The most generative theory I read in Prof. Hays Feminist Theory course in graduate school was Luce Irigaray’s essay-poem “When Our Lips Speak Together” from The Sex that Is Not One. It was the kind of text that I felt from within myself, not just one I wrangled with in the intellectual spaces of my brain. This got to me in a different way, and like poetry I could see myself reflected and refracted in it, shifting my interpretations with each read. I sensed I was a sex that was not one and found the possibility of myself in her critique of the gender binary.

If we continue to speak the same language to each other, we will reproduce the same stories…Get out of their language. Go back through all the names they gave you. I’m waiting for you. I’m waiting for myself. Come back. It’s not so hard. Stay right here and you won’t be absorbed into the old scenarios, the redundant phrases, the familiar gestures, bodies already encoded in a system.

I know I must. Getting out is survival. Irigaray’s critique is resonant with Rich’s: men have used language and philosophy to construct the subjectivity of women in their own image, and as a repository for all of their aversions and fears. (Western) writing about women, female, and the feminine, has silenced and erased actual women’s subjectivities and experiences. Women in poetry, stories and philosophy are not women, but mirrors and projections of male subjectivities.

As a feminist queer transman how can I use language against and between the gender binary, in generative synthesis? I’m turning it over and over in my mind, how these feminist thinkers and writers, in making space for women subjectivities, both gave me a sense of empowerment and a deep sense of alienation from my masculinity and male identity. I don’t know how to talk about it.

I am a mirror of a mirror, absorbing the projections of women’s fears about men, generated by men’s fears of women, my subjectivity defined as a choice, and a dangerous one (with questionable politics) at that. I’ve been feeling very alone in this journey.

Irigaray compels me in the way she tantalizes the reader with the possibility of authentic connection, a healing from split connections and fractured subjectivity. That the “you” and “I” that have been severed by gender, by fear, by power could actually be reunited. I find myself longing for such connection with another person, never realizing that it was a disconnection in myself that required care.

When you say I love you — right here, close to me, to you — you also say I love myself…This “I love you” is neither a gift nor a debt…This currency of alternatives and oppositions, choices and negotiations, has no value for us. Unless we remain in their order and reenact their system of commerce in which “we” has no place.

When I first read Irigaray I was lesbian-identified and the possibilities for authentic connection in the taboo of women’s sexual/love relationships with women seemed like my salvation. Maybe I could connect, I could reach, you, and thereby find myself.

But it turns out that’s not how love works, at least not the kind that doesn’t flame out in disappointment. Looking at the broader context of Irigiaray’s work more recently, I understand that she was not advocating lesbian separatism and in fact trying to make sense of how women, in a full empowered subjectivity, could engage in authentic relationships with other humans (including men). She later wrote a book called I Love to You where she articulates an alternative expression of love, between equal subjects. Her discussion of love in “When Our Lips Speak Together” used to read to me as advocating a total loss of one’s subjectivity in another person, a complete union in which there is no distinction between self and other, almost as if trapped in a feedback loop of blissful co-produced fantasy fulfillment. I read it differently now:

I Love You

Subject (writer) --> Object (fantasies / desires of the subject)

Male writers have constructed women in the image of their fear-desires

vs.

I Love to You

Subject (speaker) --> Subject (another person)

Love's existence is not dependent on the response of the loved

I’ve internalized the projections of others about who I am, who I should be, and who they need me to be. Coming out as a transman has broken their mirrors and my own need to find myself in the face of another.