Chapter 3

Returning to the medieval church of St George of Colegate, the third event in the series took place on 10th May 2024 and included newly commissioned work and work-in-progress from Kole Fulmine and Naomi Morris and Salam H. and a live performance from Cyprus-based musician and sound artist Maria Spivak in collaboration with FENWOMEN organiser Rose Higham-Stainton.

TRANS-SEND.

By Kole Fulmine

SECTION ONE: 

Weak melba sunlight graces the corners of your council estate, the groggy dirt licking of a skyline memorised; no value lost. It's yours because you say it is, it's yours because you've lived here for almost twenty years and in London that's a lifetime of graft. All those intros where you've claimed to be a Londoner and she's laughed out loud—Essex isn't London babe. She knows the difference 'cause she's a real one. You're chugging lustily on dried up American Spirit, grazing against the wintery wheeze of COVID blemished lungs—constant pressure—there'll be no learning, no grace period allowing them to heal. The daily nicotine blast has become a way to survive the monotony of cold weather, the running nose and other common side effects of Northern Hemisphere existence; the seasonal loss of sunlight so that right now it's 3pm and you're staring out your window saying goodbye to another grey-lit day. In many ways this moment is the right moment to be writing this and in many it isn't. You'd been thinking, albeit sporadically, about what it would feel like for years. Planning, justifying, making sure to really answer the question that others seem to have received the guidebook for; only the queer version is sold out and the trans copy is having issues at the printers. There was a day you just decided it would be better to take it than to not take it at all, and you put it off—smoking rather than medically transitioning seemed more in line with the masochistic existence you had thus far perfected. Not in a theatrical way, more a phenomenological discovery of what lies beyond all that a dysphoric body can bear. Or, maybe you just couldn't say goodbye to the only companion who accepted you no matter what your flavour. Someone said I guess it's no worse than a cis guy smoking and you recognise that internally you're now basically a man. Three years of subepidermal infiltration and still no surgery to prove it but inside you're basically a man, right? Only you're not because you still bleed every month and it's worse not better. And you still cry all the time and it's worse not better. And you still have no need to shave hardened hair follicles that should by now mask your face and that makes things worse not better. Back home, you're running. Again, she says, would expect nothing less. You know it's the only way to exist in that place, the trance you enter whilst padding through the undergrowth of Epping Forest, unlike any other; they call it runners high because you are actually high, you say.  Lindsey A. Freeman explains that the body produces a cocktail of 'endogenous chemicals that can alter mood and sense perception,' endocannabinoids are released into the bloodstream. Basically a gummies worth of THC slip sliding through your body and filling you up with so many good ideas. No phone time for at least an hour after a run, she says, knowing what it's like to be high. Only the buzz doesn't start for ages, at least five miles. Rather the steady repetition of shooting sensations, you're doing well for your age, you think, as a sharp reminder of last month’s explosive soleus sends a shock wave vibrating from hamstring origin to insertion stopping sharp in the glute max.

You feel doubt, have done since you woke up and knew a run was scheduled. Uncertain you can trust your body to get through this. Even though it's like this every time. The temporality of scepticism holds thick and fast for the first hour of awake. The empty streets contain the same tension as the empty pages, harsh familiarity of imposter syndrome a syncretic penance you know tantalises your curiosity as you consider yet again, what if you don't make it? In the forest; mud-encrusted leg hair, in the library; gender-neutral toilets broken...again. The similarities between each contingency, remarkable. If neither or none work out, if neither or none is necessarily true, if neither or none are the one, what next? Every run brings something up, sometimes sexy, sometimes scary, sometimes angry. It can be as small as a toenail that hasn't been cut properly or as big as forgetting one layer of your running uniform; the compression lycra, long shorts to cover, double sports top and baggy long sleeve. If you don't massage gun your iliotibial band, can't find your GPS watch or Bluetooth headphones can you even go out? Only now that's come to include an even longer ritual—if you don't shit, shower, coffee, take your T, how will you ever be that runner? The one who glides soundlessly, bouncing along in grotesque smug oblivion. T has changed the structure of your body so that naked you appear more like the classic connotation of an athlete; narrow hips, muscular limbs, a shadowy line that cups quadriceps around thigh steadily leading eye to hardened glutes. Sometimes you wonder if looking the part is enough to fool even yourself, because if you look like a runner but have an off day maybe you'll receive some sort of allowance from those who judge. McKenzie Wark says the, '[F]irst thing I look for at raves: who needs it, and among those who need it, who can handle their habit?' You replace the v for a c and know that your experience is similar to hers, that runners are a particular breed. With a particular praxis for everyday life. They need it in order to dodge the relative normality of existence, pushing themselves to their physiological edge provides an escape before the work day has even begun. The sweet sweet taste of ketosis, the twitching muscular epiphany that guides you headfirst into that Strava high five, K gave you kudos!—thank fuck for the digital highway of runners out there validating your every step. You wonder if you should tell them you double dropped your T today or explain that the reason you write, the reason you run, is simply to generate an architecture to house your vulnerabilities of being trans. Moving through these activities is a way to understand the excess of emotion you are, at times, beholden to. Paying no particular attention to the crowd, allowing yourself to experience whatever comes up within the complex gestalt that is your body. 

SECTION TWO:

You've been going over trans participation in sport historically, what this meant at an individual level and what this has meant for specific groups. How in order to discuss fairness you've referenced your own testosterone levels and other athlete's testosterone levels. The policies that exist for trans athletes at a competitive level and how those policies cascade down into your less binary community. You've questioned Rawls' veil of ignorance, justice as fairness and interrogated basic human rights. You've noted how fairness cannot include eliminating natural physical characteristics and not include other socioeconomic factors. How gender intersects with all the other systems of domination including race and class, and determines how athletes negotiate essentialist and binary beliefs daily. Years of competing in a category that does not match your gender identity propelled you to apply for funding to host Hackney's first queer and trans only running and walking event — TRANSCEND. You've been wondering if the rewriting of the sport you live and breathe could begin here, how something as seemingly simple as eliminating binary categorisation could help a spectrum of trans athletes be appreciated for their skill rather than their physiological differences, of which there are so many. You can't begin to imagine how your body would feel on race day, knowing that someone wasn't going to categorise you incorrectly.

SECTION THREE: 

You were born on the edge of London. Your family descends from the borough of Tower Hamlets. Your nana, a much-loved Cockney, had illusions of grandeur for her family as the matriarch of the household. She moved you all out to Essex. Far enough from the Bow Bells not to encounter the ruckus of last orders but close enough to get the tube home. Your accent has changed over the years, you never really knew if you were supposed to listen to your mother tongue and replicate, or, pretend to be someone else. Your family always told you that pretending was essentially becoming and so you dutifully went to all those extracurricular elocution lessons because they wanted more for you than they ever had. Skipping maths and science to sit in a room with a speech therapist who rounded the edges of your clipped questions and forced an articulation of your T's where before there was none. There are some words in your vocabulary you know could be traced back to the East End, when you instinctively reply 'how comes?' rather than 'why?'. Only the real reason you went to a speech therapist, would become clear to you as an adult. You were a quiet child, your confidence lacking, the murmur that was your voice refused to blossom and so to erase the fear of silence your mum put you to work. You know now that you were just figuring it all out, trying to understand how to be in the world, focusing on what you actually wanted to sound like, which was not the voice you had as a teenager. 

The process of becoming your self-determined gender, constructing your sense of self, will be one that you'll bear the promise of for your entire adult life. Living on the outskirts meant you were reared in the in between, too far East to be a Londoner, too far South to be an Essex boi. Without a claim to a specific identity, you made one up. So that, in some circles you consciously leant on hackneyed renditions of cockney slang and in others you rolled your 'R's'. When you met George you knew you'd found a kindred spirit. 

Descending from Croydon, which is technically the same as the Essex border your heritage claims, George has always felt familiar to you because of it. Their ambition and determination for a new world utopian at times. The way they manipulate trans theory to suit their own needs, the way they manoeuvre what is happening to their body internally to suit their own rhetoric—compelling. You bonded over your addiction to 'one or two' cigarettes daily making both of you, in your eyes, better runners. George has a stress-fracture on the edge of their right foot. Something that they've concluded is due to an increase in muscle mass from the surge in exogenous testosterone their body has encountered over the last two years. Interestingly they summarise that being trans, being more physiologically male has made them a worse runner, you couldn't help but think of Karkazis and Young's interpretation of the hormone, 'In trans men who took T, for example, and suddenly had much higher T levels than they previously had, their androgen receptors rapidly downregulated, meaning they were less active, effectively getting less bang for the buck from T in their system.' (p.192)