The last three weeks, every stranger I have come across has misgendered me, whether I’m femming it up or not. In the mirrored elevator doors at work my face looks tired, angular in all the wrong ways. With some unease, I recognize my dad in my reflection. Both my spiro and estro pills ran out today, and I’m flipping out. They’re probably going to arrive Monday, but they might have gotten lost in untracked airmail and what the fuck am I going to do if I’ve got to spend another Benjamin and wait three weeks more? I want to scream. I’m filled with steam. I’m warding off the desire to hit myself, and so I start daydreaming in my gray cubicle. I see a hijacked airliner turn and head directly towards my desk. I’m staring it down, making ridiculous arm gestures, calling it in like some sort of kamikaze air controller. There’s a loud flash, I disappear, and everything burns.

Being so qualitative, dysphoria is difficult to pin down exactly. A decent definition would be something like “intense unease in regards to (one’s) gender,” where gender is understood to include the entirety of sex, gender, and anatomy (since none exist outside of the discourses within which they are produced and they are all intimately interrelated). There is a tension, typically formulated as a contradiction between sex and gender, or between what one is, what one desires, and what one is not. Yet, a move away from positivity might help sidestep implicitly essentialist language while potentially opening up some new lines of thought.

Despair and hopelessness marks the quality of dysphoria, burning the border between the world and impossibility deep into me, making its omnipresence unbearably visible. Many other types of despair carry with it the seed of a hope that something possible (however unlikely) could fix the situation one despairs within: the cancer might go away, this ugly breakup could always turn around and spontaneously become a deep and lasting love, I might win the lottery so I can stop being in crushing debt, Obama might bring meaning to my life. Dysphoria carries with it no such thing. While there are despairs that do not carry this hope, the intensity, duration, and scope of gender dysphoria suggests that it is worth analyzing.

This conflict between actual and impossible does not exist in a vacuum, but exists precisely because of the naming-constructing-creating that is this world. The world creates its own impossibilities by its incessant productive categorization, as nothing fits its own definition. Everything is perpetually scratching at the walls, blindly, without any purpose. The intolerability that surrounds everything is also a graininess in everything. The border reveals itself as not one but two, a pair of overlapping shadows. The impossible existing and the longed-for nonexistent intersect here. While this graininess exists everywhere, dysphoria marks where this graininess comes into conflict with gender, and by extension the world and our constitution as subjects. Beyond not fitting the category we were assigned (I am not-this), it is our continually failing to be (I am not-that). This is where the rhetoric of the liberal transfeminist fails. I wasn’t born this way, and I can’t ever be either. Not-this would imply that dysphoria has a similarity with despair, sharing the commonality of something else one could hope for. The not-that both stands in for and precludes that hope.

It is important to recognize that I am not talking about individuals, beliefs, choices, or actions here, but of a conflict that takes place between graininess and the world within gender and manifesting itself through gender. There is no revolutionary identity here, only an irreconcilable conflict against and through identity. This despair and this hatred is the result. Subsequently, identity-based attacks upon gender will not be able to collapse gender. My taking hormones or getting surgery or whatever is simply my performing the conflict by the lines of power that run through me. It does not follow that these things constitute an attack upon gender itself, although it may stimulate it to evolve in order to maintain its existence. Through and against are distinguished by where (and thus how) the conflict takes place. These overlapping circles – the impossible existing and the nonexistent – produce one another endlessly, composing the topography of the world. I’ve gone over why the existing is impossible, but the status of nonexistent might be less obvious. The nonexistent is not something that can be acquired, but exists as the shadows and holes produced by the structuring of the world. It is not a way out. Yet, in the very foundation of this world lies its weakness, by the very fact of its own creating. Not-this, not-that: negation at its heart. Nothing, the very same as the graininess that gives rise to the conflict. Nothing because it lacks categories, because it is the emptiness that overflows every name given to it. It cannot be put to work, it is always breaking down. It cannot be rendered tame, but it will explode in revolt. It exists in the spaces between the things, and in the heart of every thing. It can never be contained. This Nothing attempts to destroy everything in its path.

Looking at the negative responses dysphoria presents, I think a course of action against gender emerges. Where dysphoria drives us towards destruction and away from interacting with gender on its own terms, we see something (or rather, Nothing) that dissolves, attacks, demolishes. This might often appear as destruction of the self or directed against the self such as suicide, drug (ab)use, self-harm, but also can appear as any other outwards action where I, unstable and miserable, unravel everything around me. These all are fundamentally an undoing, action which threatens the very existence of structure. Misgendering is an instance of this structure imposing itself, spurring this conflict into even greater violence within me. The violence visited upon trans bodies is also an undoing of the conflict, although it works in attempt to stamp out this Nothing. Every action we could take that interacts with gender directly will at best be ineffective, every effort to impose gender upon us is met by increased resistance, and all that is left is destroy. Only Nothing can destroy gender.

To elaborate and clarify: this world is typified by the operations of productive power, creating two overlapping shadows. At once, there is the existing, a direct result of power’s creation. As a simultaneous corollary, the nonexistent appears as produced holes, gaps, shadows, a mirage of what could be but contradicting themselves fundamentally. Both the existent and the nonexistent are impossible, empty. Their existence is both enabled and plagued by a graininess that cannot be contained by either but which production finds itself needing. Gender exists as an aspect of the power that creates the world, and while the obvious manifestations of gender can be separated from other aspects of power, its root is this power.

Dysphoria is situated in the space where the existent and the nonexistent overlap – that is, in the world – and is typified by antagonism and fundamental negation. On the one hand, it is a negation of the existent (not-this) and desirous of the nonexistent (not-that) in the modes of which it is capable. Where dysphoria can be softened by interacting with gender and attempting to bring the existent closer to the nonexistent, this will not affect power or the reproduction of the world. Where dysphoria becomes feral and lusts for dissolution becomes the exit from this world to a place that does not yet exist. To destroy gender, we must be willing to destroy the world it exists within. After all, there’s no hope anyway… why not?

It must be admitted, we do not care about ‘the economy.’ Or, if we do, we find a certain thrill in watching the bankers and rulers of the world tremble as the cracks in their capitalist world appear. As the economy is collapsing, streets of major cities around the globe explode with defiance. England and Milwaukee draw some interesting parallels as the dispossessed and forgotten throw caution to the wind. There is no accident that those delighted lunatics in England are smashing televisions in the street and having so much fun doing it.

The economy is nothing but an excuse to steal our lives by our jobs, by throwing us in prison for trying not to have jobs, or for killing us because we are of an undesirable lot. The economy is an excuse to make us work ever harder for always less pay in a job that is completely useless. We cycle between work and purchasing the products of others’ work just to keep the economy going. We certainly aren’t doing it for fun anymore. The economy transforms us into dead things, lifeless eyes and hands mechanically performing the operations that keep this economy alive. We would be glorified keyboards, power drills, and spatulas, if there could be any glory in transmuting life into dead matter.

This world cannot be improved – it must be destroyed in order that we may stop being dead. To improve this world means to allow it to function better, which always means our lives are again sacrificed on the altar of capitalism – “we need to tighten our belts, work harder, and we’ll make it through!” – and that’s assuming that we weren’t already doing that just to keep possession of our ever more precarious jobs. We understand that there is no future for us within this world, so why would we bother trying to make anything better? Instead, we take what we can get our hands on, to pay our rent or eat. We lash out against the police who kill our friends or throw them in prison.

The response we have to this grotesque sanity will quite obviously be insane. The economy that functions by leeching life from a dying planet cannot be reasoned with or repaired. We will be crazy, because to be sane is to acquiesce to death. We do not want a better managed economy. We don’t want a different set of bosses. We want lives not dictated by the whims of this undeadeconomy. We don’t care if anarchy will work. We don’t want anything to work. We don’t want a “practical” which makes sense only to the logic of capital, we want to live human fucking lives.

We enter into a war that we were already a part of.

The problem is not whether or not the taking, sharing, and thereby profaning property or the attack on the physical bodies of white people (in fact corresponding closely with value of the commodity of whiteness) is a poor revolutionary strategy. The problem is how to align ourselves with attacks on the social order while making our allegiances explicit enough to not be confused with being on the side of whiteness - that is, being on the side of domination. We do not claim to patronize the position of those who acted by claiming to understand them, but it would not be hard to understand the desperate nihilism of such risk and the seeming anti-social nature of the attack. It is difficult not to see how the experience of the other (the one outside of whiteness) responds to the white mass that erases their existence with a healthy share of hostility. Hence the need to differentiate oneself from the “good, well behaved, and civilized” black citizens, from white people (which needs little explanation), from any includable and pacified category within society.

We now understand the disaffection, desertion, and destruction of whiteness to be of the utmost strategic necessity. But this situation is and isn’t about race, like all questions of identity. Our power, against the power of the social order which imposes identity upon us, is a power of identity’s overflowing, of its self-abolition. It is a betrayal of what we are, of white people no longer doing only what white people do, of women no longer doing only what women do, of even humans no longer doing only what humans do, as we constitute ourselves against every mode and apparatus of containment. It becomes an issue of opening up space for an exodus, for others to join the already excluded and deepen the rifts which already permeate the social terrain of the city.

Among the many things made clear by the events of July 3rd, we have before us an example illuminated: civil war in Milwaukee already exists.

And if civil war exists, then the question is how to take part. We ask you to take very seriously this task. We ourselves are just barely starting.

For those unfamiliar with the story:

• Hispanic News Network (an independent blog) with a fairly accurate accounting of events. One note: the composition of the group of victims was mostly white people. The demographics cited in HNN are incorrect.
• Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (local newspaper) article
• Local TV station WTMJ article.

To say that the events of July 3^rd were unprovoked is partially true. The victims seemingly did nothing to invite hostility on an individual level. However, to claim that race or class tensions are unprovoked – in other words, that there is no explanation for these events – is absurd. Milwaukee is the 4^th poorest and most segregated major city in the United States, and the police are notoriously racist and brutal. All economic growth and opportunities take place in the white areas of town, while the nonwhite areas are left to fester. The Milwaukee Public School system (largely serving poor and nonwhite communities) has one of the lowest graduation rates of any city in the country.

Riverwest constitutes a border between the poor black neighborhood of Harambee (to the west) and the significantly better off college neighborhood of the East Side (to the east) and the well-to-do, white, somewhat liberal neighborhoods of Shorewood and Whitefish Bay (to the northeast). Demographically, Riverwest is diverse, and some sort of community seemingly exists here, but it should be acknowledged that the peaceful, tolerant, and diverse bubble of joy here is not immune to its place within the larger context of the city. (We have heard such frequent reference to the diversity of Riverwest as a supposed reason why the attacks should be considered senseless that we are pretty much done with the term. So far as we’re concerned, it seems mainly to mean, “Hey look, we live with black people! We’re so beyond racism.”)

Milwaukee would be thinking about race even if the attackers had not called the victims whitey, simply as a result of who was involved and that it took place on a border, as well the racial discourse in the city. Whether we make the claim that it was the fault of black people, refuse to discuss racial issues, or acknowledge that occasional chaotic violence is to be expected given race and class tensions in the city, every single discussion concerns race. We believe this is important to recognize as an essential component of the narratives and of the relations of power.

There seem to be two main factors fueling the outrage over this: that the police weren’t doing their job properly and that a large attack occurred on people who had individually done nothing to invite attack. That police ‘weren’t doing their job’ is an materialization of the fact that the police cannot protect us. Their jobs are to gather evidence, incarcerate, and use violence; their function is to maintain control and remove those who upset the social order. People in this area seem shocked that cops maybe don’t give a shit about them, and aren’t really here to protect them or to make things right. This sentiment also implies that there is an obvious sort of people from whom we want protection, the same sort of people who cross Riverwest from the west to go to the lakefront and watch the fireworks. I hope it is obvious how racist this attitude is.

The solutions being proposed tend to focus on cops doing their jobs better. At the Institute of Ignorant Research, we think this is a horrible idea. We also think this won’t actually work. Let’s look at its horribleness for a moment: We find it difficult to see how ‘cops doing their jobs better’ isn’t the same thing as ‘cops making sure that black bodies and poor bodies are policed more.’ The connection is denied, but following the logic of the desired results back, we see no other way to interpret this. It is a problematic situation that desire for better police (to effectively enforce segregation) and feelings of being let down by the police are being expressed while segregation is being accepted as an inescapable part of the scenery and (usually racist) police violence is not confronted.

Racial attitudes and racial tensions are being stirred up from their usual invisibility in this city. Their increasing visibility is exciting and perhaps useful. However, it is clear how race and racial tensions serve to mask and redirect class antagonisms. The lack of discussion both in terms of race and class is troubling.

An appropriation of goods combined with an attack making Riverwest appear dangerous for white people (a direct attack against gentrification) and elaborating race antagonisms is perhaps one of the most notable and radical actions to take place here for some time. It is irrelevant whether or not those involved had a revolutionary ideology, consciousness, or mindset. It must be admitted that over the last few days, having the racial tensions in this city further exposed by the openly racist and unconsciously racist dialogue, we have also fantasied about beating white people.