why we do this to ourselves: an answer to Love Outside Community (7/3/25)

Every four or five weeks, I bring myself across town to the place where a kind woman will fire a powerful laser at my lower face. It is an occasion which I have been saving money in hopes of for quite some time, and daydreaming of for quite some time longer: reflectively, it is probably the most immediately rewarding step taken in my sex transition thus far. It is also the most excruciating. My upper lip, cheeks, chin, and neck are padded with some ointment unknown to me, then they are scorched. What I first noticed, after the initial searing pain had subsided, was that I could smell my own hair burning, I could see smoke rising from my own face. I wanted to panic — oh my God, this is a real and actual destruction of my body — instead I dug my nails into my palms and tried as best I could not to flinch. I knew the importance of it. Though, I was at once made acutely aware of the procedure’s true nature, being: I am paying someone to kill my hair follicles, dead. I am obliterating a part of myself. My one God-given body. I turned my head to the wall, adorned with a bizarre rendering of a bright-red laser being fired at a single strand of hair, it raising a white flag — I was giving up parts of myself and they were not coming back. I tried to reconcile this immense fear of the total damage being done to me with the fact that I was clearly welcoming it; simply, I tried to find my religion in this.

But despite my attempts to reckon with this monthly pain ritual, to fashion some spiritual experience out of it, the obviously inflicted damage is in fact a crucial part of why I am so adverse to these frequent claims of ‘divinity’ innate to transness; I have found it is instead rather terrestrial, it is not even a ritual at all. It is simply mundane, I am damaging my mortal body, introducing to it external modifications and novel hormones just as one might undergo any other banal medical procedure. This is not to illegitimize my own or other any sex transition — after all, every one of us damages our body, more often with carcinogens and tattoos and everything else that comes byproduct of a life well lived — this pain present in our transition is too in service of some attempted satiating project, and perhaps one more so than what comes with the occasional relief of a cigarette or the basic cosmetic expressions of inked skin. This satisfaction of these ends in themselves ought to be enough, we need not turn to New Age, pseudo-spiritual fictions to justify our own lives, nor even the romances we share with one another during — these things are empty explanations for what overall stubbornly remains a deeply pedestrian experience. After all, being a trans woman is in certain terms the manifestation of a negotiating with dreadful material realities, the sort which we might prefer to ignore: the dwindling fact of our birth as ‘men,’ the constant budgeting we embark on to purchase new procedures and ‘buy back’ parts of our body in a marketized medical system, and the most obsessive eye we must give to differences in gender expression while an ideal political project would call for the (eventual) abolition of such. These are less-than-perfect drudgeries which are mainly unique to us within the “LGBT” categorization: despite the lofty sloganeering of “Pride” and our mainly shared experience of “coming out,” the end-goal of the majority of transitions is to “pass”; in a sense, to have our transness humbly “disappear” to the public. This is not necessarily a bad thing — depending on you ask it is out of a concern for safety in a world often violently opposed to our visible existence, or the true assimilative “end” of transitioning — I do not wish to argue one or the other, though this movement toward “passing” is inarguably central to many of our transitions. One might think, in a world which commands us to be more proudly self-fascinated: how underwhelming! This constant, ambient discomfort with our lived realities, then, and the requisite self-obsessive introspection that is necessary to even knowing one is trans at all; it makes sense that I — we — are so often compelled to resolve these facets of our lives by the self-narrative fantasy found in “divine” transness, in “divine” t4t romance. Much like all people, we want to place ourselves outside this cruel, boring fucking world.


Blogger Tara Knight recently self-published through the Barnes & Noble Press outfit a collection of (two) essays mainly to this fantastical effect. These are bound on-demand into a book titled Going Rogue: & Love Outside Community, named for the (two) essays therein, a stumbling mess of work on its face resembling more a therapeutic self-soothing mechanism than anything else. In the first essay, Going Rogue, she sporadically, rather ominously, alludes to being thrust out of a Community (social scene) in Montreal after causing some nondescript “harm,” a decidedly inciting event which also informs the title of its companion essay Love Outside Community: What It Means to Be Passionate and Free — the main conceit of which is that trans-woman-4-trans-woman romance is not just romance as such: it is a “spell,” it is “revolutionary,” it is all the things which she implicitly charges standard straight or cisgender love with being unable to similarly breach. While this is being sold online in hopes of profit, it is also available freely on her Medium blog, where I first read it. When I did, I had initially dismissed it as that all-too-familiar warbling resultant to a first-time trans romance, a tired line about “safety in each other” which I have personally heard at the outset of far too many doomed, toxic t4t relationships myself. It is one I have even found self-deception in, impelling myself, as others have, to look past obvious defects and abuses in past relationships so as not to literally “lose faith” in the divine trans project, if there were one. It follows that in the past year or so I have become intimately familiar with a notion counter to this, that trans romance — much like trans existence at all — is mortal, and just as susceptible to the same risks as any interpersonal expression of vulnerability. I as well date a trans woman while happening to be a trans woman myself, we share in our love as all lovers do, and this is as plainly beautiful as all lovers find. So goes my (and many others’) fittingly boilerplate retort: love is not an act of resistance, but it is enough in itself. But Knight (though perhaps known more commonly by her screenname, “Bundleofstyx”) is quite the popular fiction writer — not only this, she has amassed a brand for herself, a rather impressive following on both Twitter and (especially) Instagram, as well as a stream of revenue stemming from this social standing (I am not one to make a habit of judging a trans person’s financial specifics, particularly in such a difficult world, though some additional discretion is to be advised when so much of one’s income derives from being bankrolled on GoFundMe and CashApp by other trans people — we must be very aware of what messages we are quite literally selling each other!) With this in mind, the need for any response to her loudly-announced politic of trans exceptionalism and ‘divinity’ becomes absolute: to further distance yourself from the rest of humanity when we are already shunted as such to the periphery is to only compound our marginalization, to invite trans people to be brought unchecked into sometimes alienating and abusive t4t relationships under the guise that they are somehow, by nature, ‘safer’ or ‘more love than love’ is to only compound the already neglected harm we face.

Love Outside Community begins with a disclaimer: it has been written while mixing the drugs pregabalin and ketamine. Anyone reading it might be able to discern that this foreword is meant to cast the work following as more honest, written without inhibition — they might also be able to discern that it very possibly is the author already anticipating an excuse for why her essay is so poorly written. “More honest” is a consistently attempted theme throughout, anyway, and between bouts of gratuitous, malformed prose a few revealing phrases present themselves: “Our love defies interpretation because it burns with an intense flame.” Putting aside how little this sentence means on its own — does all love not burn intensely? Are such sentiments not found in every love letter, penned by people both cis and trans? — it is nearly blind to claim otherwise. Despite Knight’s hollow platitudes about passion, she seems unable to justify what makes “T4T lesbians,” as she says, at once “too much and not enough” for a nebulous other she refers to as simply “They.” She remarks that us trans women who date trans women must be “too messy” — all love is a disaster, though — “too intimate with the grotesque beauty of ourselves” — as if all lovers do not find eroticism and beauty in even the most disgusting parts of one another, as though these universal sentiments of love were all just unique to us t4t lovers. Perhaps most laughable is her claim that we are simply “too unmarketable”: marketability has never been too difficult or unpalatable for Knight herself, who (to reiterate) has for years built much of her profitable online persona around being trans and, now, having a trans relationship. Perhaps this economy of self-branding ‘influencers’ might be unfortunately part and parcel to our presently dire, alienating capitalist system, but let’s not pretend this blogging project is a part of anything otherwise — need I remind, Knight’s idyllic story of not-for-sale trans4trans love is, ironically, part of a book being sold for profit, and is more importantly being advertised on social media pages run for profit.

“There are no audiences in our room,” Knight bombastically proclaims at the outset of the section “Love Without a Witness”; longtime participants in trans4trans lovemaking might object to this, though, we know there oftentimes is an audience in our room — typically, somebody getting off to it. Whether it be a friend of ours acting out some mutual sex fantasy, or a disembodied stranger watching a video of the act online — trans love is often subjected to a foreign eye, sometimes even one willing to pay for this viewing experience (meaning the love is, in fact, copiously marketed, again counter to what Tara tries to assert). This is not to chastise those participating in sex work, for whatever reason (be it coercion by financial realities or simple personal decision), rather to instead reject the notion that t4t love somehow uniquely exists outside the same social and market relations that compels all other forms of romance and lovemaking to be depicted in pornography — no, it will not preclude you from this. It is, in fact, far more dangerous to ignore our unique precarity and pretend ourselves to be exempt, to act as though we are not often perniciously subject to a cadre of hostile cis society which equally hates us and wants to use our bodies (and, of course, our love) as a commodity for their masturbation: exemplifying this, ultraconservative gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson recently was revealed as making frequent reference to enjoying trans pornography on an anonymous account, all the while he publicly acted as a standard-bearer for a prospective North Carolina state government crackdown on trans people. Unfortunately, there is no innate safety from this reality to be found merely in romance with other trans people; love still is not, as Knight claims, “revolutionary.” Despite this, Knight will persist with toeing this line throughout the essay, and further conflate trans love with the act of trans sex: “This love cannot be monetized,” “Our sex is not sanitized. The intimacy we share remains hidden from the public eyes [sic]. It is private.” Again, unfortunately, this is not the case. In this it becomes overbearingly obvious, too, the altered state in which the essay purports to have been written in, as our so-insightful author begins to write herself in circles and return to the same, exhausted points — a useful parable for much of the trans discourse she is here participating in (as I am too), if nothing else.

Carrying on with her written delusions, it is alleged that trans love creates “an alternative reality beyond the artificial staging of protection and danger” — this is a rather confusing outburst. Likely, it is meant that t4t love itself rejects the insincere showmanship of the Trans Community (a scornful topic which Knight lets serve as a throughline of sorts across the (two) essays present in the aforementioned book, and as well her broader body of work) — though this does seem an uncharitable reading on my part: not only is the alternative which is presented, trans romance, also guilty of not providing the unique protection which Knight posits it does (as is the case with all romance), there is also no part of the danger which trans women face that is artificial. It is very real, and results in very real deaths and at least very real ruin otherwise — troublingly, sometimes within our very own relationships, the ones which Knight lionizes so. After all, if we can accept that we love like any other person, then it comes naturally that our relationships might be party to abuse like any other; especially when it still so easy to mirror the pain which is often inflicted upon us by dominant cis society. Though it is truly possible Knight has deluded herself away from recognizing this fact, as her written work provides no alternative interpretation of this line. And despite my own apprehensions with The Community as it tends to manifest itself, it certainly cannot be said that this fictional idealized love Knight writes of, which she supposes literally breaks down the barriers between a couple (or, perhaps, a polycule) is the answer to our woes, so she claims — “T4T is a mirror held up to another mirror” — no it is not. We do not lose ourselves in the other, no matter how nice a sentiment it might sound, because to lose one’s ego like that is inevitably to confuse the world with our own self and become pure narcissists (something only achievable for most of us while on dissociative drugs). Knight calls upon us to engage with our love in a way that is, ironically, truly banal — this oblique reference to 1 Corinthians 13:12 (“For now we see in a mirror, dimly,”) revealingly forgets the following inversion which the passage’s moral lesson arises in: “but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.” She rejects this maturation away from such childish notions of love as she exhibits — to which I object: the beauty in love comes from the friction between two people who are ultimately strangers to one another. The beauty in love comes not from this impossible idealism, but the opposite, from its common mundanity — the fact that every one of us gets to take part in it. Isn’t it beautiful that something so privately special to us is also something so universal? Isn’t it enough to know that? Perhaps, if you have something to prove to yourself, still some personally-held uncertainty about the nature of trans love yet to be quashed, it is not. This is understandable. It is also not a political revelation, nor a program to be bestowed upon thousands of people; it is the subject of a self-therapizing journal entry, nothing more.

Knight spends paragraph after paragraph finding new ways to articulate these same sentiments: that trans love is unique, and it is somehow defiance of “the liberal conscience,” it is “constructing sacred spaces of worship inside each other’s lips,” it is “co-dependence turned covenant.” Each pattering-on sentence is more meaningless than the last. Yet this essay, rife with formal errors arranged around an ill-advised thesis, is not just the innocently eager blog post of a naive early-transition woman; it is marketed as real commentary by someone just as long-involved in the trans scene as I, being sold for $4.44 to at least a handful of her more earnest fans — people who might very well internalize the irresponsible message of ‘exceptional’ trans romance. Trans people are, regrettably, not objects of worship or even capable of protecting each other in simple two-to-four-person relationships. This is implicitly recognized among us: it is why an impromptu network of people willing to financially and otherwise materially support one another exists at all, the very threadbare makings of proper community, and one that Tara Knight has routinely been capable of tapping into for both social capital and support. Because trans 4 trans love is, in fact, not indestructible safety nor an act of worship (despite the in-bed roleplaying we might sometimes do), instead it — much like being trans itself — is a simple, imperfect and often discomforting thing. But this is okay, life alone is discomforting: a good friend of mine told me, dismayed, that she believes we all must constantly stand and sit uncomfortably until we die; we never find a position that will totally satiate us and all that searching for it is ultimately futile in the end anyway. So, as trans women, we should be lucky simply to shift in our seats and have hair scorched from our face and break our skin with needles, because it has a measurable end, because it is discomfort in service of something so relieving as just looking in the mirror and seeing a woman, and then looking at our girlfriend and seeing a woman we love. Both pain and passion, so requisite of each other, do not necessarily a unique spiritual process make — these are typical human experiences, we are not special in them. But to be at least in peace enough to share this common, expansive sort of love that all people do; it is not more, it is not less. It is enough. And that is all it has to be, love for one another does not need to be justified as a political project, as something holy, or any of the other things blogger Tara Knight wants so clearly for it to be — its needs only to simply exist. We should not pretend otherwise. Such an impulse is starkly immature and best to be uprooted from one’s beliefs, if nothing else than to take the blinding stars from your eyes for the sake of an adult’s self-preservation — perhaps, it might be advantageous for anybody taken in by Knight’s undue veneration of trans 4 trans love to be told how genuinely dangerous the idea that your romantic partner might save you, that you might save her, is. Though Tara has, cunningly, already pre-empted my making of this claim. “They say we are toxic,” she so confidently blathers on, “Maybe. But only in the way wild mushrooms are.” To this, I suppose I must agree — if you are not careful, wild mushrooms will kill you.