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This piece is an excerpt from the show DAKSHINA, a piece created for Red Eye Theater’s Isolated Acts cohort in the summer of 2025. The piece was created together with BakiBakiBaki, Sati, Aurora, Kristi, Paige, and me, aegor.

Trans people have always been here. Trans people have always been here. Trans people have always been here. As a form of means-testing, I find this argument eugenicist. What I mean is that I see the snide accountant at the end of this argument. He’s meting out my right to exist now based on how much I have proven my role as an ancient poet-priest eunuch, a dapper soldier of yore who fucked your wife, or a peacemaking sissy who kept the public at an arm’s distance to live a life of the mind.

It is more than ‘we are here now and that is enough.’ It is more, too, than ‘cis people don’t have to prove that they were warrior priestexxes to get funded through housing precarity.’

What I mean is that it takes courage, not pithiness nor distillation, to dream ourselves out of a sick society. That the only return or call to the past that I believe in is material, not ideological. That the spirit of belonging lives next to the spirit of expropriation. That the whole story of sacredness also contains violence. That these things are held within each other, that this disturbs the individualism that a statement like “trans people have always been here” takes on in an individualistic society.

Trans people have always been here? What were the conditions of their living? Of their here-ness? What did they have to broker for their safety? Did they have autonomy over how they were remembered? Who told their stories, and how?

“Cissexism is relatively new in human societies” is not as pithy or evocative. Is it true? Does it need to be?

Try this on for size: “trans people have done harrowing and brave things to survive and we will continue to, but at what cost?”

The cost is that for weeks I shower in the dark because my body feels like something happened upon it, and something did. I am able to think through my position, what it affords, the reality that my body is always tied to the narratives surrounding it. I stand on stolen land, high caste and a man. I resent that I also don't know how to get free without borrowing someone else's myth.

Trans people have always been here. It feels like whoever the ‘always’ is architected towards gets to decide when the clock starts. An institution, a field that power makes. I want to be a weed, that which runs wild without any tending. That which knows that wildness is its own tending. That which grows despite being named an aberration, because neither a Latin name nor a diagnosis can stop me from eating the sun and planting roots into the deep underneath. I do my best growing where no one can see.

There is a time before trans people and there is a time after us. I am hoping, by allowing my body to be a knot that time makes, I am wedging into the gap of the present. Making space, making an impression. I don't think we have any other choice.

(But if you said this to me in the dead of night, my lover, my friend, when I am crying out about my dicklessness or the betrayal of my body against the words given for it, if you held me to your chest and told me the story of a boy who found a way when the way was sealed shut, if you told me you see that boy in me, if you told me that every semblance was its own whole, if only for a moment, if only in the way that a moment becomes always, holds its own forever, I would feel you clearly and coolly as the wind on my face.)

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Puppies Puppies aegor rayDeán SantoAva Tuitt

CULTURE WEAPON

Online exhibition presented by Yearly Emerging Practices

Puppies Puppies
aegor ray
Deán Santo
Ava Tuitt

CULTURE
WEAPON

Online exhibition
presented by Yearly Emerging Practices