For the past while I’ve been thinking about transitions. The shifting of weight, changing of direction. Genders and governments. Choreographic and interpersonal. Transitions, no matter the context, are a political moment. A chance to detach from weighted positions, a chance to be moved. What is a transition that is not a solution? What’s a transition that is not a solution? -Every Ocean Hughes, from Uncounted (2012-2015)

What is life if not a transition? 

Day and night. Inhale and exhale. We are born toothless, with soft bones. Our first breath is a scream, and then the cord is cut. Our body slowly oxygenates as we age, and our cellular functioning gradually weakens throughout our life. Our skin loses its elasticity and our bones become more brittle. With our final breath, the physical body begins to decompose, slowly taken over by insects, fungi, and plants. The fabric of our being is repurposed as sustenance for new forms of non-human life. As we live and breathe, our planet spins around the sun. Our moon dances around our earth. Each of the planets in our solar system chart their own course, each forming its own unique geometric dance, as we hurtle through the expanse of space, encircling the center of our galaxy once every 230 million years.

What is human civilization if not a transition?

Each isolated moment in human culture has been a transition from a previous cultural composition. We have always been in the midst of making sense of our existence, struggling with nature, with ideology, and with each other. Throughout the entirety of human history, our civilisations have been a flurry of innovation and expression, empire and famine, peace, war, death, discovery, dissonance, and the most simple of joys. We are a totally random evolutionary phenomenon of this timeline on earth. If the universe could re-roll the dice, human beings may never have existed. And yet, we exist: fully formed as a random outcome of a living, breathing planet.

What is the present if not a transition?

A Digital Harvest. And our current transition? We have managed to construct a concept of reality so separate from the natural world that we see only our own selfish uses for the materials that surround us, both living and non-living. Our present is dictated by a philosophy of extraction, destruction, and the replication of human designs. After colonizing the entire world and extracting all its material resources, the Western elite have now initiated the next phase of their plan for universal domination: the mining of human beings and human culture for its own commercial value. Everything we are and represent, our cultural histories and our stories, our memories and our data, our biometrics and our labor, are being mined and converted to liquid assets to feed the endless consumptive drive of the wealthy.  We are increasingly surveilled, our bodies and faces mapped at every turn. One might wonder what fate our bodies, our spirits, and our very identities may meet at this current rate of extraction. Are we ourselves becoming the fodder for humanity’s dreams of the future? Algorithmic violence and mechanized controls cast their heavy shadows on our daily lives and consciences. An industrial slaughterhouse. The utopian dream of the internet has become a graveyard and panopticon.

 The Gender of Becoming. Micro- and nanoplastics, blue light toxicity, mood-enhancing cocktails, endocrine disruptors. The blade of technology shapes our plastic bodies, and Preciado’s pharmacopornographic invocation takes its radical new form. Each human body is a wish, a prayer, a manic tilt-swipe up left right wish I could be that body. I wish I could be anybody but this body. We stroke glass and romanticize the machines with which we co-mingle. We sexualize technical objects whose creation relies on the exploitation and death of child miners in the DRC. We wish we could be as automated as the Large Language Models that divine each of our inquiries neatly in chat boxes. Transgender people worldwide are coming out of hiding and existing in our modern world, and saying, Although you hide us and kill us, we are here, we have been here, before cars, before electricity, before we built huts and before we even knew fire, we have been here and we are here and we are alive and awake now. And yet the tide swells backward, toward the past. As the future presents its perilous new complexity, the patriarchal reptilian brain longs for control of women’s bodies, of trans bodies, of everybody. New laws redraw old worlds.