ngansuril

  Class Hatred in the Trans Community   As the crisis of capitalism escalates ever further, things get worse: the quality of manufacturing and services, imperialist war and genocide, the price of food, the surveillance state, our behaviour towards one another. An idealist might say that it is foolish, perhaps even offensive, to compare these things – but a materialist sees all of these things as connected. Everything is getting worse; it is because of the exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie, and it is getting very difficult for the average person to ignore that. I’ve been consciously trans for around 13 years, and during that time I have seen an evolution in the way trans people talk to one another. The trans community, online and offline, has undoubtedly changed – the words we use, the places we go (cyber or real), the meaning of ‘trans’. These past couple years, I have noticed two things. First, I have noticed an explosion in a kind of language people call ‘/...

  The Ones Who Come Back to Omelas  Asikea Ngansuril This is the second part of an earlier story I published, which you can read here .  I spent many months living by the seaside. I transferred jobs – still clerical work, though now in a department situated by the docks – in the hopes of never again having to see the Mausoleum of Prosperity. But no matter what I did to distract myself, I could not fight off the images that played in my mind: a bowl of cornmeal next to a pile of human faeces, skin stretched taught around swollen organs, the bones of a hundred children crammed in a tiny mass grave. To tell you the truth – and perhaps you may feel the same – I never really enjoyed work. One day, when I could bear the images in my head no longer, I said to a co-worker, ‘Do you have fun here?’ I thought better of my words the moment I said them. It wasn’t normal to say such things. Perhaps I was just flustered; she was disarming, approachable – as if she were fashioned from th...

For several years now, I have suffered periods of total hopelessness. I often lose weeks at a time to this feeling that my life can never get better. Hopelessness has become my default state of being; but, in those sublime few days in a given month where I can move through the world without being brought to tears, I am able to see a future where I am liberated. The hopelessness does not come from nowhere. I am a trans person. What is a trans person, or transgender, person? Dictionary definitions point to transgender being a feeling: “ transgender :  of, relating to, or being a person whose gender identity differs from the sex the person was identified as having at birth “ gender identity  :  a person's internal sense of being male, female, some combination of male and female, or neither male nor female” (Merriam-Webster) Perhaps  transgender , then, must refer to a variety of feelings. A trans person could be someone who was born with a penis, but wishes to be...