Mailbag, Episodes 7-10

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​​Hi Never Post!

My name is Moss (she/her) and I am trans.

Your recent segment on before and after pics got me thinking about the particular variety of before and afters that are shared online in the trans community. I think that this became a lot more visible to me after being witness to the early chaos of unconstrained trans horniness and wild openness in the early formation of Bluesky last year, which is a whole fascinating bit of platform ecosystem history, especially seeing how much Bluesky has leveled out into something much more "presentable" and twitter-like now that it's operating at scale—but I digress.

On sites like Twitter and Bluesky (and surely elsewhere...) there is an established trend of trans beings (queer beings) sharing before and after pictures of themselves. These are occasioned by trans holidays, like Transgender Day of Visibility, by personal events like transition anniversaries, and by quote chains of such pics (not to mention special occasions of steps taken towards transition). I think it's important to mention these not only as a queer phenomenon, but as something that illuminates how before and afters work for everyone in a variety of situations (as is the case with many things related to transness—it's not [only] about being trans: it's about living more freely). The trans case highlights a few aspects that I want to explore here:

1) The pics, by virtue of being in a trans discourse, would seem to point to something deeper about how life is structured—an identity, a gender—rather than merely an aspect of life—weight, appearance, dwelling, &c.—not of course that identity and gender are not merely aspects of life nor that what seem to be mere aspects are not structuring, but thinking about the weight these are given culturally. What does it mean to see one photo and then another and think, and be encouraged to think by the poster, to see the second as more in line with their gender, as "more woman," "more animal," "more thing," "more man," "more..."? But perhaps above all "MORE THEMSELF." I think we can reasonably be quite ambivalent about this: as your segment points out, the after of the before and after is actually a changing state, and that perhaps it's harmful to over-fix (and that it might fix norms that should be taken as fluid and contextual), but, on the other hand, the fixing function of the before and after photo may be precisely the point for the trans poster—a trans performance to reinforce self. We might further ask, what is visible and what is invisible about transition—does the before and after pic over-reinforce the visible (and how does it then interact with the endless discourse of "passing")? There is also of course a great potential for rupture with norms with queer people—the after often completely rejects standard norms (but then is it rejection or creation...? and so on and so on and so on).

2) The before pic is possibly quite contentious for trans beings, when it is understood to be a pre-transition pic (and not say, both before and after being after the start of transition). This is because there are a ton of frameworks for understanding what one was before transition, and—rightfully—everyone has a different approach: Shall I define myself in opposition to my past? Shall I cut the past off and build myself in the now? Should my transition be understood as an attempt to work with my past, to heal my past, and to continue what is good from it? Is transition not at all a dividing line between me and my past—is it simply an event in a continuous life? Is transition not an event but a continuous process that has been operating since the very moment of my birth? (How many of these are at play at once!?) This makes understanding what is conveyed by the after very difficult. There's a sense in which the before and after flattens all these possibilities into the idea of CONTRAST, of cutting off, of opposition, without precisely exploring what kind of contrast is meant, or whether it is meant at all. There's also a tendency that I've noticed in the commentary (from both the original poster and commenters) on these posts to read them in terms of well-known transition narratives, where before the being was miserable, and after the being is happy and thriving. There's kind of an assertion that this is somehow visible in the picture—that a moment of photography can capture years of pain, years of pleasure—when, of course, life is so complicated, so variegated, even when transition does mark a huge change for the better (and it really does).

3) There is a pretty complicated interaction between the before and after pic and the values of the audience, when the audience is trans (I could also talk about the beings trying to figure out whether they should transition, but I don't want to make this too long). If I come across a before and after pic displaying a change in weight, I might (will) have a complicated emotional reaction, but I myself may not have committed to changing that aspect of myself, and there's a sense that a weight before and after is aimed at a pretty broad swath of the poster's community. But if I come across a before and after transition pic, not only does the pic feel in some sense aimed at me as a member of the trans community, but I in fact have as a trans being already accepted the underlying goals and values of this by committing myself to transitioning—it is something that I myself am trying to accomplish (but of course, not necessarily by the same methods as the being in the pics, and not the same goals). This is not to say that this kind of in-community targeting of before and after pics is unique to the trans community—think for example of before and afters shared in a weight-loss subreddit vs. ones that show up from a friend on your general feed. However, there's a kind of weird way in which being connected to trans people on social media, just as your friends and peers, puts one into a community rather than general discourse.

In any case, I think I have rambled enough—it's a big can of worm spaghetti. Hopefully there's enough wiggle room and questioning here that all beings might find a place to be nurtured from it. Thank you all for your wonderful work on this enjoyable podcast, and thank you for encouraging community input. Keep it up!

Moss