Trans Expertise, Anakin Skywalker and Knowing When to Throw Out the Whole Man to Start Again
Bundle his ass into a rocket and fire him into the heart of the sun!
I love being a snarky bitch. Girlfriends tell me about when their man makes the slightest misstep and I’m firing off demands to have him disposed of.
Five minutes late? “Throw the whole man out and start again!”
Didn’t do the dishes? “Chuck his shit off the six-story balcony into the street!”
Didn’t pay you enough attention? “Run his ass down with your car!”
I particularly like “throw him out and start again”. Like he’s a sourdough starter that failed to rise or a flan that collapsed in the oven. All your effort, all your time, wasted. Nothing left to do but drop him in a dumpster and walk the fuck away. The casual disdain? The cruel disregard for nuance?
I. Fucking. Love It.
It feels great to diminish the “privileged gender”. It feels great to sow the seeds of fear that a man, any man, is just a few short missteps away from a nighttime visit from the feminine ghosts of misdeeds past. The notion that he’d be waking in the lonesome dark to find a towering menace leaning over him. A grin that has far too many teeth to be human, mouth dripping in ichor whispering “ya done fucked up, son”.
It’s good comedy… But that’s what it is… comedy.
It’s what we do, we tell stories. We bury the parable. Sometimes deep, sometimes shallow, but it’s almost always there if you look. You can see the spiraling mess of the world reflected in our stories, especially the ones removed from our day to day life. Dragons and ancient curses and laser swords will always be relevant because they’re the vehicle to talk about things like feminism, patriarchy and… oh, I dunno… the rise to power of a fascist demagogue on the backs of men who’ve had their feelings of dissatisfaction invalidated and ignored?
Enter Anakin Skywalker.
The poster boy for teenage angst allowed to run unchecked. The poster boy for what it looks like when men are told to suppress their feelings. The poster boy for being so desperately in need of compassion and validation they’ll gladly take it in the embrace of a dictator giving a pale facsimile of kindness.
“The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.”
"When the child is not fed love on a silver spoon, they learn to lick it off knives."
This is the purpose of fiction. To tell these stories and it takes almost zero media literacy to see it. All extremist movements over the span of human history have taken disaffected young men, showed them the barest shred of compassion and then pointed towards an enemy to be held responsible. It has always happened and will continue to happen unless we provide meaningful alternatives to these men.
And just how fiction can highlight the problem it can also lead the way to solutions.
In the free-form ramblings of the internet I read a glorious fan-fic nugget of wisdom about Anakin Skywalker: “He should never have been taught to be a soldier. He should’ve been taught to be the creche master.” He should have been charged with the responsibility to provide care and safety to those like him. Children without parents, children who are lost. He should’ve been given the chance embody the thing he needed most in the world. He should have been given the chance to be a father, but instead they put a weapon in his hand and pointed him at an enemy.
“We teach men to be weapons and wonder why they choose violence”.
So yeah, in my drawn-out shitty pop-culture metaphor about the real life-and-death situation we’re in, the online readicalised right is the fascist empire. But the mainstream performative left? The ones who change their social media profile pic in support of the cause du jour and do nothing else?
They’re not the rebellion. They’re the Jedi order; a cadre of high-ideal intellectuals doomed to fail because they view the world through the exact same lens as the ‘enemy’.
That’s the thing that’s hardest to face about the “why are men like this” discourse. That’s the discomfort I feel when I joke about “throwing out the whole man to start again”. I realise I’m thinking like the ‘enemy’. I’m thinking about the problem from the perspective of consumption, of planned obsolescence, of instinctively throwing away things that are broken instead of fixing them. These are people we’re talking about…Where do you draw the line on a man being unsalvageable? At what point do we just “dispose of the problem”?
Sure, this is the perfect juncture for someone to swoop in with a what-about-ism detailing the most vile and heinous act a man has ever committed, but that’s simply a tactic to obfuscate the hard work that is still being studiously avoided.
As a trans woman, as someone who put their “manhood on the chopping block”, I’m confident in saying that yes, all men have work to do. All men need to resist the call to violence and power in a world specifically shaped to give them easy access to violence and power. Even silence, choosing the path of NOT acting IS a choice provided to you because the world has been shaped to allow you the luxury of doing nothing.
It’s unfathomable to most men what it’s like to even live without the luxury of choosing silence. When women are silent it isn’t a choice, it’s coerced and far too many are blind to pervasive pressures of rigorously held gender dynamics.
Uncomfortable as it may be to hear it, Transgender people know better than you.
The pressure to conform to a gendered expectation is present in the front of our minds at all times. Regardless of if we were baptized in the waters of manhood at birth and tried to wash away that mark, or later anointed in the sea of masculine expectations, transgender people have lived both sides of this. Our tangible lived experience is the grappling with masculinity, the shedding of it or the adopting of it, but in either direction both trans men and trans women are carefully picking through the debris, trying to parse what is poisonous, and what is worth cherishing.
The majority of the world is still in the mindset of outright abandonment rather than salvation. Transgender people don’t have this luxury. We cannot simply kill off parts of our minds, our bodies. Transition is the process of repairing, of healing, of growing. Yes, we feel the urge to discard, just how you feel the urge to discard the “problematic man”. We feel it the same as you and have that same the urge to throw out the whole of society and start again.
But there are babies in that bath water.
There are parts of me that are good and kind and worthy in that bath water.
And there are men there too. Men who are genuinely trying to change despite the fact there are others in the world that seem irredeemable.
Sure, I’ll make my silly little jokes. I’ll joke about burning a man alive or suffocating him in his sleep. I’ll inflate the consequences of the smallest infraction to absurd comedic proportions, but I’ll forever remind myself the reality of it, that comedy becomes horror when words become deeds and just how closely my words mirror those of who would do me harm.
I will be forever reminded of the moment when I woke to find the person I love standing over me in the dark. Forever reminded of what they told me: “You don’t get to leave so someone else can have the benefit of my labour to turn you into a good partner.”
It still haunts me.
I’m haunted by the fact that to someone I was the “man who deserved to be punished”, and I am haunted by how easily their words escalated to deeds, haunted by just how close they came to “disposing of their problem”.
–S