George Orwell did not write that ‘people sleep peaceably in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf,‘ but it’s too late, the idea is already under my skin.
Assuming that you don’t plan on being a rough man, what determines where you stand? What determines whether you – or I – get to be one of the people peaceably sleeping in bed, or one of the objects of violence? in an increasingly hostile world, who gets to be inside the circle of protection, and who is outside it? I really like Fall’s ‘I Sexually Identify As An Attack Helicopter’ and Rumfitt’s ‘Tell Me I’m Worthless’ because they offer twin accounts of how that inside/outside dynamic gets constructed, at least in terms of the role that gender/transness plays (which is, of course, only a small part of this inside/outside dynamic).
In my reading of Fall’s ISIAAAH, a big part of the horror comes from co-optation of transness as a tool of war. It runs as a drumbeat throughout the work:
But how often—really—do you think about the grand strategy of gender? The mess of history and sociology, biology and game theory that gave rise to your pants and your hair and your salary? The casus belli? Often, you might say. All the time. It haunts me. Then you, more than anyone, helped make me.
When society was ready to accept plastic gender, and scientists were ready to manipulate it—the military found a new resource. Armed with functional connectome mapping and neural plastics, the military can make gender tactical. If gender has always been a construct, then why not construct new ones?
Listen: I exist in this context. To make war is part of my gender.
Throughout, Fall is deeply concerned about how a more plastic idea of gender and transness gets snared and caught up by the militarised state, the moment it takes (sic) wing. We (as trans people) have fought all our lives for recognition, and the state recognised us, and said actually yes, we can use this and incorporate it in such a way as to make war better, to commit genocide. Barb, the narrator, describes the long-term objective of their attack helicopter’s strikes as ‘attack[ing] the demographic skill curve’, using their gendered identification with a tool of violence to better avoid air defences and fire guided missiles at schools (I can’t help but remember that the Israeli Air Force is, right now, using similar tactics to enact genocide in Gaza).
Sure, this gives rise to new forms of gender policing – Axis, Barb’s copilot and gunner, is dysphoric – their ‘militarized gender conditioning is malfunctioning’, that’s bad for mission survival, and must be corrected – but a lot of what Barb describes is phrased in terms of euphoria and fulfilment. The state looked at them and decided that actually, it would accept you as a trans person inside the circle of protection, because you were useful at kinetically reinforcing its boundaries.
This goes beyond ideas of homonationalism, Jasbir Puar’s idea that queer rights get weaponised as a tool of Western nationalism and xenophobia (often against a non-white or Muslim ‘other’) – instead, it’s a more specific incorporation of transness and gender plasticity into this military strategy. Similarly, I can’t help but remember how the UK national security state explicitly targets neurodivergent women because of their supposed good fit for espionage and monitoring work. The image of the trans weapons developer with xir ‘progress pride flag Lockheed Martin socks‘ is overstated, and that tide feels like it’s ebbing (Lockheed Martin sells socks with F35s on them, but no pride ones any more 🙁), but it is an idea with political currency, if only for a limited class/race group.
So – again – the horror of ISIAAAH is, at least for me, is one of inclusion. While the state is preparing its armed lifeboat against climate collapse (protecting the lucky few aboard, and, in the words of Finnish ecofascist Pentti Linkola (quotation is not endorsement!!!), preparing to ‘take the ship’s axe and sever the extra hands that clutch at the sides’), it looks you, the compliant and lucky trans subject, dead in the eye and says ‘sure! you are useful; I will take your transness and affirm it and provide gender-affirming care and use it all against Them, such that we can all sleep peaceably in our beds.’
What about Tell Me I’m Worthless?
TMIW is a much longer text than ISIAAAH – I can’t do the whole thing justice, but I’ll talk about a bit of it. Rumfitt is also concerned with the horror of being inside the circle of protection, inside Albion, inside the House that is haunted by the spirit of fascism:
The House spreads. Its arteries run throughout the country. Its lifeblood flows into Westminster, into Scotland Yard, into every village and every city. It flows into you, and into your mother. It keeps you alive. It makes you feel safe. Those same arteries tangle you up at night and make it hard for you to breathe. But come morning, you thank it for what it has done for you, and you sip from its golden cup, and kiss its perfect feet, and you know that all will be right in this godforsaken world as long as it is there to watch over you.You, too, are implicated in its presence. Don’t forget that. You, me. Those you love.
Alice, one of the protagonists, is racist, and between her (more overt) antipathy towards Brandon (her friend’s boyfriend, who is black), and her (more covert – ‘decide[d] to be a joke only after she has already thought it’) antisemitism towards her friend Ila, she is an active participant in the maintenance of this great grotesque monstrosity of Albion, ‘reproducing fascism over and over and spreading it as rain across this nightmarish island we call Britain.’
But while the US military that offers ‘tactical-role gender reassignment’ in ISIAAAH offers at least nominal inclusion, Albion in TMIW is much more openly abusive and full of contempt to those who come seeking shelter in it:
The world outside is dark and unknowable. In the room you are safe. You are subject to violence, abuse, mistreatment, hurt, pain, all of the above, but you are safe from what is outside the room and that is what matters, inside the room is the pain you know, outside the room is the pain you do not know, it’s not a hard choice to make in the end.
… they have forgotten have they not they forget what keeps them here safe from the outsiders. I will rise up again …
Albion, ‘the bloody heart of England’, is cruel to those it harbours, but wins affection by saying ‘at least you’ll be safer with me’, and promising greater performative and actual cruelty to others, even others within the system (this is, of course, a particularly British political strategy). But ultimately, there is no place for them.
There’s a terrifying chapter towards the end of TMIW (most of them so far have been titled with the perspective of the narrator – ‘Alice’, ‘Ila’, ‘House’ – this one is titled ‘You’) that breaks down into an almost stream-of-conscious narration of what the House wants for the world, namely that
We have to secure a future for our children, he tells himself. We have to secure a future for our children and our land. We have to secure a future for our children and our green and pleasant land, our Jerusalem, a picture of Powell on the wall of every classroom in England, yearly competitions to see who will get to read rivers of blood on Radio 4 this year, which is the highest of honours that can be bestowed to man (or woman! Let’s not be sexist here).
I can’t do this section justice – and can’t quote the whole thing – safe to say that Rumfitt captures the fascist id very well. Ultimately, there is no inclusion or cooptation here – our protagonists are vanished, mutilated, and remade because the rough men (or women! Let’s not be sexist here) want to hurt, to revel in a cruelty and sadism that reproduces Albion. Our protagonists leave the circle of protection/are placed outside it – and suffer horrible violence done to them because of it. If ISIAAAH was horrifying because the state found your transness conditionally useful in reproducing itself, TMIW draws a lot of its horror from the fact that Albion just hates you.
I started writing this – 1416 words ago, yikes – because a friend, R, wrote that ‘I would be interested to hear about how [TMIW] is politically important and has changed your views on the world.’ So, with Leah’s book reports written, I want to answer her.
Both the inclusionary and exclusionary futures terrify me. I know what the latter does – whether it’s the extremes of mass violence that I teach students about, or more indirect structural killing done by austerity and the politics of ‘you are outside the circle of protection, not someone the state exists to protect’. But the inclusionary side is horrifying to me as well – even if we are not ourselves attack helicopters, there is something evil, Mark-of-the-Beast-ish about being one of the people on the inside, about sleeping peaceably in one’s bed while direct or structural violence is done in your/in my name. For all that I’m trans – and thus one of Albion’s targets – I’m also white, middle class, in the Global North, in a country built on imperialist extraction and resulting mass death, typing this on a laptop dependent on conflict minerals and powered by fossil fuels. I am inside, and beneficiary, of a machine built to do this, and – to a greater or lesser extent – you are too, dear reader. And, in a warming world – when, as Fall describes, ‘climate and economy and pathology all [go] finally and totally critical’ – I fear this will only get starker.
So why do I like these two works? Not for the politically useless self-flagellation I indulged in above – but because it helps me to think about the world today. Albion and the Attack Helicopter are extremes, but they help me to navigate between this future of cooptation/complicity, and exclusion/cruelty. I go between the two – I’ve often felt like I live in Fall’s world, and my privilege gives me cause to worry I’m still there, but increasingly, the collapse of the ideological landscape into phantasmagoria of based/cruel/strong national/nationalist security and simpering blue-haired Hamas sympathisers makes me wonder if actually we are closer to what Rumfitt suggested. And – horrifying though that is, there’s something clarifying about that. I won’t go into the epilogue of TMIW, but suffice to say that Albion drops its pretence of loving the protagonists (even as it hates them), and tries directly to kill them. And it doesn’t work – ‘the future will be red-tinted and unknowable, but they will be together.’ Just before the epilogue, Rumfitt asks us
Do you think they’ll be okay, in the end? I think they will be. I have to think they will be.
And I think that’s clarifying in a way – optimistic, even. The House is still there – but it’s dropped some of its pretences, unmasked itself for what it truly is.
What does this actually do for me, politically? What is to be done against the twin figures of Albion and Attack Helicopter (not write meandering mid-tier cultural criticism, that’s for sure)? I don’t know – at least, not in any way that I can clearly articulate here. But it’s a start.