This is a collection of columns written by Preciado over the course of several years, mostly about European politics (focusing on France, Spain, and Greece), trans and queer issues, and reproductive rights. Preciado is a philosopher, professor, and museum curator who has lived a fairly nomadic life. He identified as a lesbian for most of his life, then began taking testosterone but was uninterested in being pinned down by a gender label, and then ultimately conceded to getting legally recognized as a man in order to avoid some practical challenges (like people always getting confused and questioning him/getting him patted down when he showed his passport that identified him as a woman). His parents are/we conservative Catholics, but they have been working on their relationship and his parents have since voted for more progressive gender/sexuality causes.
One thing I distinctly remember is that in Spain, when someone gets a gender marker and name change, they are announced in the newspaper alongside all of the other births for the day, and their birth certificate is destroyed. They become legally newborn, in some ways, even though they are already existing. I know in at least some parts of the U.S., you have to “publicly declare your intention to change your name,” but my friends say that in their experience, that just means putting up a note on a bulletin board in the county courthouse. So, it’s technically public but not really.
An excerpt:
“The first person to learn it [the name change going through], before my lawyer, was my mother. She read the paper, as she does every morning, and saw this name mentioned in the birth announcements. She panicked….She called me up: ‘What’s this all about?’ My mother was witnessing my birth, once again. In a way, she brought me back into the world, this time as a reader. She gave birth to her son, born outside her body, as printed text.”
I also think the introduction to the book is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever read. I think it does all of the things The Argonauts does that people praise it for, but written from a trans perspective instead of being a cis woman exploiting a trans person’s story and identity. (Even though Nelson’s partner offered extensive comments on early drafts and even contributes writing to the book, he also describes Nelson writing about him as akin to subjecting an epileptic to a strobe light. So, I think the lines of consent are problematic at best, given the enormous pressure he must have been under to be okay with her writing a book about their lives together, given that she is a professional memoirist.)
The introduction interweaves personal narrative, dreams, theory, philosophy, history, and poetry. The first sentence is, “As the years passed, I learned to think of dreams as an integral part of life.” If we spend 1/3 of our lives asleep, why not? He then describes a dream that stuck with him about having apartments on all of the planets, but not being able to afford it. The person he was talking to recommended he give up the apartment on Uranus. Upon waking, he researched the planet, and discovered the term Uranism, a term coined by Ulrichs to mean “being of the third sex” or being gay. Uranians were conceived of as feminine souls in masculine bodies drawn to masculine souls. As a Roman god, Uranus’s gender and sexuality are complex— Venus arises directly from his castrated genitals. Preciado says he cannot give up the apartment on Uranus. He sees his trans identity as a new form of Uranism. He “brings news from Uranus,” which is not, as the West originally thought, the ceiling of the world (a la Dante’s Paradiso).
He says he did not start taking testosterone to become a man. He did not view it as “treating” a medical condition of “gender dysphoria.” He rejects what he calls the pharmacopornographic system. He says he took testosterone to “become unrecognizable” by that system, to begin adventuring beyond gender. Only the material constraints of a gender-binary world eventually forced him to shape himself (in part) to masculinity.
I would like to read Testo Junkie, his autotheory book about his use of testosterone.