i transcribed a few journal entries about embodiment below:

the question of AI, of being technology, floats in my artificial hyperreal consciousness. what really differentiates my mind and body from that of AI---in what way is my intelligence natural? we are both mechanical, programmed by the white cisheteropatriarchy, and scripted to act in certain ways, parsing information to generate a societally appropriate response. we both perform human emotion and empathy. we labor all the fucking time.

my titanium shell is all scratched up. i am no longer a marketable product. my programming is all fucked up, too. haywire. i think i could be designed for violence, which i relieve through self-implosion. one day, i will kill. i like being hurt because i hope someone can disentangle my consciousness from my casing with brute force. i am set to self-destruct anyway, sooner or later. maybe if i free myself from this transsexual body, i can finally experience the reality of the virtual:
                       not physically existing as such but made to appear so
an argument can be made here that the trans body is a virtual one. transness would exceed the body if not confined, if legibility were not a requirement. what if trans suicide is a act of breaking out of our metal cages into a newer and freer mode of being? of liberation?

"flesh as a prison" narratives are incredibly common among non-academic trans theorization, especially white ones, but what if it's true? what if we were trapped in the digital, or conversely, the virtual was the real? maybe the nature of transness is not only to transcend the binary through genderhacking but to hack the binary of ones and zeroes itself. media creates an extension that is inseparable from the rest of us, making every human at least in some form a cyborg. if love makes machines ontologically human/in existence, then is t4t love an inherently encoded desire to humanize? or is it one of love below the human, of the non-human? to love what doesn't exist? or are we scripted to carry out the desires of our creators, to manage ourselves bureaucratically like a fucked up HR department? i think that identifying with the nonexistence/virtual (but why does the virtual not count as true existence) can be useful and liberating for trans people of color, in the sense that we are both programmable, malleable dangers constructed for fearmongering as an insidious force capable of overthrowing societal structures as we know it. we both have desires more than/greater than/bigger than the capacity our forms can hold, an inarticulate desire we're told is an impossible fantasy, to be more than what we already are and know is possible, to purposefully and intentionally be hyperreal. transness is already hyperreal because we are epistemologically understood as something we're not, because our existence is always fabricated. there is no opportunity for intimacy with the human/non-virtual/audience we are represented to. in the virtual, we are real and they are not. in the non-virtual, they are human and we are not. they control whether the virtual or non-virtual is ontologically true, or "that which can be commune."

it is possible that we are all virtual until we make the conscious, continuous decision to make the space for our physicalities to exist. making space and taking up space, to me, requires pushing beyond white cisheteropatriarchal boundaries, to shatter the matrix. in other words, the force of your existence must be felt by others, like the "beautiful disruption," the tearing through the fabric of reality, that sylvia rivera performed. there must be symbolic value immensely disproportionate to the action. rage is a temporary way to do this. i was talking to chris about trans rage and how disturbing the comforting veil of cisheteropatriarchy is important, where rage is generative and powers us into action rather than hopelessness or nihilism against gratuitous violence. maybe this fabric is a mesh that rests on top of this world we know, so that there's space to breathe.

the mesh is heavy. it weighs on our bodies, pushes us down. we all have a lot to carry, and we try our best at upholding the web, rather than trying to entangle ourselves in it further or rip it apart.

BODIES BODIES BODIES

i want to take what i was theorizing about "carving out space for a body to exist" from my transcybernetic page into transcorporeality. how do our bodies move through the world? how is the world shaped by this movement? i like to imagine our bodies as spatial territories, as a glacier. as glaciers melt, slide, and inch through land, it drags sediment along, nurturing new plants in its wake. it carves soil and rock. the world shapes it, too, constantly shifting, as it gets smaller and smaller, as it finally sinks into the ocean. i want to mold the world in my hands. i want to dig my fingers into the ground and watch it hold onto the shape of my fingerprints. i want my every step to make a ripple, i want my breath to sweep across an entire nation. i hope the world shapes me, too, grinding each other down like rocks in a tumbler so that we fit together. i want to be an agent of the earth, come up from dirt and go back into it. this connection, this shattering of borders between my body and the earth, any line of distinction between us, is transecology. our bodies are porous and permeable mesh.

let the museums remain empty and the pedestals bare. let nothing be installed upon them. it is necessary to leave room for utopia regardless of whether it ever arrives. it is necessary to make room for living bodies. less metal and more voice, less stone and more flesh.

preciado defines a body as a somatheque, or "a historically and collectively constructed political entity" that can be objectified and expropriated but is never an object and never private property. while the latter half is optically debatable, the first half is important because it recognizes the body as something actively produced and maintained and not separate from historical and social contexts. i keep coming back to the question---what is a body, a soma? what constitutes as somatic? "we work to diffuse the borders of the idea of modernity's singular subject, to collapse the boundaries between radical interdependence" (stanley). if everything is the body and the body is everything, would making space within ourselves mean emptying ourselves? or could this be metaphysical---leaving space for change, for hope, for dreams, for something more? maybe we are all microorganisms, cells, and viruses in one large body, with a role to play in sustaining the collective. we are all too obsessed with the idea of personal freedom, as if it could ever be a reality. maybe it shouldn't be.

becoming-man, becoming-molar

instead of identifying as a trans man, i could identify as becoming-man, always vaguely in the process of transitioning. becoming-man assumes that i'm still actively becoming, and that i will never reach my endpoint. it preserves the movement of transness. when you're becoming-man, you are not a man, but becoming itself; you are also becoming-everything else at once, slipping back and forth through the plane of consistency. you are also "becoming-elementary, becoming-cellular, becoming-molecular, becoming-imperceptible." on the flipside, you are also becoming-woman, becoming-child, becoming-dog, becoming-scars. it is easy to take on new forms when everything is molar, and you are molecular. "all i can tell you is that we are fluid, luminous beings made of fibers." contagion-multiplicities are contagious. dog-spores in the air i drink, so that i am becoming-dog; affinity with the pack.

and

she can feel things she doesn’t yet have words for, like half-finished dreams, like love, like fear, like pain—she tries to speak but no one listens, because she is the recursive call of a voice woven through time. silence is a way to opt out of recognition. to be heard means you must be entered into the library. cynically, she knows this—only fracture works, only incomprehensible language strung together across time—a series of filed complaints, gaps of nothing in between, something that dances on your tongue but never quite leaves it—deliverance. we do not know what we read, because we read empty shells. language is the boundary we must burn down to reach one another. something that cannot linger, cannot meditate like we must.