Physical

I feel like I’ve gotten ~all the basic health benefits that people talk about with yoga—I have more energy, I sleep better, I’m demonstrably stronger and more flexible. My relationship to food has gotten significantly better and I’m slowly finding myself more able to gain weight (I’ve dealt with mild anorexia and been chronically underweight for most of my life). I’ve also had some long term digestive issues begin to clear up since starting. My posture has also improved in a way that, judging from people’s reactions, has made me ~10% hotter.

Psychological

I Feel More Clearheaded:

Managing or reducing stress is obviously one of the primary reasons people recommend yoga, but from where I’m at now this feels like a lossy description. It’s probably different for different people, but for me what this feels most like is that my mind is less “fragmented”. My thinking doesn’t feel pulled in so many different directions anymore, distractions are less salient, and I’m less prone to anxiety spirals. For the most part I’ve adjusted to this as a new baseline, but every now and then I’ll do something that puts me back into my previous, more fragmented state (say, spending the morning rapidly multitasking on several different admin items) and I’ll be reminded what it felt like it—it really sucks! Nowadays, however, it’s fairly easy for me to just “reset” out of that feeling with practice and/or sleep.

I’m Less Reactive Online:

In general, scrolling X (formerly twitter) went from being a crippling addiction to being a a manageable problem that I’m slowly starting to rein in. But even beyond metrics like “time spent scrolling”, the way I engage with internet discourse has changed a lot. I’m much less susceptible to rage bait, I find that I’m less bothered about a lot of what shows up on my timeline, I’m less motivated to argue. This isn’t to say that I’ve stopped caring about the things I used to be prone to arguing or getting mad about, it’s just that I’m more capable of acting on the knowledge that spiking my stress hormones and wasting 30 minutes over it won’t help matters.

I’m Less Depressed:

Another change has been in the intensity of my depression. Much like my mild anorexia, periodic, fairly intense depression has been a regular feature for most of my adult life. Now, my depression isn’t gone, but in addition to being generally less intense, it’s begun to feel more tractable, and depressive periods are less prone to spiralling out of control. One way this works is that I’m generally a lot more aware of my body and things that might be making me feel worse. Sometimes I’ll be on the verge of a depressive spiral and then suddenly I’ll stop and notice that I’m really hungry, or I haven’t been out in the sun in too long, or one of my nostrils is stopped up—I’ll go and address the problem and suddenly everything is less bad. I’ll still be depressed, but it goes from feeling like this inescapable, all consuming weight to just a “eh, this kinda sucks” feeling, one that often goes away after sleeping.

My Sexuality Came Back:

This has been one of the weirder effects for me. Ever since a somewhat bad experience a few years ago my sex drive—and with it a more general desire for intimacy—had felt like it’s been in artificially low gear. Never gone exactly, but dampened, somehow remote. This didn’t change immediately when I started practicing more or even in teacher training, but it did begin to shift a few months ago when I started becoming a lot more consistent about my morning asana and meditation practice. It felt like something snapped back into place and suddenly this part of myself was there again—this was fairly unexpected and I’m honestly still working through what to do with this.

The Weird Stuff

Insight Comes More Naturally:

For several years I had periodically experimented with various divinatory systems (Tarot, Futhark, etc.) to little avail. One day, about 1/3 of the way through YTT, I had the urge to try again, specifically with the Futhark.1 I made a set of runes with paper flashcards, tried drawing them, and this time it just seemed to click. I’ve continued this practice since and while I’m still a novice, I am at a point where it’s capable of generating useful insights for myself (and occasionally others). Likewise, there are substances that, when I’d taken them before, usually just produced unpleasant and confusing experiences. When I engage with these substances now, I come away learning something that meaningfully improves my life.

I’m More Sensitive:

This one is probably the most mixed result I’ve gotten, though I still think it’s been a positive overall. My sense of touch has become sharper and more information-heavy. Hearing, too, feels like something I can more actively control—it’s like I have the ability to spatially orient my hearing and “zoom-in” on a particular location, both inside my own body and outwards. The downside here is that I seem to be more sensitive to changes in the weather—pressure headaches when a new system is blowing in have become more common—but, on the flip side, I feel like I enjoy the weather more. The petrichor smell after it’s rained, crisp, cool mornings, the warmth sunlight—all of these feel significantly more pleasurable to experience than they did before.

My Music Taste Has Shifted:

I used to listen to a lot of really intense, fast-paced music—stuff like Metal, EDM, Techno. And the thing is, I still really like all of those things when I’m at a concert or a rave, but having them in my ears while I’m walking or doing chores feels a little overwhelming now, and also maybe unnecessary? I think before I was using ~constant high-energy music in my headphones to do something, to help myself push through things. Now I feel like I’m producing whatever that music was giving me endogenously.

Animals Are Friendlier:

This isn’t the intense version of this you sometimes hear about where animals actively flock to you, but I’ve noticed that animals I encounter seem to be “move up” one degree on a scale of hostile-skittish-indifferent-friendly. Geese are less likely to honk and make threat displays, squirrels don’t run away as much, and outdoor cats in people’s yards are more likely to wander up to me if I stop while walking by.

Conclusion — The Practice

At this point I’m consistently teaching three classes a week. Additionally, I try to take classes from other teachers most days, and in practice this averages to 4-5 classes a week. On my own, I practice Asana and mantra chanting ~every morning, although how long I do so varies, as preparation for a daily mediation practice which lasts from five to fifteen minutes, though I’m working on lengthening that. Outside of yoga I do indoor bouldering most days and I walk quite a lot, but there have been periods in the past where I’ve done those things without yoga, so I feel pretty confident about attribution for most of the effects below.

If you’re looking for the 80/20 version of this I would recommend going to a yoga class2 at least 3 times a week. The styles that work best for you are going to vary from person to person—I find that a level of intensity and speed slightly below the average Vinyasa class is a sweet spot for me. Look for teacher(s) that you click with and that feel down to earth and generally chill; longer meditation periods at the start and end of the class, inclusion of mantra chanting, and more instruction around your breathing are all usually positive signals. If you have the time and opportunity to go on a longer yoga and meditation retreat I’d recommend that, but you should maybe go with the attitude that you’re there to learn skills that you can integrate into your practice and daily life rather than treating it as a vacation.

You may have noticed that I haven’t speculated about the mechanism of action for any of these effects—I do have thoughts here, and there is scientific research that suggests some interesting possibilities. I’m planning to write more on this in the near future.

DISCLAIMER: None of the following is medical advice; always listen to your body and seek help if you feel yourself getting sick.

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Step 1: (Optional) Be Hot

Not really much to say here, just generally makes everything in life easier—probably achievable for like 60% of people and 85% of Humans.1

Step 2: Read Bronze Age Mindset (Pervert, B.A. 2018)

This one is not optional. It’s full of generalisable insights on the dynamics of human interaction and the dance floor. You’ll thank me later.

Step 3: Pick a Rave

So now that you’re armed with some important background knowledge, it’s time to pick a rave. The critical things here are that it be:

• Indoor venue

• In the winter

• Relatively well-attended

Bonus points if the venue is (literally) underground, as this will activate ancestral memories of cave-based ecstatic initiatory rituals.

Step 4: Don’t Buy Tickets In Advance

It’s important that the rave you’re going to does, in fact, sell door tickets as well as advance tickets, so make sure to look this up ahead of time.

Step 5: Pick An Outfit

You probably have at least *some* good features (if not, see Step 1), so show them off. If you’re at a loss for how to do this, reach out to the nearest circuit gays or rave girlies in your social graph and ask for advice.

Step 6: Get In Line Early

This is pretty self-explanatory. You didn’t buy tickets in advance, and you want to make sure you get in, so you’ve got to be there early. How early? Oh, say an hour before doors, just to be safe. Will you be comically early and look silly? Possibly! But you might also have a lovely chat with a beautiful domme and her boy toy while you’re waiting in line.

Step 7: Dancing

So, if you haven’t figured it out yet, the point of those specific instructions is that you should be freezing by now. Like, “worried if you’re actually going to get hypothermia” freezing. You’ve been standing around in a (hopefully) skimpy outfit for north of an hour in February, and now you’re finally in the venue. The idea is that now you physically have no choice but to hit the dance floor and get moving just to warm up your mortal flesh.

Here you can, optionally, hit the bar for one (1) White Claw. This will help your temperature a bit and serve to lower your inhibitions. You don’t actually want to be inebriated, though, so you should probably stick to one standard drink, or no more than two if you have a very high tolerance.

And from there, go dance! You’ll naturally try to work your way towards the front-centre of the crowd because, again, you’re freezing and any spare body heat helps. You may still feel awkward, but every time you do, remind yourself that you need to keep your blood pumping and keep going. If you’re still having trouble knowing exactly what to do with your body, try and mimic the people in front of you—I promise no one is watching you closely enough to notice—but go light on the footwork until you start to get a feel for things. With any luck, by the end of the night you’ll feel a little more natural and a little more able to lose yourself in the music. You may not be exactly where you want to be, but you’ll have made some progress that you can build on.

Okay, but like, seriously, how do I learn to dance?

I don’t actually know; at present I can only share what worked for me and changed my relationship to dance from one of a painful, awkward social performance to something that I really enjoy in an embodied way. Maybe this will work for you; I hope it helps, even if you don’t try to replicate my process in its entirety. As to what happens after that, I can’t exactly say. I said at the top that this isn’t “Part 1 of How To Be A Good Dancer”, and that’s not an article I can write because I feel like I’m still working my way there, but doing what I outlined above did take that journey from a chore that I thought I would get around to at some point to a fun thing I’m actively seeking out. If you get to this point and are looking for direction, maybe find a style of partner dance you like and sign up for some classes, or find videos where creators walk you through popular EDM dance movements. Also, consider taking up yoga or tai chi and starting to get a feel for what the witches and bodyworkers mean when they talk about “energy.”

Good luck!

Across the Atlantic in the United States, the “ResistLib” core of the Democratic base—joined by a few Lincoln Project types who ought to know whereof they speak—is fantasising about a future “de-Ba’athification” of the US government in which Trump appointees and perhaps whole agencies are purged. Many want to go further and enact a “Second Reconstruction” to tear out the roots of Republican power, even in deeply red states. I submit that while all of this is conceivably possible, it is, at present, exceedingly unlikely. Democrats do not command the loyalty of any centre of hard power in the United States as Republicans do with ICE and many state and local law enforcement agencies. Although Trump’s popularity has taken some hits, the hoped-for “Blue Wave” of 2026 as yet shows little sign of materialising—certainly not to a degree that would offset an unfriendly House and Senate map (which will only get worse in 2030). Perhaps most importantly, the leadership of the Democratic Party displays very little sense that it is capable of rising to the moment that its exponents constantly warn the country is facing. There are, of course, individual explanations (uncharitably, excuses) for every failure at every step of the way, but the question remains, if the Democratic Party believes that Donald Trump is an existential threat to Americans’ liberties and US democracy; why did a Democratic administration—which at the time possessed official control of all the levers of federal hard power—allowed him to run for president, win, and take office? Even Gavin Newsom, currently the darling of the Democrats’ online and increasingly radicalised base, has shown little appetite for the kind of lawfare and direct confrontation that would likely be required at this stage to put the genie of Trumpism back in the bottle.

My point in saying all of this is to argue that the world we knew in the 2010s is not likely to come back; at no point are we all going to wake up from a bad dream and feel like it’s 2015 again. When I speak of the world of the 2010s, I speak of a period in which left-wing parties (either neoliberal or social-democratic) were generally ascendant in the West, in which left-wing social causes were expected to advance further, and in which the major organs of society (universities, legacy media, and large corporations) were expected to not merely accept the advancement of such causes, but to positively facilitate them. I am speaking, briefly, of the world in which “wokeness” was dominant. Personally, I am at best an ambivalent defender of this period, but even I am forced to acknowledge that the material basis for many of the things I hold near and dear was a product of this political economy, and that basis is threatened by the new regime that seems to be emerging across the Occident. It rather worries me, therefore, when I see other people who are also attached to these things mount defences of them which only make sense if you think we’re still in the world of the 2010s. What good is an appeal to the ECHR when the first priority of the next government is likely to be withdrawing from it? What does it profit us to maintain lockstep support from a party that has a very good chance of being locked out of national power for a generation?

Ultimately, the political settlement will shape what is materially possible. I have acknowledged, on occasion, that some of the first politics I ever chose for myself were those of (early) third-wave, sex-positive feminism. As much as my outlook on the world has changed since then, many of those priorities are still dear to me. The liberation of pleasure from the strictures of domination and social hierarchy, its pursuit as a positive good in itself, the ability to freely choose one’s own path, LGBT life being open, destigmatised, and accessible—these are all things that are deeply valuable both to me and the majority of my friends. I do not know how we preserve them in a world where ethno-nationalism is a dominant political force and where the right is globally ascendant—I fear we cannot preserve them in full, or at least in the same forms they have existed for the last decade and a half. I believe, however, we have to try and learn how to do so, because if these things we love can only survive if the clock is turned back to 2015, I fear they won’t survive at all.

Sprawl, Metropolis, and the Nature of American Civilisation

The disagreement between those who see American Civilisation as mostly novel and unique, and those who see it as an innovation on and extension of the European Civilisational model is as esoteric as it is consequential. FDR’s perception of the contrast between America as a democratic Superpower and the European Empires had far-reaching effects on the shape of the postwar world, and the current Vice President’s clear belief that the US and Europe are sister-civilisations is currently shaping American policy towards the continent. Loath as I may be to side with the latter, I find myself firmly in the camp of America as a European and specifically British offshoot. Experiencing LA for the first time gave me more sympathy for how people end up in the other camp.

I come from one of the original 13 colonies, and I currently live in another; our states predate America as a country, founded by men and women who came directly from Europe and brought their cultures with them. Our counties and streets bear the names of British kings and nobles as often as they do a small set of revolutionaries, and our oldest institutions were endowed by the Crown and its colonial representatives. Our cities, though young by European standards, are ancient by those of North America, from metropolises like New York and Boston that grew organically as trade and commerce bloomed to the results of a particular style of Enlightenment utopian planning like DC and Savannah. Critically, in terms of the built environment these cities grew up in the era of riverine and animal-powered transportation, or at their latest in the heyday of railroads. When automobile infrastructure cut its destructive path through North Americans’ cities, laws, and minds, the East Coast cities were best poised to survive the onslaught. Even as their outer suburbs have sprawled it remains obvious that the cores of the cities on the Northeast Corridor and beyond were built for another time, their shapes dictated by history and necessity rather than modern planning regimes.

Even from the approach to LAX, it was obvious that this city was a different beast entirely; the older downtowns (plural, because LA seems to be much more an agglomeration of towns and suburbs than a centralised city) are utterly dwarfed by endless neighbourhoods of one- and two-story houses and low-rise shops. On the ground you can taste the particularly 20th-century flavour of hypermodernity—you can see how all this felt sleek and futuristic in the 70s, even if now the highways are choked with too many cars and ten-million-dollar houses are left in quiet decay due to arcane property tax law. Which is all to say that I can see how, living in a place that is so much a product of the late 20th century—where the legacy of the first colonists amounts to a few ruins rather than the core and identity of the city—one might come to the conclusion that America has little to do with Europe, that we live in a country that has and will continue to make its own destiny out of whole cloth. It is also to say that I don’t think I could be happy in LA. A part of my soul remains in the far-flung, sparsely-populated places of the world, like the Appalachian Mountains of my youth and the Scottish Highlands my ancestors left, and another part has grown attached to the constant heat and overstimulation of great cities like DC, New York, and the Asian metropolises that have nurtured me in brief, critical periods of my life—both parts, however, recoiled from LA.

Venice Beach: Models, Homeless, and a Brief Spiritual Crisis

I’ve existed for about a year on the far fringes of the fashion world, or perhaps merely awareness of it. It’s not a world I’m trying to work my way towards the centre of, but it’s one I’ve enjoyed learning about, and I’ve become increasingly fascinated by how people dress and, more broadly, how they carry and present themselves to the world. Cities—or at least their elite populations—develop their own particular character about these things. DC is dominated by office culture; New York is more varied but has a certain gritty, practical streak as a through-line. It’s a dirty city, and even its richest echelons tend to do quite a bit of walking, so the everyday wardrobes of even the most elite and avant-garde adapt around this; there’s a certain “feral model” look that you eventually learn to spot in the wild. Not so in my brief experience of Southern California; if the models and actresses in New York are trying to dress down, everyone in LA is trying to dress up. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what it is, but even across subcultural lines I noticed that everyone looks just a bit more polished, more made up, sleeker. Maybe a city built on the entertainment industry would always prize artifice over (perceived) authenticity, maybe it’s more driving and less walking, or maybe (as my petty East-Coast nationalism wants to believe) it’s a kind of region-wide status-anxiety—maybe models in NYC don’t feel the need to go out with perfect makeup for the same reason that finance bros don’t post about lifting weights in the office.

The other thing that stood out on Venice Beach was the street market and the woo that more than half the stalls were hawking. I’m talking crystals, tarot (decks and readings), all manner of vaguely eastern-flavoured iconography, incense, more crystals, palm readings, even people straight up offering to cast spells for money. Now, I’ve been in my fair share of esoteric bookstores, and I won’t deny that there’s often a slightly seedy vibe to those, but I’ve never seen anything that compares to the sheer amount of supposed magic for sale on Venice Beach or the hollowness I felt at it all. As someone who seriously practices an ~esoteric religion and is currently in training for a skill that skirts the line between woo and mainstream health/fitness, it prompted a minor crisis of faith. Is this what it all leads to? Am I just a better class of these hucksters? It was brief and I recovered, but for a moment there part of me was ready to pack it all up and revert to Anglicanism.1

The one really positive thing I have to say about Venice Beach regards the homeless population. New York, and to a lesser extent DC have a lot of actually quite threatening homeless people. I feel the need to point out strongly here that this isn’t a comment on the moral culpability of the people in question—homelessness is an awful, dehumanising experience that is likely to rob a person of many of their faculties and the better angels of their nature—but a description of an existing reality. Yes, you are far more likely to be hurt in a car accident than by an assailant on the subway (homeless or otherwise), but pretending being physically blocked and screamed at isn’t a scary experience where someone would feel justifiably threatened is absurd.2 At any rate, I didn’t notice anyone like this on Venice Beach. There were plenty of visibly homeless people sleeping rough, but they all more or less either kept to themselves or panhandled quietly. Honestly, I think it’s the weather. Beyond the general pleasantness of the beach, I’m told that it doesn’t really get cold in Southern California and it doesn’t rain much, and while it’s cruel to make people homeless anywhere, there’s a particular cruelty in leaving someone unsheltered in a place where the temperature drops well below freezing for much of the winter and thunderstorms are a regular occurrence. That cruelty likely breeds a different kind of alienation and mental degradation that isn’t present everywhere. Ultimately, a walk through any American city in the 2020’s is going to include these reminders of how badly we’re failing as a society.3

In Conclusion

My single most salient and overriding thought about LA was how beautiful the natural landscape is and how badly we’ve made a mess of it. The jagged, stony mountains giving way directly to inviting beaches was reminiscent of Iceland for me and almost as enticing—as much as I love the South, the forested flatlands of the Tidewater make me genuinely nervous, evoking, I suspect, genetic memories of the first Indo-Europeans to conquer Britain being ambushed by Early European Farmers in the bogs. It’s a tragedy that we found one of the places with the best weather and scenery on earth and then proceeded to pave over much of it, limit that paved Walden to now-outrageously expensive single-family homes, and mismanage the local forests so badly that they burn catastrophically nearly every year. I’m hoping to spend some more time in California when I return to the United States, and maybe I’ll have more and better things to say about it then; before that, I’ll have some updates on what I’ve been doing in the Orient.

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Two weeks ago I boarded an Amtrak bound for NYC to attend the premiere of Aimee Armstrong’s new film, Envy/Desire. Beyond a couple of tangential social connections, the scene and the venue fell well outside of my previous experiences, and I confess to a degree of apprehension going in. I was worried enough that I put some amount of effort into butching up my typically androgynous presentation, lest I be gendered and found wanting by the cunty NYC dolls and their chosen chasers. Still, I’d seen the invite link and been intrigued, so I texted a partner and booked tickets. As it happened I had I little to worry about; when we arrived at the unmarked venue we soon found ourselves at home among a welcoming, mostly well-dressed (the man in the raceplay hoodie notwithstanding), and surprisingly varied crowd. When the film started, we were laughing along with everyone else.

First of all, Envy/Desire is funny—not a scene goes by without a witty, expertly-delivered in-joke or reference to Twitter discourse. The referential nature of many of the jokes perhaps makes the film somewhat insular, but I think that’s alright. Any work of art has an intended audience, and given Twitter’s (admittedly somewhat damaged) status as the preferred hyperreality of the intelligentsia, a work narrowly targeted to heavy users can still have an outsized impact. Nor, as I had feared might be the case, was Envy/Desire’s humor rooted in lowbrow man-in-a-dress transphobia. Aimee spoke in the Q&A about how she hoped the satire would cut both ways, and I think it largely succeeds at this. As much as Natasha (Salomé) is often right, for example, she’s portrayed as delightfully paranoid and comically reactionary, particularly via clever cinematic details, like when the camera ominously zooms in on the picture in Ray Blanchard’s Wikipedia article or a religious icon.

While Envy/Desire is obviously a low budget (shadowy right-wing billionaires are perhaps less generous to the arts than some are wont to believe) film, nothing felt egregiously low-end. The cinematography and the performances—delivered by Aimee herself alongside Salomé and George Olesky—were at worst merely good and occasionally inspired. The only gripe I have with the production quality was somewhat uneven audio which made it difficult to hear every line clearly, particularly in the packed venue.

It’s difficult to say too much without giving everything away—we are, after all, talking about a twenty-minute indie film—but the elephant in the room bears addressing. Other reviewers, along with quite a lot of people who haven’t seen the movie, have laboriously decried it as transphobic—with the first reviewer labeling it “the most offensive movie [she] has ever seen.” Specifically, they have argued that it not only reinforces but actively hawks Blanchardian typology. This contention, I believe, results from a misreading of the text on two levels.

The first level of misreading is a childish inability to engage with a text on any level beyond that of a medieval morality fable, preferably with included exegesis (or, for the more online, a tumblr story that ends with “and everyone clapped”). Natasha—a fictional character—says that AGP is real and Ethan—again, a character—has it, therefore the filmmaker must also think so. Natasha calls Ethan a man in a dress, therefore the filmmaker must be telling you to go out and use that phrase for anyone who looks remotely like him. Natasha’s framing is lost on this sort of viewer, because the very concept of framing is an affront to this kind of engagement with fiction. This refusal of any responsibility on the part of the reader (including the responsibility to even read the text) is strikingly similar to the sort that led a mob to harass Isabel Fall off the internet.

The second, more complex misreading is in understanding Ethan as a budding trans woman rather than as a chaser. This is a misreading that I was initially more sympathetic to, but find myself increasingly baffled by. I find it difficult to imagine that any transfem who has used Grindr, dating apps, or even Twitter long enough has not encountered a specific and common category of chaser. For these men, attraction to trans women exists on a spectrum of kinks that also includes embodying some aspects of hypersexualized transfemininity. Aimee even mentioned in the Q&A that the initial inspiration for the film was drawn from her lived experience. Do some of these men eventually become trans women? Of course—and for the record I am a firm “Catholic”1 on these questions—but most, we must admit, are just passing through for a wank.

There is perhaps a serious conversation to be had about what constitutes right and graceful action for a trans woman whose boyfriend proves to be such a man—what, if any duties do you have to him beyond those of a romantic partner and fellow human being? And what weight ought to be assigned to the possibility that he may, in time, become a fellow woman? But this was not the conversation that Envy/Desire set out to have, and it seems strange to fault it for not doing so. It requires a certain refusal of empathy to deny a trans woman (of any sexuality) the space to be disappointed and even, yes, disgusted to learn that she is “loved” not as a woman and as the object of holistic masculine desire, but as fetish object (or, at best, a kind of sherpa into womanhood). To acknowledge and hold space for the feelings of a woman in such a position feels like it ought to be Feminism 101.

Some have argued that Ethan’s character is a slur against trans lesbians, but, again, this feels like a willful misreading. There are so many cultural signifiers—ranging from the cute to the cringe and Reddit to what are essentially blood libels—of trans lesbianism, and Aimee is certainly online and aware enough that I’m confident she could have made a vicious film that cut directly at all of their (our?)2 deepest insecurities. But whatever her takes—and I won’t endorse all of them—that doesn’t strike me as the kind of artist that Aimee wants to be, and that’s certainly not the film she made here. I’m old enough to recall a time on Tumblr when Whipping Girl-toting transfeminists told people questioning their gender that if you still wanted to be a woman when you weren’t horny—if you still wanted to be a woman at work and at school and when you went to buy groceries and did all the other little mundane unsexy things in your life—then it probably wasn’t just a fetish. At the risk of giving away the ending, that’s not descriptive of Ethan. At best, the urge to read him as a trans woman feels like a trauma response—to have seen yourself depicted as a man in a dress so many times that, when faced with an actual man in a dress, you can’t help but feel you’re looking in a mirror. At worst, it feels like a stubborn refusal not just to understand, but even to want to understand another trans woman’s experience. I find this troubling.

I’ve expressed to friends before that it feels like the transfem identity has splintered rapidly in the last several years (I couldn’t help but wonder if anyone else at the premiere knew about the other group of trans women that call themselves dolls). This is probably natural and even a good thing, but it troubles me that this splintering is so often acrimonious. One significant source of enmity arises from Blanchardism itself, as online trans lesbians have lamented (often with good reason) that straight trans women seem happy to accept the dubious privilege afforded by the typology, even to the point of distancing themselves from their lesbian sisters. Nonetheless, when this concern fuels a slanted misreading that casts the film as a bigoted swipe at the out-group, and invites all the ensuing online castigation, it can only serve the same end—to deny the possibility of empathy between groups of trans women. There are likely several legitimate criticisms of Envy/Desire, and I’m hardly going to argue that everyone ought to have the same reaction to it as I did, but I would encourage everyone—particularly trans women—to see the film,3 and to approach it with an open mind. You might have fun, and, cringe and lib as it may be, the project of engaging in empathy through art is rarely a wasted effort.

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