Into the Darkness I:
Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself
The sun has long since set. And there is no moon to light our way. (Where is the moon? Where is the moon?). Yet everything feels so thick and sticky, as we start on our journey. We’ve abandoned our homes, if we ever had any, and we’re heading toward the caverns, marching straight into darkness, in our quest for absolute oblivion. Not to become one with this oblivion. But to transcend it. To extinguish its ever presence within our hearts. To breathe our last breath fully, finally replete with life. Towards this end, we press forward in the night as the shadows already begin to take on these menacing shapes. Do they even belong to us anymore? Does it even matter? Everything wants us to die anyway. And then suddenly from beneath us, it comes rushing up, as if to devour us. Whoosh!
Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Talia Mae Bettcher. And I’d like to welcome you to my substack. I’m calling it “Into the Darkness.” Fun, huh?
I am a 58-year-old trans woman. I transitioned in 1995. I have lived more of my life “as a woman” than I have “as a man” (such unpleasant expressions). And I have been out and proud for most of that time. I have met an untold number of trans people from various walks of life, with differing experiences and points of view. I have had discussions, adventures, activist engagements, relationships of various types, with many. I have been around.
I am a professional philosopher. Which means that (i) I philosophize; and (ii) I actually get paid for that shit. I first fell in love with philosophy in 1986 at Glendon College, Toronto, where I was earning my BA. I earned my PhD in philosophy at UCLA in 1999. I was then employed by Cal State LA in 2000, where I have been teaching in the philosophy department ever since. I was hired to teach “modern philosophy” because I had written my dissertation in that area. (“Modern Philosophy” – not as modern as you might think – stretches approximately between Descartes (mid-1600s, say) and Kant (late 1700s)). But events in my life compelled me to start philosophizing trans issues. At the time, while there were some trans philosophers thinking about trans issues, there was no such thing as “trans philosophy” as a subfield. That didn’t get named until around 2016. So, I am generally considered one of its originators. You might think of trans philosophy as analogous to feminist philosophy, Latinx philosophy, critical philosophy of race, and so forth. I define it as any philosophy performed in resistance to trans oppression.
I am also a Canadian who has lived in the United States as a permanent resident. For the past five months, I’ve also found myself living in a strange new country called Gilead. I have been living in Los Angeles since 1991, which means I have spent more of my life in the States/Gilead than I have in Canada. Truthfully, I didn’t have super strong patriotic leanings until Trump started threatening to annex Canada. And I love Los Angeles deeply. I consider myself an Angelena. I lived in so many places in Canada – Calgary, Montreal, Parry Sound, Alliston, Toronto – that LA has been my life’s center of gravity. I found myself here, made myself here. Transitioned here. Found community here. Earned my PhD here. Worked here. Made family here. However, it’s a “here” that was achieved through colonization, violence, and theft. (As were the many “theres” in Canada).
I am a white girl of European – in particular, German, English, and Irish – descent. On my mom’s side, there were British Empire loyalists, on my dad’s side, German peasant farmers, nomads, who left Germany, settled in Ukraine, and then the Dakotas and then to Alberta. I am ‘anglo’ in a double sense of the word. (In Canada, while my French is decent, my accent is horrible. In California, my Spanish is not entirely non-existent, but certainly limited, my accent is somewhat better).
So that’s me, for now. No doubt you’ll learn more about my life as we descend into darkness. But I did want to give you a sense of who I am or at least where I am located in the general scheme of things right away.
What I want to do now is to talk about what this essay project involves and who this project is for. What do I mean by “Into the Darkness”? Well, in an obvious sense, for trans people we are heading into a very dark time. I mean, we’re already there. And it’s getting scarier and scarier by the day. Certainly, for those of us who live in either the UK or in Gilead. But I also mean “into the darkness” in a less obvious sense.
I want to do something with these essays that I have tried to avoid doing for a long time – namely, to address the anti-trans arguments and positions in a systematic way. For the most part, I have avoided direct engagement for the following reason: Once you engage, you have already ceded terrain. You have already agreed that trans lives (unlike nontrans lives) are up for debate. You have played into an asymmetry that is already a function of trans oppression. So, instead, it has seemed to me that creating my own positive account of transness without such engagement was strongly preferable. Thus, I wrote Beyond Personhood: An Essay in Trans Philosophy. But then the Nazis took over. And now the horse is out of the barn. We are on our heels, fighting for our very existence. And so, it has now seemed to me imperative to face the transphobic arguments head-on. Moreover, it has seemed the best way to do this is through widely accessible essays, rather than scholarly tomes, that make their moves in very small, manageable bite-size chunks.
My plan is to put as many of our presuppositions and favorite theories and paradigms to the side. In Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes had the notion of starting afresh – of tearing down all of his past beliefs and starting over again – looking at everything anew. I guess I want to do that too, at least in the case of transness. I think it’s the only way to successfully address the anti-trans arguments. I mean, if we start off relying on assumptions that anti-trans people reject, how can any arguments that flow from those assumptions convince? No. I want to get super basic. Admittedly, as critics of Descartes have long pointed out, you can never really suspend all of your past assumptions. You need to hang on to something to make the next move. So, I can’t promise my strategy will be comprehensive. Rather, I will simply give it my best shot.
In any event, I see these essays as serving two functions – each function for a distinct readership. First, my hope is that there still exist open-minded people who are willing to consider the arguments. My hope is that there are folks who either have been swayed by anti-trans sentiment or have remained confused by the whole affair who are willing to take this journey with me, to follow along with me, step by step. If you are such an individual – curious, bold, willing to hear me out – then this project is for you. That’s the first (potential) readership.
The second readership is trans folks themselves (as well as our friends). In this case, of course, there is no need to persuade. You are already here. The aim, rather, is something close to therapeutic. My thought is that for some of us, we are haunted by the demons of transphobia. These demons come to us and tell us that, in the end, we are wrong. We are fucked up. We are not who we think we are. The transphobes were correct all along. This is what transphobia does. It lives in our minds and in our spirits. So, by “into the darkness” I also mean to head into the deepest, most horrible anti-trans arguments possible and to answer them. I aim to slay as many demons as I can.
Some people find that such an exercise helps. Some people do not. And some find that the very thought of heading into soul-crushing transphobia absolutely the last thing they want to do during a time such as this. They find that the best thing to do is to seek out nurturing environments and to shut off such negativity whenever they can. My view is that any strategy that helps you get through the day is a perfectly good one. Especially in godawful times such as these. If you aren’t up for the darkness, don’t read these essays. Don’t. The most important thing you can do right now is to take care of yourself. So that you can survive. However, if you do want to slay a few demons – if doing such a thing is a way of taking care of yourself, a way of surviving – then join me as we head down into the caverns. But it’s gonna get dark. It’s gonna get scary. So, light up a torch.
Trans lives are no more “up for debate” if we question the etiology of gender distress or the philosophical sensibility of statements like a male “feeling like a woman” than Christian lives are “up for debate” if we question the revelatory nature of biblical texts or question the resurrection of Jesus or a person’s “personal relationship with Jesus”. A person can have sincere feelings without that telling us much about the etiology of those feelings. One can think that there are many problems with gender ideology and the notion that people are literally “trans” while being very in support of civil rights for people to act/feel/dress however they like.
So the Nazis have taken over, and yet you are free to speak your mind and, indeed, to call the winners of our last election “Nazis”? If so, our Nazis are the weakest Nazis in the history of Nazis. Your lack of appreciation of the ironic nature of your statement is amazing.
Moreover, no one, and I mean NO ONE, is debating whether trans people have a right to exist. It is simply not good faith to claim that Americans are having such a debate.
I hope your coming work is not simply a steady stream of calling people who disagree with you Nazis who want to kill trans people. If so, you are wasting everyone’s time and dumbing down the conversation.