As I think of it, I get the distinct impression that James Cameron's protagonist left behind a great deal more then simply the use of his legs in the various "hell holes" in which he served. The "scars" on his soul seemed by far the deeper injury. Those scars in fact presaged his transformation from Human to Na’vi.
I think, as teh trans, we each suffer by degrees. Yet in the wake of this neurological, bio-chemical and physical transformation, I now see that the sickness rests squarely with society. My dysphoria, as it turns out, was profound. But something more profound than becoming "woman" or "female" happened when I transited gender. I shot past it into quite another place. As evidence by my previous speculations into the nature of existential "completeness" can attest, the concept of gender and gender identity actually complicates my appreciation of the land in which I now sojourn. The eye is clouded by what I suspect will always be an illusion. The illusion that gender ever mattered at all.
Socially, I'm seen fully as "woman", yet I experience myself as woman and man . . . both . . . and yet neither. The Brain-Body map is repaired (if repaired is indeed the right word) but repaired as what . . . and to what?
I draw your attention to Donna Haraway
"A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181.
Ruminations of me as a constructed being loom large now as I piece together what sort of cyborg (or is it chimera) I've become.
" . . . Monsters have always defined the limits of community in Western imaginations . . . "
– Donna Haraway
Renee Thomas ©2010 All Rights Reserved
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