trans girl suicide museum review

review of trans girl suicide museum by hannah baer

content warning: discussion of suicide

this was a refreshing way to read decommodified, theory-adjacent theory from a non-academia view---a take on transness from trans girl who works in therapy and has a lot of smart conversations on k rather than a professor or a researcher, if that makes sense. transness is messy and weird and controversial even within our community and HB doesn't shy away from that. i love the visual elements/texts (follow her on insta i think her handle is @malefragility) !! some of the commentary on perceiving racial lines from a white standpoint felt iffy to me but HB is also self-critical so i'll give her that

HB posits the idea of the trans girl suicide museum (TGSM) that constantly reflects ur transness back at you in a pathologizing, medicalized way. u feel trans all the time and u can't stop thinking about it and going crazy. u can't talk to cis ppl without being acutely aware of their lack of transness. different wings of the museum compartmentalize transness into something less fluid and interconnected and more like a subject of study. it also hurts a lot. all the time. ur so fragile in the suicide museum like those fancy expensive ceramic pieces that need layers of glass around it that the world is difficult to experience---it's kinda like a constant state of suicide ideation. for trans ppl, suicide is always there in the background (and often foreground) of your brain. ur always thinking abt it idly and it's always an option for you, never a closed door. at least that's how i experience it. in that way, leaving the suicide museum could mean killing yourself instead of just looking at it all the time, which also means that the museum keeps us alive. conversely, leaving the TGSM might also mean that you'll finally have a cis relationship with death. she says that you may never get out of it, but ur chance often depends on class privilege or how well you assimilate into cisness. some people are able to medically transition until they pass 100% as cis and are ok living their life like that, which ties back to how the TGSM tries to make transness legible. in a 2021 interview HB says that she's gotten out of the museum bc being trans isn't a constant state of torture for her anymore, which i think is owed in part to her own resilience and also because she's so open to talking about it. 

in contrast to the TGSM, she talks about her experience in a gendered bathhouse, which i'll just let you read for yourself because she words it better than i could:

I never felt relief in the museum, not like today, when I can silently and privately cry shrouded in the steam of a sauna of the men’s section of a gender-segregated bathhouse, with these other guys in the room with me while I’m crying, knowing that I was both misgendered and deeply seen in my gender on my way in here. That getting misgendered as an offense is predicated on a truth of gendered stability, and even though I have wept and wept and punched walls and bit my lip at the pain of being misgendered, I want to remember what I feel in the steam of the sauna today: that the truth of my transness isn’t about having a totally stable, mapped, and controlled gender that never gets bent or blows around or whisps away. 

I wish instead of the museum I had gotten to go to a bathhouse, where all the sisters and the mommies and daddies and siblings and gestational and non-gestational parents and elders and babies came to have knowledge together that wasn’t knowledge for the state or the police or the doctors or the cops or the administrators, but an other, different one (pg 133).

i'm not a transgirl, so her experiences are often totally different from mine, but the TGSM sticks with me nonetheless. i hope we can all get out of the TGSM and into a bathhouse. or that the museum opens up a new exhibit with a bathhouse in it. 

(if you're interested in reading TGSM you could probably find a pdf by googling it)