The Appendix E-Book

Liam Konemann

• Herausgeber: 404 Ink
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Inklings
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 93

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

In April 2019, Liam Konemann idly began work on what he thought of as 'the appendix' - a record of ongoing transphobia in the UK that he came across. But when his mental health began to spiral, he turned his attention to a different topic instead: how do we find beauty in transmasculinity? And how do we maintain it in a world stacked against us? The Appendix explores transphobia in UK media, as well as the trauma of living in a society constantly debating you. Liam explains his time spent 'stealth' after moving to the UK, his false belief that witnessing the transphobia by documenting it would lead people to change their behaviours - that if he could only show them the effects on people like him, it would all stop - and the peaks and troughs of anxiety. More so, he turns the focus to the more positive representations and experiences, capturing - as he sought - the beauty in transmasculinity.

Leseprobe

The Appendix

Published by 404 Ink Limited

www.404Ink.com

@404Ink

All rights reserved © Liam Konemann, 2021.

The right of Liam Konemann to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without first obtaining the written permission of the rights owner, except for the use of brief quotations in reviews.

Please note: Some references include URLs which may change or be unavailable after publication of this book. All references within endnotes were accessible and accurate as of July 2021 but may experience link rot from there on in.

Editing: Heather McDaid & Laura Jones

Typesetting: Laura Jones

Cover design: Luke Bird

Co-founders and publishers of 404 Ink: Heather McDaid & Laura Jones

Print ISBN: 978-1-912489-40-4

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-912489-41-1

404 Ink acknowledges support for this title from Creative Scotland via the Crowdmatch initiative.

The Appendix

Transmasculine Joy in a Transphobic Culture

Liam Konemann

For my parents.

Contents

The Appendix

Content Note

Introduction: A Terrible Idea That Will Make You Sick

Chapter 1: Stealth

Chapter 2: Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Children?

Chapter 3: The Appendix

Chapter 4: Not ‘Born This Way’

Conclusion: On Joy

References

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Inklings series

Content Note

As comes with the territory of writing about a transphobic culture, please be aware that transphobia is detailed throughout The Appendix, in many ways and levels of detail, across the entire book.

Specific topics within that include:

Homophobic slurs (chapters 1, 4)

Murder (chapter 1)

Rape (chapter 1)

Sexual assault (chapter 1)

Transphobic slur (chapter 3)

Introduction: A Terrible Idea That Will Make You Sick

I was making the long trek back from the Royal Albert Hall.

I’ve long held the opinion that West London is a made-up place invented specifically to mess with me, but I was in a good mood anyway. I caught up with an old friend, the band we’d just seen were great, and I realised quite early on that there was an unknown bathroom just one floor up in the venue and I didn’t need to queue for the loo all evening. I wasn’t difficult to please.

It was late, but there were still a few mangled copies of a popular UK newspaper littered about the near-empty tube car. Flicking through one, I got to the arts pages and stopped at a review of Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein, which I’d been thinking of picking up. I couldn’t decide whether I wanted it enough to slightly inconvenience myself by having to read it in hardback, or if I should just wait for the paperback to come out like everybody else.

Foolishly, I thought the review might help me.

The first sentence or so was innocuous enough. But partway through, the reviewer got to the bit they really wanted to highlight. When revealing that Ry, Frankissstein’s main character, is transgender, they wrote, ‘of course!’ You could practically feel the eye-roll coming through the newsprint. I knew then I was going to have to add the review to the growing list of transphobia I was keeping on my phone, but even I was surprised at the turn the next paragraph took. I actually caught sight of myself reflected in the carriage windows opposite, my mouth gaping open like a shocked clown. My good mood evaporated.

I hadn’t drunk that much, but I took a picture of the review anyway so I could check it again in the morning. Maybe I misread it or was overreacting. I hoped it couldn’t possibly be as bad as it seemed in the moment.

The next day, in between waking up and getting into the shower, I opened up the photograph of the review, standing there in the bathroom with my phone in one hand and a bottle of shower gel in the other. I re-read the piece while I waited for the water to heat up. I was right the first time. The newspaperreally had described Ry like this:

S/he is called Ry, short for Mary (as in Mary Shelley), which makes you wonder why s/he isn’t called Ree, so as not to sound like Ryan. S/he started out female and has XY chromosomes, but has had upper body surgery, no prosthetics and testosterone supplements which gives Ry an elongated clitoris – two centimetres, I think – and a satisfactory sex life.

An ‘elongated clitoris’. Space in the arts pages of print newspapers is famously at a premium, meaning what gets reviewed – and who gets to review it – is hugely competitive. Imagine surmounting all of that, reading an entire novel, and then wasting three of your precious, finite words, commenting on the protagonist’s clitoris.

The little aside, ‘– two centimetres, I think –’, was almost comical. Here is the reviewer, sitting at their computer, painstakingly typing their query – ‘trans clitoris how long’ – into Google. One finger at a time, pecking out the letters with a furrowed brow. They would write the review and edit it, cutting out lines and phrases to meet the word count, and ultimately decide that their newfound knowledge of clitoris length absolutely had to stay. Presumably, multiple editors and sub-editors also decided it was necessary. The people of London needed to know what Ry’s genitalia looked like. How else could they be sure if the book was any good?

Aside from the frankly bizarre interest in the quality of a fictional trans character’s sex life, it was the dehumanising, almost moralising tone that struck me most. Nobody else in the media that I saw had referred to Ry as ‘S/he’. In the promotional blurbs for Frankissstein, as well as in other reviews, Ry is always ‘they’. Or, sometimes, just Ry. But whoever was covering the book at this particular publication had to make sure their readers understood that they personally weren’t quite clear on what, exactly, the character was. They would not deign to dignify the character through use of the singular ‘they’. They simply would not stand for it. Ry’s fictional body was crossing the boundaries of what they considered acceptable, and this reviewer would not allow them to get away with it.

In comparison with the other items on my list, this review wasn’t especially hateful. That was what made me so tired. The ugliness would rear its head in otherwise unsuspecting places. By now, I was so used to the media treating trans people as though we were delusional or dangerous that I’d inured myself to it. So, when someone wrote about people like me as though we were freakish, or just plain weird, it caught me off guard. It was like, Oh, yeah. You don’t think of me as quite human, do you?

The review was added to my list, but I didn’t open the document again that day. I left it the next day, too, and then next, and then weeks passed and I realised I was done. It had exhausted me. I felt othered, under siege. I had to stop.

The Appendix was over.

*

I don’t remember having the idea. I think it came to me in stages, surfacing like fragments of a dream, but I couldn’t say for sure.

The headlines had been building up, and at some point it seemed like we had to be approaching critical mass, but there’s always doubt with these things. A distrust in your own senses. Is it really so bad? Or is the fact that you can’t go two days without hearing about some new piece of hate just the amplification of an echo chamber? It could have been down to social media – I lost hours to the doom-scroll, clicking on handle after handle of increasingly more bigoted tweeters as though I was hoping to eventually reach the Big Boss. British transphobia’s Patient Zero. This process yielded nothing. Eventually I would get a grip and put down the phone or close my laptop, feeling unwelcome in the world.

Part of me needed to prove – even just to myself – that what I felt was true. That I wasn’t overreacting, being too sensitive, or imagining the volume of hatred both overt and insidious. I wanted to have something to point to as tangible proof. It seemed like a perfectly reasonable idea: when I came across a transphobic headline, comment, or news piece, I would add it to a list. I would file it by date, and note the outlet as well as any other key information, and then I would have inarguable evidence that I was right to be hurt.

To keep some sense of scientific integrity around the project, I had to set some boundaries. If I heard a rumour about something, or saw it hinted at on social media, I couldn’t go looking for it like I had previously. I was not allowed to Google anything, or deliberately read papers and columnists I knew to be transphobic. There would be no doom-scrolling. Anything that made the list had to come my way organically, in the natural movements of my day-to-day life.

On the first day, Monday, I recorded four headlines. By Wednesday, I had eight entries. There were the headlines, and a transphobic comment or two. There was also a tweet from an Australian rugby league player, who had shared a screenshot of a new story about one state making the gender on birth certificates optional, with the caption ‘The devil has blinded so many people in this world, REPENT and turn away from your evil ways.’

It was an unpleasantly strong start.

As the list got longer, I came to think of it, privately, as ‘The Appendix’. Appendix to what, I wasn’t sure. But it helped me to think this was in service of something bigger. More journalistic.

In hindsight, my new project was probably a symptom of my old anxiety. The urge to know things for sure, to identify and catalogue potential threats, always rears its head at times of stress. Was I stressed in the Spring of 2019? At the time I would have said no more so than usual, but it’s easy to see the correlation now. There were plenty of signs that my mental health wasn’t exactly robust.

That March, I spent a chunk of my savings on a week in New York, where I hoped to distract myself from the sad state of my personal life and come home restored, refreshed. The turbulence on the flight out, however, was so bad that I spent four of the eight hours completely rigid in my seat, gripping the armrests and breathing hard. When the plane suddenly dropped altitude, the girl behind me screamed, her meal tray flying past my elbow and three feet down the aisle. I looked down at the sad, wilted piece of lettuce next to my shoe, trying to dissuade myself that it was going to be one of the last things I ever saw. I really didn’t want to die staring at someone else’s depressing salad.