Understanding Transgressive Art
By Hermes Postma
‘Gender is a social construct’ is the famous mantra of gender identity believers. If it’s social, this automatically means it is affected by the environment, hence a social contagion. But logical coherent thinking has never been the strongest pillar of the trans movement.
Trans is a Cultural Construct
I like to go a step further: ‘Trans is a cultural construct’, a phenomenon caused by social contagion, partially through misleading education (‘sex is spectrum’, gender unicorn, etc.), iatrogenic forces, political forces, supportive mainstream media, but certainly also partially cultural, a fad, a youth counterculture. In this article I focus on the latter. A topic that is largely unknown among psychologists, healthcare takers, politicians, journalists. How does trans relate to culture and art? What can we learn from artistic expressions and how can we view trans through the lens of that? I interviewed some befriended artists and art philosophers to gain insight through what motivates an Icarus to commit self-harm, while being overly convinced the radical choice is the only option. Fatalism is the root in this psychological process.
There is only one strong voice in the gender debate that recognizes this aspect: Dr. Az Hakeem calls the current trans movement Goth #4. A teenage rebellion movement, similar to several waves of goth cultures from the past: Joy Division, Bauhaus, The Cure, Sisters of Mercy, the Nu-metal bands, emocore… Hakeem is correct in this, but there is much more to tell on the history of dark culture.
Fear of Death
Our primal instinct gives us fear of death. We all fear from this, but what is even more scary is a painful death. The worst of all: longtime suffering and not dying is probably our worst nightmare. The cordyceps fungus is an infamous parasitic fungus that predates on several insects. There are also other diseases with similar parasitic strategies, such as the leucochloridium that takes over the brains of snails. There is one type of cordyceps that kills a beetle but leaves the muscle structure intact so it can still walk a little bit. When it walks, it draws attraction of birds, which eat the dead beetle and spread the fungus by their faeces. When you see the dead beetle walking, it’s is literally The Walking Dead, a zombie. This example makes it clear why we find zombie movies so scary; it is death, but in such a rude way, your decomposed body is still active. A soulless body. Another cultural example of a soulless bodies are the walking skeletons in many historic paintings (dance macabre).
The Soulless Body and the Bodiless Soul
So the zombie and the skeleton are soulless bodies. The inversion is the bodiless soul and this we can also see in culture: the witch flies on a broomstick; apparently gravity doesn’t affect her, since she is only a ‘soul’. A clearer example is the ghost, also flying and not even a visible body, only a white sheet. The last example of a bodiless soul is the vampire, and this is probably the most interesting one. Often the characteristics are described that suggest the vampire is partially bodiless: a transparent pale skin, it can move in a blink. The vampire suffers from not being able to die and go peacefully to heaven. This suffering is projected on society in predatory behaviour on young virgins. This can be interpreted as: The vampire poses a danger to the maintenance of the human population.
The vampire is particularly interesting, because besides being a bodiless soul, it is also a goth. Black and red are the colours, it is a nocturnal parasite, anti-social, solitary, cold blooded, elegant, sexy, eyes with black lines, carnivorous teeth. The blood drinking looks like consuming food, but actually it is the drugs of the vampire. They feature extremely destructive and reckless behaviour to get their drugs, to ‘feel their body again’ temporarily.
The zombie is the ultimate symbol of heavy metal music (Eddie of Iron Maiden, for instance). The vampire is the ultimate symbol of goth rock (dark eyeliner, pale skin) as well as black metal (the bands all wear black and white ‘corpsepaint’ mimicking a vampire).
Feeling the Body Again
Metalheads primarily drink as much as possible and start to walk like zombies. To feel their body they pogo, they ‘play a fight’ essentially. Goths are known for being pot smokers and become motionless, passive, like vampires also tend to do, in quiet phases. They only move when necessary, like many carnivores do.
Aldous Huxley describes in Brave New World a society where the humans are severely disassociated to their body. To solve this problem the humans take Soma, a drug that closely resembles ecstasy. Soma means body, which is a cynical pun made by Huxley, because it is exactly not the body at all. The only one who understands the body has to suffer a healthy degree of pain to feel relatively good and as an actual human is the main character, the ‘savage’ uncivilized John who is not addicted to Soma.
The computer makes you depressed. It is known most ‘trans kids’ are not very sporty and life online. Essentially, the brain has become disassociated from the body and connected with the computer. To understand self-harm like cutting, anorexia, substance abuse, we must understand automutilation being a psychiatric disease first. There is no greater pain than to feel nothing. Pain hurts, but not feeling anything hurts the brain even more. To overcome the pain of not feeling, a person can cope in many ways.
Healthy solutions are: sporting, creating, making love, engagement in social events.
Unhealthy maladaptive solutions are: substance abuse, achieving a stressed feeling by getting into an argument (with your family or partner), self-harm, or violence towards other people (or animals).
It is easy to see here on one side the success of doing sports, working (or even careering), and creating art as opposed to junkie behaviour, borderline behaviour, self-harming and criminal behaviour. Trans is a type of automutilative behaviour, like cutting, or anorexia. Hating the body and yourself, hence you want to destroy everything except your brain that is actually the ill part. Transgenderism is not only extreme to the body of the person, it also minimizes the maintenance of the human population since it destroys the reproductive organs. In this we can recognize an overlap with the vampire again.
The most dangerous part of transgenderism is that the violent act on the body is delegated to the hospital. Self-harm requires guts and effort to commit, while transgenderism is the laziest variant: The doctor puts drugs in you and cuts out your reproduction organs for you. The most cynical type of automutilation possible.
Transgressive Art
After modernism art moved to post-modernism. A prominent aspect of post-modern art is being transgressive. Transgressive for transgression’s sake. To get attention via the easiest efficient (and laziest) way: to shock people. The transgressive aspect of art can be viewed as immature, rebellious, similar to how teenagers behave, but now as artistic expression. It is not for nothing that most punk bands as well as most other radical art is made by young reckless artists. Once they mature, their art becomes less confrontational and matures along with the artists and gets more layered. The shocking element becomes less crucial and is no longer the main ingredient.
The history of transgressive art features an endless list of extreme automutilative examples: the works of Marina Abramovic, Shoot of Chris Burder, the transhumanist art of Stelarc, the destructive violent performances of GG Allin, extreme body modification (EBM) artists, to name a few. Most remarkable is the history of Throbbing Gristle and Genesis P-Orridge which features essentially everything you can imagine in the direction of transgressive and automutilation: the humiliation porn of band member Cosey Fanni Tutti, bisexual polyamory filled with mutual jealousy, the paedophilic band member Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson, publications of castration snuff films, extreme BDSM practise, abuse of every drugs possible, and most remarkable: the autogynephilic The Pandrogeny Project of Genesis and his then wife Lady Jaye, where Genesis transformed himself into a ‘non-binary’ and Lady Jady as well to look like each other as an expression of the most intense love possible. After the death of Lady Jaye, Genesis claimed her soul and his pronouns became ‘we’, long before the pronouns fad existed. Once you know more about the grim side of autogynephilia you look at this art project from a total other perspective: it is the most visible example of the cliché of autogynephilia since all the AGP-guys copy the looks of their wife or their mother. It is a total cliché trait of that paraphilia. Genesis marketed his former wife parasitically after her death.
Throbbing Gristle was the first industrial band, industrial evolved in what would become goth music. It can be viewed as the true source of the genre. Hakeem was so spot on with his insight that trans is the new goth movement.
Understanding Music
Ballads are often composed in minor scale. Dance music and happy tunes are mostly written in major scales instead. Minor music makes you melancholic, major music makes you happy. You could say, minor music is the ‘music of the mind’, it is intrinsic and makes your body passive, while major music is more the ‘music of the body’, it is extrinsic and makes you want to dance and party and connect physically with friends or even (when lucky) a possible sex partner.
Sports connect well with ‘music of the body’ as can be clearly heard when we listen to the music played in any soccer cantina after the matches. The fingers go in the air and the brain is not very relevant for a while. The crowd sings with embodied voices. Exactly the opposite of the music of the mind genres, where you sing not or softly whispering from the head.
Goth and metal, but also industrial, emo, post-punk, lo-fi, post rock, shoegaze, ‘experimental improvised music’ and ‘noise music’ can be put in the same basket as the ballad. It is the music of the mind. The metal heads bang their heads (to get a headache) or do a mosh pit (to get physical pain), but don’t use the music to seduce a girl on the dancefloor. Relations are created by talking and bonding through drinking heavily. Goths don’t dance, they smoke pot and again the relations arise from long in-depth conversations.
Of course, the world is not black and white as described above. Though this very rough music philosophical sketch illustrates in a bold but clear way why the body and mind separation we recognized in vampires connects well with ‘music of the mind’ of goths.
Understanding Anime
A funny proof the trans youth are making false claims and are not so ‘gender non-conforming’ as they claim becomes visible in their leisure time behaviour and art consumation. Anime and gaming are the most significant hobbies of the trans kids. What hardly anybody knows is that manga and anime are boxed in genres: Shōnen, Shōjo, Seinen, Josei, Hentai, Gekiga, Heta-Uma, Ero-guro.
We enumerate this list with a short description of what those genres mean:
Shōnen manga (少年漫画, lit. “boys’ comics”) is a category of Japanse comics targeting an audience of adolescent boys.
Seinen manga (青年漫画) is a category of Japanse comics marketed toward young adult men.
Shōjo manga (少女漫画, lit. “girls’ comics”) is a category of Japanse comics targeting an audience of adolescent females and young adult women.
Josei manga (女性漫画, lit. “women’s comics”, also known as ladies’ comics (レディースコミック) and its abbreviation redikomi (レディコミ, “lady-comi”), refers to manga marketed to an audience of adult women.
Hentai (Japanese: ヘンタイ) is a style of Japanese pornographic anime and manga. In addition to anime and manga, hentai works exist in a variety of media, including artwork and video games.
Gekiga (劇画, lit. ’dramatic pictures’) is a style of Japanse comics aimed at adult audiences and marked by a more cinematic art style and more mature themes.
Heta-uma (ヘタウマ or ヘタうま) is a Japanese underground manga movement started in the 1970s. Heta-uma can be translated as “bad but good”, designating a work which looks poorly drawn, but with an aesthetically conscious quality, opposed to the polished look of mainstream manga.
Ero guro (Japanese: エログロ) is an artistic genre that puts its focus on eroticism, sexual corruption, and decadence. As a term, it is used to denote something that is both erotic and grotesque.
When we look on the bookshelf closets of trans kids which books they have bought or you ask them what their favorite anime is, the boys will say titles such as Attack on Titan, Joe’s Bizarre Adventures, One Piece, Chainsaw Man, Death Note. These are all Shonen or Seinen. Books for boys and immature young adolescents!
They never read Gekiga of Heta-Uma. Those books are published by Drawn & Quarterly for the English readers and share similarity with for instance the graphic novels of Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, Robert Crumb or the equivalent of intellectual art house movies for adult intellectual audience. The fact that they don’t read these genres indicates immaturity.
The boys never mention titles that are Shojo or Josei. Those genres are books for girls and woman, comparable to the ‘castle romans’ or for instance the Netflix series Outlander that every adult woman has seen (with repeat viewing, including fan group trips to Scottland and a meet-and-greet with Jamie Fraser). Not reading these genres indicates gender conforming behaviour of the trans identifying boys cohort. Not that this is not okay, but you would expect the opposite according to their claims for being gender non-conforming. They are totally not.
A lot of boys watch hentai in secret. It is equivalent to watching porn. It is to be assumed tomboy girls do not watch hentai, and their gender distress indicates more towards (hetero) sexphobia. Hentai is specifically interesting on one aspect: the genitalia are forbidden to be shown in Japanese culture. In other words, while watching porn, the boys don’t know what a real vagina is and how this sexually functions. Many are reclusive 24/7 online boys without girlfriends, so it is very likely they have a distorted impression of how sex works. The hentai genitalia can be seen as an equivalent of a vaginoplasty and a phalloplasty, that both are not sex organs at all, but flesh modifications for fetish practices that have little to do with the sex adults have to confirm affection, create love and also babies: normal healthy sex that makes people empathetic to the other sex (or same in case of homosexuality), intimate, compassionate, happy and beloved. We all know porn doesn’t do that.
One noticeable aspect among the male trans adolescents is a clothing style influenced by the anime-hentai aesthetic, often referred to as the ahegao look. This style is a more provocative variation of the schoolgirl outfit, typically including long socks, a crop top, a collar, and fingerless gloves.
Ero-Guro is the truly depraved explicit genre: tentacle porn, extreme gore, dead, torture and sex intertwined as a type of shock art. Japan is known for having a very grim fascination of merging ultraviolence with sexually-depraved art. This is comparable to the works of Robert Williams (the cover of Guns ‘n Roses’ Appetite for Destruction), album covers of many extreme heavy metal bands like Slayer’s Hell Awaits. You would expect ‘true trans’ people would pick up this genre, but they do not at all! The people interested in Ero-Guro are the same people who buy extreme comics: Liberatore, Heavy Metal magazine, Last Gasp, underground comics: old guys that just enjoy art diversity and are openminded, but not specifically fetishists at all. They are the same old dudes who collect also VHS movies like Chainsaw Massacre or other ridiculous humorous grotesque horror. Ero-Guro is avoided by the trans youth. This indicates trans kids are in general not sexual freaks at all, but mainly misled confused kids that are so deluded by misinformation that they started to believe it is necessary to sacrifice your genitalia to become a new person. A reincarnation during life.
And what about the trans identifying girls? They play Minecraft just like the boys do and they watch Studio Ghibli just like the boys do. Minecraft as well as Studio Ghibli are gender neutral, similar to Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Pixar and Disney, all gender neutral. Stuff that everybody enjoys, since it is mainstream high quality and contains elements that fascinate both sexes. In the past the goth girls in the 90s read Elfquest, which is comparable to the leisure behaviour of the trans identifying girls.
Of course, nothing is black and white. Metal music has a predominantly male audience, but also girls listen to metal music sometimes. Does that make the girl a boy? Of course not! But the regressive thinking of trans ideology claims to see truth in gender non-conform behaviour as a sign of being trans. The fascinating paradox is that the trans identifying youth unconsciously is very gender conforming if you truly look at their leisure time behaviour. A very valid reason to not believe their self-diagnosis at all. They lie while not realizing it themselves.
Greek Mythology
This article is not a happy story. Now that we know trans is not ‘an innate identity’, but in fact a fashion connected to transgressive automutilative art, we close with some wisdom present in Greek mythology.
Oedipus is the story in which the teenager boy rebels against the father. He wants to kill the father in fact. It is one of the most used themes in many other stories. The Dutch art house movie Abel of Alex van Warmerdam has this as the main theme, but also the lyrics of Les Bourgouis of Jacques Brel feature it in a humorful way. Brels lyrics can be read in English on YouTube.
Surprisingly the media, politicians, and health care specialists have somehow developed a massive blind spot to the Oedipus behaviour of the trans youth. Where in the past all youth movements were criticized by the establishment, which protected the parents, now society supports the youth rebellion and calls the parents bigots who don’t understand their children. The truth could not be more different. This collective hostile behaviour against the parents is an extreme betrayal and should be abandoned as soon as possible.
Icarus is another important one to bring up. A narcissistic adolescent takes life threatening risks. It dreams of going to the sun. You could say the head is separated from the body and already flying high. To bring the body and mind in contact with eachother the boy gets an extreme bodymodification: wings. And once the wings are on his back he flies high to the sun, but the wings don’t stick well due to the melting wax and the boy falls to the earth and dies. In our times it is the doctors that modify the bodies and this is equivalent to glueing wings on a young reckless person, who cannot see the complete picture of life yet: it will suffer from complications, severe physical and mental health deteroration and death due to decreased mental health, regret, miserable lonely lifes and suicide are to be expected on a large scale in the future. Specifically, in the ROGD cohort.
At last I want to highlight the myth of Hermaphrodites. A young reckless boy (similar to Icarus) loses his genitalia in a dark lake and becomes a ‘non-binary’ without specific sex characteristics. Hermophrodites regrets his bad choice and asks for foregiveness, but this is refused. Then he has a very peculiar final request: If any other (young) person is just as reckless as he was and goes into the lake, this person should also become sexless. In this we can recognize the fanatic activism of autogynephiles. In order to not regret their bad irreversible choice, they have to get confirmation that they made the right decision, by seducing other (young) people to take the same disastrous pathway. This explains the 8000, often pedophilic, fantasy stories on the Eunucharchives website and the dubious career of Marci Bowers who loves to castrate young boys.
Conclusion: Hakeem is Right
Hakeem is right: body and mind separation, trans and goth are connected and manifestations of the same behaviour of a certain subgroup of young (and older) people. The ‘goth identity’ can very well be an innate trait of a character of a person. Such a person is probably born as a more melancholic person instead of a sporty happy-go-lucky dude, but this is no valid reason at all to get body mutilation treatment at a hospital. A goth has to learn how to cope with his mental issues in a healthy way, for instance by joining a sports club, or starting a band, or collecting miniature trains as a hobby, or going fishing, but most important of all: going away from the computer… Hospitals don’t stimulate healthy solutions, since that is not their task according to their job description, but in fact it is very much their task: make people healthy and do no harm. Cutting of genitalia is the exact thing not to do to solve their problems. In fact it often increases the underlying problems.
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