"Researching transgender history helped me find that sense of belonging"
Susan Stryker, from Screaming Queens (2005)
Susan Striker seems, at first glance, improbable.
I'm no academic, but like Stryker I do a lot of digging through queer and trans history. Pre-transition I was searching for a glimpse of someone who looked like me and my hodgepodge of wants and needs. Post-transition I'm trying to understand the historical context that led to a life where I didn't transition until my late 40s. As I read through books and re-OCRed PDFs -- Stryker's name and work kept coming up.
I say improbable because when I entered the world of queer adults I ran smack into the TERFs of '90s feminism and was shoved deeper into self-denial about being, or being allowed to be, a girl. Meanwhile, at the same time, Stryker was running around San Franciso, an out trans woman and outspoken capital L Lesbian. Somehow able to claim that mantle even though a large (or perhaps, in retrospect, just loud) swath of lesbian culture despised trans women. The more Stryker's name came up the more I wondered how a woman could have managed to do everything she did.
Her new collection of essays, When Monsters Speak, edited and curated by McKenzie Wark, goes a long way towards answering that question.
The book features seventeen essays written by Stryker from 1992 - 2020. The essays are bookended by an introduction from Wark and a new interview between Wark and Stryker. Split into three sections, nine of the essays are autofiction and autotheory from Stryker's time in the "Trans San Francisco" of the late-1980s and 1990s. The second section dives into the formation of trans academic theory, and the book wraps up with a reprinting of Stryker's most famous essay and three others where, over the decades, she reflects on her words to Victor Frankenstein.
The San Francisco essays were, by far, where my interest was most piqued. They paint a picture of the bohemia that Stryker found herself in as she began to transition and, like so many of us, invent herself. Pulled from zines of the era and essay collections published in the decades that followed, these nine pieces read a bit like a blog. Wark, like myself, seems interested in the story of how Susan Stryker came to be the trans dyke counterfactual and these essays provide a satisfying answer to that.
The four essays in the middle of the book serve as a bit of a Rosetta Stone for trans feminists my age. Published between 2007 and 2013, Stryker speaks of the importance of Gayle Rubin in her formation, and via feminist and gender theory discusses the ways that theory fails trans people and how it might be expanded. Janice Raymond is discussed and dispatched to the fringe, where she belongs.
The inclusion of My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix is inevitable, and I appreciate Wark's framing it as a piece moving through time via Stryker's remembrances -- although I've found the best way to experience this seminal piece is to have a future lover read sections to you aloud on her couch.
After finishing the book I understand a bit more how my and Stryker's paths diverged.
Coming from the "knew as a child" branch of trans womanhood, Stryker was already plotting how she might make her desires real at eleven. I come from the "I don't know what's going on but nothing fucking works" branch of trans womanhood, and self-possession comes later for us. At eleven I was vaguely aware that transexuals existed but they seemed somehow unreal -- like astronauts, or happy people.
Fourteen years older than me, she was able to see the development of post-Transexual Empire TERF ideology in real-time and recognize it for what it was. Her early ambitions placed her in San Francisco during the formation of a queer underground that had a place for a trans lesbian. My early ambitions placed me in the east coast rust belt where queer culture was already being homonormalized, at a time when TERF ideology was received wisdom in the radical groups I found myself drawn to.
I find myself playing out the thought experiment of how I might have responded to a Stryker-like figure if she was transported to the kink scene of mid-late 2000s Portland, or if the lost girl I was then had been transported back to the dungeons and private parties of San Francisco in the '90s. I'm left with the uncomfortable regret of knowing that I would have been intimidated by her and embarrassed that I couldn't name or even see my desires clearly -- and that the younger Stryker would have had no time for a "part-timer" like me.
I don't wallow in this regret like I might have a year ago or blame any individual, including myself. The world is always against trans women and we do what need to do to survive. I do, however, think of the lost girls still out there and wonder what, if anything, we owe them.