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I really did think Becky and Stacy were going to stay contained to two essays, but apparently adulthood gave both of them Substack, and now I have to deal with the consequences. I want all of you to know. I resent you for enjoying this series. Somewhere in the middle of trying to explain why everyone online is so desperate to prove they have better taste than everybody else, Mark Fisher limped back in without my consent (this is called a double entendre). So this is the finale: Becky, Stacy, TikTok, Substack, one extremely normal trans woman with a Stanley cup, and me becoming progressively more annoyed that any of this requires Hegel. (Hegel in an article about Beckies and Stacies, can our tech feudal overlords please just take us out now?)

1.

A trans woman I know, married for six years, lives in a subdivision with a two-car garage and a wife who works in HR, spent an evening last spring at a queer function explaining to a group of people with much cooler haircuts than hers exactly why the state's new Medicaid pre-authorization policy for gender-affirming care was going to eat the working-class girls first. She had the billing codes memorized. She knew which surgical CPT codes had been folded into which policy revisions, which regional Medicaid contractor had quietly changed its interpretation of medical necessity in March, which appeals process had a functioning deadline and which one had been turned into an infinite paperwork loop. She was, in the most literal material sense, the most politically useful person in the room on the subject at hand. She was wearing a Target dress. Her nails were done in what I can only describe as HomeGoods Season Rotation Pink. She had a Stanley cup. When she left, she was going to go pick up her wife from a Pilates class.

Two women in the room, both of whom had recently written Substack essays about the aesthetics of trans-feminine refusal, spent the walk to the after-party critiquing the way this woman had transitioned. The medical part was fine. The problem was aesthetic and cultural. She'd become, they said, too legible. She dressed like a mom, she'd bought a house, she had made an actual joke about carpool at one point, and one of them used the word assimilationist twice while the other one settled on bleak. From there they continued on to a party at which several people would be doing bumps of ketamine off the same iPhone case, congratulating each other for having escaped the American nuclear family.

I've been thinking about that walk for months. The two women are ordinary in a way I recognize, because I've been ordinary in exactly the same way, and I'm not particularly interested in going after them personally. What I've been thinking about is the trans woman with the Stanley cup, and the fact that the analysis she gave that night, the specific one about billing codes and appeals timelines and which trans girls were going to get chewed up by the pre-auth system first, was materially more radical than anything anyone in that scene had written in the past six months. Being a suburban wife isn't, on its own, radical. It's the assumption underneath the sneer that concerns me, which is the assumption that a woman's aesthetic legibility as an ordinary married American reveals her politics. That assumption was produced almost entirely by the visual and cultural habits of the people making it. Their politics had eyes and no ears. They could see that she looked like she probably had strong opinions about pillow shams, and they couldn't hear that she was, in the meantime, the only person at the party who actually knew how the state was about to kill some of us.

I keep getting stuck on that. Unfortunately, I also keep getting stuck with Mark Fisher. Consider the second half of the title fair warning.

Both of the pieces this one completes are already out there. If you haven't read The Psychology of the Becky or the Stacy essay, you don't have to, but the short version helps. I've been arguing for a while that the girls who figured out how to be safe in the cafeteria at fifteen didn't stop figuring that out when they turned thirty. They just got better at it. Becky was the anxious girl who studied the rules until she could pass for someone born with them, because being caught not knowing them had cost her something once and she wasn't going to let that happen again. Stacy was the girl the rules organized themselves around, whose desirability and social fluency gave her the authority to define what the current rules were at any given moment, at the cost of being watched constantly for any drift out of alignment. Both of them are grown now. They both have Substacks. God help us.

What happens when Becky and Stacy grow up is that the same skills follow them into political life. The anti-mainstream has become one of the most predictable mainstream positions available in the English-speaking left, and the performance of political sophistication has drifted alarmingly far from any material commitment. The woman with the Stanley cup keeps exposing it when she turns up in scenes designed to exclude her, which she does often, because she is a trans woman with a wife and a job and she doesn't think of any of this as ideological.

Also there will be a part where I admit that I do this too. Sorry in advance.

2.

The suburban trans woman is not a person the queer left knows what to do with. The available scripts don't cover her. There's a tragic-victim script that needs her to be visibly suffering, and a vanguard-freak script that needs her to be visibly strange, and a trans-radical script that needs her, at minimum, to be visibly refusing something legible. She refuses nothing. She just went to work, got the hormones, got married, put her deadname behind her, and now she has a wife who is a slightly annoying woman with strong opinions about backsplashes, and the two of them are together forever unless something spectacular happens. She is a woman. That's the entire event. The queer intellectuals in her general vicinity are still theorizing about what a woman is supposed to be able to become, and she just walked into their party with one.

The queer scenes I've moved through for most of my adult life have a specific way of registering her as a problem. It's rarely stated outright, because stating it would sound conservative and everyone in the scene knows better than to sound conservative. It comes out sideways. Somebody makes a joke about "the wives." Somebody uses the word cis-passing as if it explains something. Somebody makes a knowing comment about Reformed T4T. Somebody, at some point, uses the phrase "she's basically a straight woman now," which is worth pausing on because it is what people say when they mean she has stopped being available for the specific forms of intimacy and status the scene is built out of. She's no longer in the roster. Her attention doesn't accrue to anyone here. Her sex life is happening in a bedroom none of us have been in. She has left the group chat that was never called a group chat.

Underneath all this is the fact that transsexual women in Amerika have historically been prevented, by force and by design, from having what she has. From the medical gatekeeping that required us to prove we would live as legible normative women in order to receive care, through the housing discrimination that made stable domesticity a lottery, through the employment discrimination that made a boring middle-class job a rare achievement, through the family estrangement that made a wife who would show up to your mother's funeral improbable, through the everyday violence that made walking to the store an act with stakes, the ordinary suburban American life has been structurally withheld from us. There are trans women my age who grew up watching their older sisters die in efficiency apartments. The mundane life is a life a lot of us were told, in a hundred small and large ways, that we could not have. When one of us gets it, she is, whether or not she means to be, sitting on top of a historical achievement that a hundred years of medical and social violence tried to prevent.

She is also, sometimes, boring. This is a feature. Ordinariness is what boring people get to be. Every marginalized population produces a small class of people whose political demand is essentially that they be allowed to become as boring as everybody else, and it's a real demand, and it isn't defeated by the fact that boringness isn't, in itself, revolutionary. Nothing is revolutionary in itself. Buying a house is not revolutionary. Being married isn't revolutionary. Wandering around Target on a Saturday afternoon looking for a very specific type of drawer organizer isn't revolutionary. But being allowed to do any of those things, when for most of the twentieth century the medical establishment considered you a rare deviant category and the state considered you fraudulent by default, is a historical shift that is not visible to somebody whose theory of the radical is built entirely out of visible refusal.

The queer intellectual sees, in the suburban trans woman, assimilation. That is the word she reaches for. What she often means, on inspection, is that she can't tell what the woman is protesting. What she often means, further, is that the woman is not protesting anything for her benefit. The suburban trans woman isn't producing content. She isn't recognizable as a political actor to somebody whose politics runs on being able to recognize one on sight. She's just living.

I've read enough centrist trans commentary to know how easily this argument slides into a defense of the good normal trans woman as against the bad theatrical one, and I refuse that entire framework. I'm not arguing that ordinariness is preferable. The mistake is treating visible aesthetic transgression as a proxy for political seriousness, and that's been running the aesthetic upper end of trans-left culture for at least a decade. The suburban woman with the Stanley cup can be a political idiot. She can also, as in the case I opened with, be the person who has done the actual work of understanding how the state is about to eat some of us. What somebody looks like walking into a room tells you very little about what she thinks or what she'd risk.

3.

I'm on Substack, which means pretending I could write any of this from outside the platform would be dishonest.

Substack has produced something historically specific. It isn't the first medium that let writers sell their opinions to a self-selecting audience, and it won't be the last, and it's not uniquely evil. What it's done, more efficiently than any prior medium, is monetize the feeling of being unusually intelligent for disliking normal things. You subscribe to a writer, in a lot of cases, because reading her makes you feel like one of the people who gets it, and she writes, in a lot of cases, in a mode that flatters you for having got it. This isn't a description of every writer on the platform, or of every reader. It's the pressure sitting over the whole thing. The confessional does well. The cultural sneer does well. The political explainer that flatters your existing politics does well. The sneering confessional political-cultural explainer that flatters your politics while making you feel wounded and knowing does especially well. I have written in most of these modes. Some of my most-read pieces are among them. This isn't a self-exempting essay.

Substack rewards a very recognizable version of adult Becky. Not every writer on Substack is Becky. Some of the best writing on the platform is coming from people who are actively working against its pressures. But the person Substack was built to reward is somebody who has spent a long time studying which cultural objects the people she wants to be around currently despise, and who has developed the skill of publicly despising them slightly better than everybody else. She's smart, and she reads. Her taste is remarkable mostly for how efficiently it predicts the taste of her milieu six weeks in advance. She thinks she's independent because she was one of the first people in her feed to hate the thing everybody now hates. She is Becky in her thirties, doing what Becky always did, which is anticipating her cohort's next opinion and calling that anticipation discernment.

The sneer isn't always wrong. Sometimes the mainstream cultural object really is bad, sometimes it's politically bad in ways worth sneering at, and I don't want to pretend I disagree with all of the specific complaints. The Marvel movies are, in fact, imperial propaganda with a labor problem. A significant portion of the current romantasy market is organized around consent violations the genre refuses to metabolize. The nonprofit-industrial complex does produce writing that reads like it was assembled from the sadder half of an HR manual. These are correct observations, and I have made several of them myself. What happens on Substack is that the observation becomes the product, the product becomes a status good, and the status good sells the reader the feeling of being on the correct side of a cultural line she is paying, monthly, to keep intact.

This is where somebody usually accuses me of being a hypocrite. Correct. I am a hypocrite. I benefit from this economy. I check my analytics. I know exactly which of my essays over-perform relative to length and which under-perform and I have opinions about why. I have, in the past, written a headline sharper than I strictly needed to because a sharper headline gets clicked. Every writer on the platform who has been on it for more than eight months has done a version of this. The question isn't whether we participate. We do. The interesting part is what Substack rewards over time, and it rewards Becky, because Becky is the person whose talent is anticipating what a self-selecting audience is about to want to feel superior about.

This becomes politically ugly because a lot of the writing produced under these conditions is claiming to be left-wing. Some of it is, in the ordinary sense that its author would probably vote for a socialist if one were on the ballot and would probably show up to a picket if one were down the street. But an enormous quantity of it turns the reader, and the writer, into members of a class defined by our correct taste. It's the taste that does the work. The politics is the wrapper. This is what liberalism has always done, since liberalism first became a bourgeois cultural project in the eighteenth century: it distinguishes the cultivated from the unrefined and then treats cultivation as a moral qualification for citizenship. What Substack has done is put that project inside a distribution technology that pays the person doing it eight dollars a month per reader.

4.

The eight dollars a month buys a relationship. Not to me exactly, and not quite to the other subscribers, though some of that happens in the comments. What it buys is a shared relationship to a circulating set of signs, which is what Debord was describing in The Society of the Spectacle (1967) when he argued that the spectacle is a social relation mediated through images rather than a collection of images. The distinction is the whole point. What matters is how people relate to each other through what they look at together, and our capacity to organize ourselves outside that field has been substantially degraded. Debord's second move is the one I keep needing even though I find his prose dreary: recuperation, capital's ability to take signs and gestures produced in opposition to itself, absorb them, drain them of political force, and resell them as commodities or as style. The 1960s counterculture got recuperated into perfume ads within about a decade. The rebellion becomes an image of rebellion, the image becomes a product, and the product gets bought by people who feel, buying it, that they're participating in the rebellion.

Recuperation is the concept that will not leave you alone once you have it, because it applies to every visible aesthetics of rejection currently in circulation. Anti-capitalism becomes product design, radical feminism becomes girlboss marketing, Marxism becomes a t-shirt slogan you can buy at a mall, and trans radicalism becomes a brand campaign for a hormone-delivery startup that will invoice your insurance. The aesthetics of hating AI is undergoing its recuperation in real time as we speak, and Mark Fisher himself has been recuperated to the point where the tote bag exists, and yes, I have seen the tote bag, and yes, I laughed. Capital doesn't particularly care whether you buy the mainstream product or the product whose branding assures you that mainstream products are spiritually degrading. It got your money either way. If you are wearing a t-shirt that says EAT THE RICH and Urban Outfitters sold it to you, you can work out on your own what has happened to the political content of the slogan.

What Debord didn't fully anticipate, because the technology wasn't yet there, was what happens when the counterculture's own participants start doing the recuperation themselves. Nobody needs a corporation to buy up the iconography first. People voluntarily reformat their political identity into a set of commodifiable signs so they can be recognized by other members of the counterculture at social gatherings and on the internet. The recuperation, on Substack, is DIY. Nobody's making us do it. We do it to ourselves, in real time, for free, because being recognized as a certain kind of politically serious person by other people who want the same recognition is one of the few forms of belonging available to a generation that has lost its material infrastructure of political participation.

I can watch this happen in myself, in real time, around AI. My hatred of AI is real. I write for a living. I write in a specific voice that took me a long time to develop. Generative models are trained on writing like mine, without my consent and without compensation, in service of a product whose commercial success would materially reduce the number of people paid to write. The training data was scraped from the open web by companies with venture funding and no interest in the labor conditions of the people whose work made the corpus valuable. The energy costs are real. The concentration of infrastructure in a handful of Amerikan corporations with worrying political alignments is real. The plagiarism is real. The devaluation of skill is real. The class dynamics are, if anything, understated in most of the discourse: the people whose jobs are being restructured first are the ones whose skills were already being underpaid, and the beneficiaries of the restructuring are the people who already own most of the capital in the country. All of this is true.

Now: the hatred of AI has become, in the specific scenes I occupy, a taste marker. There is a way of hating AI that indicates your class position and your cultural affiliations and your intellectual seriousness, and there is another way of hating AI that indicates you're a boomer who is also mad about smartphones. The correct-affiliated hatred has its own language and its own reflexive set of jokes. If you are a certain kind of writer in a certain kind of scene, hating AI is expected of you in a specific style, and if you produce the correct style of hatred you accrue small amounts of cultural credit in your feed. This is happening at the same time as the material critique, sometimes even in the same tweet, and the two get so tangled that it becomes difficult to tell which is which.

Hating AI is doing two things simultaneously. It is naming a real material harm. It is also working as a way to tell everybody what kind of person you are, and to let people from the same social world recognize you. The problem is not that she is wrong to hate AI. She isn't. The problem is that performing the hatred correctly tells us almost nothing about whether the material critique goes any deeper. Somebody can produce all the correct jokes about ChatGPT and vote against every meaningful labor protection for writers. Somebody can never say a word about AI and be organizing her state's freelance writers union. The sign and the substance have drifted apart, which is what always happens when politics gets turned into aesthetics.

My prediction is that this specific culture around AI hatred will look historically strange within a decade, in roughly the way that the specific 1990s panic around video game violence looks strange now. The material issues will remain material issues. Copyright, labor, energy, monopoly, deskilling, surveillance: those don't go away. What goes away is the particular texture of the performance, the jokes, the way saying you hate AI works as a class signal. Some technology will replace this one in the position of Thing You Are A Good Person For Being Angry About, and the current generation of jokes will retire, and we will all look back on them the way we now look back on the guy in 2003 who spent a lot of time being publicly appalled that people had ringtones.

None of this means the hatred's wrong. Hating something correctly isn't a politics.

5.

A teenager who does a trend on TikTok knows it's a trend. She heard the song because everybody heard the song. She learned the dance because everybody did the dance. She bought the shirt because it was in the video with the dance. She's participating in mass culture and she knows it, and the participation is largely the point. There's an uncomplicated honesty to that. It's the honesty of the cafeteria, which everybody in the cafeteria knows is the cafeteria. Nobody's confused about the fact that the popular table is the popular table. That was Stacy's whole domain, and the honesty of the domain was one of its virtues.

In the Substack scenes I've been describing, TikTok gets treated as evidence of civilizational collapse, and what Substack tends to sell instead is the fantasy of having exited the cafeteria. The Substack subscriber often believes she is subscribing to a writer as a way of escaping the algorithmic mass culture that TikTok represents. But Substack also has an algorithm, and it also has trending posts, and it also has a discourse pattern that moves in cycles, and if you have been on it for more than a year you can predict, within a couple of weeks, when the next round of essays complaining about the current object of complaint is going to arrive. The people who left the mainstream cafeteria in disgust have built a new cafeteria, one where the cool kids are the ones with the best paragraph rhythm and the most current cultural sneer, and the rules of who is popular are just as legible, and the operation of the popularity is just as coercive. It is, in most of its social mechanics, the same room. It has better language. Its clique dynamics are identical.

The teenager on TikTok, honestly participating in mass culture and honestly telling you she is, may be doing a less compromised thing than the thirty-year-old on Substack who is charging her audience a monthly fee to feel like she has escaped it. The teenager is not lying. The teenager knows what game she is in. The Substack version often does not. That's not a defense of TikTok. It has its own problems, most of them concerning the corporate ownership of the platform, the algorithmic manipulation of attention, and the compressed timeline on which trends turn political concepts into decorative jargon within a week. The story about TikTok being the site of stupid mass consumption while Substack is the home of intelligent independent thought is a story Substack tells about itself, and I don't believe it, and neither should you.

Stacy grew up too. If Becky's adult habitat is Substack, Stacy's is the institution, in a loose sense of the word that covers editorial staffs, nonprofit boards, agent lists, gallery invitations, curator circles, festival juries, publisher acquisitions meetings, and the group chats where the actual currents of a given scene get decided months before anyone posts about them. Stacy grew up and became somebody whose opinion on whether your work is embarrassing has real effects on your career. Her authority feels invisible from where she's sitting, which is important, because that invisibility is what lets it function.

Adolescent Stacy was watched constantly. Grown Stacy still is. Her authority depends on staying desirable and staying synchronized with whatever her scene is presently doing, which is a job that never turns off. She can't become embarrassing. She can't make the wrong friends publicly, and she can't get caught liking something her scene has already decided is beneath it. The work of maintaining the position is enormous. From outside it looks like effortless taste. From inside it is a full-time occupation of monitoring the very small distance between where cultural opinion is and where it is about to move, and moving first, before somebody catches her on the losing side of a line she helped draw.

Stacy has never been a villain in my writing and she isn't one here. She is a woman doing extremely hard emotional labor inside a court that will forget her the second she stumbles. Her power is real and it's also fragile, and the fragility is what makes some of her behavior so recognizable. She has to keep signaling, and she has to move first, and if she doesn't stay ahead of where the conversation is about to go, someone else will take the position she occupies, because the position isn't really hers. It's the scene's, and she's currently the person filling it.

What Stacy does, in adulthood, is administer the value of what Becky produces. Becky writes the essay. Stacy decides whether the essay is worth sharing. Becky develops a take. Stacy decides whether the take belongs to a person we're currently listening to or a person we're currently through with. Becky studies the rules. Stacy is one of the people who, without ever formally deciding anything, contributes to what the rules currently are. The two of them aren't adversaries. They are structural complements. Stacy needs Becky to keep producing the cultural output that the scene consumes. Becky needs Stacy to occasionally recognize her, because without recognition the effort was wasted. Both of them are exhausted, in ways they cannot easily talk about, because the exhaustion is the sign that the game is working the way it's supposed to.

6.

Both of them need somebody else to tell them it worked. That isn't a personality defect and it isn't specific to them. Hegel got there first, in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807): self-consciousness doesn't come into being privately, it comes into being relationally, through another consciousness confirming that you are what you think you are. No identity is achievable on its own terms. Every claim to be a certain kind of person is, secretly, a claim that needs somebody else to ratify it. Things get famously grim a few pages later, when he works out that this recognition can be coerced, extracted through domination, bent into unequal shape by whoever has more leverage in the exchange, and that's the part everybody remembers. The earlier move is the one I need. You don't become who you think you are without somebody else recognizing you as that person. There's no self that doesn't require the other.

Which is a problem for the anti-mainstream position specifically. The person who declares that she has escaped the mainstream needs the mainstream to exist so that she has something to have escaped from. Her contempt for normies requires normies as its object, and her declaration that she doesn't care what anybody thinks requires a definite audience of people whose thinking she can be publicly not-caring about. If that audience doesn't respond to her not-caring, she'll typically respond by getting louder about not caring, until it does. Social media formalizes this to a degree that would have delighted Hegel: the person who has retreated from the discourse posts about her retreat, the person who is not going to engage announces her non-engagement, and the person who is above the fray positions herself just far enough above the fray to be visible from within it.

I'm describing myself here. Bundle of Styx exists in an economy of recognition. I've chosen my aesthetic and my political language, and even my publication schedule and the specific rhythm of these sentences are choices I've made in view of how they'll be received. I'm recognizable in a marketplace and I benefit from that recognizability, and I wouldn't have the readership I have if my writing weren't identifiably mine at a glance. My independence, whatever it is, doesn't consist in having escaped this. It consists, at best, in being clear-eyed about the fact that I haven't.

The queer intellectual scene has its own version of the recognition problem. It has organized its identity around the refusal of certain mainstream cultural objects, and it therefore requires those objects to remain in circulation so that its refusal has content. If the suburban trans woman with the Stanley cup were, tomorrow, the only remaining trans woman on earth, the queer intellectual scene would have no way of describing itself. Its self-description depends on the existence of trans women it can define itself against. This is why the scene reacts to her with irritation. She's a threat to the scene's ability to know what it is. She isn't doing anything to it. She's just existing in a way that doesn't require the scene's approval, and that alone is intolerable, because the scene's authority is built out of exactly the approval she's stopped needing.

7.

There is a reason the anglophone left is currently so good at managing cultural signs and so much worse at building collective material power. We lost.

From roughly the mid-1970s onward, the political-economic settlement that had produced strong labor organization and mass social-democratic parties across the developed world was systematically dismantled. In the United States this looked like the destruction of the industrial union movement, the deregulation of the financial sector, the erosion of the welfare state, and the ideological triumph of a neoliberal common sense that framed markets as the natural default of political life. Elsewhere it looked similar, with local variations. By the late 1980s the collapse of the Soviet bloc removed the last mass alternative to capitalism as an available political horizon, and by the mid-1990s a Democratic president in the US and a Labour prime minister in the UK were competing to demonstrate their commitment to market discipline. The left had lost the mass organizations through which political identity had, for a century, been materially experienced. The unions were smaller. The parties had capitulated. The presses had folded. The reading groups had aged out. The neighborhood organizations that had once produced socialist consciousness had been replaced by nonprofits with grant-writing schedules.

What didn't go away was the desire for a political identity. The desire migrated. Since people could no longer easily experience themselves as members of a mass working-class formation with the power to strike a city and win, they began experiencing themselves as members of scenes organized around shared taste, shared media consumption, shared language, and shared opposition to a general enemy called the mainstream. This migration wasn't stupid. It was what was available. It was what fit through the door that had been left open. When collective material power is unreachable, symbolic distinction is what people reach for, because symbolic distinction is achievable in an afternoon.

The 2010s complicated the picture. Occupy in 2011, the Black Lives Matter uprisings that began in Ferguson in 2014 and returned in force in 2020, the Sanders campaigns in 2016 and 2020, the international feminist wave, the eruption of trans political consciousness, the renewed socialist organizing that briefly produced a genuinely mass DSA: these were real. Millions of people changed politically in that decade. I am one of them. It would be dishonest and stupid to pretend those movements were merely cultural. They were serious attempts to build durable political power. Most of them, for reasons that would require another essay to work through, failed to consolidate into governing capacity. Rent kept rising. Healthcare in the US remained an insurance company's revenue stream with a hospital attached. Union density limped upward from historic lows without reaching anything like the strength of the mid-century. And a right-wing counter-formation, which did have institutional patience, discipline, and access to state power, reorganized itself and struck back with force I don't think most of my generation has fully absorbed.

A generation of us became extraordinarily sophisticated at describing domination while remaining substantially incapable of stopping it. We've gotten extraordinarily good at naming everything that's wrong. Our ability to describe the structures that hurt us is remarkable. Our ability to hold territory, defend a strike, run a hospital, house a family, or protect a trans girl from being taken by the state, is uneven at best. And so the political energy that once would have gone into building the institutions that could have done those things has increasingly gone into maintaining a cultural identity that at least lets us feel like we're on the correct side of things, even when we can't do very much about them.

The court came back because the party didn't.

One result of that history is that the anglophone left largely accepted the right's preferred framing of politics as culture war. This isn't a symmetry claim. The right's cultural project is backed by state power, capital, church infrastructure, and long-term institutional discipline. The left has none of that at anything like the same scale. The asymmetry matters. But when the right insists politics is fundamentally about defeating the wrong cultural signs, and the left responds by defending the correct cultural signs, the entire terrain of political conflict has been pulled onto the right's ground.

Everyone becomes obsessed with media and representation, with which movies are secretly reactionary and which pop stars are secretly correct. Meanwhile the landlord raises the rent, the insurance company denies the surgery, the school board eliminates the position, and the state legislature passes the law that the sheriff will show up to enforce. The material questions don't stop being material because the discourse has moved on to something else. They proceed without contest, because the people who might have contested them are doing analysis of a music video.

This is where liberal elitism sneaks into ostensibly radical politics. Liberalism in its classical bourgeois form has always been a project of distinguishing the cultivated from the unrefined and then assigning citizenship rights based on cultivation. This is what the eighteenth-century liberal intellectual meant by refinement, and it's what the twentieth-century liberal intellectual meant by cosmopolitanism, and it's what the twenty-first-century radical intellectual sometimes means when she describes herself as politically serious. The words change. The move doesn't. Cultivation becomes a moral qualification for belonging. Taste becomes evidence of consciousness. Consumption becomes politics. The person who has the correct references becomes politically recognizable as a comrade, and the person who doesn't becomes suspect regardless of what she'd actually risk. The suburban trans woman with the Stanley cup becomes suspect. The nonprofit-brained white woman with the correct reading list does not. Anyone who's spent five minutes in a movement space knows which of the two is more likely to show up when it gets serious. It's not typically the one with the correct reading list.

8.

The correct reading list has an author. Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism (2009) argued that the ideological triumph of neoliberalism was so total by the late twentieth century that it had made the imagining of any alternative to capitalism almost impossible, and the book was correct about the phenomenon it described. Five years later, Ghosts of My Life (2014) gave us hauntology, adapted from Derrida, to describe the way contemporary culture is haunted by futures that once seemed possible and never arrived. It's beautifully written and it contains a serious diagnosis of a real cultural stagnation. In between came "Exiting the Vampire Castle" (2013), his essay in The North Star attacking the individualist and moralistic status game on parts of the online left, now most famous for the pile-on it generated, whose central charge, that punitive individualist moralism was replacing collective political action, was correct then and remains correct. Fisher was serious, he was intelligent, he was frequently correct, and I am now going to spend several thousand words explaining why I want to throw Capitalist Realism across a room.

The problem is not that Fisher was wrong about the general shape of the cultural situation. He was often right. The problem is that Fisher's account of cultural stagnation was inseparable, on inspection, from a particular structure of taste, and that taste happened to belong to a British intellectual man born in 1968 whose cultural formation ran through post-punk, rave, modernist high literature, mid-century experimental cinema, and a specific twentieth-century British left cultural world. Fisher's diagnosis of what had been lost was extremely detailed about what he in particular missed. His diagnosis of what had failed to arrive was extremely detailed about the futures he in particular had expected. His analysis of cultural vitality was very sharp on the cultural forms he had cared about at seventeen, and increasingly imprecise about the cultural forms that were being produced by people who were not him, in scenes he did not know.

This is a common intellectual condition, and it's not a moral failing. Everybody's taste is somebody's taste. Trouble starts when the taste gets installed as the diagnostic standard. When the disappearance of the particular cultural futures that Mark Fisher was rooting for at nineteen is presented as evidence of the collapse of futurity as such, something has gone quietly wrong. Maybe the futures didn't disappear. Maybe they stopped looking like Mark Fisher expected them to look. Maybe he aged, which is what people do, and maybe the culture kept going without him, which is what culture does. Maybe the young people building the futures were doing it in scenes his sensors weren't tuned to. Fisher's own way of thinking about culture has trouble making room for that possibility, because he's trying to describe a general condition with evidence that is, on close reading, autobiographical.

Take his repeated returns to the idea that popular music has undergone historical stagnation. In Ghosts of My Life and elsewhere, Fisher argues that the specific rate of formal innovation that produced the succession from psychedelia to prog to punk to post-punk to house to jungle within roughly thirty years no longer characterizes the popular music of the past several decades. Fine. Grant him the observation. There are real economic and technological reasons a certain kind of formal innovation in popular music has slowed, and Fisher's account of those reasons is often serious. What the observation does not warrant is the emotional register in which he delivers it, which is the register of a man mourning the disappearance of civilizational possibility. There is an enormous difference between analyzing the political-economic conditions that once produced a particular experimental popular culture and becoming the guy at the party in his fifties explaining that music used to be better before you were born. Fisher was often, in his cultural writing, that guy at the party. He was that guy with better language. That's not the same as not being that guy.

Hauntology is where this becomes most acute. At its best it does real analytical work: it names the sense of temporal suspension that shows up in certain kinds of contemporary cultural production, the feeling that we're recycling images of the past because we can no longer produce images of the future. When he writes about the ghost of the future in the sound of Burial, he's doing extraordinary criticism. The problem is that hauntology also became a general license for Fisher to feel that his own aesthetic preferences constituted a diagnosis of civilizational condition. When it stops being a specific critical tool and becomes a way of saying the entire cultural present is a diminished repetition of a moment he happened to have been young during, it's stopped diagnosing. It's projecting.

The problem gets worse because Fisher's cultural politics can easily become an excuse for exactly the kind of taste economy this essay has been circling. Convince yourself that the culture has undergone catastrophic collapse and that the appropriate response is melancholic connoisseurship, and you've given yourself permission to spend the rest of your political life curating your alienation. Your politics is the refinement of your taste. Your capacity to identify how bad things are becomes proof of your seriousness. You accumulate cultural capital through your ability to be more precisely disappointed than everyone around you. Fisher himself, to his credit, didn't entirely do this. He was serious about mass politics, he was involved in various organizing efforts, and he was, until his suicide in 2017, actively trying to develop a positive cultural politics. But the reception of his work, the tote-bag Fisher, the Fisher who has become shorthand for a certain kind of intellectual seriousness among people who have read two of his essays and watched a YouTube video, has turned his work into exactly the kind of taste machine his own theory should have been able to see coming.

Fisher, of all people, should have seen this coming. He understood recuperation. He understood the way capitalism absorbs opposition. He described, at length, how the aesthetics of rebellion get stripped of political content and recirculated as commodities. And then his own name became one of the commodities. Capitalist Realism became cultural capital. His concepts became a reading-list signal. His photograph became a tote-bag illustration. His melancholy became a sensibility young intellectuals could adopt as a mark of seriousness. If you believe his theory, this outcome was more or less inevitable, and the fact that he didn't build his own work in a way that could survive its recuperation is a criticism you can level against him using his own tools. That's the devastating one. It uses his argument against him. It doesn't misrepresent him. It just points out that the blind spot was the theory itself.

Fisher's late writing, and especially some of the essays collected posthumously, developed an increasingly beautiful language for describing political defeat. The prose became more elegiac. The diagnoses became more searching. The melancholy acquired an intellectual dignity. Political defeat has an aesthetic use: if you're not careful, it becomes something you have language for, and so something you can inhabit instead of something you have to overcome. Fisher's own suicide was a tragedy, and his depression was serious. What I'm talking about isn't his personal condition. I'm talking about the intellectual style. There is a way of writing about the collapse of political possibility that makes the collapse more livable by making it more beautiful, and this style, in the hands of his readers, has produced a generation of intellectuals for whom political impotence has a soundtrack. That is not what he wanted. It is what happened.

Ask a left cultural theory one question: what does it produce in its readers? Does it produce more capacity, more organization, more courage, more clarity about material stakes, more people willing to show up when the situation gets ugly? Or does it produce a beautiful language for the sensation of already having lost? Fisher's work has produced both, and the ratio has shifted over time, and I think the current ratio is bad. The Fisherian cultural critic in her thirties, sneering at popular consumption from her Substack, believes she is outside capitalist realism because she consumes better films, better music, better books, and better theory. Her politics has become the refinement of her alienation. That is liberal distinction in a black turtleneck, and Fisher's own theory contains all the equipment necessary to identify it, and his readers have collectively decided not to.

The Vampire Castle essay was mostly correct, and it was pilloried mostly by people who were pilloried in it. Fisher accurately identified a specific style of online left moralism in the early 2010s in which political conflict was systematically routed into individualized moral judgment, in which people accrued small amounts of status by publicly identifying the moral failures of other left-adjacent people, and in which class analysis was displaced by punitive attention to the personal shortcomings of individual leftists. He was right. That style still exists. I've been on both ends of it. What his essay didn't, couldn't, or wouldn't do was apply the same attention to taste as a parallel status game. He saw the moral case. He didn't see the taste case. He was, in his moralism essay, positioned inside the same economy of cultural distinction he couldn't name, sneering at moralists in a mode that itself accrued cultural capital among people whose politics was largely their taste. The essay was correct and also self-implicating in a way its author couldn't, or wouldn't, admit. That's a limitation. It doesn't disqualify the essay. It does, I think, disqualify the intellectual style that has taken the essay as permission to sneer at moralists without noticing that sneering, too, is a status good.

His late positive project, insofar as I can reconstruct it from the fragments, was a call for the recovery of collective political consciousness in the face of what he understood as neoliberalism's individualizing pressures. That project's a good project. I want it. The mistake I'd flag is that his account of what a recovered collective might look like was still, on close reading, an account of a collective organized around a particular scene. The recovery he imagined was aesthetic before it was material. The comrades in his implicit imaginary all read the correct books. The music at the party would be right. Nobody would be watching a Marvel movie. If your account of a recovered left requires the aesthetic preferences of your specific milieu as a precondition of the recovery, you have described a scene, and a scene is not a movement. A movement is what happens when people who do not share your cultural world, and who never will, can be organized alongside you in defense of something concrete. Fisher wanted the movement. What his framework kept producing was the scene. That's my full complaint. Fuck Mark Fisher, with love and respect, and with a genuine appreciation for the seriousness of his work.

9.

If Fisher's blind spot was the taste economy inside his own theory, Debord's was that recuperation, once described, could be self-administered. In 1967 he was picturing corporations absorbing counterculture. What's happened since is that participants in oppositional cultures have absorbed themselves. Somebody with a Substack, an aesthetic, and a recognizable political language is running her own recuperation department. She takes the political content of a movement, reformats it into a set of postable signs, sells the signs to an audience organized around recognizing those signs, and receives, in exchange, both money and status. The corporation is redundant. She's automated it. This is, I think, the important update to Debord that his own life did not permit him to see, and it applies to me. I run a small in-house recuperation operation. I'm aware of this. Bundle of Styx is a brand. Its aesthetic is recognizable. Its political language is identifiable. If you subscribe to me, part of what you are subscribing to is a certain kind of feeling about your own politics. I know this. Knowing it doesn't exempt me from it. It just means the essay you are reading is being written by a person who is inside the thing she is describing.

What I'm selling, when I sell that feeling, is a classification. Bourdieu spent years surveying what French people actually consumed in the 1960s, the music and the art and the food, and what he found in Distinction (1979) is that taste operates as a system of social classification which also classifies the person doing the classifying. What you like reveals your class position. What you hate reveals it more precisely. Contempt is especially efficient: to express it you have to place yourself above whatever you're contemptuous of, and in doing so you tell the room that you know what mass culture is, that you're not part of it, and that you belong to a scene sophisticated enough to recognize the gap. Three pieces of self-presentation. One gesture.

The old bourgeois distinction markers used to run through classical music, fine dining, elite education, and correct manners. In some scenes they now run through obscure theory, niche music, alternative relationship structures, correct political language, ethical consumer choices, anti-consumer consumer choices, and knowing which ordinary pleasures deserve contempt. The objects have changed. The social mechanism hasn't. This is what I have been calling adult Becky. It is why the queer intellectual can be, in her material conduct, indistinguishable from the daughter of a country-club Republican, except that the country-club Republican was more honest about what her taste was for.

The suburban trans woman has been carrying more of this argument than she probably deserves. She isn't secretly wiser than the queer intellectual. That would be the mirror-image cliché of the one I'm attacking, and it would betray her by making her a symbol in a different direction. She's a woman, and she's variable in the way people are. Some days her analysis is sharper than anybody's at the meeting and some days she is politically confused and voted for someone I would not have voted for and cannot articulate a clear reason why. She might have spent no time whatsoever thinking about the questions I spend my life thinking about, or she might have spent an enormous amount of time on them and arrived at conclusions I disagree with. None of that makes her right about anything.

Reading her ordinariness as evidence of political capitulation is the mistake, made by people whose theory of politics has quietly become a theory of aesthetics. If your test for whether somebody is politically serious is whether she looks like the kind of person you would want to sit with at a queer function, you have a taste test masquerading as a political test, and your test will produce reliably wrong results. It will misidentify serious people as sellouts because they don't dress right. It will misidentify aesthetically appropriate people as comrades even when their material conduct is indefensible. It will select, over time, for a movement made up of the people who have the free time and the class position to develop the correct aesthetic, which is not the same population as the people who would defend it under pressure.

The suburban trans woman stands for the possibility of a trans life that is not being lived as material for anybody else's political imagination. She isn't producing herself for the queer scene or the transmedicalist forum. She isn't producing herself for the terfs to hate or the allies to celebrate. She's just being a woman with a wife and a house and a job, and the fact that her ordinariness is possible at all is one of the actual historical achievements of the trans political movements of the past century. That achievement was made by people who fought for medical access, employment protection, housing protection, and legal recognition, most of whom were killed or forgotten in the process, and the woman with the Stanley cup is what their work has permitted. She shouldn't have to justify her existence to a scene that has decided her existence is politically embarrassing. She is what the movement was for.

None of this means that ordinary suburban life is a horizon. It isn't. There are trans women who will never have any version of what she has, because they are too poor, too Black, too trans-visible, too unhoused, too criminalized, too disabled by the medical system, too far from any of the resources that made her life possible. Their fight isn't over. The material conditions that let one trans woman get a mortgage in a subdivision haven't been extended to most of us, and pretending otherwise would be a class betrayal. But a movement that treats her as a defeat has confused its cultural preferences with what it actually wants politically, and that confusion is going to make it materially worse at reaching the people it says it wants to reach.

10.

Underneath all of this, there's a lot of sadness. The reason people work so hard to prove they're different is that contemporary capitalism has made almost everybody feel replaceable, and cultural distinction is one of the few available compensations. Becky worked out how to be safe by knowing the rules because her exclusion, as a girl, had a specific cost. Stacy worked out how to remain interesting because her authority, as a woman, is contingent on continuing recognition. The intellectual worked out how to sneer at normies because superiority is a fragile identity and it requires an object. The radical worked out how to build an aesthetic because politics has, for reasons I have already tried to explain, failed to give her enough material experiences of collective power to sustain her identity on the basis of that power alone. And I worked out how to be Tara Knight because being recognizable in a marketplace of writers is one of the few forms of stability available to a person with my class background who's trying to make a living by putting sentences together.

The desire to be special is ridiculous. It's also human. I have spent most of my adult life wanting to prove that I was unusually intelligent, unusually interesting, unusually difficult to dismiss, and I have built a career on it, and I can't pretend to have escaped the wound that produced the wanting. What I can do is refuse to package the wound as politics. The wound is that people, most of us, don't have enough of a hold on any material form of collective life to feel that we couldn't be replaced tomorrow by another sufficiently talented producer of content, another sufficiently correct young intellectual, another sufficiently on-message activist. Capital responds to that fear by selling us increasingly personalized ways to feel unique. Substack does that. Instagram does that. The queer scene does that. Bundle of Styx does that. The suburban trans woman, whether or not she means to, is doing a small quiet thing against that logic, which is that she has stopped participating in it. Her belonging is elsewhere. Her wife knows her name. Her neighbors recognize her when she takes the trash out. She doesn't need the scene to certify that she exists, and this makes her incomprehensible to a scene whose central activity is the mutual certification of existence through the exchange of the correct signs.

I don't think this makes her a saint. I think it makes her, on some days, materially freer than the rest of us.

Becky and Stacy grew up. Becky learned all the rules and put them to work in cultural production. Stacy learned how to administer the value of the rules and put that to work in cultural institutions. Both entered political culture in their thirties and discovered that adulthood had reproduced high school with better language and the same social mechanics. Becky became culturally sophisticated because sophistication was the adult form of the safety she had been chasing since she was thirteen. Stacy became the person whose recognition made sophistication valuable, because that recognition was the adult form of the authority she had first learned to wield at parties nobody's parents supervised. Neither of them is evil. They're both adapting to systems of recognition older than either of them, and the tragedy of the whole arrangement is that their adaptation gets mistaken for their politics.

Becky wanted to learn the rules. Stacy wanted to become the person who made them. The mistake we made was assuming either one had anything to do with freedom.

Then the suburban trans woman walks in with an unforgivable seasonal beverage, says something more materially radical than everybody there, and accidentally exposes the fact that the whole aesthetic theory of trans-left politics has been organized around the wrong axis. Becky cannot place her on the cultural map. Stacy can't govern somebody who isn't asking for the scene's recognition. The queer intellectual, whose theory of who is capable of political thought did not have room for this specific woman, is left with a small crisis nobody in her feed will help her resolve. And the woman herself doesn't particularly care, because she has to leave to pick her wife up from Pilates, and the theorization is going to have to proceed without her.

Nobody gets comfort they haven't earned. We're not going to fix this. The aesthetic left isn't going to stop selling distinction, because distinction sells, and the material conditions that made mass politics possible for our grandparents haven't returned. Writers who are honest about being inside the thing they describe will keep being useful, and writers who claim to have escaped it will keep producing brands. Suburban trans women are going to keep being sneered at by scenes that need them for the sneering to have an object, and the girls without the material means to become suburban are going to keep being betrayed by movements whose primary work is the maintenance of a specific taste. My own writing, this essay included, is one of the things being sold in the distinction economy, and I don't know a way out of that except to keep saying so.

One of the more radical things a transsexual woman can achieve, in this specific country in this specific decade, is the capacity to become an ordinary person rather than a public symbol of somebody else's politics. The queer scene wants a martyr or a warning, the right wants a case study, and the centrist press wants a heartwarming profile of somebody who has beaten the odds. The suburban trans woman with the Stanley cup is refusing to be any of those, and refusing without announcing that she's refusing, and the refusal is quieter and more interesting than most of what gets called radicalism in the queer press. I'm not where she is. I've built a career on being a symbol of a particular kind of politics for a particular kind of audience, and I'd be lying if I said I was ready to give it up. She might not know she's done it. She might be there anyway. I'd like to arrive where she is, someday, without pretending I've already arrived.

For now I'm going to close this laptop, and probably open TikTok, and probably watch something stupid, and if you catch me I won't deny it. See you on Substack.

Works cited:

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979). Used for the argument that taste operates as a system of social classification and that contempt for specific cultural objects classifies the person expressing it.

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle (1967). Used for the definition of the spectacle as a social relation mediated by images and for the concept of recuperation, capital's absorption of oppositional signs.

Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009). Used as both source and target: source for the analysis of neoliberal cultural closure, target for the way that analysis licenses aesthetic distinction as political posture.

Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (2014). Used to examine hauntology and to argue that Fisher's account of cultural stagnation depended on the aesthetic formation of a specific British intellectual generation.

Fisher, Mark. "Exiting the Vampire Castle" (The North Star, November 2013). Used to credit the essay's diagnosis of punitive individualist moralism on the online left and to argue that its author's own cultural politics operated inside a parallel status economy the essay could not see.

Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Used for the argument that self-consciousness is constituted through recognition by another consciousness, and therefore that an identity built on distinction from the mainstream remains dependent on the mainstream.

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Jane Schoenbrun has clearly been reading Tara Knight. There’s no other explanation. I’ve spent the better part of a year writing about desire, about who taught us to want the things we want, about the poverty of consent as an entire sexual ethics, about lesbians being allowed to have boundaries and the men, and increasingly everybody else, who treat those boundaries like a personality defect in need of correction. Sometimes they say it outright, and sometimes they leave it vague enough that you can never really be sure. I published an essay on this in the spring. I’ve got another one sitting in drafts. Then Schoenbrun goes and makes a horny, blood-soaked, extremely good movie about a queer filmmaker who catches feelings for the reclusive scream queen she’s trying to talk into a reboot, and somewhere around the second act my entire argument walks in eating gas-station fried chicken.

Where’s my credit, Jane? My lawyers, who are three group chats and a Notes app, will be in touch. Be ready.

One little thing before we go anywhere. Yes, I’m going to criticize Castration Movie in this. Yes, I remember what the comments did the last time I criticized Castration Movie. I have read the words “she doesn’t even understand what the film is doing” in more variations than most people encounter in a lifetime, all written by dorks with Letterboxd in their Instagram bios who had likely been the smartest people in their freshman English courses.

Consider this my formal notice that I have learned nothing, retained nothing, and will be doing it again at length and with citations.

Anyway, I’m joking about Jane, obviously. Schoenbrun has never read a word I’ve written and has no reason to, and if they had, the movie would be worse and considerably more erotic. What actually happened is stranger than if they had read me, and more interesting. Call me, Jane. Let’s talk. A handful of people who don’t talk to each other, working at wildly different budgets in wildly different corners of the industry, all arrived at roughly the same conclusion in the same year.

Kris Williams is a Sundance-anointed queer filmmaker handed the assignment every horror kid dreams about and instantly regrets: reboot the dormant Camp Miasma franchise, the sequel-rotted slasher series that scarred and thrilled her as a teenager, for an audience the studio keeps describing as younger and queerer without asking anyone younger or queerer what that’s supposed to mean. Somewhere between research and obsession, Kris goes looking for Billy Presley, the actress who played the original final girl, refused every sequel, and then vanished so completely that she’s apparently been living alone at the actual campground where the first film was shot.

It’s the dead of winter. The lake is frozen solid. Billy answers the door in what I think is a turban, although I genuinely have no idea what it actually was.

What follows is mostly a two-hander, snowed in, with fried chicken, weed, and unbearable proximity carrying the load that teenagers wandering off to have sex normally carry in this genre. Schoenbrun and cinematographer Eric Yue keep cutting back to the original Camp Miasma, the film within the film, with Amanda Fix as young Billy, and the pastiche is genuinely gorgeous: geysers of blood, cartoon gore, and needle drops so unhinged I audibly moaned in the theater as my butch groped me. There’s a sex scene between young Billy and a camp counselor that the killer interrupts at the exact moment it starts working on her, and that scene is the reason Kris does this for a living. She says so out loud. A girl’s arousal and death occupy the same frame, the same second.

That collision isn’t incidental to the movie Kris grew up on. It is the movie Kris grew up on.

She loved that franchise. She loved its monster. She’s remaking the thing that built her, and she has no idea yet what that means.

The killer is called Little Death, which, yes, we all got it, and Jack Haven plays it under a mask for nearly the entire runtime while doing more work than any studio monster has done in years. The backstory begins with a bullied kid drowning in the camp lake, coming back changed and ungendered, and starting to kill teenagers in sequences staged with obvious relish for the gore and this weird, persistent tenderness toward the thing doing the killing.

Haven, who’s trans and nonbinary and worked with Schoenbrun on I Saw the TV Glow, has talked about the slasher as a machine for what they call trans microdosing. The audience bonds with a girl who’s usually got a boyish name and boyish energy, rides along while she becomes fully feminine, and then gets to watch her die for it, or become the monster and die anyway, over and over. It’s an entire genre rehearsing a transition it’s too scared to name out loud.

Little Death descends directly from Norman Bates, Buffalo Bill, and Angela at the end of Sleepaway Camp, all killers horror trained generations to read as monstrous for the specific crime of refusing to stay one gender. The movie is also playing with autogynephilia, which matters enormously to the context here, but I will not be explaining it because the concept has an extraordinary ability to harm trans lesbians and is a disgusting little brainworm. Sorry.

Schoenbrun and Haven aren’t pretending that history is clean. They pick it up anyway, working from the idea that the only way past a disgusting history is to actually hold the thing and reckon with it. The movie is at its best when Little Death is standing at the edge of the frame doing almost nothing, patient and curious and more heartbroken than furious.

Anderson is the reason to see this regardless of how you feel about a single word of my politics. She plays Billy as a Norma Desmond who knows exactly what she’s quoting and commits anyway, mascara applied like she’s going to war with the concept of subtlety, her drawl pitched somewhere between real and a bit she’s run so long that it became real. Both women reject the Sunset Boulevard comparison out loud in the script, which of course confirms it.

I want to be normal about this and I can’t. Gillian Anderson has now spent three decades as a load-bearing wall of lesbian culture, and casting her as a reclusive final girl who lives at the scene of the crime and won’t come out is the kind of move that should require a permit.

Einbinder has the harder and much less flattering job. Kris describes herself at one point as a prude, and she’s anxious, over-intellectual, narrating her own feelings roughly half a second after having them, the sort of person who metabolizes wanting somebody by first turning it into a pitch deck or, in some cases, making a Substack or something. Watching her fail to think fast enough to keep up with what’s happening in the room is one of the most purely enjoyable parts of the film because of how relatable it is. Maybe that’s just me.

There’s a ten-minute scene of the two of them getting high by a fire that serves almost no plot function and earns every second because Schoenbrun understands that two people becoming interested in each other generates its own tension. No jump scare required, although Einbinder does get a great line ribbing the movie for not providing one.

The second half loses some of the grip the first half had. A few critics have pointed out, fairly, that the question of how a one-and-done teen scream queen affords an entire abandoned campground gets waved off in favor of pure vibes, which Schoenbrun is entitled to do and which not every viewer is going to forgive. There were two trans men, shocker, sitting behind me and my fiancée who said, “That movie made no sense. It just went from scene to scene.” Way to pass, boys.

The film is also, at points, so delighted with its own cleverness, so full of a Foucault nod here and a Cronenberg gesture there, that it risks becoming a movie about how smart it is to be making a movie like this.

None of that touches the thing it gets right, which is why I’m still chewing on it and writing this review during an Adderall binge at one in the morning.

Camp Miasma understands that wanting something doesn’t explain why you want it. Like some of us even get “pull here” tramp stamps or something.

Kris loved that franchise. She loved its killer. She specifically loved a scene where a girl’s pleasure and death landed in the same breath, and that love made her an artist. Now it’s helping her fall for a woman twice her age who is functionally still living inside the movie that made them both. The film never treats this as shameful, and it never shrugs it off as no big deal either. It’s also really hot, but that’s not important right now.

Schoenbrun keeps examining that desire from different angles until the film has actually said something about it. That’s harder to pull off than any jump scare, and it’s why I couldn’t stop at simply liking the movie.

There’s a question I keep coming back to like Socrates: Who taught you to want that?

It’s a question our “queer community” hates to ask.

Nobody’s desire fell out of the sky. Desire is shaped by porn, trauma, fantasy, gender, culture, and a world that existed before any of us had language for ourselves. That doesn’t make desire fake. It means desire is produced, the same way everything else about you was formed by a world you didn’t agree to be born into and can’t see the whole of from inside.

Camp Miasma nails this by refusing to turn it into a pathology. Kris’s entire personality was built around a franchise that taught her, before she had language for any of this, that a girl’s arousal and a girl’s death belong in the same shot. That is obviously not a healthy origin story, and the movie never pretends otherwise.

The film also refuses the tidy little equation where the bad childhood explains the grown woman’s taste and the explanation somehow makes the taste evaporate. Desire doesn’t work like that, and the movie knows it without beating you over the head with the message.

Kris’s desire is snarled up with pleasure, identification, and a real, if bent, love for the images that raised her. Schoenbrun lets all of it sit there in a pile. I love complexity in films, but complexity has to mean something. That refusal to simplify is the film’s actual sophistication, much more than any Foucault namecheck. You get to watch somebody want something for reasons that are historical, personal, formally interesting, and hot all at once, without anyone choosing one explanation and calling it the answer.

And now we enter the part of this review where somebody accuses me of wanting a feminist committee to pre-approve everyone’s kinks.

I don’t. I never have. I don’t know a single serious person who does.

Lesbians developed their sexuality inside a culture organized around heterosexuality, and their desire is still theirs. Trans women don’t figure out what gets them off in a sealed laboratory, and our desire is still ours. A feminism that loses the ability to ask how desire got made has quietly resigned from being a feminism because it gave away the question separating political analysis from a shrug and a “you do you, babe.”

Both things fit in one head. A want can be sincerely felt and still have arrived from somewhere.

Camp Miasma holds both ideas for a hundred and twelve minutes without blinking, which is rarer on a screen than it should be.

Consent matters. It isn’t a formality or a box you check on the way to the interesting conversation. It’s the floor. What interests me is what happens after the yes, because a floor isn’t a house, and enormous swaths of sexual culture behave like it is.

Seeing the tears leave the face of the woman I love during a scene in the film involving something nonconsensual made me feel something that had me Googling what the minimum was for a crime that starts with an M.

A woman can consent to something, and that consent settles the ethics of that specific encounter. It does absolutely nothing to settle the political question of why that particular act became something an entire generation of women feels obligated to be into.

A lesbian can say no to a man clearly and repeatedly and watch that no get reinterpreted in real time as evidence of a defect in her rather than evidence that he simply wasn’t who she wanted.

Somebody can sincerely enjoy a fantasy assembled from images the porn industry mass-produced because they were cheap to shoot and reliably profitable. The fantasy still has a manufacturing history, just like mine does.

Consent tells you whether an act was permissible. It can’t tell you why that act, out of everything humans have ever thought to do to each other, is the one the culture keeps handing women a script for.

The habit I’m naming isn’t “consent exists,” which nobody disputes. It’s the reflex that treats any question asked after the yes as an intrusion, as though analysis were simply violation in a better outfit.

Call it queer liberalism, because it needs a name and that one fits.

I mean a political tendency, dominant now across much of institutional queer politics, that handles sexuality almost entirely through individual autonomy: identity recognition, self-description, boundary negotiation, procedural consent. This framework isn’t stupid, and I’m not inventing a strawman. It won real things. It helped get queer people out from under the idea that our desires needed a doctor’s signature or diagnostic code to count, specifically by insisting that what consenting adults get up to is nobody else’s business to litigate.

That was a genuine victory, and I’m not writing this to take it back.

But a framework built to defend the right to want gets structurally itchy the second you ask why so many people, supposedly independently, keep wanting the same narrow gendered thing. Queer liberalism has excellent tools for defending an individual’s yes and almost none for explaining a pattern, because explaining a pattern requires structural analysis. Structural analysis of desire has been treated in plenty of queer spaces as the opening move in confiscating somebody’s yes.

Louise Weard’s Castration Movie isn’t one film, and the scale makes lazy description tempting, so let’s do it properly.

It’s an ongoing anthology, shot mostly on Hi8 camcorder under Weard’s own banner, Hentai Cop Films. i. Traps dropped in 2024 at roughly four and a half hours. ii. The Best of Both Worlds followed in 2025 at a full five. iii. Year of the Hyaena arrived this June at five and a quarter. That’s around fourteen hours of DIY transsexual cinema, self-released on Gumroad before Elizabeth Purchell’s Muscle Distribution picked it up, screened from Glasgow to Austin to rooms Weard has described, without much exaggeration, as unsurprisingly seventy percent trans, because why wouldn’t they be?

Nobody accidentally makes fourteen hours of anything. You do it because there’s something you have to work out and ninety minutes won’t hold it.

Traps opens, of all ways, on a cis guy. Turner is a production assistant whose relationship with his girlfriend Brooklyn is coming apart in real time, and there’s a scene where he reads incel forum posts aloud while she works on a furry porn commission, which is either the bleakest joke in the film or the most accurate portrait of domestic life currently available in North American cinema. I lean toward both.

The real center is the second half, where Weard plays Michaela, known as Traps, a trans sex worker in Vancouver juggling clients, a friend group that loves her and cannot always hold her, and a slow-building decision to get a back-alley orchiectomy because the waitlists have turned her own body into a negotiation she isn’t party to.

The Best of Both Worlds relocates to New York, opens on Trump muttering about gender ideology through nauseating color grain, and spirals out into a trans sex-cult plotline, including a member named Circle whose final choice the film declines to score as triumph or tragedy.

Year of the Hyaena pushes further, with a woman named Izzy doing everything in her power to stop her partner from transitioning while Michaela, per the film’s own synopsis, simply tries her best to be a good person. After fourteen hours, that reads less like a logline and more like a prayer.

The urge to dismiss all this, or to treat the vulgarity as automatically radical or automatically embarrassing, misses what’s happening. Weard has said flat out that she wanted to write a trans woman with really bad politics, which she’s very good at doing. I mean, she is from Boston after all. She wanted somebody she could let say heinous things without the script arranging a redemption arc, and that impulse is worth something.

Trans representation still mostly asks women like Michaela to be dignified on demand. Letting a trans woman be genuinely unpleasant on screen without making her earn her humanity back by the credits is a real achievement, and I’m not going to shrink it for the sake of a cleaner argument.

The problem I have with Castration Movie comes from somewhere else.

Weard has said outright that “the politics should be allowed to be messy and weird and sometimes ambiguous,” and that she deliberately hands interpretation over to the audience’s own media literacy rather than steering it. I take that seriously as a stated position rather than something I invented to knock over.

I still think it’s the project’s central limitation.

After fourteen hours of a trans sex worker’s life, a trans sex cult, a woman sabotaging her partner’s transition, and all the other political conflicts the anthology accumulates, ambiguity starts carrying an extraordinary amount of weight.

Ambiguity itself isn’t a failure. A version of these films that resolved everything into a clean moral would be much worse and much less interesting than what Weard actually made. Art owes nobody a thesis statement, and filmmakers don’t have to lecture.

But refusing easy answers is different from declining to establish any relationship between your own materials. After fourteen hours, “everyone contains their own truth” stops working as humility and starts working as an out.

Explanation has almost completely replaced judgment. A work this long, built so obviously out of real political stakes, keeps walking to the edge of a claim and stepping backward until the stepping back becomes the position.

I think Weard succeeds completely at a specific and limited theory of what a film about marginalized life is for: bearing witness rather than arguing.

Bearing witness is real work.

Representation still cannot stand in for analysis, however much of it you pile up, however explicit or honest or many hours long. Showing a trans woman behaving badly doesn’t automatically make something radical. Showing something taboo doesn’t automatically make it transgressive. Length doesn’t create depth, and explicitness doesn’t produce materialism.

You can put every conceivable perspective on screen, give each of them a monologue, and still leave the organizing question untouched: why does this keep happening, and who benefits from it staying unclear?

The audience walked in with the dominant ideology preinstalled, and nothing in the film’s construction necessarily asks them to leave without it. The filmmaker declines to judge. The audience applauds that refusal because refusing judgment reads as sophistication. Meanwhile the actual social relations underneath all that dangerous material stroll out of the theater completely undisturbed, unbothered, moisturized.

Put that beside what Schoenbrun does at a fraction of the runtime and, on paper, a fraction of the political ambition.

And don’t give me some bullshit about it not being political. The personal is political, nimrods.

Camp Miasma organizes its own material into a claim. The genre trained generations to eroticize and punish gender deviance. That happened to actual people, including people involved in making this film. The way through becomes a complicated and loving reclamation, staged as a love story between two women who are both still living inside the movie that made them.

Desire generates consequences, and the film tracks them.

There’s a real stance in there even where the position stays complicated, even where I have real criticisms of the back half and was feeling very warm looking at the back halves in this movie, let me tell y’all.

That’s why Schoenbrun’s ambiguity feels earned to me. The movie connects its own material. Weard’s project often feels like an extraordinarily sincere, occasionally brilliant act of collection that stops before making those connections.

The problem shows up constantly in queer spaces and almost never gets named: lesbians are allowed to have borders, and the volume of cultural pressure currently aimed at those boundaries is genuinely bizarre.

A woman says she isn’t attracted to men, or isn’t attracted to some particular category of person for reasons she may or may not be able to fully articulate, and that statement increasingly gets processed as a claim requiring public defense.

The pressure isn’t always hostile. Often it arrives wearing the costume of curiosity or concern, as a warm invitation to examine her own exclusionary tendencies, with an unspoken why not him? why not her? humming underneath.

What exactly are you protecting yourself from? Have you considered that the protection might be prejudice in a nicer coat?

Ask a straight man why he only dates women and you’ll get a shrug and a joke about his mother. Ask a lesbian the same question in certain rooms, in a certain tone, and watch how quickly the conversation turns into an audit. That audit often has the worst haircut you’ve ever seen and is going to cope about it on Tumblr.

Every sexual boundary is an exclusion by definition. Desire works that way everywhere, queer spaces included. Wanting some people means not wanting almost everybody else, and no political community, however sincerely committed to inclusion as a value, can abolish that without abolishing sexual autonomy along with it.

Nobody is owed anybody.

And yet lesbian refusal specifically attracts a scrutiny that refusal from other positions doesn’t, because a woman’s no has historically never been permitted to stand as a complete sentence. It has always required a reason, an apology, a softening, some proof that the refusal wasn’t really about the person doing the refusing.

You end up with a grown woman being gently walked through her own sexuality like she’s a failing student and somebody else has the answer key.

None of this requires anyone to be knowingly running interference for male access to women’s bodies. That’s precisely why it works.

The content of heterosexual entitlement, the assumption that a man’s interest generates an obligation somewhere in the woman receiving it, survives beautifully inside vocabulary that has nothing to do with straight culture because the entitlement was never really about men as such. It was about whether a woman’s no ends the conversation or opens one.

Queer language didn’t invent that question. It just gave the old pressure a nicer apartment.

This isn’t a conspiracy, and I’m not interested in narrating every disagreement between queers as a secret operation run by men. Most of the people applying this pressure to lesbians aren’t straight men. They’re often other queers, frequently other women, operating in total good faith and sincerely committed to a version of inclusion they believe has to be demonstrated through erotic availability.

That’s exactly what makes it worth writing about instead of clocking it and scrolling past.

A political culture doesn’t need a mustache-twirling villain to reproduce the oldest trick in the book, which is teaching women that their no has to earn its keep.

A feminism capable of asking hard questions about desire, about where a want came from and what a fantasy owes its own history, has to be equally capable of defending a flat, unadorned, unexplained no.

Those projects belong together.

Curry Barker arrives at all of this entirely by accident, and I mean that as both a compliment to the movie and a factual statement about the man.

He’s twenty-six, built a following making sketch comedy on YouTube with his creative partner Cooper Tomlinson, and broke through with Milk & Serial, an eight-hundred-dollar found-footage feature he put on the internet himself after a year of failing to get distribution.

Obsession premiered at TIFF in 2025, went wide in May of this year on a budget of about seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and turned into one of the year’s genuine phenomena, complete with a billboard campaign in LA and New York consisting of increasingly unhinged messages signed only “Nikki.”

Asked directly what he was saying about modern dating, Barker said he wasn’t chasing cultural commentary at all. He wanted to dramatize something private and universal: the low-grade horror of having a crush and not knowing whether it’s returned, the way people quietly construct entire alternate lives with somebody in their heads without that person’s knowledge or consent, and how deeply creepy that ordinary fantasy becomes the second it’s spoken aloud.

That’s the whole stated ambition.

Nothing in his interviews suggests he’s ever read feminist theory on purpose. I looked, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise to make this tidier.

His usefulness here is that he wasn’t trying.

Bear is a shy Atlanta music-store employee in love with his coworker and childhood friend Nikki, and he can’t work up the nerve. She, meanwhile, has just quit her job to write full-time, which the movie establishes early and which matters enormously later.

Rather than risk an actual conversation, Bear buys a cursed antique toy from a crystal shop, the One Wish Willow, and wishes that Nikki would love him more than anyone else in the world.

It works instantly.

She turns up at his car window a different person: obsessive, unhinged, fixated, everything she wanted before scraped out and replaced with a version built to want him and only him, permanently.

What was supposed to be the payoff of a romantic fantasy plays as horror from the first frame after the wish lands because it is horror.

The single most useful line in the film comes from a customer-service voice for the cursed toy: “Just because you chose it for her doesn’t make it any less real.”

Barker has talked about wanting to sit in the discomfort of that rather than resolve it. Bear caused the transformation and therefore, in some warped sense, owes her something, but he has no idea which version of her he owes it to after personally erasing the one who could have told him.

This is entitlement, point blank.

Bear doesn’t want to risk rejection, so he manufactures a Nikki who can’t reject him. The horror isn’t really that she becomes violent, although she does. The horror sits one floor up in the ordinary fantasy underneath it, one plenty of people have had about somebody at some point with no magic object involved: that the person you want could somehow be made to want you correctly, that her interior life is a bug to patch instead of a person you’re supposed to risk yourself in front of.

She had a book she was going to write.

His wish took the book.

The film keeps its sympathy with Nikki even as she becomes dangerous, which is the right call and not an obvious one, because the audience never gets to use her violence as an excuse to stop caring about what was done to her underneath it.

Barker has described selfishness as the connective tissue of the whole wish premise, that every wish serves the person making it rather than anyone else. Bear’s is no exception, dressed as romance right until the costume comes off.

It keeps striking me as funny in the darkest way that a twenty-six-year-old former prankster with no stated interest in gender theory produced a cleaner illustration of male entitlement than most explicitly political films that tried.

Barker gets there because he takes a completely mainstream romantic fantasy, the one where the girl finally sees what’s been in front of her the whole time, and follows its internal logic. He simply declines to look away after the wish gets granted, and what waits there is the same thing hiding inside every fantasy that treats another person’s desire as a problem your desire gets to solve.

So why now?

Why are a queer indie meta-slasher and a mainstream horror debut from a YouTube prankster circling the same wound in the same year, with neither one having read the other and neither one, as far as I can tell, having read a word of what the rest of us have been publishing about desire for the last several years?

I think a culture has simply run out of road on an answer it’s been driving for twenty years and hasn’t noticed the pavement ended.

For a long stretch, the dominant popular story about sexual liberation centered on removing prohibitions, reducing shame, expanding representation, and giving people permission to say what they wanted instead of choking on it in a church parking lot.

That was necessary work for most of that stretch, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise for a punchier essay.

People were dying, closeted, medicated into compliance, arrested, and thrown out of their homes over wanting things that hurt nobody. Expanding the field of permissible desire saved actual lives, and I won’t write one sentence that shrinks that.

Permission was never going to be the whole answer, though, because permission answers questions about the state, the law, and your mother. It answers almost nothing about the culture doing the actual manufacturing of what gets wanted.

Several decades into the sex-positive settlement, people are living inside the results and hitting a different category of problem.

You can be entirely free to want something and still find that the wanting makes you miserable. The market manufactures fantasies faster than anyone can build language to examine them, and porn teaches an entire generation what sex looks like before that generation has any tools to ask who profited from the lesson. Sexual openness, shockingly, doesn’t dissolve gendered power.

The framework of permission has very little to say about any of this because these aren’t questions about permission. They’re questions about production, power, and who benefits when certain desires become culturally mandatory while others stay culturally suspect.

That’s the gap three filmmakers working on unrelated films all backed into this year.

Horror got there first because horror never lied about the stakes. It’s one of the few popular genres comfortable admitting that wanting something can get you killed, turn you into somebody you don’t recognize, or hand your interior life over to somebody else’s idea of who you should be.

Something is happening on the audience side of these movies that’s even more interesting than the movies themselves, and it’s making me hopeful, which is not a sentence I write often and which I’d appreciate you not screenshotting out of context.

Watch what got written about Obsession in the weeks after it went wide.

Emma Cieslik, in Ms. Magazine, read it as a film about “a man deciding he is entitled to a woman’s love” and noticed that most of the discourse had somehow become about Bear anyway. A critic at The Rolling Tape put it among the decade’s most significant feminist horror and read the ending as carrying a clear implication of sexual violence, which is a real reading and not an overreach.

Meanwhile, the highest-upvoted Reddit threads, and I apologize for having to cite Reddit, spent their energy litigating Bear’s psychology: whether he was the real monster, whether it was loneliness or entitlement, scene by scene, as if a man’s interiority were a crime scene and the woman he erased were the weather.

The man becomes the subject of analysis and the woman becomes the setting.

A lot of women watching noticed that split happening in real time and started writing about the split instead of only writing about the film. At that point film criticism starts turning into political consciousness reassembling itself in public, out of a horror movie, in the replies. The movie handed people a scenario clean enough to argue about, and the argument immediately reproduced the exact dynamic the movie was depicting.

You cannot design a better political education than that.

Barker did it by accident with a cursed piece of wood and seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

The same thing is happening around Camp Miasma in a different key. It took the Queer Palm at Cannes and turned into a legitimate summer hit, and the conversations coming out of it aren’t really about whether the gore is good. They’re about why the girls in these movies always died the second they got wet, why a generation of lesbians learned arousal and punishment as a single gesture, and what it means that we all still love the movies that taught us.

Those are radical feminist questions.

Nobody’s calling them that, which is fine. They don’t need my label to work.

I’m not saying women are suddenly waking up, as though we’d been asleep and needed a horror movie to shake us. Women have been saying this out loud continuously and getting called prudes for it, sometimes by other women and frequently by queers who should know better.

What’s changed is the permission structure around saying it.

A film gives you cover. You can talk about Nikki’s stolen book and stolen life for two hours in a group chat without ever having to say, “I’ve been treated like that,” out loud. By the end of those two hours, the analysis exists anyway, fully formed and available for use on your own life whenever you’re ready.

Consciousness has always traveled through shared objects people fight over as much as it has through manifestos.

And I think this is going to keep happening.

The conditions producing these films are getting worse, not better. The manosphere didn’t go anywhere, and neither did its recruitment pipeline. Porn is still teaching before anyone gets a chance to ask questions. Women are still being audited over what they don’t want while nobody audits men over what they assume they’re owed.

There will be more of these movies because the material is sitting there, obvious to anyone paying attention, and because Focus Features bought Barker’s next feature before this one even opened. The industry has noticed the appetite even if it hasn’t understood it.

What follows will be uneven. Some of it will be garbage. One of these movies is going to be a genuinely dangerous piece of work made by somebody nobody has heard of yet.

Fine.

The vocabulary gets built out of the arguing, not handed down by the movies.

The analysis I think we’re circling back toward is materialism.

I don’t mean nostalgia for some imaginary purer feminism from before any of us were born. I’ve spent enough of this year fighting that particular nostalgia to avoid turning around and endorsing it here.

I mean something simpler and much harder to practice: sex happens between bodies that are located somewhere, inside relations that have a history, and that fact does not disappear because somebody theorized hard enough.

Sexual subcultures generate their own norms, hierarchies, and quiet policing mechanisms, and none of that dissolves because everyone in the room is queer. Male power does not evaporate on contact with a queer party. Being transsexual doesn’t exempt anybody from operating inside misogyny, including the misogyny transsexual women absorb and then aim at each other, which we all know happens and mostly discuss in DMs.

Lesbianism didn’t become politically weightless because the categories got complicated.

We’re getting back to basics: a feminism that asks what people actually experience, in actual rooms and under actual pressure, and what organizes that experience whether or not the people inside it can see the machinery.

Radical feminism, underneath everything it got wrong and everything it got right, gave us this proposition: “sexuality is a legitimate object of political analysis.”

Sexuality does not have to be treated as a sealed private zone where politics stops at the door and takes its shoes off.

That permission, the willingness to actually look at desire instead of only defending the right to have it, is what’s coming back right now in Cannes premieres, Focus Features horror debuts, and camcorder epics, mostly carried by people who would be startled and possibly horrified to hear it described this way.

The language is different. Plenty of the people rediscovering these questions actively dislike the radical feminist tradition, often for good reasons. Most have never read a page of it.

We inherit the questions whether or not we want the old answers, and we’re allowed to build new ones, including answers the tradition’s architects would have refused to recognize, including ones built to hold trans women.

Weard’s limitation gets far more interesting once you stop reading it as personal and start reading it as historical.

Queer liberalism got extraordinarily good at one specific fight: defending the right of queer people to exist in public without a doctor’s, pastor’s, or legislature’s permission.

That was a real war, and queer liberalism helped win it, with the backs of Black trans women to stand on.

The harder question is how we live together once the central conflict is no longer whether we get to be here. What happens when the conflicts move inside the group, between people wanting incompatible things and wrecking each other in ways the outside world has nothing to do with?

Queer liberalism knows how to protect an identity, and it has much less to say when two people’s individually legitimate choices add up to a collective pattern nobody chose and everybody has to live in.

It speaks autonomy fluently. It goes quiet when autonomous choices, made freely by consenting adults, keep producing the same gendered outcome on repeat because naming the pattern sounds, to ears trained by the last few decades, like an attack on the individuals rather than a question about the conditions they were choosing between.

Coercion in its legible forms can be condemned without hesitation.

Pressure that never announces itself as force, the kind that simply makes one option feel natural while everything else feels like it needs a permission slip, leaves the framework stumped.

And an entire ethics built around the premise that everyone deserves a voice turns out to have very few tools left for the harder job of concluding, occasionally, that somebody is simply wrong.

That doesn’t make Weard a bad filmmaker. She can’t help being born in Boston.

It makes her an unusually honest instrument for measuring exactly where her political generation’s toolkit runs out.

That’s not an insult. It might be the most useful thing the project does.

So, about the title.

Schoenbrun almost certainly doesn’t share my politics point for point, and I’d put money on them bristling at parts of this if they ever read it. Call me.

What matters is that an artist has to arrange contradiction into meaning. They have to decide which images answer which other images even while refusing to hand anybody a thesis in dialogue.

A film can stay ambiguous and still know what question it’s asking. It can refuse easy answers without refusing to take a position. It can shoot desire with real heat and genuine love for the bodies involved without treating desire as automatically liberating because it made it onto a screen.

It can look straight at trauma without reducing the people carrying it to nothing else. It can let pleasure be pleasure, fully and without apology, while staying curious about where that pleasure came from and what it cost to build.

Camp Miasma pulls that off in a hundred and twelve minutes, which is exactly what makes Castration Movie’s much larger ambition and much greater risk more frustrating rather than less.

The size of the swing makes the missing connections more visible.

And Barker isn’t playing this game at all. He wandered into the same territory like any man does: barging in.

Three filmmakers took three unrelated routes to the same place, and the differences are the point.

You have one openly queer artist interrogating desire through queer horror on purpose. You have another building an enormous archive of transsexual life and getting stuck, I think, inside her own refusal to ever close an argument. Then you have an outsider who tripped over the wall by accident and had the nerve, unlike plenty of people who saw it coming, to describe what he found.

So, Jane. I’ll be expecting my royalty check.

Something is moving in the culture that doesn’t run through our essays, our podcasts, or anybody’s think pieces.

If we’re lucky, what develops from this will be a materialist, trans-inclusive, unembarrassed radical feminism that refuses to stop asking where desire came from.

Defending a want and studying its formation were never actually in conflict, whatever twenty years of internet fighting trained people to assume.

Queer sexuality can be celebrated without pretending queers are structurally incapable of reproducing the misogyny that raised us. Lesbian freedom can be defended without quietly redefining freedom as universal erotic availability, since those were never the same thing and only one of them was ever about lesbians.

Mostly, what I want is for somebody to walk into a theater, watch two women fall for each other over fried chicken and gore at a frozen summer camp, and walk back out with more questions about desire than they came in with.

A movie that leaves you with fewer questions was never doing much with desire in the first place. It was describing something until you felt comfortable wanting it.

The good ones make you less comfortable.

They sit you down a little longer than you’d like with the fact that you don’t fully know why you want what you want, and neither does anybody else. That’s not a problem that has to be solved before we’re allowed to have sex.

It’s the actual beginning of thinking about it.

Viewing and sources. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, dir. Jane Schoenbrun (MUBI/Plan B, 2026), Queer Palm winner at Cannes, US release August 7, 2026; reporting and interviews drawn from Deadline, IndieWire, CNN, The New Republic, Variety, RogerEbert.com, WBUR, Portland Mercury, Nerdist, iHorror, The Hollywood Reporter, and Out. Castration Movie Anthology i. Traps (2024), ii. The Best of Both Worlds (2025), and iii. Year of the Hyaena (2026), dir. Louise Weard (Hentai Cop Films); Weard quoted from her interview with Filmmaker Magazine, June 2025, and her interview with Truthdig, November 2025; additional reporting from Screen Slate, Phantasmag, Directors Notes, Hyperreal Film Club, and Film Obsessive; the critical reading of the second installment’s central metaphor is from a Letterboxd review by user miseryminister, September 2025. Obsession, dir. Curry Barker (Focus Features), TIFF premiere 2025, wide release May 15, 2026; the One Wish Willow line and Barker’s comments on it are from his interview with Slant Magazine, May 2026; Emma Cieslik’s reading is quoted from Ms. Magazine as excerpted in Trill; the feminist-horror assessment is from The Rolling Tape, May 2026; audience discourse is characterized from reporting in Trill and Salon; additional interviews and reporting from IndieWire, The Wrap, Time, In Review Online, The Playlist, The Cold Magazine, and Deadline.

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Introduction

There is a kind of leftist who believes politics becomes more serious the less funny everyone involved is allowed to be. They treat mockery as a contamination of theory, trolling as evidence that somebody has abandoned politics for spectacle, and public humiliation as something fundamentally beneath serious organizers. The ideal revolutionary, apparently, speaks exclusively in the cadence of a nonprofit annual report.

This is historically ridiculous.

Marxism was built by people who spent enormous amounts of time insulting one another, parodying each other’s books, publishing replies whose titles were themselves jokes, inventing factional names designed to make opponents sound weak, writing songs that mocked preachers, and occasionally devoting hundreds of pages to somebody almost nobody remembers anymore.

That does not mean cruelty is automatically revolutionary. Marx was perfectly capable of aiming the same viciousness he used against political enemies at people beneath him, including through racism, and the history of socialist polemic is full of men who learned the pleasure of contempt without learning any discipline about where to point it. There is also an obvious difference between a joke attached to an organization capable of acting and a joke posted because an algorithm rewards conflict.

That distinction is what this essay is about.

The left did not invent trolling on Twitter. It inherited a political tradition in which ridicule, naming, exaggeration, parody, spectacle, and public confrontation were regularly used to alter the terms of an argument. Sometimes they clarified theory. Sometimes they recruited people. Sometimes they destroyed organizations that should have survived. Sometimes the person doing it was completely right and still managed to make being right cost far more than it was worth.

The point is not that trolling is secretly revolutionary activity whenever somebody with a red flag emoji posts something funny. The point is that polemic has always been part of political practice, and its usefulness depends on what it is attached to, who it is aimed at, whether it can be answered, and whether there is anything left after everybody finishes laughing.

That is the Brimstone Band tradition.

1. A year of your life for a man nobody remembers

In 1860, Karl Marx spent a year of his life on a man named Karl Vogt.

Vogt was a naturalist and a former delegate to the Frankfurt parliament, and in 1859 he published a pamphlet claiming Marx ran a blackmail operation out of London. He called Marx’s circle the Schwefelbande, the Brimstone Band, and said they squeezed money out of German exiles by threatening to expose them as police spies. It was a lie, and it was the kind of lie that sticks because it was specific and funny and landed on people who already thought Marx was insufferable.

Everybody told him to let it go. Lassalle told him to let it go. Engels, who had spent fifteen years watching Marx get pulled off course by lesser men, told him to let it go.

Marx wrote two hundred pages.

Herr Vogt came out in December 1860, and it is one of the funniest things Marx ever wrote, and it is completely deranged. He audits Vogt’s money. He reconstructs the travel schedules of exiles nobody had thought about in a decade. He goes through the minutes of committees that had four members. The family was broke the entire time. Jenny copied out the manuscript by hand. Marx wasn’t working on Capital, which he had already been failing to finish for over a decade and would keep failing to finish for another seven years.

Then the Second Empire collapsed, and in 1870 the papers found in the Tuileries were published, and it turned out Karl Vogt had been paid forty thousand francs by Louis Bonaparte in August 1859.

So Marx was right. He was right in the most expensive way a person can be right, which is to say he was right in public, ten years late, about something that had already eaten a year he was never getting back, and by then most of the people who read the accusation had never heard about the correction.

I think about this every time somebody quote-posts me to explain that posting isn’t praxis. They’re not wrong about the word. They’re just using it as a vibe instead of a theory. In 1845, in a notebook he never got around to publishing, Marx wrote that philosophers had only interpreted the world in various ways, and the point was to change it. That’s the whole doctrine of praxis in one line: a theory that never risks anything in the world, never goes and gets tested somewhere it can actually lose, isn’t praxis. It’s just a nicer kind of talking. Herr Vogt is a year of somebody’s actual life spent finding out, in public, whether a theory about how ruling-class smears operate was true.

Posting isn’t praxis, and neither is spending 1860 on Karl Vogt, at least not by itself. Yet the man who did that also wrote the book half of you own a tote bag about, and he didn’t do those two things in separate rooms with different hands. It was one temperament. He was a hater. The hating and the theory came out of the same place in him, and if you cut the hating out, you don’t get a purer Marx. You get Kautsky.

2. He put the joke on the cover

The first thing to understand about the Marxist canon is how much of it is titled like a subtweet.

In 1846, Proudhon published The System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty. In 1847, Marx published The Poverty of Philosophy, in French, in Paris, so that Proudhon’s own readers could watch it happen in their own language. He took the man’s subtitle, turned it around, and put it on the cover. That’s the whole gag, and it worked so well that a hundred and eighty years later you can’t say the name of Proudhon’s book without saying the name of the reply.

In 1845, Marx and Engels published The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism. Against Bruno Bauer and Company. They took the Young Hegelians’ favorite self-description and repeated it back until it sounded stupid, which is a technique every girl in a group chat already knows. You say it again with the same face and let the phrase attend its own funeral.

Then there’s The German Ideology, written across 1845 and 1846, in which the section attacking Max Stirner is titled “Saint Max” and runs longer than The Ego and Its Own, the book it exists to destroy. They wrote a reply physically larger than its target. They never published it. In the 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx said they had abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice, and that they didn’t mind because the real point had been to get clear for themselves.

There’s a reason none of this is only cleverness. Decades later, Antonio Gramsci was arrested by Mussolini’s government and sentenced to more than twenty years, a fascist prosecutor telling the court the point of the sentence was to stop that particular brain from working. From his cell, sick and filling notebook after notebook he wasn’t sure would ever be read, Gramsci worked out that a ruling class doesn’t hold power only through armies and elections. It holds power by controlling what everybody already assumes before an argument even starts, which he called hegemony, and the slow work of contesting that common sense he called a war of position, set against a war of maneuver, the single decisive battle for the state itself.

Putting your rival’s own subtitle back on your own cover, making Bruno Bauer’s circle sound like a cult it can’t disown, or running your reply longer than Stirner’s own book just to be sure nobody reads one without the other does not decide an election. It decides what a reader picks up second and who that second book already sounds like it’s laughing at before the first page.

The first complete statement of the materialist conception of history exists because two men in their twenties wanted to be book-length mean to Max Stirner and couldn’t make themselves stop. The theory is downstream of the beef. You don’t arrive at the argument without the fight because the fight is the thing that forces you to say what you actually believe instead of what sounds correct at a meeting. Almost nobody builds a position from scratch in a calm room. People build positions when somebody they can’t stand says something they can’t let stand.

3. The catechism was a reply guy

In the mid-1870s, a lecturer in Berlin named Eugen Dühring started picking up followers inside the young German party. He had a system. He had opinions about everything, which is the actual qualification for a following, and young socialists were reading him with enthusiasm. Liebknecht kept writing to Engels asking him to do something about it.

Engels didn’t want to, and he complained about it. Answering Dühring meant following the man into political economy, philosophy, natural science, mathematics, and the history of socialism, because Dühring had an opinion waiting in each of those rooms, and you can’t leave one of them standing or the followers will point at it forever.

So Engels went into every room. The result ran in Vorwärts across 1877 and 1878 and came out as a book titled, more or less, Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science, which is the same joke as The Poverty of Philosophy delivered with a flatter face.

For an entire generation of European socialists, that book is how they learned Marxism. Not Capital. Not the Manifesto. Anti-Dühring. Engels pulled three chapters out of it in 1880 at Lafargue’s urging and published them separately as Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, which went into more languages and more hands than almost anything else either of them wrote while alive.

The standard introduction to Marxism is a reply. It is a man getting dragged into an argument he didn’t want, against a guy he considered a crank, at a length nobody requested, and it turned out to be one of the most effective pieces of political education the movement produced in the nineteenth century. Eugen Dühring is remembered largely because Engels couldn’t let it go.

Every single one of you has an Anti-Dühring in your drafts and deleted it because someone in your DMs said it wasn’t a good look.

4. Lenin lost the vote and took the word

At the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in the summer of 1903, which opened in Brussels and finished in London because the Belgian police got curious, the party split over the definition of membership. Lenin wanted a member to participate in an organization. Martov wanted a member to give regular assistance under the direction of one. The vote went to Martov.

Lenin lost. That is the part people skip when they tell this story. He lost the substantive fight over what the party was.

Later in the congress, the Bundists walked out, and the Economists walked out after them, and on the remaining votes about who controlled Iskra and the central bodies, Lenin’s side had the numbers still sitting in the room. So he called his faction bolshinstvo, majority, and the people who had beaten him on the actual question got menshinstvo, minority.

They answered to it for the rest of their political lives, through years when they had more members, more money, more of the working class, and more of the intelligentsia, and they still never got the word.

This is the war of position in miniature, and Lenin fought it exactly as seriously as he fought any other kind. A word on a masthead recruits. It tells a printer’s apprentice in Baku which side is winning before he has read a line of theory, and by the time he is equipped to evaluate the theory he has been calling himself a majority-ist for two years and his friends are all majority-ists too. Lenin understood that a faction is partly a branding problem, and he wasn’t embarrassed about it. The men who were embarrassed about it lost.

5. The margins

Lenin’s titles are a hate crime against his own comrades, and I say that with total admiration.

Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, 1909, is four hundred pages accusing Bogdanov and the Machists of smuggling God back into physics. Bogdanov was one of the most capable organizers the Bolsheviks had, and Lenin called him a priest at book length, in print, with his name on it.

The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, 1918. Renegade, in the title. Kautsky had been the pope of Marxist orthodoxy for twenty years, the man who kept the sacred texts, and Lenin put the word renegade on the cover beside his name and let it ride into every socialist household in Europe.

“Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, 1920, is a book asking the ultraleft to come and work with him, and the title calls them babies. He is recruiting and insulting them inside the same six words. There is also a short piece from 1911 called Judas Trotsky’s Blush of Shame, which he didn’t publish in his lifetime, and six years later he and Judas ran a revolution together.

He was worse in private. He annotated books the way an angry woman annotates a screenshot before forwarding it: exclamation marks, “ha-ha,” sic, and the occasional single word of contempt parked in the margin beside a paragraph he considered beneath answering.

What all of that abuse has in common matters more than the abuse itself. Every instance of it has an address: a named person, a stated position, a date, and a claim somebody could go and check. Bogdanov could answer. Kautsky did answer. The ultraleft answered so hard they were still answering in 1968. Lenin’s contempt was bolted to an argument capable of losing, delivered by a man who then had to keep turning up at congresses where the people he had insulted were sitting in the third row with their own delegates.

6. Twenty-seven years old, in a hall full of men who ran the largest party in Europe

Stuttgart, October 1898. Rosa Luxemburg had been in Germany for months. She had a Polish accent, a hip that made her walk badly, no standing in the party, and a body that every man in the hall had already reached conclusions about.

The question on the floor was Wolfgang Heine’s compensation policy, the proposal that socialist deputies trade votes for the military budget in exchange for concessions on civil liberties. It sounded reasonable, which was the problem with it. Rosa got up and compared it to a wife who agrees to let her husband beat her a little in exchange for something she wants.

She took a debate about parliamentary tactics among serious men and dropped a domestic scene into the middle of it. Every deputy in the room became the husband, and the party became the wife. She did it as a joke, in front of the leadership, at twenty-seven, in her second language, and the reason Bebel and Kautsky had to deal with her for the next twenty years is that the joke was correct.

The following year, she published Social Reform or Revolution against Bernstein, and the argument is that credit, cartels, and the world market don’t smooth capitalism’s contradictions out. They concentrate them. A party that quietly drops the conquest of political power doesn’t get a slower road to the same destination. It gets a machine that has started mistaking its own institutional survival for progress. She was right about that too, and in 1914 the party she was arguing with voted for the war credits, and in 1919 men acting under that party’s government beat her skull in and threw her in a canal.

I want the girls to hold onto this one. The most feared polemicist in the Second International was a small disabled Jewish immigrant woman who got funnier every time they patronized her, and every organizational instinct those men had was to manage her. Now each of them is a footnote in her biography.

7. The funniest pamphlet in the canon, and what its author’s father-in-law called him in the mail

Paul Lafargue was born in Santiago de Cuba in 1842, into a family carrying African, Carib, and Jewish ancestry through Saint-Domingue and Jamaica before it landed in France. He married Laura Marx. In 1880, much of it written from Sainte-Pélagie prison, he published The Right to Be Lazy.

The argument is an act of aggression against his own side. The workers’ movement, he says, has adopted the boss’s religion. It demands the right to work. It celebrates labor as dignity and calls that socialism, when the actual content of proletarian demand should be less of your one life sold off, fewer hours standing inside somebody else’s building, and the machines running so that people can stop. He calls the love of work a mania and a delirium, and he is saying it to socialists.

It got translated everywhere. It was read by enormous numbers of people who never finished Capital and never planned to. It is still one of the funniest things in the tradition, and it is a shitpost, and it did real work because it named the thing the movement’s own moralism had made unsayable.

In private letters, Marx used racial epithets about Lafargue. Repeatedly. The same man who wrote two hundred pages defending his own name against a slander used slurs about his daughter’s mixed-race husband in the post to Engels, and did the same about Lassalle in a letter from July 1862 so vile that his defenders have spent a hundred and sixty years explaining that it was private correspondence, as if the girls haven’t heard that one before, and as if the private letter weren’t exactly the place where people keep what they actually think.

Everything I have described so far is a tradition of extremely gifted haters. The hating produced the theory, and the same faculty produced the racism. It is one faculty. Contempt doesn’t arrive with a targeting system pre-installed. You have to install it yourself, deliberately, and Marx didn’t. The tradition he founded inherited a polemical style with no direction control on it whatsoever, which is how you end up with a hundred and fifty years of socialist men who learned from Marx that viciousness is a political virtue and never once checked which way they were pointing.

8. The Hague, 1872, or: he would rather kill it than lose it

The International Workingmen’s Association was founded in London in 1864, and Marx wrote its inaugural address. People remember it now as a debating society, which is a slander. Its actual work was material and boring and effective: raising strike funds across borders and organizing so that, when English employers tried to break a strike by importing workers from the continent, the continental sections got to those workers first and told them what they were walking into. That is the thing that existed. That is the thing that was at stake.

Bakunin joined in 1868, bringing his Alliance of Socialist Democracy with him. The political disagreement was real and enormous. Marx’s side held that the working class had to organize as a political party and take state power. Bakunin’s side held that the state had to be abolished as the first act, and that participation in politics was already a defeat. That argument is still live. Nobody has settled it.

What Marx did was investigate. He and Engels and Lafargue put together a report on Bakunin’s Alliance, published in 1873, and a great deal of it was correct. Bakunin really had run a secret organization inside the public one. He really had been entangled with Sergei Nechayev, whose circle murdered a student named Ivanov in 1869, and who had sent a threatening letter to a publisher to get Bakunin out of a translation contract he had taken the advance for.

At the Hague Congress in September 1872, Marx’s side expelled Bakunin and James Guillaume. Then, having won, Marx moved that the General Council be relocated to New York.

New York, across an ocean, out of reach of the federalists and out of reach of every working-class organization in Europe that the International had been built to connect. The European movement never got it back. The federalists met at Saint-Imier a week later and carried on for a few years under their own steam, and the body Marx had built formally dissolved in Philadelphia in 1876.

He deleted the server. He was right about Bakunin’s secret Alliance, he was right about Nechayev, he won the vote in front of the delegates, and he would rather have shipped the whole apparatus three thousand miles to die than watch it get run by a man he despised. Every one of you has watched this happen in a Discord. An admin loses control of the culture and, rather than be in a room she doesn’t run, she archives the channels and posts a statement. The difference between her and Marx is that the strike funds were real and the workers on the docks at Liverpool were real, and what got destroyed was somebody’s leverage over their own employer.

Being right isn’t the same as being worth it. That is the bill for a polemical temperament with no institutional discipline attached, and it came due in 1872. The tradition has been paying it in installments ever since.

9. The dustbin acquires a lid

October 1917, Smolny, the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets. The Mensheviks and the Right SRs get up to walk out in protest, and Trotsky tells them from the platform that they are bankrupts, that their part is finished, and that they should go where they belong, into the dustbin of history.

It is the greatest live line in the history of the left, and nothing has touched it since. A man watched his enemies leave a room and handed them a destination on the way out.

In March 1921, the Tenth Party Congress banned factions inside the party, and Kronstadt was put down the same month. Trotsky was expelled in 1927, deported in 1929, and killed in Coyoacán in 1940 by an agent of the state he had built.

The man who invented the dustbin went into it, and the reason has nothing to do with irony. The polemical culture that produced Trotsky required one very specific condition in order to exist: an opposition that couldn’t be arrested. Every book named so far was written into a live argument with people who had their own press, their own money, their own delegates, and the ability to answer at the next congress. Marx could call Vogt a Bonapartist stooge because Vogt could sue him, and did. Lenin could call Kautsky a renegade because Kautsky had a journal and used it. Rosa could compare the party leadership to a wife-beater because she was going to be standing in the same hall as them the following autumn.

Take that condition away and the polemic stops being polemic. What’s left is an announcement from a body that can’t be contradicted, and there’s already a word for that: propaganda. Rosa saw it coming in 1918, in the manuscript published after her death as The Russian Revolution, where she wrote that freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently. She meant it as a warning to people she was otherwise defending, and it is the sentence I resent needing most.

10. When the joke had a treasury

Spokane, Washington, 1909. The city passed an ordinance against street speaking, aimed squarely at the Industrial Workers of the World, who recruited from soapboxes outside the employment agencies robbing migrant workers with placement fees for jobs that lasted a week. The IWW put out a call. Members came in from all over the West, and one after another they got up on the box, said one sentence, and got arrested. Then the next one got up. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was arrested while pregnant. The jails filled past capacity, the city’s costs went vertical, and the ordinance broke.

That is a prank, but it is also a strategy, and what separates the two is that hundreds of people had agreed in advance to go to jail in a specific order.

Then there’s Joe Hill, who in 1911 wrote “The Preacher and the Slave” to the tune of the hymn “In the Sweet By-and-By,” which is where English gets the phrase “pie in the sky.” The Wobblies would stand next to the Salvation Army band on the same corner and sing the same melody with different words, loudly, so the crowd couldn’t hear the sermon. They printed it in a songbook subtitled To Fan the Flames of Discontent. They called the Salvation Army the Starvation Army and then sang it at them in harmony.

Set that beside a good quote-post. The formal content is identical. Somebody said a thing, you took their own structure and filled it with your meaning, and the audience laughed at them instead of with them. What is different is that behind the Wobbly on the corner there was a union with a defense fund, a legal apparatus, an agreed order for who gets bailed out first, and a specific list of the employment sharks the entire performance was actually about. The joke was the recruiting arm of something. Remove the something and it is karaoke.

11. Détournement, and the day the Stock Exchange bought glass

The Situationists understood the joke as a method and gave it a name. In 1966, a handful of pro-Situ students won the student union elections at Strasbourg and spent the union’s money printing On the Poverty of Student Life, an attack on student life, financed by students and handed out at the university’s own ceremony. The courts got involved and the union went into administration. Note the title, lifted from Marx, who lifted it from Proudhon. The tradition trolls itself down the generations like an inheritance.

In August 1967, Abbie Hoffman and a small group went up to the visitors’ gallery of the New York Stock Exchange and threw money onto the trading floor, and traders scrambled for it in front of cameras. No speech could have done that. The scene made the argument, and it made it in about eleven seconds, and afterward the exchange enclosed the gallery in glass, which is the most honest review any action has ever received. The ruling class doesn’t answer a joke with a rebuttal. It answers with architecture.

Then, because history has a sense of humor and it is at our expense, the right studied all of this and got better at it than we are. From roughly 2014 onward, everything above got picked up by people who understood the mechanics perfectly and stripped out the one part that made it dangerous to the person doing it. The whole innovation of the modern reactionary troll is the escape hatch. He can’t be answered because, the second a point lands, he was kidding, and the second he is pinned, he was never serious. There is no name on the account anyway.

That is the opposite of everything described so far. Marx put his name on two hundred pages about Karl Vogt and stayed in London where Vogt’s lawyers could reach him. Rosa said it at the congress with the men in the room. Joe Hill sang it on the corner and the state of Utah shot him in 1915. This isn’t a tradition of getting away with it. It is a tradition of not getting away with it, on purpose, in public, with your legal name attached to the invoice.

12. The four conditions

So the rule has four parts.

It is signed. Your name and an account people can find. Anonymity is fine for the girls who would actually be killed, and I mean that literally, and I am not talking to them here. I am talking to the men in the reading group with the frog avatar and the theory degree.

It has an address. A named person, a named position, a named organization, and a specific thing that was actually done on a specific day. The discourse isn’t an address, and neither is a vibe you are subposting so that four different women think it is about them and one of them cries.

It can lose. What you said has to be checkable, which means it has to be capable of being wrong, and you have to be willing to eat it when it is. This is the same bar Marx set for theory in that unpublished notebook in 1845 and then actually met in 1860: an idea that never risks the outcome isn’t praxis. It’s just opinion with a bibliography. He spent a year on Vogt and was vindicated in 1870. He could just as easily have spent that year and been wrong, and there are plenty of other fights where he was.

You stay in the room. You take the reply. You don’t post and mute. You don’t swing and then announce you are stepping back for your mental health while your friends handle the aftermath. If you can’t survive the answer, you were never in an argument. You were performing one for people who already agreed with you.

Underneath all four is the requirement that it goes up, or sideways at cowardice, and never down. This is the condition Marx failed. He aimed at Vogt, who was on a foreign government’s payroll, and he aimed at Lassalle and at his own son-in-law with the identical equipment. There was nothing in his method to stop him because he never built the stop.

We have to build it. Squeamishness isn’t the reason, and neither is a sudden taste for respectability politics. The difference is between contempt as a political instrument and contempt as a personality.

13. The exchange rate

All of that is a defense of the sharp reply, and I am extremely aware of who gets to make one.

A white man in a reading group can call another man a renegade and it reads as erudition. He gets a laugh, and somebody screenshots it admiringly and puts it on a graphic with a red background. When I do the same thing at half the temperature, there is a document. There is a group chat where three people who have never met me establish that I am a danger. There are DMs going out to organizers explaining that I am difficult, and difficult travels faster than any essay I have ever written. By the time it arrives in a room I have never stood in, it has become unsafe, and there is no reply to unsafe because unsafe is built to be unanswerable. That is the entire appeal of the word.

I have watched money leave over one sentence. Bookings evaporate over one sentence. I have had people describe my tone as an injury while sitting on housing and an income I have never had, and while never once in their lives having been in the smallest physical danger from me, which is the only kind of danger I am actually capable of putting anybody in and the only kind nobody ever bothers to accuse me of.

So the rule about direction isn’t an abstraction where I live. When a Black transsexual woman is sharp, the bill is charged immediately and it is charged in rent. When a white cis man is sharp, he gets called based. The tools are identical. The invoice isn’t, and the difference has nothing to do with any quality in the sentence. It is about who can be made to pay and who has a room full of people ready to absorb it on his behalf.

Since I am running an audit on everybody else, I have gotten this wrong myself. I mocked a woman from a large platform once, for free, because it was easy and because a certain audience wanted it, and she blocked me, and I didn’t care at the time. Years later, after my own turn in the machine, I went back and read her properly and found out she had been right. That wasn’t polemic. There was no claim in it capable of losing, there was no address, and there was nothing underneath it. It was entertainment for people who were never going to lift a finger for either of us, and I was the labor.

14. What I actually want from you

Be a hater. I mean it. The anger is doing real work, and the movement’s habit of laundering it into gentle language has produced twenty years of people who can describe an injustice for ninety minutes and can’t embarrass a single person responsible for it. Contempt is load-bearing. Amerika runs on the confidence that nobody serious will ever be publicly humiliated for what they do to us, and the small available correction to that is somebody with a name and an audience saying out loud the exact thing everybody in the room already knew.

Aim it up at the executive director, at the man with the fellowship, and at whoever’s comfort is being paid for out of somebody else’s silence. Aim it sideways at cowardice, which is the one lateral target I will always allow, because cowardice is how the arrangement gets maintained and it is the only sin in our circles that never once gets punished.

Put your name on it and stay for the answer.

Have something underneath it, because this is the part that isn’t a joke. Marx bought his year back in 1870, in the form of proof, a decade late, and that is the going rate. Pay it if you want. Spokane worked because there was a union, and the Wobbly on the corner was recruiting into a thing that existed, with a bail fund and a plan for the morning after the arrest.

The joke is a recruiting arm. That’s the war of position and the war of maneuver actually holding together instead of one standing in for the other. Position without maneuver is decoration. Maneuver without position is a fight nobody watching even knows is happening. If there is nothing for the joke to recruit into, you aren’t agitating. You are producing free content for a platform that will sell ads against your worst week and ban you the following year.

Build the thing, and then be as mean as you want about it.

Works cited

Marx, Karl. Theses on Feuerbach (written 1845, first published 1888 as an appendix to Engels’s Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy). Used for the eleventh thesis’s formulation of praxis, applied throughout as the standard that separates a tested claim from mere commentary.

Gramsci, Antonio. Prison Notebooks (Quaderni del carcere, written 1929 to 1935, first published in Italian 1948 to 1951). Used for the concepts of hegemony and the war of position versus the war of maneuver, applied to the naming and titling material in sections 2 and 4 and to the closing argument that a joke needs an organization behind it.

Marx, Karl. Herr Vogt (1860). Used for the central case of polemic as a year-long expenditure, and for the 1870 Tuileries revelation of Vogt’s payment from Louis Bonaparte, which supplies the claim about vindication arriving too late to be worth its price.

Marx, Karl. The Poverty of Philosophy (1847). Used for the title inversion of Proudhon’s The System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty (1846), cited as the earliest instance of the tradition putting the joke on the cover.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism (1845). Used for the technique of repeating an opponent’s self-description back until it discredits itself.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology (1845 to 1846). Used for the “Saint Max” section against Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own (1844), supporting the claim that the first full statement of the materialist conception of history was produced by the effort of attacking somebody, and for Marx’s remark in the 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy about abandoning the manuscript to the mice.

Engels, Friedrich. Anti-Dühring (serialized 1877 to 1878, published as a book 1878) and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880). Used for the argument that the most widely read introduction to Marxism in the nineteenth century was a reply to a minor opponent, and that Dühring survives in memory largely as its target.

Marx, Karl, Friedrich Engels, and Paul Lafargue. Report on the Alliance of Socialist Democracy and the International Working Men’s Association (1873), together with the proceedings of the Hague Congress (September 1872). Used for the expulsion of Bakunin and Guillaume, the Nechayev material, and the removal of the General Council to New York, which supports the section on winning a factional fight by destroying the organization.

Records of the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (1903). Used for the sequence in which Lenin lost the vote on the membership clause to Martov and then claimed the name bolshinstvo after the Bundist and Economist delegations withdrew. Supports the claim that naming performs organizing work independent of argument.

Lenin, V. I. Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909), The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918), “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920), and Judas Trotsky’s Blush of Shame (written 1911, unpublished in his lifetime). Used as evidence that Lenin’s insults were addressed, dated, and answerable, which is the distinction the four conditions are built on.

Luxemburg, Rosa. Speech at the Stuttgart party congress (October 1898) and Social Reform or Revolution (1899). Used for the wife-beating comparison against Heine’s compensation policy, and for her argument that credit, cartels, and the world market concentrate rather than resolve capitalism’s contradictions, which is why abandoning the conquest of political power converts a party into a machine for its own survival.

Luxemburg, Rosa. The Russian Revolution (written 1918, published 1922). Used for the claim that freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently, which supplies the condition that polemic requires an opposition capable of answering back.

Lafargue, Paul. The Right to Be Lazy (1880). Used for its argument that the demand for the right to work imports the employer’s morality into socialism, cited as an instance of a joke pamphlet outperforming the serious literature, and for the biographical contrast with Marx’s private racial abuse of him.

Trotsky, Leon. Speech at the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets (October 1917). Used for the dustbin of history line, set against the Tenth Party Congress ban on factions in March 1921 and his own expulsion and assassination, to argue that polemical culture depends on an opposition that can’t be arrested.

Records of the Spokane free speech fight (1909) and Joe Hill, “The Preacher and the Slave” (1911), published in the IWW’s Little Red Songbook. Used for the distinction between a prank and a strategy, which is the presence of an organization, a defense fund, and an agreed order of arrest.

Situationist International and the Strasbourg students. On the Poverty of Student Life (1966). Used for détournement as method and for the fact that the pamphlet was financed by the institution it attacked. The title’s descent from Marx and Proudhon supports the point about the tradition inheriting its own jokes.

Hoffman, Abbie, and the New York Stock Exchange action (August 1967).

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Before you read this, read Steph’s Transmanosphere: The Trans Masculine Radicalization Pipeline. I’m responding directly to the phenomenon she identifies and the history she lays out, and I’m not going to spend thousands of words reproducing her argument when she already made it herself.

I agree with a substantial portion of it. My disagreement is about where we locate the cause. There’s a point where her analysis stops several feet before the bottom of the building.

Steph Is Describing Something Real

Spend enough time in queer spaces as a transsexual woman and eventually you run into a particular kind of transmasculine politics organized around resentment toward trans women. Sometimes it’s dressed in the language of invisibility, which is its own kind of joke, since I have never in my life felt invisible. Sometimes it’s about resources: who gets the grant, who gets the reading slot. Sometimes it becomes an elaborate theory in which transfeminism is secretly the instrument through which trans women dominate everyone else. I’ve seen versions of this so many times that I could reproduce the entire discourse from memory while being hit over the head with a frying pan.

Trans women are hypervisible and therefore privileged, hypersexualized and therefore privileged, disproportionately discussed and therefore privileged, disproportionately murdered and somehow still privileged because people discuss the murders. It’s an extraordinary political technology because it never loses an argument. Feed it evidence of transmisogyny and it comes back out the other side as evidence that trans women receive too much attention. There is no input the machine cannot use.

Steph and many others have called the ecosystem producing some of this the transmanosphere. The comparison to the manosphere is useful, and I think it undersells the problem.

The manosphere did more than teach men to hate women. It gave them an explanatory system that converted personal frustration into political grievance. Romantic rejection became feminism. Loneliness became gynocentrism. Sexual insecurity became female privilege. A miserable afternoon became evidence that civilization had been captured by women. The genius of reactionary politics has always been its ability to take a real feeling and hand it the worst available explanation.

Trans men do experience alienation. They experience medical neglect, sexual violence, reproductive violence, and transphobia. They get infantilized and isolated. They get treated by nominally progressive people as confused women who wandered tragically away from womanhood, which carries its own humiliation. The injuries are real. The political question is what explanation gets attached to them, and increasingly one available explanation is trans women did this to you.

Grievance Needs an Analysis

One of the failures of contemporary queer politics is the assumption that marginalized people will naturally understand one another. Apparently oppression was supposed to function as an undergraduate seminar in comparative political theory. It doesn’t. Suffering teaches you that you suffered. Everything after that requires analysis.

A person can experience misogyny without developing feminist politics. A trans person can experience transphobia while remaining perfectly capable of reproducing transmisogyny. Identity gives us a location in social relations. It does not come with an explanation attached. You learn the explanation the way you learn anything else, by reading and getting corrected, usually more than once.

Her article is useful here because she recognizes that trans men can build political cultures around grievance the same way cis men do. I’d go further. Queer culture has spent years making that development easy. We built political environments where identity counts as epistemic authority, discomfort counts as evidence of injury, interpersonal conflict gets translated into structural oppression, and people are encouraged to understand themselves through finer and finer taxonomies of marginalization. Then everybody acted surprised when people learned to construct oppression narratives about one another. We built a courtroom, and the anonymous ask box was where the trials happened: unattributable, impossible to face. Then we handed everyone a law degree from Tumblr University. Somebody was eventually going to start filing.

The Oppression Calculator Was Always Going to Break

A great deal of queer discourse runs on an implicit ranking system. Who is visible? Who is represented? Who receives resources? Who gets talked about? Who is allowed to speak? Who is centered? Those questions can be useful. They become disastrous the moment they come loose from material analysis.

Consider the claim that trans women are “overrepresented.” Compared to whom, where, and under what conditions? Pornography is visibility. A murder statistic is visibility. National legislation naming her is visibility. Being the symbolic explanation for the collapse of Western civilization is visibility. Visibility describes attention. Power describes relationships. A woman can be the single most discussed category of person in a country’s politics and still not be safe walking into a public restroom.

Collapse those categories and the grievance politics writes itself. Trans women receive enormous amounts of cultural attention. Trans men often experience erasure. The mistake happens when the second gets explained through the first. Suddenly the trans woman is the beneficiary of her own hypervisibility. Her fetishization gets counted as representation, her political persecution as cultural centrality, her position as the favorite object of reactionary obsession as proof that society cares about her more. That’s how a material relationship turns into a competition over attention, and attention is a currency that can be measured and screenshotted in a way that power, mostly, cannot.

Attention is the currency of the internet. Steph is right to spend so much time on platforms. They changed what political conflict feels like. The timeline hands everyone a scoreboard: likes, followers, reblogs, views, comments, mentions. One person gets twenty thousand likes for a post about transmisogyny and another gets forty-seven for a post about transmasculine healthcare, and an entire theory of social power gets built out of analytics. Capitalism has finally achieved the dream of turning oppression into influencer metrics.

Trans Men Are Men. Now What?

Steph writes what will probably become the most contested sentence in her article: “Trans men are men. As men, they hold male privilege.”

I understand what she’s doing. Queer spaces have been reluctant to analyze trans men as men whenever doing so would mean admitting that transition can change someone’s relationship to patriarchal power. A trans man can be read as male and pick up the social authority that comes with it. He can participate in misogyny and transmisogyny. He can abuse women. None of this should be controversial unless our theory of gender mysteriously stops working the second it produces an uncomfortable conclusion.

My disagreement with the sentence was never about whether the privilege is real. It’s about whether one label can do the work an entire relationship needs. A trans man can hold real power in one room and be genuinely unsafe in the next, and admitting the second doesn’t require taking back the first. Invariance means asking how power operates across changing social contexts instead of handing every person a fixed inventory, and that only works if you’re willing to hold both facts about him at once.

A passing trans man talking to a woman at work is in one social relation. The same man in a gynecologist’s waiting room is in another. So is the closeted trans boy living with violently transphobic parents. So is the white trans man talking over a Black trans woman. The categories stay meaningful. Their political expression changes depending on who is standing across from you.

A trans man raising his voice in a staff meeting gets read through the same script that reads any man raising his voice: forceful, maybe an asshole, but rarely unstable. The same man raising his voice in an emergency room, giving a doctor his actual medical history, can get read as a woman who needs to calm down before anyone will treat him. It’s the same man and the same volume, and two different institutions arrive at two completely different verdicts. A privilege chart cannot hold both of those rooms at once. Only an account of the specific institution can.

This is why reducing everything to AGAB fails. Flipping the analysis after transition and calling the problem solved fails the same way, just with the arrow pointing in a different direction. We need to analyze relationships instead. Who has institutional credibility? Who is presumed dangerous? Whose anger reads as a threat? Whose sexuality is treated as predation? Whose body is publicly debatable? Who can mobilize the institution against whom? Those questions tell us more than a little RPG character sheet where everyone gets +3 privilege for one identity and -2 oppression for another. Human society unfortunately has more complicated game mechanics.

The Queer Community Has Its Own Gender System

Here’s where I split from the framework around the transmanosphere. The problem can’t be understood by importing the gender hierarchy of heterosexual society into queer spaces and calling it done. Queer communities build their own local hierarchies: reputations, sexual economies, friendship networks, aesthetic expectations, moral vocabularies, informal discipline. Inside those, transmisogyny can operate through people with wildly different relationships to gender outside them. A cis lesbian can participate in it. So can a nonbinary person. So can a trans man. A trans woman can reproduce ideas that end up hurting other trans women.

So it can’t be reduced to the identity of whoever happens to be carrying it. What reproduces it is a queer culture that has never dealt with the fact that it produces gendered power internally, and that culture runs through very ordinary channels: who vouches for whom before a date and who gets warned about in the group chat. None of that requires a villain in a MAGA hat. It just requires people repeating what they already believe to people who already agree with them.

We prefer stories where oppression arrives from outside: the Republican politician, the pastor, the TERF, the fascist, the man yelling from the pickup truck. Those villains are convenient because recognizing them costs us nothing. The hard question starts when everybody in the room has pronouns in their bio. What happens when the person spreading transmisogyny is trans? What happens when the person protecting an abuser is a lesbian? What happens when the institution abandoning a trans woman has a Progress Pride flag hanging over the front desk? What happens when everyone involved can correctly explain intersectionality?

Then we have to admit that having progressive language doesn’t stop people from reproducing domination. Sometimes it makes them much better at justifying it.

The Radicalization Pipeline Begins With Something True

Reactionary movements find pain and give it an enemy.

Young men are lonely. True. Dating has gotten strange and commodified. True. Economic life is precarious and people feel disposable. True. Then Andrew Tate walks into the room and explains that women did it. The lie attaches itself to something recognizable.

Transmasculine grievance politics can work the same way. Trans men are sometimes ignored in queer discourse. Transmasculine healthcare gets insufficient attention. Trans men experience sexual violence that is routinely misunderstood. Some queer spaces infantilize trans men. Some transfeminists are assholes. I have investigated this allegation extensively and regret to inform everyone that trans women are capable of being annoying.

Then comes the conversion. Why are trans men invisible? Because trans women demand all the attention. Why are transmasculine problems neglected? Because transfeminism captured queer politics. Real injury goes in one end. A political enemy comes out the other.

Trans women make an easier target than cis patriarchy for a simple reason: you can find us. Cis patriarchy does not have a Discord server. It does not post. A trans man frustrated with his healthcare cannot block his endocrinologist’s entire professional field, but he can block a trans woman and get forty replies agreeing that she was the problem all along. The target has to be close enough to reach, and that is most of what decides who gets picked.

And This Is Why “Listen to Marginalized People” Was Never Enough

There’s an uncomfortable lesson in this for progressive politics. We spent years teaching people that lived experience carries political authority without teaching them how experience becomes analysis. Someone can describe accurately everything that happened to them and still be wrong about why it happened.

Grievance politics survives by collapsing that distinction. “I feel ignored” becomes “you have privilege over me.” “I experienced violence” becomes “your demographic did it.” “I am uncomfortable around this group” becomes “this group is dangerous.” “My needs are neglected” becomes “resources are being stolen from me.” Each substitution swaps a feeling for a causal claim and skips the part where you show your work. Once subjective experience becomes self-interpreting, almost nothing is left that can correct a reactionary conclusion.

Queer spaces are especially vulnerable because our moral language puts enormous weight on validating people’s experiences. Sometimes validation is humane. Sometimes a person’s interpretation of what happened to them is simply wrong. A functional political culture has to be able to say so.

Tumblr Did Not Invent This

Steph spends real time tracing Tumblr’s role, and she’s right that Tumblr matters. I have my own history with that website, which I’ll describe academically as Jesus fucking Christ.

But Tumblr can’t carry the whole explanation. The same politics shows up on TikTok, on Twitter, in Discord servers, on Instagram, and offline. Different platforms change its vocabulary and intensity, but what travels with it does not change: the same friend-of-a-friend network deciding who is credible, the same conviction that private information becomes public property the moment somebody is angry enough. The shape survives the migration.

Algorithms reward grievance because grievance produces engagement. They find contradictions that already exist and learn to monetize them. Trans women and trans men occupy different positions in gendered society. They experience different violence and have competing institutional needs. They misunderstand each other, and sometimes they do each other real damage. A healthy political movement would build something capable of negotiating that. An unhealthy political culture turns it into content. Guess which one Silicon Valley prefers.

Where I Agree With Steph

There is a transmasculine political tendency organized partly around resentment toward trans women. It should be studied. Trans men participating in transmisogyny shouldn’t be shielded by appeals to their transness. Feminists should stop treating trans men as honorary women whenever recognizing them as men becomes politically inconvenient. Trans women shouldn’t be expected to eat misogyny because the person serving it also experiences transphobia. Solidarity becomes meaningless the moment it requires pretending the contradictions disappeared.

But I don’t want the response to the transmanosphere to turn into another identity war. Do that and the transmanosphere wins. If trans women answer by building an inverse politics where trans men are a coherent enemy class, we’ve built the same machine with the signs reversed. Every injury becomes evidence. Every anecdote becomes sociology. Every abusive trans man represents trans men, every abusive trans woman represents trans women, and everyone retreats into demographic fortresses to spend the rest of their lives compiling screenshots about the neighboring kingdom. We already tried politics by callout dossier. It sucked.

We Need Feminism Again

The answer is feminism. I mean it in the old-fashioned sense, the embarrassing one, where we try to develop a theory that explains gendered social relations across differences. A Feminism built and grounded in invariance.

Transfeminism should be able to explain the lives of trans women and our relationships with cis women, trans men, nonbinary people, and men in general. It should explain institutions, sexuality, family, violence, and why people who sincerely believe themselves progressive keep reproducing the hierarchies they condemn. The aspiration of trans feminism should be to change feminism itself. Eventually, a feminism incapable of understanding transsexual life should become intellectually impossible. Without a Feminism grounded in a invariant ideology an analysis of everyday life it is useless.

That’s more demanding than deciding which category of queer person is currently the villain. It means analyzing relationships even when everyone involved is marginalized and admitting that oppressed people can hold power over other oppressed people. Solidarity gets built through political practice. The comforting fantasy that queer community exists outside the social relations governing everybody else has to go.

There’s no force field around the gay bar and no exemption for knowing what intersectionality means. We bring the world inside with us: its racism, its misogyny, its transmisogyny, its class hierarchy, its sexual violence, its obsession with beauty, its talent for turning frightened people on each other. What we build once we’re in there is the part that’s still open.

Steph is right that something dangerous develops when transmasculine grievance organizes itself around hostility toward trans women, and calling it the transmanosphere gives us a name for one expression of it. The transmanosphere is also a symptom. We taught everybody how to identify their wounds. We were much less successful at teaching them how to work out who inflicted them. Wherever that distinction stays unresolved, somebody is always waiting to supply an answer. Usually the worst one available.

Works cited

Transmanosphere: The Trans Masculine Radicalization Pipeline. The article this piece responds to throughout. the Tumblr history discussed in the Tumblr section, and the quoted line on trans men and male privilege.

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Psychology of the Becky did NUMBERS. I wasn’t expecting it to do so well. People sent it to their group chats. A few of you sent it to women you’d been arguing with for years, which is either a compliment or a war crime depending on how the argument went (and rather or not you blame me for it ). It got quoted back to me in places I don’t post. Somebody’s aunt read it. I still don’t fully understand the mechanics of what becomes popular. I’ve stopped pretending I do.

What I do understand is the question that came back, because almost all of you asked some version of it.

Well, what about the Stacy?

Sometimes it was a defense. She’s not the problem, the mean girls are, and here’s the story of what one did to me in 2009, and that is why Tara Knight should be put down. Sometimes it was a challenge, mostly from women who correctly noticed I’d spent thousands of words dismantling the girl with the tote bag and the correct opinions while leaving the girl who actually ran the hallway completely untouched, sitting there in the corner of the argument with her hair done, unexamined. Sometimes it was a woman writing to say she’d been the Stacy, that reading about the Becky had made her feel something she couldn’t name, and could I please explain why.

So. The Stacy.

American high school movies, an embarrassingly large share of American movies at this point, keep casting the same two girls against each other and asking you to care about which one wins. The genre has a favorite. She’s kind. She’s pretty in a way that reads as accidental. She ends up with the crown because the universe finally recognized what was always true about her. The movie calls this justice. The other girl knows what the crown costs. She built her entire being around getting it. She goes under a bus. She gets exposed at prom. Her diary gets read aloud.

Her friends abandon her.

Somebody humiliates her in the exact room she spent the film trying to rule. (Fuck you, Katy.)

The movie calls that justice too.

If you haven’t read the Becky article, read it first, because this is the second part of an argument that started there. Short version if you won’t: the Becky is the girl this culture hands the progressive microphone to. She’s correctly positioned and photogenic, and her politics is a redistribution that never asks where the goods came from. The crown moves from a cruel head to a kind one. The hierarchy survives. The audience exhales. Nothing structural has happened.

The Stacy is the other girl.

The one keeping the numbers.

The one who priced every face in the building before lunch and never bothered pretending she didn’t.

The genre has spent four decades making sure she never gets a political sentence to say out loud because, on some level, it already knows what would happen if she did. A girl who can read a room that accurately and has already refused every comforting lie about how that room works is probably someone you want destroyed before she figures out which direction to point.

The question here isn’t whether the Stacy is progressive.

She isn’t.

She runs the machine. She optimizes it. She disciplines other girls into compliance through nothing more than a well-timed glance, and she rarely uses her knowledge of the hierarchy to loosen it for anybody underneath her. That’s management with better shoes.

The question is what she becomes if somebody reaches her before the bus does.

That question matters because the Becky and the Stacy don’t begin from the same place. The Becky’s politics has a ceiling built into its foundation. She came up inside the system without ever having to price it, so redistribution is usually as far as her thinking goes. Move the crown. Improve representation. Put somebody kinder behind the microphone. Leave the factory running.

The Stacy already knows the factory.

She knows the shift schedule.

She knows which doors open.

She knows which ones only look unlocked.

She knows what everything costs because she has spent years paying and collecting.

She has simply never been given a reason to do anything with that knowledge except protect herself.

Reach her correctly, without demanding that she become sweeter or less feminine or less ambitious first, and something far more dangerous becomes possible.

The Becky asks the system to distribute better.

The Stacy already knows where the system keeps the books.

That difference has a consequence the genre works very hard not to say out loud.

The Becky is expected.

Every institution built to manage women’s politics has already planned for her. There’s a committee. There’s a fellowship. There’s a line in somebody’s budget. She has been the acceptable face of dissent since before either of us were born, and the machine absorbed her without breaking stride.

The Stacy, radicalized, is not in anybody’s plan.

Nobody built a committee for her.

A radicalized Becky writes a petition.

A radicalized Stacy knows which door the money comes through, whose name is on the deed, and what would come apart if you pulled the right thing out of the house.

One of those is a nuisance.

The other one is a threat to the household.

That difference is where I want to start.

Not in a movie.

In a hallway.

i.

Priya Anand let me copy her chemistry homework for two years.

She never charged for it out loud. The price came in a look that lasted half a second too long, long enough that I understood the loan and the interest both before she slid the folder across the table with a smile the yearbook staff loved and I never trusted.

She kept the folder in a canvas tote with a peace sign screen-printed on the side, the ink already cracking by October. Inside were color-coded notes, a running list of book club picks nobody else had read, and flyers for whatever the cause was that month. She organized the canned food drive freshman year and the coat drive sophomore year. By junior year, she’d graduated to things with actual stakes, the kind of causes that got you a paragraph in the local paper if you phrased the petition correctly.

She dated a boy from the debate team, Grant Delacroix-Meyer, who once used the sentence “I’m an ally” to describe himself at lunch and meant it sincerely enough to make the table uncomfortable. Priya let him finish.

Junior year, she wrote an op-ed for the school paper about the dress code.

It was good.

I want that established immediately because otherwise, the rest of this becomes too easy. The statistic she cited was real. The girls she described were real. Girls really were getting pulled from class for shoulders and thighs that boys walked past without a hall monitor blinking. Priya was right.

The article ran beneath her photograph.

Hair down.

Cardigan buttoned exactly one button lower than the handbook technically permitted.

Nobody said anything about it, which either meant nobody noticed or everybody noticed and understood that dress-coding the girl in an article about discriminatory dress codes would create a problem too photogenic to contain.

The hallway loved it.

Teachers complimented her.

Students shared it.

One administrator called it “thought-provoking,” which is the sort of phrase institutions use when somebody has criticized them in a way they believe they can survive.

And Priya deserved some of that praise.

What bothered me was how impossible it seemed for anybody to separate two facts.

Priya was right.

Priya looked like the kind of girl people expected to be right.

Everybody treated the second fact as proof of the first.

I didn’t have language for that yet. I just knew something about the applause felt strange, the way you recognize a smell before you know what’s rotting.

Three lockers down from mine stood Dani Voss.

Dani never wrote an op-ed.

She didn’t need to.

She could look at a girl’s shoes for one second on a Monday morning, and that girl would be wearing different shoes by Thursday.

I watched her do it to a freshman named Kayleigh.

Kayleigh had worn the same jean jacket four days running. Dani caught her eye near the water fountain, glanced down at the jacket, then back at her face.

Nothing else happened.

No insult.

No laugh.

No whisper to a friend.

By Friday, the jacket was gone.

Kayleigh had something new on, something closer to whatever the hallway had silently agreed counted as correct, something that had clearly cost somebody’s allowance.

Nobody would have called what happened bullying because nobody had said anything.

Dani had found a way to extract obedience that left no evidence a teacher could act on.

She knew what everything cost.

She knew what her own face cost too.

If you were close enough and asked correctly, she’d tell you which parts of it she’d built and which parts were still under construction. She once told another girl while doing her brows that the first six months of growing them out had been ugly on purpose because you had to grow out the damage before you could shape anything worth shaping.

She said it with the flat professionalism of a contractor explaining a renovation.

I was standing at the sink beside her, washing my hands slower than washing hands requires.

She wasn’t talking to me.

She was talking to me.

With Dani, that counted as an invitation if you were paying attention.

I was always paying attention.

I liked Priya.

I learned something from Dani.

Neither is her real name, and neither is one girl you could dig out of a yearbook. Priya is built from several girls I knew, compressed into one. Dani is too. They’re close enough to memory that I occasionally forget where the composite begins.

That seems appropriate.

The whole point is that the hallway was producing them in batches.

ii.

There was one Thursday when they stood at the same mirror.

It was before a dance, something smaller than prom, and Priya was fighting with eyeliner.

She had the right pencil.

She’d watched the tutorial.

She had apparently learned nothing.

Dani watched for maybe thirty seconds.

“Give me that.”

“I can do it.”

“Clearly.”

Priya laughed and handed it over.

Dani tilted her chin.

“Close your eye.”

One line.

Then the other.

Maybe twenty seconds total.

Priya looked in the mirror.

“Oh.”

Dani handed the pencil back.

“How did you do that?”

“Practice.”

That word has stayed with me longer than anything else either of them said that afternoon.

Practice.

The entire mythology of feminine effortlessness collapsed into eight letters.

Dani hadn’t woken up knowing.

She learned.

She failed.

She corrected.

She repeated.

Eventually, repetition hardened into fluency, and fluency became so smooth that everybody else mistook it for nature.

It’s one reason makeover movies are stranger than they first appear.

Take She’s All That.

Laney Boggs spends the first part of the film coded as invisible because Rachael Leigh Cook is wearing overalls and glasses, an extremely brave effort by Hollywood to imagine ugliness. Then comes the makeover. Hair. Clothes. Makeup. The labor is displayed directly in front of us.

Afterward, Laney walks down the staircase.

The room gasps.

Anna Paquin’s character announces herself as “the new, not improved, but different” Laney Boggs.

The line is supposed to be cute.

It is also the whole con.

Several people have spent an afternoon producing a result, and the movie immediately asks us to experience the result as revelation. Laney was always beautiful. They merely uncovered her.

Silvia Federici spends part of Caliban and the Witch tracing a much larger version of this trick: women’s labor being naturalized into something women simply are, especially reproductive and domestic work, precisely because labor understood as natural capacity becomes easier to leave uncounted.

The makeover montage does the miniature version.

It shows you the work and then destroys the invoice.

Nobody standing at the bottom of the staircase asks how long the hair took.

Nobody asks who did the brows.

The labor becomes essence between one shot and the next.

Arlie Hochschild gives the other half of this in The Managed Heart. She studied flight attendants trained to produce warmth on command, hour after hour, for strangers who would never know what the warmth cost, and she called it emotional labor. Managing your own feeling in order to produce a feeling in somebody else, then selling the result as personality.

A flight attendant’s smile looks like who she is.

It’s a shift.

Dani’s face was a shift too. Clocked in before first period, maintained through eight hours of hallway, clocked out somewhere after the last bell. Nobody in that building called it work because the entire value of the performance depended on it reading as free.

Dani didn’t have the privilege of forgetting the invoice.

She had receipts.

She knew which foundation oxidized.

She knew which haircut needed another three weeks.

She knew a face could be built because she’d watched herself build one.

The strange thing is that everybody else recognized the result while despising her for understanding its production.

High-maintenance.

Fake.

Vain.

Shallow.

Femininity was rewarded most when the woman performing it successfully concealed that she wanted the reward.

Priya stared at herself for another few seconds.

Then she remembered the petition.

She’d been gathering information for the dress-code piece and asked Dani, casually, whether she knew which teachers actually wrote girls up.

Dani knew.

Of course, she knew.

She named three teachers immediately.

She knew one enforced the rules harder against girls a grade below her own daughter.

She knew another could be softened with flattery about her classroom decorations.

She knew which administrator handled appeals and which appeals he’d actually overturned.

She knew which girls had already been written up and would sign a petition because they were angry.

She also knew which girls had gone quiet with shame and shouldn’t be asked to put their names on anything public.

She laid the whole thing out in under two minutes.

Priya listened.

She used almost all of it.

The piece that eventually ran beneath her photograph contained patterns she could never have discovered alone.

Dani’s name wasn’t in it.

I don’t think Priya consciously stole anything.

I don’t think the thought of crediting Dani even occurred to her.

That’s exactly what made the transaction so clean.

Knowledge from a girl like Dani rarely arrived coded as expertise.

It arrived as gossip.

Observation.

Girl stuff.

Something everyone already knew.

The same confusion the makeover montage depends on happened at the level of politics.

The knowledge was delivered.

The room later experienced it as discovered.

For one afternoon, the ledger changed hands.

Then everybody forgot who had been holding it.

iii.

Go back to Kayleigh’s jacket.

Dani looks.

Kayleigh changes it.

That sounds almost too small to theorize.

It isn’t.

Michel Foucault’s account of discipline is useful here because his central insight is that the most efficient authority eventually stops needing to stand over you.

The subject learns the rule.

The subject begins watching herself.

Bentham’s panopticon, the architectural model Foucault takes up in Discipline and Punish, works because the prisoner never knows when the guard is watching. Eventually, the possibility of observation becomes enough. The prisoner behaves as though watched even when the tower is empty.

Dani had built a panopticon three lockers from mine without ever reading Foucault.

She didn’t need to inspect Kayleigh again.

Kayleigh learned the gaze.

Thursday morning, standing alone in front of her own closet, Dani didn’t have to be physically present.

The look had already been installed.

This is how a hierarchy becomes cheap to maintain.

Constant enforcement costs energy.

Internalized enforcement runs for free.

Girls learn which clothes are embarrassing.

Which bodies need hiding.

Which sexual behavior makes somebody a slut.

Which amount of effort counts as desperate.

Which amount counts as letting yourself go.

Which girl can repeat an outfit.

Which girl cannot.

By the time everyone has learned the schedule, Stacy barely has to administer it.

The girls do it themselves.

It’s also where the easy feminist reading of Stacy fails.

Calling her a bitch identifies a personality and mistakes that personality for the structure.

Remove Dani tomorrow.

The hierarchy doesn’t disappear.

Somebody else learns the schedule.

Or, more efficiently, everybody continues enforcing it on themselves.

This doesn’t excuse Dani.

She understood the authority of her own glance and used it.

Kayleigh bought the jacket.

The money came from somewhere.

The shame came from somewhere too.

Understanding that Dani didn’t invent the market doesn’t make her innocent of collecting.

It tells us what her actual job was.

She was management.

iv.

Priya’s specialty wasn’t the op-ed.

It was the walkout.

Senior year, a boy two grades below us got suspended for something that should have gotten somebody else suspended. His name was Marcus. I’m not going to detail what happened to him because it isn’t mine to spend, and because what matters here is what happened around him afterward.

Within two days, there were flyers.

Then a hashtag.

Then a walkout.

Priya stood on the front steps with a bullhorn borrowed from the theater department, reading a statement to maybe three hundred students who had left fifth period to stand in a parking lot and feel something together.

I was there.

It felt good.

Crowds feel good when they’re angry about something true.

I remember the heat coming back through the soles of my shoes from the asphalt. I remember a girl crying beside me with the unselfconsciousness you only get in a crowd large enough to disappear inside. Somebody had a portable speaker. Once Priya finished, music started.

Her statement was good.

She’d spoken with Marcus’s older sister the night before.

She took careful notes.

She credited her by name.

She read the sister’s words with enough reverence that nobody watching could reasonably accuse her of treating Marcus’s family carelessly.

A local news van came.

The clip that aired that night showed Priya with the bullhorn.

Her hair was doing something cinematic in the wind.

Marcus wasn’t on the steps.

His sister wasn’t either.

Marcus transferred schools two weeks later.

Nobody organized a walkout for that.

I’m not accusing Priya of using him. I don’t think she experienced the afternoon as exploitation. I think she experienced it as courage.

The more uncomfortable argument is that the machinery deciding whose face represents a cause doesn’t require anybody’s malice.

It needs a face people already trust.

Priya had spent years building one.

A dress-code op-ed.

A canned food drive.

A photographed fundraiser.

A hundred competent little performances of correct concern.

By senior year, people saw her and already knew what kind of story she was there to tell.

I asked her about Marcus once, badly, at a bonfire the following summer.

Why hadn’t he spoken?

She said he hadn’t wanted to.

She said she’d asked.

She said some people process things privately, and you have to respect that.

Every word may have been true.

Every word also kept the bullhorn in her hands.

I didn’t push.

She glanced toward someone arriving, and the conversation closed without a slam. We talked about college instead.

I’ve remembered that non-conversation because it was probably the first time I understood that being right and being the person authorized to say the right thing publicly are different jobs.

The second job pays better.

Priya had been training for it long before either of us knew there were two.

v.

The Becky thrives in that second job.

That’s what I was trying to get at in the first essay.

Her politics is sincere often enough.

The sincerity isn’t the problem.

The problem is that sincerity arrives bundled with institutional fluency so tightly that eventually nobody, including Becky herself, can separate the message from the machinery selecting its messenger.

Priya’s parents ran a community health nonprofit from a strip mall office.

I went to her house twice for group projects.

The living room had photographs of her father shaking hands with local politicians, plaques on shelves, flyers stacked on the dining table for a health fair her mother was helping organize.

The work was real.

Appointments got made.

Forms got filled out.

People received services they otherwise couldn’t afford.

Priya wasn’t raised around fake politics.

She was raised around useful politics.

She also learned, from watching that usefulness operate, that causes need faces.

The face needs credibility.

The camera needs arranging.

A handshake needs photographing.

The person speaking needs to sound like somebody the room expects to hear.

None of this required cynicism.

Which is why it reproduced so easily.

By the time Priya stood on the steps with the bullhorn, sincerity and fluency had been growing together for so long that she probably couldn’t have told you where one ended.

Why would she?

Nobody had ever asked her to.

The Becky enters adulthood with institutions already prepared for her.

There is a foundation job.

There is a committee.

There is a fellowship.

There is an advisory board.

There is a DEI working group, or whatever renamed version survives the latest round of political cowardice.

She can criticize the institution in a language it already knows how to process.

It may even pay her to do it.

This is why redistribution becomes such an easy political ceiling.

She can ask who gets the microphone.

She’s much less prepared to ask why a microphone confers power in the first place.

Dani would ask that question accidentally.

She’d want to know who bought it.

vi.

Dani never ran for anything.

Student government was for girls who wanted titles. Dani had figured out that a title is what institutions hand you instead of power.

She didn’t sit through meetings.

She stood at a locker and ran an economy.

In Mean Girls, Regina George makes this economy literal.

The Burn Book is a ledger.

Names.

Photographs.

Judgments.

Records.

The film treats the book as proof of Regina’s cruelty, which it is. It rarely pauses on the other thing the book proves.

Running this operation requires work.

Somebody assembled those pages.

Somebody remembered the incidents.

Somebody knew which insult would stick.

Somebody distinguished useful information from boring information.

Cady spends the film horrified by Regina and eventually discovers she can operate the same machinery perfectly well.

Because the machinery was never Regina’s personality.

It was the position.

Whoever takes the crown inherits the accounting.

Dani’s accounting stayed in her head, which was smarter.

Until it didn’t.

Near the end of sophomore year, she wrote it down.

I don’t know why.

Maybe pride.

Maybe anger.

Maybe the same impulse that makes an accountant want the whole balance sheet visible at once.

Maybe seventeen-year-olds occasionally make catastrophically stupid decisions without first developing a theoretical justification for them.

Whatever the reason, she ranked the girls in our grade.

She wrote why.

The document left her hands.

By second period, it had been photographed.

By lunch, girls who barely spoke to each other were comparing positions.

I remember Brooke standing beside the vending machines, holding her phone away from her body like it might explode.

Then Dani entered the cafeteria.

The room changed.

It wasn’t silence.

It was three hundred separate calculations happening at once.

Everybody knew some version of what Dani had written before they read it.

That was why it hurt.

The list took private knowledge and made it common.

Faces were ranked.

Bodies were ranked.

Clothes were ranked.

Everybody had been participating in this privately for years.

Now one girl had made the mistake of becoming the author.

And authors can be punished.

vii.

René Girard calls this a scapegoat mechanism.

A community contains rivalries and tensions it cannot resolve directly. Eventually, those tensions converge on one available figure whose expulsion produces temporary peace.

The important part is that the community doesn’t experience the expulsion as arbitrary.

It feels like justice.

Stacy movies work exactly this way.

The hierarchy itself is diffuse.

Beauty has rules.

Status has prices.

Sex produces reputation.

Femininity requires labor.

Somebody is always losing.

Almost everybody participates.

Those conditions are difficult to punish because nobody authored them.

Then Stacy walks in.

She makes the structure visible.

She keeps records.

She says the price aloud.

She is cruel enough to make hatred feel righteous.

Suddenly, a diffuse social arrangement has a face.

Regina goes under the bus.

Courtney Shayne has her own confession played over the school PA at the exact moment she expects to be crowned.

Kathryn Merteuil’s diary destroys her publicly.

Heather Chandler dies.

Chris Hargensen goes through a windshield.

Then the audience experiences relief.

The hierarchy remains.

Somebody else becomes popular on Monday.

Somebody else makes the judgments.

Somebody else wins the crown.

The economy survives every one of these deaths because the death was never directed at the economy.

It was directed at the woman who made the economy legible enough to hate.

There’s a name for what the rest of that cafeteria was doing.

Freud called it disavowal.

Knowing something and refusing it at the same time, holding both live, because choosing between them would cost more than either.

Everybody knew the ranking existed.

Everybody clapped when the girl who wrote it down disappeared.

Dani never had access to that comfort. She was the one keeping the books, and books don’t disavow. They total.

It is easier to forgive a girl for being cruel than to forgive her for refusing the disavowal that lets everybody else sleep.

Dani transferred.

I remember the hallway afterward.

It felt looser.

People seemed lighter.

Nobody stopped ranking anybody.

Kayleigh didn’t put the old jacket back on.

The discipline survived its manager.

What disappeared was the possibility of pointing at a single person and admitting somebody had been keeping the books.

So everybody called Dani awful.

Which was true.

Then they stopped there.

Which was useful.

viii.

Andrea Dworkin gives me the language for the part that comes next.

In Right-Wing Women, she treats women who align themselves with patriarchal institutions as people making calculations under dangerous conditions. Her argument does not require believing those calculations are emancipatory. It requires taking seriously the conditions that made the bargain intelligible.

The woman looks around.

She sees danger.

She sees which arrangements offer protection.

She makes a deal.

The deal can reproduce the system, hurting her and still be rational from inside the options she has actually been offered.

Dani had already done something like that by fifteen.

She looked at the hallway.

She saw that beauty mattered.

She saw status mattered.

She saw femininity had rules.

She saw people who failed those rules got punished.

She did not respond by deciding the rules were socially constructed and therefore spiritually irrelevant.

Teenage girls, unlike political theorists, often have the disadvantage of encountering theory while still being forced to live through lunch.

Dani got good at the rules.

She accumulated enough authority that other girls preferred her approval to her hostility.

She made herself expensive enough that the market hurt less.

Then she began collecting.

You can condemn the collecting.

I do.

The more interesting question is why nobody ever offered her another use for the knowledge.

Imagine telling Dani that beauty standards aren’t real.

She would look at Kayleigh’s new jacket.

Imagine telling her popularity doesn’t matter.

She would look around a room that physically rearranged itself when she entered.

Imagine telling her people should simply stop caring what other people think.

She had seventeen years of evidence saying otherwise.

Mainstream feminism often approaches women like this with a moral correction before offering a material alternative.

You shouldn’t care about that.

You shouldn’t want him.

You shouldn’t want the crown.

You shouldn’t spend so much on your face.

You shouldn’t participate in hierarchy.

Dani’s answer, if she were being honest, is short.

Okay.

What are you offering instead?

That’s where the politics begins.

ix.

Nobody lets Stacy ask that question in the movies.

She rarely gets politics at all.

Regina George has no opinion about anything outside North Shore High School.

Kathryn Merteuil’s intelligence never becomes political.

Courtney Shayne runs her school with precision and apparently has never contemplated a world beyond it.

Their knowledge stops at the building’s edge because letting it travel farther would change the genre.

Give Regina George one serious political opinion, and suddenly Mean Girls has a problem.

A girl who can identify every coalition in a cafeteria, manipulate social incentives, distribute information, enforce discipline, detect insecurity, understand reputation, organize loyalty, and anticipate betrayal possesses an enormous amount of political skill.

The movie calls it being a bitch.

Put the same competencies in a campaign office, and somebody writes “strategist” on her LinkedIn page.

Cher Horowitz gets closer than most.

Her refugee argument in Clueless is played for laughs because she translates an unfamiliar political problem through the social vocabulary she actually knows: guests arriving unexpectedly at a dinner party.

The joke depends on the audience hearing the register as trivial.

Yet she is doing actual rhetorical work.

She takes something abstract and translates it through categories her audience understands.

She persuades.

Nobody calls this political intelligence because she does it in the accent of a girl who cares about Alaïa.

Legally Blonde goes further.

Elle Woods doesn’t become competent by surrendering the knowledge everyone used as proof of her stupidity.

Her knowledge of hair maintenance becomes evidence.

Her attention to clothing, beauty, social presentation, and feminine ritual travels into the courtroom intact.

The film lets her keep pink.

That should not feel revolutionary.

The fact that it does tells you how consistently the genre has demanded feminine women renounce some portion of femininity before intelligence can safely be recognized.

A radicalized Stacy should not need a makeover in reverse.

She gets to keep the nails.

x.

All of it gets clearer if you’ve ever had to learn femininity late.

I wasn’t visibly participating in that hallway’s economy yet.

To the school I was a boy, quiet enough that teachers called me thoughtful and other students used less generous words.

That invisibility gave me a vantage point.

Nobody was pricing my face because nobody believed my face belonged in the market.

I could stand at the bathroom sink longer than necessary.

I could watch Dani.

I could learn.

Years later, when I had to build my own face deliberately, the mythology of natural femininity was unavailable to me.

I remember the wrong foundation.

I remember the haircut that looked like a costume for months until one day it didn’t, with no single visible change explaining when the line had been crossed.

I remember learning that an eyebrow moved a face farther than it seemed reasonable for an eyebrow to move anything.

I remember failing.

Correcting.

Repeating.

Practice.

And when people began reading me the way I’d wanted to be read, it felt good.

That’s the annoying part.

Knowing recognition is socially constructed does not stop recognition from working.

Knowing beauty standards were built does not prevent somebody calling you beautiful from reaching some primitive little switchboard in the brain and turning the lights on.

Knowledge doesn’t dissolve desire.

I know money is constructed.

I still prefer having enough for groceries.

Dani understood this before I did.

That was one of the things I misread about her while I stood outside the economy feeling superior to someone who had already discovered the limits of opting out.

She knew the crown was built.

She still wanted it.

The contradiction wasn’t a failure of analysis.

It was life.

xi.

This is where Hegel becomes more useful than another speech about self-esteem.

Recognition cannot be reduced to an object because what people actually want is recognition from another person capable of withholding it.

The crown is the genre’s attempt to make recognition physical.

It turns an unbearable social need into something a girl can hold.

Here.

Tiara.

Problem solved.

Except the crown only matters because the room claps.

Stacy’s whole life has been organized around this unstable thing:

Being seen.

Being wanted.

Being envied.

Being chosen.

The same recognition that raises her can disappear almost instantly.

A boyfriend cheats.

Someone posts an ugly photograph.

A friend stops inviting her.

Another girl becomes prettier.

The social value everyone treats as her private possession turns out to have been collectively administered the entire time.

The crown never belonged entirely to her.

Neither did the face, really.

Everybody had an opinion on it.

It’s why Stacy often understands something about social construction before she ever encounters the phrase.

She watches value move.

She sees a girl become desirable because one boy desires her publicly.

She sees another become embarrassing because one socially authoritative girl laughs.

She watches fashion change.

She watches bodies move in and out of approval.

The entire thing is obviously relational when you stand close enough to the register.

The progressive girl may have the vocabulary.

Stacy has the transaction history.

xii.

Race changes the transaction.

There’s no universal Stacy waiting underneath different skin tones.

The archetype was built through white femininity.

That matters because the story depends on a specific fall.

The Stacy begins close enough to ideal femininity that her cruelty contaminates something the culture has already granted her:

Pretty girl.

Popular girl.

Desirable girl.

Potential innocent.

Then she behaves badly.

The audience gets to enjoy watching the ideal become corrupt.

Black girls have historically been denied the same neutral starting point.

A Black girl can be beautiful, popular, socially dominant, cruel, ambitious, feminine.

Obviously.

The cultural reading of those qualities changes before she speaks.

She can become “aggressive” faster.

Older faster.

Sexual faster.

Threatening faster.

The archetype gets rerouted.

Bring It On makes the racial structure unusually visible.

The Toros have been winning with routines stolen from the East Compton Clovers.

Isis already has the expertise.

The choreography is hers.

The trophies are elsewhere.

When Torrance discovers the theft, her father offers money that would allow the Clovers to attend nationals.

Isis refuses.

The Clovers get there another way.

They win.

This looks like narrative justice.

The film still belongs structurally to Torrance.

Gabrielle Union has discussed how additional Clovers footage was shot for marketing even though it wasn’t part of the film itself, so even outside the story the Black girls’ presence could be used to enlarge the apparent size of their role.

The extraction reproduces itself around the film that is supposedly criticizing extraction.

bell hooks describes whiteness consuming Black culture and style as spectacle while refusing the actual cost of Black life.

Bring It On manages it twice.

Once inside the plot, where the routines get taken.

Once outside it, where the faces get used to sell a story that gave them less than the trailer promised.

Hortense Spillers helps explain why the crown cannot simply travel onto a Black girl’s head and mean the same thing.

White womanhood was historically constructed as a protected status in relation to Black women whose bodies were denied those protections while their labor remained indispensable to the society producing the category.

The crown is a tiny, glittering version of that pedestal.

White girl to white girl, the movie can move it around without explaining the architecture.

Put a Black girl at the center and suddenly the architecture becomes harder to ignore.

Who built the pedestal?

Whose labor supports it?

Who was allowed to represent femininity before the contest even began?

The Combahee River Collective made the structural version of this point in 1977. Systems of oppression interlock, and a politics built to process one axis at a time will always leave somebody standing outside the room it claims to have built for everyone.

That’s the genre’s actual limit.

Its machinery was designed to process one thing: white girls testing the edges of a pedestal.

Give it a body carrying two weights and it doesn’t fail loudly.

It reroutes.

A different school.

A different subgenre.

A supporting role.

A social world that exists primarily as the environment through which a white protagonist discovers something about herself.

No shortage of Black actresses could fix this.

Stacy’s symbolic job was racialized before casting began.

xiii.

Follow the money out of the plot for a minute.

She’s All That cost around ten million dollars and returned more than a hundred.

Mean Girls did comparable numbers, then built an afterlife the original film couldn’t have imagined. Merchandise. A musical. A film of the musical. Two decades of quotable inventory.

The formula is cheap to produce.

The beats are proven.

Makeover, bet, reveal, crown, bus.

A studio has been converting a girl’s cruelty into shareholder value on a reliable schedule for forty years.

None of that money reaches a hallway.

It doesn’t reach the girl who actually got pulled out of class for her shoulders.

It doesn’t reach the real Danis who got transferred out of real schools for saying a true thing in the wrong format.

It moves upward, the way it always does, out of a story about girls extracting value from each other and into the hands of the people who extracted the story.

Federici’s argument was that capitalism needs certain labor to appear free so the value can be taken without anybody paying for it.

The genre runs the same operation one level up.

It takes real girls’ real social knowledge, the pricing, the ranking, the audit, and converts it into a formula that pays for four decades.

The girls who generated the knowledge get a bus, a transfer form, or an essay written about them years later by somebody who watched.

xiv.

The internet did something the high school movie never managed.

It fused Priya and Dani into the same platform.

Open any app organized around faces.

The makeover montage now runs continuously.

Get-ready-with-me videos make the labor visible.

Products named.

Steps demonstrated.

Brushes identified.

The invoice is finally on screen.

Then the finished photograph appears thirty minutes later, and the same audience treats the result as effortless.

Both versions make money.

Transparency makes money.

Mystery makes money.

The contradiction itself has been monetized.

Dani would have thrived here.

Her ability to price a face across a cafeteria at forty feet is now an occupation.

Women build audiences by performing the exact audit she once performed through silence.

Face analysis.

Color analysis.

Body typing.

Glow-up advice.

What looks expensive.

What makes you look cheap.

What ages you.

What makes you feminine.

What destroys facial harmony.

The ledger became content.

Priya thrives here too.

Correct politics beneath an attractive photograph has become its own communications genre.

The progressive caption and the optimized face no longer need separate hallways.

They can live in the same post.

I know because I live there too.

I know which photograph will carry a paragraph farther.

I know some arguments travel better when my face sits above them.

I know what time matters.

I know what gets clicked.

I know the unpleasant little relationship between being seen and being read.

I’m not standing outside the machine describing it.

Nobody writing on the internet is.

The interesting question is what you do once you recognize you’re inside.

xv.

I found Dani again years later.

Or she found me.

A mutual follower.

A changed last name.

A face I needed a few seconds to place because adulthood had softened some things and sharpened others.

I waited three days before messaging her.

She answered within an hour.

She remembered me.

We talked around high school for a while.

Then she brought up the note herself.

She said she didn’t regret writing it.

She regretted losing control of it.

Once something becomes an object, she said in effect, other people decide what the object does.

She learned that at seventeen.

She told me she still notices faces automatically.

She still does the math.

She’s made peace with the calculation itself even if making peace with what she did with it took longer.

I understood exactly what she meant.

I’ve done both women’s jobs since high school.

I’ve published the correct argument beneath my own photograph and watched people credit me for things women before me had been saying for years.

I’ve also priced another woman out because the joke was available.

There was a trans woman in my orbit once, early enough that the awkwardness of learning was still visible.

I made a joke about her in a group chat.

Nothing spectacularly vicious.

The kind of joke that receives a laughing emoji and disappears.

The satisfaction arrived before the guilt.

That’s the detail I remember.

The pleasure of knowing the rule well enough to enforce it against somebody else.

I didn’t apologize to her.

There’s no clean ending to that paragraph.

Knowing the hierarchy doesn’t lift you above it.

Sometimes it simply improves your aim.

That’s why Dani’s knowledge cannot be mistaken for politics.

An accurate ledger remains capable of cruelty.

The question is where the information moves.

xvi.

There’s a younger trans woman I mentor informally now.

No program.

No title.

Someone gets your number.

Then your phone rings.

Once she called late at night because somebody had posted a photograph of her from a party.

Bad angle.

Bad lighting.

The kind of picture capable of erasing a week’s worth of confidence before the screen finishes loading.

I could have told her beauty is constructed.

True.

I could have told her the photograph didn’t define her.

Also true.

Neither would have helped much.

So I did something else.

I told her exactly what the camera had done.

The lens was too close.

The angle was too low.

The light caught the underside of her jaw.

Technical problems.

Reproducible problems.

Correctable problems.

Nothing metaphysical had happened to her face.

She started taking notes.

That small exchange clarified the whole argument for me better than most of the theory did.

Dani had knowledge and used it to make Kayleigh replace the jacket.

I had learned the knowledge partly by stealing lessons from women like Dani who never knew they were teaching me.

Here was the possibility of another route.

Hand over the ledger.

The knowledge becomes common.

The girl at the bottom no longer has to experience the price as a mysterious statement about her inherent value.

Here are the numbers.

Here is how the photograph works.

Here is where the light goes.

Here is what the market is doing.

Now decide.

That’s fundamentally different from telling her she was beautiful the whole time.

The Becky gives reassurance.

The Stacy, reached correctly, can give technique.

xvii.

Give Dani another Thursday.

This one didn’t happen.

I want that clear.

Fiction cannot repair the first one.

It can show where another decision could have existed.

The dress-code petition succeeds.

This time somebody asks where Priya got the enforcement information.

She tells them.

Dani’s name appears.

Then someone asks Dani to speak.

She is terrible at it.

Public speaking isn’t her register.

She stands in front of maybe seventy students and says four sentences.

She tells them which teachers enforce the rules.

She tells them which administrator kills appeals by letting the clock run out.

She says girls with larger breasts get punished for shirts nobody notices on smaller girls.

She says the whole thing is obvious if you’ve been paying attention.

Then she sits down.

No inspirational music.

No personality transplant.

Monday, she is still mean.

She still thinks Kayleigh’s jacket is ugly.

She still knows who is sleeping with whom.

She still wants to be popular.

That’s important.

Political consciousness does not require psychological sainthood.

She keeps the expertise.

The difference is that something she previously used vertically begins moving sideways.

Other girls know.

The hierarchy becomes more expensive to administer once the people underneath it can see the bookkeeping.

That’s what makes knowledge politically useful.

Not possession.

Circulation.

xviii.

Now give her prom.

The genre keeps waiting for Stacy to prove growth by rejecting the crown.

I don’t want that ending.

Let her win.

She spent money on the dress.

She spent time on her hair.

She wanted the thing.

They call her name.

She walks up.

She smiles.

The crown goes on.

Nothing explodes.

The political revelation isn’t that the crown means nothing.

It clearly means something because an entire room has spent weeks deciding who receives it.

The revelation is that Stacy can finally see what it means without confusing meaning with nature.

She sees who voted.

Who didn’t.

Who could never have won.

Who spent the same amount preparing and got none of the recognition.

Who is standing by the wall.

Who already took off her heels.

Who gets photographed.

Who will clean the gym.

She knows exactly what her own dress cost.

She knows the crown cost almost nothing.

She knows the machinery producing the difference between those two prices costs a great deal more than either.

Then she enjoys herself.

That last part matters.

Feminist consciousness does not require a woman to stop experiencing pleasure from recognition.

Knowledge does not cancel desire.

The task is learning what desire is doing while you’re having it.

The crown stays on her head.

The ledger stays in her hand.

For once, the genre has to tolerate both objects in the same frame.

xix.

So is Stacy progressive?

No.

That answer still stands.

Regina isn’t a radical.

Courtney isn’t.

Kathryn isn’t.

Dani wasn’t.

The Stacy knows the rig and runs it during the same afternoon.

She optimizes the world she inhabits.

She accumulates safety by becoming unusually skilled at an unfair market and then makes it worse for girls with less bargaining power.

There’s nothing emancipatory about that.

The interesting part begins after the no.

Because no is different from never.

The Becky begins with politics and often lacks the audit.

The Stacy begins with the audit and lacks politics.

Those deficiencies are not symmetrical.

Priya can learn to credit Dani.

She can become a more careful organizer.

She can make sure Marcus’s sister gets the microphone.

She can improve the redistribution.

Those are worthwhile changes.

But her worldview was formed inside institutions that taught her to understand politics through access, representation, recognition, and correct procedure. Its outer edge appears exactly where the institution itself becomes the object of analysis.

Dani starts somewhere uglier and, potentially, farther out.

She already knows the institution lies about its own rules.

She already knows formal equality and actual enforcement differ.

She already knows status is produced.

She already knows people respond to incentives.

She already knows supposedly private choices cluster into public patterns.

She already knows everyone claiming not to care about hierarchy somehow behaves with extraordinary consistency around it.

She knows the machine because she learned to run it.

Reach her, and you start from disillusionment.

Nobody has to walk her out of innocence first, because she was never in it.

That can produce reaction.

It often does.

It can also produce something the Becky struggles to reach, because Dani does not need to be convinced that the individual explanation is insufficient.

She has already watched three hundred individuals reproduce the same pattern.

The question is whether she keeps using that knowledge to secure a better personal position or begins treating the knowledge as something everyone should possess.

That’s the hinge.

A ledger hoarded is management.

A ledger shared becomes organizing material.

xx.

This is why the genre destroys her so consistently.

It understands, perhaps accidentally, that the dangerous version of Stacy isn’t the cruel one.

Cruel Stacy is easy.

Cruelty personalizes the hierarchy.

Everybody gets to hate her.

Then the bus comes.

The difficult Stacy is the one who survives long enough to understand that the same skill set she used to discipline other girls can identify who actually sets the terms.

She knows who follows whom.

She knows which sanctions work.

She knows where reputation moves.

She knows which authority is formal and which authority is real.

She knows which people control access.

She knows which rules exist only because everyone has agreed to behave as though they exist.

An organizer’s education, hiding inside a mean girl’s biography.

Television occasionally lets one live long enough to prove it. Blair Waldorf gets six seasons, which turns out to be enough time for a show to discover that a girl who keeps records that precisely is very good at running things.

Film has never had that much patience.

So it interrupts.

Bus.

Diary.

Confession tape.

Public humiliation.

The girl who knew too much becomes the explanation for the system she knew too much about.

Then the credits roll.

xxi.

There’s still a third girl.

The one neither archetype quite contains.

She’s upstairs in the bathroom nobody uses, trying to make the eyeliner work.

Maybe she’s learning by watching.

Maybe she has a video paused.

Maybe she has no one.

Nobody is coming to crown her.

Nobody is coming with a bus either.

Visibility has privileges.

Invisibility has its own thin protections.

I was some version of her for years.

Watching an economy I wasn’t yet permitted to participate in gave me too much time to learn its prices.

You notice things when nobody believes you’re bidding.

Eventually, she finishes.

She checks the mirror.

Adjusts something that probably didn’t need adjusting because the adjustment is still hers.

Then she picks up her bag.

Walks back into the hallway.

The hallway has already assigned her a price.

Maybe she knows that.

Maybe she doesn’t.

What I want for her is something neither Priya nor Dani could give her alone.

I want the politics that can tell her why the price exists.

I want the knowledge that can tell her how the price was calculated.

Then I want her to have both without first being required to hate herself, reject femininity, pretend recognition means nothing, or demonstrate sufficient moral purity to deserve the information.

Tell her the truth.

Then give her the numbers.

xxii.

Some of you already know which girl you were.

If you were Dani, or still are, I’m not interested in absolving you.

The audit was never the problem.

The problem is where you send the bill.

You can know exactly what a room is doing and still spend that knowledge downward because downward is cheap.

The girl beneath you has less capacity to retaliate.

Hierarchy teaches this quickly.

If your knowledge never reaches anyone who could use it except you, you’re not outside the system because you understand it.

You’re management.

If you were Priya, the question is different.

Whose name isn’t on the statement?

Whose knowledge arrived in your hands looking so ordinary that you forgot knowledge had an author?

Who lived the thing you’re currently explaining?

Your politics doesn’t become false because somebody else should have been holding the microphone.

The politics becomes more serious once you stop treating the microphone as neutral.

And if you were the girl upstairs, learning a language nobody volunteered to teach you, then I don’t have a speech about authenticity.

You already know authenticity won’t fix the eyeliner.

Technique will.

Information will.

Someone willing to teach you without using your ignorance to increase the value of her own expertise will.

That’s solidarity in a form small enough to fit inside a bathroom mirror.

It still counts.

xxiii.

The crown and the ledger were always the same story.

One records recognition.

The other records what recognition costs.

American high school movies keep separating them because the separation produces the moral structure the genre needs.

The nice girl deserves recognition because she never appears to have calculated its value.

The mean girl deserves destruction because she did.

The nice girl gets the crown.

The mean girl keeps the books.

Then the movie burns the books and calls the crown innocent.

I don’t believe either object is innocent.

I also don’t think smashing either object automatically frees anybody.

The crown can be broken and the hierarchy survive.

The ledger can be exposed and the market keep running.

The political question begins after the symbolism has exhausted itself.

Who knows how this works?

Who gets access to that knowledge?

Who remains underneath it?

Who sets the rates?

What happens if the people being priced learn to read the price list?

That’s where Stacy finally becomes interesting.

Not when we discover she was secretly kind.

Not when she takes off the makeup.

Not when she stops caring about popularity.

Not when a boyfriend teaches her humility.

Not when she hands the crown to Becky and applauds.

When she keeps every skill the genre taught us to fear in her and changes what those skills are for.

She still walks into the room and understands it before everybody else.

She still sees the coalition.

The insecurity.

The hierarchy.

The weak point.

The difference is that now the girl beside her gets to know too.

The Becky, radicalized, becomes a better administrator of a house she has never once looked at the foundation of.

The Stacy, radicalized, has the blueprint.

She knows which wall is load-bearing.

That’s the girl the genre has never written.

The girl who keeps the ledger and hands copies out.

She would still be difficult.

She would still be vain sometimes.

She would still want things feminism has spent a century arguing women should stop wanting.

She might even still want the crown.

Fine.

Put it on her.

Then let her tell everybody what it cost.

Works cited

Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch (2004). Used for the argument that women’s labor is frequently naturalized into feminine essence, applied here to beauty work and the makeover sequence, and later to the genre’s own extraction of that knowledge into a studio formula.

Dworkin, Andrea. Right-Wing Women (1983). Used for the argument that women’s apparently reactionary bargains can be rational responses to dangerous material conditions, applied here to Stacy’s decision to master a hierarchy she did not create.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish (1975). Used for the movement from external enforcement to internalized self-surveillance, applied to the informal discipline of femininity and status.

Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred (1972). Used for the scapegoat mechanism, applied to the genre’s repeated destruction of the popular girl as a substitute for confronting the hierarchy she administers.

Hochschild, Arlie. The Managed Heart (1983). Used for emotional labor and the production of apparently natural personality through managed performance.

Freud, Sigmund. Writings on fetishism and Disavowal.

Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics (1987). Used for the racial construction of womanhood and the instability of treating the Stacy archetype as racially universal.

Hooks, Bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992). Used in relation to racialized spectatorship, extraction, and the consumption of Black cultural production.

Combahee River Collective. “A Black Feminist Statement” (1977). Used for the interlocking character of systems of oppression and the limits of treating gender hierarchy independently from race.

Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Used for recognition as a relation between subjects, applied here to the crown as an object standing in for social recognition.

She’s All That (1999), dir. Robert Iscove.

Mean Girls (2004), dir. Mark Waters, written by Tina Fey.

Bring It On (2000), dir. Peyton Reed.

Jawbreaker (1999), dir. Darren Stein.

Carrie (1976), dir. Brian De Palma.

Cruel Intentions (1999), dir. Roger Kumble.

Clueless (1995), dir. Amy Heckerling.

Legally Blonde (2001), dir. Robert Luketic.

Heathers (1988), dir. Michael Lehmann.

Gossip Girl (2007 to 2012), created by Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage.

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In 2020, the board could get you estradiol from a vendor somebody had actually used and probably engaged in sex that, frankly speaking, wasn’t great, a needle gauge that wouldn’t wreck your thigh but will make you frankly rethink your choices, a range to aim for (seriously, the doctor not understanding a trans woman’s healthy hormone levels in 2026 is crazy; maybe I should write “ dump your doctor next” ), and an unemployed stranger who would read your labs at two in the morning for free because she was awake anyway and remembered being scared of the syringe. Nobody was kind about it. Nobody was ever kind about it. Half the replies told you that you’d never pass and that you should have started at fifteen, which you couldn’t have, because at fifteen you were in your mother’s house praying it would go away, begging your family to understand you. You took the dose information and left the rest, and the trade was worth it, because the endocrinologist had you at a level she wouldn’t have accepted in a menopausal cis woman, and she wasn’t going to explain why.

Six years later, that same culture can get you a word. Not a vial, not a ride to an appointment, just a word, which is about as useful as a Tumblr discourse thread in a medical emergency.

(I swear that’s the last Star Wars reference.)

Ngansuril published “Attack of the Sneeds” on August 1, 2026. It’s a careful piece of lexicography about “sneedhon” and its back-formation “sneed” , dragged through the trenches of 4chan’s /lgbt/. First found there in April 2021 as nonsense from a Simpsons joke. And also some dork on tranny twitter in 2023, which I will be honest I cannot bring myself to find.

And synthesized around 2023 into an archetype, the naive trans woman with bad presentation and no self-awareness. Flattened and smoothed over into “sneed”, then into “the sneeds” , a clique described from outside by people who aren’t in it. She’s honest about the limits of her analysis. Discord is a walled garden and always will be, Twitter’s search died with the purchase, and so /lgbt/ or more commonly known as /tttt/ (they more often use 4tran now but whatever) becomes the source of trans online culture by default rather than by merit. That’s a real problem to say it plainly.

The essay stops being lexicography and begins to sort every trans person alive into Sneeds and Moders, sorts them by intensity of dysphoria, and lands on the claim that Boymoders are ontologically proletarian. Which is where I come in.

The true parts are, of course, divas, and I’ve spent a year writing them myself. Healthcare is an endless slog with no end. Vaginoplasty and facial surgery get filed as cosmetic, while the same surgeon reconstructs a cis woman’s breast under insurance, and that’s called reconstruction, and I think both should be covered, but I know this isn’t based on progressive values to you, but we will get there. A woman can try three times to hold a job and fail three times and lose access to the fourth attempt, and nobody in the optimist economy has a plan for her. Forced positivity functions as a gag, and the girls who report their pain accurately get treated as the problem for having reported it. A lot of the people theorizing about us are building careers on material they’ll never have to live inside. The last twenty-six years produced enormous movement on legal recognition and almost nothing on getting a poor transsexual woman an operation.

She didn’t get the etymology wrong. I don’t think I could improve on her account of how a word goes from a Simpsons joke to a “slur” (but I would argue it is more harmful to the user as it ends with them in a locker typically) to a class marker. She built the case with real care and then spent it all on a conclusion that will get women killed. A case made with that much care deserves an answer made with the same care.

Everything after the lexicography goes wrong, and it goes wrong in an old, well-documented way. I want to take it apart at the level of the person doing it, not just the argument, because the doctrine’s downstream of an injury, and there’s no point arguing with a doctrine while the injury underneath it is still running. So let’s play dr and get into it.

The Genealogy That Won’t Turn Around

Nothing I’ve read names the mechanism as cleanly as Nietzsche does, and I go back to this book more than any other when I need the vocabulary for what’s happening on that board. ‘On the Genealogy of Morality’ (1887) makes an argument in its first essay that this piece walks into and gets hit with. He describes a moral system produced through “ressentiment”, and the claim while bastardized (and nobody is more bastardized than the Big N himself) is a mechanism more so than insulting: this kind of morality has to have an outside before it can produce anything at all. It begins with the No said to what is external. Its creativity is real, it genuinely makes values, and every one of those values is a reaction. The other kind says yes to itself first and only afterward bothers to notice what it isn’t.

Sneed is a value produced entirely by negation. There’s no dose in it, no vendor, no price, no plan. What it contains is a person you aren’t, ranked below you on a scale you didn’t build and can’t climb.

The lambs and the birds of prey passage is the one that stings here. The lambs decide that being unable to seize anything is a moral achievement, and weakness gets reinterpreted as a merit freely chosen. The board runs the same conversion in the other direction. Its members got hit hardest by the surgical price list, by puberty, by family, and by the labor market, and the culture takes that beating and reissues it as rank. Intense dysphoria becomes clear sight. Poverty becomes materialism. Failure to pass becomes the ability to see who else isn’t passing. What was done to a woman gets converted into a standing she holds over other trans women, and the standing is the only thing the beating has ever paid back.

There’s a smaller point in the second essay of the same book that ends the article’s central defense of the word. Nietzsche says the cause of a thing coming into existence and its eventual usefulness lie worlds apart, that anything in existence gets seized and reinterpreted toward new purposes by whatever has the power to do it. Her own method concedes this without noticing. She tracks a word that meant nothing in 2021 becoming an archetype in 2023 and a clique in 2026, which is exactly a thing being seized and repurposed, and then she defends the word by returning to its origin. Sneed comes from a Simpsons gag; therefore, it carries no contempt for the disabled; therefore, the objection is folk etymology and beneath a serious person. The genealogist’s whole discipline says the gag is irrelevant. What matters is what the word does in the mouth of the girl using it in July 2026, and what it does is sort.

The mirror problem

Here’s what I think is actually happening, and I want to be careful with it, because I’ve been in the state I’m describing, and I don’t think contempt explains it.

Dysphoria breaks the instrument you would ordinarily use to know what you look like. You can’t see your own face. What you see is a composite of memory, fear, the last photograph that ruined your week, and whatever a stranger’s expression did to you on the bus. The instrument reads differently at different hours of the day. A girl in this condition is in a genuine epistemological emergency with immediate practical consequences. She has to make expensive and irreversible decisions about surgery, about coming out at work, about who she lets touch her, about whether to walk home at night, and the measuring device is broken.

So she outsources the measurement. This is the single most important thing about the board, and almost nobody says it out loud. An anonymous rating thread is a calibration device. You put your face in, and you get numbers back from people who have no reason to be nice to you, and for one hour, you know something. The reason the harsh verdict is preferred is that a kind verdict is worthless as data. Your mother says you look beautiful, and it tells you nothing because your mother would say that regardless. Your girlfriend says it, and it tells you nothing because she’s fucking you. The clinic says it, and it tells you nothing because they need the appointment to end. The only statement that carries information is the one from a person who would enjoy hurting you and still couldn’t find the thing to hurt you with.

That’s a coherent epistemology, and it was built by people who were lied to constantly. It’s also wrong, and it’s wrong in a way that eats them.

It’s wrong because the calibration never terminates. There’s no reading that closes the question. A woman who gets told she passes concludes the thread was being nice, or that the photo angle was generous, or that the anons are getting soft, and she posts again next week. The device produces a permanent demand for more readings, which is how an addiction behaves. It’s wrong because the raters are using an instrument that’s just as broken, and every one of them learned the criteria in the same place. The accreditation standards weren’t rigorous. And it’s wrong because the process converts a private emergency into a public hierarchy: once four hundred women are all submitting to the same ranking, the ranking becomes a social fact with winners in it, and the winners have an interest in its continuation.

Then there’s the second function, which is the prophecy. You will never pass. You started too late. You should give up. Said to a nineteen-year-old six weeks on estrogen, this is false as often as it’s true, unfalsifiable as advice, and said constantly. It’s said because it works as inoculation. If you say the worst outcome yourself, first, in your own voice, then it can’t be done to you by someone else. Hope is the thing that costs. Every time it fails, you pay, and after enough failures, a girl will pay a fixed price up front to never be charged the variable one again. Doom is a way of buying out of the future. It presents as realism, and it’s a defense, and you can watch it operate in real time in any thread where someone posts a picture and asks an honest question.

The third function is anonymity, and it’s the reason none of this can ever become anything. A reputation is something you can be held to. It accumulates, it can be ruined, it obligates you. Strip it, and you get statements nobody owns, which means nobody can be argued with, corrected, thanked, or asked for help next month. It also means the same woman writes the insult and receives it. She posts her face at midnight and rates someone else’s at one, and both posts come out of the same wound. Self-hatred with two accounts is still self-hatred, and it feels like company.

And the fourth is the consolation of rank, which is the plainest of them. At the bottom of the world, there’s still someone below you. The sneed exists so that the moderator isn’t last. Take her away, and the moderator is alone with the actual arrangement of her life: a landlord, an untreated condition, a wage she can’t get, and a body that hurts.

What they actually believe

I’ll state it as a doctrine, in its strongest form, because the strong form is what people are converting to, and the weak form is a straw one.

Sex is the substrate, and gender is what people say about it. Medicine can move you across, partially, at a cost measured in money and years, and the outcome is largely fixed by when you started and what you were built from. Passing is the only outcome that changes your material conditions, because passing determines whether you get a job, a landlord, a partner, and a walk home. Dysphoria is a real medical condition with a physical target, and its intensity is the thing that separates a transsexual from a person with an identity. The institutions lie: the endocrinologist underdoses you, the therapist gatekeeps you, the surgeon prices you out, and the academic uses you for a chapter. Optimism is what people say to you instead of helping. Anyone who claims to be happy in an unpassing body is either lying, or was never in the condition, or is rich.

The first thing to say is that a great deal of that is correct, and the correctness is the reason the culture recruits.

Passing does determine your material conditions. It’s the most honest sentence in the doctrine, and the liberal trans world can’t say it, because saying it means admitting that the outcome is bought and that most of us can’t afford it. I’ve sat in rooms where a woman said exactly that and watched everyone flinch, like she’d said something dangerous, when all she’d done was tell the truth before anyone in the room was ready to fund it. The clinics do underdose. The surgeons do price by what the market will bear. The academics do build careers out of us. Everyone who told a suicidal girl that her problem was internalized transphobia rather than an untreated condition with a surgical solution deserves the contempt they get for it. They’ve earned it.

The second thing to say is that the doctrine smuggles four claims through under cover of the true ones.

First: the intensity of dysphoria establishes authenticity, which turns a symptom into a credential and makes the sickest woman in the room the most real one. This is a hierarchy that rewards deterioration, and it will be obeyed. If suffering is the entry criterion, people supply suffering.

Second: the outcome is fixed at the start. This is presented as biology and it functions as fatalism, and it isn’t what the evidence of anyone’s own eyes says. Women transition at thirty-five and end up unremarkable in public. Women transition at sixteen and don’t. The variance is enormous, the predictors are weak, and the confidence with which nineteen-year-olds get sentenced on the board is manufactured.

Third: anyone happy is lying. This is unfalsifiable and it’s load-bearing, because it protects the whole system from counterexample. Every visibly content trans woman becomes evidence of fraud rather than evidence against the model.

Fourth: being right about medicine makes you right about politics. It doesn’t. The board’s medical realism is often better than the nonprofit’s, and its political content is an aesthetic ranking with no demands attached. That gap is the whole argument.

Why they hate the sneeds

There isn’t one reason. There are several and they stack.

The sneed is proof that the pain isn’t universal. If there’s a trans woman who is calm, employed, publicly out, badly dressed, ugly by the board’s metric, and not suffering, then suffering is a distribution across a population. And if it’s a distribution, then a moderator’s position in it has causes, and causes implicate a life, and a life implicates choices, and now the whole architecture that makes her position bearable by making it fated is under threat from a woman with a pride flag in her bio. The sneed doesn’t have to say anything. Her existence is the argument.

The sneed got the thing without paying. This is the oldest resentment there is, and it doesn’t need transness to explain it. Someone else received what you were told had to be earned through a decade of misery, and she received it by asking for it, and she doesn’t seem to know what it cost anyone. The response isn’t a political analysis. It’s the response of a person who paid full tuition watching someone walk in free.

The sneed says the pain is a mindset, and that’s the cruelest lie anyone tells us. When a woman with an untreated, physically targeted condition is told her problem is her attitude, the correct response is fury, and I’d defend that fury against anyone. What the board does with that fury afterward is a different question, and a worse one.

The sneed is reachable. The insurer isn’t. The surgeon isn’t. The state isn’t. She has a public account, she replies, she can be quote-tweeted, and she’ll be hurt by it in a way you can watch. Contempt aimed at her produces a result in under a minute. Contempt aimed at a hospital system produces nothing, ever, unless there are two hundred of you and a lawyer.

The sneed is visible, and visibility is a public cost that somebody has to carry. A woman who boymodes is running a private solution. It’s a rational one and I’ll defend it below. But it depends on other trans women being visible enough to be the face of the thing, taking the legislative hit, taking the sidewalk hit, getting followed into a bathroom, being the one on the news. The girl with the flag in her bio is absorbing a cost that the invisible strategy doesn’t pay, and being sneered at by the people whose privacy she partly subsidizes.

And underneath all of it, the sneed is usually younger, or was insured, or had a mother who signed the form at fifteen. That’s a class resentment with nowhere to go, misfiled as an aesthetic objection. It comes out as a complaint about black lipstick and Bluesky because a complaint about inheritance would require a politics, and the board doesn’t have one.

## Why the needs are right

They’re right about the destination and useless about the road, which is the exact reverse of the board, which knows the road and has nowhere to go.

They’re right that a jaw isn’t a verdict. The board’s central empirical claim, that womanhood is settled by the skeleton, is false, and it’s falsified daily by cis women who get read as men and by trans women who don’t. Passing is contextual. It’s a function of the observer, and it moves with the neighborhood, the hour, and who’s looking. Treating it as a fixed personal property is bad measurement even on the board’s own terms.

They’re right that the desire to be unmarked isn’t an obligation to be unmarked. A woman who wants to be read as female without qualification is asking for something reasonable, and she should get it. The board takes that legitimate want and converts it into a duty, so a woman who can’t achieve it becomes a failure rather than a person who was denied a resource. This is the same move the surgeons’ price list makes, performed by the patients.

They’re right that a politics assembled only from the most dysphoric excludes the people who do the actual work. Look at who drives somebody to a consult, hosts, signs a lease, runs the fund, answers the phone at four in the morning, and keeps a spare bed made up. It’s disproportionately the earnest ones, the flags-in-bio ones, and the reason has nothing to do with luck or moral superiority. You can’t run a phone tree on contempt, and someone has to be willing to make the calls. The disposition that lets a woman be publicly, embarrassingly hopeful is the same disposition that lets her stay in a friendship with someone who was mean to her last month, and that second thing is the entire material basis of anyone surviving anything.

They’re right that the informed consent clinics, the name change guides, the funds, and the crisis lines were built by earnest people, not by the board. You can hate their vocabulary. The board has been running for a decade, and its cumulative institutional output is a lexicon. Apparently, the revolutionary program is inventing another noun.

And they’re right about this too: optimism is infrastructure. It’s the cheapest and most renewable resource a poor group has, and every serious movement of poor people has run on it. Treating it as stupidity is a luxury position held by people who’ve already decided nothing is coming.

And where they’re wrong, they’re seriously wrong, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise, because the board’s audience was manufactured by these failures.

Telling a woman her dysphoria is internalized transphobia is a form of medical denial, and it has a body count. Treating grief about a face as a political error is contemptible. The purity apparatus that turns a disagreement into an accusation is real, and Sarah Schulman’s *Conflict Is Not Abuse* (2016) has the mechanics of it right: a conflict gets escalated into an abuse claim, the group is recruited to enforce it, and the escalation feels like protection to everyone participating. Every trans woman I know has been on the receiving end of that at least once, and Black trans women get it first and hardest, because we’re the ones whose harshness reads as menace. And the earnest world abandons us fastest when defending us becomes socially expensive, which they’ve proven, repeatedly, at scale.

So both statements are true. The sneeds are correct, and they left us to rot. That’s not a contradiction. That’s a description of liberals.

The actual name for it: transfeminine cultural nationalism

What the board has is a nation.

It has a territory that can be encroached on, and the July 2026 complaint about the sneedification of the board is a border complaint. It has a language, and the language is guarded, and using the wrong regional variant marks you as new. It has a founding injury and a mythology of that injury. It has an authenticity test administered on the body. It has traitors, and the traitors are always the ones who look like assimilationists to the nationalist and like ordinary members to everyone else. It has a diaspora, on Twitter and in the servers. It has a flag, and the flag is the boymoder. And it has no program, no demand, no target, and no address to send anything to.

Fanon called this, and it’s in *The Wretched of the Earth* (1961), in the essay on national culture. His argument is that the colonized intellectual, cut off from a living tradition, goes looking for an authentic culture to defend, and what he ends up defending is a mummified version of it, a set of customs and words held up as proof of existence. Fanon’s objection isn’t sentimental. He says a culture is the present struggle of a people, and that a nationalism which stops at custom, which becomes a matter of correct vocabulary and correct dress and correct memory, never converts into political and social consciousness and will hand the country to whichever elite is standing closest when it matters.

The other half is in the violence essay, and it’s the one that should be read out loud on that board. Fanon describes the aggression of the colonized turning first on the colonized. Before it ever reaches the settler, it gets discharged sideways, into feuds, into fights at the edge of camp, into an obsessive vigilance about who among us is really one of us. He isn’t calling those men bad. He’s saying the aggression is correctly produced by the situation and is being spent in the only direction that’s open, the direction where nobody stops you. The sneed is what a trans woman does with a rage that has no permitted object. I know what that discharge feels like from the inside, and it felt like being right the whole time I was doing it.

Amilcar Cabral, in “National Liberation and Culture” (1970), makes the point that finishes it. Culture is a product of a people’s history and their level of development, and the return to the source by an educated stratum means nothing unless it converts into taking part in the struggle. Cultural pride that doesn’t become organization is a class alibi.

Transfeminine cultural nationalism is what you get when a group of women with a real grievance, real material deprivation, and no organization builds a nation instead of a movement. The nation is cheap. You can found one on a phone. Its membership dues are payable in vocabulary. It offers what a nation offers: the sensation of belonging to something with an inside and an outside, and it requires nothing except that you enforce the border, and the border is the only place where the members ever get to feel powerful.

And it’s not feminism. It has never made a demand on a single institution. It has no position on housing, no position on the wage, no position on the prison, no position on who does the cooking. Its entire content is a determination of who is really one of us, adjudicated on the body of the applicant. That’s the definitional core of a nationalism, and it’s the opposite of what feminism has been for.

The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977) is the document I’d hand to anyone who thinks I’m splitting hairs. Those women built a politics directly out of their own material position, which is exactly what the board thinks it’s doing. And they explicitly refused separatism. Their objection to lesbian separatism was that it rested on biological determinism and left out too much of actual life to function as a politics. They wanted an analysis that could hold race, class, sex, and the wage at the same time, and they said so while being poorer and in more danger than anyone posting today. A politics built from your own oppression is feminism. A politics built from your own oppression that ends at the border test is a nation, and the two look identical from the inside, and Combahee could tell the difference in 1977 with no money at all.

The feminist critique, which is worse than the nationalist one

Here’s the part that should end the argument, and it’s the reason I can’t treat the board as an eccentric cousin of my own politics.

The board’s ranking criterion is the verdict of the street. Passing means being read as female by strangers, most of them men, in public, in bad light, quickly. That’s the instrument. So a culture that ranks trans women by passing has taken the definition of womanhood and handed it to the appraisal of men. Every internal hierarchy on that board is a proxy for how a man on a bus would sort us. They believe they’re the last realists in a world of pretenders, and they’ve installed the male gaze as their standards body and given it final authority over who counts as a woman.

Feminism has one long, unbroken argument about that arrangement, and it isn’t complicated. Being appraised is the condition. Passing the appraisal is a survival tactic, and it’s a good one, and any woman who can should use it. Making the appraisal into a rank is submission to the thing that’s grading you, and it produces exactly what it produces among cis women: a hierarchy of beauty in which the women near the top police the border most aggressively because their position is the only asset they’ve been paid, and the women at the bottom are treated as having failed at a job rather than as having been denied a resource.

This is my Theory of Feminized Punishment doing exactly what I built it to do. The punishment is administered by women, on women, for insufficient compliance with a standard set elsewhere, and the administration is experienced as honesty and love. Hon, the ur-word of the whole lexicon, is a term for an older woman who is deluded about how she looks. Strip the transsexual context and you have the most ordinary misogyny on earth, the thing said about every woman over fifty who wears something bright. They imported it whole. They think they invented a science of the body, and they reproduced the beauty terror in a purer form, because the population is a group of women who have been stripped of every other currency and have only this one to trade.

Julia Serano’s *Whipping Girl* (2007) named the double bind that makes it airtight. Trans women get punished for failing at femininity and punished for succeeding at it, and there’s no position on that axis that isn’t contempt. The board resolves the bind by choosing a side: succeed, or be honest about having failed, and either way accept the axis. The sneeds resolve it by rejecting the axis, badly, with terrible theory and an annoying vocabulary. I’ll take the bad theory that rejects the axis over the good theory that submits to it, and I don’t think that’s a close call.

The race analysis makes it worse, and this is where I stop being able to hold it at arm’s length. The passing metric is a set of European facial norms: brow ridge, jaw width, nose, hairline, skin. The whole grammar of what reads as feminine in that grading system is white, and it’s applied to Black trans women by people who genuinely believe they’re measuring sex. A Black woman gets read as masculine because of race, and the board scores it as a failure of transition. I’ve watched it happen. I’ve had it done to me, by other trans women, in threads I should have closed and didn’t, because some part of me still wanted the number. The board’s most confident scientific claims are a beauty standard with the racial history filed off, and its members will defend the scoring to the death because it’s the only expertise they’ve got.

Hortense Spillers, in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” (1987), makes a distinction between the body and the flesh, where flesh is what’s left when a person is reduced to material available for marking and measurement by someone else’s instruments. She’s writing about the Middle Passage and the American slave, and I’m extending her, so take that as my argument and not hers. The rating thread is a machine for converting women into flesh. It takes a person and returns a set of measurements taken by strangers using a captor’s grammar, and the women submit to it voluntarily because they’ve been denied every other mirror. That’s the most feminist thing I can say about the board and the most damning: they built the appraisal shed themselves, and they line up.

Monique Wittig, in “One Is Not Born a Woman” (1981), argued that women are a class produced by a social relation and that the myth of a natural, biological woman is what keeps the relation invisible. Both sides of this fight fail her test. The needs make gender an essence you declare. The board makes sex an essence you’re built from. Both have swapped a relation for a substance, and neither can explain why the poor ones cook.

The platform question, which is why I care in 2026

None of this would matter as a subculture. Subcultures are allowed to be strange and cruel and inward. What’s happened since 2022 is that this one migrated onto a platform engineered to reward it.

Musk completed the Twitter purchase in October 2022. In April 2023, the hateful conduct policy quietly lost its provision against targeted deadnaming and misgendering. In June 2023, he stated that cis and cisgender would be treated as slurs on the platform. In July 2023, the ad revenue share for paying subscribers began, which converted engagement into a direct payment. Paid accounts got reach, replies got sorted by subscription, and the search function that Ngansuril correctly mourns went with everything else.

Put a culture whose only remaining product is the ranking of other trans women onto a platform that pays cash for the ratio and boosts whoever pays eight dollars. The result isn’t complicated. Contempt for other trans women is the highest-performing content a transfeminine account can produce because it’s the only transfeminine content the general audience will amplify. A trans woman saying that most trans women are deluded, ugly, mentally ill men who should stop kidding themselves will be retweeted by tens of thousands of people who want every one of us dead, including the woman who wrote it. She will get paid for it. She’ll interpret the numbers as vindication because the number is the only feedback the platform gives.

That’s the laundering operation, and it’s the actual danger. The vocabulary was developed in a room where everyone was trans, and in that room hon and sneed and youngshit meant something specific and internal. Moved onto Twitter, they became citable evidence from a native informant. Every gender-critical account on Earth has learned to quote a mod, because a trans woman saying it carries an authority no one else can supply. The board built a supply of testimony against transsexual women and put it on a platform that pays for volume, and the buyer is a political movement currently removing our healthcare by statute.

And the incentive runs the other way too. A young trans woman arriving on that platform in 2026 finds that the transfem accounts with reach are the ones doing this. She learns the vocabulary in a week because the vocabulary is what gets the likes, and she has no idea it came out of a room with a dosing wiki in it. She gets the contempt with none of the material function that once justified it. I’ve watched a joke that meant nothing outside a group chat get screenshotted and passed around as testimony against the rest of us. That’s the culture becoming dominant, and it’s what I’ve been watching happen for three years now.

Nietzsche has one more piece of this in *Thus Spoke Zarathustra* (1883 to 1885), in the section on the tarantulas. Zarathustra’s complaint about the preachers of equality is that their souls are full of revenge and they’ve agreed among themselves to call it justice. The board runs the identical engine with the doctrine reversed: it preaches rank out of revenge. Same appetite, opposite content, which tells you the content was never the point. If a culture will produce either doctrine depending on which one licenses the punishment, then punishment is the product and the theory is packaging.

The line between what I do and what they do

People say my writing is tttt posting with citations. I want to answer that seriously, because the accusation isn’t stupid and there are pieces of mine where I’d have to think about it.

There are three tests, and I run everything I write against them, including this piece.

First: does the target have a choice? A jaw is not a choice. A hairline is not a choice. The age you started is not a choice, and being poor at nineteen is not a choice, and every one of the board’s criteria is a fact about a woman’s body or her luck. What I attack is what people do: who left someone on read when rent was due, who dropped her when defending her got expensive, who cooked, who got picked up from the airport, who got the guest room and who got the couch, who was told to be patient. A woman can change all of that by Tuesday. She can’t change her skull by Tuesday, and criticism she can’t act on is just a sentence handed down.

Second: does it name a beneficiary? Every piece I write is trying to find who’s getting paid. Somebody is always getting labor, money, sex, status, or safety out of it, and the essay’s job is to find her and say her position out loud. The board’s criticism has no beneficiary in it, because a jaw doesn’t benefit anyone, which is how you know the analysis is decorative.

Third: does it convert into a demand? Money for the fund, a name on the lease, a change in who hosts, a public defense when it costs something, a strike, a lawyer, a bed. If the essay ends and there’s nothing anyone could do differently on the strength of it, then it was ressentiment with footnotes, and I should have kept it in my drafts.

I fail these sometimes. I’ve written lines about trans women that were about appearance and I dressed them up as analysis, and I knew what I was doing, and it got engagement, and the engagement is the tell. The distinction I’m claiming is operational and I’d want it applied to me by someone who doesn’t like me. It’s the only version worth having.

What the board was for, and when that ended

None of that means the board was always this. It was dialectical for a while, and the usefulness was inseparable from the cruelty in a way that makes both hard to describe honestly.

Nobody there was managing your feelings, which meant a girl could ask what her actual estradiol level was and get an answer from someone with no lawsuit, no ethics board, and no funding to protect. It meant sourcing for people whose clinic was eighteen months out or four hundred miles away or run by a man who wanted two letters and a year of therapy first. It meant injection sites, what a bad vial looks like, what to do when your levels crash, and what to say to get seen. It meant that the first honest account of what an incongruous puberty costs, which no organization will print because it isn’t inspiring, was available for free to a seventeen-year-old at three in the morning. I recognize that girl. I was her, at more ages than I’ll list here, and the honesty is the part of that world I still owe something to.

That’s what DIY means. The people who need the thing produce the thing, outside of and against the institution that refused to. The board did that. Cruelty attached to a workshop can be tolerated for years, because you walk out with what you came for and the insults don’t come home with you.

The workshop closed. I’d date it to roughly 2022, and I’d argue it with anyone who was there, but the direction isn’t in dispute: the productive function moved out to private servers, to wikis, to group chats, to DMs, and the board kept the vocabulary. It kept hondose and youngshit and moder and, on schedule, produced sneed. This is what happens when a culture loses the ability to make anything material. Words are the cheapest possible output. There’s no vendor, no money, no logistics, no risk, no follow-through, and a new word still feels like a discovery when you’re the one who coined it.

The anon complaining about sneedification is describing something real, and it has nothing to do with newcomers. A place whose only remaining product is classification gets overrun by people who came for the classification because that’s the only thing on the shelf. Sorting trans women is a hobby with very low barriers to entry.

The test is what the thing can get a girl. A vial, a bed, a ride to the appointment, a lawyer’s number, four hundred dollars, an injection she isn’t scared of, a bloodwork range, a way out of her mother’s house. In 2020, that culture could get a girl several of those. In 2026, it can get her a word for the girl she resents, and the word is free, and so is everything else it has left.

Ending

The girls in the black lipstick with the flags in their bios and the terrible posts about gender being an essence will still be answering messages in ten years. Their theory is bad, and it collapses the second there’s a doctor or a cop in the room. They’ll still be there because the disposition that lets a woman be that publicly, stupidly hopeful is the same one that gets her name onto a lease for a girl with no credit.

The bill for the other culture comes due privately, at four in the morning, when a woman with a flawless vocabulary for everyone else’s inadequacy has nobody left to call because she spent six years demonstrating to every available person that she would eventually rank them too. That board rehearses its members’ deaths as a genre. It has been doing it for a decade, and it has never once organized a fund.

Ngansuril is right that it’s a monstrous reality. She has the direction wrong. The word is what a nation manufactures when it can’t make anything a girl can put in her body or her bank account, and it lands on the only people in the story holding less than she is. Andrea Dworkin’s argument in *Right-Wing Women* (1983) was that women attach themselves to the systems hurting them because the terms on offer everywhere else are worse, and she meant it as an indictment of what was on offer. Boymoding is a rational bargain, and I’ll defend it against anyone who’s never had to walk to work in it. What the board did was take a survival bargain and convert it into a moral rank, so the women paying the highest price for their safety became the ones with the most invested in the scoring, and the scoring is the only return any of them will ever see.

The girls it teaches to say sneed will die fluent.

---

Works cited

Ngansuril, “Attack of the Sneeds,” Substack, August 1, 2026. The essay under discussion. Used for its lexicography of *sneedhon* (first /lgbt/ attestation in April 2021, semantic shift in 2023, back-formation to *sneed*, the *sneedpoon* derivative), the July 2026 post complaining of sneedification, the Sneed and Moder typology, its list of factors it treats as producing a Sneed, and its claim that Moders are ontologically proletarian.

Friedrich Nietzsche, *On the Genealogy of Morality* (1887). First essay for the account of a morality produced by ressentiment, which requires an external opposing world before it can act at all, and for the lambs and birds of prey passage on weakness reinterpreted as merit. Second essay for the argument that a thing’s origin and its later use lie worlds apart, which answers the Simpsons-etymology defense of *sneed*.

Friedrich Nietzsche, *Thus Spoke Zarathustra* (1883 to 1885). The section on the tarantulas, for the claim that a doctrine can be an alibi for the will to punish, and that the same appetite will generate opposite doctrines depending on which one licenses it.

Frantz Fanon, *The Wretched of the Earth* (1961). The essay on national culture, for the argument that a nationalism which settles into the defense of custom and vocabulary never converts into political consciousness, and that culture is the present struggle of a people rather than a preserved inventory. The violence essay, for the account of the colonized’s aggression being discharged laterally, against his own, before it can reach the party responsible.

Amilcar Cabral, “National Liberation and Culture” (1970). For the argument that culture is produced by a people’s history and material development, and that a stratum’s return to its own culture means nothing politically unless it converts into participation in struggle.

Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement” (1977). For the distinction I’m drawing between a politics built from a group’s own material oppression and a separatism resting on biological determinism, which the collective examined and rejected as inadequate to actual life.

Monique Wittig, “One Is Not Born a Woman” (1981). For the argument that women are a class produced by a social relation and that the myth of the natural woman conceals it. Applied here against both the declarative-gender position and the sex-essentialist one.

Andrea Dworkin, *Right-Wing Women* (1983). For the argument that women’s attachment to the systems hurting them is a rational bargain made where the alternatives are worse. Applied to boymoding and to why the women paying the highest price defend the ranking hardest.

Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (1987). For the distinction between the body and the flesh, flesh being what remains when a person is reduced to material marked and measured by someone else’s instruments. Spillers is writing about the Middle Passage and American slavery; the application to the rating thread is my extension and not her claim.

Julia Serano, *Whipping Girl* (2007). For the double bind in which trans women are punished for failing at femininity and punished again for succeeding at it, with no available position on the axis that escapes contempt.

Sarah Schulman, *Conflict Is Not Abuse* (2016). For the mechanics of a conflict escalated into an accusation and a group recruited to enforce it, used in the section conceding what the sneeds get wrong.

Platform changes referenced: the completion of the Twitter acquisition in October 2022; the removal of the targeted deadnaming and misgendering provision from the hateful conduct policy in April 2023; the June 2023 statement treating cis and cisgender as slurs; and the launch of subscriber ad revenue sharing in July 2023.

DUMP YOUR POLYCULE

Tara Knight

Bundle of Styx

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Before anything else: paid subscriptions and Ko-fi are how I survive and keep Bundle of Styx running full time. If you value the essays, theory, videos, arguments, and general transsexual media apparatus I’ve somehow assembled from my bedroom, please consider becoming a paid subscriber or supporting me through

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So I’ve decided to submit my latest article “White Trans women stop being racist” as someone who has been subjected to Ai witch hunts multiple times.

Here is the results:

I didn't write my own essay on three em dashes.

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---

# White Trans Women, Stop Being Racist

### a letter from a Black trans woman

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Somewhere on this app, right now, somebody’s daughter is one semester deep into a degree and reading my latest essay the way a meter maid reads a windshield. She couldn’t summarize the argument with a gun to her temple, and she doesn’t have to, because she’s waiting for something smaller. A date. A page number. A middle initial. A casualty figure rounde…

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