Khanna’s Visceral Logics of Decolonization is a philosophical work that is predicated on race, on skin colour, and is going deeper then what is on the surface to get at the role of affect and to challenge the racialized colonized to sit with the cognitive dissonance by paying attention to internal sensations that arise when doing colonial work. Khanna Is criticizing racialized elites who take up the logics of bourgeois white ruling classes as if it is their own acknowledging that in part, failures to decolonize, is due also to unexamined complicities amongst this group of racialized colonized people. Or at least that is a summary of my understanding of Khanna’s work from which I move forward from.

As a white settler, I take Khanna’s work as a call for me to stay in my lane, to work harder to understand how my body responds to colonial work. As someone whose history demonstrates that my people (I have Ukrainian and Hungarian ancestry but I do not know what side of what fight my ancestors were on) have suffered and also been used as tools of colonization, encouraged to do harm to others and ourselves, I turned to the colonial concept of gender as a way to extend Khanna’s visceral logics to those who have been racialized as white. My aim is to explore how those who exist or accept the rule of a gender binary even at the same time that they accept the existence of the trans other are, in the same way that the racialized colonized would adopt the imaginaries of the colonizers, adopting gender logics of the colonizers.

Such adoption may also reveal failures in feminism to address questions of gender inequity where their logic and thoughts continue to rest within a binary – the essence of colonial logic. And so, in the way that Khanna shows how bourgeois elite anti colonial or postcolonial racialized writers in the progressive writers alliance (PWA) fail to take up the emancipatory teachings of the visceral logic/dissonance, I am operating on an assumption that predominantly white, bourgeois elite so-called trans people are at risk of doing the same. To eradicate the essentialist foundations of the gender binary that serves fascist and colonial ideologies, we must indeed abolish gender.

Equipped with an ethic of care and an acknowledgement that healthcare and medical systems are transactional and as such relies on language that reduces people to bodies is not only appropriate but necessary to be able to give ourselves what it is that we need. Rooted in an ethic of care and a practice of love would require that we see the human body and the humans that exist in bodies as more than bodies without defaulting to colonial understandings of gender and gender roles. This of course complicates sociological or ‘scientific’ understandings of the impacts of gender on health and would require an entire re-evaluation of what it might mean to eradicate gender. It would also require medical and political systems to be built around getting people what they need to survive indpendent of identity, abolishing austerity rules and a scarcity economy for there is always money for bombs.

Regimes of identity politics that determine who is or is not deserving would need to fall. The capacity to distinguish between needs and wants to be able to respond to questions of what do we need to survive in ways that are divorced from competition and individual levels of greed is not a skill that we in the West currently have. As such, there is much work to do to learn how to love ourselves and how to relate to others lovingly as a precondition to being able to identify what it is we need to survive while valuing the well-being of those around us. This is the site where we can begin to learn to exist, to live beyond survival.

And so I am more than trans.

And because I have never been a woman, only perceived as such I contend that it is impossible for me to be trans. I am only perceived as such. I am not transitioning from something that I never was. I am learning to live as who I am.

As we all should be.

And so while those of us who reject the binary have always been here, I want to acknowledge that this notion of trans (and all of its synonyms historical or otherwise) is a concept that became necessary to break away from the propaganda that gender is somehow a binary reduced to the junk in your trunk.

It is the colonial imagination which fabricated the propaganda of a gender binary and then asserted such fabrications to be natural, common sense, indestructible, and all-encompassing. How is it that you know what side of the binary you are on? And you are not allowed to refer to your body or its functions in your answer. And so I end with a quote from Tasmin Lorraine: “Although I am not as convinced as Irigaray that gender is the only or even the most important way to mark the groups associated with mind body dualisms, I believe she is right to insist that theorizing the mechanisms of this dualism is critical to our struggles to create a more ethical future” (p 7 Lorraine 1999)