The Rebis

Alchemical perfection — An Alchemist’s Magnum Opus

After one has gone through the stages of putrefaction and purification, separating opposing qualities, those qualities are united once more in what is sometimes described as the divine hermaphrodite, a reconciliation of spirit and matter, a being of both male and female qualities as indicated by the male and female head within a single body. The sun and moon correspond to the male and female halves, just as the Red King and White Queen are similarly associated.

Upon reading Susan Stryker’s “My Words to Victor Frankenstein” I reached enlightenment. She blessed me with an epiphany that had evaded the capability of language.

She starts by breaking down the monstrosity of the transsexual in extremely profound ways. “The transsexual body is an unnatural body,” she says, “…It is flesh torn apart and sewn together again in a shape other than which it was born.” I have been hyper-fixated on this concept since discovering my own transsexuality and I could not agree more. But much like transgender is to transsexual, why not push the boundary further? Why be unnatural when you can be supernatural? Preternatural? Extraordinary? To augment oneself to perfection. To reach a level of divinity only capable through self-made creation. This is where my love for the alchemist began. 

As transsexuals do we not toe the line between scientists and sorcerers, ever in pursuit of physical perfection? To transform one substance into another? Matter cannot be created nor destroyed but it can be transmuted. We become monsters, or in Stryker’s explanation, heralds of our own extraordinary creation.

While carving, sewing, and transforming your body is perhaps the closest to divinity I can imagine, there is always the scrutinizing eye of the world upon you. In embodying what lies beyond the realm of normalcy comes the onlookers probing for answers. To be transsexual is to be spectacle – for better or for worse. You walk through the world always on display, always looked at but never seen; this is visibility versus legibility. In the space between the two, I find my transgender rage. Always listened to, but never heard. Always known, but never understood. In this violence, I find my transsexual body an abject one constrained by the world’s subjectivity and “…limited by its signification.”

I could spend forever talking about what enrages me about my own transsexual embodiment, but I’d like to end on a positive note. I am a monster in all aspects and retellings of the word. But I am a monster of my own creation. In some strange way, I am both Frankenstein and his monster. Creator and created. Alchemist and Rebis. And I will continue to create.