ-11993

Document Type Dissertation

Format theses (aat)

Rights Dunn, Eliot Jean

Internet Media Type application/pdf

Type texts

Source 20230630-usctheses-batch-1059 (batch), University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the author, as the original true and official version of the work, but does not grant the reader permission to use the work if the desired use is covered by copyright. It is the author, as rights holder, who must provide use permission if such use is covered by copyright.

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu