The fugue of counter-subjectivation, a four-part exercise in non-binary trans auto-analysis
Author: Liz Escalle-Dyachenko, Université Paris Nanterre
1.
What is a countersubject? In the music analysis classes I took when I was a teenager, I learned that a countersubject is a typical – though not obligatory – feature of the fugue, a polyphonic musical form based on the imitation of a melodic theme: the subject. When present in a composition, a countersubject continues, contrasts and sustains the subject through its many variations. Back in my days at the music school, we were supposed to marvel at the mastery of the great-white-cisgender-male-composers-of-the-Western-classical-tradition™: how they were able to display a consummate use of counterpoint to escalate tension in the fugue before resolving it in a grandiose final gesture, a coda that successfully brought home the melodic fragmentation and the contradictions of the piece.
In her autobiographic essay How we desire, the lesbian war journalist Carolin Emcke recalls her teenage fascination with the fugue, in which she found an analogy for understanding her sexuality:
“[…] learning a musical language, analysing the world of fugue, a world concerned with questions of model and imitation, norm and difference, the appropriation of a theme—all [that] things were silently gnawing at me. Glenn Gould may have complained that the fugue ‘is not a form as such, in the sense that the sonata (or, at any rate, the first movement of a classical sonata) is a form’, but to me that seemed its great benefit, making it a model for the way I saw desire—not a form, ‘but rather an invitation to invent a form’” (Emcke 2018: 118).
As a non-binary trans person and someone who was trained to become a professional musician, I have also found myself more than once captivated by the seemingly utopian and disidentificatory possibilities of the fugue. A methodology rather than a form, counterpoint indeed seems to suggest interesting transpositions when it comes to navigating sex and gender in everyday life. After all, gendered social interactions, as well as polyphonic compositions, are made up of different sets of voices, materially dependent on the largely predetermined ground of their entering in various kinds of relationships, yet relatively autonomous in their singular agency: as such, the dramaturgy of each social event may arouse contradictory responses, such as the will to control and the will to give in.
Once you’ve been assigned a sex at birth, what space and time can you crave and find to invent alternate way of engendering your subjectivity, without becoming absolutely illegible in the social realm? Which kinds of counter-subjectivation can help you materialize the possibility of a variation, and invent aliveableforms of life, without relying on the fantasy of pure individual choice?
2.
A few months ago, as I was checking out of a gardening and DIY shop in the small town where I live in the French Alps, the cashier – a woman in her 30s, just about my age – started to panic as she gave me my change, because she didn't know how to address me properly. “Thank you, Miss… Sir… Madam… Sir… I don't know what [sic] you are!" she finally blurted out, as if out of breath. To my own surprise, I found myself replying calmly, “Neither do I”. We both burst out laughing with relief, a reaction that would repeat itself with different people every time I told this story. What does this chain of reactions suggest about the “wounded attachment”, to use Wendy Brown's term (1993), that each of us more or less willingly maintains to the binary engendering of our social worlds, a way of categorizing that continually fails to achieve its purpose? Of course, the cashier had to thank her customers formally, according to French etiquette and workplace protocol, while I really wanted to end an uncomfortable conversation that could potentially escalate into a verbal or physical aggression, something that had happened to me more than once in such situations.
Sure, my gender illegibility to the cashier represented the vanishing point of how we talked and laughed together, but what struck me in this and many other instances – like the time my presence was challenged out loud in the men's and women's restrooms on the same day in particularly dehumanising terms – is that I don't really look androgynous at all. I was assigned male at birth, transitioned in my early twenties, and for many years “passed” most of the time in public places as a cis woman without having my identity constantly questioned, unless I revealed that I was trans. But around three years ago, when I started presenting more butch – because that is what is truly giving me perspective these days, and simply how I understand myself in terms of gender and desire – my long-ago acquired passing was broken and I started being identified very randomly as a cis man or woman, a trans man, or an “ungendered [non-genrée, sic]” person. In short, anything but a (butch) trans woman or a non-binary trans person, the identity labels I would reclaim for myself.
All of this strikes me as yet another re-enactment of the situation once summed up in a memorable phrase by the non-binary Transsexual Menace activist Riki Wilchins in their first memoir: "What if they gave a sex and nobody came?" (1997: 56). As Wilchins notes, this kind of everyday gender crisis is not a mere bug in the social production of our imperialist and capitalist Western societies, but the necessary impulse for the reproduction of their kind of foundational disciplinary practices:
“Sex! is a cultural command that all bodies understand and recognize themselves in a specific way, an identification of our bodies that we are forced to carry around and produce on demand. To participate in society, we must be sexed […] There is an entire social apparatus whose sole purpose is to determine, track and maintain my sex. Perhaps sex is not a noun at all. Perhaps it is really a verb, a cultural imperative—as in "Sex yourself!"—in the face of which, none of us has a choice (ibid. : 56-57)
Riki Wilchins believed in the necessity of refusing the question altogether – with a good laugh. This had remarkable consequences for their political vision of gender liberation: it made them defiant of the possible reification of trans identities and an advocate for a collective struggle to dismantle all kinds of binarism. Only such a shared will for bodily autonomy, they argued, could unite all sex and gender minorities, including but not limited to intersex, trans, non-binary and genderqueer people:
This is why I am at pains to point out, wherever I speak, that I am not a transsexual, nor am I interested in a transgender rights movement, one which, unable to interrogate the fact of its own existence, will merely end up cementing the idea of a binary sex, which I am presumed to somehow transgress or merely traverse […]. It is my larger agenda to fight [the] cultural machinery which categorizes, stigmatizes, and then marginalizes minorities, rather than to fight for the rights of one particular category over another (ibid: 67-68).
3.
I am a transsexual. It was the first word that allowed me to make sense of the fact that I was not a boy, despite the sex I had been assigned at birth. I wrote the phrase shakily in my teenage diary, “I am a male-to-female transsexual”, and "just as night is not the opposite of day, but rather the scansion of its pulse, so male and female are nothing but nuances that blur into each other in many meaningful ways” – I quote from memory. But “transsexualism” was also the diagnosis written on a certificate I received from a renowned psychiatrist in my early twenties, the paper I needed to get a hormone prescription covered by my health insurance. Being a white, middle-class, educated person certainly helped me find the right wording: I didn't mention that I'd been on a DIY hormone therapy on my own for a while, or that I had ambiguous feelings about how our society perceives “women” in general. I really just said that I was sure that I was a girl, perhaps not as straight as the clinical categories would have it – I quickly moved on to another subject – but a “girl” nonetheless, with no doubt about which side of the gender binary I fell in. By the time when, about ten years later, I grew definitely tired of such gender expectations, I was still very afraid that my endocrinologist would decide to revoke my feminizing hormone treatment because of my non-binary gender expression.
Many trans girls in Euro-American trans communities are now reclaiming the word "transsexual" because they feel the need to focus on the realities of transition in cases like the one I just evoked. See, for example, Luce DeLire and her provocative idea of redefining “Nature” as a trans woman:
[…] “nonbinary,” “gender fluid,” “trans,” “transgender,” and many other terms are understood in deliberate distinction from “transsexuality” as kinds of transition without or independently of body modification and medical intervention (such as hormone treatments and surgeries). Consequentially, due to its high affective impact and its political currency, I think we should appropriate the term, rather than avoiding it. Yet that appropriation doesn’t have to describe individual identities. “Transsexuality” is a social paradigm. It does not (necessarily) describe individual people (DeLire 2024).
This is a very meaningful paradigm for trans people who face binary gender expectations on a daily basis, and especially for trans women who continually face the double and unattainable standards of transmisogyny because, as trans activist Julia Serano puts it, it forms the crux of their oppression:
[…] individuals on the trans female/feminine spectrum are culturally marked, not for failing to conform to gender norms per se, but because of the specific direction of their gender transgression - that is, because of their feminine gender expression and/or their female gender identities (Serano 2012).
But where do we find in this scheme a place for the effective transitions of trans women and trans people assigned-male-at-birth who do not fit easily into the binary opposition of 'male/masculine' and 'female/feminine' sex and/or gender identities? As I cut my hair and started to look more and more butch, I became less and less legible, not only in terms of gender identity, but also in terms of my transition narrative. The fact that I had at some point - to my greatest satisfaction - undergone gender-affirming surgery, which had been the focus of almost all unwanted curiosity about my life when I presented more feminine, became less and less a crucial part of my story, as most people couldn't imagine that I had somehow “changed my sex” because they weren’t sure if I had a “sex” at all.
In his Countersexual Manifesto, philosopher Paul B. Preciado proposes a new queer social contract for “a countersexual society committed to the systematic deconstruction of naturalised sexual practices and the gender system” (2018: 21). The idea is simple: “in the beginning was the dildo”. (ibid: 22). While it may seem that Preciado is arguing for the artificiality of sex itself, it is important to understand that what he is actually arguing against is the artificiality of the sex/gender system as a way of mastering the expansiveness of both sex and gender through the use of binary narratives. Perhaps we should be wary of the master narratives of both transsexualism AND gender transition. After all, as Lea Rivière beautifully writes, outside of these fictions we are “not trans in the forest”:
TRANS is the name of the difference between the strange, moving, unfinished thing that I am and the rather ambitious project of making the profuse multiplicity of animal life forms coincide in two ambiguous categories. it is the name of a structural failure of our imagination (Riviere 2024: 41).
4.
Non-binary trans people are (a)sexual beings just like any other living creature on this earth. And music is everywhere, it seems, not just in what we call “music” as opposed to so-called “noise”. It seems to me that being excluded practice from the realm of intelligibility within straight, cissexist assumptions of what it means to be a sexual subject calls for new ways of conceptualizing such an exclusion, just as we need to hold space for musical counter-subjectivations that are not taken into account in dominant ways of thinking musical subjectivity. Historian Jules Gill-Peterson introduced in her book A Short History of Trans Misogyny the term trans-feminized to “describe what happens to groups subjected to trans misogyny”, including people who “did not, or still do not, wish to be known as trans women” (2024: 13). Would it be possible to think what it means to be constantly non-binarized for trans people like us within such an analytic of social engendering?
While it is certainly true that to be a non-binary trans person is to find oneself outside of the social positions assigned and enforced by the gender binary since before we were born, I would argue that it is all too easy to forget that non-binary trans people also have moving bodies capable of feeling and being felt. Indeed, when our embodied selves are reduced in discursive practices to questions of identity or even expression, they are too often stripped of their own erotic agency and objectified as the transgressive promises of future gender developments for gender-conforming people, rather than effectively described as complex subjects prone to pleasure, doubt, growth and self-determination. In such instances, what Julia Serano calls “oppositional sexism”, “the belief that female and male are rigid, mutually exclusive categories, each possessing a unique and nonoverlapping set of attributes, aptitudes, abilities, and desires” (2007: 13) is certainly at play, but with a peculiar twist. Indeed, these categories are also totalizing, as they are supposed to describe all sexual subjects and divide them according the gender binary: it is this dynamic that non-binarize those of us who fall outside gender norms, and the reason why we have to counter the denial of our own subjectivies.
I think it might be useful to extend Audre Lorde's insights in her essay “Uses of the erotic” (1978) beyond women to all people who experience oppositional sexism in our societies. Do we have a “sex” at all when the vast majority of institutions – be it the state, medical power, cultural practices or our families – are based on a dual, oppositional and strictly separated concept of sex and/or gender? Countries that offer a third gender option in legal records are still the exception, and there is still no country that doesn't assign sex at birth. Unconsenting surgeries are regularly performed on intersex children to make their otherwise healthy bodies readable in terms of sex characteristics – as if natural sexual variations would be impossible to live with. On the other hand, trans people of all ages are denied gender-affirming surgeries if they do not conform to the expectations of a particular transition narrative that maintains a strict masculine/feminine binary hierarchy as the dominant structure of society, without allowing subjectivity to be in motion during the course of one’s life.
This kind of restrictive understanding of sex/gender is what Audre Lorde calls "pornography" in her essay (ibid). Indeed, while gender nonconforming and intersex bodies are systematically placed outside of “sex” as a metonymy for the gender binary, they are also imbued with constrictive sexual meanings – "confused, trivial, psychotic, and plasticized sensations" (ibid.), as Lorde writes. On television and in magazines, non-binary trans people are both objects of fascination and repulsion: we are both monsters and exciting fantasies in the constant spectacle of sex and gender extraction. This is why it could be so important for us, as non-binary trans people, to rethink our everyday lives in terms of our own eroticism. As Lorde writes, “the erotic is the nurturer or nursemaid of all our deepest knowledge” (ibid.). Because of the pressures to conform we experience in our lives, we are constantly inventing counter-strategies to effectively access, build and maintain health care, work, friendship and family. We are constantly creating new ways of affirming and expressing who we are in order not only to survive but to thrive. We have, in Audre Lorde's words, “a capacity for joy” (ibid.) through sincerity of feeling, awareness, and a deep loving connection with other living beings.
CODA.
This exercise in auto-analysis does not beg any kind of resolution. Rather, I meant it as a practice of freedom, an attempt to think through my contradictions and the questions raised in my everyday life as a non-binary trans person. As a librarian, I know one or two things about the consequences of classifying knowledge. I do really wonder: what if trans and non-binary lives were about individual and collective counter-subjectivation beyond the binary? Could it be yet another way to describe the erotic fugue of our lives, without negating our differences when we want to stand in solidarity with each other? I leave the last words to Leslie Feinberg and hir non-binary trans butch wisdom:
We are a movement of masculine females and feminine males, cross-dressers, transsexual men and women, intersexuals born on the anatomical sweep between female and male, gender-blenders, many other sex and gender-variant people, and our significant others. All told, we expand understanding of how many ways there are to be a human being […].
Our struggle will also help expose some of the harmful myths about what it means to be a woman or a man that have compartimentalized and distorted your life, as well as mine. Trans liberation has meaning for you – no matter how you define or express your sex or your gender (Feinberg 1998: 5).
Bibliography:
Brown Wendy (1993), “Wounded Attachments”, Political Theory, 21(3), 390-410, <https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591793021003003>
DeLire Luce (2024), “Towards a Transsexual Understanding of Nature”, e-flux journal, #46, <https://www.e-flux.com/journal/146/613810/towards-a-transsexual-understanding-of-nature/>
Emcke Carolin (2018 [2013]), How We Desire, translated by Taylor Imogen, Melbourne: Text Publishing Company.
Feinberg Leslie (1998), Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue, Boston: Beacon Press.
Gill-Petersonberg Jules (2024), A Short History of Trans Misogyny, London: Verso.
Lorde Audre (1978), The Uses of the Erotic: the Erotic as Power, Freedom: The Crossing Press.
Preciado Paul B. (2018 [2000]), Countersexual Manifesto, translated by Dunn Kevin Gerry, New York: Columbia University Press.
Riviere Léa (2024), L’odeur des pierres mouillées, Rennes: Éditions du Commun. My translation.
Serano Julia (2007), Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, Emeryville: Seal Press.
Serano Julia (2012), “Trans-misogyny primer”, Whipping Girl: Julia Serano’s blog,
<https://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2012/04/trans-misogyny-primer.html>
Wilchins Riki (1997), Read my Lips, New York: Firebrand Books.
All internet links were last accessed on the 6th of April, 2025.