Anarchist Monstrosities
Tranarchists against the state

Mikhail Bakunin once said that we are not born free, but bound by laws and morals, in our place of birth. In his words, "Man does not voluntarily create society, he is involuntarily born into it. He is above all a social animal. Only in society can he become a human being, that is, a thinking, speaking, loving, and willful animal.” It is not possible to ‘start from scratch’ or invent languages and forms of life completely detached from our surroundings. It is impossible not to name the world, its differences, and its norms. However, it is the institutionalization of these names that inscribes them in wars of annihilation. The cult of authority leads us to think in terms of rulers and ruled, to acquire certain ideals about our desires and sexualities. In criticism of this cult, tranarchism can be thought of as an opposition to both governmental and scientific authoritarianism, which, in the vast spectrum of denominations, designates certain bodies as monsters and others as human.

In constraining those who treat us as representations of diagnoses, as monstrosities, we appropriate the threat attributed to us – the monster, after all, personifies everything that threatens this Humanity to which we [do not] belong. As monstrous figures, we threaten what is claimed to be true. However, when we identify humanity's roots, and understand the historicity of the Monster, we offend the norm, exposing its fear and fragility. To offend normativity is a liberating act that appropriates language in a disruptive movement: we constrain the white-cisgender ‘Self’ and argue that gender norms are a fabrication verging on the unnatural; that the notion of nature is a fiction disguised as truth; we affirm the unrepresentability of trans and queer lives and the inability of the state to meet our demands. Instead of pursuing assimilationist positions, queer anarchists and tranarchists advocate for social emancipation through tactics that confront institutional violence, never forming alliances with the arms of the state. Trans movements that fight against the state and its institutions must be recognized, movements that do not resort to the state's tentacles to mitigate the violence that the state itself produces; that do not trust it with the ability to protect us; and that do not wish to fit into a violent ideal of humanity.

The norm lies where it claims not to be; it becomes explicit when it invents its antagonism. While no embarrassment is shown in describing someone as monstrous and denying them access to healthcare; in surgically intervening on intersex children to ‘adapt’ them to a cisgender and heterosexual ideal; in reiterating the norm in a verbal, bureaucratic, surgical, and scientific way, institutional cisnormativity refuses to name something that is constantly reiterated in all these processes. Denouncing this naturalization is one of the steps in the anti-colonial movement for liberation. It is in this sense that we advocate a tranarchist use of language, combined with the dismantling of the world as we know it. In order to build another world, we must destroy the current one; we must appropriate the threat we pose to the political establishment. And a tranarchist use of language is one of our basic tools. Language is a disruptive tool in the very act of naming the norm and prefigurating other forms of life where our bodies, desires, and thoughts are considered possible.