trans girl suicide museum Quotes

“If we lived in a culture with a higher tolerance for ambiguity, rather than obsession with measurement, fixed identity, and knowability, transition wouldn't be so confounding to people, and the process might be more normal. Epistemologically, we are anal retentive, Not rigorous, just stressed out. We need to know what a trans girl is. What are you, trans people get asked. Where are you from, people of color get asked. White supremacist capitalism wants to make a map of everything and then monetize the ways that things move around on the map. Basically literally, the museum.”
― Hannah Baer, trans girl suicide museum

“I know trans people are supposed to get to be trans no matter how they look or present. This is why the pronouns ritual is supposed to be important, to let you introduce yourself without anyone's assumption interfering with your wish. But I also know that hearing someone's pronouns doesn't make a cis person witness their gender. And this is part of the trauma. As Cyrus told me so long ago, gender is constituted in part by what's reflected back to you, and you don't get to instantiate the exact reflection you want just by saying your pronouns. That's why I'm having my face cut open.”
― Hannah Baer, trans girl suicide museum

“Maybe it's just like why k is better when you can't buy it at CVS, because there's some part of transness that cracks of fucks with all these cultural norms I'm talking about, and this current cultural moment of trans visibility is probably actually about securing transness in a sack of amber and declawing it and making it legible (the way gay culture has been ripped from the anonymity of the dark bathhouse and into the stagelighting of the reality show...lots of people have critiqued this one.)”
― Hannah Baer, trans girl suicide museum

“It makes more sense to describe it as being trapped in a museum because my body belongs to me and I love it, but the thing I'm trapped in someone else built and i can't find the door.”
― Hannah Baer, trans girl suicide museum

“...being socialized as a man for me, especially at fancy colleges, was being trained, over and over again, to hold power by criticizing things from a place of objectivity, instead of just saying my emotional intuition and not making up a reason for why it felt that way.”
― Hannah Baer, trans girl suicide museum

“...when we talk about curing addiction in secular culture, it's predicated on this capitalist idea of a self-regulating subject, someone who, if left to their own devices, could control their own behavior and decisions. Denise talked about how indigenous communities where people are more heavily connected to one another and dependent on the community to regulate their bodies and behaviors (rather than being alienated like white and/or capitalist communities and just having to do self-regulation) often have different relationships to substances and addiction, but that when those same communities become colonized and people start having more alienated capitalist first-world lives, addiction problems suddenly spring up.”
― Hannah Baer, trans girl suicide museum

“This is part of the reason why I feel weird about introducing pronouns when people meet each other in groups; it creates this expectation that each of our genders should be mapped and appropriately invoked at any time, that I'm safer if someone can say exactly what I am, and that I would be harmed if my gender ever confused anyone (or confused me). I'd rather be misgendered than be "accepted" by an establishment that's making some kind of ominous bio/political truth claim about what my transness is. I don't want a trans utopia where there's 200 genders on the census box. I don't want a trans utopia where instagram asks me my pronouns and my sex assigned at birth and then targets marketing at me. I don't want cis people to make money using images of bodies like mine.”
― Hannah Baer, trans girl suicide museum

“I just felt so fucked up about trans ness and class and how completely cut off from my political or activist life I've been in the suicide museum, just going to no protests and no planning meetings and systematically neglecting any relationship with anyone who would pull me back into activist work, because I have no constitution for it, no imagination for it, just imagination for myself, my clothes, my drugs, my friends, my fucked up gender, my surgeries and health insurance and did I mention clothes, my web browser is all 60 tabs of Issey Miyake and 12 tabs of Wendler's glottoplasty longitudinal research...”
― Hannah Baer, trans girl suicide museum

“...suicide is what happens when one's internal and external life context overwhelms one's resources to keep living. It helped me to think of suicide like this as a kind of tipping mechanism, a result of overwhelm. In a healing/transformation framework, suicide can be prevented by changing a person's life context or by fortifying their inner resources to tolerate the horror of being alive.”
― Hannah Baer, trans girl suicide museum

“Introducing pronouns, as a practice is perhaps an appeal for everyone to be seen publicly in relation to their preferred private symbol. I want to tell people I use 'lace thong pronouns,' I use 'ketamine princess' pronouns, I need people to know that my pronouns are 'she/her/suicidality.' I want my pronouns to be 'sorry/i got/lip stick/on your dick' or 'yes/you can fuck me/but I'm just going to lie here' or maybe I'll tell people my pronouns are 'yes you can come over/yes i'll give you K/but please don't fucking try to touch my disgusting perfect transexual body.' I don't want anyone to think they are entitled to an explanation of how I relate my gender and my body, and sometimes when I'm asked my pronouns I feel like that's what people are asking for.”
― Hannah Baer, trans girl suicide museum

“The idea that queerness is about discovering your personal truth and therein being healed is part of a capitalist conspiracy that centers personal identity over solidarity or collective power or broader cultural and societal justice movements," I blurt out at my father. I'm not sure he's totally following.”
― Hannah Baer, trans girl suicide museum

“...and I knew we were cut from the same cloth in some way, that she was telling me that she too had an altar to suicide that she had visited, or a river of suicidality in which she waded. Even when I don't go to the altar daily, I do pay my respects, periodically, with little offerings.”
― Hannah Baer, trans girl suicide museum

“I will continue to try to imagine the bathhouse, to imagine a way of knowing bodies and gender where no one is forced to be knowable, concrete, connected to truth, etc. Gender as pure private symbol, gender as vapor, gender as the crusted ketamine on the edge of your nose when you wake up in a bed full of other people and can’t remember where you are.”
― Hannah Baer, trans girl suicide museum

“He was simply noting, I think, that it takes a certain kind of fearlessness to approach the totem of one’s assigned gender and say 'despite the fact that I shall not be rewarded
for what I am about to I do, I will desecrate this shrine such that only weird people will think I’m sexy forever.”
― Hannah Baer, trans girl suicide museum

“It’s nice for me to think about transness not as just a getting-rid-of, but as a manifesting, an imagining, an inception, an integration.”
― Hannah Baer, trans girl suicide museum

“Introducing pronouns, as a practice is perhaps an appeal for everyone to be seen publicly in relation to their preferred private symbol. I want to tell people I use 'lace thong pronouns,' I use 'ketamine princess' pronouns, I need people to know that my pronouns are 'she/her/suicidality.' I want my pronouns to be 'sorry/i got/lip stick/on your dick' or 'yes/you can fuck me/but I'm just going to lie here' or maybe I'll tell people my pronouns are 'yes/you can fuck me/but i'm just going to lie here' or maybe I'll tell people my pronouns are 'yes you can come over/yes i'll give you K/but please don't fucking try to touch my disgusting perfect transexual body.' I don't want anyone to think they are entitled to an explanation of how I relate my gender and my body, and sometimes when I'm asked my pronouns I feel like that's what people are asking for.”
― Hannah Baer, trans girl suicide museum

“Another thing about K is it feels so connected to the internet.”
― Hannah Baer, trans girl suicide museum

“You were really mean to that boy after you made out with him and I wondered if it was because you feel shame around your desire.”
― Hannah Baer, trans girl suicide museum

“...there's this idea in family systems therapy that when something changes in a system, family members make "change back bids" trying to undo whatever is different.”
― Hannah Baer, trans girl suicide museum

“I thought in that moment about my TERF position, my "why bother with TERFs" argument. It was premised on the resilience of trans girls, that we could get what we need from other spaces if we were not allowed in cis-women spaces, in TERF spaces. I know that believing this for me was in part born out of my class privilege, my sense is that I could leave and go somewhere else if I couldn't be treated as a woman in a given space.”
― Hannah Baer, trans girl suicide museum

“Remembering this moment, I began to laugh, because I realized my second-wave feminist mother and I have something in common: neither of us want to look like a man.”
― Hannah Baer, trans girl suicide museum

“I want to do it, I want my little boobies to tell the world "here is a girl, that's how she feels to herself, that's the symbol she wants you to convey to her.”
― Hannah Baer, trans girl suicide museum

“I think especially for activists, women, and in a different but overlapping way for trans people, it can feel really shameful to be in one place in your process, and then change and be in a different place.”
― Hannah Baer, trans girl suicide museum